Moloka'i (10 page)

When Rachel reached into her steamer trunk for her bedclothes she felt something unexpected. She pulled out a doll she’d never seen before: a handmade girl with a round face and long black hair, wearing a dark green dress with a long
kapa
skirt. Around her neck was draped a fragile
lei
strung with tiny shells, and pinned to her front was a handwritten note:
Love you, Papa
.

Rachel was delighted, but as she gazed at her new doll it made her sad to realize that her home was now one of those faraway places across the sea. She tucked the little
wahine
under her blanket with her, cradling it in her arms like a memory, and was instantly asleep.

Haleola noted the affection in Pono’s eyes as he pulled the blanket up to cover his niece. “She’s very sweet, your Rachel.”

Pono nodded. Haleola saw too the yearning this child evoked in him: “Have you heard from them? Your
keiki?”

He shook his head. “Not lately. Their mother don’t write too good, you know.” It was always “their mother,” never “Margaret,” since the divorce decree. As though the speaking of her name were an entitlement he no longer deserved.

They agreed it was best she sleep at her own home tonight, so after a kiss goodnight Haleola set off on the short walk to her cottage. There was no sunset here in the long shadow of the
pali
; at three o’clock in the afternoon the sun was stolen over the top of the westernmost cliffs, and with it what little warmth it lent to Kalawao. Illuminated by oil lamps and torches, the village seemed even more remote and abandoned than it did by day; the
pali
was nearly invisible in the gloom, a deep well of darkness on every side. As she walked, Haleola heard evening come to Kalawao: as warm air fled the cooling earth, the wind rose up the face of the
pali
, making floorboards creak, windows rattle, causing tin cans to clang against one another and empty bottles to chime. Had she not heard these sounds every night for the past twenty-three years, Haleola might have thought them caused not by wind but by the passage across the plain of the
huaka'i-p
—that ghostly procession of dead chiefs and warriors who marched across mortal terrain to the place on the shore where their souls would make the leap to the next world.

The night brought other sounds to Kalawao as well: the rowdy laughter of men and women consuming illegal “swipe” alcohol, and from behind closed doors, the sounds of appetite and thirst, desire and consummation. The sounds of people whose bodies might have been failing them, but would not fail, at least, in this one thing.

When she reached her house, Haleola stopped and looked back at the oil lamp burning in Pono’s cottage. She thought of Rachel, of the supper she’d cooked for her and the laughter they’d shared, and felt almost as if she had been transported back to the days when her sons were small and the young family grilled fish caught off the Maui coast. It was a feeling she had never dreamed she would recapture. This little girl’s smile had brought her something old and new, something lost and impossible. She watched as the oil lamp in Pono’s house was snuffed out, and found herself looking forward to tomorrow.

H

aleola was up at dawn to start her morning rounds of friends and neighbors who had need of her. Mrs. Pohaku was too stiff and pained with neuritis to work her garden, so Haleola gathered some taro and sweet potatoes for her and then rubbed a salve made from guava leaves into her aching joints. Harriet Chu’s asthma was greatly improved since taking an herb which grew abundantly here on Moloka'i. José Dominguez was running a high fever; Haleola gave him some tamarind seed to reduce his temperature and chopped
'awa
root to help him sleep, but sadly she held out little hope for recovery. Few patients died from leprosy itself—most, weakened by the disease, were easy prey to other sicknesses like dysentery or pneumonia. Haleola had been performing tasks like these since before the Board of Health saw fit to assign—thirteen years after the settlement’s founding!—a resident physician. But then as now, she whose name meant “house of life” often found herself a helpless attendant in this house of death.

Later, as she and Pono and Rachel sat on the steps of Pono’s house enjoying a breakfast of eggs and
poi
, Haleola glanced up to see Ambrose Hutchison approaching the house—and alongside him one of the Catholic Sisters of Charity.

Haleola had known Ambrose long enough to recognize his unease. The sister was young, her delicate features starkly framed by her black and white veil; her expression, it seemed to Haleola, was that of a woman trying very hard to think only pleasant thoughts, and not succeeding.

“Good morning, Haleola. Pono.” Ambrose smiled at Rachel, but Haleola had no trouble reading the distress behind the smile. “Did you . . . sleep well, Rachel?”

Rachel nodded, too busy eating her
poi
to do more.

“Pono, Haleola, this is Sister Mary Catherine, from the Order of St. Francis. Sister, this is Kapono Kalama, his niece Rachel, and Haleola Nua.”

The nun smiled with what seemed genuine warmth.
“Aloha,
Rachel. Welcome to Moloka'i.”

Rachel, still chewing, mumbled a hello around her food. Sister Catherine laughed, a girlish laugh. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-two years old.

“Pono, I’m sorry about this, but . . .” Ambrose sighed. “I’m afraid we have to take Rachel with us.”

Pono didn’t quite understand. “What do you mean? Take her where?”

“To Bishop Home. She has to stay there, Pono; she can’t live with you.”

Pono jumped to his feet, glowering at Ambrose. “Why the hell not! She’s my niece!”

Rachel put down her food, listening with alarm to the raised voices.

Ambrose said, “The sisters prefer that all girls under the age of sixteen reside in their care, at Bishop Home.”

“For their own protection,” Sister Catherine added, but this only inflamed Pono even more:

“My brother asked me to take care of her!” he shouted, and the sister flinched, lapsing back into silence.

Now Rachel began to cry, and Haleola squatted down to hold her. Pono glared at Ambrose. “You happy now? Maybe you like to sneak up behind her and say ‘Boo’? Yeah, look, she ain’t nearly scared enough!”

“Damn it, Pono, I don’t—”

“Ambrose, there must be some mistake.” Haleola’s tone was calm and conciliatory. “Why don’t we go speak with Mother Marianne?”

She can’t be more stubborn,
Haleola told herself, remembering earlier times on the island,
than that old mule Damien.

K

alawao in 1879 was little changed from the village Haleola and her husband, Keo, had first come to nine years earlier. Life was still hard. The Hawaiian government provided each resident with a subsistence diet, but food shipments from Honolulu were subject to the weather and often delayed by storms or high surf. The sum of the average patient’s worldly goods was little more than a blanket, a pot and pan, a knife, a spoon, and an oil lamp. And though there were now four churches on the peninsula, there were still many exiles whose only creed was “In this place there is no law”—who abandoned all pretense at civility, as civilization had abandoned them. Why fear retribution for theft, for rape, when there was no punishment worse than the one to which they were already condemned?

And then there was “the crazy pen.”

The ramshackle grass house on the outskirts of town was a home for no one and everyone—a place for dancing, drinking, and losing oneself in the moment, because in Kalawao moments were all anyone could count on. A fire blazed outside as around it women danced the
hula
: not the decorous
hula
performed for kings and queens but a wildly sensual dance marked by a lusty gyre of hips.

In those vanished days, Haleola would sometimes watch from the distant shelter of a pandanus tree. She had no desire to join in, to drink from the calabashes of beer or to feel the rough hands of drunken men on her body. She was here for the
hula,
and for the prayers, spoken over a makeshift altar inside the house, which preceded it:

“Collect of garlands, Laka, for you!
Heed our prayer, ’tis for life;
Our petition to you is for life.”

How many Hawaiians these days even knew the
hula
’s patron goddess and her two faces, gentle Laka and fierce Kapo? Yet in exile these people danced to Laka, turned their damaged faces to her, as two-fingered musicians magically coaxed rhythm from homemade drums. So loud were those rhythms that Haleola was oblivious to the sound of hooves until they were almost upon her. A black horse galloped past her, and Haleola’s spirits sank as she saw its rider yank on the reins, bringing the horse to a stop.

Father Joseph Damien de Veuster, thirty-nine years old and almost alarmingly robust, quickly dismounted, grabbing his walking stick from where he had lashed it to his saddle. He waded into the crowd outside the crazy pen, brandishing his cane like a sword, scattering the revelers.

“Pau ia!
Be done with this!” The stocky, broad-faced man in the flat cleric’s hat struck a grazing blow of the cane to a man blocking the entrance, then stormed inside. “Go to your homes!” he commanded in competent but undistinguished Hawaiian. His cane lashed out, overturning the calabashes of beer. “Are you men, or animals? God judges not the beast because it knows no better, but God’s judgment
will
be made on you, and you, and you!” Most revelers fled; an unlucky few felt the sting of Damien’s cane across their backs or hindquarters. The priest stepped up to Laka’s altar, brought his stick down onto the altar draped with
maile
vines and smashed it to pieces.

Haleola was baffled by this man—the same she had seen earlier that day, cutting two-by-fours amid the skeletal frame of a dormitory for Kalawao’s orphaned children. This “Kamiano,” as he was called, built houses for the sick, dressed their sores, comforted the dying. What kept him here on Moloka'i, year after year, a healthy white man tending to lepers? And why did he care if people on their way to the grave drank beer and danced the
hula?

Haleola turned away in disgust, joining the disgruntled revelers as they straggled back to Kalawao.

Keo was just awakening when she got home, and in the morning light she saw and grieved for the changes time and disease had wrought. His body, once strong and lithe, was now frail and enfeebled; his face, always more endearing than handsome, had been savaged by the
ma'i p
k
,
his mouth little more than a gash in ulcerated flesh, the disease having stolen his once impish smile. Keo’s had been the smile of a trickster, a rascal. Her parents hadn’t liked him, they thought she deserved better, but she’d known she could not have found any better husband, anywhere, than her Keohi. And as the young rascal became a successful merchant and devoted father, she took pleasure in reminding her parents that she had been right.