The Devil in Paradise--Captain Putnam in Hawaii

by James L. Haley

  Clarity kissed her cheek in return. “It will surely be after dark when we return, perhaps late.”

  Beecher helped her up into the sleigh, and Harriet after her, then sat on the opposite and facing seat; he tapped his driver on the back. “Off we go now.”

  They paused at the Beecher house to deposit Harriet and continued on at a trot, in gloom and silence for over a mile. “I want to thank you for coming, Mrs. Putnam,” said the minister at last. “Henry has long regarded you as a special friend.”

  “You fear it is typhus.”

  “Yes.”

  “Some do recover.”

  “Yes, but Henry is very sick.”

  “Poor Harriet,” she said. “Her disposition is so naturally sunny, it nearly destroyed her to have to tell me why she had come.”

  “She is a great joy to us. And she appreciates your tutelage in her composition. Just keeping her in paper and ink has become a considerable household expense.”

  Clarity felt a swell of satisfaction. “She could be a great writer someday. Do tell me,” said Clarity above the clip-clop of hooves on the frozen road, “when you call out ‘Harriet!’ who answers?”

  Beecher’s face cracked into a smile. “They both do, in fact, sometimes.” After a proper year of mourning Roxana—his parishioners were too sympathetic to count on their calendars that it actually had been less than a year—he married Harriet Porter, who was now already great with child—her first, though his tenth.

  Clarity had remained silent on those occasions when Bliven brought up the incongruity of such a religious man having such an appetite as to have fathered ten children by his fortieth year. She was willing to accept that Beecher was such a furnace of energy that his preaching, writing, and church building were simply not sufficient outlets, and that he was impelled to leave a legacy also of children, and more children.

  As the sleigh passed up North Road beyond the limits of the town, they remained in their facing seats, each under a thick lap blanket. “You know,” said Beecher, “the other day I was perusing a book of architecture. I know your husband has a great interest in the subject.”

  “Indeed, he does.”

  “I read that the Greeks, apart from their three famous orders of columns—”

  Clarity sensed that he was about to wax didactic, and perhaps name them, and determined to move him along. “Yes, I am familiar with them.”

  “Well, apart from those, they had another kind of column, one that was carved in the shape of a woman, that sometimes a rank of these columns bore the weight of the portico. There was a special name for them: they were called caryatids. So we see that, in a very real sense, sometimes it was women who supported the temple. It put me in mind of you, and your mother, and how grateful we all are for your support, especially of the mission school. I know it has been difficult since God called your father to his heavenly rest.”

  My God, she thought. He is good. He has honed his fund-raising skill to the sharpness of a Toledo blade. “Thank you, Reverend. It is our privilege to be able to help, and it is kind of you to acknowledge us.” So help me, if he mentions money at a time like this, I will throw him right off his seat into the snow.

  “You must know that you and she have given Obookiah and the others the realistic chance to return to their home countries and preach the light of the gospel to their people in their own languages. I cannot believe that God would call him home when he is”—his voice broke—“so, so close to obtaining his object!”

  In her heart Clarity forgave him, and indicted herself. “To believe that, Reverend, one must believe that it is God who sends disease among us. The Bible itself tells us that there is evil in the world. Therefore I do not believe that God sends disease, but that it is God who will ransom his poor soul if these are indeed his ultimate hours.”

  “It is a rare gift,” he said after a full minute of silence, “to be able to comfort the minister. I shall hold to that, and thank you for it.”

  After more than a mile of silence she relented and asked, “How are the affairs of the mission school this term?” She knew she had opened the door to voice their needs, but he had earned the privilege by forgoing it before.

  “Quite good, actually,” he answered. “Surprisingly solvent just now. I believe it was a wise step to begin admitting Indian candidates from the West. It seems that a number of our parishioners believe that our first duty is to effect the conversion of the natives on our own frontier before turning our attention to farther shores, and the admission of our Cherokee and Choctaw pupils has had a good effect on the giving.”

  Outside Cornwall they turned into the drive of the school’s eighty-acre estate, given over mostly to farming and to teaching that skill to the foreign students, and there was also a compound of buildings the size of a small village with its outbuildings. They skirted by the school itself, which was in the Dutch style, having a gambrel roof, with a chimney at one end and a belfry at the other, and two small slant dormer windows between them. Clarity’s thin lips twitched into a smile. It was a unique school, but the architect must have felt that every school must have its bell.

  Separated unto itself was the great manse, high and white and Federal in its architecture, of the principal’s house where lived Edwin Dwight, Obookiah’s special friend and benefactor, who had been entrusted as the school’s first chief administrator. She expected the sleigh to stop there, and expressed her surprise as they went on. “Is Henry not being cared for in Mr. Dwight’s house?”

  “No. A number of people are keeping watch over him, and with so many coming and going it was more sensible to put him in the steward’s house.”

  The sleigh stopped and they descended at another great house, two full stories of black-shuttered windows in white clapboard, and atop that a steep roof with eave windows flanking mighty chimneys. Clarity scarce had time to wonder why school employees needed to live in such state before the housekeeper appeared and conducted them inside. She peeled Beecher’s coat from his shoulders and made to help Clarity out of her cloak.

  “No, thank you.” She grasped it more tightly about her shoulders. “I still feel quite chilly. I believe I will keep it on for the moment.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” The housekeeper gestured up the stairs. “Mr. Obookiah is in the west bedroom.”

  They mounted the flight of steps, steep and narrow, and found the door open.

  “Oh, Miss Clear Day, you have come! Oh!”

  Clarity approached the bed, appalled at how much weight he had lost, his eyes white and deep in the sunken black skin around them. The speaking and the sounds of footsteps on the plank floor awakened a middle-aged woman who had been dozing in a Windsor chair by the window. As soon as she moved she grabbed at her neck, which had taken a crick as she slept.

  “Oh, Mrs. Mills,” said Clarity. “Please, do go down and stretch and rest. We will watch over Henry for a while.” They held hands for a second before she left, and heard her descending the stairs.

  “How are you feeling, Henry?”

  Obookiah caught sight of Beecher hanging back by the door. “Oh, Mrs. Putnam, I fear that I will not live to see my home again, my beloved Hawaii nei.”

  “We cannot know that. If you rest and eat, you may grow strong again.” She saw the sheet beneath his back soaked from sweat, as was the pillowcase. “Reverend, come help me.” She removed a thick towel from a quilt spreader at the foot of the bed and shook it out to its full size. “Don’t stand there; come help me.”

  She looked in the drawer of a nearby lowboy and found a dry shirt. “Can you sit up?” She and Beecher pulled the wet shirt from his back.

  “Oh, Mrs. Putnam, it is not fitting that you should see me thus!”

  “Hush, Henry. This is no time to be squeamish.” She spread the dry towel behind him and turned the pillow to the dry side up, and they pulled the dry shirt down his back. Gently they la
id him back down, and Clarity washed his face with the cloth from a basin of water.

  “That is so very comfortable. I am sorry to be such trouble.”

  Clarity did not sit on the bed or remove her gloves, but she held his hand and they looked deep, eyes into eyes. “Dear Henry,” she said.

  His tears welled up but he held them in check. “I wish . . . for someone . . . to see my family—my grandmother, if she lives—to say that I remember her, and I love her. And my uncle, priest to the storm god . . . Tell him that I thank him for raising me, that I love him, and that I hope, I hope he can find peace in true religion, as I have. Who can tell them these things?”

  Who indeed? thought Clarity. They heard a commotion downstairs, and realized that their arrival had been noticed, and now the younger Dwight, and the other Hawaiians, Hopu, Honoree, and Tamoree, were coming up the stairs.

  “See?” Henry pointed weakly to the desk nearby. “I have not been idle.” She looked at the desk, with papers and an inkwell and quills. Henry released her. “Go and see, please.”

  Atop a short stack of paper she saw a title page, written in a large, simple hand, that read: Ka Baibala Hemolele. She lifted the covering sheet gently and saw the text on the second page, in single lines, numbered by verse with a blank line between the verses, the script clear but rote and childlike. 1. I kinohi hana ke Akua i ka lani a me ka honua. She recognized some of the words that he had playfully taught her over the years: “beginning,” “God,” “created,” “heaven,” “earth.”

  She looked, stricken, back at the bed and saw Obookiah studying her. “It is correct,” he said weakly. “I am certain, I have not made mistake.”

  “Oh, Henry!”

  “Is not easy. My language has never had writing. I must be guided by the sounds. And I have only begun. I do not know why the Lord should take me before I finish, but He know best.” He sank into his pillow, exhausted by speech. “Surely He know best.”

  She returned to the bed and took his hand. “Yes, Henry, surely He knows best.”

  “Oh!” he cried suddenly. “Oh, Mrs. Putnam, can you go? Can you go, with missionaries to my home? Who can better give my love to my family?”

  “Henry—”

  “Oh!” Obookiah cast his gaze to see Beecher still standing at the end of the room, but he was past caring who could hear. “The preachers, they are men of God, but they lack . . . human understanding. My people will understand you better than them.”

  “Thank you for that, Henry,” she nearly whispered.

  The others came into the room, and Obookiah brightened without raising his head again. “And now, I want my friends to speak to me in my own language one more time.”

  Beecher held the door open for Clarity and closed it behind them, and they walked down the short hall to the stairs. “Perhaps,” he said, “you ought to have told him that it would be quite impossible for you to grant his request.”

  “And vex him during what may be his final breaths? Perhaps, Reverend, you should have taken his words about you to heart.”

  LITCHFIELD, CONNECTICUT

  20TH FEBRUARY, 1818

  My dearest husband,

  Oh, my captain, where are you? What ocean are you sailing upon, when I have such need of your society, your comfort, of your great strong arms?

  Yes, there has been a tragedy, but not touching you directly, for your parents and my mother all enjoy tolerable health in this frost unseasonable even for New England in mid-winter. Our foreign friend, Mr. Obookiah of the Sandwich Islands, took sick and went to his heavenly reward a few days since, and I have just returned home from the service held for him. He was resident in New Haven, or Andover, or Cornwall for nine years, since he was but a youth. He became highly educated, and when he sent for me, I saw in his room the pages he had written to translate the Bible into his language.

  Over the years we passed many pleasant hours together, I telling him about America, and he telling me about his country, his language, the flowers and birds, but also the volcanoes that throw fire a thousand feet into the air, and telling me with grief of their heathen priests and hideous idols. He said there were many things about their society that were not fit to relate to a lady, which I doubt not but, as you know me, made me only the more curious about them.

  I knew nothing of his illness until our dear Harriet came to fetch me about ten days after the great snowfall, and Rev. Beecher came for me in their sleigh, and drove us to Cornwall, where Henry lay in his room. I tended him for a couple of hours, to relieve Mrs. Mills who was quite exhausted, and he was by turns delirious and in perfect possession of his senses. He spoke affectionate farewells to all present, including to his countrymen in their own language. We departed when he said he felt he should sleep a little, and the last he said to me was, “Aloha oe,” which he told me many times is their universal hello and good-bye, but deeper in feeling, it means, my love be with you. Downstairs we took tea, and after a time Hopu went up to check on him. He returned in shock and tears and said, “He has gone.”

  At the last, when we rushed back to the room where he lay—you will think I am carried away in this by my emotion, but I declare to you I am not—he lay dead, but he was smiling, he was smiling as surely as you shall smile, when next we meet. Doubtless it was because of the prank he played on Death, who came for his body but could not take his soul.

  Reverend Beecher was much affected by this turn of events. Downstairs, he and Mr. Mills and Mr. Dwight the Younger all confessed to one another that each had tried to talk him down from his mighty zeal to return to Hawaii and preach to his people. They had many times adjured him to realize the danger of such a mission, that he might very truly be taken and killed by the priests of the wooden idols, but he met them at every turn. He held up their own Bible to them. He said he was ready. Does not the Bible say, he who loses his life for My sake shall find it? And do you know, dearest? When these high church men realized that each had opposed him and been bested, the great dark pall cast over them was more than grief, it was shame, and when the room was at its most silent, it was because they were ashamed of themselves.

  Rev. Beecher preached the funeral, and it was quite unlike his wonted orations. You would not, as you have many times threatened to do, have wrapped yourself in your cloak against the gusts of his “much saying.” He was still deeply moved, and vowed that while the world might see Mr. Obookiah’s death as the end of a wasted education, or a sign of the Almighty’s disfavor to the mission venture, they instead took increased devotion from the example of his simplicity of faith and steadfastness of purpose. There will be missionaries of this school who take ship for the Sandwich Islands, one day near or far—not just Americans knowledgeable of the Bible but also doctors and teachers and those skilled in agriculture and manufacture, and also Hopu and Prince Tamoree, and other natives who can give great assistance in the language and smooth their way. The question really is one of money, and how to raise it.

  And this brings me also, and briefly, to another point on which I wish you were here to consult with me. I received a letter from my father’s financial advisor in Boston, urging me to liquidate anything that my mother and I hold in mortgages, either as creditor or debtor. He says there is talk of credit having become overextended, and that an uncertain time is approaching. At his alarm I am dubious—yet he is in some position to know whether the mighty banking houses of Europe are becoming worried over the moneys they have poured into America. The great Bank of the United States, which has acted as their principal agent here, and which has grown so powerful on the investments of the people, surely would not let speculations run so rampant as to create what some are calling a bubble.

  I do not know what exact steps I shall take, but without acting rashly I believe I should do something to “lighten ship,” as you would say.

  Oh, my darling, I know not where to send this, therefore I will entrust it to t
he Navy Yard in Boston. Perhaps if you are on your way home you will read it there, or they will know where to send it. Your parents send their love, and I pray that your father may live to greet you again. This I tell you as a certainty, if his body were as strong as his spirit, he would outlive us all.

  Farewell my dearest love,

  Clarity Putnam

  BLIVEN PUTNAM, CAPT. USN

  WARSHIP RAPPAHANNOCK

  3

  Conspirators

  Alone in his study on the Rappahannock, closeted with his coffee and his chart of the Cuban coast, Bliven studied out what he should do next. Cuba, though it was a mountainous island, at its western extremity sank almost imperceptibly into the sea with miles of mangrove swamps, vast sandbars and tidal flats; and miles out at sea, just when one thought there must be a passable depth, there rose up reefs that were a graveyard for Spanish galleons.

  If Fleming reported the leak to be serious, he must put in at Mobile, six hundred miles north northwest of the Yucatán passage, which he did not want to do. If Fleming could find the leak and isolate it, keep it controlled, that would buy some time to act further against the piracy he was sent to suppress. Indeed, the game of piracy changed in nature when passing from the Caribbean into the Gulf of Mexico. The Caribbean was beset by the spiritual heirs of buccaneers who had plundered the Spanish Main in centuries past, only now they masqueraded as privateers for newly independent countries of South America. Piracy in the Gulf brought to mind, realistically, only one name: Jean Lafitte. That smooth-talking, oily, ingratiating, murdering Frenchman who had turned piracy into something like a business, as sophisticated in its way as a Boston brokerage.

  For years, Lafitte had operated a thriving pirate’s nest on an island deep in the recesses of Barataria Bay, which lay to the south of that long tongue of the Mississippi River delta, his lair approachable only through a maze of narrow channels among miles of reedy marshes. Lafitte had a brother, Pierre, older by ten years, who was the bolder seaman, unafraid to claim his station as a pirate of the high seas, capturing merchantmen, killing crews, and stealing their cargoes. The booty was taken to Barataria, and from there the stolen goods were poled on pirogues through the marshes to New Orleans and sold at pure profit, for the consumer there asked no more than did consumers anywhere what was the source of this bargain merchandise. The Lafitte brothers’ inroads into Gulf commerce were such that shipowners and insurance companies applied pressure to the government. In 1814 the United States Navy flushed Jean Lafitte out of Barataria Bay and turned him into a wanted man—only for him to turn up in New Orleans the next year, winning a pardon for himself and his brigands by aiding Andrew Jackson in the defense of that city, and in Jackson’s crushing defeat of the British army that opposed him.