Moloka'i (3 page)

Kal
kaua’s people were mourning more than the passing of their king.

No one understood this better than Henry, who in his lifetime had now seen the deaths of four kings. As he and his family finally entered the palace they heard choirs chanting dirges, the ritual laments echoing throughout the vast ornate halls. But in the flower-decked throne room, a dignified silence prevailed. Flanking the coffin were twenty somber attendants holding royal staffs that looked to Rachel like spindly palm trees sprouting feathers instead of fronds. The casket, carved of native woods, was adorned with a silver crown and draped with a golden feather cloak, bright as sunlight. As the Kalamas approached it they now saw, behind thick plate glass, the familiar whiskered profile of David Kal
kaua, his head pillowed, looking as if he were merely asleep.

Tears sprang suddenly to Henry’s eyes. He thought of the prophecy—made over a century ago by the high priest Ka'opulupulu, who told the ruler of O'ahu that the line of kings would come to an end at Waikiki, and that the land would belong to a people from across the sea. O'ahu was soon conquered by armies from across that sea—Maui and, later, the island of Hawai'i—and now Henry wondered if he were seeing the other half of the prophecy coming true, if soon there would be an end to the line of kings.

As they passed by the casket Henry and Dorothy each grazed the tips of their fingers against the glass, until the grief of those behind them pushed them on, and out.

On the 15th of February, a somber Sunday, the king was finally laid to rest, beginning with a simple Anglican ceremony inside the throne room, as outside a long line of citizens, again including the Kalamas, stood coiled around the palace. At the conclusion of services a long procession of mourners left 'Iolani Palace on a solemn march to the Royal Mausoleum in Nu'uanu Valley. In years to come Rachel would remember only a few of these hundreds upon hundreds of marchers: the torch bearers representing the symbol of Kal
kaua’s reign, “the flaming torch at midday,” now quenched; the king’s black charger, saddled backward, the horse’s head bent low as though it too understood grief; pallbearers carrying the king’s catafalque, flanked by two columns of brightly plumed standard bearers; and the carriages bearing his widow, Queen Kapi'olani, and his sister Lili'uokalani, now Hawai'i’s first reigning queen. The moment the king’s casket left the palace grounds the air was shaken by the guns of the battleships
Charleston
and
Mohican
in the harbor, firing a cannonade in salute, along with a battery emplacement atop Punchbowl Hill. At the same instant, church bells all across the city tolled at once. Rachel clapped her hands to her ears; the noise was almost too much to bear, but she would never forget it, its violence and its majesty. And when the last official members of the cortege left the palace grounds, the procession was joined by those dearest to the late king— his subjects. Hundreds of ordinary Hawaiians who stood twined around the palace now took up the rear of the cortege, a human wreath slowly unfurling itself as the procession wended its way into the green hills above Honolulu.

Rachel understood only that death was a kind of going-away, as when her father went away to sea; but since her father always came back she could not imagine the king would not as well. And so as his casket receded into the distance she raised her hand and waved to him—as she did her father when he boarded his ship and it sailed out onto the open sea, disappearing over the edge of the world.

T

hat moment came, as always, too soon. Papa was home only six weeks before he had to ship out again, this time for San Francisco and, after that, South America. But because he spent so much time away from his children, Henry always did his best to cram six months’ worth of activity into the breathless space of one or two, taking them fishing for shrimp in Nu'uanu Stream or riding the waves at Waikiki. The latter had to be managed with stealth and discretion, since Mama had accepted the missionaries’ proscription against surfing, seen as a worthless, godless activity; Papa would spirit the children away on some pretext, recover his big redwood surfboard from its exile at his friend Sammy’s house, then, one child at a time, paddle out beyond the first shorebreak and instruct them in the ancient art of “wave sliding.”

Another day Papa packed everyone up in their rickety old wagon and took off up a winding six-mile road to Mount Tantalus overlooking the city. The road meandered through bowers of stooped trees bent low over the dirt path, the foliage at times so thick it seemed they were driving through a tunnel of leaves, the air sweet and loamy. At a lookout high above the city they sat and ate a picnic supper; Rachel peered down at the green V of the valley, at the doll’s houses of Honolulu spread out below that, and at the long sweep of coastline from Diamond Head to Kalihi Bay. Thrilled and amazed that she could see so much all at once, she gazed out at the thin line separating blue ocean from blue sky and realized that somewhere beyond that were the distant lands her father knew—the lands of cherry dolls and
matryoshka,
moonfaced rag dolls and little yellow
amahs.

The day he left, the whole family accompanied Papa to the harbor—Rachel up front in Mama’s lap, Ben, Kimo, and Sarah riding in the back of the lurching wagon. Papa tied up at the Esplanade, his children putting on a brave face as they escorted him back to the SS
Mariposa,
all of them quietly determined not to cry.

But almost as though someone were taking their secret thoughts, their hidden grief, and vocalizing it, there came—from the pier immediately ahead—a terrible, anguished wail. It was not one voice but many, a chorus of lament; and as the cry died away, another promptly began, rising and falling like the wind. It was, Henry and Dorothy both knew, not merely a wail, but a word:
auw
, Hawaiian for “alas.”
Auw
! Auwwayy!
(
Alas! Alas!
)

It sounded exactly like the cries of grief and loss that Rachel had heard the day the king had come home. “Mama,” she said, fearfully, “is the Queen dead, too?”

“No, child, no,” Dorothy said.

Moored off Pier 10 was a small, decrepit interisland steamer, the
Mokoli'i
. A distraught crowd huddled behind a wooden barricade, sighing their mournful dirge as a procession of others—young and old, men and women, predominantly Hawaiians and Chinese—were herded by police onto the old cattle boat. Now and then one of the people behind the barricade would reach out to touch someone boarding the ship: a man grasping for a woman, a child reaching for his mother, a friend clasping another’s hand for the last time.

“Ma'i páké,
” Kimo said softly.

“What?” Rachel asked.

“They’re lepers, you ninny,” Sarah admonished. “Going to Moloka'i.”

“What’s a leper?”

Someone in the crowd threw a flower
lei
onto the water, but contrary to legend, it was not likely to ever bring any of these travelers back to Honolulu.

“They’re sick, baby. Very sick,” Mama explained. Rachel didn’t understand. The people didn’t look sick; they didn’t look much different than anyone on the other side of the barricade.

“If they’re sick,” Rachel asked, “why isn’t someone taking care of them?”

No one answered her; and as that word,
leper
, hung in the still humid air, Dorothy dug her fingers into Rachel’s shoulders and turned her away from the
Mokoli'i
.

“Come on. Go! Alla you, go!” Henry and Dorothy shepherded their children away from the pier, away from the hapless procession marching onto the grimy little steamer, away from the crowd that mourned for them as though they were already dead; but they couldn’t escape the crowd’s lament, the sad chorale which followed them like some plaintive ghost, all the way to the
Mariposa
.

Auw
! Auwwaay! Alas, alas
. . .

Chapter 2

1892

W

aim
nalo Plantation, twenty miles up the twisting windward coast from Honolulu, lay spread in a horseshoe valley at the foot of the imposing Ko'olau Range—high jagged peaks with faces like those of worried old men, deep vertical furrows worn by the passage of time and water. Thousands of acres of taro, maize, and sugarcane fanned out from the base of the mountains, the property of a half-Scottish, half-Hawaiian nobleman; cradled among the fields were the sugar mill, ranch buildings, and laborers’ camps, the latter segregated by race.

It was suppertime in the camps, and the smell of baking bread and roasted pork, of cabbage and sweet potatoes and fresh fish, hung in the air around the big brick communal ovens. Just as pungent was the smolder of sugarcane as
lunas
—overseers—supervised a rare afternoon fire, burning away the sword-shaped leaves to harvest the cane itself. Children raced and played, weaving among women cooking and men, their backs aching and their hands coarse, returning from a long day in the fields.

The young man in the brown suit and hat walked alongside but apart from the weary column of field hands; his collar, cuffs, the crease in his pants were as crisp as a new dollar bill. He walked briskly, but not so briskly that he didn’t have time to smile at little
keiki
or give a friendly nod to women as they pulled steaming loaves of bread from the ovens. No one failed to smile back, less from
aloha
than fear.

He stopped at one of the small plantation cottages, a well-kept house painted forest green with white trim and squatting on a raised slatted foundation several feet off the ground. He climbed the steps to the tiny porch, knocked on the door. It was a few moments before the knock was answered, and when the door opened he faced a short, stocky woman squinting nervously at him: “Yes?”

The man tipped his hat to her. “Health Inspector Nakamura. Sorry to bother you at dinnertime, but could I please speak with”—and here he consulted a notepad in his hand—“Kapono Kalama?”

Margaret Kalama shook her head. “Not here.”

“Is he still working?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know where he is.”

Inspector Nakamura glanced inside. A boy and girl sat at a small table, their eyes big with fear, their dinners going untouched. “May I come in?” he asked.

“If you want,” she said, not pleased about it.

There wasn’t much to see. A small living area, a bedroom in which both adults and children slept with a single window looking out on the back yard. The mattresses, covered with bedsheets made from hundred-pound sugar sacks, lay flat on the floor with not an inch below to harbor a body. He opened a closet, saw only clothes, shut it. As he walked back into the living room, he smiled at the children: “Please. Your food’s getting cold. Go on, eat.” He noticed there were four place settings, four hot plates of cabbage and fish and fresh bread.

On his way out he handed Mrs. Kalama a business card and said, “Please tell your husband I’d like to see him at his earliest convenience.” As the door closed on him he hurried down the porch steps, checked the wash house—all five compartments, one for each family, were empty—then entered the back yard where the Kalamas kept ducks, chickens, rabbits, and a small taro garden. He noted the way some of the taro plants, right under the bedroom window, had been stomped flat; noted too the footprints in the soft red earth. He followed them out the yard and down a dusty corridor that bisected the cane field; after twenty feet the tracks veered off into the cane, disappearing amid the closely planted stalks.

It was harvest time and the cane was at its tallest, standing almost six feet high. A man could, and often did, hide in the thicket of cane for days if he had to. Nakamura frowned. He was certain Kalama hadn’t had time to get very far, but searching the thicket would be a long and no doubt fruitless task. Trying to enlist assistance from the plantation workers would be useless: no one would aid him, he knew, except perhaps the Scottish
lunas
.

He stood there considering his choices, listening to the faint rustle of cane stalks in the breeze, breathing in the sweetly acrid smell of the cane fires.

And then he smiled.

After a brief conversation with the overseers, the inspector climbed atop the miniature saddle-tanker locomotive used to ferry the cane across the plantation. From up here he could see the entire breadth of the cane field. Now too he saw a
luna
directing his men to set a fire in the center of that field; saw the first lick of flames consume the green swords of the leaves; and watched as a thick pillar of brown-black smoke rose into the sky.

In no time at all the radius of the fire had expanded a good fifty feet, a swath of flame and smoke marching to the sea. Not long after, Nakamura heard coughing from deep inside the cane thicket as the smoke enveloped it, and then the frantic rustling of stalks as someone rushed to escape the oncoming blaze.

Nakamura jumped off the locomotive and raced down the perimeter of the field—just in time to see a lanky, frightened Hawaiian man come stumbling out of the cane, coughing and wheezing. Nakamura jumped him; the man went down, offering no resistance.

Pono lay on the ground, half blinded, the tears in his eyes not from the smoke but from the thought of what he was about to lose. His cheek had been abraded by the bramble of cane, but the livid red blemish beneath his left eye was a wound of a very different sort, and a mark—permanent and ineradicable—of his shame and his fear.

P

apa had come home from South America in time for the Christmas of ’91, bringing with him the usual fine assortment of gifts (including, for Rachel, an Argentine peasant doll from Buenos Aires). There had been a feast on New Year’s Day at Aunt Florence’s; Rachel was disappointed when Uncle Pono didn’t tease and play with her but sat by himself in a corner, seeming withdrawn and depressed. And then in April came the shocking news that Pono had been arrested as a leprosy suspect and sent to the Kalihi Receiving Station on the western flank of Honolulu, where his case was to be “evaluated.” For a lucky few, this could mean a diagnosis of some unrelated, relatively benign disease like scabies or scrofula; for most it meant being branded a leper, forcibly detained in the hospital at Kalihi for months or years, and ultimately, exiled to Kalaupapa on the remote northern tip of Moloka'i.

Rachel understood only that Uncle Pono was sick in the hospital, but when she asked if they could go see him, her mother snapped out a brusque
“No”
and changed the subject. Henry Kalama did visit his brother at Kalihi, but no one considered, for reasons obscure to Rachel but obvious to all the adults, bringing children along . . . even if it had been allowed.

Everyone in the
'ohana
, the family, pitched in to help provide for Pono’s wife and children, who were not only deprived of husband and father but of his income as well. Margaret and the children went to live with Pono’s sister Florence and her husband Eli; Dorothy’s brother Will, the fisherman, helped out with a portion of his weekly catch; and Dorothy and Henry lent what small financial assistance they could, even as they struggled to come to terms with what had happened to Pono. That first night Rachel and Sarah could hear (through the walls, thin as a ginger cracker, separating the girls’ room from their parents’) the sound of their father weeping for the older brother who had taught him how to swim and how to surf; weeping as if for one already dead. And the girls cried as well, for Uncle Pono and for Papa, so obviously in pain.

Before any of the children left the house after hearing the news, Mama took them aside and cautioned, “You don’t tell nobody about this, understand? Not your friends, not your teacher, not Mr. MacReedy at church,
nobody
. You don’t even talk about it to
each other,
you understand?” The children all nodded. Mama added, “Or
else.”
They nodded again, and true to their word they didn’t even talk about it among themselves, though not out of fear of what Mama might do to them. No, it was the fear they saw in Mama’s own eyes that cowed them into silence. They had never seen Mama truly frightened before, never imagined it possible; and as that was far more terrifying to contemplate than any disease, they were only too happy not to speak, even to think, about poor Uncle Pono and this terrible thing called the
ma'i p
k
.

P

apa shipped out again in June, but out of concern for Pono he signed on for a shorter stint, a voyage of five months rather than eight or ten. For Rachel life went on as before, though over the summer relations with her sister became more strained than usual, a result of what came to be known as “the soup trouble.”

Playing in the back yard with her friends Aggie and Elsa while Mama and Sarah were out, Rachel thought it might be fun to play at cooking dinner. The big steel tub Mama washed clothes in made an excellent saucepan; an old broom, a fine stirring spoon. She and Aggie filled the tub with water brought bucket by bucket from the cistern, and then Rachel considered what kind of “soup” to make.

She knew not to waste food, so each ingredient for Mama’s chicken stew had to have its own pretend equivalent. Rachel chose two pair of her own white socks, each rolled into a ball and looking, sort of, like a peeled Irish potato. (She threw in a pair of Papa’s brown socks to represent the local sweet potato.) A handful of Mama’s green silk handkerchiefs, bought by Papa in Hong Kong, made convincing enough cabbage leaves, particularly when wet. Sarah’s yellow felt hat was an adequate summer squash, and a pair of her bracelets, made of orangish
koa
wood, bobbed on the surface like sliced carrots. Aggie kicked off her sandals and dropped them into the mix, where they doubled nicely for boiled chicken legs.

Elsa added a pinch of garden soil as a condiment.

They were enthusiastically stirring their “soup” when Mama and Sarah came home from the grocer’s. Sarah let out a shriek when she saw her felt hat swirling beside Aggie’s dirty sandals; Mama expressed little appreciation for her handkerchiefs’ resemblance to cabbage; and Rachel was rewarded with a couple of swats across her behind and no dinner for the night. “I should make you eat your own soup!” Mama threatened, but didn’t. Rachel was baffled; she’d thought she was being so responsible, not using real food, only clothing that Mama would eventually wash anyway! Couldn’t anybody see what a good job she’d done?

In retaliation the next day, Sarah stripped all of Rachel’s dolls of their clothing and played mix-and-match with them: the
sakura-ningyö
was wearing an Argentine peasant’s outfit, the Chinese
amah
had apparently taken up
kabuki
dancing, and the rag baby from America was buck naked with its swaddling wrapped like a turban around its head. The baby the
amah
had been carrying now dangled like a tassel from the window curtains.

The soup reached a boil, so to speak, a few days after the start of school. The students were spilling out of the schoolyard, Rachel and Aggie already headed down Fort Street, giggling and talking, when Sarah began pacing them. Slowly Rachel became aware that her sister seemed to be juggling a pair of Easter eggs as she walked.