Hawaii

by James Michener

  Therefore, in the middle of September, when Nyuk Tsin was pregnant with her fifth child and when it became wholly apparent to her that Mun Ki would not be cured and that the quack's herbs were of no use whatever, she waited one day until the evening meal ended and then she sent the children away and knelt before her husband, sharing with him the resolve she had made more than a month before: "Wu Chow's Father, I shall be your kokua."

  For some minutes he did not speak, nor did he look at the woman kneeling before him. Instead, he slowly picked up one of her needles and stuck it carefully into each finger of his left hand. When he had tested his fingers twice he said, "There is no feeling."

  "Shall we hide in the hills?" she asked.

  "No one has spied upon me yet," he replied. "Maybe next week the herbs will work."

  "Wu Chow's Father," she reasoned, "the doctor is a quack."

  He put his hand upon her lips and said, "Let's try once more."

  "We have almost no money left," she pleaded. "We must save it for the children."

  "Please," he whispered. "I feel sure that this time the herbs will work."

  So she took the last precious dimes and reals of her family and plodded down to Iwilei in the hot September sunlight, and when she entered Rat Alley, she noticed that two men watched her carefully, and first she thought: "They think I am one of the girls," but quickly she realized that they were not looking at her in that way, and she gasped: "They're spies, watching to see who visits the doctor. If they report Mun Ki they'll get a little money." So she hurried down a different alley and then up another and finally slipped into the doctor's office.

  He was happy and hopeful. "Is your Punti husband getting well?" he asked graciously. And something in the man's manner that day cautioned Nyuk Tsin and she lied: "He's very grateful to you, Doctor. All the sores have gone and much of the itching in his legs. It's been a wonderful relief to us."

  The doctor was surprised at this news and asked, "But nevertheless you wish a few more herbs?"

  "Yes," Nyuk Tsin replied, sensing a great evil about her. "A little for the legs, and he'll be cured."

  "He'll be cured?" the doctor repeated curiously.

  "Yes," Nyuk Tsin explained, feigning happy relief. "It seems not to have been mai Pake after all. More like a sore from the taro patch."

  "Where does the cured man live?" the doctor asked casually, as he filled the jar, and the manner in which he spoke convinced Nyuk Tsin that he was in league with the spies outside, and that he was turning over to them the names of his clients, so that after the afflicted Chinese had used up all their funds on herbs, he could squeeze a few more reals from the government as a reward for turning them in to the leper authorities.

  "We live at Malama Sugar," Nyuk Tsin said quietly.

  "Nice plantation," the doctor replied casually. "Which camp?"

  "Number Two Camp," Nyuk Tsin replied, but when the cautious, probing doctor handed her the herbs and started to pick up her family's last coins, she could no longer tolerate him, and she swept the coins back into her own hand and grabbed a blue jar and knocked the top off and shoved the jagged glass into the doctor's face, and when the glass cut him and his own quackery entered his eyes, causing them to pain, she threw the money in his face and whispered in a hushed, hate-choked voice: "Did you think you fooled me? I know you are reporting secretly to the police. You pig, you pig!" In uncontrollable fury she smashed half a dozen pots of herbs to the floor, kicked them about with her bare feet, and then grabbed the broken blue jar to assault the doctor again, but he fled whimpering to the rear of his office, so she hurried away down a side alley, but she paused long enough to peer back at the doctor's shack, and when that man's cries had continued for a moment, the two spies hurried up and went inside to rescue their conspirator, while Nyuk Tsin returned, by a devious path, to Dr. Whipple's. When she reached home, she did not immediately go inside the gate, but walked on, stopping now and then to see if she were being followed. Then she went empty-handed to her husband and said, "The doctor was a spy. He was going to report us tonight, because his helpers were there, waiting."

  "What did you do?" Mun Ki asked.

  "I hope I cut his eye out," Nyuk Tsin replied.

  That night she matured her second plan, for when the evening meal was over, she left the Whipple grounds and moved quietly about the Chinese community, going to families which had come to Hawaii with her in the hold of the Carthaginian, for all such men were brothers, and she said to each, "Will you take into your home one of the sons of your brother Mun Ki?"

  Almost invariably the Chinese would listen, say nothing, look at Nyuk Tsin, and finally ask, "Is it the mai Pake?" and without fear, for she knew that no Carthaginian man would betray his brother, she always replied honestly, "It is." Then the man would ask, "And are you going to be his kokua?" And when Nyuk Tsin replied, "I am," the man said either, "I will take one of your children," or, "I can't take a child myself, but let us see Ching Gar Foo, because I am sure he'll take one." But she noticed that they shuddered when they came near her.

  By midnight Nyuk Tsin had disposed of her four sons and her household goods and had made arrangements with a cook for one of the Hewlett families that when her unborn child arrived, Nyuk Tsin would return it to Honolulu by ship from the leper island to be cared for by that cook. She was therefore in a relieved if not hopeful mood when she returned to tell her husband that his sons would be cared for, but when she reached the Whipple grounds she saw an unaccustomed light in her quarters, and she started running toward where Mun Ki was supposed to be sleeping, but when she burst into the little wooden shack she saw Dr. Whipple standing beside the bed with a lamp in his right hand.

  The American doctor and the Chinese woman looked at each other in silent respect, and she saw that tears were running down the white-haired man's face. He lifted Mun Ki's hand and pointed to the lesions, and Nyuk Tsin, following the course that Dr. Whipple's finger took across the doomed hand, had to look away. "It's leprosy," the doctor said. Then he held the lamp before his maid's face and asked, "Did you know?"

  "Yes," she said.

  "I understand," he replied. Then, putting the lamp down he started to question her, but she asked, "Did bad men whisper you?"

  "No," Whipple replied. "It occurred to me that I hadn't seen Mun Ki for some time and I recalled his itching legs. I was in bed, Mrs. Kee, and it suddenly came to me: 'Mun Ki has leprosy,' so I came out here, and I was right."

  "Morning come next day he go away?"

  "Yes," Dr. Whipple said matter-of-factly, but the terror of his words overtook him and he said in a shaking voice, "Mrs. Kee, let us all pray." And he kneeled in the little shack, and asked his maid to do the same, and he formed Mun Ki's doomed hands into a Christian temple, and prayed: "Compassionate and merciful God, look down upon Thy humble servants and bring courage to the hearts of these needful people. Help Mun Ki to face the next days with a fortitude of which his gods would be proud. Help Mrs. Kee to understand and accept the things that must be done." His voice broke and for some moments he could not speak; then, through tears that choked him he begged: "Compassionate God, forgive me for the terrible duty I must discharge. Forgive me, please, please forgive me."

  When the prayer was said he slumped upon the floor and seemed not to have the strength to rise, but he did so and asked Nyuk Tsin, "Do you know what I must do?"

  "Yes, Doctor. Tomorrow police."

  "I must," he replied sorrowfully. "But you can stay here as long as you wish, and all your children," he assured her.

  "I kokua," she said simply.

  He had to look away from her face as the crushing force of this word struck him, for he knew what it meant: the banishment, the horrors of the leper settlement, the sons lost forever . . . He thought: "I would not have the courage." Then he recalled that it had been Mun Ki's plan to abandon Nyuk Tsin as soon as they got back to China, and to take her children from her, and now she was volunteering to go kokua with him. Slowly he raised his head and
looked at Nyuk Tsin. She was a small Chinese woman with not much hair, slanted eyes, brown wrinkles about her mouth, but she was his sister, and he stepped forward and kissed her on each cheek, saying, "I should have known that you would go kokua." He turned away to stanch his tears and then asked brightly, like a minister, "Now, what can we do about the children?"

  "Tonight I fix one boy here one boy here one boy here, all fix." She told him which families would take whom, and when this was explained she asked, "Tomorrow police?"

  "Yes. I must. In God's mercy I must."

  "I know, Doctor. Long time ago I speak my husband, 'Police go,' but we hope."

  "God will forgive those who hope," the old man said.

  As soon as he was gone, Mun Ki was out of bed, explosive with energy. "We will run to the hills!" he swore. "The police will never find us there."

  "How will we eat?" Nyuk Tsin pleaded.

  "We'll take food," Mun Ki explained excitedly. He had visions of a free life in the mountains. He and Nyuk Tsin would work for nobody and maybe even the sores would go away. "Hurry!" he cried. "We must be gone before the police come."

  Nyuk Tsin looked at her husband with incredulity. How could he hope to lose himself in the hills back of Honolulu, when the police would be on his trail within six hours and when every Hawaiian who saw two Chinese struggling through the trails would know they were mai Pake? It was ridiculous, insane, as impractical as the reliance upon the quack doctor, and she was about to tell him so, but then she looked in a new way at her quixotic husband and saw him as a temporary assembly of earth and bone and confused desire and a pigtail and hands that would soon fall apart with leprosy. He was a man who could be very wise and the next minute quite stupid, as now; he was a human being who loved children and old people but who was often forgetful of those his own age. He was a mercurial gambler charged with hope: he had hoped that the quack doctor could cure him; now he hoped that somehow the forests would hide him. But above all he was her man: even though he was a Punti he had chosen her as his woman, and she loved him more than she loved her own sons. If he had this crazy desire to try his luck once more in the hills, she would go with him, for he was an obstinate man and sometimes a foolish one, but he was a man who deserved to be loved.

  It was two o'clock in the morning when Nyuk Tsin finished hiding in high places anything that might hurt her children. Then she went to each child as he slept on the long polished board and fixed his clothes, so that in the morning when the boys were discovered, they would be presentable, and she straightened her bed. Then she took her husband's hand and led him out the Whipple gate and up toward the mountains back of Oahu. She did not depart unnoticed, for Dr. Whipple, unable to sleep, had kept watch on the Chinese quarters, suspecting an attempted flight, but when it eventuated, and he saw the thin little Chinese woman guiding her doomed husband toward the hills, he could not bring himself to stop them or to sound an alarm, and when she carefully returned to close his gate lest his dogs escape, he prayed: "May God have mercy upon those who hope." At first he was inclined to go down and bring the Chinese babies into the house, but he thought: "That might arouse somebody. Anyway, I'm sure Nyuk Tsin left them in good condition." So he sat by the window, guarding the house where the babies slept.

  But after a while his New England conscience, undaunted by forty-eight years in the tropics, made him reason: "The children must not be left in that contaminated house another minute. Rescue now might save them from the disease, whereas an hour's delay might give it to them," so in the darkness before dawn he led his wife to the Chinese house, gently wakened the children so as not to frighten them, undressed them so that not a shred of their old garments came with them, and carried them into the Whipple home.

  When this was done, Dr. Whipple studied his watch and thought: "Nyuk Tsin and her man have had two hours' lead. It will be all right to call the policemen," and he sent a servant after the officials. When they arrived he reported: "Mun Ki has leprosy. We must burn the house and everything in it," and with his own matches he ignited both the Chinese house and the cooking shed. Then, pointing to the Nuuanu Valley, he said, "I think they headed for those hills."

  Throughout the morning he expected the police to appear with the two Chinese, but their capture was delayed. The afternoon also passed, and so did the evening, without the Whipple servants' being apprehended. This seemed strange to the doctor, and early next morning he inquired of the police what had happened.

  "There's no trace of them," the officers explained.

  "I'm sure they went up the Nuuanu," Dr. Whipple assured them.

  "If they did, they vanished," the police replied.

  An ugly thought came to the doctor and he asked, "Did you look at the foot of the Pali?"

  "We thought of suicide," the police assured him, "and we studied the Pali rocks, but they didn't jump."

  Day by day the mystery deepened. Nyuk Tsin and her dream-spinning husband had accomplished the miracle Mun Ki had relied upon: they had fled to the mountains and had somehow disappeared. Fortunately, the quack herbalist and his two spies had had the good luck to report Nyuk Tsin's suspicious behavior to the police before Dr. Whipple did: "We are sure she is hiding her husband, who is mai Pake." So they got their reward, and the herbalist often pointed out to his friends: "If I had waited till next morning, the leper would have been gone and I would have received nothing. This proves that it is always best to perform your duty promptly and let the sluggards lie abed lazily till the next convenient day."

  At the end of a week the police came again to Dr. Whipple and confessed: "We've been to every grass house between here and the other seacoast. No Chinese. We've been wondering if your servants could have doubled back and gone into hiding somewhere right around here. You spoke of arrangements made by the woman to give her children away. Which families did she choose?"

  A minute search of those premises also failed to reveal the fugitives, so the police said, "We are faced by a mystery. Somehow Nyuk Tsin and her husband have made themselves invisible." And so as far as active energy was concerned, the official search for the leper ended.

  On the night that Nyuk Tsin led her husband through the Whipple gate, and then turned back to close it lest the dogs escape, she walked rapidly toward the mountains, and as she stepped boldly forth Mun Ki, trailing a few paces behind, could not help seeing her big, unbound feet and he thought: "On a night like this it's all right for a woman to have such feet." But reflection on this ancient problem that separated the Punti and the Hakka served to remind him of the mournful fact that he would never again see his village, and he grew disconsolate and lost his optimism and said, "It will soon be morning, and they will find us."

  His wife, who originally had advised against this ridiculous attempt to escape, now became the one who urged her husband on, assuring him: "If we can get even to the lower hills before dawn, we will be safe," and she began to formulate stratagems, one of which she put into effect as dawn broke.

  "We will hide beneath those thickets," she said, "close to the road where no one will look."

  "All day?" her irresolute husband asked.

  "Yes. There's a trickle of water running through and I have some balls of cold rice."

  They approached the thicket from a roundabout way, so as not to leave footprints leading into it, and when daylight brought travelers to the road, none saw the leper and his kokua. Nor did the police when they hurried past. Nor did the children on their way to school. All day stout-hearted Nyuk Tsin kept her man hidden, and for long periods they slept, but when Mun Ki was sleeping and his wife was awake, she was distraught by the manner in which her man shivered, for leprosy seemed to be accompanied by a slow fever that kept an infected man forever cold and stricken with trembling.

  That night Nyuk Tsin wakened her husband, counted her rice balls, and started on up the mountainside. She did not know where she was going, for she was impelled by only one driving consideration: the longer they evaded the police, the longer they were fre
e; and such a simple doctrine anyone could understand. They grew hungry, cold and weak, but she drove them both on, and in this manner they escaped capture for three days, but they approached starvation and exhaustion.

  "I have no more strength to walk," the sick man protested. "I will lend you my shoulders," Nyuk Tsin replied, and that night, with Mun Ki hanging on to his wife's back, but using his own sick legs to walk whenever he could, they made some progress toward their unknown goal, but it was cruelly evident that this was the last night Mun Ki could move, so when morning came his wife bedded him down in a hidden ravine, washed his face with cold water running out of the hills, and set forth to find some food.

  That day it rained, and while Nyuk Tsin sloshed through the mountains gathering roots and trying vainly to trap a bird, her afflicted husband shivered on the cold ground while surface water crept in below his shoulders and hips, soon making him wet and colder still. It was a dismal, hungry night, with a handful of roots to chew and not even a remnant of hope to rely upon; and it became Mun Ki's intention, when morning came, to crawl out to the highway and wait until the searching police found him.

  But Nyuk Tsin had other plans, and in the hour before dawn she told her shivering husband, "Wu Chow's Father, stay here and I promise you that I shall return with food and help." She smoothed the damp earth about him and saw with dismay that it was going to rain again that day, but she told him to be of cheer, for she would soon return. Crawling carefully among the trees parallel to the highway, she looked for narrow trails leading off into the hills, and after a while she came upon one, well trod, and this she followed for several hundred yards until she came upon a clearing in which an almost-collapsed grass shack stood, with a three-hundred-pound Hawaiian woman sitting happily in front. Cautiously, but with confidence, Nyuk Tsin walked down the path to greet the huge woman, but before the Chinese maid could speak in explanation of her unexpected appearance in the clearing, the big Hawaiian woman asked, "Are you the Chinese who is mai Pake?"