Moloka'i (21 page)

Catherine and Victor received a hero’s ovation from children and sisters alike. Mother commended them for their quick thinking and their courage. “Sister Victor is the real hero,” Catherine told them, but Victor seemed almost not to hear, her mind’s eye turning inward again.

At dinner Victor ate a little sweet potato and part of a biscuit, then excused herself, retreating to the privacy of her room. Catherine considered following but decided to give her the time to herself; only after dinner did she go to her friend’s room, to find her sitting alone in the dark, rubbing incessantly at her hands.

Catherine squatted, taking Victor’s hands in hers.

“It’s all right, Sister,” she said, stilling Victor’s hands. “I get soiled all the time when I dress their sores. You wash up afterward, that’s all.”

Victor nodded dully. Her hands twitched between Catherine’s.

“You showed great courage,” Catherine told her. “You didn’t hesitate. Mother was proud of you—just like the old days, at St. Joseph’s.”

Sister Victor glanced up at that, a ghost of a smile lighting her face.

“Yes,” she said, a dim pleasure in her voice. “She
was
proud . . . wasn’t she?”

Catherine nodded and let go of her hands.

Sister Victor’s smile became less ghostly—more alive. Her whole face began to seem more alive, more vibrant.

She said, “I just need a good night’s sleep.”

Catherine started to leave, stopping at the door long enough to say, “You were very brave today, Sister.”

Sister Victor smiled. It was a proud, radiant smile. Catherine would never forget it.

She went to her room, said her nightly devotions, and as exhaustion overtook her she slid gratefully into bed.

At three A.M., Catherine was awakened by a scream.

At first she thought it was an animal being butchered in the village slaughterhouse. But as she sat up she heard a very human agony in the shrill cry and knew at once from whose strangled heart it came.

She rushed out and down the corridor to Sister Victor’s room. The scream was long and ceaseless, changing only in pitch and tone—terrified one moment, mournful the next. Catherine flung open the door and in the darkness saw Victor sitting up in bed, backed up against the wall as though facing down some demonic intruder, body convulsing as if from St. Vitus’s dance.

Catherine ran to her, held her, trying to quell her spasms. “It’s all right, Sister, it’s all right!” But the convulsions were so fierce that Catherine lost her grip and was actually thrown backwards onto the floor.

Now the others rushed in, Albina and Crescentia and Leopoldina, clumping together in the doorway in mute, uncomprehending horror. Then, as Catherine got to her feet, Mother herself appeared—and all the sisters stepped aside to give her a path into the room.

Mother Marianne listened to the agonized cries of her colleague of old, and for the first time her sisters saw something other than serenity or mild annoyance on Mother’s face. They saw the face of true anguish. Mother Marianne went to Sister Victor, sat down on the edge of the bed, gazing with inexpressible sadness at the torment she saw in her old friend’s eyes. Mother leaned forward, enfolded her in her arms, and Sister Victor’s convulsions ceased. Her screams dissolved into sobs. Mother held her tight and wept with her; wept for the woman she once was, and the woman she had been again today, briefly but bravely.

T

he sea was particularly rough this afternoon, the launches from the
Lehua
often swamped as they ferried passengers to and from the Kalaupapa Landing. Henry held Rachel to him as fiercely and tenderly as Rachel hugged her dolls at night. Over her shoulder he saw the last boat bobbing precariously by the landing. He watched as Sister Leopoldina and Sister Catherine, supporting between them the unsteady figure of Sister Victor, helped their friend to the ladder, where a sailor was poised to assist.

As she stepped down onto the first rung, Sister Victor stopped suddenly, turned. “No. Wait,” she said, losing her balance, Catherine catching her. Victor straightened, steadied herself with a hand on Catherine’s shoulder . . . then leaned in and grazed Catherine’s cheek with a kiss.

“God bless you, Sister,” she said. With the ghost of her old smile, she added, “Remember me to the cannibal’s pot.”

Catherine kissed her cheek and bade her Godspeed, and the sailors gently gathered her into the boat.

Rachel wept, certain that she would die if she had to let go of her father. “Papa, don’t leave me,” she begged him. “I need you all the time!”

The words both touched and grieved him. Henry’s eyes filled with tears. He kissed his daughter and told her, “I love you, little girl. No matter where I am, no matter how far away, I’ll never stop loving you.”

Henry hugged Rachel one last time—then handed her to Haleola, who held her as tightly and tenderly as he had, stroking Rachel’s hair with her clawed hand. As he descended the ladder, he called out, “I’ll be back!”—and then the boat bearing Henry and Sister Victor pushed off and began its bumpy journey to the
Lehua
. Henry waved to Rachel all the way to the steamer. He didn’t stop until the ship had pulled anchor and turned about. And as she watched the
Lehua
climb the steep incline of the ocean and gain the summit of the horizon, Rachel was filled with grief, loss, anger—and the wordless resolve that someday, somehow, she would follow her father over that horizon and down the other side, where the world lay hidden.

PART THREE
Kapu!

Chapter 10

1903

H

aleola could feel it inside her, the leprosy germ, stirring restlessly after a long sleep. She’d taken to calling it “the bug,” sometimes addressing it as she might an old acquaintance she didn’t particularly like.
Hello bug,
she’d say;
so there you are again, eh? Don’t make yourself too comfortable, sorry you can’t stay longer, aloha
.

But of course the bug stayed as long as it wished, weeks or months during which joints ached and nerve sheaths became raw and inflamed. On days like today she lay in bed all morning, barely able to move, husbanding her energy for tasks that afternoon. It was close to noon, to judge by the light, and Haleola had promised to meet Rachel at the beach. She propped herself up on one elbow, wincing, then took a deep breath and sat up. She was still a little disoriented by her surroundings: her new house, twice the size of the old one in Kalawao, still smelling of fresh lumber and paint. It had been not quite a year since the last residents of Kalawao—all but Brother Dutton and his boys—had at last fled for the warmer shores of Kalaupapa; and at sixty-seven, Haleola had to admit she didn’t miss the chill and the damp.

I’m getting up now, bug. Don’t try to stop me
. She got out of bed, the bug kicking and griping inside her, and was on her way. She ate a little
poi
and boiled water for tea. She wrapped some Hawaiian salt—the color of pink coral—in ti leaves, then took it and the teapot with her as she left the little cottage near Damien Road.

Obligation, not affection, made her stop at the home of George Wakina, not the best of company even on his good days. He met her at the door with his customary scowl. “ ’Bout time you showed up,” he grumbled as he let Haleola in. “Everything hurts like hell.”

“Good morning to you too, George.”

“It’s afternoon,” Wakina corrected her.

These days more residents chose to consult the settlement physician, Dr. Goodhue, rather than a
kahuna
; Haleola wished George were one of them. But he didn’t trust
haole
doctors. “I brought something for your rheumatism,” she said, and proceeded to heat the wrapped salt on Wakina’s stove. When it had cooled a little she poured the salt into a flour bag and applied it to George’s joints.

“Ahh,” he sighed, “feels good.” His smile quickly darkened to a frown. “Could’ve used you in that goddamned jail.” Arrested last year for brewing “swipe” alcohol, Wakina, while in the Kalaupapa jail, had suffered a severe recurrence of rheumatoid arthritis—but superintendent C. W. Reynolds, who had replaced the late R. W. Meyer, refused to permit him any medical aid. Around the same time another prisoner, Philip Miguel, came down with fever, was also denied medical attention, and ultimately died. The Board of Health investigated and fired Reynolds for negligence—along with the probably blameless Dr. Oliver, who had tried and failed to get the prisoner sent to Bay View Home.

“I also brought you some herb tea,” Haleola said, pouring from the teapot, “for general debility.”

Wakina took a sip, blanched. “This tastes like shit.”

“What do you think it’s made of?” Haleola replied sweetly.

Wakina regarded her uncertainly, not sure if she was serious; then broke into an uncharacteristic guffaw.

“Long as it’s not dogshit, ’ey?” he said with a laugh, and drank down the tea without further complaint.

W

alking through the center of town, Haleola passed the superintendent’s office, a small house encompassed by one of the white picket fences these
haoles
seemed to love and which looked to Haleola like a string of shark’s teeth erupting from the earth. The new superintendent, J. D. McVeigh, was tying up his horse in front; he was an easygoing
haole
who sported a drooping mustache and a cowboy hat, and in less than a year at Kalaupapa had shown himself to be a fair and decent
luna
. He was forever raising funds to build recreational facilities which R. W. Meyer would have dismissed as unnecessary and frivolous, considering that the residents were here to die, not to live. McVeigh tipped his hat and wished her good morning. Haleola nodded and returned the greeting; she liked McVeigh well enough.

But she hated what flew from a staff above him. At the top of a tall flagpole a banner of stars and stripes snapped in the wind with a sound like gunshots. Its colors flew higher than anything else in Kalaupapa, its stars supplanting the stars in the sky, reminding Haleola and all Hawaiians in the settlement of everything they’d lost.

In 1898, while at war with Spain in the Pacific, the United States Congress decided Hawai'i would be a strategic asset and issued a joint resolution annexing the islands, which President McKinley signed into law. Hawai'i became only the second sovereign nation to join the United States. But unlike the Republic of Texas, where a public referendum was held, no one asked the thirty-one thousand native Hawaiians whether they wished to give up their country. Twenty-nine thousand of them signed a petition of protest, which was submitted to Congress and politely ignored.

When a group of American commissioners arrived on an inspection tour of Kalaupapa in September, the Sisters of Charity sewed miniature American flags for patients who wished to wear them. Few did, and Haleola was not the only resident to grind the hated symbols into the mud.

If there was one thing that
haoles
were good at, though, it was spending money, and when the settlement was taken over by the U.S. Public Health Service, Kalaupapa became the beneficiary of Federal largesse. The first years of the century would see construction of a home for elderly men unable to care for themselves, and another for women; improved visitors’ quarters; McVeigh’s many new recreational facilities; and an assortment of patient-owned businesses including a bakery, a dry goods store, and a fish market.

Haleola, for one, would have traded every scrap of lumber to see her kingdom’s flag flying again from this staff.

In minutes she found herself at Papaloa Beach, no longer the exclusive preserve of the Bishop Home girls. Some were here, to be sure, but now there were adults from the village as well—swimming, fishing, surfing. One surfer stood tall and steady on a crudely fashioned board, poised on the surging crest of a wave.

Haleola was not surprised to see that it was Rachel.

Her
h
nai
niece coasted toward shore for another few seconds, then, as the wave slowed, gracefully stepped off the board and into the surf. In one smooth motion she spun the nine-foot board around, bellied onto it, and paddled out to meet the next set of waves.

Haleola watched her with pride. At seventeen Rachel was still lithe and strong; if not for a few small sores on her legs no one would have suspected she had leprosy. She was taller than her parents but her body nevertheless owed something to her father’s: shoulders broader than most girls, a boyish build with small breasts and slim hips. Her face was no longer chubby but neither was it delicate; even from here Haleola could see the wide smile on Rachel’s broad face as the next wave rolled beneath her surfboard and she stood up on it, the board skimming the surface of the sea like a flat stone skipped across a pond.

Haleola noted that some surfers seemed to crouch on their boards, arms outstretched, constantly striving for the proper balance; others stood straight as a statue, arms at their sides, gliding serenely on the surf as if untroubled by balance or gravity. Rachel fell in between: poised but fluid, her knees bending and hips twisting as she shifted her weight to change the board’s direction. Not serene, perhaps, but graceful and self-assured.

Haleola carefully descended the sand dunes (no mean feat with the fire burning in her nerves) to join Sister Catherine standing watch over her flock. Of Rachel’s contemporaries when she first came to Bishop Home, Noelani, Hazel, Bertha, and Josephina were gone; only Emily and Francine survived to swim alongside Rachel in the surf.

“Is that Nahoa’s board?” Haleola asked, her gaze going from Rachel to a young leper sitting idly ashore.

Sister Catherine, her face slightly weathered by years in the tropic sun, nodded. “He’s being rather generous; she’s been out there at least an hour. And I do worry,” she added with a frown, “that eventually he’ll expect some sort of . . . compensation . . . for the use of his board.”

“Ah, you nuns, you have nothing but sex on your minds,” Haleola sighed. “This problem could be easily solved, you know, if Rachel were allowed her own board.”

Catherine laughed and said, “I’ll let
you
have that discussion with Mother.”

Within minutes Rachel emerged from the water carrying the board under her arm. Haleola and Catherine watched as Rachel returned it to Nahoa and thanked him; and though the young man did seem a bit smitten with Rachel he just smiled good-naturedly, took the board, and headed into the surf.

Haleola said, “That was a near thing, eh? Did you see that wild, crazed look in his eyes?”

Catherine shot her a sidelong glance, but this was old sport for both of them.

Rachel came running up the beach to them. “Auntie!” She gave Haleola a hug. Catherine said, “We’ll be heading back in ten minutes, all right?” Rachel nodded, and as the sister moved down the beach to corral the younger girls, Rachel and Haleola sat down on the sand together.

“Today I rode a wave all the way from the Indian Ocean,” Rachel declared. Haleola smiled. Years before, Rachel had read in a magazine how an ocean wave might begin as a small ripple in the aftermath of an earthquake in China, then roll across the breadth of the Pacific, gathering force and momentum until it reached Hawai'i’s halo of coral reefs, which slowed it and pushed it to the surface. So each time she rode a wave, she decided, she was riding a piece of China or Japan or Samoa. It would cement Rachel’s love of surfing, and give her a touchstone to those faraway lands she still longed to see.

“Oh, I heard from Papa! He’s in Australia.” She hesitated, then added, “He says Sarah’s getting married.” Her tone was wistful, quickly covered by an impish smile: “Do you suppose she’ll ask me to be a bridesmaid?”

Rachel’s smile poorly masked the hurt she felt at the way her mother and siblings had vanished from her life, and she from theirs. In Kalaupapa they had a word for it:
ho'okai
, to reject, be rejected. Henry Kalama, on a later visit to the settlement, admitted to Rachel that he too rarely saw Ben and Kimo and Sarah; Dorothy had ended the marriage and did not encourage visits from Henry. As painful a wound as it was for Rachel, she felt worse for Papa: one child in exile, and he himself exiled from the others. Small wonder that he always returned to the sea—the only place, she imagined, he felt at home any more.

Soon Sister Catherine appeared again, trailing a ragged line of wet, exhausted girls. “Rachel. Time to go.”

“Let me just say
mahalo
to Nahoa.” She started back down the beach.

Catherine shook her head. “You already thanked him.”

“Well, I want to do it again!”

“Once was sufficient,” Catherine said. “Come along.”

Rachel glared, kissed Haleola on the cheek, and fell in step behind Catherine with ill-concealed resentment.

Haleola started back the way she had come, climbing over a low dune—when she somehow lost her footing, slipped, and went sprawling onto the sand.

Feeling like a fool, she quickly righted herself. Luckily Rachel hadn’t seen, and neither had anyone else.

Very funny, bug,
she told the leprosy germ.
But don’t try that again
. Gathering her dignity about her like a slightly tattered shawl, she walked slowly away from the beach, doing her best to ignore the protests of her body.

T

hat afternoon Dr. William Goodhue, a cheerful, bespectacled Canadian who’d replaced Dr. Oliver as resident physician, made one of his frequent visits to Bishop Home. He examined the girls for cuts or scrapes that might fester into gangrene—frequently such cuts went unnoticed due to anesthesia of the skin—and offered other treatment as well. This included the intravenous injection of chaulmoogra oil, derived from an East Indian tree and used in Asia for centuries to treat leprosy. Many girls shied from the hypodermic needle, but not Rachel. She was determined that someday, despite all odds, she would get well and leave Moloka'i—return to Honolulu, see her family, see the world. Every year a handful of patients were discharged from Kalaupapa; most had been incorrectly diagnosed and never had leprosy in the first place, but a few were those in whom the disease had “burnt out,” as sometimes happened to no one’s understanding. Rachel, however, was resolved to
make
it happen. So she agreed to have the brownish-yellow oil injected directly into her bloodstream. The result was nausea, indigestion, loss of appetite—all too common side effects that were not lessened by the eventual development of an oral form of chaulmoogra. It was a far from pleasant course of treatment, but she submitted to it uncomplainingly. And to keep her immune system strong she followed Dr. Goodhue’s advice to abstain from alcohol, get plenty of fresh air and exercise, and consume a nourishing diet, low in salt.