Hawaii

by James A. Michener

  ONE DAY in early 1833, after John Whipple had recovered from his exhaustion due to the pestilence, he was accosted by a sailor who asked, “You Doc Whipple?”

  “I am,” John said.

  “I was directed to hand you this personally,” the sailor explained.

  “Where are you from?” the doctor asked.

  “Carthaginian. We’re in Honolulu.”

  Eagerly, yet with apprehension, Whipple opened the letter, which said simply:

  “Dear Dr. Whipple. You have good sense. Can you get Abner and Jerusha Hale out of Lahaina for a week? I intend to build them a house. Your trusted friend, Rafer Hoxworth.”

  “Tell your captain yes,” Whipple said.

  “When can he arrive?” the sailor inquired.

  “Next Monday.”

  “He will be here.”

  So Whipple fabricated an intricate plot, whereby Abner was called to what the missionaries called “a protracted meeting” at Wailuku, where long ago he had tended Urania Hewlett at her death. To Abner’s surprise, the Whipples said, “Amanda and I need a rest. We will join you, for holiday.”

  “The children?” Jerusha asked, frightened, for she had never left them during a single night since Micah’s birth.

  “Mrs. Janders’ll care for the children,” John insisted, and although both Abner and Jerusha thought it perilous to risk their offspring to a woman who allowed Hawaiians to nurse her babies, they at last consented, and the four who had known one another so well aboard the Thetis began their pleasant hike to Wailuku, but when they reached the summit of the pass that divided the two halves of the island, John Whipple stopped and stared sadly back at the additional valleys that had been depopulated by the measles and said, “Abner, somehow we’ve got to get a virile new people into these islands. Because if dying Hawaiians were able to marry strong newcomers …”

  “Whom could you get?” Abner asked, mopping his forehead.

  “I used to think other Polynesians would do,” Whipple replied. “But recently I’ve changed my mind. It’ll have to be Javanese. A totally new blood stream.” As he paused he idly compared the parched leeward areas he had just left with the green windward area they were approaching. “Curious,” he mused.

  “What is?” Abner asked.

  “I was looking at the two halves of this island,” Whipple replied. “The rain falls over here, where it isn’t needed, but it never falls on our side, where the big fields lie barren. Abner!” he cried with positive delight. “Why couldn’t a man bring the useless rain over to where it’s needed?”

  “Do you seek to correct God’s handiwork?” Abner snorted.

  “In such matters, yes,” John replied.

  “How could you bring rain through a mountain?” Abner challenged.

  “I don’t know,” Whipple mused, but he kept staring at the contrast between rainy windward and parched leeward.

  They were not long on their journey before the Carthaginian hove into Lahaina Roads and Captain Rafer Hoxworth strode ashore. One-eyed Kelolo and a band of able policemen met the fiery whaler at the pier and leveled six guns at his chest. “Dis place kapu for you, kapena! We no aloha for you, you damn hell!” the old alii warned, in his best pidgin.

  Hoxworth, brushing aside the guns, announced: “I come only to build a house.”

  “No girls on the ship!” Kelolo said sternly.

  “I want no girls,” Hoxworth assured him, striding briskly up to the mission house. To his following sailors he said, “Get every movable thing out of that house. And be careful!”

  The removal took only a few minutes, and when Hoxworth saw how pitifully little the Hales had—their only substantial furniture being the chairs and tables he had provided them—he held his big right hand over his mouth, for he was biting his lip with incredulity. “Cover it up,” he said, and when this was carefully done, he applied a match to the old grass house, and in a moment it blazed into the air, with its burden of insects and memories. When the ground was cleared he said, “Dig.”

  The cellar was broad and deep. It would be cool in the blazing hot summers at Lahaina, and when it was done Captain Hoxworth lined it with building stones hewn from coral, and these he continued some distance above the earth, so that when he started to erect the house itself, it had a solid foundation. Now he ordered his sailors to bring him the corner posts, each numbered, and he began the fascinating task of reassembling the house exactly as it had been when standing on the wharf in Boston.

  In three days the job was well launched and obviously on its way to success, and it was while lounging in the offices of Janders & Whipple, that Captain Hoxworth, having told Pupali and all his women to go to hell and leave him alone, heard the story of Keoki Kanakoa and his sister Noelani. “You mean that tall, handsome girl I saw skimming naked past my ship one day on a surfboard?” he asked quizzically.

  “Yes. All this happened to her,” Janders said gloomily.

  “Why, hell!” Hoxworth growled. “She’s the best-looking girl the islands ever produced. You mean she’s out there in that grass shack … alone?”

  “She has the usual women-in-waiting,” Janders explained.

  “I know,” Hoxworth said contemptuously, making huge circles with his hands to indicate the women who usually attached themselves to the alii. “I mean … she’s just there?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s a hell of a way to live!” he boomed. “Just because she got mixed up with a lot of crazy nonsense. Janders, I’m going out there.”

  “I wouldn’t,” the older man said. “They don’t remember you well in this town.”

  “To hell with memories!” Hoxworth cried, slamming his big fist onto the arm of his chair. “I’m thinking of staying in Honolulu, Janders. Sail my ship to Canton in the China trade. Maybe build a couple of ships. Could I get cargoes here?”

  “If your charges are low enough,” Janders replied cautiously. “I’ve got a lot of skins I’d like to get to China.”

  “I think you’ll get ’em there,” Hoxworth said, and he strode out of the office and along the main road to the grass palace of the alii. At his approach, guards ran to inform Kelolo, but before the old man could prevent Hoxworth from doing so, the bold captain had bowed graciously, shoved open the gate, and marched into the grass palace where he found Noelani.

  “Ma’am,” he said, extending his big right paw, “I’ve been wanting to meet you ever since I saw you riding naked past my ship. That must have been thirteen years ago. You were a dazzling beauty in those days, ma’am. You’re lovelier now.”

  “Have you come to find someone else to sell?” Noelani asked coldly.

  “No, ma’am. I’ve come to find me a wife. And I feel in my bones that you’re the one.”

  Noelani started to reply to this abrupt assertion, but before she could do so, Hoxworth thrust upon her a bolt of choice Canton silk and a flood of words: “Ma’am, I suppose you know why I came back to Lahaina. My actions last time have preyed upon my conscience, and I deplored seeing an American man and woman living as those two did. If I offended you on my earlier visit, I now apologize, but with that out of the way, ma’am, I want to tell you that I propose running my ship henceforth in the China trade. I’ve bought a house in Honolulu, and for some time I’ve been looking for a wife.”

  “Why did you not find a wife in Boston?” Noelani asked coldly.

  “Tell you the truth, ma’am,” Hoxworth replied … But at this moment Kelolo rushed up with some guards and burst into the room to save the princess; but she, in turn, dismissed her father and said that she wished to talk with the captain.

  “Truth is,” he continued as if there had been no interruption, striding back and forth before the doorway leading to the garden, “I proposed once to one of those peaches-and-white-linen women of Boston, and I failed to win her. Since then I’ve come to prefer the lustier women of the islands.”

  “Where is Iliki?” the alii asked.

  “I hope she’s in good hands,” Ho
xworth said bluntly. “Where would she be if she were here?”

  The question caused Noelani to reflect, and to gain time she asked, “When will the house be finished?”

  “In two days, ma’am, and that’s why I think it important that you dine with me tonight aboard ship. I want you to see your quarters … in case you should ever decide to join me on one of the trips to Canton.”

  The sound of this word, this distant city from which had come her clothes and her furniture and which she had never expected to see—nor had she any reason to see it—so captivated Noelani that she betrayed her excitement, whereupon Hoxworth said bluntly, “Noelani, you’ve had a bad time here, caught up in things of which you were no part. Why not leave it all? It’s a sad, messy business that you will never conquer. I offer you a wild, exciting life.”

  “I have a son, you know,” the proud woman said tentatively.

  “Bring him with you. I’ve always wanted a tyke of my own aboard ship.”

  “He belongs to the people …” she hesitated.

  “Then leave him with the people,” he said firmly, and before she could protest, he had caught her by the hand and drawn him to her, kissing her harshly upon the mouth and pulling at her garments.

  “Please,” she whispered.

  “Go to the door and tell the women to guard it. You’re entertaining your husband-to-be.”

  She pushed him away, stood solemnly before him and asked, “Could you forget that I was once married to …”

  “Noelani!” he chided. “How many of the girls of this village have I kept in my cabin? That’s also past. Now I need a wife.”

  “I meant, that it was my brother who …”

  He pondered this question for a moment, then laughed again and said reassuringly, “With me each day that dawns begins a new year. I have no memories.”

  The tall captain’s words were warm in her ear, the kind of bold, sweet words an alii liked, and she thought: “This kapena is much like an alii. He is tall, eager to fight, and he is the leader of his men. He is tired of running after waterfront women. He owns an important ship and he was willing to take my son as his own. He is not pious, but I think he is honest. The day of the Hawaiian is dead, but the years of the white man are upon us.” To Hoxworth she said quietly, “I will go with you to the ship.”

  He kissed her again and felt her wealth of hair cascading upon his hands, and it aroused him as the kisses of dark island girls had always done, and he whispered, “Tell the women to guard the door,” but she refused and said, “Not in this room. It is a center of the old ways. I will go with you to your ship.” And the town of Lahaina was astonished to see Captain Hoxworth and Noelani, the Alii Nui, walking down the dusty road beneath the palm trees, talking idly as if they were lovers. But they were more astonished when the tall girl, marvelously beautiful now that she was seeing daylight again, climbed into the captain’s rowboat and went out to the Carthaginian, where she stayed till dawn, and when at parting she looked at the handsome, well-kept cabin which was to be hers, she thought: “He is a real man, and I will be faithful to him. I will eat his food to please him. I will dress as he prefers, so that other men shall look at him and say, ‘Kapena is the lucky one.’ I will never say no to him”—and then a soft smile came to her face, as it would later come to the thousand Hawaiian girls who would marry Americans—“for I know that with my own words I can win him to a gentler life.”

  Noelani saw Captain Hoxworth on each of the next two days, and on the last day of his visit to Lahaina, while his men were dragging a complete set of furniture from the Carthaginian to the new mission house, she was alone in the grass palace wrapping in tapa cloth two heavy thigh bones; one Keoki had given her before his death, and the other she had received directly for herself. Taking the bundles in her arms, she went out to her father’s small house and said to him, “Kelolo, my beloved father, I am leaving Lahaina, and I dare not take these oppressive gifts with me. You must return them to their grave. We cannot any longer live with such memorials haunting us.”

  Reverently, he accepted the two great thigh bones, placing them tenderly on the earth before him. “Are you determined to go to Honolulu with the American?” he asked.

  “Yes. I am seeking a new life.”

  “May it be a good one,” he said gently through his broken and lisping lips. He did not rise to bid her good-bye, for although he understood the pressures which were forcing her to act as she did, he could not condone them; and he was certain that she was rejecting the only true vocation and happiness she would know on earth. “May the goddess Pele …” he began, but she hushed his wish, unable to bear any further invocations.

  Yet on her part she said, “May the gods be good to you, Kelolo. May the long canoe ride swiftly until the rainbow comes for your departure.” She studied his worn old figure with its circular scars about the face and its gaping eye socket, and then she left, to board the ship, but when she reached the pier the sailors told her, “The kapena is not aboard yet,” and they directed her to the mission house, where, looking into the bright new room, she saw her intended husband sitting on a kitchen chair, turned backward, its arched back under his chin, and he staring moodily at the floor; and as she watched he rose and carried the chair with him, and set it down three or four times with great violence, making the entire house shudder with his fury. And for some minutes he stood there, pounding the chair into the floor and holding his head down, with his eyes closed and knots standing out on his forehead in dark passion; and she recalled his earlier words and thought: “He can boast that he has no memories, but I am pleased that he has. I thought he remembered only trivial things like selling Iliki.” And after he had thrashed the chair into the floor a dozen more times, to control himself from kicking the entire house into splinters, he carefully returned it to its place, gave the small wooden room one last lingering look and came out into the bright sunlight.

  “We’ll go,” he said, and villagers, who had heard of the impending marriage, followed them to the pier, where they watched as the big captain caught Noelani in his arms and lifted her into the longboat.

  On the way home from Wailuku, John Whipple and his wife, as soon as they reached the summit of the trail, began gazing into the distance so markedly that Abner finally asked, “What are you looking for?”

  “A great surprise,” John explained mysteriously, but the four had reached the last small hill before he was able to spot, beneath the branching trees, the roof line of the new mission house. “I see it now!” he cried. “Can you?”

  The Hales looked futilely at the outlines of Lahaina and saw nothing. There was the broad reach of sea, the hills of Lanai, the dusty trails. And then Jerusha gasped, “Abner! Is that a house?”

  “Where?”

  “At the mission! Abner! Abner!” And she broke into a run and dashed down off the hill, with her bonnet flying behind and her skirts causing dust, and when she reached the road she rushed on ahead, not waiting for anyone to catch her, crying all the time, “It’s a house! It’s a house!”

  Finally, gasping with excitement, she stood beside the stream and looked across the walled-in yard to where the old grass house had stood, and there rose, as in a magic story, a New England farmhouse, snug and secure. She put her left hand to her mouth and looked dumbly first at the house and then at the approaching three, and finally she ran desperately to Abner and kissed him in public. “Thank you, my dearest friend and companion,” she said weakly.

  But he was more surprised than she and looked at Whipple for enlightenment, and for the time being John thought it permissible to tell only part of the truth, so he explained: “Your father sent it out from Boston, Jerusha. We wanted to surprise you.” Later, when the association with Captain Hoxworth was fully developed, the two missionaries were so happy with their home that neither made complaint. They took the gift as having come from Charles Bromley, in Walpole, and they thought it proper to ignore the intermediary by whom the gift had been delivered, and who in fac
t had initiated the idea. Jerusha thought it a marvelous house in these respects: it did not harbor bugs; it did not have an earthen floor; it had a proper cellar for storing food; it had separate rooms for the children; it had a desk where Abner could work; and it had a kitchen. Jerusha was proud when the Hawaiians came to see it.

  The first official visitor was Kelolo, bringing with him a large square of paper which he had got from J & W and on which he wanted Abner to print the name NOELANI, after which, for no apparent reason that could be ascertained at the time—although later his purpose became clear—he sat on and on until Abner felt that he might have to ask the one-eyed old man to go. He recalled how his wife Malama had always loved the church, how Keoki had wanted to become a minister, and Noelani’s happy marriage in Honolulu. There seemed much more that he wished to say, but he did not say it, and at sunset when Jerusha interrupted, “Kelolo, my dear friend, we are about to have our sea biscuit and salt beef. Will you join us?” he gripped her hands passionately and wished her a world of luck. Finally, when he stood alone with Abner, he predicted, “Your church will last when you and I are both upon the rainbow, Makua Hale. It is a fine church, and through it you have done much good in Lahaina.” He then inquired if he might embrace the little missionary, and in the Hawaiian manner he rubbed noses and said farewell.

  It was not yet dark when he walked down the dusty road, past the taro patch and the royal grounds over the little bridge where the whaling boats came for clear water and onto the grounds that Malama had loved. As he walked he thought happily: “There is always a chance that the night marchers may come along to take me away,” and he listened hopefully for the footfalls, but in vain. The walk did not tire him particularly, but he did feel himself to be an old man, and when he reached his small house he rested for a while before wrapping in the paper the three treasured objects he intended for his daughter: Malama’s necklace, the whale tooth hung on the hair of his hundred friends, his feathered cape, and the ancient red stone of Pele.