Moloka'i

by Alan Brennert

  Rachel’s joints ached and polyneuritis lit a match to new nerves, but she accepted the new parameters of her disease without complaint. She was hardly alone: Hokea’s hands, his artist’s hands, were slowly turning inward on themselves to the extent he was barely able to pick up a paintbrush any longer; David was fighting what the doctors called “leprous fever” and his skin, too, was ulcerating. Rachel felt her resistance to the bacillus being slowly worn down, as the surf wore away the volcanic shore, and it seemed to her just as natural a process: in the rock’s erosion, after all, the sand of the beach was born. Without Kenji she found it hard to summon the reserves of strength she needed to fight the disease; found it harder to care whether she lived or died.

  As the war in the Pacific finally ended amid a conflagration of atoms, the war within Rachel grew no less heated. Her limbs became swollen with edema, so painfully she could barely walk. Catherine brought her back, after all these years, to Bishop Home, to tend to her; but as Rachel’s body exploded into full-blown lepromatous leprosy it became necessary to transfer her to the hospital, where Dr. Sloan could more adequately care for her.

  Her memories sustained and comforted her through fever and pain: she thought of Mama and Papa, their little house near Queen Emma Street, the happy years before Inspector Wyckoff took them all away from her. Uncle Pono lived again in fitful dreams, sometimes as himself, sometimes as an owl telling a bawdy joke. Haleola was at her bedside in the moments before dawn, assuring her everything would be all right, that she loved her, would always love her. And at night as Rachel struggled to breathe, she took in gasps of air tasting of Kenji, the scent of his skin, the breath they’d shared in their kisses.

  And sometimes—as on the morning of April 1, 1946—she would dream again of being Namakaokaha'i, her waves rolling across burled coral beds, scattering moonlight, cresting higher and higher the farther she traveled over the reef. She was a colossus of water and motion soaring toward the black crescent of 'Awahua Bay, her soul perched on the curling lip of the wave, riding it in the only way she could now; she felt the mana, the power in her waves, felt the rumble in her ocean depths. . . . .

  She woke, but continued to feel it: a roar in her bones, a vibration coming not from within but without. It was 6:45 A.M., and though the ward seemed quietly normal, some inner sense of dread propelled Rachel painfully to her feet, out of bed, and to the nearest window.

  She gasped at what she saw. Out at sea, a wave at least twenty feet high was rolling shoreward—a wall of water pushing up from the ocean floor, as unexpected as lava spilling from a dead caldera, its great rumbling mass resonating inside her.

  The rumble turned explosive as the wave crashed into the Kalaupapa coastline, completely engulfing it; even the tall spire of the lighthouse was nearly swamped. Rachel feared that the wave’s reach would extend inland to Kalaupapa itself, but it stopped just short of that.

  Cries rose up from the startled town; in the hospital, patients and doctors alike flocked to the windows.

  The lights in the ward winked out.

  Rachel watched in awe as the massive wave receded back into the sea . . . peeling back the ocean over the reef, where fish now flopped and flailed helplessly on the exposed seabed . . . dragging out to sea great handfuls of uprooted trees and broken timber.

  Moments later, the next wave arrived.

  A series of six huge waves came and went in pulsating surges, shattering whatever remained of the structures unluckily situated at the shore. By now the streets of Kalaupapa were filled with people racing for high ground—sick people crying “Tsunami!” as nature played yet another mean trick on them, God’s last best joke at their expense. It was, after all, April Fool’s Day.

  When the waters at last subsided Rachel was amazed to see the lighthouse still standing, but little else along the shore: no trees, certainly no houses. Massive boulders torn from the seabed lay scattered along a beach denuded of sand.

  There was no running water in the settlement, the pipes from the reservoir having been smashed to pieces; likewise no electricity. The administration building had been spun around on its foundation, as if someone had played spin-the-bottle with it. Headstones in the cemeteries were strewn about like dice in a crap game. But the only homes destroyed were beach houses owned by patients whose primary residences were in the main town. No one was killed or injured. It soon became apparent that Moloka'i had been remarkably fortunate, despite heavy damage to the island’s East End; on Maui the village of Hna had been nearly obliterated, and Hilo on the Big Island was largely underwater. All told, one hundred and fifty nine people died throughout Hawai'i in the tsunami.

  Rachel was helpless to do more than watch from her window as work crews cleaned up what was left of the shoreline. Staggering back to bed she felt useless, and reconciled to the idea that her time on earth was nearly over; in fact she welcomed it. She knew she had been luckier than most, luckier than Emily or Leilani or Violet; she had grown up, grown old, fallen in love and been loved. And not just by Kenji—she knew how blessed she had been to have an 'ohana here to take her in, Pono and Haleola and Catherine and Francine and so many more. Her Kalaupapa family. She lay in bed at night listening for the sound of drums and marchers, content to die.

  A month or so after the tsunami, as Dr. Sloan examined Rachel with grim purpose, he told her, “Rachel, I’d like to put you on a new medicine, they’ve had some success with it at Carville. It’s called Promin—one of the new sulfa drugs, an antibiotic.”

  Rachel managed a faint derisive noise. “They tried penicillin, it didn’t work.”

  “Yes, but these sulfa derivatives are quite effective against tuberculosis, which is similar to the Hansen’s bacillus.” More and more the doctors were calling it “Hansen’s disease,” the result of fervent editorializing by the patient-run newspaper The Carville Star, arguing that the Biblical connotations of the words “leprosy” and “leper” unfairly stigmatized Hansen’s patients.

  “But it is an experimental drug,” Sloan advised her, “and though of low toxicity it is, to some degree, toxic.”

  “Good,” Rachel said, closing her eyes. “Maybe it’ll finish me off quicker.”

  That afternoon she received the first of her daily intravenous injections of Promin: six times a week, two weeks out of three. For most of that time there was no noticeable change in her condition other than a slight allergic reaction, which subsided after a week.

  Then, in the third month of Promin injections, Rachel noticed that an open sore on her arm was scabbing over.

  Over the next few weeks, to Rachel’s amazement, her ulcers began to heal, one by one—the purple bruises vanishing, fluids draining, skin clearing.

  After three months’ treatment with Promin Dr. Sloan replaced it with another medication called Diasone . . . and within another month her swollen, distended face began to take on its old shape, its aging beauty.

  It was a miracle. A haole medicine that actually worked! No thunderclaps, no proclamations from heaven; God spoke not from on high, but out of a test tube.

  After six months’ treatment with sulfa drugs, fifty-five out of seventy-two patients at Kalaupapa showed marked improvement; only eight appeared not to have benefited. David Kamakau saw his fever cool and his ulcers disappear. The clawing of Hokea’s hands and the erosion of his nasal cartilage was arrested: the sulfones couldn’t reverse tissue damage, but they could prevent further deformation. Astonishingly, a scourge that had plagued humankind for generations was seemingly vanquished—virtually overnight!

  “The drugs don’t kill the bacillus,” Sloan explained to Rachel, “they weaken it enough that your immune system can destroy it.” The Hansen’s bacilli were not completely wiped out, but Sloan and his colleagues were cautiously optimistic that their numbers would be greatly reduced.

  Sister Catherine watched with a kind of stunned joy as hope took root at Kalaupapa for the first time in her fifty-two years at the settlement, and morale soared. Patients who had not
been able to respirate without a tracheotomy tube in their throats were soon able to breathe unassisted. Failing vision was arrested; the nearly blind would now be able to see the future, however dimly. And as the cruel distortions of their bodies were halted, patients could consider surgery to repair their disfigurements, without fear that more would inevitably follow. They might yet live out lives measured in decades, not merely years or months.

  Catherine was profoundly grateful to have lived to see this day. There would not be too many more for her, she suspected, but the triumph of this moment would light her path to heaven—or wherever I’m headed, she thought wryly. She was even able to foresee a time, not so distant surely, when this shore of exile was no more; when no one else would be brought here against their will. She went to the Franciscans’ little chapel, knelt before the altar, and with joyful tears thanked God for His mercy—for the spirit that had given men wings and now this miraculous cure, for the many lives that cure would save—and most of all, she had to confess, for Rachel’s life.

  L

  ong discharged from the hospital and living on her own again, Rachel was at the airport that day in June of ’47 when the little twin-engine plane bearing the settlement’s new superintendent touched down on the landing strip. A reception committee of staff and patients swarmed around the aircraft as the superintendent and his wife disembarked, Rachel among the first to greet him.

  “Just can’t stay away, can you, Missionary Boy?” she said, and Lawrence Judd laughed heartily and said, “Apparently not.” Like her, he was in his early sixties now; his pleasure at seeing her was apparent and genuine. “You look wonderful, Rachel,” he said, extending a hand, and this time she took it.

  It was a much different Kalaupapa that Judd was returning to oversee at the close of an enviable career in public service. Dr. Sloan had been right about Promin and Diasone: bacilli leprae were dying as leprosy victims once died, by the thousands. The sulfa drugs did not strictly “cure” Hansen’s disease, but it so dramatically reduced the number of bacilli in a patient’s system that in most cases the disease was arrested within a matter of months, and the patient was rendered noncontagious. The first wave of test subjects were now receiving one negative snip after another; the prospects of parole were no longer so remote.

  In the light of the medical community’s growing realization that Hansen’s disease was even less contagious than tuberculosis, Superintendent Judd immediately set about making changes in the way things were done at Kalaupapa. He started with his own office, throwing out the ridiculous railing between superintendent and patient. He tore down the high wire fence around the visitors’ quarters as well as the mesh fence that separated patient and visitor inside the cottage. All unnecessary barriers between residents and staff came down—even the guard at the top of the pali trail was eliminated. Judd was determined that residents feel more like patients than prisoners. And he was doing it all quickly, as he confided to Rachel, “before they toss me out of here on my ear.”

  “So if leprosy’s not so easy to catch as everybody thought,” Rachel asked him, “did we all get sent here for nothing? For no good reason?”

  Judd sighed and considered that. “I don’t know, Rachel,” he said finally. “Hawaiians had no immunity to this disease. Did something need to be done to stop it? Yes. Was isolation far from your families and friends the only answer? I don’t think so. Was it all for nothing? No . . . but the price you and others paid was far too high.”

  In December, Dr. Sloan informed Rachel that her sixth and final snip was negative, and she was now eligible for parole. Rachel heard the words, but couldn’t quite comprehend them. “Parole?” she said, as if she were slightly tipsy.

  “Six negatives in a row, Rachel. You’ll need regular check-ups, of course, but once your application’s approved, you’ll be free to leave Kalaupapa whenever you wish.”

  It was the moment she had dreamed of since she was seven, and now that it had come she didn’t know what to do.

  She was sixty-one years old. Her youth was gone and all her friends were here in Kalaupapa. What promise did the outside world hold for her? Unlike some patients, she was not so disfigured that she feared living topside, but her right hand was definitely and noticeably crippled; how could she even make a living?

  Catherine suggested, “Go for a visit, at least. A week or two. Don’t you want to see your brothers and sister?”

  Now that this was a real possibility, Rachel wasn’t so sure. “Why should I go looking for them? I haven’t heard a word from them in fifty years!”

  “They’re still your family.”

  “You’re my family. You and everyone here.”

  “You have other family too,” Catherine reminded her. “What about her?”

  That gave Rachel some pause. “I . . . have no idea where she is.”

  “There are ways of finding people.”

  Rachel said, “What if she doesn’t want to be found?”

  Catherine had no answer for that.

  Leaving Bishop Home, Rachel drove up Damien Road to the Kauhak trail and parked her car. Even with her clawed and missing toes she made it easily to the summit—it was amazing how much more energy she had now! She gazed out across the stone leaf of the peninsula and into the misty distance, the south flank of O'ahu peeking out from beneath wisps of cloud like strokes of Hokea’s brush. Beyond lay the world her father had brought back to her in pieces over the years—the lands of sakura-ningyö and matryoshka and Chinese Mission dolls, lands no longer kapu.

  And somewhere out there, a little girl, grown into a woman, who had never known the mother who birthed her.

  She wished Kenji were here. She wished she could be leaving with him. But she knew what he would have done.

  She filled out the parole application. She had some money saved from twenty years of her and Kenji’s combined salaries at the store, in addition to the small government pension she received for those years of service. Added to the few dollars that Papa had left her, she would be solvent for a while even if she couldn’t find a job right away. And she was told she could keep her house in Kalaupapa, in case she decided to come back.

  David and Helen threw her a “parole party,” and Rachel was touched by the number of people who came. Amid food and laughter and music they celebrated not just Rachel’s imminent release but potentially their own. David and Helen were each only one snip away from freedom.

  The day before Rachel’s flight to O'ahu, there remained only one more person to bid farewell to.

  She walked down Damien Road to Puani Street—to Bay View Home perched on its low bluff overlooking the sea. Inside its blandly institutional hallways she walked past men—aged, blind, crippled—for whom the sulfa drugs came too late. She walked down corridors of despair and loneliness, glancing into rooms on either side, until she found the one she was looking for and she stopped.

  She strode into Gabriel Crossen’s room, and when he turned and saw her his face went dust-white—almost as white as the patch over his gouged eye.

  After a long moment she said, “I’m leaving.”

  He stared at her, dumbfounded.

  “You took the best part of my life,” she told him, “but not all of it. I’m going to go look for the rest of it. I’m leaving.”

  She allowed herself a cold smile. “But you never will,” she added with satisfaction.

  She could see the pupil of Crossen’s remaining eye dilate, as from a sudden light.

  “Even if the sulfa drugs cure you,” Rachel said, “you’ll either be put in prison on O'ahu or just left here, in Kalaupapa . . . for the rest of your life.”

  Crossen began to look a little sick.

  “All this time,” she said softly, “and not a word of remorse from you. Of apology. ‘Regret,’ you said. You regretted the ‘accident.’ Well, now you can regret the fact that if you hadn’t killed Kenji . . . maybe you’d be leaving here someday.”

  She didn’t wait for a reply. She turned, walked
out of the room, and never looked back.

  The next day Superintendent Judd was at the airport to drape a lei around her neck and give her a kiss.

  Tearfully, Sister Catherine hugged her. “I love you, Rachel,” she said. “Godspeed.”

  Rachel kissed her on the cheek. “I love you, too, Catherine. Thank you for being part of my life.” Before she could start crying, Rachel hefted her suitcase and walked up the short flight of steps onto the plane.

  She sat in one of the six seats, fastened her seat belt as the pilot instructed, and was startled and exhilarated when the little Cessna began its fast taxi down the short runway. Then it leapt into the air, Rachel’s stomach turning over as the land dropped away from them. She stared out the window in wide-eyed wonder as the plane banked over the settlement and climbed up the green face of the pali, once so forbidding, now so easily vaulted; and then it was below them, falling away as from a bird in flight, as she left it behind.

  N

  ine days later the body of former Seaman First Class Gabriel Crossen was found floating in the waters off 'Awahua Bay. Some residents suggested suicide; others thought he’d simply had too much to drink. He was put to rest in the Protestant cemetery along the coast, a small American flag marking his grave. The only mourners were the minister from Kana'ana Hou Church and a single member of the Kalaupapa band, who indifferently blew “Taps.”

  Chapter 21

  F

  lying, Rachel discovered, wondrously distorted space and time. From up here the turbulent whitecaps of the Kaiwi Channel were reduced to tranquil combers, and half a day’s steamer travel was miraculously compressed into a mere thirty minutes. It had even transformed her: no longer a sixty-one-year-old woman, she was a girl again, looking out the window with a child’s eyes and a child’s wonder. For fifty years the distant line of the horizon had been an implacable barrier—the unbreachable ramparts of the sky. And now in a matter of minutes they were breached after all, and so easily at that—not just the air travel but the suddenness of her cure (if it was a cure and not merely a remission, as the doctors were quick to caution). Did everything in the outside world move so fast? Had the nature and pace of time changed in the half century she had been trapped like a fly in the amber of Kalaupapa?