Moloka'i (9 page)

I

n December, after a thorough inquiry into the overthrow of the monarchy, U.S. President Grover Cleveland concluded that American troops had been wrongfully deployed on Hawaiian soil. “The military occupation of Honolulu by the United States was wholly without justification,” the President said. “The Provisional Government owes its existence to an armed invasion by the United States.”

But though Cleveland attempted to bluff the conspirators into surrendering power and returning the queen to her throne, it was only a bluff. A single armed battalion, backed by the guns of the USS
Boston
, could have handily defeated the Provisional forces and restored the monarchy; but no such battalion ever landed. Though the United States did reject annexation of Hawai'i under the circumstances, the Provisional Government would soon grandly declare itself the “Republic of Hawai'i”—a republic in name only that existed only against the day America might accept its jilted suitor.

So as he prepared himself to lose a daughter he cherished, and mourned a marriage painfully bled of love and affection, Henry Kalama grieved too for the loss of his country, his kingdom, now just a kingdom of the heart.

T

wo days after Christmas, Rachel and some thirty other patients were transported by wagon from Kalihi to Honolulu Harbor. A few of them were as old as sixty years; none was younger than Rachel. Some held the entirety of their worldly goods in worn carpetbags, while others had more substantial belongings in the cargo hold. Henry made certain that the steamer trunk containing Rachel’s dolls was safely stowed aboard the
Mokoli'i
: he did it himself. And then he waited at the wharf until Dorothy, Ben, Kimo, and Sarah arrived, and he didn’t care that his fellow stevedores were staring at him, wondering what he was doing, and wasn’t that the leper ship, the dirty steamer that carried dirty lepers to Moloka'i?

As the harbor came into view Rachel tried to be brave. She swallowed her fear and, when the wagon came to a stop, took a deep breath and followed the other patients onto the pier, even as the crowd on the other side of the wooden barricade gave up the terrible and familiar moan Rachel had first heard years before.

But in that collective wail Rachel heard some distinctive voices, and now she saw, on the other side of the barrier, Mama and Papa and her siblings; and seeing them, Rachel’s resolve crumbled, her tears flowed. The police herded the patients along, discouraging contact with friends and relatives. Already the first of the exiles were being taken up the gangway and onto the ship. Rachel, adults towering on every side of her, could barely make out her family and felt suddenly afraid; she had to see them one last time! She began pushing her way through the mass of people, struggling to get closer. “Let me through! Let me
through!”
she cried out, barely able to see past the barricade of her own tears; she shoved and elbowed her way over, until at last she broke through the bulwarks of leprous flesh and saw them, saw Mama and Papa and Ben and Kimo and Sarah pressed against the wooden fence. When they saw her their hands shot out, they called her name, their bodies strained against the barrier. The crowd surged behind Rachel, she was propelled forward like a speck of foam on a billowing wave; her hand reached out, the tip of her fingers just grazing Mama’s palm as she passed, the human wave carrying her away. Rachel would cherish that last touch for years to come, remembering the warmth of her skin, the way her big fingers almost closed around Rachel’s, and the desperate love in Mama’s face as it was stolen away from her.

PART TWO
The
Stone Leaf

Chapter 5

T

he
Mokoli'i
shuddered as it pitched down into the face of a ten-foot wave, white water crashing over its bow and engulfing the pilot’s cabin. For a moment the moon and stars appeared only as bright refractions in an explosion of foam; then, almost as soon as the sky cleared, the little steamer was lifted on the next swell, the wave rolling beneath it like lava squeezed from the cracked earth.

Inside the ship’s cabin the crew and paying passengers were shielded from the cold, gusty spray of the Kaiwi Channel, but the same could not be said for the thirty-odd men, women, and children huddled in a wooden pen in the stern, not far from a similar enclosure holding twenty head of cattle. One man, sick to his stomach as were they all, heaved through the wooden slats of the pen. The bluster of the wind, the frightened lowing of the cattle, the tortured groans of the hull amounted to pure bedlam.

Rachel barely noticed any of it, and not just because she was insulated by the press of bodies on every side of her. She paid little mind to the deck bucking beneath her like a maddened mule, or even to the stink of feces and urine that the exiles were forced to void where they sat. She was simply numb, her mind having absorbed all the fear it could, like a sponge saturated with water: after a while the fear became a constant, cold companion, a simple fact of existence.

She couldn’t tell where she was going or where she had been; for ten hours all she’d been able to see was the starry arch of the night sky above. When she dozed, she dreamt that she was clinging to a piece of driftwood, floating ever farther from her family; then she would wake, and the reality, horribly, would be no different from the nightmare. She forced herself to stay awake until the stars were wiped away like letters on a blackboard and the bright moon became a pale ghost of itself.

First light fell on calmer seas, and now, through a bright morning haze, the exiles glimpsed land off the port side. Moloka'i. It was not a name spoken lightly in these islands. Sometimes it was called “Moloka'i of the potent prayers,” known for centuries as the home of powerful sorcerers capable of praying men to death, of sending giant fireballs hurtling across the sea, fiery planets of destruction seeking out hapless victims. Today the island was still an object of fear and fascination; but for very different reasons.

The cattle were quieting, the rumble of the engines now louder than the bluster of the wind. A few passengers, bound for the gentler shores of Maui, cautiously ventured out of the cabin, gazing curiously at what lay ahead.

The Kalaupapa Peninsula was a nearly flat, triangular promontory, shaped rather like a leaf, spat into the sea by a volcano which was now a spent crater at the center of the triangle. Six square miles of land—a dry plain, nearly treeless, matted with brown wintry grasses.

And rising up behind this stone leaf were the walls of a prison.

The huddled exiles gazed up, taking in the towering
pali
that rose so impossibly high above the peninsula: a sheer vertical cliff, green and densely wooded, reaching two thousand feet into the sky. Waterfalls spilled like tears down its face. It could scarcely be imagined anyone in the most robust health scaling its heights, much less the sick and the weak. The high sea cliffs tapered into the distance on both sides of the peninsula, extending the prison wall for nearly the entire length of North Moloka'i, precluding any hope of escape. The exiles gave up a collective sigh as they sailed into the shadow of the
pali
, standing like a judgment before them, immense and final.
Auw
! Alas!

All around Rachel people began to stand up, their lament sounding in her ears. Despite her fear, Rachel felt a tickle of curiosity. She got to her feet, tugged at a man’s pant leg. “Can I see?”

The man grunted and picked her up. Suddenly aloft on his shoulders, Rachel gasped as she looked up.

She saw what the others saw, and yet did not.

Rachel saw the lush green
pali
soaring high into the sky—bigger than anything she had ever seen, more beautiful than anything she could have imagined. She felt some of what she’d felt atop Mount Tantalus, but this was something more, something that reached inside to penetrate her cocoon of numbness and fear. Much later she would learn the word for it:
grandeur
. There was a grandeur to the
pali
that awed and moved her, and for the first time in days she actually felt something other than terror and loneliness.

A few hundred yards out the
Mokoli'i
cut its engines and rode in on the swells, tossing anchor and beginning the laborious task of landing passengers and cattle. The latter found themselves rudely dumped into churning surf and expected to swim to shore, herded by
paniolos
—native cowboys. Three of the cows evidently decided to swim back to O'ahu and were never heard from again.

The steamer’s human freight was brought ashore in rowboats bearing four or five passengers at a time. Rachel was in the third boat; in the distance she saw clusters of white, green, and red buildings scattered across the stony peninsula like bright coral heads on a rocky seabed. But as the landing drew nearer, so did the faces of those waiting on shore: a man whose features were nearly obscured by a moonscape of tumors; a woman whose deeply scored skin had the hard glossiness of a varnished wooden idol. For every person of normal appearance, Rachel saw two more whose faces looked as cracked and hard as the shell of a
kukui
nut.

Yet she wasn’t as frightened as she had been that first day at Kalihi. Everyone in the crowd, despite the grim corruptions of their flesh, was smiling broadly—even those whose mouths were distorted into something Rachel would never have imagined
could
smile—their sometimes fingerless hands waving gaily at the incoming ship. Those ruined, gay faces somehow lessened Rachel’s fear, more so when she spotted one face in particular.

“Uncle Pono! Uncle Pono!” Rachel waved joyously, and the thought draped itself around her, warm and comforting as a favorite blanket: she wasn’t alone here.

Soon the waves were jolting the rowboat against the landing dock; a sailor from the
Mokoli'i
lifted Rachel up and onto a rusty ladder, which she quickly scrambled up. The moment her short legs touched land, Rachel ran into her uncle’s welcoming arms. Pono scooped her up and cried, “ ’Ey, look, it’s my favorite niece! Fancy meeting you here!” Rachel wrapped her arms around her uncle’s neck and wept with relief.

Pono wiped away her tears, and as he turned slightly Rachel now saw that he was standing alongside someone else: a woman almost as tall as Pono himself, in her fifties, with long gray-flecked hair, her only evidence of leprosy a contracture of her left hand.

“Rachel, this is my friend, Haleola. She’s a
kahuna lapa'au
—a healer. You get sick, she makes you better.”

Rachel sensed at once a calmness, a composure about the woman, quite unlike Mama’s more mercurial temperament. Haleola smiled kindly and said, “
Aloha
, Rachel. Your uncle’s told me all about you.”

Rachel had never seen a real
kahuna
before. “You make sick people better?”

“I try.”

“Can you make me and Uncle Pono better? So we can go home?”

Haleola said sadly, “No, I can’t. I’m sorry.”

Ambrose Hutchison—a part-Hawaiian patient who served as resident superintendent, second only to the head
luna
, R.W. Meyer, who lived on “topside” Moloka'i—wandered over with an open ledger in his hand:

“Pono, what is it about you? You attract all the prettiest
wahines.”
He winked at Haleola, then smiled at Rachel, pen poised to write. “And what’s your name, miss?”

“Rachel Kalama,” Pono answered for her.

“Rachel
Aouli
Kalama,” she corrected him.

“Ah! Yes.
Aouli,”
Pono said, then muttered under his breath, “For all the good it’s done you.”

“And your age would be . . . twenty-eight? Twenty-nine?”

This drew the expected laugh and the scolding response, “Seven!”

“My niece,” Pono said proudly. “She’s come to live with her uncle!”

Rachel caught a glimpse of the first cargo—boxes, crates, bags—being brought ashore, and called out with the urgency of childhood, “My dolls! I need my dolls!”

“We’ll get them, Aouli,” Haleola said, and her use of the name somehow pleased Rachel. Ambrose excused himself to check in more arrivals, and ten minutes later Rachel’s steamer trunk was lifted out of a rowboat and onto dry land. Between Pono’s limp and Haleola’s clawed hand, they had a time of it getting the trunk into Haleola’s old wagon; but soon Rachel was snuggled up against her uncle, absorbing his familiar warmth and smell, as Haleola, at the reins, navigated the narrow streets of Kalaupapa. It looked much like any little village in the islands: a general store, a butcher shop, several churches, even a Young Men’s Christian Association. The homes were all neatly painted wood-frame houses, many bordered by little gardens of taro and other vegetables. But then Haleola turned onto a larger road, one which seemed to take them
away
from the settlement, and Rachel nervously asked her uncle, “Why are we leaving?”

“Oh, this is Kalaupapa. I live in Kalawao.”

“When the government first started sending people here,” Haleola explained, “the settlement was on the other side of the peninsula. Back then they thought cold weather was good for people with leprosy, and you can’t find any place on Moloka'i colder than Kalawao! Except it turns out cold weather’s
not
good for us, in fact it makes us sicker . . . so once the government buys up all the remaining land here, we’ll all move to Kalaupapa.”

Rachel was relieved. “How long have you been here?”

“A long time. Since eighteen hundred and seventy. My husband, Keo, was a leper, and I came to take care of him. By the time he died, I had the disease myself.”

“It’s nicer here than they said it would be at Kalihi,” Rachel noted with surprise.

“Oh, it wasn’t always so nice! When Keo and I first came, the steamer landed us at Kalaupapa, so we had to walk three miles in the rain, to Kalawao. Thirty sick, hungry, tired people, and we had to walk! Keo said, ‘How perceptive of them to notice that we needed the exercise!’ ” She laughed fondly. “Keo was quite an amusing fellow.”

Pono whispered, “Not like me,” and Rachel giggled.

“Then when we got to Kalawao, we were told there was no place for us to stay—we’d have to build our own houses out of grass. And until our first allowance of
poi
and meat arrived, we ate wild bananas, peas, even fern roots.”

Alarmed, Rachel asked, “Do I have to eat roots?”

Haleola laughed and assured her she would not.

She didn’t tell Rachel about the rest of that first day: how in Kalawao they passed a man wearing a kerchief, pushing a wheelbarrow filled with what looked like rags. But there was something about the way the rags jostled as the wheelbarrow bounced along, something that made Haleola stop and look back. At the threshold of a tiny shed, the man tipped the wheelbarrow and shook out its load: not rags but a man in ragged clothing who moaned as he tumbled through the doorway! When Haleola rushed over and demanded to know what was going on, the kerchiefed man just shrugged and said, “It’s the
end-of-life.”
Here the sickest people were discarded and left to die—unattended, and in utter squalor. Prostrate in their own filth, with neither blankets, food nor water, in a windowless room fetid with the stench of their own sores.

No, she would not tell Rachel about that.

“Do you have any
keiki?
” the girl asked hopefully.

Haleola nodded. “Three boys. Liko, Kana, and Lono. All grown up now, with children of their own.”

“Can I play with their
keiki?”

“They’re not here, Rachel. They’re back home, on Maui. I haven’t seen my boys in twenty-three years.”

Rachel could barely imagine the span of time, let alone the rest of it. “You haven’t?”

“Coming to Kalaupapa is very expensive, Aouli. There’s the steamer fare, and visitors have to bring their own food, enough to last two weeks. It’s more than most poor families can afford.”

“But don’t you miss your boys?” Rachel asked.

“Yes,” Haleola said softly. “I miss them very much.”

Kalawao was markedly older than its sister village on the western shore, but though the wood-frame cottages were a bit dilapidated, the residents—many of them quite disfigured—sat outside, playing cards or working gardens, much as people did in any rural village in Hawai'i. Pono’s house was a one-room plantation-style cottage even smaller than the one his family had lived in at Waim
nalo. Rachel was ravenous after her long trip, so Haleola cooked a midday supper and they feasted on grilled fish and roasted coconut. Uncle Pono joked and sang (badly off-key), and for the first time in days Rachel felt safe and relatively happy. But as the fear that had kept her awake ebbed, exhaustion overtook her, and before it was even six o’clock Haleola suggested it might be time for bed.