Hawaii

by James Michener

  At the next dusk, the conches sounded and a good many sailors climbed into boats and returned to their ships. Those that didn't were chased through the town, not by policemen, but by infuriated gangs of Hawaiians bent on thrashing them. But whenever a sailor was caught, some policeman was ready to rescue him, and by eight o'clock the jail was full. On the third night, most of the sailors who were caught ashore after curfew sought out the police, to whom they willingly gave themselves up, preferring that to the coursing mobs. And by the fourth night, order was restored in Lahaina. Kelolo's police were in command.

  On the next day, Malama, at Kelolo's suggestion, summoned the whaling captains to her grass palace, where a feast had been spread. She greeted each bruised skipper with personal warmth and commiserated with him over the rude behavior of her people. She fed the captains well, offered them fine whiskey, and then proposed: "Our lovely church is burned. It was an accident, I am sure. Naturally, we want to rebuild it, and we will. But before we do, we want to do something for the fine Americans who come to Lahaina. Therefore we are going to build a little chapel for sailors. It will give them a place to read, and pray, and write letters home to their dear ones. Will you kind men set the example and give a few dollars for the chapel?" And by her daring charm she wheedled more than sixty dollars from the astonished captains, and another of Abner Hale's dreams, one that he had entertained since that day off the Four Evangelists when the sailors went swinging through the arcs of heaven, was realized: the Seamen's Chapel at Lahaina.

  BY 1828 it seemed that Abner's world was at last beginning to be well organized. He had a rude desk and a whale-oil lamp by which he translated the Bible. He had three schools functioning with increasing success, and the day seemed not too far distant when Iliki, Pupali's youngest and loveliest daughter, would be married in church to one or the other of the established Hawaiian men who were trying with increasing regularity to peek into Jerusha's school. Captain Janders' return to Lahaina and his announced decision to settle down as a ship chandler, with his wife and children coming out from New Bedford, gave Abner a polished mind with whom he could conduct discussions; while the captain's happy knowledge that young Cridland, the devout sailor from the Thetis, was footloose in Honolulu, where the ship's company had been disbanded, encouraged Abner to direct a letter to the youth, asking him to throw in his lot with the Seamen's Chapel, so that Cridland was now employed there, giving guidance to the younger sailors who arrived in Lahaina on the rapidly increasing whaling fleet--45 whalers in 1828; 62 in 1829.

  Malama was rapidly approaching a state of grace, so that it seemed assured that she would be accepted into the rebuilt church when it was dedicated, and there were really only two difficulties looming on the broad and lovely horizon at Lahaina. Abner had anticipated the first, for when it came time to rebuild the church, Kelolo announced that the kahunas wished to consult with Abner again, but he replied, "The door will stay where it was. All this talk in the community that the kahunas knew the church would be destroyed irritates me. Some drunken sailors burned it and that's that. Your local superstitions had nothing whatever to do with it."

  "Makua Hale!" Kelolo protested gently. "We did not wish to speak about the door. We know your mind is made up, and we know that your church will always be unlucky. But there is nothing we can do about that."

  "What did the kahunas want to see me about?" Abner asked suspiciously.

  "Come to the church," Kelolo begged, and when Abner met with the wise old men they pointed to the two-third walls and the absent ceiling and made this proposal: "Makua Hale, it has occurred to us that the last church was very hot indeed, what with more than three thousand people huddled on the floor and no wind to cool them off."

  "It was warm," Abner agreed.

  "Would it not therefore be a wise thing if we did not build the destroyed walls any higher? Would it not be better, indeed, if we could pull them down even farther? Then we could erect high posts and raise the ceiling as it was before, so that when the church is finished, the winds will move across us and cool us as if we were on the shore."

  It took some minutes for Abner to comprehend this radical suggestion and he tried to piece its various components together in his mind. "You mean, tear the present walls down to here?"

  "Even lower, Makua Hale," the kahunas advised.

  "Well . . ." Abner reflected. "Then raise the pillars as before?"

  "Yes, and hang the ceiling from them, as before."

  "But you wouldn't have any walls," Abner protested.

  "The wind would move over us, and that would be better," the wise men explained.

  "But there would be no walls. A man sitting here," and he squatted on the ground, "could look up and watch the sky."

  "Would that be wrong?" Kelolo asked.

  "But a church always has walls," Abner replied slowly. He thought of every church he had ever seen in New England. The very essence of a church was that it have four rugged, square walls and a steeple above them. Even the pictures he had seen of churches in foreign lands showed four walls, and those that did not were clearly popish, so he said firmly, "We will build the church as before."

  "It will be very hot," Kelolo warned.

  "A church must have walls," Abner said, and he left the wondering kahunas.

  The second difficulty could not have been foreseen, at least not by Abner Hale. It concerned Keoki Kanakoa, whose school was accomplishing wonders in bringing Hawaiian boys from the Stone Age into the present. Half the sailors aboard the Thetis, as it plied from Lahaina to Honolulu on weekly trips, were young men trained by Keoki. The boys who worked at the mission printing press, publishing the Bible, were his boys, too. In community life he was a rugged, dependable tower of Christian strength, and his Bible readings in formal services were inspiring. It should not have been surprising therefore -- but it was -- when Keoki appeared in Abner's grass house one day and asked, "Reverend Hale, when can I hope to be ordained a full minister?"

  Abner rested his pen and looked at the young man in astonishment. "A minister?" he gasped.

  "Yes, I was told at Yale that I must return to Hawaii and become a minister to my people."

  "But you already work with them, Keoki," Abner explained.

  "I believe I am ready to have a church of my own," Keoki suggested. "In some new part of the island where the people need God."

  "But there can't be a church without a missionary, Keoki."

  "Why not?" the handsome Hawaiian asked.

  "Well . . ." Abner began. He threw down the pen. "I have no plans for ordaining Hawaiians," he said bluntly.

  "Why not?" Keoki pressed.

  "Well . . . It's never even been considered, Keoki," Abner explained. "You do excellent work in the school ... of course . . . but a full-fledged minister? Oh, No! That would be ridiculous. Impossible."

  "But I thought you missionaries came here to educate us ... to get us ready to take care of ourselves."

  "We did, Keoki!" Abner assured him. "You have heard me talk with your mother. I insist that she govern every aspect of the island. I touch nothing."

  "You have been fine about that," Keoki acknowledged. "But the church is more important than the government."

  "Exactly," Abner jumped. "The government could fail because of your mother's errors, and that would be no irremediable harm, but if the church failed because of your error . . . Well, Keoki, the damage could never be repaired."

  "But how will you know whether I am strong enough to do God's work unless you test me?" Keoki pleaded.

  "With the life of the church at stake, Keoki, we can take no chances."

  "Does that mean that I can never become a minister? Here in my own land?"

  Gravely, Abner leaned back in his chair and thought: "Somebody better tell him the facts." So he said coldly, "Would you have the strength, Keoki, to discipline your fellow Hawaiians as God requires? Would you seek out those who lead a lewd life and announce their names on Sunday? And track down those who drink? Would you dar
e to expel the alii who smokes? Could I trust you to use the right words in explaining the Bible? Or to refuse bribes when the alii want to join the church? Keoki, my dear son, you will never have the courage to be a true minister. For one thing, you are too young."

  "I am older than you were when you became a minister," the Hawaiian pointed out.

  "Yes, but I grew up in a Christian family. I was . . ."

  "A white man?" Keoki asked bluntly.

  "Yes," Abner replied with equal frankness. "Yes, Keoki, my ancestors fought for this church for a hundred years. From the day I was born I knew what a heavenly thing, what an inspired, divine thing the church was. You don't know yet, and we can't trust the church in your hands."

  "You are saying very bitter things, Reverend Hale," Keoki replied.

  "Do you remember aboard the Thetis, when I gave the old whaler in the fo'c's'l the Bible, and how he brought ridicule on the Bible and on me and on God? That's what happens when we risk the welfare of the church in the wrong hands. You must wait, Keoki, until you have proved yourself."

  "I have proved myself," Keoki said stubbornly. "I proved myself at Yale College, when I stood in the snow begging an education. I proved myself at Cornwall, where I was the top student in the mission school. And here in Lahaina I have protected you against the sailors. What more must I do to prove myself?"

  "Those acts were your duty, Keoki. They qualified you for church membership. But to qualify for the ministry itself! Perhaps when you are an old, tested man. Not now." And he dismissed the arrogant young man.

  He was rather startled when, in discussing these matters with Jerusha, she sided with Keoki, arguing, "Your commission, Abner, from the American Board that sent you here was to train up the Hawaiians so that they could organize and run their own churches."

  "Organize them and run them, yes!" Abner instantly agreed. "Soon we will take in more members and institute a board of deacons. But to make a Hawaiian a minister! Jerusha, it would be complete folly. I couldn't tell poor Keoki, but he will never become a minister. Never."

  "Why not?" Jerusha asked.

  "He's a heathen. He's no more civilized than Pupali's daughters. One good hurricane, and he would lose all his veneer of civilization."

  "But when we are gone, Abner, we shall have to turn the church over to Keoki and his fellows."

  "We shall never go," Abner said with great solemnity. "This is our home, our church."

  "You mean to stay here forever?" Jerusha asked.

  "Yes. And when we die, the Board in Boston will send out others to take our places. Keoki running a church! Impossible!"

  But Abner had acquired the habit of listening to his wife, and long after their discussion ended he brooded about what she had said, and at last he found a reasonable solution to the impasse over Keoki, and he summoned the young Hawaiian. "Keoki," he announced happily, "I have discovered a way whereby you can serve the church as you desire."

  "You mean I can be ordained?" the young man cried joyfully.

  "Not exactly," Abner replied, and he was so preoccupied with his satisfactory answer to Keoki's problem that he failed to observe how disappointed the latter was. "What I'm willing to do, Keoki, is to make you the luna of the church, the top deacon. You move among the Hawaiians and find out who is smoking. You check to see who has alcohol on his breath. Each week you hand me a list of people to be admonished from the pulpit, and you draw up the names of those to be expelled from church. At night you will creep quietly through Lahaina to let me know who is sleeping with another man's wife. I am willing to have you do these things for the church," Abner concluded happily. "How do you like that?"

  Keoki stood silent, staring at the little missionary, and when the latter asked again for his response Keoki said bitterly, "I sought a way to serve my people, not to spy upon them." And he stalked from the mission, remaining in seclusion for many days.

  If Jerusha and Keoki could not stand up to Abner's arguments against the Hawaiians, a visitor was about to descend on Lahaina who not only marshaled all of Jerusha's doubts and expressed them in vigorous English but who also brought along many of his own. It was Dr. Whipple, lean and brown from years of work on distant outposts, who came in one day on Kelolo's ship, the Thetis. He hurried immediately to the mission house and shouted, "Sister Jerusha, forgive me for not being here when you were pregnant. Good heavens! I forgot you have two children. And pregnant again!"

  The years had mellowed Whipple and given him a strong no-nonsense vernacular. He had witnessed too much death--wives, children, black-frocked men who worked themselves to death--to bother any longer with the niceties of expression that had characterized the Thetis. "I had the same stateroom coming over. Only four other men in it with me, and I felt lonely. Sister Jerusha, how's the medicine box?" And he yanked the black box down and checked its contents against the new medicines he had lately received from Boston. "I'm giving you lots of ipecac," he advised. "We find it very good for children's fevers. And tonight you and Brother Abner and I are going to have a big dinner with Retire Janders in his new store. And because I was seasick on the damnable Thetis again, I'm going to have some whiskey. You'll be seasick too, when you go back to Honolulu."

  "Are we required to go?" Abner asked, for like Jerusha he preferred to remain in Lahaina, finding Honolulu, at the yearly meeting of the missionaries, a dirty, dusty, ugly little collection of hovels.

  "Yes," Dr. Whipple said sadly, "I'm afraid it's going to be a difficult meeting, this one."

  "What's the matter?" Abner asked. "They going to discuss pay for the missionaries again? I explained my position last time, Brother John. I shall always be unalterably opposed to salaries for missionaries. We are here as God's servants and we require no pay. My mind will not change on this."

  "That isn't the subject," Whipple broke in. "I don't agree with you on the salary question. I think we ought to be paid wages, but that's beside the point. We've all got to vote on the case of Brother Hewlett."

  "Brother Abraham Hewlett!" Abner repeated. "I haven't heard from him since his baby was born. And he's on the same island with me. What is the question about Brother Abraham?"

  "Haven't you heard?" Whipple asked in astonishment. "He's in trouble again."

  "What's he done?" Abner asked.

  "He's married a Hawaiian girl," Whipple said. There was a long, shocked silence in the grass house, during which the three missionaries stared at each other in amazement.

  Finally, Abner took out his handkerchief and wiped his forehead. "You mean to say he's actually living with a native woman? A heathen?"

  "Yes."

  "And the meeting is to decide what to do about him?"

  "Yes."

  "There's nothing to decide," Abner said flatly. He went for his Bible and thumbed it for a moment, finding the text that applied to the case. "I think Ezekiel 23, verses 29 and 30, covers such behavior: 'And they shall deal with thee hatefully, and shall take away all thy labor, and shall leave thee naked and bare: and the nakedness of thy whoredoms shall be discovered, both thy lewdness and thy whoredoms. I will do these things unto thee, because thou hast gone a whoring after the heathen, and because thou art polluted with their idols."" He closed the Bible.

  "Are they determined in Honolulu to throw him out of the church?" Jerusha asked.

  "Yes," Dr. Whipple said.

  "What else could they do?" Abner demanded. "A Christian minister marrying a heathen. 'Gone a whoring after the heathen!' I do not want to go to Honolulu, but it seems my duty."

  Dr. Whipple said, "Would you excuse us, Sister Jerusha, if we walk down to the pier?" And he led Abner along the lovely paths of Lahaina, under the gnarled hau trees and the palms. "You are fortunate to live here," Whipple reflected. "It's the best climate in Hawaii. Plenty of water. And that glorious view."

  "What view?" Abner asked.

  "Don't you come down here every night to see the best view in the islands?" Whipple asked astonished.

  "I wasn't aware . . ."


  "Look," Whipple cried, as a kind of poetry took command of him, tired as he was from seeing so many bleak Hawaiian prospects. "To the west the handsome rounded hills of Lanai across a few miles of blue water. Have you ever seen gentler hills than those? Their verdure looks like velvet, thrown there by God. And to the north the clean-cut rugged mountains of Molokai. And over to the south the low hills of Kahoolawe. Wherever you look, mountains and valleys and blue sea. You lucky people of Lahaina! You exist in a nest of beauty. Tell me, do you ever see the whales that breed in the channel here?"

  "I've never watched for any whales," Abner replied.

  "A sailor told me, as I was cutting off his arm, that one night at Lahaina he saw a dozen whales with their babies, and he said that all his life he had been harpooning whales and had thought of them only as enormous, impersonal beasts so huge that the ocean was scarcely large enough to hold them. But when his arm was gangrenous and he knew that he was going to lose it, he, for the first time, observed whales as mothers and fathers, and they were playing with their babies in the Lahaina Roads, and he told me ... Well, anyway, he won't be throwing a harpoon any more."

  Abner was not listening. He was doing something he had not done before: he was looking at the physical setting in which his whaling town existed. To be sure, he had seen the hills behind the town, for he had walked over them, but he had not appreciated the glorious ocean roads: jeweled islands on every side, the deepest blue water, white sands and the constant scud of impressive clouds. He understood why the whaling ships were content to anchor here, for no storm could get at them. From all sides they were protected, and ashore they had Lahaina for water, and fresh meat and cool roads.

  "This is rather attractive," Abner admitted.

  "I was sorry to hear your view on Brother Hewlett," Dr. Whipple began when he had found a comfortable rock.

  It's not my view," Abner replied. "It's the Bible's. He went whoring after a heathen."

  "Let's not use that old-style language," Whipple interrupted. "We're dealing with a human being in the year 1829. He isn't a strong human being and I never liked him much . . ."