Hawaii

by James A. Michener

  When this was done, he placed the package in the middle of the room and proceeded to gather up his four remaining treasures: the skull of Malama, her right thigh bone which he had given Keoki, and her left, which had been Noelani’s heirloom now rejected; and most significant of all, the sacred stone of Kane, which he had protected from the missionaries for so many years.

  He carried these objects to the altar by the sea, where a canoe waited, unmanned and with a solitary paddle. Reverently, he moved the three bones onto a low tapa-covered table perched in the prow. Then, ceremoniously, he covered them with maile leaves, whose memorable fragrance marked the night. This ritual completed, he placed the sacred stone on the platform which had so infuriated Abner, and here for the last time he spoke with his god.

  “We are not wanted any longer, Kane,” he reported frankly. “We have been asked to go away, for our work is done. Malama is dead with a different god. Keoki is gone, and Noelani spurns you. Now even the kahunas worship elsewhere. We must go home.

  “But before we leave, great Kane,” the old man pleaded quietly, “will you please lift from your children in Hawaii the burdens of the old kapus? They are heavy and the young no longer know how to live with them.”

  He started to carry the god to the canoe, but as he did so the awfulness of his act oppressed him and he whispered to Kane, “It was not my idea, gentle Kane, to take you from the islands you have loved. It was Pele who pointed to Keala-i-kahiki, the way that we must go. Now we shall go home.”

  So speaking, Kelolo gathered up the god and wrapped him in a cape of yellow feathers, placing him in a position of honor in the prow. He then turned and looked for the last time at the grass palace, where he had known Malama, greatest of women and the most complete. “I am taking your bones back to Bora Bora,” he assured her, “where we shall sleep in peace beside the lagoon.” Bowing to the house of love, and to the rocky altar, and to the kou trees whose shade had protected him he climbed into the canoe and started paddling resolutely toward Keala-i-kahiki, and as he stood out into the ocean itself, he chanted a navigational song which his family claimed had been composed by some ancient ancestor on his way from Hawaii to Bora Bora:

  “Sail from the Land of the Little Eyes,

  Southward, southward

  To the oceans of burning heat …”

  By morning he had entered exactly those oceans, and without water or food he paddled resolutely into them, a near-blind, toothless old man, bearing his god and the relics of the woman he had loved.

  JERUSHA ENJOYED for less than three years the clean wooden house her father had sent her, for perversely, although she had managed to maintain her health in the grass shack, she could not do so in her comfortable home. “She’s worked herself to death,” Dr. Whipple said bluntly. “If she’d allow Hawaiian women to care for her children …”

  Abner would not hear of this, so Whipple suggested, “Why not send her back to New Hampshire? Three or four cold winters with lots of apples and fresh milk. She’d recover.” This time it was Jerusha who was adamant.

  “This is our island, Brother John,” she insisted stubbornly. “When I first saw it from the railing of the Thetis, I was afraid. But through the years it has become my home. Did you know that some time ago Abner was invited to Honolulu, but it was I who refused.”

  “Then I can give you only one medicine,” Whipple concluded. “Less work. More sleep. More food.”

  But with four children and a girls’ school, Jerusha found little time for resting, until at last she awakened one morning with her entire chest in a viselike grip that she could not adequately describe, except that she found much difficulty in breathing. Abner placed her beside an open window and hurried to fetch the doctor, but when Whipple reached the room, Jerusha was gasping horribly.

  “Put her to bed, quickly!” John cried, and when he lifted his friend’s wife, he was appalled at how little she weighed. “Amanda,” he thought, “weighs more than she.” And he sent the children, running by themselves, to Captain Janders’ home, and then he said quietly to Abner, “I am afraid she’s dying.”

  There was no need to whisper, for Jerusha sensed that she was near death, and she asked if Amanda and Luella could come into the room, and when the women were there she sent for her children and said that she would like to hear, once more, the great mission hymn, and all in the room, including the dying woman, chanted:

  “From Greenland’s icy mountains,

  From India’s coral strand;

  Where Africa’s sunny fountains

  Roll down their golden strand;

  From many an ancient river,

  From many a palmy plain,

  They call us to deliver

  Their land from error’s chain.”

  “We have labored to do so,” Jerusha said wanly, and seeing that death was strangling at her throat, Amanda Whipple began to whisper the hymn that had launched them on their individual adventures on the golden strands. “Blest be the tie that binds,” Amanda began, but Abner could not join in the painful words, and when the wavering voices reached the poignant second verse, which seemed written particularly for those who travel in God’s work to far places, he fell into a chair and held his hands before his face, unable to look at the frail figure on the bed who sang in the perfect fellowship of which she was the symbol:

  “We share our mutual woes;

  Our mutual burdens bear;

  And often for each other flows

  The sympathizing tear.”

  “My beloved husband,” she gasped in great pain, “I am going to meet our Lord. I can see …” And she was dead.

  She was buried in the Lahaina church cemetery, with a plain wooden cross, and with her children at the graveside, watching the white clouds sweep down from the mountains; but after the ceremony was ended, and the crowd dispersed, Amanda Whipple could not rest content with the niggardly marking of her grave, and she had carved in wood, which was later reproduced in stone, an epitaph which might have served for all missionary women: “Of her bones was Hawaii built.”

  In later years it would become fashionable to say of the missionaries, “They came to the islands to do good, and they did right well.” Others made jest of the missionary slogan, “They came to a nation in darkness; they left it in light,” by pointing out: “Of course they left Hawaii lighter. They stole every goddamned thing that wasn’t nailed down.”

  But these comments did not apply to Jerusha Hale. From her body came a line of men and women who would civilize the islands and organize them into meaningful patterns. Her name would be on libraries, on museums, on chairs of medicine, on church scholarships. From a mean grass house, in which she worked herself to death, she brought humanity and love to an often brutal seaport, and with her needle and reading primer she taught the women of Maui more about decency and civilization than all the words of her husband accomplished. She asked for nothing, gave her love without stint, and grew to cherish the land she served: “Of her bones was Hawaii built.” Whenever I think of a missionary, I think of Jerusha Hale.

  In the hours following Jerusha’s death, the Americans in Lahaina held long discussions as to what should be done with the four Hale children, and it was tentatively agreed that Mrs. Janders should take them until such time as a ship could be found to carry the youngsters back to the Bromleys in Walpole, but since these plans had been worked out without consulting Abner, they were obviously not binding on him, and to the general surprise he announced, when Mrs. Janders offered to take the children, that he would continue to care for them; and they stayed inside the mission wall—Micah, aged thirteen; Lucy, ten; David, six; Esther, four—while their father tended their needs. In this he was much aided by Micah, a sallow, serious child who read voraciously and who had a vocabulary even greater than his erudite father’s, for often while the Whipple and Janders children were roustabouting near the mission grounds, Micah Hale, with nothing better to do, sat hunched inside the wall reading for pleasure either a Hebrew dictionary
or Cornelius Schrevelius’ Greek-Latin Lexicon. The two little girls were dressed as Abner thought appropriate, in fitted basques with full-length sleeves, plain flowing skirts, pantaloons to the ankle, and flat straw hats with ribbon streamers, all dredged up from the bottoms of the charity barrels, and they too became extremely fast readers with vocabularies that astonished their elders. Only on Sundays did the general population see the Hale children, for then their father washed and polished them, easing them one by one into their best apparel and leading them solemnly behind him to the big church. At such times many mothers in the community observed, “They are so pallid. Like their mother.”

  All might have gone well, however, for Abner was a father who demonstrated deep love for his children, except that in the spring of 1837 the Carthaginian put into Lahaina on a routine visit to pick up Janders & Whipple furs for an intended run to Canton, and while the handsome ship was loading, Captain Hoxworth idly roamed the tree-lined streets of the town; suddenly he snapped his fingers and asked a Hawaiian, “Where is Mrs. Hale buried?” Stepping briskly, the tall, powerful captain strode to the cemetery, stopping only at a wayside house to buy some flowers; and his intentions were peaceful, but when he reached the grave he had the great bad luck to find Abner Hale there, tending the grass that had grown up beside Amanda Whipple’s improvised marker; and when the whaler spotted Abner, the author of his constant grief, he flew into a dark and savage rage, shouting, “You goddamned little worm! You killed this girl! You worked her like a slave in this climate!” And he dove for Abner, catching him below the knees and bearing him violently onto the grave, where he began punching him about the head. Then, struggling to his feet while Abner was still prone, he started raining kicks at the little man, crashing his heavy boots into Abner’s head and chest and stomach.

  Under such treatment, Abner fainted, but to lose the hateful enemy thus infuriated Captain Hoxworth additionally, and he grabbed him from the grave and began throwing him down again with tremendous force, shouting, “I should have kept you among the sharks, you dirty, dirty, dirty bastard.”

  How far the dreadful punishment would have continued is uncertain, for natives, hearing the fight, hurried in to rescue their beloved little minister, but when they reached him, they thought him dead. With love they carried him to the mission house, where unthinkingly they allowed the four Hale children to see their father’s mutilated figure, and the three younger ones began to weep, but sallow-faced Micah kneeled over his father’s battered face and began washing away the blood.

  In the days that followed, it became quite apparent to Dr. Whipple that Abner had suffered severe damage in the head, Captain Hoxworth’s huge boots having either displaced a piece of bone or dislodged a set of nerve ends; and for several days Abner looked blankly at his commiserating friends, who said, “We have told Hoxworth he can never again come into this port.”

  “Who is Hoxworth?” Abner asked dully.

  But under Whipple’s care, the missionary recovered, although ever afterwards the people of Lahaina would frequently see him stop on his walks, joggle himself up and down as if resetting his brain, and then continue, an uncertain man who now required a cane. There was one particularly uncomfortable moment during his recovery when he discovered that his four children were not with him, but were lost somewhere among the heathen of Maui. He began to rant, and his voice raised to a wailing lament, but Amanda produced the children, for she had been tending them in her own home, and he was pacified.

  Both the Whipples and the Janderses were surprised, upon his recovery, to find that not only did he insist upon keeping the children with him; the children much preferred their life within the mission confines to the freer existence outside; and as soon as he was able, Abner reestablished the curious, walled-in household on the mission grounds.

  Then, in 1840, an unexpected visitor arrived in Lahaina, and the pattern of life was permanently broken, for the arrival was a tall, emaciated, very striking-looking Congregational minister dressed in jet-black and wearing a stovepipe hat that made him seem twice his natural height. At the pier he announced, “I am Reverend Eliphalet Thorn, of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, of Boston. Can you lead me to Reverend Hale?”

  And when the gaunt old man, spare and effective as a buggy whip, strode into the mission house, he was instantly aware of all that must have transpired, and he was appalled that Abner had tried to keep his children with him. “You should either find yourself a new wife, or return to friends in America,” Thorn suggested.

  “My work is here,” Abner replied stubbornly.

  “God does not call upon his servants to abuse themselves,” Thorn countered. “Brother Abner, I am making arrangements to take your children back to America with me.”

  Instead of arguing against this sensible decision, Abner asked carefully, “Will Micah be able to enter Yale?”

  “I doubt that the boy’s preparation is adequate,” Thorn countered, “living so far from books.”

  At this, Abner summoned his scrawny, sallow-faced son and bade him stand at attention, hands at sides, before the visitor from Boston. In a steady voice Abner directed, “Micah, I want you to recite the opening chapter of Genesis in Hebrew, then in Greek, then in Latin, and finally in English. And then I want you to explain to Reverend Thorn seven or eight of the passages which cause the greatest difficulty in translation from one language to the next.”

  At first Reverend Thorn wanted to interrupt the exhibition as unnecessary; he would accept Abner’s word that the boy could perform this feat, but when the golden words began to pour forth, the gaunt old missionary sank back and listened to their pregnant promises. He was struck by the boy’s feeling for language and was unhappy when he stopped, so that he asked, “How does such a passage sound in Hawaiian?”

  “I can’t speak Hawaiian,” Micah explained.

  When the boy was gone, Thorn said, “I’d like to meet some of the Hawaiian ministers.”

  “We have none,” Abner replied.

  “Who is to carry on the work when you go?” Thorn asked, in some surprise.

  “I am not going,” Abner explained.

  “But the vitality of the church?” Thorn pressed.

  “You can’t trust Hawaiians to run a church,” Abner insisted. “Has anyone told you about Keoki and his sister Noelani?”

  “Yes,” Eliphalet Thorn said coldly. “Noelani told me … in Honolulu. She now has four lovely Christian children.”

  Abner shook his head, trying to keep all things in focus, but for a moment he could not exactly place where he had known Eliphalet Thorn before, and then it became clear to him, and he recalled the manner in which the grave, gaunt man had gone from college to college in the year 1821. “What you must do, Reverend Thorn,” Abner explained eagerly, “is go back to Yale and enlist many more missionaries. We could use a dozen more here at least.”

  “We have never intended sending an unlimited supply of white men to rule these islands,” Thorn replied severely, and his accidental use of the word rule reminded him of his major responsibility in visiting Hawaii, but the subject was difficult to broach, and he hesitated.

  Then he coughed and said bluntly, “Brother Abner, the Board in Boston is considerably displeased over two aspects of the Hawaiian mission. First, you have set up a system of bishoprics with central control in Honolulu, and you must know that this is repugnant to Congregationalism. Second, you have refused to train up Hawaiians to take over their churches when you depart. These are serious defects, and the Board instructed me to rebuke those responsible for these errors.”

  Abner stared coldly at his inquisitor and thought: “Who can know Hawaii who has not lived here? Reverend Thorn can throw down rebukes, but can he justify them?”

  Thorn, having met the same kind of stubborn resistance in Honolulu, thought: “He is accusing me of intemperate judgment on the grounds that I know nothing of local conditions, but every error begins with a special condition.”

 
Eliphalet Thorn was not at ease in delivering rebukes, and having warned Abner, he turned to happier topics, saying, “In Boston the tides of God seem always to run high, and I wish you could have witnessed the phenomenal changes in our church during the past few years. Our leaders have brought to the fore God’s love and have tended to diminish John Calvin’s bitter rectitude. We live in a new world of the spirit, Brother Abner, and although it is not easy for us older men to accommodate ourselves to change, there is no greater exaltation than to submit to the will of God. Oh, I’m convinced that this is the way He intends us to go.” Suddenly, the inspired minister stopped, for Abner was looking at him strangely, and Thorn thought: “He is a difficult, custom-ridden man and cannot possibly understand the changes that have swept Boston.”

  But Abner was thinking: “Jerusha instituted such changes, and greater, in Lahaina seven years ago. Without the aid of theologians or Harvard professors she found God’s love. Why is this tall man so arrogant?” A single conciliatory word from Thorn would have encouraged Abner to share with him the profound changes Jerusha had initiated in his theology, but the word was not spoken, for Thorn, noticing Abner’s aloofness, thought: “I remember when I interviewed him at Yale. He was excitable and opinionated then. He’s no better now. Why are the missions cursed with such men?”

  Then, driven by that perverse luck which often frustrates full communion, Thorn stumbled upon a vital subject, and the manner in which it developed confirmed his suspicion that in Abner Hale the Church had acquired one of those limited, stubborn men lacking in capacity for growth who are such impediments to practical religion. “Brother Abner,” the questioning began, “I have come here to join you in ordaining any Hawaiians who are ready for the ministry. Will you assemble your candidates?”

  “I have none,” Abner confessed.

  Thorn, already satisfied that he had identified Abner’s character, did not raise his voice. “I’m not sure I understand, Brother Abner. When young Keoki betrayed the church, didn’t you immediately recruit eight or ten better prospects?”