Moloka'i (32 page)

“It’s beautiful,” Rachel said, thinking of how lights like this had guided her father’s ships, perhaps even saved his life. Then, her attention moving from one breathtaking sight to another, she noticed the blue expanse of sky outside the 360-degree windows. Jake took her out and onto the catwalk surrounding the lantern room. The wind tugged at her hair as she went to the railing and held on with both hands. Two hundred feet below Kalaupapa fanned out to her right, Kalawao to her left; rising up between them was the green-mantled cinder cone of Kauhak
. Delightedly she made her way around the catwalk to the opposite side overlooking the sea. In the deepening twilight she could just make out the line separating sea and sky, the slate gray ocean choppy with whitecaps, the familiar profile of O'ahu in the distance. She breathed in the salt spray and repeated softly, “It’s beautiful.”

“So are you,” Jake said, as softly. He was standing so close that the hairs on her arm felt the brush of static electricity, a promise held in the air between them.

Her face tipped up to meet his; his arm moved to her waist. She could feel his breath on her lips, on her cheeks. She waited for the brush of his lips against hers.

It didn’t come.

She looked into his eyes and saw desire; longing. But she saw something else too. She saw fear.

He stood there, paralyzed it seemed, the want in his eyes at war with the fear. Then, like a man who had found himself about to step on a poisonous snake, he cautiously took a step back.

The relief in his eyes brought tears to Rachel’s.

“I . . . I’m sorry,” he stammered. “I just . . .”

He stopped, at a loss for what to say. Rachel stared at him, hoping that her eyes would pull him back toward her, that this moment of apprehension would pass.

It didn’t. In a gentle, almost loving tone he said, “You’re a very beautiful girl, Rachel,” and it hurt worse than if he had called her an ugly hag.

Wordlessly he led her back down the corkscrew staircase, but before he could say anything else Rachel was out the door and over that threshold which only minutes before had seemed to promise so much. She jumped on her stallion and rode away as fast as the animal would take her.

She galloped down the rugged eastern shore, away from Kalaupapa and her humiliation, finally stopping at an isolated spot just outside Kalawao. Sitting alone by the sea, she wept angry tears; anger less at Jake than at herself. How stupid could she be to think a clean person would love her—would risk death and decay and banishment for love! A blossom of self-hatred flowered inside her and she jabbed her fingernail into the rosy patch of skin on her leg. She poked and jabbed until it bled, but felt no pain; it might as well have been someone else’s flesh, someone else’s body. She looked up at the
pali
, at the trail she had ascended years before, and cursed herself for a fool. She could have stayed topside, traveled, loved, married, lived! But she
came back,
damn it. She thought of all she’d given up in that moment, places she couldn’t imagine and would never know, and she wept.

Night fell on her sorrows. Riding into Kalawao to water her horse, she noticed a large crowd gathered down the road from St. Philomena’s Church.

There were women there as well as men, which meant they had come all the way from Kalaupapa; but for what? Rachel tied up her horse and joined the crowd congregating outside a fence posted with signs warning: UNITED STATES LEPROSY INVESTIGATION STATION–KEEP OUT! Though it was too dim, even in the glow of oil lamps, to make out much of the station’s buildings, the grounds were clearly bustling with activity. Laborers were hanging lamps on poles throughout the compound, and stringing wire from pole to pole. They were the same sort of lamps, Rachel realized, as those that lit Honolulu’s streets beginning in the early 1890s.

“Are those electric lights?” she asked an old man standing next to her.

He nodded. “First on Moloka'i!” he declared proudly.

Rachel watched in fascination with the rest of the crowd. The air was charged with anticipation, but when the moment finally came it took everyone by surprise. Somewhere an electrician merely flipped a switch and dozens of incandescent bulbs outside blazed into life along with others inside the buildings—and with more candlepower than a thousand oil lamps, night turned brilliantly into day.

Now Rachel could see that the station’s buildings, moments ago hidden in gloom, were painted a soothing yellow, the windows and doors trimmed in white, and were crowned by green shingled roofs. She saw too the green of the lawn covering the sprawling compound and the blossoms—changed from yellow to red with the fall of night—of the
hau
trees decorating the grounds. Copper screens on the buildings’
l
nais
gleamed like pennies. The lamps also threw light on the
pali
behind the station and on a tiny waterfall trickling down a narrow crevice. Even the ocean was illuminated; where seconds ago only the luminescent crests of the waves could be glimpsed, now Rachel saw the shoulders of the waves as they crashed ashore.

The crowd cheered almost as thunderously.

All this, the old man said, from one thirty-horsepower gasoline engine and dynamo. And the station’s refrigeration plant was capable of making a thousand pounds of ice each day! Rachel was as captivated as he was by this marvel of engineering, and like many present there that night she wondered what other miracles these scientists might be able to accomplish once they put their minds to it. It hardly seemed as though anything were beyond their reach.

She stayed there for a while, thinking and wondering, before heading home to Kalaupapa. She went to bed but couldn’t sleep, the flash of another light—once every twenty seconds—streaming through open windows. Even after she shuttered them the light seeped in around the edges, mocking her with its brilliance, reminding her of things best forgotten. Beyond the light was that distant line of horizon she had glimpsed from on high—a line like a solitary prison bar, needing no intersection with other bars to keep her jailed. And she decided then and there that she would not stay here and be mocked; she would
not
.

D

r. Goodhue took a scraping from the rose-colored spot on Rachel’s leg, and a microscopic examination confirmed what she already knew: she was bacteriologically active again. “Leprosy can go dormant for a long time, then flare up all at once,” he told her sadly. “But that doesn’t mean it won’t go into remission again.” When this patch of skin became a tumor, he assured her, he would remove it too.

“Don’t bother,” Rachel said, and immediately went to Dr. Hollmann and informed him she wanted to volunteer to be a patient at the Federal Leprosy Investigation Station.

He asked her why, and she answered, “Because I’m sick of being a damn leper.” He warned her that no one could guarantee the station’s work would result in a cure for leprosy, much less a cure for her, specifically. She understood, but was willing to take that chance. He told her she would have to leave Kalaupapa—would have to move to, live at, the station in Kalawao. “Good,” she replied.

There were examinations to be done and papers to be signed; it would be weeks before the station was even ready to open. Rachel gave up her house, Haleola’s house, allowing the settlement to reassign it to new residents; entrusted most of her belongings to Leilani for safekeeping; and left her horse in the care of Francine and her husband, Luis. She took with her only her clothes, pen and writing paper, and a few books. And two days before Christmas, when the station opened with the flourish of a formal ceremony, Rachel was among the first patients to be admitted for purposes of treatment and research.

When she was shown the station for the first time, she was even more impressed than she had been as a spectator outside the gate. The neatly landscaped grounds were divided into three compounds—Hospital, Administrative, and Residence—circumscribed by not one but two picket fences, four feet high and ten feet apart, creating a “safe zone” for station and staff. There was a hospital building, a laboratory, surgery, executive offices, stables, storage building, refrigeration plant, powerhouse, staff residences, laundry facilities, and (discreetly not pointed out on Rachel’s initial tour) a morgue. Populating this was a staff of about thirty: doctors and administrators, a nurse, a pharmacist, an engineer, and others.

The hospital was clean and bright with twelve-foot ceilings and
l
nais
that wrapped around both first and second stories. The patients’ rooms were comfortable if institutional with windows that opened to admit fresh sea breezes, thought to be therapeutic. And like all the buildings it boasted the miracle of indoor plumbing.

Although Rachel was one of only nine patients admitted that day, the administrators expected many more in the months to come. The nine of them were gathered together on the hospital’s main ward, gleaming with shiny metal instruments and linen so white it almost made you squint; the only touch of warmth was provided by a small Christmas tree in the corner, dripping with tinsel. They were welcomed by the staff: Dr. Donald Currie, the director of the station, a handsome man with a military bearing; Mr. Frank Gibson, pharmacist and general administrator, a kind-looking gentleman with a mustache; and of course Dr. Harry Hollmann, the only familiar face among them. All wore crisp white uniforms. “I have labored against many blights in my time,” Dr. Currie told them, “from bubonic plague in San Francisco to yellow fever in New Orleans. Like them, leprosy at present eludes our understanding. But by volunteering at this station you are all helping to provide us with the tools and the knowledge necessary to someday, God willing, obliterate this scourge.”

The patients applauded and settled into their rooms, and talked among themselves in the common areas. They were men and women, young and old, some with few traces of the disease and others with faces bloated and red. But they were all enthused at the prospect of turning their curse into a cure, of it lending some higher purpose to their lives. That evening Rachel stacked her books in neat piles on her nightstand and went to bed excited and hopeful.

The next day, Christmas Eve, Rachel and the others had breakfast in the hospital dining room before being transferred to examining rooms. There doctors wearing surgical masks, gowns, and gloves asked questions about the beginnings and the duration of the patients’ leprosy, filling medical charts with column after column of notations. After disrobing Rachel was examined as thoroughly and as dispassionately as she had been at Kalihi—every square inch of her poked and probed and scraped for tissue samples which were then placed on glass slides and labeled. The one area not yet breached was her private parts; now the doctor rectified that, asking her to please open her legs. “Have you ever had syphilis or gonorrhea?” he asked, and Rachel shook her head. A small mirror was inserted into her vagina, the doctor rooting about inside as if spelunking; Rachel’s whole body felt flush with embarrassment. She consoled herself with fond memories of the doctor at Kalihi whose testicles she had squeezed like lemons.