Moloka'i

by Alan Brennert

  Leilani smiled as Rachel turned and headed for home.

  I

  n November Emily celebrated her eighteenth birthday by moving out of Bishop Home, and readily accepted Leilani’s invitation to share her cottage. Six months later, when Francine also abandoned the sanctuary of the convent, Leilani and Emily decided the house was really more than big enough for three. And as they and Rachel enjoyed the first thrilling flower of their adulthood, the settlement too came of age, in a different way.

  Chapter 12

  1908–09

  T

  he horses thundered down the track to the rising cheers of the crowd. There were three ponies, black, brown, and calico, with riders just as distinctive. On the black mare was a Portuguese boy of fifteen, a mere cavity where his nose had once been; on the brown mare was a twenty-year-old Hawaiian lad, a bright red kerchief around his neck masking the tracheotomy incision through which he breathed; and on the calico was a determined wahine with the reins looped around the vestigial stump of her left hand, her good right hand wielding a whip. The wahine was Francine, and she was in the lead. In the grandstand Rachel, Emily, Hina, and Leilani shouted themselves hoarse as Haleola, quiet but no less excited, watched along with her “girls.”

  Francine’s mount easily cornered the next curve, but the black pony was closing on her. “Go! Go!” Hina yelled. “You can do it!” Rachel cried. But as the ponies rounded the bend the black one inched into the lead and the brown mare came up hard behind Francine—who did not, it must be said, look at all disturbed. By the time they rounded the next bend and began the second lap the brown mare was running neck and neck with Francine and the black pony had pulled ahead by half a length.

  Francine suddenly snapped her whip, the air cracking next to the calico’s face, and as Francine knew it would the animal tapped into a wellspring of strength and speed. In less than ten seconds Francine made up half the distance between herself and the lead pony. Rachel and her friends whooped with joy. As the ponies came out of the turn and into the last stretch, Francine and the Portuguese rider were almost on top of each other, barely a foot of air separating them, and the Hawaiian boy fell back by a length and a half. The crowd was now on its feet, cheering. As the riders swung into the final turn, Francine, who seemed most confident in her cornering, squeezed the calico’s sides with her knobby little knees and pulled into the lead, by a nose—which is exactly how she finished the race.

  “She did it again!” Rachel cried in delight.

  “Damn,” Emily laughed, “I bet on the Portagee!”

  Rachel gaped at her. “You what?”

  “Hey, six in a row, I figured she was due! Nobody’s lucky streak lasts that long!”

  Leilani laughed. “You traitorous little bitch,” she said cheerfully.

  Emily shrugged.

  A triumphant Francine rode her calico to the reviewing stand and collected her purse of ten dollars: big money at Kalaupapa. Haleola smiled, bemused at the thought of where she was and what she was watching:a horse race, one of many that would be run this week. And on the inside of the track lay the baffling geometries of a baseball diamond, those games held even more frequently than the races. There were also athletic clubs, two brass bands, a rifle club, glee clubs—a far cry from the somber funeral societies Damien had founded. Kalaupapa had evolved from a “given grave” where the afflicted could only wait for death to a place where people lived as well as died.

  Physically, too, the settlement had changed; Kamiano would hardly have recognized it, but would surely have approved. Mature foliage now covered much of the peninsula, providing breaks against the endless rake of the wind and shade for homes that once sat roasting in the sun. There were newly built stables; a new hospital; a new landing to replace the decrepit old dock; a dozen new patient cottages; a steam laundry; a bandstand; and most popular of all, a factory in which fresh poi could be steamed without dependency on the arrival of often-rancid blocks of taro from Honolulu.

  Less pleasant to contemplate were the faces of Haleola’s girls. Emily’s eyebrows were long gone, her eyes heavy-lidded under the weight of leprous flesh; Leilani’s once-fine features were becoming puffy and bloated; and Hina’s hair mercifully obscured long distended earlobes. Only Haleola’s sweet Aouli was relatively unblemished, the result of half a dozen operations by Dr. Goodhue to remove sores. She bore faint scars where surgeries had removed the tumors—as did many residents, since Goodhue’s surgical approach to leprosy had proved both successful and popular. The pleasing cosmetic results not only lifted the patients’ spirits, but the excision of the tumors also seemed to slow the progress of the disease.

  After the race Francine treated everyone to coffee and cake from the bakery; it had been a while since they had all been together like this. Emily and Francine had boyfriends in whose houses they spent as much time as the one they shared with Leilani (who put the privacy to good use). Hina lived with a boy from Hilo; only Rachel was still unattached, and taking her time to rectify the condition. “When the hell you getting a boyfriend?” Emily would ask, to which Rachel would snap, “When you getting a new mouth to replace that big one you got now?”

  Afterward they all wandered down to the dock where the James Makee, the second steamer to arrive at Kalaupapa this week, was anchored offshore. Kalaupapa Landing was busier than anyone had ever seen it, men and material arriving constantly to service two major construction projects. The first, a multimillion-dollar Federal Leprosy Investigation Station to do research into a cure, was being built at Kalawao. The second was the new lighthouse being erected at the tip of the peninsula. A temporary light had stood there for at least a year, but it was little more than a keeper’s house and a tall mast crowned with a red lantern; this new structure would be more permanent and far grander. The steamers Makee, Likelike, and Iwalani regularly deposited onto the shore tons of powdered concrete, iron, and lumber, which were then hauled a mile up the coast on the backs of men and mules. The base of the lighthouse had already been poured, an eight-sided foundation thirty feet in diameter, each side some five feet thick.

  Over the months residents watched the structure take form, its iron bones flexing higher and higher into the sky as men on scaffolding slowly gave the skeleton skin and shape. The lighthouse tender Kukui soon joined the other steamers on the Moloka'i run—and for the first time since the Board of Health had forced the original residents of the peninsula to leave, the people of Kalaupapa, pleasantly enough, knew again what it was like to have neighbors.

  E

  mily’s jibes about Rachel’s virginal state left a greater impression than Rachel was ready to admit. She was twenty-two years old, and as she looked at her friends, happily settled with their various lovers, she worried that Uncle Pono’s joking prediction would come true and she would be an old maid. What if, while she waited for the right man to come along, her leprosy worsened and she became ugly and deformed? Would any man want her then?

  Anxious and afraid she might die without ever knowing love, she made her decision. Surfing by moonlight with Nahoa, their boards balanced on the phosphorescent crest of the same wave, Rachel waited until a break between wave sets. As they lay on the beach together Rachel turned to Nahoa, took his face in her hands and kissed him. Surprised at first, Nahoa eagerly returned her ardor; as Rachel pressed closer to him she felt him growing hard, his ule swelling against her belly. In moments they had shed their swimsuits, Nahoa’s gorged penis found its way inside her, and she gasped upon this shocking but exciting penetration of her body’s most private space. His thrusts were clumsy though no less pleasurable for that, but too soon she felt his orgasm inside her and he withdrew, leaving her empty and unsatisfied. They made love again, and this time she came closer to reaching her own climax, but still fell short; after which Nahoa seemed to lose interest.

  They tried once more, days later, but the results were no more rewarding and they soon fell back, with some relief, into their accustomed roles of surfing pals.

&n
bsp; Leilani assured Rachel that hers was not an atypical first time, and urged her not to give up on the notion. But the only positive thing Rachel could see coming out of the whole experience was that the next time Emily harped on her about getting a boyfriend, Rachel could say, “Had one, thanks,” and bask in Emily’s stunned silence.

  O

  uch!” “Sorry.” Goodhue’s scalpel had just nicked the calf of Rachel’s left leg. “But pain is a good sign. It means your tissues are healthy—no new nerve damage.” He turned his attention to Rachel’s right foot, from which only recently he had excised a leprous mass.

  “Four years, six surgeries, and the tumors haven’t grown back,” he noted as he scraped a skin sample from Rachel’s heel. “You’ve made excellent progress, Rachel.”

  Rachel beamed with pride. She was keenly aware that the Board of Health had just “paroled” a patient who, like Rachel, had been among the first to have his tumors surgically removed. After six skin snips failed to show any trace of the Hansen’s bacillus, his leprosy had officially been declared “bacteriologically inactive.”

  “If this one’s negative,” she said hopefully, “that makes two in a row, doesn’t it? Only four more to go?”

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, now. This could take another nine or ten months,” Goodhue cautioned. “But I think we have every reason to be optimistic. Be patient.”

  The words made her spirits soar. Ten months! In less than a year, she might be cured—paroled—free!

  The next day the Makee brought a parcel from Papa, postmarked in San Francisco; the possibility that she might someday go to what locals now called the “mainland” no longer seemed so remote. The package contained a book Rachel had requested, The Sea Wolf. Its author, Jack London, had visited Kalaupapa a year and a half ago; Rachel had liked The Call of the Wild, and worked up the nerve to tell him so. He seemed surprised to find a fan here, but was very friendly and gracious. Shortly after, he published an even-handed, sympathetic account of his stay at Kalaupapa.

  Papa was still shipping out ten months of every year, but it was clear from his letters that at fifty-five he was tiring of the work and the travel:

  If I had one wish that God could grant to me it would be to come to Moloka'i to live out the rest of my days with my little girl, but since that won’t happen I might as well sail the globe as I always have, thinking of you every day and wishing I were with you, or you with me.

  By now the memory of Rachel’s ugly adventure with the late and unlamented Moko was far enough distant that she could return to Kauhak without fear of reawakening old nightmares. Haleola enjoyed the occasional picnic there, and together astride a brown stallion Rachel had recently purchased they would ride up Damien Road and onto the narrow trail Rachel had discovered fifteen years before.

  At the summit they sat and looked out at the emerald bowl of the crater, abandoned now by human habitation but still very much populated: not far away a spotted deer rooted about in the underbrush; above them a flock of birds wheeled in a cloudless sky; far below, deer drank from the brackish water of the lake on the crater floor. “It is beautiful here,” Rachel admitted.

  “This crater, you know,” Haleola said, “was said to be the first one dug by Pele on Moloka'i.”

  “I, um, thought Pele lived inside the volcano on the Big Island.”

  “This was before. You see, Pele was the offspring of two gods. Her mother was Haumea, and one legend says Pele and her siblings were ‘born from the brain,’ that is, they sprang from their mother’s head, not her loins. They lived far across the ocean in the land known today as Tahiti.

  “Now Pele, like someone else I know, dreamed always of faraway places. So she set off in a canoe with two of her brothers, who controlled the tides and the currents; and after a while they found our islands, our Hawai'i Nei. Because her elemental form is fire, Pele sought an island in which to dig a deep volcanic home for herself.

  “But her older sister Namakaokaha'i—a goddess of the sea, who delighted in tormenting Pele—followed her to Hawai'i. On the first island where Pele tried to dig a crater for her fire—Ni'ihau—her sister sent ground water surging into the hole, quenching Pele’s flames, and Pele had to move on to Kaua'i. There she dug even deeper holes, but once again her sister flooded them, wiping out what would have been Pele’s homes.

  “On O'ahu she dug at Koko Head and other places, but Pele’s wicked sister destroyed them too. Pele came here to Moloka'i and you see the result below us. Finally, on Maui, Pele and her sister waged a fearsome battle. Pele shot streams of angry lava into the sea as her sister pounded the coastline with hundred-foot waves, trying to collapse the crater Pele had made—what we know today as Haleakal. After days of war Pele’s sister finally extinguished the fire inside Haleakal and her pounding surf broke apart the lava bones of Pele’s body. Namakaokaha'i rejoiced because she believed that she’d succeeded in killing her sister.

  “But the bones were only part of Pele’s body, and while her sister was lulled into believing she’d won, Pele traveled to the Big Island, going far inland—far out of the sea’s reach—and digging a hole so deep that her sister could not breach it. The sea goddess raged in defeat and returned to Tahiti. Pele and her family have lived ever since in Klauea.”

  Rachel gave a low whistle. “I guess I’m lucky my sister only got me sent to a leper colony,” she said with a smile, then worked up the nerve to ask something she had long wondered. “Auntie? Do you . . . still believe in the old gods? Are they still real to you?”

  Haleola seemed surprised, even amused, by the question. “Aouli,” she said, “is a daughter ‘born from the brain’ of her mother any less believable than a virgin who gives birth to the Son of God?”

  “That wasn’t what I asked.”

  “I know.” Haleola stood, a bit shakily, and sighed. “I wish that I had been born fifty years before I was,” she said. “Before the kapus were overthrown. When things were more certain. All my life I’ve lived in two worlds—the world my mother raised me to believe in, and the world around me. As a healer I was taught that sickness came from the soul, from a person’s past actions and state of mind. Yet I’ve seen with my own eyes the tiny creatures that live in our blood, the ‘microbes’ that supposedly make us sick. Which do I believe? Maybe both.”

  She looked around her, at the lush green slopes of the crater, teeming with life; at the ocean pounding the lava coast as if Namakaokaha'i were still futilely battering her sister’s bones; and up at the towering face of the pali. She smiled.

  “I’ll tell you what I believe in,” she said. “I believe in the 'ina—the land and the sea and the air around us. When our ancestors first saw the fury of the surf or the angry fire spitting from volcanoes, they saw that there was a power to these things that they could not explain. They knew they had mana—power. And they do. Can you look at the beauty around us, Aouli, and doubt that there is mana in this crater, and in the land and sea and sky that surround it?”

  “No,” Rachel allowed.

  “No land is more beautiful,” Haleola said, “and therefore more powerful. That is what I believe in, Aouli. I believe in Hawai'i. I believe in the land.”

  S

  ister Catherine dropped into the confessional’s seat and said in a trembling voice, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. My last confession was on Friday last.”

  Father Maxime André clearly noted the distress in the sister’s voice and waited to hear of its cause.

  “I have questioned God’s will. I have felt anger toward Him. I have doubted His wisdom. And I still do.”

  “Sister, what has caused you to doubt?” he asked.

  “I don’t know where to begin.” And she didn’t know Father Maxime half as well as Father Wendelin, who’d left Kalaupapa after friction with superiors in Honolulu. “My . . . father committed suicide. When I was seventeen.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “He hadn’t seemed depressed or anxious,” Catherine went on. “He w
asn’t in any financial trouble, or having an affair. One day he just took out his pistol and shot himself. Left a note saying he was sorry, but no more.

  “My mother came to blame herself. She thought, when the man you’ve loved all these years is so troubled that he’s driven to kill himself, shouldn’t you know? Shouldn’t you be able to see it coming? And then it’s a small step to wondering, Maybe it’s my fault. Maybe I failed him as a wife. What did I do? What did I fail to do?

  “Well, ever since, Mama would have trouble sleeping. She’d spend half the night awake sometimes; I used to hear the floorboards groan as she paced the house. Her physician, Dr. Almont, prescribed laudanum to help her sleep.”

  “Laudanum. That’s tincture of opium, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. And it did help. We all knew she’d become addicted to it, but . . . the alternative seemed somehow worse. And now my brother telephoned today to tell me”—her voice caught—“last night Mother took a fatal overdose of laudanum and died in her sleep.”

  “Catherine. Dear God,” Maxime said softly. “I’m so sorry.” He added hopefully, “Was it an accident?”

  Catherine shook her head, though he couldn’t see. “No. Quite deliberate. She left a note.” She added quietly, “There’s no way I can get back to Ithaca in time for her funeral. I’m going to miss my mother’s funeral.”

  She began to weep.

  “Sister,” Father Maxime said, “you’ve nothing to confess to. You’ve had an awful shock, of course you’ll experience some doubt, some—”

  “Listen, Father, please listen.” She wiped away tears, tried to order her thoughts. “When my father killed himself, our parish priest took the view . . . the charitable view . . . that my father had not been in full possession of himself. He’d had a drink that night, and Father Bernds took that into consideration and concluded that my father’s suicide was not a mortal sin; and that therefore he could be given a church burial.