Moloka'i (38 page)

P

arents surrendering their children could
h
nai
them—give the child to relatives to raise—or put them up for adoption through the Kapi'olani Home in Honolulu. Kenji’s family refused to take her—the shame was too great. Rachel asked Papa if one of her siblings might
h
nai
her; Papa wrote back offering to raise Ruth himself, but with no mention of whether Ben, Kimo, or Sarah had even responded. Rachel was touched by her father’s offer but knew it was too much to ask of an ailing man nearly sixty years of age; and not fair to Ruthie either. Reluctantly she and Kenji decided that adoption was in their daughter’s best interest—even though this meant they would surely never see her again after she left Kalaupapa.

Immediately after she was handed over to settlement authorities, Ruth Dorothy Utagawa was transferred to the Kalaupapa nursery. In this pretty little clapboard building near the
pali
she was assigned a crib—the nursery accommodated up to twenty-four children at a time—and cared for by the nursery matron, Lillian Keamalu, and a Japanese couple who served as lay nurses. A handful of cows grazed in a nearby corral, providing milk the infants would never receive from their mothers’ breasts.

Rachel and Kenji applied to the superintendent’s office for a permit to visit their daughter, which they were allowed to do twice a week. Each Wednesday and Sunday they would go to the visiting room where Ruth would be placed in a crib on the other side of a glass window. They could see her, talk to her, sing to her—do everything but touch her. Over time they watched as her eyes turned from blue-gray to brown and the pigment in her skin darkened. They thrilled when she smiled at them or made a burbling sound that might’ve been a laugh; and when she was colicky and started to cry Rachel ached to rock her and hold her. Instead Miss Keamalu came in to cradle and comfort her, and Rachel, teary-eyed, had to flee the room.

A year was an excruciatingly long time to be able to watch, but never hold, a child; to see her smile but never feel her breath on you; to watch a tiny hand wrap itself around empty air. But Rachel never wanted to touch her baby so much that she would risk seeing a florid blossom on Ruth’s clear skin as a consequence of a year’s contact with her mother.

There were perhaps half a dozen other infants being cared for in the nursery at this time, and Rachel and Kenji came to know some of their parents, who sometimes shared the visiting room with them. One couple, Mr. and Mrs. Pua, came often to visit their six-month-old son, a chubby little boy named Chester. The two couples exchanged compliments over their
keiki
and shared their frustration and heartache. Then, over a period of several weeks, Chester began to lose his baby fat at what seemed to Rachel an unnatural rate. At the same time he seemed to cry more, and began sneezing and coughing so much that he was transferred to a crib in another, isolated section of the nursery. Not long after, Rachel and Kenji learned that Chester had whooping cough, and that the other babies were at risk for it as well. And then one grim day Rachel and Kenji arrived at the nursery to find Mrs. Pua raging hysterically at the nursery staff, as her husband wept and restrained her. “You killed him!” she screamed, equal parts rage and anguish. “He was sick, you wouldn’t let us take care of him, but then you let him die!” She tried to attack the nursery matron, who looked heartsick, but Mr. Pua held her back. And as the griefstricken woman collapsed into her husband’s arms, Rachel looked anxiously at her daughter on the other side of the glass, and prayed that she might live to see her freedom.

E

leven months and three weeks from the day they gave up their daughter, Rachel and Kenji stood at Kalaupapa Landing and watched as Miss Keamalu handed a tiny bundle to Sister Catherine, bound for Honolulu and the Kapi'olani Home. Catherine carefully took little Ruth and held her close, shielding her from the day’s brisk wind. Rachel took considerable comfort in Catherine’s presence; she would not have wanted anyone else to do this, nor could she have trusted anyone more.

Catherine looked down at her tiny namesake—at the brown eyes gazing up at her, the unknowing smile on her face—and felt something quite unlike anything she’d ever experienced, a surge of joy and pride she thought she would never know in this life. She gave Ruthie her little finger to play with, then glanced up to see the last launch from the
Claudine
nearing the landing. She ached at the love and heartbreak in Rachel’s and Kenji’s faces, and before the boat arrived she hurried to them while she still could.

As Rachel gazed into her daughter’s eyes she fought an overwhelming impulse to snatch her away—to run with her to some distant place where no one could ever take her away. But she knew that that place, the only place Rachel could take her, was called death, and she would not let her daughter go there before her time.

“Good-bye,
akachan,”
Kenji said softly as Ruthie’s eyes focused on his face for the last time. “Papa loves you. He’ll always love you, and he’ll always be your papa.”

Rachel looked at her daughter and thought: Go. Go and be free. Go everywhere I ever dreamed of going, but never did; or stay at home, it doesn’t matter, as long as it’s your choice. Go!

Then the boat arrived, and Catherine promised Rachel she would keep their Ruthie safe. At the ladder a sailor briefly took the infant in his arms as Catherine made her way down the rungs and into the launch. Then she took back her precious cargo as the boat pushed away from the dock.

And as it made its way toward the steamer in the distance Rachel knew now how her mother must have felt some twenty years before; knew the loss and longing that would nest forever in her heart; and knew that without question this was the worst, the most unbearable
kapu
of all.

PART FOUR
'Ohana

Chapter 17

1928–29

S

he woke early these days, rising before dawn to take the dogs—H
ku and Setsu, brother and sister terrier mixes—for their morning constitutional. When Rachel’s neuritis was bothering her, she just walked the dogs around the block, pausing for H
ku to pee on every scrap of vegetation he encountered (his sister, more dignified, merely sniffed). When Rachel was feeling better, as she was today, she took them to the beach, where the dogs played tag with the waves as the sky brightened above Papaloa.

She kicked off her sandals and sat on the sand, keeping one eye on the dogs and one on a surfer paddling out toward the wavebreak. His surfboard was longer than most, a good fifteen feet, and narrower as well; but the real surprise came when he stood up on it. It floated higher on the water than the redwood boards Rachel had ridden, and it was fast, skimming the waves as if shot from a gun. More maneuverable, too—the surfer leaned to the right and the board responded smoothly, sliding up and down the face of the wave—and when the young man emerged from the water Rachel decided to get a closer look.

“Nice board,” she told him, as H
ku and Setsu orbited, casting cautious eyes on the stranger.

“Thanks.” No more than eighteen, he brushed wet hair from his eyes and regarded her dubiously. “You surf?”

“Not anymore,” Rachel said wistfully. “Can I look?”

He handed it to her, flinching a little when he saw her right hand, contracted now into something like a question mark. He was still young and unblemished, but Rachel did not envy him that; she envied him his board!

She didn’t try to lift it but just rotated it, its tip pivoting in the sand: “It’s so light!”

“Yeah, ’counta it’s hollow.”

“Hollow! You lie!”

“Friend of mine back in Honolulu, Tom Blake, made it for me. Gonna get a patent, make plenty more.”

“You new here?”

He nodded. “Been on Moloka'i a week.”

Rachel was bemused to see a small fin at the aft of the board. “Never seen one of these before either.”

“Helps you turn. Makes it more stable. Want to try?”

Rachel would have liked nothing better, but shook her head sadly. “Can’t,” she said. She lifted one of her bare feet, showing him how her toes were clawing, being resorbed into her body. “Shoots the hell out of your balance.”

The young man winced.

Rachel gave him back the board.
“Mahalo.”

“No mention,” he said. H
ku and Setsu in tow, Rachel headed back to town, sobered by the queasiness in the surfer’s eyes. Most of the time she was barely conscious of her affliction; leprosy, like age, had crept up so stealthily she had scarcely noticed it. Hers was a borderline, or mixed, case of the disease, but tending more toward the neural form: her skin was still largely free from ulcers, the bacillus infiltrating instead her ulnar and peroneal nerves. It had taken the fingers from one hand and most of the toes from her feet, but this seemed a small sacrifice compared to the disfigurement and short life that was the lot of so many here. She was learning to write passably well left-handed, and as for surfing, well, she told herself that, too, was small sacrifice.

At home she left the dogs to play outside as she padded into the house. The small moon of a clock face told her it was half past six; she sat on the edge of the bed and looked fondly at her sleeping husband. Kenji had a mixed case of leprosy as well, but in him it tended more toward the “lepromatous,” or skin-related. His eyebrows were long gone, and he’d had scads of tumors excised from his skin, removed these days with powdered blue stone or carbon dioxide “snow.” More serious was the damage that couldn’t be seen: a year ago the muscle that controlled his right eyelid became paralyzed and he found he could no longer close that eye. Left untreated this could have cost him half his sight, but Dr. McArthur caught it in time and arranged for him to go to Kalihi for corrective surgery. All the surgeons could do, though, was to suture the eyelid into a fixed position—leaving the eye open enough to permit some degree of vision, yet closed sufficiently to keep out irritants which might damage the cornea.

So even as Kenji lay dozing his right eye remained half open: one eye squinting up at the ceiling, the other staring into a dream. Rachel didn’t know how he was able to fall asleep that way but Kenji assured her he’d had plenty of practice when the eyelid wouldn’t close at all.

Slowly, now, his other eye opened.

“Morning,” he yawned, his one eye perpetually drowsy.

“Morning.” Rachel lit an oil lamp, there still being no electricity in private homes at Kalaupapa. Kenji glanced at the little wind-up clock. “I should get up.”

Rachel slipped back into bed, snuggling close. “Why?”

He smiled. “I don’t know; work?”

“Don’t worry about being late. Confidentially? I’m sleeping with the manager.”

“Ah,” Kenji grinned, “so you are,” as his mouth found hers and her arms wrapped around him, and the failings of their flesh were of no moment, their bodies sufficient to the need. And the need was as strong as ever.

It was starting to rain when Kenji tardily opened up the Kalaupapa Store, management of which had been his these past five years. He was still being paid far less than a nonpatient would have received—pennies for every dollar he should have gotten. But his earnings had helped defray the cost of his “wasted” education, as he insisted on calling it, though not one word of thanks had ever come from his family in Honolulu. When he had gone to Kalihi for eye surgery, and he was back on O'ahu for the first time in fifteen years, no one had even come to the hospital to visit him. After that he stopped sending money home. “
This
is home,” he said simply, and never spoke otherwise again.

Most days Rachel worked as Kenji’s assistant manager at the store, but Thursday was her day at Bishop Home, now a part-time position she’d returned to out of loyalty to Sister Catherine. She hurried through the rain to St. Elizabeth’s Convent, still haunted by the absence of Mother Marianne, who had died in August of 1918—just two weeks before Rachel received word that Henry Kalama had passed away at the Seaman’s Home in Honolulu.

Inside it was obvious Bishop Home had not aged gracefully. The winter squall pelted the roof, which leaked like a colander: the newer drips wept slowly into shallow porcelain bowls while ones of long standing streamed into buckets. The floorboards were decrepit and dangerous, and drafts blew in around the edges of windows. Dormitories that had been nearly new when Rachel was a girl were now woefully inadequate, but lack of funds prohibited anything more ambitious than a yearly whitewashing. The whole settlement, for that matter, was feeling its age, even before the retirement of Superintendent McVeigh and Dr. Goodhue three years ago.

As Rachel entered Catherine looked up from the bed she was stripping. “I think,” she said with trademark wryness, “we have more waterfalls in here today than on the
pali.”

Rachel glanced up at the ceiling and said, “Why don’t we just tile the floor and call this a shower?”

“No money for tile,” Catherine quipped.

But though Catherine’s spirit remained unbroken, at fifty-six the physical cost Moloka'i had exacted on her was apparent: with hair more gray than brown, a furrowed brow and weathered hands, hers was a palpable exhaustion born of hard manual labor and the death of children.

Wielding a mop in her good hand, Rachel scrubbed down the already damp floor as Catherine gathered linens. They finished just as the current crop of Bishop girls escaped from school—as rambunctious a crew as Rachel and her friends had been. Thirteen-year-old Alice was the class rebel, who upon arriving at Bishop Home had stubbornly refused to wear the wine-colored uniform. “Yow, those
ugly,”
she announced, and no amount of coercion could get her to put them on. Catherine figured to bide her time until Alice grew out of her old clothes; what she didn’t know was that Rachel had already conspired to buy Alice new ones, when needed, from the Sears catalog.

—she’s thirteen now, too—day after tomorrow—

Rachel pushed the thought away and helped Catherine with the laundry. By late afternoon the storm had largely passed but the voluptuous waterfalls cascading down the
pali
were still gorged with rain—some feeding pools of water so clear Rachel could see every pebble on the bottom. Admiring them from the
l
nai,
Rachel was surprised to see Catherine, just minutes ago peppy and joking, now slumped at the far end of the porch, staring at a slip of paper.

“Sister? What’s wrong?”

Catherine looked up. A cataract of pain clouded her eyes. “My . . . sister Polly has died,” she said.

“Oh, Catherine. I’m so sorry.”

Catherine appeared uncomfortable. “Thank you, but . . . truthfully, Polly and I were never close. She could be selfish and bull headed—so could I, I suppose—and we always seemed to clash at the least provocation.”

“You don’t hold the patent on that,” Rachel noted.

Catherine glanced at the cascades spilling down the
pali
. “We used to play in falls like these. In Enfield Park.” She smiled at whatever memory Rachel couldn’t see and said quietly, “I always thought I’d get back someday, to visit her and Jack, but . . . too late now.”