Hawaii (48 page)

Abraham Hewlett uttered a low sob and knelt at the bed, holding his wife's hand, and this unexpected movement caused Urania to shift her shoulders, and Abner in amazement cried, "Can she be

sleeping?"

Outside, the midwives, listening intently, had already told the crowd, "She's sleeping. She'll probably stay that way for an hour flt more. Then when she wakens, she'll begin all over again."

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"Is it a good sign when a woman already in labor sleeps?" the crowd asked.

"No," said the midwives.

"Why not?" a man asked.

"It means she's weak," the woman said.

"What should they do ... in there?" the man asked.

"They ought to be gathering herbs," the midwives explained.

"Why herbs?"

'To stop the bleeding, later on ... since she is a weak woman."

Inside the shadowy house Abner and Abraham went frantically through their handbooks and could find nothing about sleeping at the eighteenth hour of delivery, and Abner began to experience an overpowering trembling and fear. "Somewhere in here there must be an explanation," he muttered, but his awkward fingers could not find it. "Brother Abraham, do you find anything?"

Then, mysteriously, the labor pains started again, rhythmically and in full force, but they gave Abner little help, for it was not Urania who was experiencing them, but her husband Abraham. It was pathetic to see the undernourished missionary grip at his stomach, following the exact course of a woman's pain, and for the third time Abner had to run to the door and beg the Hawaiians to take his assistant away. "And keep him away!" Abner snapped.

At two o'clock in the morning Urania Hewlett wakened and at five she had diminished her cycle of pain to intervals of a minute and half, whereupon the listening women outside predicted, "The birth will be soon." Abner, still fumbling with his book, his eyes bleary, came to the same conclusion, but his next half hour was one of special trial, for not knowing that Urania was undergoing typical labor, he had leafed through the diagrams in the back of the book where unusual births were explained, with black-lettered titles, and he was possessed by one diagram: "Abnormal Birth: Shoulder and Arm Presentation." Turning rapidly to the associated text, he discovered how difficult his immediate task was going to be if he was, indeed, raced by such a presentation. It was therefore absolutely essential that he prepare for the actual birth, if only to anticipate an abnormality; but this he could not do, because Urania still lay swathed in bedclothes and tapa, and he could not in propriety either remove them himself or ask her to do so. So he went to the door, where streaks of morning light were beginning to penetrate the palm trees, and asked for Brother Abraham, who was sleeping. One of the midwives started toward the door, but Abner recoiled from her in honest horror, so Abraham was wakened and Abner said to him, "Brother Abraham, you must now undress your wife. The hour is at hand."

Abraham looked dumbly at his associate and started toward the bed, but his own labor pains returned with violence, and he had to flee the delivery room, but Abner's problem was solved by a vigor-movement on the bed, where Sister Urania, caught in the :nce of birth, was kicking her clothes away and screaming for to help her. Abner, swallowing like a schoolboy and shaking

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with embarrassment, approached the bed, and then strangely all ofj his uncertainty vanished, for he thought with boundless thanks to? God: "That is surely the head. It is a normal presentation." j

Outside, when the wail of the child was first heard, the two raid-wives said gravely, "He had better have the herbs ready."

Abner, preoccupied with the baby boy he held in his hands and with the nerve-racking job of cutting the cord and then tying it, summoned desperately every memory of his midwife's textbook and did a creditable job. Then he stood for a moment in the shadows, perplexed, holding the new child in his hands, and knowing not what to do, but finally he went out into the dawn and handed the child to a native woman, whom the Hawaiians had summoned twenty-four hours before, certain that she would be needed, and this woman placed the child to her breast.

The first midwife said: "He ought to be watching the mother."

The second replied: "I wonder if he is massaging her stomach to help her throw out the afterbirth."

And the first asked: "Do you suppose he would want these herbs?" And she indicated a brew that her people had used for two thousand years to stop bleeding.

But the second replied: "He would not want them."

Inside the shack Abner now feverishly thumbed his book, refrest ing himself as to what he must do next. He cleaned the bed, washed the mother, listened to her breathing, and then saw with alarm that something was happening that the book did not tell about. "Brother Abraham!" he called in fear.

"What is it?" the sick husband replied.

"I am afraid she is bleeding more than she should."

Brother Abraham knew nothing, but he quickly looked through hi book, and while the two well-intentioned missionaries tried vainly to catch the shreds of knowledge that would have saved a life, on the rude bed Sister Urania grew weaker and weaker. The long day1! exertions and the long night's exhaustion were inexorably exacting their toll, and her face grew gray.

"She should not be sleeping so soundly," Abner cried in panic,

"What can we do?" Hewlett moaned. "Oh, God! Don't let hai die now!" '

Outside, the midwives said, "They ought to be massaging her stomach, but they seem to be talking, instead." And gradually over the large crowd of natives that had stayed through the night, crepl the knowledge that the frail white woman was dying. The idea came upon them like the rays of the morning sun, sweeping down from the coconut palms, so that the Hawaiians, to whom birth was a mystical matter, were already weeping before the missionaries knew that Urania had bled to death.

Later, sitting exhausted under a kou tree, Abner said dully, "Brother Abraham, I did all I could to save your dear wife."

"It was the will of God," Hewlett mumbled.

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NAnd yet," Abner cried, hammering the medical text with his "there must have been something in here we didn't read." It was the will of God," Hewlett insisted.

The Hawaiians, watching, said, "How strangely the white men do filings."

"They are so smart about reading and guns and their new god," an old woman observed, "that you'd expect them to have found a better way than this to birth a baby."

"What is most curious," pointed out another, "is that in America men do the work of women," but the old woman who had been most critical of the midwifery was first to acknowledge: "Even so, they make fine children."

After the burial of Urania�the first of many mission women to die in childbirth or from physical exhaustion due to overwork�Abner arranged with natives to care for Abraham Hewlett, his newborn son and the latter's wet nurse for the next two months until the difficult return journey to Hana at the tip of Maui was practical, and when these details were completed, Abner and the messenger climbed the nffly path to home; but they had not gone far when they heard a voice calling them, and it was Brother Abraham, pleading that they take his child with them.

"In Lahaina there will be people to care for the boy," he argued desperately.

"No," Abner refused. "It would be unnatural."

'What can I do with the boy?" Brother Abraham begged.

The question was abhorrent to Abner, who replied, "Why, Brother Abraham, you will care for him, and bring him up to be a strong man."

"I don't know about these things," Brother Abraham mumbled. � "Cease!" Abner cried sternly. "It is your duty to learn," and he turned the distracted missionary around and sent him back to Wailuku and the responsibility of his child. When the ungainly man had left, Abner remarked hotly to the messenger, who could not understand, "I think that if he had had courage, his wife need not have died. If he had kept her at Hana, and done the best he could, all would have been well. Sister Urania was killed by the long climb 'to Wailuku. And the poor thing, eight months with baby."

These thoughts drove him to the contemplation of his own wife, and he became afraid that news of Urania's death in childbirth might have an adverse effect upon her, so he devised an illogical plan for suppressing the news. He reasoned, more from hope than from common sense: "It will be some time before word of this bad business reaches Lahaina. I shall say nothing of it to my dear wife." He entered into a solemn compact with himself and even called God to witness, but when he reached home and saw the way in which Jerusha's six little curls fell beside her face, and the manner in which she leaned forward in eagerness to greet him after their first days of separation since marriage, his words were faithful to the pledge, but

his actions could not be, and he looked at her with such love and apprehension that she knew instantly what had happened. "Sistsl Urania died," she cried. �

"She did," Abner confessed. "But you will not, Jerusha." And for the first time he called her by her name.

She started to ask a question, but he grasped her harshly by her two wrists and looked hard into her brown eyes. "You will not die, Jerusha. I promise you by God's word that you will not die." He released her and sat on a box, holding his tired head in his hands, and said, half ashamed of what he was about to admit, "God protects us in the most mysterious ways, Jerusha, and although my thoughts may in some respects seem horrible, nevertheless they are true. 1be-lieve that God took me to the death of Sister Urania so that I would be prepared when your time came. Now I know what to do. I know what Brother Abraham should have done. Jerusha, I am prepared, and you will not die." He leaped to his feet and screamed, "You . . . will . . . not . . . die!"

More than anything else in life he wanted, at that moment, to sweep his wife into his arms and embrace her with kisses, wild bellowing kisses like the sounds of animals in the meadows at home, but he did not know how to do this, so all of his love expressed itself in this one profound resolve. "You will not die," he assured his wife, and from that moment on, no woman in a remote outpost, far from help, ever faced her last days of pregnancy with a sweeter resolution.

BUT IF ABNER thus found spiritual triumph in his missionary home, he encountered a fairly solid defeat at Malama's grass palace, for when he went to give the Alii Nui her day's lesson, her found that Kelolo had not moved to the new house built for him, but lived as usual with his wife. "This is an abominationl" Abner thundered.

The two huge lovers, well into their forties, listened in embarras-ment as he explained again why God abhorred incest, but when he was finished, big Malama explained quietly, "I built the house for Kelolo outside the walls, and it is a good house, but he doesn't want to stay there alone." She began to cry and added, "He tried it for two nights while you were away, but when I thought of him sleeping alone, I didn't like it either, so on the third night I walked out to the gate and called, 'Kelolo, come inside where you belong.' And he came and it was all my fault. I am to blame, Makua Hale."

"You will never be a member of the church, Malama," Abner warned. "And when you die, you will suffer hellfire forever."

"Tell me about hellfire again, Makua Hale," Malama begged, for she desired to know exactly how much risk she was taking, and when Abner repeated his awful description of souls in eternal torment; Malama shivered and began asking specific questions while tears crept into her big eyes.

K "You are sure that Kamehameha the king is in such fire." � "I am positive."

"Makua Hale, once a Catholic ship kapena came to Lahaina and spoke to me about God. Are Catholics in the fire too?"

"They are in the fire forever," Abner said with absolute conviction. f "And the same ship kapena told me about the people in India who have not heard of your god."

"Malama, don't speak of Him as my God. He is God. He is the only God."

"But when the people of India die, do they go into the fire, too?"

"Yes."

"So that the only people who escape are those who join your diurch?"

"Yes."

Triumphantly, she turned to Kelolo and said, "You see how terrible the fire is. If you keep that platform out there, hanging onto old gods the way you do, you will live in everlasting fire."

"Ah, no!" Kelolo resisted stubbornly. "My gods will care for me. They wfll never let me bum, for they will take me to their heaven, where I will live beside Kane's water of life."

"He is a foolish man!" Malama reflected sadly. "He's going to bam and he doesn't know it."

"But, Malama," Abner pointed out, "if you continue to live with Kelolo in such horrible sin, you also will live in everlasting fire."

"Oh, no!" the big woman corrected. "I believe in God. I love [eras Christ. I am not going to live in fire at all. I will keep Kelolo nth me only until I begin to feel sick. We have agreed that before I die I will send him far away, and then I shall be saved."

Then Abner played his trump card. Pointing his finger at her, he boldly faced her and warned: "But it is your minister alone who can let you enter the church. Have you thought of that?" , Malama pondered this unexpected news and studied her tormentor. Se was a foot shorter than she, less than half her age, and weighed ibout a third as much. Cautiously she probed: "And it will be you who judges whether I have been a good woman or not."

"I will be the judge," Abner assured her.

"And if I haven't been . . ."

"You will not be accepted into the church."

Malama reviewed this impasse for some time, looking first at Abner and then at Kelolo, until finally she asked briskly, "But maybe jou won't be here at the time, Makua Hale. Maybe there will be lome other minister."

"I will be here," Abner said firmly.

Malama studied this gloomy prospect, sighed in resignation, and then changed the subject abruptly. "Tell me, Makua Hale, what things must I do if I am to be a good Alii Nui for my people?"