Hawaii

by James A. Michener

  Each year Jerusha had had one moment of complete motherly happiness; it coincided with the arrival of the annual gift box from her parents in Walpole, New Hampshire. Each November they dispatched it, but she could never be certain when a ship’s captain would knock on her Dutch door, saying, “We’ve a box for you, ma’am.” How exciting it was to get that message, but how infinitely more exciting to see her family standing in a circle as Abner ripped away the top. There were dried apples, and spiced pears and hard dried beef. “These pants will be for Micah,” Jerusha would say carefully, lingering over each item. “And this dress will fit Lucy. David can have this and Esther this.” On the succeeding Sunday, at least, Jerusha could look back over her shoulder as her children marched to church in their new clothes, and she could be proud of them. She always allowed the box to stay in the house long after it was empty, and whenever she looked at it she could recall the cold winters of New Hampshire and the smell of cider.

  A major reason why Abner would have found it impossible to accept aid from the Whipples was this: a phrase of John’s kept running through his mind and seemed to him to summarize the apostasy into which his former roommate had fallen. At strange times Abner would hear ringing in his ears John’s sharp pronouncement: “I don’t think the alii sent the wind, and I don’t think God sank the ships.” The more he reflected on this the more contemptible it sounded. “In simple terms,” Abner rationalized, “what he has done is to equate heathen idols of the alii with God himself. How appalling!” And increasingly he kept away from John Whipple, for without either man’s being aware of the fact, as Whipple’s financial fortunes grew, so did Abner Hale’s deepening reliance upon the Lord; and since in Lahaina as elsewhere these lines of development are not parallel but are actually divergent, so that the distance between them increases, the two men grew not to comprehend each other.

  Nevertheless, Whipple remained interested in Abner’s welfare, and it was with both amazement and relief that he heard one day from a Salem captain, lately sailing from Boston, that a preposterous yet tantalizing thing was occurring on the wharves of that city. “Matter of fact, it’s no doubt completed by now,” the incredulous captain explained. “There was this man named Charles Bromley, out of New Hampshire, and he was building a complete two-storied wooden house right on the dock within spitting distance of the bay. No cellar, but everything complete, even to window cords. As soon as it was done, carpenters went over the entire thing with paint brushes and numbered every piece of wood in the house. Draftsmen drew pictures of everything, and indicated the numbers. Then what do you suppose happened?” the captain asked dramatically. “Damned if they didn’t start knocking the whole house down and carrying it aboard this ship, plank by plank.”

  “What ship?” Whipple asked.

  “Carthaginian, Captain Hoxworth, out of Bedford,” the captain said.

  “I would deeply appreciate it, Captain, if you’d keep this matter a secret,” Whipple said.

  “As a matter of fact,” the man said, “the house is headed for these islands. Honolulu, probably. I was so fascinated I spoke to this fellow Bromley. He didn’t want to talk but he did say that the idea was Captain Hoxworth’s. The captain came to him and said that this mission family in Honolulu … living like swine … you know, grass house, bedbugs, cockroaches. Why Bromley was building the house I didn’t get clear.”

  “Will you promise me?” Whipple pleaded.

  “Of course,” the captain agreed.

  “I assure you, Captain,” Whipple said, “you will be protecting a wonderful woman from hurt if you will keep your mouth shut about this. And I shall, too.”

  Dr. Whipple’s preoccupation with anything so minor as a new house was superseded when Abner became aware of mysterious events occurring in Lahaina without his being able to identify them; and since he considered himself arbiter of all that happened in the community, he was irritated to think that Hawaiians would wish to conduct important affairs behind his back. To the meeting in Honolulu he reported: “I first became aware of this unusual secretiveness four days ago when returning from inspection of a home that burned because the owner smoked tobacco, and after having admonished him for his sin, I happened to peer into Malama’s old palace grounds, where I spotted several kahunas I knew, and they were supervising the building of a large new house.

  “ ‘What are you building there?’ I called.

  “ ‘A small house,’ they replied evasively.

  “ ‘What for?’ I inquired.

  “ ‘The other houses have grown musty,’ they lied.

  “ ‘What other houses?’ I prodded.

  “ ‘Those over there,’ they said, waving their arms in some vague direction.

  “ ‘Exactly which ones?’ I insisted.

  “This question they did not answer, so I pushed my way into the compound and inspected the new house, finding it spacious, with real doors, windows and two Chinese mirrors. ‘This is a very substantial house,’ I said to the kahunas, but they shrugged me off by saying, ‘It’s a pretty small house,’ so I left the deceiving rogues and went in turn to each of the other houses and smelled them, and not one was musty, so I challenged the kahunas and asked, ‘Tell me what you are building,’ and they replied, ‘A house,’ and I left the conspirators, convinced that something suspicious is afoot, but what it is I do not know.”

  Abner was pondering these exasperating mysteries when he saw from his Dutch door a line of seven natives coming down from the hills bearing maile branches and great bouquets of ginger flowers. Leaving his Bible-translating, he hurried to the roadway and demanded, “Why are you bearing maile and ginger?”

  “We don’t know,” the Hawaiians replied.

  “Who sent you to the hills?” Abner insisted.

  “We don’t know.”

  “Where are you taking the flowers?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “Of course you know!” he fumed. “It’s ridiculous to say you don’t know where you’re going,” and he limped after them to the waterfront, where they wandered off, each in his own accidental direction.

  Infuriated, Abner stood for some minutes in the hot sun trying to piece together his various clues. Then, jamming his hands into his coat pockets, he stomped over to J & W’s and said brusquely, “John, what’s going on in Lahaina?”

  “What do you mean?” Whipple parried.

  “I just encountered seven natives bringing down maile and ginger. Why are they doing that?”

  “Why didn’t you ask them?”

  “I did, and they’d tell me nothing.”

  “Probably some kind of ceremony,” Whipple guessed.

  Abner both despised and feared this word, for it conjured up forbidden rites and heathen sex orgies, so he asked tentatively, “You mean … pagan ceremonies?”

  Then Whipple remembered. “Now that you bring it up, two days ago some of the whalers wanted extra supplies of tapa for calking. Usually I can find a hundred yards by snapping my fingers, but I went to a dozen homes, and they were all making tapa, but no one had any for sale.”

  “What were they doing with it?” Abner pressed.

  “They all said the same thing. ‘It’s for Kelolo.’ ”

  At this, Abner placed before the doctor the various bits of evidence he had collected, and when they had studied the facts, he asked, “John, what’s going on?”

  “I don’t know,” Whipple replied. “Have Kelolo and his children been in church recently?”

  “Yes, as pious as they ever were.”

  “I’d keep my eye on Kelolo,” Whipple laughed. “He’s a wily old shark.” And for the rest of that day Abner brooded over the fact that an event of obvious significance had been masked from his surveillance; but his present exasperation was nothing compared to what it became when in the late afternoon he heard as if from a distant valley the muffled, haunting throb of a pagan drum. He listened, and it stopped. Then it began again, and he cried, “The hula!”

  Without even informin
g Jerusha of where he was going, he started out in search of the long-forbidden hula, and he followed the echoes from one area to the next, until at last he pinpointed them as coming from a house on the edge of town. Hurrying along a winding footpath, he was determined to catch the lascivious revelers and punish them, when suddenly from behind a tree a tall native casually stepped into the middle of the path, asking, “Where are you going, Makua Hale?”

  “There’s a hula in that house!” Abner said ominously, but the man must have been a sentry, for when Abner reached the place from which the drum had echoed, he found only a collection of sweet-faced men and women practicing hymns, with never a drum in evidence.

  “Where did you hide them?” he stormed.

  “Hide what, Makua Hale?”

  “The drums.”

  “We had no drums, Makua Hale,” they said with the most winning simplicity. “We were singing hymns for Sabbath.”

  But when he reached home again, he heard once more the sound of drums, and he told Jerusha, “Something is happening in this town, and it drives me mad that I can’t find out what it is.” He ate no supper, but later, as the moon was rising, he announced sternly: “I shall not go to bed till I discover what evil is afoot.”

  Against Jerusha’s protests he donned his white shirt, best stock, claw-hammer coat and beaver hat. Then, fortifying himself with a stout cane, he went out into the warm tropical night and for the first several minutes stood silent under the stars and the sighing palms, trying desperately to detect what was occurring in his parish, but he heard nothing.

  He wondered if Murphy had revived the hula in his grog shop, but when he crept past the saloon it was orderly. He then went to the pier, suspecting that whalers might have conspired with Kelolo in organizing a debauch, but the ships were silent in the ghostly moonlight.

  And then, as he stood at the far end of the pier, staring at the ships, he happened to see out of the corner of his eye a flickering light along the shore some distance to the south. He dismissed it with the thought: “A night fisherman with his torch on the reef,” but it did not move as a fisherman’s should, and he muttered, “That’s not one torch. It’s several.” And with this he remembered the new grass house at Malama’s, and he recalled the kahunas, and like a fish drawn to the torches, he limped off the pier and started walking along the edge of the coral reef, past the fort, past the great alii homes and out toward Malama’s, and as he walked silently through the sand, the torches grew brighter and it became obvious that a considerable celebration was in progress, one at which he was not welcome. He therefore moved stealthily, slipping from one coconut palm to the next until at last he came upon a hidden spot from which he could spy upon the palace grounds, and the first thing he saw was a concentration of guards at the gate that led from the public road into the compound, and he thought with satisfaction: “Those guards are there to keep me out. What evil are my people up to?”

  He had not long to wait, for from a crowd of men who had been feasting on roast pig, Kelolo stepped forth in brilliant yellow robes, accompanied by six kahunas in feathered capes. Kelolo dropped his hand, and from an area near the beach a night drum began to sound, and then another, and finally a high-pitched variant which established a throbbing, disciplined rhythm. Suddenly, from the crowd, six women whom Abner had seen in the house singing hymns moved forth, naked to the waist and with red flowers in their hair, necklaces of polished black nuts about their shoulders and anklets of shark’s teeth which clicked as they began an ancient hula.

  Abner, who had often railed against this dance, had never seen it, and now as the swaying skirts made of ti leaves moved in the faltering shadows, he noticed how solemn and graceful the dance was, for the women seemed to be disembodied spirits, undulating in response to night winds: a movement would start in their heads, work its way along their supple arms, and pass to their hips in one unbroken symphony of motion. “This isn’t what I expected,” Abner muttered. “I understood that naked men and women …” But his fleeting concession was interrupted by what now took place, for he stood appalled as a chanter leaped before the dancers and began to cry mournfully, yet in exultation:

  “Great Kane, guardian of the heavens,

  Great Kane, guardian of the night,

  King of the gods, ruler of all men,

  Kane, Kane, Kane!

  Attend our ceremony, bless our shore!”

  And as Abner stared in disbelief, from the new grass house Kelolo appeared, bearing in his reverent hands the ancient stone of Kane. It should have been long since destroyed, but it had survived through Kelolo’s love, and now he placed it upon the low stone altar near the shore. When it was in position he shouted, “Great Kane, your people welcome you home!” Over the crowd a deep silence settled as each Hawaiian filed past Kelolo to deck the altar with flowers, and when this was done the kahunas chanted. Then at a signal from Kelolo the drums hammered out a new and wilder rhythm; the hula dancers swayed more joyously; and the people of Lahaina welcomed back their ancient god.

  In spite of Abner’s hundred sermons and two hundred hymns about destroying heathen idols, this stone was the first he had seen, and he stared at it with unholy fascination, for the curious combination of reverence and ecstasy it inspired in these worshipers bespoke its real force, and through it the little missionary comprehended much of Hawaii that he had not known before: its persistent religious passions, its abiding sense of history, and its mysteriousness. With all his heart he longed to rush forth and strike down the altar that kept these un-Christian forces alive.

  But his attention was diverted from the idol to the figure of a man who now appeared from the new grass house. It was Keoki Kanakoa, in a golden trance, his mechanical movements betraying the deep hypnosis into which he had fallen. He was naked to the waist, his body rubbed with oil; about his loins he wore a brown tapa and across his left arm a feathered cape. His helmet was in the old style, with an elevated comb sweeping from the base of the neck to the forehead, and he wore a necklace of human hair from which dangled a huge whale’s tooth fashioned into a hook.

  As he walked toward the statue of Kane, a priest chanted: “He comes, the perfect man. His hair is dark and reddish, his figure is commanding, triangular from shoulders down, with narrow hips. He bears a straight back, has no deformity, no blemish. His head is squared from molding while an infant. His nostrils flare. His neck is short and muscular, and his eyes are intoxicating like the tree that lures fish into the ponds. He is the perfect man and he comes to worship Kane!”

  In a trance, the young alii moved to the altar, bowed and cried: “Great Kane, forgive your son. Accept him once more.” And from the shadows Abner prayed: “Forgive him, Almighty God! He is in the possession of evil men and knows not what he does.”

  Abner now had to suffer a sharper blow, for from the grass house appeared Noelani wearing a golden tapa and Malama’s famous whale-tooth necklace. She bore flowers in her hair and moved solemnly toward the altar, while the priest cried: “She comes, the perfect woman. Her skin is flawless, soft and melting like the waves of ocean, lustrous and smooth like the banana blossom. She is fairer than the lehua petal, lovelier than the opening buds of breadfruit. Her nostrils flare from her straight nose. Her brow is clean and low. Her lips are full and her back is straight. Her buttocks are rounded, with cheeks like the bursting moon, solid like the foundations of Maui. She is the perfect woman, and she comes to worship Kane.”

  Abner, stunned by this double apostasy, began to mumble: “They can’t go back to Kane! They know the catechism. Keoki’s been to Yale. They’re Congregationalists. They’re members of my church and I forbid it.”

  But the apostasy, complete though it was, formed merely the prelude to an event of much greater significance, for from the group of kahunas, whose night of triumph this was, a tall priest stepped forward bearing a black tapa, such as Abner had not seen before, and after a passionate prayer to Kane, this priest swirled the tapa wide in the night air, and when it was complet
ely unfolded, brought it down about the shoulders of the brother and sister, crying: “From this moment on, you shall share forever the same tapa!” And he led the couple toward the waiting house.

  The drums leaped to wild rhythms. Dancers created violent gestures which erased memories of earlier beauty, and the kahunas chanted: “Noelani and Keoki are married.” Abner could tolerate no more. He leaped from his hiding place, swinging his stout club and shouting, “Abomination! Abomination!”

  Before the astonished gathering could apprehend him, he leaped to the altar and with a mighty swipe of his club sent the sacred stone of Kane spinning into the dust. In fury he kicked at the maile branches and the ginger. Then, dropping his club, he marched solemnly to the married couple, ripped away the black tapa, and cried, “Abomination!”

  By now the Hawaiians were recovered from their amazement, and Kelolo, aided by two kahunas, pinioned Abner, but they treated him gently, for they knew he was the priest of the other god, and what he had done was only his duty. So Kelolo pleaded softly, “Dear little friend, go home. Tonight we talk with other gods.”

  Abner broke loose and pointed his finger at Keoki, crying, “In God’s eyes this is an outrage.” Keoki looked at him glassily, and Abner cried, “Keoki, what has happened?”