Moloka'i (7 page)

After the Goto bath she was given more medicine. They called this one a “beverage,” but it had a foul bitter taste befitting its origins, a kind of Japanese tree bark. She got dressed in a brand-new blouse and skirt and was moved out of isolation and into the girls’ dormitories, clean institutional rooms smelling of strong medicinal soap and—something else. Something the soap couldn’t quite mask, a heavy, sickly odor Rachel didn’t recognize.

She was distressed to learn that she would have to share a room with another girl, but before she had time to think about this she was told she had some visitors and was taken by a guard to a long narrow visiting room. On one side of the room was a bench, on the other a table and chairs, between them a wire mesh screen rising from floor to ceiling. And waiting on the bench were Mama and Papa! Ecstatic, Rachel ran toward them, her fingers poking through the holes in the wire screen—only to find herself pulled back by the guard, who warned, “No touching allowed!” The words were like a knife in the heart for both parents and child. From now on all their visits would take place at a small remove, only words allowed to pass between them, and Rachel would come to ache for her mother’s kisses, for the comforting warmth of Papa’s chest against her.

The guard stood outside as Papa haltingly explained to Rachel that the tests she took the day before had come back positive. “That means the leprosy germ is inside you. But they’re gonna try and force it out, with those baths and the pills they give you. You take ’em after every meal, just like the nurses tell you, okay?”

Mama was pretty quiet, for Mama, letting Papa do most of the talking; Rachel asked if she could have one of her dolls to sleep with, and Papa promised to ask about it. Then Mama finally spoke, telling her that Sarah wanted to come but the doctors here wouldn’t let her. “She’s so sorry, baby,” Mama said, “she didn’t mean to do it.”

Rachel wasn’t so sure of that. All she said was, “How long do I have to stay here?”

“Two, three months, maybe,” Papa said, repeating what the doctors had told him, but not believing it himself. “Long enough for the treatment to work.”

By the end of the visit Mama looked sadder than Rachel had ever seen her, and said in a small voice, “I love you, baby.”

“I love you, too, Mama,” Rachel said, and then the nurse took her back into the dormitory and Dorothy began to cry.

Meals were no longer a private catered affair; Rachel had to eat in the cafeteria with the other
keiki
and the moment she entered she wanted to dash out again. At the tables and in line to get food were dozens of boys and girls, and many of them, like Rachel, showed few outward signs of their disease; but many more did, and Rachel shrank from them as she would a ghost. Smiles appeared on tumorous faces as the children tried to chat with her, but Rachel just looked away, scooped her noodles and
poi
from the steaming vats of food, then sat by herself in a corner, wondering fearfully if
she
would look like this someday.

It was like that everywhere: Kalihi’s tiny school boasted a curriculum of horrors, boys with earlobes drooping like taffy, girls with deep scores in their young skin like wizened gnomes with bright shiny hair. After school she met her roommate Francine, a young Hawaiian girl with short pixieish hair, who asked Rachel if she wanted to go play in the recreation yard; but though Francine had smooth unblemished skin, her left hand was starting to contract into a lobster’s claw and Rachel looked away, shaking her head. “I don’t feel like it.”

“Come on,” Francine said, reaching out to nudge her on the arm, “they got volleyball, and badminton, and—”

When Francine’s clawed hand touched her, Rachel screamed and flung herself onto the bed. Francine looked at her sadly—seeing, perhaps, her own first day here—and let her be. Rachel lay on the lumpy mattress and wept, ignoring dinner, refusing her Goto bath, crying herself asleep before the light had even faded outside the window.

When she woke it was evening. She was still alone in the room, a faint electric light spilling in from the hall. She was hungry and lonely and afraid. She longed for Mama and Papa; it hurt so much to think she couldn’t call out for them in the middle of the night. She started to cry again, then jumped as she heard a male voice.

“ ’Ey, you!”

She looked up and saw a man standing in the doorway. His face was pitted with sores, his ears were strangely misshapen, and he leaned on a cane. Rachel shrank back onto the headboard of her bed.

“You hear ’bout the clumsy little girl who broke the wind?” he said, and took a step inside. “On account of she had Portagee
bean soup
for dinner!”

As he laughed at his own rude joke Rachel saw past the sores on his face, and she beamed with delight.

“Uncle Pono!”

She jumped out of bed and raced across the room toward him. “ ’Ey, there’s my little favorite,” he said, squatting down to embrace her. “My
special
girl.” Rachel wrapped her arms around him, cried with joy and relief, and scarcely noticed that there were tears in her uncle’s eyes as well. It didn’t matter that his face was pocked and his ears looked strange; it was her Uncle Pono, he was holding her, and nothing else mattered. And would matter less and less, from that moment on.

Chapter 4

1892–93

T

he day after Rachel’s arrest, Dorothy and Henry came home from visiting their daughter at Kalihi to find a bright yellow sign nailed to the fence surrounding their house.

QUARANTINE NOTICE

This house has a communicable disease,

LEPROSY,

and is subject to Fumigation.

The following Sunday in church it was as though the family were surrounded by a bubble of air that pushed away anyone who strayed too close: friends and neighbors of long standing greeted them at a comfortable distance, smiling hello but always somehow on their way elsewhere. Parishioners beside whom Dorothy had sung for twenty years now sat two pews behind her, or three ahead. Children stared at her with a mixture of confusion and fear, and once Dorothy overheard a mother whisper to her little boy, “That family’s dirty.” As though their home were a filthy breeding ground for leprosy germs.

Dorothy was mortified, but she told herself this would pass in time, and for now she must swallow her anger and her hurt and remember Christ’s admonitions that “ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.” And so the more they avoided her, the more she tried to engage them in conversation. The greater the fear in their eyes, the louder she sang the hymns, to show them all how deeply she believed, how fervently she held Christ in her heart.

For the annual Christmas bake sale, raising money to buy gifts for sick and underprivileged children—including those at Kalaupapa—Dorothy baked, as usual, an angel-food cake with passionfruit filling and sweet coconut icing. She brought it to church and gave it to Mrs. Fujita, the sale organizer, who held it in her hands as though it were an unexploded artillery shell . . . then slowly handed it back to Dorothy. “I’m sorry,” she said. “We can’t take this.” Dorothy stared at her, uncomprehending, until she added, “For . . . sanitary reasons.”

The words stung Dorothy as nothing else had. She blinked back tears and quickly left. She walked the ten blocks to her home carrying the cake in her hands, as though she were taking it to a party, as though she were not dying inside; only after she hurried past the yellow QUARANTINE sign and into the house did she put the cake down and allow herself to weep.

She continued to love and worship Christ in her heart, but after that Dorothy stopped going to church.

That Christmas was a cheerless one for Rachel. Oh, the staff at Kalihi tried to make it a festive enough day for the patients, and Mama and Papa came and brought her a new doll as a Christmas gift; but once their allotted time with her was up, Rachel cried out for them to stay longer and had to be dragged out of the visiting room. At supper, Uncle Pono’s attempts to cheer her up only made her sadder. She cried herself to sleep again that night, her doll lying forgotten on the bed beside her. Had she not been lost in her own grief and homesickness, she might have noticed that not all the girls on the ward had visitors that day, and fewer still had Christmas presents.

With his world coming apart as if it were a
matryoshka
—each new horror splitting open to reveal yet another nesting inside—Henry decided he could no longer afford to spend long months at sea away from his family, and so took a job as a stevedore at Honolulu Harbor. He worked from seven in the morning to five in the afternoon, and thanks to the harbor’s proximity to Kalihi he could visit Rachel each evening, unless he had to work an extra shift or Dorothy needed him at home (less and less, these days). Sometimes Pono would hobble into the visiting room with Rachel—the
ma'i p
k
having caused wasting and contracture in his left foot—telling jokes, tickling his niece under her arms. And in those moments Henry actually envied his brother for being a leper—for being able to touch Rachel, to make her laugh or wipe away a tear.

One evening in January, after Rachel had returned to her room, a more subdued Pono quietly asked his brother, “Henry. You seen my
keiki?”

“Yeah, sure, last month, at Eli’s.”

“They okay?” Pono said wistfully. “I ain’t seen them in so long.”

Over a year, Henry realized. He tried to imagine not seeing Rachel for an entire year.

“Yeah,” Henry said. “They’re good. Florence and Eli, they’re taking good care of them.”

Pono nodded. “Florence, she’s a good sister,” he said, then added, “And you been a good brother, Henry.”

With difficulty Henry said, “You been a good brother too, Pono. And a good uncle to my Rachel.”

Pono’s eyes reflected both guilt and shame. “Better uncle than a husband, ’ey?” he said gloomily. Then, “You know leprosy is grounds for divorce?”

“Margaret won’t divorce you.”

Pono laughed, not a happy laugh.

“Minute I go to Moloka'i, she’ll file. You watch.”

“Who says you’re goin’ to Moloka'i?”

Pono pulled a wrinkled sheet of paper from his pants pocket. Since he couldn’t pass it through the wire mesh separating them, Pono held it up for his brother to read. It was a letter on Board of Health stationery, and informed Pono that on January 15, 1893, he would be transferred from Kalihi to Kalaupapa on the island of Moloka'i.

Henry hung his head and began to cry.

Rachel was no less upset by the news. When at breakfast the next morning her uncle told her, she too cried, but they were angry tears. “No! It’s not fair!”

Pono shrugged. “Not fair we got leprosy, either. It just is.”

“I won’t stay here, I want to go with you!” She pushed away her tray of
poi
and eggs; it went skidding across the table and onto the floor.

Pono calmly picked up her discarded breakfast, then turned to Rachel and said gently, “Now how you gonna do that? You’re gonna get well, grow up, get married—they don’t send healthy old married ladies to Moloka'i, ’ey?”

He smiled and wiped a tear from beneath her eye. “You do me a favor, though. Whoever you marry—no matter how handsome he is—you stay my special girl, okay?”

Rachel agreed that she would, then ran weeping out of the dining hall.

Henry visited Kalihi the night before his brother’s departure for Kalaupapa, but at Pono’s urging neither he nor Dorothy ventured to the wharf that day to see him off—for fear that if Henry’s employers saw that he was related to a leper, they would fire him. It had happened before.

The day after Pono’s departure, shortly before five in the afternoon, Henry Kalama’s world split open like a
matryoshka
yet again.

T

here was always a great clamor at the docks—the groan of winches and cranes, the blast of a ship’s horn, shouts and curses in half a dozen languages—so when Henry, clocking out for the day, turned to leave, he hadn’t heard anything that might’ve prepared him for what he now saw: four boatloads of American sailors, rowing ashore from the USS
Boston
moored in the harbor.

Henry had seen American soldiers before, but never so many: three companies of bluejackets, one of marines, a hospital unit, even a corps of musicians. And the troops now landing at Brewer’s and Charlton’s wharves were bristling with weaponry. Each man carried a rifle and double cartridge belt, and the artillery unit was bringing ashore Gatling guns and a pair of revolving cannon!

The soldiers quickly formed a single column and began marching off the docks and into downtown Honolulu. Unlike most American sailors Henry had known, these offered no friendly smiles, no boyish waves—they walked ramrod-straight, rifles resting on shoulders, in parade formation.

A young man lounging at the dock reminded Henry there had been a public rally that day in support of Queen Lili'uokalani, who wanted a new constitution. The old constitution had been forced on King Kal
kaua by
haole
vigilante groups, and had stripped the monarchy of much of its power—and most Hawaiians of their right to vote. “Maybe things get ugly,” the young man speculated. Had the Americans been called to help keep the peace?

As he watched the troops march away, Henry’s disquiet grew. Unlike most Hawaiians, he had traveled far and wide; had witnessed the might of great navies. The more he saw of the world, the more he realized how small and vulnerable these islands truly were. And he was only too aware that the twenty-six-inch guns of the American warship in the harbor could have quickly leveled most of downtown Honolulu.

Henry followed the troops up Fort Street.

At the corner of Fort and Merchant a marine company was detached to guard the American consulate, the remainder of the troops turning right onto Merchant Street. In minutes they were marching into Palace Square. This was where the rally was to have been held, but it was empty now; clearly the Americans were not here to quell a riot.

Glancing toward 'Iolani Palace, Henry saw Queen Liliu'okalani herself standing on a balcony, watching the troops as they passed by. They gave her a respectful salute, the flag bearers drooping their colors, the musicians delivering four short ruffles of their drums. The queen was a large, sturdy woman, but standing there on her balcony she seemed to Henry quite fragile.

He found himself thinking,
And the land shall belong to a people from across the sea
.

The Americans marched on under a light rain, finally encamping beneath the sheltering trees of an expensive house. There the soldiers laid aside their rifles and began to look and act more like the Americans he had known—smiling, laughing, rolling cigarettes. A
haole
woman came out of the house and served the troops lemonade and bananas, as if they were on a picnic. And on the grounds of the nearby Hawaiian Hotel, the Royal Hawaiian Band began its weekly Monday night concert and Henry could hear the familiar, comforting melody of “Pua Alani” under the patter of rain.

Henry told himself he was being silly; surely the Americans were simply here on some sort of maneuvers. He caught a trolley going west on King Street, toward Kalihi, and put everything but Rachel out of his mind.

The next day, the shocking news radiated across the city: the queen had been deposed.

I

mmediately after Lili'uokalani’s call for a new constitution, a small coterie of white businessmen had formed a Committee for Safety—their own. Fearing that a more powerful queen might threaten their property and business interests, they dedicated themselves to her overthrow. They would have been easily overwhelmed by the Queen’s Royal Guard had it not been for the collusion of the American Minister to Hawai'i, John Stevens, who landed troops to “prevent the destruction of American life and property,” though there was no such property anywhere near where the troops were deployed.

Before the Committee had time to rearrange the furniture in the Government Building, Stevens formally recognized the Provisional Government. That night, on the reasonable assumption that her Royal Guard was outnumbered by American forces, the queen reluctantly surrendered.

In the days after the coup, there was little practical difference in the way people lived their lives. Streetcars ran on the same schedules, stores kept the same hours, the price of a shank of beef remained the same. At a public meeting at Kaumakapili Church, Reverend Waiamau suggested that nothing important had been lost, and in the long run Hawai'i had much to gain from the new status quo. Henry argued that what they were in danger of losing was their very history: for what were the
ali'i
, the royalty, but the Hawaiian people’s living kinship to their own past?