Moloka'i (5 page)

Maka began by asking each of Rachel’s siblings if they were bearing any anger toward their sister. Kimo and Benjamin both looked startled and confused by the question; no, they each said, why should they?

“And you, child?” Sarah squirmed under Grandpa Maka’s calm gaze. “She ruined my hat,” she said finally. “She’s always doing
something.”
Out came the litany of Rachel’s transgressions against Sarah. Maka listened patiently to them, then said, “Do you know what
kala
means?”

Sarah frowned. “To forgive?”

“More than that: to let go. And when you forgive your sister—when you let go of your anger—you forgive yourself as well.”

“But my
hat
—”

“Is the love you felt for this hat more important than your sister’s life? What if your anger is what’s sickening her? Do you still want to hold onto it so jealously?”

Sarah thought about that, then shook her head. “No,” she said. “Not if . . .” She looked at Rachel. “I don’t want you to be sick, Rachel.”

“So can you
kala
your sister?”

With apparent sincerity she said, “Yes. I
kala
Rachel.”

“Rachel, do you
kala
Sarah?”

“Yes.”

“Good.” Maka nodded. “It’s good that Sarah owned up to her anger, and that she was able to let go of it. But . . .” The grandfather’s steady gaze swept across them all. “I wonder that something so easily forgiven could be the cause of so grave a sickness. Does anyone else here feel that there is something unsaid? Something to do with Rachel, that needs to be set right?”

Silently the adults searched for an answer in each other’s faces, until one of them finally spoke up.

“I do,” said Henry.

His father nodded his approval. “Go on.”

After a moment’s hesitation Henry said, “Before Rachel was born, I had a dream.” That piqued everyone’s curiosity: dreams were often as significant as the waking life. “I dreamt Dorothy and me were on a mountaintop. Lying on our backs, looking up into the sky, me stroking Dorothy’s stomach, feeling our little girl kicking inside.” He smiled; Dorothy looked surprised and touched. “It was a bright, clear day. The sky above us was blue and forever, and I looked up at it and thought:
Aouli
. ‘Blue vault of heaven.’ Just came into my head:
Aouli.”

There were murmurs from the other adults, confused glances among Rachel and her siblings. Grandpa Maka just nodded. “An
inoa p
,” he said. To the puzzled children he explained, “A ‘night name’—a name found in a dream. It comes from the next world, and once the name is spoken, it must be bestowed on the child.”

He turned again to Henry. “You knew that, didn’t you? That the name must be given, or the child will sicken, perhaps even die?”

Rachel felt suddenly afraid. Was she going to die? Was that what this was about?

“Yes,” Henry said. “I knew.”

“But you kept the dream to yourself.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Henry looked down. “Because I knew how my wife felt about such things,” he said, startling Dorothy. “The old ways, the old language . . . She wanted all our children to have Christian names, to celebrate Jehovah.”

Dorothy pointed out, defensively, “It’s the law. The king decreed it, that every child have a Christian name!”

“Is Kimo not Kimo despite what is written on his birth record?” Maka turned to Henry. “This is why Rachel is sick. Because you heard her night name and you ignored it. If she is to be well, she must be given her
inoa p
.”

T

hat night some roasted pork, coconut pudding, baked fish and a little
poi
was burned in a fire in the Kalamas’ back yard—a sacrificial offering, given up to God or gods, as the family prayed. At the feast that followed, Grandpa Maka spoke aloud his granddaughter’s new name for the first time: “May the Lord God and our ancestors be pleased. Let us eat, drink and celebrate the health and long life of this girl, Rachel Aouli Kalama!”

The family applauded and cheered; and Rachel basked in the love and concern she felt from all around her, even Sarah. Though she only vaguely understood what had happened here today, she knew that all these people had come here to help her, and that pleased her. She turned the new name over in her mind:
Aouli
. She didn’t feel like an Aouli, she felt like Rachel. But why couldn’t she be both? She smiled to herself, starting to like the sound of it, and she thought, Everything will be all right. Her left foot was starting to itch and she reached down to scratch at it, but she knew in her heart that all would be well; that with so many people around her, loving and praying for her, everything would turn out just fine.

Chapter 3

O

ur Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done—”

Along with the rest of her class, Rachel spoke the prayer as automatically as she could count to ten, but her mind was elsewhere—mostly on the various indignities she had lately been forced to suffer. It was bad enough that Mama refused to remove the bandage on her thigh, long after the cut had healed; bad enough that she also made Rachel wear frocks with long frilly skirts; but now, the supreme embarrassment, her mother actually insisted that Rachel wear
shoes
to school. She tried to tell Mama it wasn’t necessary, that the itching she’d felt in her left foot had gone away—she no longer felt anything in that spot, nothing at all—but Mama wouldn’t listen. “You’re gonna wear shoes or your backside is gonna be as red as your foot!” she warned, Rachel grudgingly submitting. And if it wasn’t enough that Rachel’s feet were suffocating, her friends seemed to delight in teasing her about it—accusing her of putting on airs—and had lately even taken to calling her “Little Miss Shoe.”

“Good morning to you; good morning to you—”

Today the second-graders were singing a greeting not just to their teacher, Miss Johnson, but to a visitor—a blank-faced
haole
in a business suit. It was not the man’s first visit to their classroom, nor would it be his last.

“Class,” Miss Johnson said, “you remember Inspector Wyckoff from the Board of Health. Please sit quietly at your desks and hold out your hands as Mr. Wyckoff passes.”

As usual the man made his way down the first aisle, surveying the hands presented for his inspection. Sometimes it was just a quick glance, his gray gaze sweeping once over a child and then on to the next; at other times he might take a student’s hand in his, noting the color and texture of the skin, turning it over to study the palm; and only then he would move on.

Rachel watched as the inspector—
bounty hunter
, some whispered—stooped to examine a bruise on a boy’s knee. Now Rachel began to feel self-conscious about her own blemish, hidden beneath bandage and skirt. As Mr. Wyckoff probed the child’s bruise with the tip of a pen, drawing a wince from him, Rachel thought about the red spot on her foot and how the strap of her sandal didn’t seem to chafe there as it did her other foot. By the time the inspector reached her she was nervously tapping her foot against the leg of her desk; as he took her hand he looked up, sharply. “Please don’t do that,” he said in a flat tone that instantly froze Rachel’s foot. His gaze lowered again to her hands. He turned them over, first the left, then the right; carefully scrutinized the bed of her nails; and just when his interest was beginning to alarm her, he looked up—and smiled! “Long life-line,” he said, tapping a finger on her palm. “Means a long life, eh?” Rachel didn’t know what to say to that so she just returned his smile. He gave her back her hand, moved on, and she exhaled in relief. There was obviously nothing wrong with her after all!

The inspector continued without incident until he came to Harry Woo in the back row. He gave Harry the same scrutiny he’d lavished on Rachel, then went a step further. He reached out, took one of the boy’s earlobes between his fingers, and pinched. Rachel winced, but Harry didn’t. Mr. Wyckoff asked for his name and address—the class shuddering as one—and jotted the information in a small notebook. When he had completed his inspection of the class he thanked everyone for their cooperation, smiled at Miss Johnson, and left.

The next day Harry Woo did not come to school; nor the day after; nor for the rest of the term. After the third day Rachel asked one of her classmates where he was and the girl whispered back, “He has the separating sickness.” Rachel thought of Uncle Pono, of the bandage on her thigh, and then did her very best not to think about it anymore.

W

hen Papa came home again in October it was a source of amazement to his children that Mama actually succeeded that first Sunday in dragging their father into church. True, he did stifle the occasional yawn, but he came quickly awake when the minister launched into that week’s sermon, titled “Leprosy and the Hawaiian People.” Henry and Dorothy tried not to show more than casual interest: since Pono had lived in Waim
nalo, no one here suspected the Kalamas had a relative in Kalihi Hospital.

A full-blooded Hawaiian in his fifties, with a fringe of graying hair and a white beard, Reverend Waiamau was a charismatic preacher who began by detailing the history of the disease in Hawai'i: how it may have come from China (hence
ma'i p
k
, “Chinese sickness”); how Hawaiians seemed to be particularly susceptible to it; and how in 1865 the foreigners in His Majesty’s government convinced Kamehameha V that unless something were done the scourge would be the death of the Hawaiian race. The result was an “Act to Prevent the Spread of Leprosy,” mandating the arrest of all suspected lepers, and even (for the first eight years) confiscation of all their worldly assets to pay for the costs of exiling them to Kalaupapa.

Soon the disease would earn another name as well: “the sickness that tears apart families.”

“Some say the
ma'i p
k
affects our people so disproportionately,” the pastor said, “because we Hawaiians value family and community so much that we would rather shelter a leprous friend or relative than see him cast out of our midst. Others simply blame bad hygiene—too many hands eating from the same calabash.

“But perhaps there’s more to it than that.” He fixed his congregation with a sober look. “There are those, indeed, who say leprosy is more than a physical ailment; it is a moral disease as well.

“Some medical men—including the former physician for the Moloka'i Leprosarium, Dr. George Fitch—believe that leprosy is actually a fourth stage of venereal disease. The syphilitic becomes, in time, the leper. Syphilis was the great scourge of our nation in the early years of this century; and now this disease born of impurity and immorality may have festered into an even deadlier plague, one that threatens our people with extinction!”

As the pastor’s voice grew in intensity, his parishioners shifted uncomfortably in their seats, but they hung on every word, none more keenly than Dorothy.

“Could this be the true source of leprosy? Not bad hygiene, not leprous touch or breath.
Unchastity. Immorality.”
His voice fairly boomed now. “Too long have we turned away from the sin and vice in our midst, condoning it by our silence and inaction! And now its offspring comes—grown like a mold from the culture of our lust and laziness—and my children, it comes to kill us! To burn the very memory of us from the earth as lava boils away the sea, and if we let it happen, then we
deserve
it!

“Will you let it happen? Or will you show the sinner there is no place for him in society? More important—will you acknowledge and repent the sin in your
own
hearts, and cast it out even as we must cast out the leper? To save our nation, will you first save your own souls?”

His flock responded with enthusiastic cries of “Yes!” and “I will! I will!” And as Dorothy joined in she began to understand the guilt and shame she was feeling; began to see what God was trying to tell her, the message he had writ plain and which only now she began to comprehend.

In the weeks to come she and Henry would argue more than in all their twelve years together. Rachel and Sarah, lying awake in bed, didn’t understand all of the shouted words in English and Hawaiian that bled through the bedroom wall, but the tone of them was painfully clear.

“He’s your brother! That’s all I’m saying.”

Henry was adrift, confused at the bitterness in Dorothy’s tone. “So?”

“So, this didn’t come from
my
brother.”

“How the hell do you know that?” Henry asked, irritated. “This sickness, it hides in the body a long time. How do you know Will doesn’t have it, too?”

“Because he doesn’t!” she snapped. “Will is a good man, a moral man!”

“And Pono isn’t?” Henry said in disbelief.

“Pono’s a dog. He flirts with any
wahine
he sees—even me, his brother’s wife! Margaret says he’s slept around plenty on her.”

“That’s between Margaret and Pono,” Henry said, reeling. “And we don’t know for sure it came from Pono! Maybe it did, maybe it didn’t!”

She gave him a stink-eye look, cold and direct, and Henry was wounded to see the anger in once-loving eyes.

“Maybe it didn’t,” she said flatly.

Something about the way she said it rankled Henry all the more. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’m just agreeing. Maybe it came from somebody else.” She kept on giving him the stink-eye. “Lots of leprosy in those places you go to, eh? Shanghai. Hong Kong. Lots of cheap
p
k
whores with dirty
kohes
.”