She woke at dawn, splinters imbedded in her shoulders and buttocks. She was filthy with soot and crusted blood. She turned, crying out for her child. Holo was sitting in a shaft of sunlight, turning her head this way and that, grinning with wonder. Everything was somewhere else! The room seemed upside down. Pono lifted the child, and crept outside, the sun so warm she thought maybe she would live.
In the big house, the cook silently took the child. All night the camp had heard them. The camp had wept for her. Now, they saw Calcados walking with a limp. They saw his bandaged ear.
The cook leaned close and whispered, “You one good fightah, Pono!”
She bathed her wounds, wrapped strips of rags round her broken ribs. She drank ‘awa tea for curing grief, ate nutmeg for pain-killing, chewed eggshell for strength. Then carefully, she knelt, trying to scrub the floors, her hands unable to grip the brush. The buckle-memory on her hip had bloomed into an eggplant, so large it interfered with walking. The burning deep between her legs made it horrible to sit. Workers came and stared because her head would not stop shaking. It shook for days, and when it stopped, Calcados was there, warping her view. He was everywhere, waiting, biding his lust. If she fled, he would run her down, take her child. If she stayed, she would die.
She roamed the beaches, rocking in the surf. Beloved. Tell me what to do. The worst part was not knowing if Duke was alive. If he was dead she would join him in a minute. And take Holo, too.
She began to dream. Tires spinning, a laughing woman in a speeding car. Holo staring at a damaged doll. Calcados inside her again, his big, slovenly member battering. Then, Calcados sinking deep in muck until there was just his eyes. Pono woke in a sweat. And every day he watched her, his distance narrowing, the memory of her firing him anew.
One day the railroad cars appeared, transporting sugarcane to shipping ports. And hidden on the trains were infiltrators, outside organizers, unionizers.
Workers sat in their shacks, debating. “Who care what dese organizers called? ‘Communists’? So what? Dey fight foah us, bettah wages foah us. Dey de only ones who care ‘bout us.”
One night a haole sat among them, a union organizer smuggled in from California. Pono watched him from the shadows.
“Those two ‘horse-thieves’ Calcados killed were framed,” he whispered. “They were strikers working for us. The ILWU.”
“What dat?”
“International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union. We’ve changed the face of labor on the mainland.”
“. . . bunch of haole!”
“So what!” the man argued. “Who cares what’s the color of our skin. We’ve come to help you organize on every island in Hawai‘i. Are you men? Or slaves?”
Something went through Pono. She listened closely, weighing every word. Late at night, when people came to ask her should they trust this man, should they strike with him, she was silent, meditative.
The next time he was smuggled in, bringing pamphlets on human rights, higher wages, better working conditions, Pono walked right up to him. “I am . . . kahuna. Workers ask me for advice. They are confused about you.”
He sat with her by candlelight, explaining what was happening on the mainland, the thirties’ Depression had begun. He explained what a labor union was, the purpose of organizing mass strikes.
“I guarantee it, a massive walkout here in the islands would net pay raises of at least fifteen percent. Of course, there will be violence, and deaths . . .”
She asked the question carefully. “You have union men on every island? Even . . . Moloka‘i?”
“Of course! Huge plantations there, terrible conditions.”
She blew the candle out, talking in the dark. “I will help you organize, if you will do one thing.” She spoke so softly now, her voice took on a dreamlike quality even though she spoke of horror. Kalaupapa, the leper settlement. Duke Kealoha.
“Find out if he is dead,” she said. “Or living.”
“Who is this leper?” the haole asked. “What is he to you?”
“. . . My life. The father of my child.”
When she lit the candle he was gone.
For two years she had lived in fear, now she lived in hope. It turned her brazen. She demanded more milk for Holo, demanded her wages on time. Yet, when Calcados came at night, bringing his demands, she fought his body less. She was preoccupied. Shaking his saliva from her brow, feeling him come inside her, groaning like a beast, she turned her head aside and wondered, Who in camp is trustworthy? Who will help me organize?
She held meetings late at night, robbing workers of their sleep. “Why be hōhē? What you got to lose? Want stay shit poor? Yoah kamali’i end up slaves like you, no education?”
Workers rallied, willing to gamble lives to unionize. They hand-printed pamphlets in Pidgin while the luna slept:
PAU “COOLIE” KINE, NOW UNION KINE. TRY COME MEETINGS
They used their kids as runners, spreading the word from camp to camp, up and down the Hamakua Coast.
Calcados’s wife began calling to workers from the porch. “Don’t be slaves! Soldier on! Be brave.”
He locked her in her room, and there was only sobbing. One day she slipped through a window, stood in the driveway, and smoothed her hair. Dressed in hat and gloves, she slid inside their rusty Ford and, smiling, accelerated down the road. Later, Pono saw men running in the fields, pointing backwards toward the cliffs. There were no signs of brakes applied before the car went over. Workers said she even waved.
Suddenly, armed guards were posted at the camp fence gates. Pono saw their fires at night, saw moonlight refracted on their rifles. Who were they keeping out? Or in? She dreamed again, Calcados drooling over her, then his body sinking deep in muck. Holo staring at a broken doll. Pono sat up shaking, remembering fragments of an early dream. Tires had spun, Calcados’s wife had died laughing in her car. Pono waited. What would happen waited with her.
One night the sounds of gunshots, someone banging on her door. “Pono! Dey shoot him! Dat haole guy . . . You got pamphlets, bettah burn dem quick! Dambastards . . .!”
And she ran, ran down the muddy, red dirt road, skidding on her backside. A crowd encircled the haole unionizer, guards cursing over him. His body was stubborn, he snapped and flinched taking a long time to die. Pono stared and stared, and then the cook was whispering beside her.
“He lookin’ foah you, Pono. Dey shoot him. I come runnin’ find him wrigglin’ in da grass. He say yoah name, push a paper at me. BAM! Dey shoot him again . . .”
Pono turned, her eyes deadly. She pulled the cook into the shadows, dragged her to her shack. Inside, Pono lit a candle, watching as the cook pulled from her dress a rumpled sheet of paper smeared with mud. Silently, ceremoniously, they sat. Pono leaned forward, a woman ready for the worst.
“Read!” she whispered.
Laboriously, the woman stuttered out the words:
BELOVED PONO . . .
I AM BECOME A HORROR. NOT FIT TO LOOK UPON. I ASK YOU TO FORGET ME. GO OUT INTO THE WORLD AND LIVE. WHATEVER HUMAN THING IS LEFT OF ME GOES WITH YOU . . .
That night she sat quiet for hours, caressing the edges of the page as one would stroke a profile. Then, facing in the direction of Moloka‘i, she took a bamboo chopstick, working silently, sharpening the tip.
“Now,” she whispered. “Now I will . . . dare everything.”
One night she left Holo with neighbors. “I don’t come for her at midnight, you try come my place and help. Might be plenty trouble.”
That night when Calcados climbed on top of her, she wrapped her arms round him, feigning affection. When he was deep inside her, crooning all those obscene things, how he loved her, loved fucking her, would never let her go, she drove the bamboo chopstick in with all her might, left of the midline, between the ribs. He sighed, a long, underwater sigh, and slumped. Neighbors came running at midnight, and by then her body had turned a glistening red. Grunting, peeling him off of her, pulling him out of her, people shudder
ed, people prayed, each in his own language, to his own god. While men rolled him in a burlap sack, women stood her outside in the rain, letting him run off of her.
“What we do now, Pono?”
“Drag.”
They dragged for hours, cut the fence in darkness and dragged him far into the bush, through tangled jungle vines and singing bamboo groves, past mountain creeks and swamps, and finally, into one mimiki. They pushed him in feet-first, but just before the muck sucked up his back, she made them pull him out again. Groaning, tugging, they laid him in the dirt face-down.
“What for, Pono! What you lookin’ for?”
Her juices. Her rhythms. Her honor. Lodged somewhere in the grottoes and arches of his spine. Silently, in torchlight, she guided the knife, traced a flashing crimson line along his back. They knelt beside her following the stripe, digging deeper down where disks of cartilage and ligament took hold. Blood surged, muscle and jelly burying their fingers and wrists and forearms as they worked, separating, defining. The crack of ribs splintering from vertebrae, of vertebrae from skull, his long, gray worm of spinal cord—impulses, reflexes, memories—flung out into the dark like bait. What was left simmered in its curdled stench. They flung the wreckage of his body into the muck. Then they flung the head. It spun high into the air, its own bright hairy planet. Earth bubbled up and sucked it down. Pono studied his spinal column held in her two hands. She stood different now, redeemed.
Two days later, a big Packard rolled up the drive. The white plantation owner walked his land. Then he assembled the entire camp, a crowd of several hundred.
“Calcados is missing. If he’s been murdered, we will find his body. You. will suffer. Men will hang.”
The new luna, a brutish-looking Scot, assigned the camp to overtime, killing hours without food or pay. Anyone caught organizing strikes would be shot instantly. Pono measured time, watching the tides, waiting for a full-moon night in which to run. But something overtook her, paralyzed her. She stopped talking, the whites of her eyes turned rusty.
The cook noticed first, flotsam of another race filling Pono’s belly. “Mother God, Calcados plant his seed in you! What you gonna do?”
“Be still,” Pono said. That womb-wrapt thing within her would unravel, she would snip the yarn.
But nothing helped. Not crushed roots of poison fern, not drafts of caustic soap. Not prayers, nor Buddhist neighbors chanting. Again, her mana failed her. The new luna ignored her growing belly, another wahine carrying a bastard. As long as she worked, he let her be.
With the intuition of a child born frightened, Holo knew. Knew something. One day she raced toward her mother who was staring at the sea as if listening for instructions. The child ran on tiptoe, hot sand burning her small tough soles. And then she stopped. In the distance her mother pummeling, pummeling her big belly with her fists. Holo backed away, sat down in shade and curled into a ball, trying to become invisible.
One day Pono stopped scrubbing floors. She stood slowly, knowing it was time. Leaving Holo with the cook, she walked unsteadily to her shack, measuring her steps. Night air clean, moon and stars in lucid confederation, she smelled sharp smells from the jungle—foliage, humus, dung—the yeastiness of earth.
Then dread trickled down her brow. The coming pain. She crawled into her shack, ripped a sheet into strips, stuffed a strip into her mouth. And screamed. Screamed as if she were singing, high notes hitting walls and bouncing back. And no one heard. She screamed with all the voice she had within her, screamed from fear, hurt, degradation. She screamed for the indignities, the years she died innumerably. She screamed for her grandmother, Emma, dead of plague, her grandfather, murdered in cold blood. She screamed for strikers murdered in their sleep, and women forced to lie with syphilitic strangers. She screamed for love, for Duke bound in a cage. And terror, birthing all alone in jungles. She screamed, mourning slaughtered innocence, the part of her forever dead.
She flung herself against the walls and ricocheted, a large, mad monkey tired of its cage. She screamed, and no one heard. Her teeth tore the sheet to shreds. She jammed another strip into her mouth. And screamed. And then her shadow was a looming on the walls. A rocking, awful grandness, until the thing fell out. One bleat. An infant bleat. And then a smaller strip of sheet into its tiny mouth, round its tiny neck.
Frightened, longing for her mother, Holo had slipped from the cook’s shack, and run outside in moonlight, running home to that which was familiar. She squeezed the door open and looked. And saw. A doll. An artifact. Blood-spangled white, and dangling from her mother’s fist. Pono shook it, making sure. Shook and shook.
This would be Holo’s memory for all her days. Her mother chanting softly, binding Holo in rags across her back. And something else. A little mummy wrapped and hanging from her mother’s waist. And running. Down cliffs, the steep and humpbacked cliffs. And then her mother pausing, chanting still, the mummy flung out high above the sea, its cloth slowly unwinding. A broken doll cartwheeling into waves.
Then Holo and her mother running, burrowing into the jungle. And blood, her mother stuffing spider webs and moss between her legs. And sleeping, sleeping it seemed for weeks. Hidden deep in giant ferns and soft humid moss. Her mother’s body surrounding her. Protecting her. Warmth, and mothermilk weeping into Holo’s hair. Her mother O so tenderly! giving her her breast. This would be Holo’s memory. Terror. And motherlove. And running.
Ka Liona Lohi
* * *
Slow Lion
THIS PENINSULA. Most beautiful, most desolate part of all the Hawaiian Islands, jutting northward from the coast of Moloka‘i. And, on these grassy slopes shielded east and west by jungled cliffs, Kalaupapa, “Place of the Living Dead.” Since lepers were first banished here in the 1860s, progress had been made. Doctors who probed patients from afar with twelve-foot poles had been replaced by humane physicians and nurses, risking the disease. And missionary Brothers of the Sacred Heart. After years of drunkenness and debauchery among the lawless dying and “the damned,” a church had been established for those who still believed in God.
By now, a real hospital had been constructed for the extremely ill, the elderly and blind, another for patients in the early stages of leprosy, and even a small research station. Bishop Home was built for afflicted young girls and women, and Baldwin Home for boys. Marriage was permitted among lepers, and whole families of the afflicted, arriving one at a time on “shipment day,” were allowed to live together in tiny cottages. Supply vessels docked at the pier not far from the hospital and sometimes brave visitors even came ashore. In the “caller house,” a chain link fence and wide planked tables separated patients from non-patients. Blood relatives were forbidden ever to touch. Still, there were lū‘au, parades, horse races, dancing and singing in the old Hawaiian way. One big ‘ohana, people said. And no one stared. Except for hideous disfigurement, rotting flesh, the loss of sensation, of limbs, of sight—and stigma, and death—it was a good life.
Those who were still ambulatory and hearty engaged in sports, fished, hiked up to Kauhako Crater and stood on soaring cliffs, watching the sea below wear down the rocks. They splashed under waterfalls ribboning down several thousand feet, and swam out to little islets clustered offshore like gamboling whales. They hiked the valleys where graves of nameless lepers blurred to soft green fields. And in the glow of dusk they spat up in the wooden church of St. Philomena with its expectoration holes between each pew, sometimes seeing through the holes winking eyes, spirits of the dead awaiting them.
For a year Duke had stared across the sea at night lights of Honolulu, imagining her there. Imagining her beauty maturing in someone else’s eyes. Then one day news reached him from Tang Pin on the Big Island. Workers had deserted, everything overgrown or dead, the plantation posted as a leper house. But then the other news, Pono and a child. Duke prayed it wasn’t his, knowing it was. Innocent, already damned. Ma‘i Pākē in its genes. He tortured himself, wondering what his daughter looked like. And does she hav
e Pono’s black eyes, my mother’s delicate piano fingers? Will she walk in her sleep and love animals, like father? He tried to imagine the smell of her, the feel of her little head resting in his hand, the shock of her laughter echoing notes and textures and colors. The actuality of her hitting him like shrapnel.
Another year passed. Duke pondered himself in mirrors, waiting for his features to take on the look of extinct beasts, shaggy mammoth, prehistoric cave-ape. Friends he came to love expired, fingerless, footless, faces like giant warts with eyes, some used as human guinea pigs: horse toxin, “nose tripping.” Suicide. Still hopeful of a cure, he gallantly endured drugs, medical experiments. His lesions spread, one hand turned twisted like a crab. He let them try anything: Chaulmoogra oil, which almost killed him. Horse toxin injections, which blew his body wide open, burning him with fever, so he temporarily lost his sight. Staggering back to consciousness and half-health from each experiment, he began to take an almost academic interest in the history and treatment of what was killing him.
When, in 1865, King Kamehameha V ordered all lepers confined to the most desolate part of his realm, the royal government had provided no doctors, no hospital, no housing, only food supplies pushed off the ships behind them. Lepers had lived in improvised grass huts, an outcast society, so exposed to the elements many died of tuberculosis before leprosy consumed them. Fresh water was so scarce, sometimes they died of thirst crawling toward the sound of waterfalls.
In 1873, a Belgian priest, Father Damien arrived at Kalaupapa, dedicating his life to the afflicted until he died in 1889, a leper. He inspired colonists to build better houses and a primitive hospital on the sheltered side of the peninsula and to install water lines. The bacillus, mycobacterium leprae, discovered in 1874 by Armauer Hansen, a Norwegian physician, was now often referred to as Hansen’s disease, hoping to destigmatize the sickness.
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