Horror in Paradise (8 page)

“It’s a native infection. The natives undoubtedly know a lot more about it than we do, and if it were my own hand, I’d have them treat it with their own medicines. They’ve had hundreds of years of experience with the few native diseases there are. Likely enough this kind of infection isn’t known to civilized doctors at all.”

“What do you do for this illness?” I asked Tauria, who was in the house at the time.

“A tobacco poultice,” was his suggestion.

I had chewed tobacco just once. My mind flashed back from that coral island to the grassy violet-starred bank of a little river in Wisconsin; my father nodding in an afternoon nap over his fishing-pole; the sample plug of Battle-Ax that had been tossed on the doorstep, brought furtively from my pocket. I hadn’t repeated that experiment. However, if I didn’t chew now, Tauria would, for he was eager to try the remedy. So I reduced to pulp a sufficient quantity of the acrid Tahitian “twist” and bound it upon the injury.

The tobacco didn’t make it worse, but it didn’t improve it, either.

“Tauria is only a young man,” Keneti reflected. “If I were you, I would consult Paunu. He is a tahunga; he probably knows just what to do in cases like this.”

Paunu displayed professional interest.

“It is an
uruaitu,”
he diagnosed, using a word long vanished from the language of daily speech, “a ghost-head.”

“A ghost-head,” he repeated. “Who has had cause to work sorcery upon you?”

“As far as I know, I have done nobody any wrong.”

“Temata has cast a spell on you,” suggested Roki, who did not like the daughter of Maru. I recalled the grievance that young woman cherished against me, proceeding from that fateful joke of weeks ago.

It was unfortunate that my blunder had been directed toward Temata, who was of a peculiarly sensitive and proud disposition. Others of my friends might have overlooked or forgiven such a slight, having compassion for my ignorance. But Temata had already a rather difficult time of it at Tepuka. Of alien birth though of Tepuka ancestry, with a smattering of foreign ways derived from residence at Fakahina and in Tahiti, and deficient thereby in the fundamental art of a Tepuka woman: the making of hats and mats—she had developed a deep-seated inferiority complex and a correspondingly active defense mechanism which caused her to be stigmatized by the native sons and daughters of her ancestral island as
“teoteo,”
which might be translated “uppity” or “big-feeling.”

Paunu turned to Temae, grandfather or great-uncle of the suspect: “Has Temata worked witchcraft against Pari?”

“Nonsense!” scoffed Temae. “Temata does not know witchcraft.”

“What then could be the cause?” I queried.

“You must have committed some sacrilege without knowing of it, and a spirit has entered your finger. Perhaps you have walked too near a grave.”

“Perhaps so,” I agreed. I did not tell them of the time when, having heard that the spirits of the ancestors arise on moonlight nights and walk along the road that passes the tiny cemetery, I had gone there and sat on the stone wall of the House of the Dead for the time it takes to smoke a pandanus-leaf cigarette, and no spirit had appeared.

“Will you invoke the spirits for me?” I asked Paunu.

“I will do so if it becomes clearly necessary,” he promised. “But first let us see what can be done with medicines. My daughters will go to the forest and pluck herbs. We may be able to cure this illness by natural means.”

Roki and Tauhoa talked of island medicine as they gathered the young leaf buds of the karauri and the flower buds of the piupiu and crushed these things upon a stone. Roki chewed a bit of the green leaf of a young coconut tree, spat it upon the mixture, and bound the poultice upon the finger with a strip of cloth tom from a clean pareu, relating meanwhile their previous cures.

“The first time Pini the son of Maono went to Fakahina, he came home very ill. He could not eat. We made medicine and in one day he was well.”

It appeared, however, that the medical skill of Paunu’s daughters was not equal to my case. Next day the pain and swelling had reached the shoulder; the arm was paralyzed and I shivered with fever. Keneti was visibly alarmed.

“Paunu,” I insisted, “you will have to make magic.”

Now Paunu, although a sorcerer of sorts, is also a prominent member of the church of the Sacred Heart, and he was clearly reluctant to traffic with the ancestral spirits by means of the ancient magic, except as a last resort. These things, he would have explained if I had persisted, were things of Satan. Still, if it became necessary to fight demon with demon, he assured me he would do so.

“Go first,” he counseled, “to Toriu. He and his wife Tinaia, daughter of Temae, know the
rakau nati.
You have seen this medicine used. Did not Noere the Younger break his leg when he fell over a canoe? The leg was treated with that medicine, and now Noere walks about and plays marbles with the other boys in the street. Go to Toriu and Tinaia, and try that medicine. If it fails, I will invoke the gods.”

Toriu and Tinaia gravely inspected the infection.

“There can be no doubt,” they agreed, “that the
rakau nati
is needed. We will come tonight and treat your illness.”

Just after dark they came, Toriu bearing a half coconut shell filled with a reddish, thick liquid, shot with pale gleams of gold.

“The root and bark of the karauri and of the horahora,” Toriu explained, when asked, but there may have been other and secret ingredients, for the concoction had a strange, muddy consistency and a thick, earthy smell. The horahora, however, is a plant of known virtues: in Hawaii, where it is called noni, it is used even in this day of modem surgery to reduce fractures and sprains.

Tinaia washed the whole hand carefully, and applied the red medicine with a white feather. Red and white are colors pleasing to the gods; to use a black feather would have been gross malpractice, by island standards.

Toriu cut the ends off a bud coconut, a little larger than those the children use for juggling, and placed the truncated nut under my arm to block the circulation and check the spread of the infection.

“Hold it there all night,” he ordered. “It will keep the evil spirit from climbing farther up your body.”

They remained long in the house that night, turning over the pages of back-number magazines, and marveling at pictures of strange things in the white men’s country. Among those pictures were scenes of hospital operating-rooms, in a play then popular in America, where white-robed surgeons wearing inhuman-looking masks wielded sterilized instruments over sufferers like myself.

“White medicine men,” I explained. “The masks are to keep away the evil spirits that cause illness, which in the white men’s language are called ‘bacteria.’ ”

Toriu understood. He understood the white robes, too, from his viewpoint, and approved. He and the white medicine men had a good deal in common; though they would give different reasons for it.

The pain dulled; whether from the effect of Toriu’s medicine, which was cool and soothing with a curious drawing sensation, or merely from nerve fatigue, I do not know. I must have been still somewhat feverish, perhaps delirious. I lay quietly on the mat and closed my eyes.

“Will he recover?” asked Keneti.

“It is hard to say,” Toriu replied cautiously. “A native can recover from the ghost-head; a white man—we do not know. We have never before treated a white man. They are not accustomed to our diseases, as we are not accustomed to theirs. We die of colds, which to the white men are a slight thing. They sneeze and cough, as do we, but they wipe their noses with handkerchiefs and go about their work. As for us, our lungs fill and we die.”

“If you had come to us sooner,” said Tinaia, “it would have been better. The evil spirit had already reached the armpit before we began treatment. It is under the left shoulder; it is near the heart. If the evil spirit reaches the heart, there is no hope.”

Paunu, who had been listening, got up, with a strange expression on his face, and went out into the haunted night.

In the languor that crept over me as the pain subsided, I lay listening to their talk with an odd detachment, as if they were speaking of someone else. Looking back upon it now, it seems strange that I was not terrified. We were utterly isolated. It had taken the
Tiare Tahiti
three weeks to reach us, and it might take as long to get back to any port where there were physicians of our own race. The natives said it would be fatal to travel, in my condition. There was no way of calling help. Only the herbs and incantations of these islanders, and what sturdiness of constitution I might have, stood between me and a miserable death. Yet, strangely, I felt no fear, but only a mild curiosity and a sense of peace. It was good, I reflected dreamily, to lie on these cool mats, with these kind people watching over me.

By one of those curious twists of psychology which magnify trivial occasions in memory, the date July 24 has stood out in my mind since on the night of that date a boy of ten years or so, in his bed in a Wisconsin village, reflected sadly that the summer vacation was half gone and he hadn’t done many of the things he wanted to do. That boy, playing at “savage” in backyards and pastures and woodlots, would have derived a curious compensation if he could have looked ahead and seen himself on July 24 of a much later year in his house of leaves on a coral island, even though disabled and in pain. Part of the celebrated “lure” of far and primitive places no doubt is a response to the boy in man; in such surroundings, among childlike peoples, he regains the play-world of his childhood. Where the pursuits at which he played as a boy are the serious vocations of adults, he finds a satisfaction of some instinct as old as the childhood of his own race.

However this may be, on that day, the second of Toriu and Tinaia’s treatment, the infected hand felt slightly better, and the general symptoms less pronounced. Old Temae, who had seen many such cases in his long life, predicted that it would be far advanced toward recovery in a few more days.

“This illness is well known,” he explained. “It occurs oftener on the sole of the foot, but it may attack any part of the body. On the foot, it often develops from a stone bruise.”

Day by day Toriu and Tinaia came and washed the hand, and painted each day a smaller area with the medicine, which left a stain like dried blood.

“We are forcing the evil spirit down into the spot where it entered,” Toriu explained.

Whatever the merits of that theory, the results justified the practice. Soreness and swelling receded as the treatment continued. By the third day, the infection had been localized. It rose—true to its name—from the base of the finger in the semblance of a ghostly skull, a high hard dome of pain.

“It is time for the poultice,” declared Toriu with some satisfaction. He prepared it as Roki and Tauhoa had done, from the same herbs, and bound it with a strip of red cloth.

“Do not bum the dressings, or throw them away carelessly,” Tinaia warned. “Put them in this coconut shell, and I will dispose of them fittingly. It is not well to anger the gods further.”

She meant that she would bury them in the ground or throw them into the sea; the practice differs in different countries and with individual medicine-makers.

The poultice was cool and soothing.

“On Monday, in the middle of the day, the swelling will break,” Tinaia predicted. “Keep it covered until then, and don’t let anyone see it.”

Visitors came and squatted beside me, and caressed the other hand: Maukiri and her daughters, urging me to come to their home to stay, that they might comfort me; Temae, who himself knows sorcery; Ngohe, mumbling words of sympathy; Tukua the chief’s daughter; Roki and Tioma, fragrant with scented coconut oil; Tauhoa, always practical and helpful, rolling up a bundle of my clothes to wash. Teuri, a frightened expression on his long, serious face, crossed himself with pious precaution before passing the doorway of this house into which “Satan” seemed to have entered.

The child Riua sat at my feet, in silent sympathy. Teuringaiti came with her sweetheart Maono the son of Maono, bringing a great basket of drinking-nuts. Paniroro, who had returned on the
Tiare
with us from Tepoto, talked of the lands she had visited. Paniroro was a traveled woman; she had been to Fakahina, that port which draws so many of the young people from the two islands, and to farther Fakarava, capital of the Tuamotu.

“This,” as she pointed out to Tinaia an advertisement in one of our magazines, “is a coloring for the lips, and this for the cheeks. I have seen a white woman, the wife of the administrator, use them so”—indicating in pantomime the application of rouge and lipstick. “The white women’s faces are pale, and they paint their lips and faces, for they have not the natural color of the human skin, as we have.”

She had a child with her—a pretty little curly-haired girl—who, she said, was half American, a quarter Chinese and a quarter Tuamotuan; and showed us pictures of the child’s parents, whom Bob recognized as friends of his in one of the more westerly islands.

“It was Tiki, the first man, who brought illness and death into the world,” said Paunu, who followed my progress closely. “Tiki made Ahuone, the first woman, out of a heap of sand, and their daughter was Hina. When Hina was grown, she was very beautiful, and Tiki made her his second wife. But Ahuone found it out, and Hina was ashamed and fled to the moon. Then Tiki, in his grief, gave himself death, and since his time all men must die.”