Hawaii

by James A. Michener

  “Did you take even the new trees?” Abner asked in disgust.

  “It is my sandalwood,” Kelolo explained.

  “You faithless servant,” Abner cried and limped on.

  When they reached the topmost ridge and could see the houses of Wailuku below, Abner paused to wipe away his sweat and thought: “If it is such hard work for us to climb this little hill, how could Urania have borne her journey?”

  In the village of Wailuku they found out. When the canoe in which they were journeying broke up, Abraham had pushed and hauled his wife more than forty miles overland in an effort to join with the Hales at Lahaina, and this had precipitated her labor pains. Now they were bogged down in a trader’s shack, helpless in panic.

  It was a miracle that Urania, after such a trip, was still alive, but it was a greater miracle that Abraham had not thought to enlist the aid of Hawaiian midwives at his home mission, for they were some of the most highly skilled in the Pacific and within ten minutes would have diagnosed Urania’s case as one of simple premature birth brought on by exhaustion. Had the Hewletts relied on them, they would have produced a clean birth and a healthy baby; but for the Hewletts to have accepted their aid would have meant admitting that a heathen, brown-skinned Hawaiian knew how to deliver a Christian white baby, and such an idea was unthinkable.

  “I was sorely tempted to call in the local midwives,” Brother Abraham confessed to Abner, when he ran up to meet the limping traveler, “but I was ever mindful of Jeremiah 10, verse 2: ‘Thus saith the Lord, Learn not the way of the heathen.’ So I have brought my wife to her own people.”

  Abner agreed that he had acted wisely, and for a moment the two young men congratulated themselves on their righteousness, but then Abner asked, “How is Sister Urania?”

  At this question poor Brother Abraham was seized with a blush of respectability which made it almost impossible for him to say the words, but finally he blurted out: “She seems to have lost a great deal of her water.”

  In the growing dusk Abner looked sickly at his companion, then started feverishly unpacking his handbook. Thumbing it awkwardly he found a section titled “The Dry Delivery,” and as he read it hurriedly, he became quite ill in the stomach, for the news was ominous, but when he looked up and saw how hopeless Brother Abraham was, he gritted his teeth and said boldly, “I should like to see Sister Urania.”

  Hewlett led him toward a low grass hut in which the Englishman who traded at Wailuku lived, but both the man and his wife were absent in Honolulu, and the house was surrounded by fifty or sixty natives, sitting on the ground and watching the amazing white men. Abner made his way through them, and with his medical book under his arm, went into the mean house to greet the frail woman with whom he had shared the tiny stateroom on the Thetis. “Good evening, Sister Urania,” he said solemnly, and she replied bravely, “It is so consoling to meet again one with whom we journeyed on the small ship.” And for a moment they spoke of happier days.

  Then Abner asked, “Sister Urania, when did your …” He paused in acute embarrassment, and then finished with a rush: “Your labor pains, how long have they been occurring?”

  “They started at six this morning,” Urania said. Abner stared at her blankly, but his mind thought fiercely: “Oh, God! That was when she was climbing the last gullies!”

  He mopped his forehead and said slowly, “That was twelve hours ago. Presumably then, Sister Urania, the child will be born at midnight.” He consulted his watch: six hours to go.

  Aching with embarrassment, he asked, “Your pains. Have they been frequent?”

  “I don’t think so,” she replied.

  “Excuse me,” he said, and fumbled for his book of instructions, but the light was so bad that he could not read, and he directed Brother Abraham to fetch a kukuinut lamp, and by its flickering, wavering light he picked out the words that would guide him. “Have we a sheet of tapa?” he asked, and when one was found, he cut it into halves, twisted them to make ropes, knotted one end and tied the other to the foot of the bed. “You must pull on these knots, Sister Urania,” he instructed her. “In a dry delivery you will be called upon for extra work.”

  Instantly he was sorry he had said these words, for Urania looked up in terror and asked, “Have I done something wrong?”

  “No, Sister Urania,” he assured her. “With God’s help we shall do well.”

  Instinctively, she took his hand and whispered, “My cherished husband and I are so glad that you came.” But when Abner, blushing like a child, wanted to examine her stomach, as the handbook directed, both he and the Hewletts thought it proper that she first cover herself with all of her personal clothing plus a stout sheet of tapa. Feeling through the several layers, Abner gravely announced: “There seems nothing awry.”

  But his head was snapped back by a sudden scream from the bed and an automatic tightening of the ropes. He hurried to the sputtering lamp and studied his watch. In four minutes another cry and another straining. Sweating, he leafed through his book and found reassuring news. Hurrying back to the bed, he announced happily: “Sister Urania, things are going well. Now time will work with us.”

  At this news Brother Abraham grew a ghastly white and it was obvious that he was going to be very sick, so Abner left the straining woman and ran to the door of the delivery room, crying in Hawaiian, “Somebody come in here and take care of Reverend Hewlett!” Two experienced midwives, who understood husbands, laughed hilariously and rescued the missionary, who was, as they had predicted in obscene asides to the gathering, conspicuously nauseated, but while the midwives comforted him other Hawaiians whispered, “Isn’t this a strange way to do things? Our best midwives outside the hut caring for the husband, while a man who knows nothing is inside, caring for the mother.”

  “It’s the way they do it in America,” a listener explained.

  Suddenly the midwives dropped Hewlett and listened acutely to Urania’s cries, and it was sardonic that through the night these women, merely by listening, knew better what was occurring inside the hut than Abner, who was there with his book.

  Hewlett, stabilized after his sickness, wiped his watery blue eyes and made his way back into the hut, demanding, “When will the child be born?”

  “Brother Hewlett!” Abner cried in exasperation. “Unless you can make yourself to be of service, you will have to remain outside.”

  “When will the child be born?” the distraught man begged. Once more Abner went to the door and called for the midwives, who recovered Abraham and made him stay with them.

  The pains now came at constant intervals, and Abner, checking his book constantly, found occasion to say, “Sister Urania, it does seem as if God were supervising us tonight.”

  “I am now in your hands, Brother Abner,” the weak woman replied. “You must do with me as you require.”

  Later, Abner recalled that she had said these words with marked lassitude, and shortly thereafter he looked at her with horror and realized that she had not experienced a pain for some time and that she was still. Panic captured him, and he felt her wrists, but they seemed cold, and he ran to the door, shouting, “Brother Abraham! Come quickly!” And when the husband stumbled into the room, Abner reported, in a ghostly voice, “I fear she is dying.”

  Abraham Hewlett uttered a low sob and knelt at the bed, holding his wife’s hand, and this unexpected movement caused Urania to shift her shoulders, and Abner in amazement cried, “Can she be sleeping?”

  Outside, the midwives, listening intently, had already told the crowd, “She’s sleeping. She’ll probably stay that way for an hour or more. Then when she wakens, she’ll begin all over again.”

  “Is it a good sign when a woman already in labor sleeps?” the crowd asked.

  “No,” said the midwives.

  “Why not?” a man asked.

  “It means she’s weak,” the woman said.

  “What should they do … in there?” the man asked.

  “They ought to be gathering herb
s,” the midwives explained.

  “Why herbs?”

  “To stop the bleeding, later on … since she is a weak woman.”

  Inside the shadowy house Abner and Abraham went frantically through their handbooks and could find nothing about sleeping at the eighteenth hour of delivery, and Abner began to experience an overpowering trembling and fear. “Somewhere in here there must be an explanation,” he muttered, but his awkward fingers could not find it. “Brother Abraham, do you find anything?”

  Then, mysteriously, the labor pains started again, rhythmically and in full force, but they gave Abner little help, for it was not Urania who was experiencing them, but her husband Abraham. It was pathetic to see the undernourished missionary grip at his stomach, following the exact course of a woman’s pain, and for the third time Abner had to run to the door and beg the Hawaiians to take his assistant away. “And keep him away!” Abner snapped.

  At two o’clock in the morning Urania Hewlett wakened and at five she had diminished her cycle of pain to intervals of a minute and half, whereupon the listening women outside predicted, “The birth will be soon.” Abner, still fumbling with his book, his eyes bleary, came to the same conclusion, but his next half hour was one of special trial, for not knowing that Urania was undergoing a typical labor, he had leafed through the diagrams in the back of the book where unusual births were explained, with black-lettered titles, and he was possessed by one diagram: “Abnormal Birth: Shoulder and Arm Presentation.” Turning rapidly to the associated text, he discovered how difficult his immediate task was going to be if he was, indeed, faced by such a presentation. It was therefore absolutely essential that he prepare for the actual birth, if only to anticipate an abnormality; but this he could not do, because Urania still lay swathed in bedclothes and tapa, and he could not in propriety either remove them himself or ask her to do so. So he went to the door, where streaks of morning light were beginning to penetrate the palm trees, and asked for Brother Abraham, who was sleeping. One of the midwives started toward the door, but Abner recoiled from her in honest horror, so Abraham was wakened and Abner said to him, “Brother Abraham, you must now undress your wife. The hour is at hand.”

  Abraham looked dumbly at his associate and started toward the bed, but his own labor pains returned with violence, and he had to flee the delivery room, but Abner’s problem was solved by a vigorous movement on the bed, where Sister Urania, caught in the violence of birth, was kicking her clothes away and screaming for Abner to help her. Abner, swallowing like a schoolboy and shaking with embarrassment, approached the bed, and then strangely all of his uncertainty vanished, for he thought with boundless thanks to God: “That is surely the head. It is a normal presentation.”

  Outside, when the wail of the child was first heard, the two midwives said gravely, “He had better have the herbs ready.”

  Abner, preoccupied with the baby boy he held in his hands and with the nerve-racking job of cutting the cord and then tying it, summoned desperately every memory of his midwife’s textbook and did a creditable job. Then he stood for a moment in the shadows, perplexed, holding the new child in his hands, and knowing not what to do, but finally he went out into the dawn and handed the child to a native woman, whom the Hawaiians had summoned twenty-four hours before, certain that she would be needed, and this woman placed the child to her breast.

  The first midwife said: “He ought to be watching the mother.”

  The second replied: “I wonder if he is massaging her stomach to help her throw out the afterbirth.”

  And the first asked: “Do you suppose he would want these herbs?” And she indicated a brew that her people had used for two thousand years to stop bleeding.

  But the second replied: “He would not want them.”

  Inside the shack Abner now feverishly thumbed his book, refreshing himself as to what he must do next. He cleaned the bed, washed the mother, listened to her breathing, and then saw with alarm that something was happening that the book did not tell about. “Brother Abraham!” he called in fear.

  “What is it?” the sick husband replied.

  “I am afraid she is bleeding more than she should.”

  Brother Abraham knew nothing, but he quickly looked through his book, and while the two well-intentioned missionaries tried vainly to catch the shreds of knowledge that would have saved a life, on the rude bed Sister Urania grew weaker and weaker. The long day’s exertions and the long night’s exhaustion were inexorably exacting their toll, and her face grew gray.

  “She should not be sleeping so soundly,” Abner cried in panic.

  “What can we do?” Hewlett moaned. “Oh, God! Don’t let her die now!”

  Outside, the midwives said, “They ought to be massaging her stomach, but they seem to be talking, instead.” And gradually over the large crowd of natives that had stayed through the night, crept the knowledge that the frail white woman was dying. The idea came upon them like the rays of the morning sun, sweeping down from the coconut palms, so that the Hawaiians, to whom birth was a mystical matter, were already weeping before the missionaries knew that Urania had bled to death.

  Later, sitting exhausted under a kou tree, Abner said dully, “Brother Abraham, I did all I could to save your dear wife.”

  “It was the will of God,” Hewlett mumbled.

  “And yet,” Abner cried, hammering the medical text with his fist, “there must have been something in here we didn’t read.”

  “It was the will of God,” Hewlett insisted.

  The Hawaiians, watching, said, “How strangely the white men do things.”

  “They are so smart about reading and guns and their new god,” an old woman observed, “that you’d expect them to have found a better way than this to birth a baby.”

  “What is most curious,” pointed out another, “is that in America men do the work of women,” but the old woman who had been most critical of the midwifery was first to acknowledge: “Even so, they make fine children.”

  After the burial of Urania—the first of many mission women to die in childbirth or from physical exhaustion due to overwork—Abner arranged with natives to care for Abraham Hewlett, his newborn son and the latter’s wet nurse for the next two months until the difficult return journey to Hana at the tip of Maui was practical, and when these details were completed, Abner and the messenger climbed the hilly path to home; but they had not gone far when they heard a voice calling them, and it was Brother Abraham, pleading that they take his child with them.

  “In Lahaina there will be people to care for the boy,” he argued desperately.

  “No,” Abner refused. “It would be unnatural.”

  “What can I do with the boy?” Brother Abraham begged.

  The question was abhorrent to Abner, who replied, “Why, Brother Abraham, you will care for him, and bring him up to be a strong man.”

  “I don’t know about these things,” Brother Abraham mumbled.

  “Cease!” Abner cried sternly. “It is your duty to learn,” and he turned the distracted missionary around and sent him back to Wailuku and the responsibility of his child. When the ungainly man had left, Abner remarked hotly to the messenger, who could not understand, “I think that if he had had courage, his wife need not have died. If he had kept her at Hana, and done the best he could, all would have been well. Sister Urania was killed by the long climb to Wailuku. And the poor thing, eight months with baby.”

  These thoughts drove him to the contemplation of his own wife, and he became afraid that news of Urania’s death in childbirth might have an adverse effect upon her, so he devised an illogical plan for suppressing the news. He reasoned, more from hope than from common sense: “It will be some time before word of this bad business reaches Lahaina. I shall say nothing of it to my dear wife.” He entered into a solemn compact with himself and even called God to witness, but when he reached home and saw the way in which Jerusha’s six little curls fell beside her face, and the manner in which she leaned forward in eage
rness to greet him after their first days of separation since marriage, his words were faithful to the pledge, but his actions could not be, and he looked at her with such love and apprehension that she knew instantly what had happened. “Sister Urania died,” she cried.

  “She did,” Abner confessed. “But you will not, Jerusha.” And for the first time he called her by her name.

  She started to ask a question, but he grasped her harshly by her two wrists and looked hard into her brown eyes. “You will not die, Jerusha. I promise you by God’s word that you will not die.” He released her and sat on a box, holding his tired head in his hands, and said, half ashamed of what he was about to admit, “God protects us in the most mysterious ways, Jerusha, and although my thoughts may in some respects seem horrible, nevertheless they are true. I believe that God took me to the death of Sister Urania so that I would be prepared when your time came. Now I know what to do. I know what Brother Abraham should have done. Jerusha, I am prepared, and you will not die.” He leaped to his feet and screamed, “You … will … not … die!”

  More than anything else in life he wanted, at that moment, to sweep his wife into his arms and embrace her with kisses, wild bellowing kisses like the sounds of animals in the meadows at home, but he did not know how to do this, so all of his love expressed itself in this one profound resolve. “You will not die,” he assured his wife, and from that moment on, no woman in a remote outpost, far from help, ever faced her last days of pregnancy with a sweeter resolution.

  BUT IF ABNER thus found spiritual triumph in his missionary home, he encountered a fairly solid defeat at Malama’s grass palace, for when he went to give the Alii Nui her day’s lesson, he found that Kelolo had not moved to the new house built for him, but lived as usual with his wife. “This is an abomination!” Abner thundered.

  The two huge lovers, well into their forties, listened in embarrassment as he explained again why God abhorred incest, but when he was finished, big Malama explained quietly, “I built the house for Kelolo outside the walls, and it is a good house, but he doesn’t want to stay there alone.” She began to cry and added, “He tried it for two nights while you were away, but when I thought of him sleeping alone, I didn’t like it either, so on the third night I walked out to the gate and called, ‘Kelolo, come inside where you belong.’ And he came and it was all my fault. I am to blame, Makua Hale.”