After especially bad visitations lasting several days or weeks, attacks that occurred without warning, without regularity, attacks that racked and ravaged, knotted her joints, left body temperature soaring, she would come back from a journey most people never made, come back reborn as if from the dead, so she seemed to be instantly older, or eerily young. At such times, her husband, Johnny, brooded over her, her hair in oily shreds, lips chapped, arms unbearably thin.
Sometimes he found her unconscious, mouth gaping horribly. And he mourned, remembering the years when she was healthy, how she had made him sleepy with her tender movements. How he had always loved her hands on things, on him. At New Year’s, they’d set places at table for ancestors, mooncakes and tea, leaving extra chairs for them. And lovely Ming, hands in her lap, would smile mysteriously at him for hours. Now he was unable to reach her, she lay outside the territory of his days.
Once he asked what happened to her mind in the worst days of the attack, the wolf mark settled on her face, her eyes rolled upward showing whites, skin larval, like the new-born, or the just-dead.
“I go back,” Ming whispered. “Childhood fantasies, terrors, all swimming in and out of sequence.”
She kept the rest behind her eyes, the other place she went to, place of drops and puffs, where she felt a decreasing need for her husband, for the world, because it interfered with her need for the other thing.
Now Ming sighed, leaned down, picked up her book. Beyond the hedge, children passed singing “Jesus Loves Me.” She thought of her mixed-marriage childhood, Buddhist father, Catholic mother, years of Christmas pageants, Lenten penance, Stations of the Cross, interspersed with steps of the Lion Dance, the Monkey Dance, in honor of Chinese New Year. Am I Buddhist or Catholic? she had asked. Both, her parents said. God has many families.
Years later, saffron robes, the smell of joss sticks, sound of Buddhist temple chimes, would mingle in her mind with catechistic chanting, a nun’s starched wimple, priests in dark closets, dispensing absolution. She had learned to accept the ideological flexibility of Buddhism, that it could incarnate into different cultures, and she had long ago decided that the athlete on the cross was just another manifestation of the Buddha.
Now, inside her house, Ming knelt on a cushion before a small shrine, lighting joss sticks of black sandalwood, solemnly asking for Buddha’s blessing. Yet, she had growing doubts about the Buddha. After twenty years of pain, she had begun to see him not at all as godlike, but as a moody, childish heckler, doling out abuse. Now she abused him back, reaching into a small covered jade bowl, curling her fingers around a pea-size ball of waxlike gum. Her breath quickened. She drew the blinds in her bedroom, plugged the gum into a bamboo pipe and lit it, sucking deeply in.
Her lungs opened, ravenous, nerve stalks alert, waiting to be stunned. Before transcendence, before the slow translucent dreams began, she thought of her cousins about to descend on her. Women who, in the eyes of strangers, had achieved a certain symmetry in their passage through the world. Yet each time they came to her, they came needy, wanting to know how to live, how to not be brutalized, practically crawling into Ming’s lap, so healthy, so robust, she found them vaguely malignant.
Yet, Ming loved them, she was devoted to each one—Vanya, Rachel, Jess—each woman a raw, shivering human event. Driven by love, ideology, a search for one’s self, they were anguished, sometimes dull, bizarre. But what possessed them basically was love, the need to stay intact for each other. And so, they looked to Ming, the oldest, seeing her gestures, her words, as clues to surviving.
They came to her with their victories, their failures, their strange, forbidden plots, wrapping round her like roots. Sometimes resentment flared, and in her mind Ming thrust them all away, even her husband and children, feeling they were amateurs, knowing nothing of life. For what did one know about living until they were stripped of human feeling, of every illusion, by blinding, pulverizing pain. Pain so abiding, so all-encompassing it left only an appetite for filth.
In her stupor she moaned. A silk curtain fluttered, sunlight drew a blade across the bed. Somewhere in the Gobi, a Mongol milked a singing horse. Caravans approached. Someone quietly removed her skin. And, then . . . and . . . then ... all the racking fevers, knotted joints, the marrow slowly crumbling in her bones, were left behind.
And she flew free, O free, even her cousins left behind, a tribe that sits at a window.
Nā Iwi o Kalaupapa
* * *
The Bones of Kalaupapa
THIS PLACE. SMALL, VERDANT ISLAND of almost impenetrable rain forests. Lush hidden valleys, plunging waterfalls, barking deer, and goat, and boar floating down aisles of giant fern, eucalypti. The heady fragrance of jasmine, frangipani, narcotic sizzle of ginger. And copper suns turning the island magenta in ancient afternoons. Here is the Polynesia of the past, of talk-soft legends and taboos, the place called Moloka‘i.
In old-time villages, families still weave their fishing nets, tend taro patches and rice paddies, hand-carve canoes. Mules still slow-poke to measuring pits where sandalwood was cut to fit the holds of nineteenth-century ships bound for the Orient. Locals still night-fish by torchlight in waters blessed by the Southern Cross. Lovestruck kāne still stroke ole kine ‘ukulele, singing in falsetto, and graceful wāhine still dance barefoot, telling legends of the rains.
The island has another side, the silent side. Winds from the north shore still whisper of terrible decades, unspeakable generations, that left that part of Moloka‘i kapu, inaccessible except by sea, air, or treacherous muddy mule paths down jungle cliffs soaring three thousand feet high. Sailors who have roamed the world still swear this silent, mist-shrouded coastline of the north, and its small peninsula asleep on the fringe of prehistory, is the most haunting and beautiful place in all the Seven Seas.
The peninsula, sheltered east and west by jungle, is the setting for a place called Kalaupapa, a name that momentarily stills the hearts of all Hawaiians. Here, over a hundred and thirty years ago, it became a kennel for the damned, those natives afflicted with ma ‘i pākē, the “Chinese sickness,” more commonly known as leprosy. Here for decades, lepers—hunted down and caged—were pushed from ships with wooden poles, left to the mercy of sharks, stormy seas, or madness, as the bacteria ravaged their nerves, their eyes, muscles, bones, then ate their internal organs.
Now, rich green fields grow over acres of crude graves, dug swiftly when victims expired daily, in the dozens. St. Philomena Church is renovated, expectoration holes still visible in newly varnished floors. Father Damien’s grave is sand-polished, tended regularly, necklaced in fresh lei. A sense of battlefields recovering, buds pushing through scorched earth. And yet. . . at dusk, one hears the shuffling, the crowds, broken spirits back from the dead to perch on cliffs and moan, remembering.
Here, on a sun-drenched day, the woman named Pono stood on a bluff overlooking the sea. She was massive, standing well over six feet, hair a luxuriant gray shawl billowing round her hips. She held her arms out, chanting, and wild boar in the jungle went down on their knees. When she sang, flowers changed color, spotted deer dissolved into the bark of trees as hunters passed with bow and arrow.
She was kahuna, creating more life around her than was actually there, heightening the momentousness of each living thing by simply gazing upon it. Almost eighty years old, she was a woman who had dared everything, committed every conceivable act, for the man sitting nearby. A gull deployed, snatching in midair the strip of raw aku she had flung. Her laugh was deep and resonant.
The man on the blanket at her feet looked up. “Why do you laugh, Beloved?”
Pono sank to her knees, wrapping her arms round him. “Because I am here where I belong, with my favorite noseless man.” They roared, rocking back and forth like children. “Because I am so happy.”
She lay down with her head in his lap, talking about “her girls” coming home to the big house, about the coffee cherries, the harvest season to come. “The time of dancing pigs�
�� she called it, when the brutes would break out of their pens, gorge on ripe coffee beans and go berserk, chasing humans and horses, rollicking down the road with Run Run’s laundry in their teeth. While Pono talked, the man caressed her with a hand long gone, so it was more a club. An artifact. His name was Duke Kealoha, and as they murmured back and forth, Pono studied what was left of him, remembering her first sight of him over sixty years ago. A bronze, Polynesian god.
A girl of seventeen, seeing him, her heart had buckled, knowing he would give her great joy, but he would also test her. Even with supernatural powers, she did not foresee that life, too, would test her. Bounty hunters. Slavery. And worse. Now, she pushed the past away, telling him of her dream, returning and returning. A human corpse, eye sockets weeping algae, rocking side to side on the ocean floor.
“I think my time is soon,” she whispered. “That’s why I’ve called the girls home.”
Duke looked down at her intently, knowing her dreams were prophetic, but suspecting he was the one who would die. His once fierce, handsome, brown face was now cratered, cheeks and lips massively scarred from old lesions, nose bridge collapsed from medical experiments, one good hand, clubs for feet, living his life in a wheelchair. Racked with kidney problems, bad circulation, side effects of the sulfone drug for leprosy, now called Hansen’s disease, he had suffered several minor heart attacks. Appetite diminished, he seemed to lack all needs, except the need for her. Emotional, spiritual. And sexual. In that way ma‘i Pākē had been kind.
Pono sat up, clinging to him. “For sixty years you have forbidden it. Now, I want to end my days with you, to live at Kalaupapa.” She rubbed his still massive chest, saw the miraculous hardening between his legs, his young-warrior passion for her.
He took her hand and shook his head, momentarily ignoring his erection. When he spoke, his voice was deep, commanding, cultured but slightly old-fashioned, from lack of contact with the outside world.
“Beloved, we have had a long life, have suffered, wept, rejoiced. All the emotions and rages of normal men and women. We have done this without the eyes of the world, privacy extending to us the dignity humans are entitled to. We have lived with conscience and pride, but at the price of our daughters, who grew up fatherless, knowing nothing of me. You, their mother, pushed them away.”
“I wanted you instead ...”
“Then make up for this with our granddaughters, before it is too late. Do not abandon them. Do not cheat them of your love ...” He hesitated. “And anyway, I think it is my corpse you see in dreams.”
She gasped, diving backward through her soul. “Oh, let me come and end our days together!”
He shook her viciously until her bones creaked. “Go against my wishes, and I will put out your eyes. You will be kapu on Kalaupapa!”
She wept, grasping his hands. “Then let me tell them you exist. Let them know their mothers were not fatherless, that I was not a whore. Let them see you, embrace you. Let us end our life in sunlight . . .”
Duke threw back his head and laughed. “See me? This cursed, filthy mound of broken flesh?” He tried to imagine it, young, healthy women gazing upon him, claiming his corrupt flesh as their own. They would be sick at first glance.
“All I ever asked of you was dignity,” he whispered. “Let me die out of sight of the world, here with the bones of my family.”
Later, as he dozed with his dear head in her arms, Pono stared intensely at nothing until her eyes, black as the red-black heart of aku, faded to brown, tan, then white, so white her eyeballs seemed turned inward, studying the mechanisms of her brain. I will sacrifice all I possess, all I love, to end my days with him. I will do anything.
She could look someone to death, transfer pain from one human to another. Yet Pono’s powers did not extend to Duke; love turned her impotent. She had never been able to trick him, or argue him out of a decision. She had never been able to cure him. Sometimes, looking for the key that would engage the tumblers, throw the lock, bend him to her will, she searched in her genealogy, for clues.
Now, she took from her pocket her aniani kahuna, her prophet-mirror, one side of which reflected the past-running-backward, and the other, the future-running-forward, which was the cloudy side. Thinking of all the lives lived that had brought her to this point, Pono gazed at herself in the past-running-backward glass, and her weathered, brown face was slowly rinsed of age.
Her features in young womanhood melted quickly to girlhood, then infancy. As she watched, her infant face dissolved into that of her mother’s, then her mother’s mother, faces blending, melting back to those of an earlier century. This time a double image appeared, the face of a dark, Tahitian beauty named Kelonikoa, Pono’s great-grandmother, beside her the haggard face of a one-eyed haole, Pono’s great-grandfather. Kelonikoa faded, and there was only the haole, growing less haggard, eye patch less distinct, melting back and back to his handsome, two-eyed youths.
Pavilions in the Sea
* * *
HE STOOD WEEPING IN A FIELD, and it was 1834. He was seventeen, owning nothing, loving nothing but a bay horse, dead at his feet of old age. His name was Mathys Coenradtsen, eighth child in a line of eight sons, and the field lay near the town of Coxsackie in the Hudson River Valley of New York State.
His family were farmers, descended from an orphan sent in a shipload of boys and girls from an almshouse in Amsterdam, Holland, to work for the Dutch West India Company, and to “. . . increase the population of New Netherland.” The letter of transmittal to Peter Stuyvesant from the Burgomeisters of Amsterdam was dated May 27, 1655, and the orphan inventory list included the first Mathys Coenradtsen, sixteen years of age.
He must have been rebellious and feisty, for records show him hauled into court November 1657 for knocking his employer down, and again in 1660 in a suit for debts he refused to pay a Reyn Van Coelen, and again in 1665 for ostensibly declaring “Damn the King,” and “The Devil fetch the King,” when caught chopping wood on the Sabbath. By the 1670s he had mellowed, settled into farming on leased land, married and began a family.
According to Albany court records, in 1683 Mathys purchased from three Mohawk Indians, Manoenta, Unekeek, and Kachketowaa, “a piece of woodland lying behind Koxhaghkye,” later called Coxsackie, to each of whom he paid “a cloth of duffel, two knives, and wampum.” In 1697 this same stretch of land was officially granted to him by Governor Benjamin Fletcher, a representative of the Crown he had publicly defamed thirty years before. The land conveyed by this grant comprised 3,500 acres. In 1699, Mathys took an oath of allegiance to the British Crown.
Until the Revolutionary War his descendants lived uneventful lives, farming portions of the land, leasing out the rest. In 1776, two Coenradtsen brothers and three cousins died fighting for the colonies, another was hanged, refusing to sign the Articles of Association, his sympathies with the Loyalists. By the 1800s the Coenradtsens had settled down again to farming, trading pigs, horses, cattle.
By 1834, when Mathys Coenradsten stood weeping in his father’s field, other Dutch families—the Van Burens, Van Dycks, Van Cortlandts—had long since distinguished themselves with dynastic patroonships in the Hudson River Valley. The greatest patroonship, Rensselaerwyck, on the west bank of the Hudson, near Coxsackie, included some 700,000 acres, land slowly accumulated by the family since 1630.
Yet nothing in the Coenradtsen genes drove them beyond the life of the soil. They did not acquire great tracts of land, did not challenge the world of trade or politics. Bit by bit their land holdings dwindled: gambling debts, bad marriages. While the enterprising and colorful Van Cortlandts, Roosevelts, and Livingstons entered the sugar-refining business, the canny Rhinelanders imported crockery, the Brevoorts became ironmongers, the Schermerhorns ship chandlers. But the shortsighted Coenradtsens remained poor farmers and animal traders.
By his fifteenth birthday, Mathys saw no future for himself. His four oldest brothers would inherit the choicest acres of family land, while Mathys and the others
would be doled out small, exhausted plots. Wanting to flee the soil, he began to dream of a life at sea. On cool, starry nights, he would lie in the field with a neighbor, third cousin of a sailor named Warren Delano (great-grandfather of a man who would become the country’s president), as the boy talked dreamily of Warren’s adventures on an opium clipper plying the Pacific, the wealth he was accumulating.
In a letter to his cousin, that took one year and three days to reach Coxsackie, Warren Delano described his high life on the seas, raving about the beauty of the Sandwich Isles, like great pavilions rising from the Pacific. “Discovered” by Captain Cook in 1778, they had been named after Cook’s patron, John Montagu, Fourth Earl of Sandwich. “But,” Warren wrote, “the natives, huge, brown, handsome warriors, claim to have been there 2,000 years before Cook, and they call their land the Islands of Hawai’i.”
One day Mathys saw in an Albany paper an ad for “green hands,” for a clipper out of New York bound for Cape Horn and the whaling grounds of the Pacific. The Atlantic whale had been hunted to scarcity; now ships had turned to a new source of precious sperm oil and whalebone. With almost no sense of it, Mathys packed a small duffel, and hopped a supply boat down the Hudson. Days later he presented himself at a crowded dock where a ship called the Silver Coin signed on a miserable-looking crew.
Knees shaking, Mathys stood among murderers, thieves, pimps, and victims of periodic attacks of delirium tremens. Some were deserters from the British Navy, some were debt-runners, some just decent sorts addicted to the sea. He lined up with the rest, facing a huge mulatto wielding scissors. One by one, each man was given a hair cut, ridding him of vermin. But hair blew about the deck and. washing wasn’t compulsory, and by the time they had been at sea a week, lice and fleas infested everyone. Crew’s quarters were reached through a two-foot-square hatch in the foredeck; below, men lay in bunks just two feet above each other, no room to sit up, no light to read by. Just darkness, and the sound of men scratching.
Shark Dialogues Page 3