No soft descriptive words came to him, but the fond feeling did, that he had found a place he loved; that he was so happy living on this island he could die here—such a life taught you how to die. The mood of satisfaction in his mind was a summation: I don’t want more than this. He knew he had everything he wished for; he was too superstitious to say so, for fear it would seem like smug boasting and what he had would vanish.

And that thought was underscored by a shama thrush, its warbling so melodious it held him still until he could see the bird itself flash from a branch to the ground, where it found an insect the geese had raised, jubilantly beating their wings. One peck and the thrush was back on its branch, its long tail twitching, warbling again.

All this time—rested, resolved into a calm, restored body—he was smiling at the warmth of the day, the beauty of the night-dampened trees, the glitter in the blaze of sunrise. He was whole again. Feeding the birds on the lawn put him in mind of the chickens in the coop. He dug a bucket of pellets from the grain barrel on the lanai and walked down the hill to the grove of trees, where a screened-in coop—once a work shed—held a dozen hens. They fluttered and screeched when he entered. He filled the feeder with pellets and found six eggs in a nesting box, small smooth ones, off-white, and delicate, like lumps of carved ivory.

Heading uphill across the lawn to his house he saw a new hibiscus blossom on the bush by the path, the knob of a tree fern swelling to unfurl into a frond, the pencil-shaped culm of a bamboo shoot protruding from the edge of a clump, the new spear of a palm slanted from the top of a trunk, a yellowish curled leaf of a monstera in the midst of elephant ears of the thick vine, gardenias blown open on a bush, and more, to the sigh of the ironwood boughs at the periphery of his lawn.

He had planted everything but the ironwoods, he had watched it all grow bigger by the week. He was no gardener, you didn’t have to be here, a broomstick jammed into Hawaiian soil would become a tree and bear fruit. His plants and shrubs had taken hold and bulked on the hillside, and he marveled at his luck.

It all looked edible, and much of it was—the thick bamboo shoots, the blossoms and leaves of the nasturtiums, the golf-ball-sized lilikoi, yellow-skinned red-fleshed passionfruit that he pinched open and ate or Olive juiced. And the sweet finger bananas that grew by the walkway, the mountain apple tree with its ripe fruit of pale crispness, the Java plum tree, the heavy avocados, each one swinging on a stem.