Moloka'i

by Alan Brennert

  “I don’t know if Father Bernds was right. I don’t know what sort of reckoning my father had with God. But—”

  Maxime said, “Your mother was under the influence of an opiate. This wasn’t a rational decision—”

  “It was very rational! She’d planned it for weeks, hoarding enough medication to do the job. She put her legal affairs in perfect order, to lessen the burden on her children. And she left a long note apologizing to us, saying she was simply tired of living with the guilt and the grief, and all she wanted was for the pain to end.

  “But now I’m frightened, Father . . . so frightened . . . that far from being over, her pain is just beginning.”

  She wept inconsolably now, and Father Maxime left his side of the confessional and came over to Catherine’s; he squatted beside her, took her trembling hands in his. “She was not in her right mind when she did this,” he insisted.

  “What about my father? Was he not in his right mind?”

  The priest hesitated. Catherine asked, “Is it a mortal sin to love someone as much as my mother did? To feel such guilt for his death that you can’t bear it another day? Is that a sin punishable by damnation?

  “Tell me, Father, that my mother is in Heaven. Tell me she’s with my papa, and God has forgiven them both.”

  Father Maxime looked helplessly at her. She broke down again, and wordlessly—for he had no words—he took her in his arms and cradled her; offering her not God’s comfort but his own, merely human, consolation.

  O

  n a stormy winter’s day in January, as Haleola felt the rain in her bones and listened to its comforting percussion on the roof, she received her first portent. As she sat sewing, her house—closed tight against the damp cold—was suddenly suffused with a familiar fragrance: that of the sweet purple flowers of the silversword plant, which Haleola had once witnessed in rare bloom on the Haela'au trail. The silversword didn’t grow on Moloka'i—even on Maui it could only be found on the slopes of Haleakal and in the West Maui mountains, and it bloomed only in summer. But its scent now seemed to fill the room as vividly as if she were sitting on the terraced slopes above Lahaina!

  “Aouli?” Rachel glanced up from The Sea Wolf and looked at Haleola. “Do you smell that?”

  Rachel’s nose twitched. “Smell what?”

  “Oh . . . nothing. Never mind.” Haleola, still breathing in the fragrance, wondered whether this was perhaps a trick of memory. She decided to enjoy the remembrance, if that was what it was, for as long as it lasted . . . about five minutes, after which it dissipated as though she were descending a trail into a valley, leaving the silversword high on the slopes above.

  But Maui came to her in other ways as well. That night she dreamt she was floating on the surface of the sea, drifting with the current and gazing down at brilliant yellow, white, and purple coral reefs passing below her. Even in dream she recognized where she was: Olowalu, just below Lahaina, a favorite swimming spot of her youth. She was delighted to be back, pleased that everything she saw was familiar as an old friend: a great blue bush of branching coral, schools of striped and yellow fishes fluttering around it like butterflies; pink brain coral looking as if plucked from some inhuman skull; spidery little crabs skittering through a crevice in a mountain of bright green lobe coral. She smiled and floated toward a bulbous mass of white coral, another friend of days gone by. . . .

  And then one of the white coral heads opened a pair of eyes and looked at her.

  Its black irises expanded in the gloom, the eyes slowly tracking her as she floated past, and Haleola panicked; she shut her eyes, as if by doing so she could shut these others too.

  When she opened them again, she was no longer in the water but on the beach with Keo and the children and their old dog, the one they had found as a puppy with its jaw broken. Haleola had mended the pup, and they named it Papa Ku'i, “jawbone.”

  They were sitting on the sand at K'anapali, a pig roasting in a pit. Keo asked her to take some pork from the pit, but she was somehow afraid. The flames seared the pig’s skin, blistering it black, but no matter how much Keo begged her to go to the pit she wouldn’t do it.

  Papa Ku'i began to howl.

  Haleola woke.

  She knew at once what she had just experienced: a “revelation of the night.” The opening eyes, the pit, the howling dog—all of these were portents of death.

  In her dream she had been afraid; here in the cool quiet night a great calm surrounded her. All this was as it should be; she’d been granted a glimpse into the future that would allow her to make the most of the present.

  It was four in the morning but Haleola rose immediately, unwilling to waste even a moment. By candlelight she wrote letters to her sons and had them sealed before Rachel stirred at seven. The rain’s persistent monotone on the roof became more inconstant, then ceased entirely, though a wet wind still ruffled the palm trees. Haleola was outside frying eggs on the griddle of the stone oven when Rachel came out, stifling a yawn. “Auntie, I’d have done that.”

  “You were sleeping.” Haleola handed her a calabash and smiled. “I wanted to cook today. Have some poi.”

  After breakfast she staggered Rachel by announcing that she would like very much to climb the pali.

  “What! With your foot the way it is?”

  “Not all the way up, just part. Would you believe in all these years I’ve never so much as set foot on the trail?”

  “You’re not missing anything, believe me.”

  “I want to. I’m going to.” Haleola was adamant, and a worried Rachel was forced to acquiesce.

  At the pali they threaded through thick undergrowth and onto the trail, widened again several years ago after a mail carrier’s mule lost its footing and plunged to earth, nearly taking the mailman with it. Rachel kept one hand firmly gripped around her aunt’s arm as they made their way up the zigzag path, first one direction, then the other, then back again. Haleola’s bad foot gave her some trouble and she slipped twice, Rachel always there to support her; finally she made it without too much difficulty some fifty feet up the cliff. From here on the trail was more precarious and Haleola motioned her niece to stop.

  “This will do,” she said, trying to catch her breath.

  “I’m so glad,” Rachel sighed, still holding on to her.

  Haleola saw the whole of the peninsula spread out below her: saw both eastern and western shores at once, the green bowl of Kauhak in the middle. Foaming surf hammered the craggy shoreline, her old friends 'kala and Mkapu standing watch over Kalawao. The scaffolded tower of the lighthouse looked from here like a child’s sandcastle; farther down the coast the U.S. Leprosy Investigation Station was nearing completion. And Kalaupapa with its whitewashed cottages looked deceptively normal, like any small village in the islands. Haleola smiled with satisfaction.

  “I wanted to see it, once,” she said, “without seeing the pali. Without the walls. As though I were free.”

  Haleola seemed uncommonly happy the rest of the day; after supper she sewed and sang a chant Rachel had heard before, one that celebrated a place on her beloved Maui, then began another. Rachel, reading, only slowly became conscious of what her aunt was singing in Hawaiian:

  “Hot fire here within

  The act of love

  Overpowers my body

  Throbbing last night.

  Two of us

  Have felt the power

  Calm after passion

  Making love within my body . . .”

  Rachel’s eyes were wide, her cheeks hot. “Auntie!”

  Haleola turned to her niece. “Yes, Aouli?”

  Rachel was momentarily speechless—then burst into embarrassed laughter. “You’ve never sung that one before.”

  “Not to you,” Haleola said with a grin. Rachel laughed again, went to Haleola and put an arm around her.

  “Who were you singing it to? Keo or Pono?”

  “Both. I loved them both, so I sang it to both.” She paused, then shrugged a
little apology. “I never learned a song for a daughter,” she said, “because I had none.”

  She reached up with her good hand and touched Rachel’s cheek. “You have been a gift of the land to me,” she said softly. “It took me from my sons, but gave me a daughter.”

  Rachel took Haleola’s frail body in her arms and said, “I love you, makuahine,” a word that meant both aunt and mother; and Haleola enjoyed the warmth of her Aouli’s touch for what she knew could be the last time.

  She slept well that night, and the night after, and dreamt no more troubling dreams; but on the third night she was awakened by a familiar sound. Her eyes fluttered open and she saw, in a brilliant shaft of moonlight, an owl perched on the branch of the eucalyptus tree outside her window. The owl hooted again, and now she heard, as from a distance, the sound of drums and a chant. She blinked in surprise, and the owl was gone. The chant grew louder, familiar words and a familiar voice, and when she turned away from the window, there was Keo sitting at the foot of her bed. The act of love overpowers my body, he sang to her, throbbing last night. Two of us have felt the power. . . . He smiled, and beckoned her with his eyes.

  She went with him.

  Chapter 13

  C

  atherine grieved for her mother’s soul and raged against the God she was supposed to love. After confession she and Father Maxime had knelt together in prayer at the altar of St. Francis’s Church, Catherine focusing on the priest’s voice with its melodious accent, allowing no words but his to enter her thoughts. But on her return to the convent, kneeling in the sisters’ own chapel, she had no such anchor; the supplication in her whispered prayers became edged in anger and her humility before God was transfigured into contempt. She watched wax drip down the length of a candle, its flame writhing as if in torment, and only then realized the breadth of her anger, far worse than what she’d felt on the long-ago day she’d struck Rachel. It was a deep, black, bottomless rage and as she plumbed its depths it seemed to possess her: she wanted to lash out, to overturn the altar and smash the sepulcher, hurl the holy relics to the floor and watch the candles ignite the fine white linen. She wanted to destroy it as God had destroyed everything she held dear. She didn’t know which was worse, the sacrilege of the thought or the black exhilaration it brought her to think of it. With a shout of sudden contrition she leapt to her feet and ran from the chapel out of fear for what she might do.

  She took refuge in her room, seeking the oblivion of sleep, but this time the angry darkness would not lift with first light. Quite uncharacteristically she stayed in bed the whole of the next day, leaving the room only to void herself or to drink from a bathroom faucet. When one of her sisters would meekly knock and inquire if she was all right, she feigned illness but doubted any of them believed it. Still, no one violated her privacy by opening the lockless door, for which she was grateful; she didn’t trust herself to contain her rage and knew that none of the others would truly understand it. More than anything she wished that Sister Victor were still here; then with an unhappy laugh realized that in a way she was.

  She slept a great deal and remembered little of her dreams but for sensations of sorrow and jolting movement, and long silences that were somehow loud and frightening. By the end of the second day she tried again to pray, Our Father who art in Heaven, but the words made her weep and not adore, and what began as devotion turned quickly to confrontation. Why? she demanded of God. Why do you make us fallible and then condemn us when we fail? Why do you punish us for being human?

  The morning of her third day of seclusion she was awakened by an insistent knocking and Leopoldina’s urgent tone. “Sister? Sister, do you hear me?”

  To Catherine’s surprise the doorknob turned, the door swung open. Leopoldina stood hesitantly in the doorway.

  “I’m sorry,” she told Catherine. “But I have a message for you. From Rachel Kalama.”

  Catherine sat up, suddenly attentive.

  Leopoldina said, “Her aunt passed away last night,” and Catherine was up and out of bed before she could think about it.

  R

  achel woke at seven A.M., saw Haleola still in bed, and knew at once something was wrong: rarely if ever did Haleola sleep longer than she. At first Rachel thought she was sick, a recurrence of the “bug,” but when she called to her and there was not the slightest movement, Rachel knew. She rushed to her aunt’s bedside and saw her once-puffy features now strangely clear, fluids drained from diseased flesh: death’s mocking gift to the leper, an illusion of life and health when both had long fled.

  Dr. Hollman, the assistant physician, concluded after a brief examination that Haleola had succumbed to a heart attack in her sleep. “A gentle death,” he consoled Rachel, who nodded mechanically, too stunned yet to weep. He asked her what kind of funeral arrangements she wanted to make, but Rachel just looked at him blankly. “I don’t know.”

  “Was your aunt Catholic? Protestant?”

  Rachel said softly, “She believed in the land,” and Dr. Hollman, hardly enlightened, told her he’d make arrangements for the body to be transferred to one of the settlement’s funeral societies.

  “I’ll wait here for them,” she said.

  “Are you certain you want to do that?”

  “Yes, I am. Thank you. Would you mind telephoning the convent and telling Sister Catherine what’s happened?”

  He said that he would, and reluctantly left. Rachel dragged a chair to Haleola’s bedside and contemplated the woman who had been aunt and mother to her these past fifteen years; only now did she begin to comprehend the enormity of her loss. Haleola had been Pono’s lover and Pono had embodied everything good in Rachel’s childhood. Whenever Rachel had looked at her aunt, she had seen the comforting face of family, of 'ohana. Soon she would see that face no longer and one of the last links to her life’s happiest moments would be gone. Tears filled her eyes. She touched her aunt’s arm and was surprised at how disturbing the absence of warmth could be. She leaned over her aunt’s face, draped in sleep, Rachel’s tears trickling down Haleola’s cheek as if she too were weeping, and kissed her one last time. And as she sat there watching over her, Rachel understood what she owed her, and what remained to be done for her.

  So when the men from the funeral society arrived, Rachel thanked them for coming but told them that although she would welcome their help in acquiring a casket, “I’ll be preparing my aunt’s body for burial myself.”

  “You mean you—want to pick out the clothes to bury her in?”

  “No, I mean I intend to prepare her body for burial myself. In the traditional manner.”

  They stared at her in disbelief.

  “What about the grave?” asked the first man.

  “What about it?”

  “Which cemetery do you want her buried in?” the second asked in exasperation.

  “I have a spot picked out,” was all Rachel would say, and once they’d agreed to deliver the casket to her, she quickly ushered them out of the house.

  Once alone she took a deep breath and hoped she was equal to the task she was setting for herself. She went to her aunt’s bed, pulled back the blankets. Haleola’s arms and legs were a disturbing shade of blue; rigor mortis had set in, but fortunately the body was in the extended position and not flexed to any degree. She had once watched Haleola do this, but that was long ago; she hoped her aunt would forgive her if she neglected anything.

  At the Kalaupapa Store she picked out several bolts of kapa cloth of two different thicknesses. “Do you have any string kapa?” she asked. “Or, um, hau rope?”

  The shopkeeper shook his head. “Just hemp.”

  “All right, I’ll take a dozen yards of that.”

  Cloth and rope slung over her shoulder, she carried her purchases back home, dropped them off, then headed for the house shared by Leilani, Emily, and Francine, who immediately offered their help. “We’ll need shovels,” Rachel told them, and Emily set about borrowing some while Leilani and Francine disseminated t
he sad news.

  Rachel returned home and stood in the bedroom doorway a moment, overwhelmed with grief and loss and more than a little apprehension; and then she began. She unwrapped the thinnest bolt of kapa and slid it under Haleola’s legs; the body’s rigidity made this easier than she had expected, but she paled when she saw that the underside of her aunt’s body was covered with a purple mottling where her blood had settled in the hours after death. When Rachel touched one of these spots the pressure of her fingers dispersed the blood, causing the skin to turn white. Her hands trembled as she wrapped Haleola’s legs in one bolt of cloth, her torso in another, and her head in a third, until the entire body was bundled head to toe in a thin layer of kapa.

  She took the heavier cloth and repeated the process, draping it over and under the body, then did it again. Uncoiling the rope, she tied a length of it around Haleola’s bundled ankles, cut it with a knife and knotted it. Soaked in sweat, Rachel wiped both tears and perspiration from her eyes, then cut several more lengths of rope. She saw to it each bundle of kapa was securely tied, until Haleola’s rigid body was tightly cocooned.

  The casket arrived within the hour; Rachel and Leilani placed Haleola’s body inside it, and with Francine’s and Emily’s help carried it out to Haleola’s rickety old wagon. At this point Sister Catherine arrived expecting to lend comfort to a grieving Rachel—only to find her wrestling with a coffin and tossing shovels into a wagon, as if she were both mourner and mortician, griever and gravedigger.

  “You can’t be serious,” Catherine said, stunned.