Keku‘i was the wife of Alapa‘i’s nephew, Keoua. She was also Alapa‘i’s own niece. She had lived for several years at Kekaulike’s court on Maui, having returned to Hawai‘i just within the past year to become Keoua’s wife. It was common knowledge that during her recent stay on Maui, she had pleasured herself with one of the king’s sons, Kahekili. Now, despite her declaration that my grandfather, Keoua, was the father of her baby, and Keoua’s public acceptance of the child in Keku‘i’s swollen belly as his own, rumor-mongers at Alapa‘i’s court whispered that the baby’s father was in fact Kahekili.
Mindful of these rumors, Alapa‘i consulted his kāhuna on the significance of Keku‘i’s bizarre yearning. “It means that this woman’s child will grow up to become a slayer of chiefs,” they said. One young priest, Ka‘akau, advised Alapa‘i to slay the infant. “E ‘aki maka o ka lauhue,” he counseled. “Nip off the bud of the poison gourd.” The mō‘ī resolved on the spot to kill Keku‘i’s baby as soon as it was born.
My uncle Kamehameha was born in a secluded hale—a thatched grass house—at Kokoiki, in northern Kohala, where Alapa‘i was then gathering his army and fleet for the coming invasion of neighboring Maui. He came into this world in the midst of a raging storm. Attended only by her sister Kamaka, Keku‘i ground her teeth and cried out as she strained in labor. Outside, the rain fell in near-solid sheets and the wind howled, drowning out the sounds of both Keku‘i’s screams and Kamehameha’s birth cries.
Learning that Keku‘i was about to give birth, the king had dispatched a party of soldiers to kill the infant. “Find her; find her child and slay it—and tell no one,” he said. The soldiers had set out at once, but the intense storm frustrated and slowed their search.
Alapa‘i’s plans had meanwhile come to the attention of Nae‘ole, chief of Hālawa, who was a cousin of Keku‘i’s father. The childless Nae‘ole was about fifteen years older than Keku‘i and regarded her as the daughter he never had. Nae‘ole began to make plans of his own.
Nae‘ole had gone to Kamaka with news of the murder plot against Keku‘i’s unborn child. Now, as Keku‘i lay deep in slumber alongside her newborn son, Nae‘ole slipped into the hale through an opening Kamaka had fashioned in one of the thatched walls. Moving quietly to Keku‘i’s side, he knelt and gently picked up the infant. The baby opened his eyes and whimpered softly. “Hush, little one,” Nae‘ole whispered. “Your life depends on it.” In the hale’s dark interior, the newborn would have seen little more than Nae‘ole’s shadowy form and Nae‘ole would have barely made out the baby’s features. Yet years later, he swore to my father that the baby Kamehameha had regarded him with a profoundly serious stare and then, without another sound, closed his eyes.
Swaddling the baby in bark cloth against the driving rain outside, Nae‘ole stole away. Keku‘i, exhausted from her birth ordeal, did not stir. Nearby, Kamaka watched through hooded eyelids as she pretended to sleep.
Daybreak brought clearing skies and a commotion outside the hale. After a long night’s search in the rain, Alapa‘i’s soldiers had at last found Keku‘i’s birthing place. Their captain, a hulking warrior brandishing a club, burst in upon the sleeping women. “Wake up! Where is the child?” he demanded.
Keku‘i’s eyes flew open and she reached for the baby who was not there. Ignoring the club-wielding soldier looming over her, she wailed, “Where is my son? He is gone!”
Kamaka feigned surprise. “Keku‘i, what has happened? Where is your baby?” she cried.
The king’s officer stood slightly stooped over, looking from one woman to the other in confusion. His eyes fell upon Keku‘i’s full, bared breasts and the thin trickle of milk oozing from her nipples. Somewhere in this hale, he knew there would be further proof of nativity: bloody afterbirth, bundled in bark cloth for ritual burial. But there was no baby.
The captain clenched his war club, turned on his heel, and pushed his way out of the hale through a knot of men trying to peer inside. “There is no baby. This woman has miscarried,” he told them. With the Maui invasion fleet’s departure almost at hand, he and his soldiers could not waste more time searching for the missing infant, but neither could he return to King Alapa‘i admitting to failure. “Come with me,” he ordered. “We must return to the fleet. We have a war to fight.” The officer marched his men away. Behind them, Keku‘i fell sobbing into her sister’s embrace.
By this time, Nae‘ole—with Keku‘i’s baby in his arms—was already miles to the east, making toward Kauhola Point and the rising sun.
After burying the afterbirth under a hala tree near the birthing house, Keku‘i and her sister returned to Alapa‘i’s court, where Keku‘i’s husband Keoua and his half-brother Kalani‘ōpu‘u were making ready to embark with the invasion fleet. Keku‘i and her sister found the two men at the seashore, amid ranks of double-hulled war canoes that stretched as far as the eye could see in each direction. The blue-green waters of the shallows near the shore glistened in the light of the new day. Maui’s Mount Haleakala, in sharp focus in the storm-cleansed morning air, loomed in the distance across the ‘Alenuihāhā Channel.
Keku‘i threw herself into Keoua’s arms, crying. He broke free of her desperate hug and held her at arm’s length. “Where is our child?” he demanded.
“Oh Keoua,” she replied through her tears, “someone or something came in the night and took him from me as I slept.” With this, she collapsed at his feet, wailing inconsolably.
“Is this true?” Keoua asked, directing his question to his sister-in-law, Kamaka. “Our son…was stolen?”
“Yes, brother,” Kamaka replied. “Keku‘i gave birth to a fine boy in the night. And when we awoke this morning, he was gone.” She bowed her head and averted her eyes.
Keku‘i was too distraught over the loss of her infant son to mention the sudden intrusion of Alapa‘i’s soldiers, and Kamaka said nothing. Keoua and Kalani‘ōpu‘u were about to go to war in Alapa‘i’s service and they might soon be fighting alongside the very men Alapa‘i had sent to murder the child. Kamaka did not want to jeopardize the brothers’ lives with knowledge that could poison their thoughts and distract them in the heat of the coming battles. Of Nae‘ole, she would say nothing to Keoua and Keku‘i until the time was right. Better to let them truly mourn their son’s supposed loss than to pretend to despair and possibly give Alapa‘i cause to doubt them and his soldiers’ falsified report.
“Brother,” Keoua said to Kalani‘ōpu‘u, “we must find my son.”
Kalani‘ōpu‘u hesitated. “We do not have time,” he said. “The fleet will be leaving soon. Our uncle will be angry with us if we delay him.”
“I know time is short, Kalani,” Keoua said, “But I must use whatever time we have to find our child.”
With Kamaka guiding them and the still-sobbing Keku‘i trailing behind, the two brothers set off for the birthing house, where they searched for some sign of the baby’s abductor. But Alapa‘i’s soldiers had trampled the ground and Nae‘ole had been careful to leave no trace of his passage through the nearby foliage, and the brothers’ search proved fruitless.
The sun was halfway to its zenith when they first heard the calls of conch shells from the direction of the coast. “It is time, brother,” Kalani‘ōpu‘u said. “We have had no luck here and the war fleet will leave soon. We must go back now.”
Keoua sighed. His shoulders sagging, he turned toward the two women, who were huddled together on the ground near the hale. “Alapa‘i will be looking for us,” he said.
“But what of our son?” Keku‘i cried.
Keoua gently raised Keku‘iapoiwa to her feet and held her close. “If our son is still alive, our families’ ‘aumakua will watch after him,” he said. “The child’s fate is in their hands now.”
Kamaka kept her silence.
As my grandparents forlornly made their way back to the coast, Nae‘ole—with my infant uncle swaddled in bark cloth and tied securely to his back—reached the sandy beach at Kauhola, where
two young men from his village were waiting by a single-hull outrigger canoe resting in the shallows. A wet nurse, already seated in the canoe, waited with them. Nae‘ole shifted his precious burden from his back and handed the baby to the woman, who put the child immediately to her breast. Then, without a word among them, Nae‘ole and the younger men pushed the canoe into deeper water, jumped in, and set off down the coast in the direction of Hilo.
With all three men paddling, the small canoe made swift progress, reaching Waipi‘o Bay as the sun was settling toward the weatherworn summit of Mt. Kohala to the west. Nae‘ole’s goal was the far end of the narrow Waipi‘o Valley, where he held administrative title to an ili kūpono—a sub-division of land within the larger boundaries of the Waipi‘o ahupua‘a. The sunlight was already cut off by Waipi‘o’s high walls, and deep shadows were falling on the valley floor as Nae‘ole and the wet nurse disembarked from the canoe. Nae‘ole took the sleeping baby from the woman, strapped him to his back once more, and slipped away into the gathering darkness. Nae‘ole went unseen and unheard by the inhabitants of the night-cloaked valley, just as he had planned. And so the infant Kamehameha—who was destined to unite these islands into one nation for the first time in our people’s long history—arrived in stealthy anonymity in Waipi‘o, which was to be his place of refuge for the next five years.
Nae‘ole left Kamehameha with a maka‘āinana couple—tenant farmers who worked a plot of land in the Hālawa chief’s valley domain. Their names and the names of their children are lost to memory now. They were commoners, after all, and beneath the notice of the ali‘i. For this reason, Nae‘ole was confident that Kamehameha would be safe in their keeping. Should Alapa‘i send spies in search of the child, they would never think to look for a kapu ali‘i prince among mere kānaka.
“Guard this child well,” he told the couple as they prostrated themselves before him. “He is precious in Kāne’s sight. You must keep him close at all times, and he must never leave this farm. As far as anyone else here is concerned, he is your own son. I will return to visit him from time to time.”
Nae‘ole handed the baby over to the woman, who trembled slightly as she took the infant from him. Little Kamehameha began to cry. It was his first sound of complaint in a day and a half. “Even then,” Nae‘ole later told my father, Keli‘imaika‘i, “your brother Kameha was as hard as a koa trunk.” The farmer’s wife, who was almost never without a baby of her own, guided my uncle Kameha’s mouth to a milk-engorged nipple. Kameha drank lustily.
The Waipi‘o Valley climbs the rainy, windward side of Mt. Kohala on the Big Island’s Hāmākua Coast. Waipi‘o’s walls are high and its floor is almost flat. In its formation, it is like a deep war-club wound in the side of the mountain. But this wound runs with clear, sweet water from the rains that fall daily as Lono sends his clouds scudding against the mountain’s eastern flanks. The rain falls on the mountainside and cascades down the valley’s thousand-foot-high walls in myriad waterfalls that shimmer as they catch the rising sun’s early light. The water from the falls runs into the Waipi‘o Stream, which courses down the valley’s three-mile length, emptying into the ocean at a black-sand beach. The air of Waipi‘o Valley is always filled with the soothing sounds of falling, rushing water and the musical calls of birds. The soil of the valley’s floor is the richest on the island. Anything will grow readily there—coconut, banana, bread-fruit, yams, and especially taro. It is even said that the valley’s pigs are the most succulent on the island.
It was in this paradise on earth that Kamehameha passed his earliest years. Kameha never questioned the constant attention that the farmer and his wife lavished upon him, accepting it as his natural due. He hardly noticed how the couple tensed when he became angry over some small thing, dropped whatever they were doing that moment, and rushed to soothe and placate him—attending to him in a way they rarely would to their other children. The farmer and his wife were affectionate toward my uncle Kamehameha after a fashion. But mostly what they felt toward him was trepidation. Kameha was, after all, ali‘i. His very person was ordinarily kapu for commoners. The couple knew without question that their lives would be forfeit to Nae‘ole if even the slightest harm should befall Kameha while he was in their care. This unspoken understanding passed between the farmer and his wife in anxious glances whenever the little boy seemed ill disposed. It colored their demeanor toward him with reserve even in the happiest of times, and Kameha undoubtedly sensed it.
Ignorant of his royal forebears and his kapu status, Kameha could only have been mystified by this odd coolness from his supposed mother and father. “It must have had a bad effect on him,” my father told me many years later. “When he first came to Alapa‘i’s court, your uncle Kameha was very quiet and serious beyond his years.”
Kamehameha looked forward to the infrequent visits of his “uncle” Nae‘ole, who would journey from Hālawa to see him, on the pretext of superintending his land holdings in the valley. In Nae‘ole’s embrace, Kameha found the warmth that was missing in the arms of his Waipi‘o Valley “parents.” Nae‘ole would joke and play with the little boy in a way the farmer and his wife never did. It was only in Nae‘ole’s presence that Kamehameha knew the release of unbridled laughter.
Late one morning early in Kamehameha’s sixth year, Nae‘ole arrived at the farm. Knowing that Kameha loved the Waipi‘o Stream and often played along its banks, Nae‘ole went there first and called out to him. Kameha, who had been playing with two of his foster brothers at the stream’s edge, ran to Nae‘ole, his bare feet fairly flying over the grass, still glistening from the morning’s rain. Kameha’s whole body glinted in the sunlight as well. After the fashion of small children in those days, he wore no clothing. “Uncle,” he cried. Then, instead of throwing himself at Nae‘ole, he pulled up short. The old man was different. Rather than greeting Kameha with a broad smile and open arms as he usually did, this day Nae‘ole kept his arms to his side and his expression was serious. In one hand he held a narrow length of kapa—bark cloth.
“Boy,” he said, extending the strip of kapa to Kameha, “you must put this on.”
Instead of taking the cloth from Nae‘ole, Kameha tilted his head and looked quizzically at him. “Why must I wear that, Uncle?” he asked.
“Just do as I say,” Nae‘ole answered, in a hard tone Kameha had never heard from him—or any adult—before. Kameha’s large brown eyes widened with surprise. “Come here,” Nae‘ole said, more kindly now. “Let me help you.”
Nae‘ole tucked one end of the bark-cloth strip under Kameha’s chin, gently tilted his head forward until the cloth was pinned between his chin and his neck and instructed the boy to hold it there. Then, Nae‘ole passed the kapa through Kameha’s sturdy brown legs, wound it around his small waist and hooked the cloth back on itself at the first turn at Kameha’s back. “You can let go of the kapa now,” Nae‘ole told Kameha, who lifted his chin. The remaining length of bark cloth dropped in front of Kameha, extending to his knees and covering his thighs like an apron. “That is how you tie a malo,” Nae‘ole said.
Kameha wriggled uncomfortably in the unfamiliar loincloth. “I don’t like it, Uncle,” he complained. “It itches.”
“Nevertheless, you must wear it now,” said Nae‘ole. How ironic little Kamehameha’s reaction to this minimal stitch of clothing now seems in view of the eagerness with which he and our people later adopted the stifling manner of haole dress.
“Why must I wear it?” Kameha demanded.
“Because it is unfitting for a young ali‘i prince such as you to run around naked like a kanaka child,” Nae‘ole said.
“I am a prince?” Kameha asked, dumbfounded.
“Yes,” said Nae‘ole. “And now it is time for you to return to the court of King Alapa‘i‘nui and meet your true father and mother.”
“I had been living a fiction,” Kamehameha told my father years later. “Nothing was as it seemed.”
“Come boy,” said Nae‘ole. Turning away from K
ameha, he started down the trail that followed the burbling stream to the mouth of the Waipi‘o Valley. And without a word of farewell to the man and woman who had cared for him for the past five years, Kameha followed Nae‘ole down the valley to the sail canoe that was waiting for them at the black-sand beach.
The farmer and his wife, who had kept to their modest hale during Nae‘ole’s last visit to the farm, got no words of thanks from the old chief. But they required none. After all, they still had their lives.
Much had transpired in the world outside Waipi‘o during the five years Kamehameha had lived there in unwitting exile.
The morning after his birth, King Alapa‘i’s fleet had crossed the ‘Alenuihāhā Channel to Maui for a preemptive strike. Kekaulike, the king of Maui, had earlier invaded Hawai‘i, inflicting great havoc along the Kona Coast, where his troops had pillaged and burned numerous villages. Alapa‘i had only just consolidated his hold on the Big Island and Kekaulike supposed that Alapa‘i was weak and vulnerable after bloody struggles for power with his half-brother, Kalanike‘eaumoku, and then Mokulani, the chief of Hilo. But Kekaulike had miscalculated. Alapa‘i assembled a fleet of canoes and intercepted Kekaulike’s forces at sea, defeating the Maui fleet in the ensuing naval battle.
Later discovering that Kekaulike was gathering a larger fleet of war canoes for a second invasion attempt, Alapa‘i had set sail for Maui.
As it turned out, the gods took the king of Maui before Alapa‘i could put a spear through him. Landing first at Kaupō on Maui’s south coast, Alapa‘i learned that Kekaulike had died. Maui was now ruled by Kekaulike’s son, Kamehameha‘nui, whose mother was Alapa‘i’s half-sister. Sailing up the coast to Kīhei, Alapa‘i met with his sister and the new king. Instead of making war, Alapa‘i concluded a peace treaty; instead of fighting, feasting ensued.
Peace at Maui did not mean a return home for Alapa‘i’s people. Instead, their mō‘ī invaded neighboring Molokai, to do battle with the king of O‘ahu, who had occupied that island. By making common cause with the chiefs of Molokai, Alapa‘i aimed to defeat the O‘ahu king there so that he could then seize O‘ahu for himself. My grandfather Keoua and his older brother Kalani‘ōpu‘u distinguished themselves in this fight, cornering the O‘ahu ruler after a five-day fray and slaying him as he tried to flee the battlefield.
Once There Was Fire: A Novel of Old Hawaii Page 2