Moloka'i

by Alan Brennert

  She galloped down the rugged eastern shore, away from Kalaupapa and her humiliation, finally stopping at an isolated spot just outside Kalawao. Sitting alone by the sea, she wept angry tears; anger less at Jake than at herself. How stupid could she be to think a clean person would love her—would risk death and decay and banishment for love! A blossom of self-hatred flowered inside her and she jabbed her fingernail into the rosy patch of skin on her leg. She poked and jabbed until it bled, but felt no pain; it might as well have been someone else’s flesh, someone else’s body. She looked up at the pali, at the trail she had ascended years before, and cursed herself for a fool. She could have stayed topside, traveled, loved, married, lived! But she came back, damn it. She thought of all she’d given up in that moment, places she couldn’t imagine and would never know, and she wept.

  Night fell on her sorrows. Riding into Kalawao to water her horse, she noticed a large crowd gathered down the road from St. Philomena’s Church.

  There were women there as well as men, which meant they had come all the way from Kalaupapa; but for what? Rachel tied up her horse and joined the crowd congregating outside a fence posted with signs warning: UNITED STATES LEPROSY INVESTIGATION STATION–KEEP OUT! Though it was too dim, even in the glow of oil lamps, to make out much of the station’s buildings, the grounds were clearly bustling with activity. Laborers were hanging lamps on poles throughout the compound, and stringing wire from pole to pole. They were the same sort of lamps, Rachel realized, as those that lit Honolulu’s streets beginning in the early 1890s.

  “Are those electric lights?” she asked an old man standing next to her.

  He nodded. “First on Moloka'i!” he declared proudly.

  Rachel watched in fascination with the rest of the crowd. The air was charged with anticipation, but when the moment finally came it took everyone by surprise. Somewhere an electrician merely flipped a switch and dozens of incandescent bulbs outside blazed into life along with others inside the buildings—and with more candlepower than a thousand oil lamps, night turned brilliantly into day.

  Now Rachel could see that the station’s buildings, moments ago hidden in gloom, were painted a soothing yellow, the windows and doors trimmed in white, and were crowned by green shingled roofs. She saw too the green of the lawn covering the sprawling compound and the blossoms—changed from yellow to red with the fall of night—of the hau trees decorating the grounds. Copper screens on the buildings’ lnais gleamed like pennies. The lamps also threw light on the pali behind the station and on a tiny waterfall trickling down a narrow crevice. Even the ocean was illuminated; where seconds ago only the luminescent crests of the waves could be glimpsed, now Rachel saw the shoulders of the waves as they crashed ashore.

  The crowd cheered almost as thunderously.

  All this, the old man said, from one thirty-horsepower gasoline engine and dynamo. And the station’s refrigeration plant was capable of making a thousand pounds of ice each day! Rachel was as captivated as he was by this marvel of engineering, and like many present there that night she wondered what other miracles these scientists might be able to accomplish once they put their minds to it. It hardly seemed as though anything were beyond their reach.

  She stayed there for a while, thinking and wondering, before heading home to Kalaupapa. She went to bed but couldn’t sleep, the flash of another light—once every twenty seconds—streaming through open windows. Even after she shuttered them the light seeped in around the edges, mocking her with its brilliance, reminding her of things best forgotten. Beyond the light was that distant line of horizon she had glimpsed from on high—a line like a solitary prison bar, needing no intersection with other bars to keep her jailed. And she decided then and there that she would not stay here and be mocked; she would not.

  D

  r. Goodhue took a scraping from the rose-colored spot on Rachel’s leg, and a microscopic examination confirmed what she already knew: she was bacteriologically active again. “Leprosy can go dormant for a long time, then flare up all at once,” he told her sadly. “But that doesn’t mean it won’t go into remission again.” When this patch of skin became a tumor, he assured her, he would remove it too.

  “Don’t bother,” Rachel said, and immediately went to Dr. Hollmann and informed him she wanted to volunteer to be a patient at the Federal Leprosy Investigation Station.

  He asked her why, and she answered, “Because I’m sick of being a damn leper.” He warned her that no one could guarantee the station’s work would result in a cure for leprosy, much less a cure for her, specifically. She understood, but was willing to take that chance. He told her she would have to leave Kalaupapa—would have to move to, live at, the station in Kalawao. “Good,” she replied.

  There were examinations to be done and papers to be signed; it would be weeks before the station was even ready to open. Rachel gave up her house, Haleola’s house, allowing the settlement to reassign it to new residents; entrusted most of her belongings to Leilani for safekeeping; and left her horse in the care of Francine and her husband, Luis. She took with her only her clothes, pen and writing paper, and a few books. And two days before Christmas, when the station opened with the flourish of a formal ceremony, Rachel was among the first patients to be admitted for purposes of treatment and research.

  When she was shown the station for the first time, she was even more impressed than she had been as a spectator outside the gate. The neatly landscaped grounds were divided into three compounds—Hospital, Administrative, and Residence—circumscribed by not one but two picket fences, four feet high and ten feet apart, creating a “safe zone” for station and staff. There was a hospital building, a laboratory, surgery, executive offices, stables, storage building, refrigeration plant, powerhouse, staff residences, laundry facilities, and (discreetly not pointed out on Rachel’s initial tour) a morgue. Populating this was a staff of about thirty: doctors and administrators, a nurse, a pharmacist, an engineer, and others.

  The hospital was clean and bright with twelve-foot ceilings and lnais that wrapped around both first and second stories. The patients’ rooms were comfortable if institutional with windows that opened to admit fresh sea breezes, thought to be therapeutic. And like all the buildings it boasted the miracle of indoor plumbing.

  Although Rachel was one of only nine patients admitted that day, the administrators expected many more in the months to come. The nine of them were gathered together on the hospital’s main ward, gleaming with shiny metal instruments and linen so white it almost made you squint; the only touch of warmth was provided by a small Christmas tree in the corner, dripping with tinsel. They were welcomed by the staff: Dr. Donald Currie, the director of the station, a handsome man with a military bearing; Mr. Frank Gibson, pharmacist and general administrator, a kind-looking gentleman with a mustache; and of course Dr. Harry Hollmann, the only familiar face among them. All wore crisp white uniforms. “I have labored against many blights in my time,” Dr. Currie told them, “from bubonic plague in San Francisco to yellow fever in New Orleans. Like them, leprosy at present eludes our understanding. But by volunteering at this station you are all helping to provide us with the tools and the knowledge necessary to someday, God willing, obliterate this scourge.”

  The patients applauded and settled into their rooms, and talked among themselves in the common areas. They were men and women, young and old, some with few traces of the disease and others with faces bloated and red. But they were all enthused at the prospect of turning their curse into a cure, of it lending some higher purpose to their lives. That evening Rachel stacked her books in neat piles on her nightstand and went to bed excited and hopeful.

  The next day, Christmas Eve, Rachel and the others had breakfast in the hospital dining room before being transferred to examining rooms. There doctors wearing surgical masks, gowns, and gloves asked questions about the beginnings and the duration of the patients’ leprosy, filling medical charts with column after column of notations. After disrobing Rachel was e
xamined as thoroughly and as dispassionately as she had been at Kalihi—every square inch of her poked and probed and scraped for tissue samples which were then placed on glass slides and labeled. The one area not yet breached was her private parts; now the doctor rectified that, asking her to please open her legs. “Have you ever had syphilis or gonorrhea?” he asked, and Rachel shook her head. A small mirror was inserted into her vagina, the doctor rooting about inside as if spelunking; Rachel’s whole body felt flush with embarrassment. She consoled herself with fond memories of the doctor at Kalihi whose testicles she had squeezed like lemons.

  Plumbing new depths of mortification, an assistant then opened the window shutters, bright sunlight streaming over Rachel’s naked body, and used a camera to photographically document each leprous symptom on Rachel’s body.

  Later she compared notes with the other patients, all of whom were as offended by their examinations as she was. “Just like bloody Kalihi,” one man summed it up nicely.

  Christmas dawned the next morning but there was little to distinguish it from any other day. A Christmas tree, yes, but no presents under it as the nuns had provided for their charges. Of course they were all adults here, not children to be gifted with toys; but even Christmas spirit was in short supply, with the assistants on duty seeming none too happy about it. The only nod to the holiday came with dinner: a Christmas ham, potatoes, applesauce, and freshly baked bread. Even so it was a gloomier Christmas dinner than most, until halfway through the meal when they suddenly heard, from somewhere outside:

  “Hark! the herald angels sing

  Glory to the newborn King—”

  To the dismay of the kitchen staff everyone jumped to their feet and poured out of the dining hall, onto the grounds of the hospital compound. When they reached the first of the double fences surrounding the station they saw—just beyond the second, outermost fence—a choir made up of boys from Baldwin Home and familiar faces from Kalaupapa, friends and neighbors come all the way across the peninsula, Francine and Luis among them. Like all the volunteers Rachel was overjoyed; she listened happily to the carolers as they sang, their voices somewhat off-key but no less sweet for that.

  Doctors Currie and Hollmann appeared out of their residences as the carol ended. The patients and visitors began calling to each other, laughing, waving, exchanging season’s greetings. One of the patients asked Hollmann, “Can we invite them inside for some Christmas supper?”

  The doctor shook his head. “I’m afraid not.”

  “Why not?” Rachel asked.

  Currie said brusquely, “As you were told when you agreed to come here, we have to keep the station under strict quarantine. No contact with other lepers.”

  “Why don’t we go out, then, and bring some supper to them?” Rachel suggested.

  “That’s not permitted either,” Currie said with some impatience. “If we’re to properly study the course of your disease, we must keep you isolated or the results simply won’t be reliable.”

  The crushed looks on the patients’ faces prompted Gibson to add gently to the visitors, “But perhaps you’d do us the pleasure of singing another carol?”

  After some brief consultation among themselves the carolers began singing “Silent Night.” Their friends on the other side of the double fence listened with tears in their eyes; and when the carol was over, the visit was too. Francine blew a kiss to Rachel, wished her a merry Christmas, and joined the other disappointed carolers starting back to Kalaupapa, as the nine men and women standing behind the double fence were left alone to celebrate this least festive of yuletides.

  O

  ccasionally in the weeks that followed Rachel would see an experimental animal—a rabbit or a dog or a guinea pig—being taken from one laboratory building to another, and she almost came to envy them. The animals were merely injected with contaminated fluids, then watched to see if they contracted leprosy. (They didn’t.) Human guinea pigs had to contend with more disconcerting procedures. Blood was drawn from their veins; tissue scrapings taken from every part of their bodies; the full weight of modern medical science brought to bear on them. One old man whose crippled feet were to be fluoroscoped was scared out of his wits by the metal bulk of the X-ray machine; when they tried to allay his fears by showing him a developed plate of another patient’s hand he pronounced it sorcery and declared he would have nothing to do with it. Those who didn’t believe in sorcery still found the instruments of haole medicine forbidding, to say the least.

  Dr. Goodhue’s soothing eucalyptus baths were tried here as well, but the principal treatment was chaulmoogra oil, injected into the skin and muscles a little at a time; the idea, Rachel was told, was that the oil would force the leprosy bacilli from the infected tissues, bit by bit, injection by injection. The treatment was painful and measured in months, and since the injections were methodically administered in a grid pattern the skin of Rachel’s leg and back began to resemble a checkerboard. Some patients’ faces, Rachel noted, looked as though they had fallen asleep on a waffle iron.

  None of the patients could say that the experiments didn’t yield some benefits. It was the way the experiments were conducted that grated: with cold, clinical detachment. Masks, gloves, and carbolic acid were the order of the day for all staff, and while this may have been prudent it only made isolated people feel even more isolated. As though the double fences and strict quarantine weren’t sufficient reminder that they were pariahs. Few staff attempted to make any personal contact at all. It slowly dawned on the volunteers that they were not patients but subjects; separated from their friends and community in Kalaupapa, they felt like outcasts among outcasts. In the settlement they could swim, fish, hunt, visit with friends, make love, enjoy life as best they could. Here they could go no farther than the fence separating the hospital compound from the administrative buildings; and all they could do was sit, sleep, eat, and be reminded day after day, night after night, of their disease and eventual death.

  One by one the subjects tired of the boredom, loneliness, and dehumanization of life at the station. One by one they left, returning to their lives, and their dignity, in Kalaupapa.

  Rachel was the last to go, the last to give up the dream of a cure and a normal life; the impetus being, quite literally, a sign from the heavens. On a cool evening in April she joined the hospital staff as they stood on the second-floor lnai admiring the bright streak of Halley’s Comet, which had just fully appeared above the distant horizon like a luminous bullet fired out of the depths of the sea. It hung in the sky, a brilliant tail flaring out behind it, motionless and yet somehow imbued with motion—like a blurry photograph of something too fast to be captured clearly on film. In the weeks to come it would arc up and over the pali like one of the sorcerous fireballs said to originate from the black heart of Moloka'i, but for now it merely rode the horizon. Rachel shared the staff’s wonder at its brilliance and its beauty. “Take a good look,” Mr. Gibson advised; “none of us will see this again in our lifetimes.”

  When Rachel looked at him in puzzlement he explained that though the comet circled the sun as the planets did, its long orbit carried it far from the earth and it would not be close enough to be seen here for another seventy-six years. By the time it returned they would all be long dead.

  The thought sobered her: her eyes sought out the bright bullet with its burning tail. It was eternal, ageless; while she and those around her were ephemeral. For a moment she saw her life from the comet’s perspective: a blink and it was over.

  That night she had a dream, what Haleola would have called a revelation of the night. She dreamt that she and Jake Puehu were observing Halley’s Comet from the top of the lighthouse, standing close as they watched it hovering above the horizon. Jake slipped an arm around her waist; she looked up at him expectantly; and this time he did not turn away but kissed her, her heart taking flight. And then he was making love to her, Rachel feeling him inside her—and somehow with every thrust of his flesh into hers, one of her sores d
isappeared as if by magic. As the last of them healed and vanished Rachel climaxed, waking to find herself wet. And she felt ashamed, not for the dream but for what it told her about her passion for Jake. She wasn’t just aroused by his strength and his health, she wanted them for herself; as if by making this clean man love her she could make herself clean as well, and deny what she was.

  Enough, she thought. Enough.

  She left the next morning—packing her books into a suitcase, signing out and going home. Though she’d given up her house in Kalaupapa, she knew she could always move in with Leilani. As she left the bright sterile rooms of the station she felt an immense relief; and as she rode into Kalaupapa on a wagon borrowed from Brother Dutton, she felt a surge of joy. Friends called out to her; the surf beckoned to her; her horse, on seeing her, happily nuzzled her neck. This was life, and if some things were kapu, others weren’t; she had to stop regretting the ones that were and start enjoying the ones that were not.

  Chapter 15

  1911–12

  Baby girl,

  It was so good to get your last letter, reading them is almost like having you here. I’m so sorry about your friend Emily. I know you cared for her very much. It’s hard to lose things and hardest of all to lose people. But she is with God now.

  A few months ago I started having some pain in my joints, it started in my big toe but went away so I never mentioned it to you. Then I started getting the pain in my knees and elbows, and my skin got red and hot and tender to touch, and I was so happy, I thought—maybe I’m getting leprosy! Maybe they’ll send me to Kalaupapa to be with my little girl! So right away I turned myself in to the doctors at Kalihi and stayed overnight while they did some tests, but the next morning Dr. Wayson came in with a big smile on his face and tells me, real loud—he’s kind of deaf—Good news, Mr. Kalama, you don’t have leprosy, you only have the gout! And I broke into tears right then and there—he thought I was pupule—crazy! I wanted so bad to be a leper and hold my little girl in my arms again!