The haole missionary stared at Mathys as if he were mad.
“If you are sure you want to marry a kanaka, she must take instructions, become a Christian first.” He studied Kelonikoa, took Mathys aside. “I warn you, they are without morals. The women row out to ships, offering themselves!”
Mathys spat at the minister’s feet, took her hand and walked away. Among a colony of grass huts they found a Hawaiian kahuna, who grinned broadly, consenting to marry them. While his wife and daughters quickly gathered blossoms for lei, the man spoke angrily of the mikanele.
“They teach Hawaiians forget language, gods, taboos. Even forget respect for nature, the sea.”
“Why do your people let this happen?” Mathys asked.
Sadly, he shook his head. “We too intelligent. Want everything haole got. We coming greedy.”
He draped them with lei made of api leaves to ward against evil spirits, and ti leaves, for healing, and the sweet smelling, best-loved blossom maile for full life and faithfulness. He gave his blessings, and joined them in marriage.
Days later on the steamer to Honolulu, Mathys and Kelonikoa threw their lei into the sea, looking back at the mountainous rain forests of Maui.
“We will return,” Mathys said. “Each year when the whales come to mate, to leap and spout in the Pacific, we’ll make a pilgrimage to these mountains. In this way we’ll stay humble, remembering how we began.”
Kelonikoa shivered, her head grazing the shoulder of her husband, in one hand her pouch of pearls, in the other, his big fist. She was not thinking of the pearls, or even the mountains. She was thinking of the first time she had seen him, one eye torn from his head, a bleeding savage, but something in his filthy nakedness stirring her, the sight of his maleness hanging strong between his legs.
She took that memory all the way, dove backward into it as he slowly undressed her that night, their wedding night, waves rocking the ship, rocking them into each other. Much later, Kelonikoa woke, thinking how she must teach her husband many things. How to prepare a wife for love, how to arouse her, make her moan with longing, how to enter her in candlelight, or torchlight, sunlight or moonlight, so they could see each other’s pleasure in the eyes. These were lessons taught Polynesians in early adulthood, because to them sex was a natural, beautiful act, not something performed in guilt and darkness. Her last thought before she slept was that she must also teach her haole husband how to bathe, and to do it often.
Pox, and
Empress
Fingerprints
* * *
DUST WAS EVERYWHERE IN HONOLULU, it even furred the porcelain plates of royalty. Foreigners joked about meals with the “Kanaka King,” how clumsy native footmen pouring wine would stumble, wiping grit from their eyes. Even the wine had a gritty texture. Near the docks—a treeless clutter of filthy, grim warehouses, grogshops, and unpaved roads—dust lay so heavy in the air haole wore handkerchiefs over their faces like bandits, folks went about coughing and sneezing. Still, the town was becoming the business center of the islands, gathering place of traders and merchants. Establishment of a Hudson Bay Company agency there in 1834 was transforming Honolulu into a major seaport of the Pacific.
Within two weeks of their arrival, Mathys and Kelonikoa sold a black pearl to a precious-gems dealer from France, and Mathys began building a modest house away from downtown Honolulu. Since foreigners couldn’t own land, the property was leased. But that law would soon change, enabling Mathys to slowly accumulate thousands of acres.
In the early 1840s, wealth was being accumulated overnight in Honolulu—human cargo smuggled in from the Orient as cheap labor, opium packed in champagne bottles, rare jade and gold slipped past immigration authorities. No one inquired about the source of Mathys’s income, no one cared. When he leased livery stables on King Street, he paid in cash. Kelonikoa sold another pearl and he bought a caulking business: “SHIP CARPENTERS, PREPARED TO DO ALL KINDS OF WORK IN OUR LINE.”
Anticipating a boom in population, within three years he enlarged his livery stables. Besides saddle horses and teams, he now offered “. . . SURRIES, BUGGIES, AND PHAETONS,” appealing to a growing carriage trade. He and Kelonikoa were naturalized, swore allegiance to the king, and as Honolulu grew into a premier port town of saloons and brothels, one day Mathys leased a run-down grogshop catty-corner from his carriage business, naming it the Bay Horse Saloon. He promptly petitioned the Minister of the Interior for a liquor license, and directed all his energies toward gutting and resurrecting the saloon.
In 1848, King Kamehameha III went into deep depression, mourning the death of his beloved sister and mistress, Nahienaena. Drinking excessively, he let himself be persuaded by white merchants and ex-missionaries to “abolish feudalism and make land-rights equal.” Ambitious haole needed security in land tenure for their growing plantations. Under the terms of the Great Mahele, or Land Division, Kamehameha III gave up the rights to much of his former property, keeping certain estates as crown lands. High chiefs received one and a half million acres, which they began to sell, lease or foolishly give away. For the rest, locals and foreigners alike, they could buy lots in fee simple from the rest of the islands’ acreage. Foreign residents were the first to take advantage of the “reform.”
Mathys’s second house, built of precious lumber, was a graceful two-story on several dozen acres he now owned. It boasted wraparound lānai on each floor so high-ceilinged rooms had access to cooling tradewinds. Other houses were stingily and hastily put together, crowded upon one another. But Kelonikoa demanded a house surrounded by beauty and fragrance—frangipani, ginger, pīkake—sweeping lawns, and the privacy of great shade trees.
Even with such luxuries, she lacked peace of mind, for she saw how increasingly hard it was for native Hawaiians to buy simple plots of land. One day her cook asked Mathys to explain registration papers she and her husband had to complete, and the deadlines by which certain claims had to be filed. The woman could read and write English, but terminology in the forms was so entangled and complex even Mathys could not translate it. Kelonikoa saw it was a ploy, a way to discourage natives from buying land, which left more land available for haole. She saw how increasingly they were marrying Hawaiian women of great land-holding families, building up enormous tracts of land for white descendants.
As work progressed on his saloon, Mathys imported special steer hides from Spain for stools and booths, and a fine mahogany bar with hunt scenes carved in Canton, shipped to Honolulu in two parts. The day it was assembled and installed, most of Honolulu stopped at the intersection of Hotel and Bethel, ogling his extravaganza. Until now, saloons had been mere dives in Honolulu, troughs for sailors and brawlers. Mathys wanted a place that attracted wealthy merchants, traders and bankers in three-piece suits and Argosy suspenders, high-steppers sporting canes, in silk Stetsons and straw bowlers.
The Bay Horse slowly acquired cachet. A back room for the rowdies with its own bar and cheap spirits was separated, by a thick mahogany door, from the heavily wood-paneled, mirrored front room resembling a gentleman’s club, with even a looking glass foyer where merchants hung their hats, arranged their cravats and gold watch chains. The king and his regents arrived in carriages and phaetons, suited and coiffed like Englishmen. Diplomats came, and merchants. And one night while the skin of Mathys’s three-year-old son erupted in red circles, a Yank named Herman Melville declared the Bay Horse Saloon odiously pretentious and departed, leaving his whiskey untouched.
For days, Kelonikoa and Mathys prayed over their firstborn, watching the virus destroy him. While hundreds of feverish measle victims flung themselves into the sea, Mathys dragged a doctor into the house at gunpoint. He vaccinated the child, even as it died. All night, Kelonikoa sat massaging her son’s big toe, calling “Ho‘i hou! Ho‘i hou!” Come back, come back. For Polynesians believed the dead were often undecided, and that the last of life hung back in the big toe.
She stood dry-eyed as they buried her son behind the house. But one night,
feeling her sudden absence, Mathys woke. He found her in her sleeping sarong out on the lawn, digging her son up with her hands. In moonlight she and Mathys struggled, the shrouded little corpse pulled back and forth between them. Finally, he relented, let her wrap the child in hāpu‘u leaves soaked in saliva of wild boar, old-time preservatives, which were then wrapped in soft kukui-cured skins of mynah, then the softest linen stained with eucalyptus, aloe and jasmine. For months they slept with the little mummy between them absorbing their grief and wilderness.
“Auwē, auwē!” the servants cried. “Mastah, Missus, come pupule! More bettah make anot’er keiki.”
Finally, when Kelonikoa felt a stirring in her womb, she let Mathys return the small mummy to its grave.
Rejuvenated by the promise of another child, he returned to his businesses with vigor. In the back room of the Bay Horse, desperate Russian, British, and French seaman pawned “baubles” from the Orient, things they didn’t know the value of. Delicate antiques of heavy silver from Macao, real carved gold from Siam, precious jade artifacts. In the front room, Mathys discreetly offered his treasures, one bauble at a time, to merchant princes for wives and mistresses.
In time, it was rumored he could procure anything for a price, the robes of an emperor, a crown. His saloon became so popular, his businesses so prosperous, he was invited to join the new Pacific Club, exclusively for haole. The day of his induction, he arrived at the club in a new gilded phaeton with matching steeds.
Kelonikoa watched and listened. She was intelligent, learning proper English from Portia Rule, a renegade Boston missionary’s wife, constantly stirring up trouble, pushing for legislation to make school attendance for native children compulsory through age fourteen. Patiently, she tried to impress upon Hawaiians the danger of their Mother Tongue dying out.
“Loss of one’s language is the first step toward extinction,” she warned. “Your children are learning English and history from Christian textbooks. You must keep up Hawaiian conversations at home.”
Kelonikoa suspected that most haole didn’t want natives educated. They wanted to keep them in the fields, and as house servants. She told her cooks and gardeners they were free to look for more dignified work. She would even help them. They wept and pleaded. House and yard work were all they knew.
“Then, I promise you,” she said. “Your children will not be servants in someone else’s home. I will help you send them to school.”
One day she looked at her four-year-old son, felt the next child stirring within, and turned to Portia Rule. “What of my children who are half-castes? Will they be servants, too?”
The woman answered carefully. “Your husband is successful. Your children will be privileged. If you are lucky, one of them, just one, will try to help their people.”
She advised Kelonikoa to read newspapers diligently, to listen to gossip in the streets, so she would understand how rapidly Hawai‘i was changing, how radically rich and poor classes were growing. In 1853, there was no middle class. White traders and merchants were becoming millionaires in Honolulu, while behind his back they called the king “Imperial Nigger, His Kanaka Highness.”
“There is something more heinous than bigotry,” Portia Rule warned. “If your people are not careful, disease will wipe them out completely.”
In 1778 when Captain Cook had “discovered” Hawai‘i, the native population was nearly a million. By 1850 it was under sixty thousand. Until Cook arrived, Hawaiians had been the most isolated people in the world, and so had not built up a strong immune system. But through ingenious, rigid systems of hygiene, they had remained fiercely strong and healthy. By now, trading and whaling ships from around the world had spread syphilis, measles, typhoid, whooping cough, and worse. Quarantine laws requiring health inspectors for visiting ships had come too late.
As if in response to Portia’s warning, one day a brig out of San Francisco docked in Honolulu flying a yellow flag. A sailor aboard was dying of smallpox. The crew was allowed ashore, vaccinated and quarantined, but local girls made love to them through fences, and within days, two Hawaiians collapsed. Families were quarantined, clothes and houses burned. A call for general vaccinations came too late. Within months two thousand natives were dead.
Hour after hour, Kelonikoa fed her second-born shark-fin soup, a fish known to have powerful mana. Still, life leaked from his delicate grotto of bones. A yellow flag hung in their doorway, and two fresh graves were dug behind their house, the second one for the child Kelonikoa was carrying when a vaccination shot left her feverish, vomiting for days. The perfectly formed fetus fell out of her, blue and hard as stone.
Inconsolable, she would not let Mathys near her. He found release in alcohol, weeping and wailing as wagons trundled by filled with corrupting corpses, noses running with worms. When they ran out of burying space, drivers stacked bodies like lumber, set them afire in fields. Soon pyramids dotted the landscape, black corpses charred into sitting-up or flying postures like monstrous acrobats. For months, Honolulu was a plague-struck town from the Middle Ages, fires of contaminated shacks blistering the night, the taste of death like soot. Floating corpses blanketed the harbor, so it looked like one huge carcass. Dogs ran in packs like gypsies, carrying limbs dug up from shallow mounds. For weeks, Mathys slept with a cocked rifle beside his childrens’ graves.
One day he learned that a haole port official had been bribed for $1,000, allowing the pox ship from San Francisco into the harbor. In broad daylight, Mathys walked into the official’s house with a rifle and cutlass, shot him through the heart, decapitated him in one swoop, stuck the head on a pole and carried it through the streets. People tore the body to shreds, flung the shreds to dancing dogs. In three years, twelve thousand native Hawaiians would die.
Kelonikoa lost her sense of speech, became a Bedouin of the valleys, wandering from village to village, wherever people mourned their dead, silently mourning with them. One night Mathys looked down from their mahogany four-poster and found her squatting wide-eyed like a madwoman. Her wrists were running blood, and with her blood she had written on the walls . . . MY DEAD CHILDREN ... MY FATHER’S CURSE ON ME. . . . He slid down beside her, gathered her to him, talking softly, explaining how loss of her presence, her love, would be greater to him than that of any child. He was nothing without her, all the sorrow, and magic, and beauty of his world was contained within her. If she went insane, or died, he would follow. Silently, she pointed to the sea.
Every day thereafter, Mathys took her to a secluded beach away from polluted harbors. There she removed her clothes, corset, underthings, and floated naked in leaping waves, mothersounds, heart thump of her ancestral home. One day she sang out in Tahitian as a school of dolphin sailed in, curious and playful, chattering in funny click-tongue. Mathys watched paralyzed as she slid onto the back of a dolphin, riding in lazy circles, the thing soaring so high his wife was sometimes airborne. Day after day the dolphins came, soaring her toward slow healing.
One day, a whale appeared on the horizon, crying out repeatedly. Mathys stared at Kelonikoa’s corset lying on the sand. From the framework of the thing, the stays of wrecked whalebone, something emanated, a cry. He lunged to his feet, afraid he’d lost his mind. Kelonikoa waved as the whale moved in, singing a mournful song, almost a call. The corset responded again, a distinguishable bleating. Mathys drew his gun, aimed it at the corset. The whale, still calling, swam closer to shore.
Song of the humpback, mind of the sperm. His memory cells jostled, a joyless comprehension. He dropped the gun, gingerly lifted the corset, and carried it into the surf, where waves washed it out toward the mother whale. Almost tenderly, she flipped the corset onto her back, and in mournful, piping song, swam off. For reasons he could not discern, Mathys began to sob.
His wife turned in the shallows, held out her arms, and spoke her first words to him in months. “Come . . . into . . . me.”
Tearing his clothes off, he flung himself into the ocean, crying out her name.
&
nbsp; The pox plague died, ships sailed again, and each year gave Mathys and Kelonikoa contemplative pause as another child was born. She tended them lovingly but with restraint, knowing God could take them in a minute.
Trade mushroomed in Hawai‘i, ships from Europe, the Americas, the Orient. Rich haole built huge plantation estates as the quality of life deteriorated for Hawaiians. Quietly, unobtrusively, Kelonikoa and other privileged high-born or well-married women dressed in plain clothes and made their way to the slums, feeding the poor, comforting the dying, ducking pails of sewage aimed at missionaries foraging back alleys for souls.
Drunken seamen, crazed from months at sea, staggered through Chinatown, looking for places of freakish legend—the Screaming Lizard, a bar where sailors won wagers by biting the heads off lizards, then waved their money while in their mouths the lizard heads still screamed. Honey House, a brothel of blind mulattoes. Grinning Grog, a place for madmen where they served hymen blood of young girls. Dance of Little Hands, a house where delicate Chinese boys were dressed in rouge and gowns.
Running the gauntlet of sailors near the docks, Kelonikoa saw how smallpox had spread so swiftly in Honolulu: refuse dumped in gutters running into harbors, gigantic cesspools where rats bobbed up and down like seals, opium addicts—men, women, children—sleeping, eating, defecating in alleys. One day, she knelt beside a thirteen-year-old native girl. For fifty dollars, her father had sold her to a whaling skipper. She had been taken to sea, used for months as the crew’s recreation, until she contracted “sailor’s pox.” Someone had dragged her from the ship and dumped her in an alley. Pregnant, diseased, she had swallowed “mad vegetation,” and died in Kelonikoa’s arms. For hours, Kelonikoa wept, relating the tragedy to Portia Rule.
Next day the woman took her to a modest bungalow, where more than thirty gentlewomen stood around in latest fashions—long dresses with sash derrieres, feathered hats, high-button shoes, silk gloves and parasols. Some were haole, some half-castes and high castes, wives and daughters of prosperous businessmen. They sat down, shifted in their seats, nervous, somewhat exhilarated.
Shark Dialogues Page 6