Moloka'i (4 page)

Easter eggs? In September?

“Hey,” she called to Rachel, “you think these’d break if they fell?”

Not eggs.
Matryoshka
. Sarah had two of the nesting dolls and was doing a pretty fair job of keeping them both aloft as she ambled along. Rachel attempted to grab them but Sarah just weaved away:

“Let’s make an omelet,” she taunted. “A
pretend
omelet.” She let one of the nesting dolls fall, then caught it just in time. “Oops!”

“Gimme those!” Rachel yelled, making another lunge for her sister. This time Sarah couldn’t weave away in time and Rachel collided with her; the two of them went toppling into the street and the nesting dolls flew from Sarah’s hands like skeet shot into the air.

In moments they were kicking and scratching and biting each other, tumbling around in the dusty street like rabid cats; classmates cheered them on, until the sounds of battle reached the schoolhouse and a young teacher came running out to pull them apart, not without some effort.

“Stop it! Stop this at
once!”
The teacher pulled Rachel to her feet, then Sarah, interposing herself between the combatants. “What started this!” she demanded to know.

“She took my
matryoshka!”
Rachel cried.

“She used my hat in her soup!” Sarah accused.

The young woman stared blankly at them. “I have
no
idea what you’re talking about,” she said, “and I don’t care! Young ladies, especially sisters, do not fight like cats and dogs in the street.” The teacher was obviously an only child. “Are either of you hurt?”

Their clothes were filthy, their noses runny and their hair a mess, but otherwise they seemed intact. “If I catch you fighting again, I assure you, you’ll both live to regret it! But for now the worst punishment I can think of is to send you home to explain this to your parents.”

With a glare she sent them on their way. Sarah shot her sister a last withering look, crossed the street and soon vanished from sight. Rachel retrieved her scuffed nesting dolls and straggled home, where Dorothy took one look at her and nearly had a stroke: “Rachel! What is it, what happened?”

“Nothing, Mama. I just got in a fight.”

Dorothy grabbed a clean towel, wet it; she hoisted Rachel into her lap and wiped at her daughter’s dirty face. “Who? Who’d you fight with?”

Rachel shrugged. “Some
wahine
at school.”

“What’s her name?”

“Nobody, Mama. It don’t matter.”

Dorothy sighed, wiped Rachel’s nose. “You’re one beautiful mess, you know that? One beautiful—”

Dorothy felt something wet fall on her foot, unexpected as a drop of rain on a sunny day. She looked down and saw blood trickling down the back of Rachel’s leg.

“Stand up,” Mama told her. “Turn round.” Dorothy lifted Rachel’s skirt. She had scratches all over her legs and on the back of her left thigh there was a patch of pink skin the size of a half dollar with a nasty bleeding gash in the middle. “Rachel! How come you didn’t tell me?”

“Tell you what, Mama?”

Rachel craned her head around and saw the cut for the first time. She was surprised to see it, but felt no pain; it was like watching someone else bleed.

“Okay, this gonna sting a little.” Dorothy carefully dabbed at the wound, cleaning out the dirt and the small particles of stone in the cut. But Rachel didn’t flinch. “You okay, baby?”

“I’m fine, Mama. It don’t hurt at all.”

Dorothy examined the cut. Not very deep, probably wouldn’t even need stitches, but . . . She dabbed at it again, almost trying to provoke a response from Rachel, but not a twitch of pain wrinkled the girl’s face.

“You tell me you don’t feel that?” Dorothy asked.

Rachel proudly shook her head. “Uh uh.”

Anxiously, Dorothy put the tip of her finger against the rosy skin surrounding the wound, pressing her fingernail ever so slightly into the flesh. “How about that? You feel that?”

Smiling, Rachel shook her head again.

Dorothy dug her nail into the skin on one side of the cut, then the other. Rachel made no response until her mother reached a point outside the rose-colored blemish. “Ow!
That
hurt.”

As Dorothy bandaged the cut, she told herself, There’s nothing to worry about; maybe she pinched a nerve, like Henry did that time he hurt his back, that’s all it is. She gave Rachel some candy; the thought of punishing her for getting into a fight never even entered her mind.

That night, after Rachel had thanked God for somehow distracting Mama from punishing her, she lay in bed wondering where Papa was now, what stars he saw in the sky, until she heard her sister’s voice, softer than usual. “Rachel?”

She turned on her side and looked across the room, lit only by a stipple of moonlight through lace curtains. “Yeah?”

“You didn’t get hurt, did you?”

“Not much. Just a little cut. How ’bout you?”

“Uh uh.”

Sarah didn’t say anything more, the moon rose higher and the room fell dimmer, and soon they were both asleep. Dorothy, however, was not resting nearly as well.

S

he gave Rachel’s cut two weeks to heal, then one morning before school took her daughter aside, away from prying sibling eyes, and said, “Let me see that cut again, okay?” Trying to conceal the anxiety in her voice.

“It’s better, Mama.” Rachel lifted her skirt as Dorothy examined the site of the wound. The cut was healed but the pink blemish remained; and now it seemed flaky to the touch. Rachel didn’t notice the worry in her mother’s face; nor did she see the small pin her mother quietly extracted from a pincushion, the tip of which she now touched to the rosy spot on Rachel’s thigh.

Rachel didn’t notice that either. Queasily, Dorothy put a little more pressure on the pin.

Rachel said, “How does it look, Mama?”

Dorothy lightly poked the pin all over the blemished skin—not hard enough to puncture it, but enough that Rachel should have felt the pinprick. “You . . . feel that, baby?”

“Feel what, Mama?”

In desperation Dorothy jabbed the pin into her daughter’s flesh. A tiny bubble of blood erupted from the skin, but Rachel didn’t flinch—didn’t cry out—didn’t even realize she
had
been pricked.

Dorothy felt light-headed; faint. She struggled to keep her voice calm and her hand steady. “Needs . . . a little more time to heal,” she lied, applying a fresh bandage, one that covered the entirety of the blemish. “You just keep this on, understand? Keep it on.” Rachel promised that she would, and within minutes was off to school.

Dorothy was not a woman easily brought to tears, but now she sat in the empty house and wept freely. This couldn’t be, not her Rachel, she couldn’t have the
ma'i p
k
—could she? Could it be something else, anything else? Wedded to her grief was a terrible panic: if only Henry were here, someone to share the anguish and the shock, someone to help her figure out what to do next. But Henry would not be back for another month, and something, she knew, had to be done in the meantime.

If she brought Rachel to a
haole
doctor, and if it was leprosy, the doctor would report it to the Board of Health. That left a
kahuna
as her only recourse—but as a Christian she had been told that
kahunas
were charlatans, ignorant holdovers of a heathen religion. She was a good Christian woman who loved her church, who wanted to believe and to embrace its proscriptions.

Yet she loved Rachel too, and if a heathen could save her daughter’s life—save her from banishment . . .

There were
kahunas
who were also Christians—who had reconciled the old ways with the teachings of Christ the Savior—and it was to one of these that Dorothy went, a thin, bony old man named Ua. She told him about the blemish on Rachel’s skin, its color and insensitivity to pain. She told him about Pono, and tears welled in her eyes as she spoke. Ua put a comforting hand on hers and said, “Don’t worry.” He got up and began taking down jars from a shelf, jars filled with leaves and powdered herbs and other, odder things Dorothy did not recognize.

“This,” he explained, showing her cuttings from a plant with oblong leaves, yellow flowers, and narrow seed pods, “is used to clear disruptions of the skin. I’ve had good results with it.” He put them in a large bowl along with four sea urchin shells, a teaspoon of salt, and papaya and
kukui
-nut juices. Then he picked up an empty jar and got to his feet. “Excuse me. One more thing I need.” He left the room, calling out a name; Dorothy watched as a little girl appeared, took the empty jar, then hurried away. She returned minutes later, the jar filled. As Ua reentered and poured the yellow fluid into the bowl there was no mistaking the familiar pungent smell.

“Has to be from a child, you see,” Ua said by way of explanation. “No good otherwise.” Dorothy smiled uncertainly, watching as he pounded the ingredients together into one pulpy mix, like some strange
poi
.

He wrapped the pulp in coconut fibers and squeezed the juice into another jar, which he now presented to Dorothy. “Apply this to the blemish three times a day for the next five days,” he directed. “Pray each night for the Lord God Jehovah to add his love and power to this medicine, and at the end of that time the blemish should be gone.” Dorothy took the jar and gratefully paid him his two-dollar fee—a great deal of money, but if this worked it would be worth ten times that, a hundred times!

Dorothy dutifully prayed and applied the medicine to Rachel’s blemish—in the morning, after she came home from school, and at bedtime. Rachel blanched at the smelly concoction and soon learned to hold her breath when it was time for an application; even as Sarah and the boys began to wonder how bad this cut could be if Mama were still treating it weeks later and coddling Rachel like a baby.

At the end of five days, miraculously, the blemish disappeared and Dorothy thanked God for His goodness in saving her daughter. She sang joyously in church that Sunday; the tension in the household, which Rachel could detect but not understand, dissipated. After church Mama stopped at Love’s and bought Jenny Lind cake for everyone.

Two weeks later, the blemish reappeared.

Ua gave Dorothy another remedy, this one made from the yellow, milky sap of the Hawaiian poppy. She applied it twice a day, but not only did the blemish not go away, at the end of a week’s time Dorothy could see that along the edges of the pink skin a small reddish ring, like a crater of flesh, was beginning to form.

Dorothy’s despair deepened; she spent each day in a state of frantic worry and helpless depression. She prayed to God for mercy for her child, but there was only one prayer he answered: at the end of October, Henry came home.

After the initial shock and grief and disbelief, Henry knew exactly what had to be done.

“We need
ho'oponopono
,” he said, and Dorothy knew he was right.

H

o'oponopono
meant “setting to right,” but it was more than a word, it was a process—part of family life in these islands for centuries. Hawaiians believed that physical problems were often the result of interpersonal relations that had gone wrong, and
ho'oponopono
was designed to expose the underlying causes. Sometimes a
kahuna
led these gatherings, sometimes a family elder; for reasons of discretion it was decided that Henry’s father, Maka, frail but clear-headed at seventy-two, would be the group leader.

Rachel, Sarah, and their brothers understood little more than that Rachel was sick—though Rachel swore she didn’t
feel
sick—and that this was being done to help her. In addition to Rachel’s immediate family, the other participants included Margaret, Will, Florence and Eli. The family gathered in a rough circle on the floor of the Kalama home, and Grandpa Maka opened with a prayer:

“Lord God Jehovah, creator of all things, listen to this humble, loving appeal from Your children. Spirits of our ancestors, join with us in finding the cause of Rachel’s illness and setting it to right.”