Daughter of Moloka'i

by Alan Brennert

  Jiro took a sip of sake, his listeners aware that any narrative their uncle told inevitably made him the hero of the tale.

  “But you’re not returning to live here, Ojisan?” Stanley asked.

  “No—Akira, Tamiko, and their children are all happy in Hōfuna, as are Nishi and I. And Japan is becoming something it has never been before: a democracy. I always admired America for its democratic principles, even though those principles were not extended to me.”

  “But the McCarran Act changed all that,” Ralph pointed out. “You could be an American citizen now, just like Grandma Etsuko.”

  “I am glad America is living up to its ideals,” Jiro said, “but I am happy being a citizen of Japan at a time when that means more than it ever has.”

  The Harada house was bursting with family on this Sunday afternoon. As Jiro held court in the living room, Frank and Ruth were preparing a supper of nori soup, beef sukiyaki, rice, green bean shiraae, and mochi. Peggy, now seventeen, was playing softball in the street with her teenage cousins; in the dining room, Etsuko doted on Ralph and Carol’s newborn daughter, Susan. At the other end of that table, nineteen-year-old Donnie—or Don, as he now preferred to be called—was quizzing his Grandma Rachel about her travels: “So you finally got to see the Great Barrier Reef?”

  “Yes, and on the way I stopped at Rarotonga in the Cook Islands, where my father made port as a sailor. But the highlight was Australia. I took a tour of the Great Reef on a glass bottom boat—it was so beautiful!”

  Don said enviously, “I would love to see that someday.”

  “How was your freshman year? Have you decided on a major yet?”

  “Yeah, I think so. I had this great biology professor who talked about the similarities between plants and animals. I thought about what you said in Hawai'i about how the land, sea, air, living things, how it’s all interconnected. So I’m thinking about a major in biological science.”

  “Don, can you help me set the table?” Ruth asked her son.

  “Sure. We’ll talk more later, tūtū, okay?”

  Rachel felt privileged to have been included in this gathering. The Watanabes all knew she had leprosy, but if they harbored any cultural fear of the disease they did not betray it and graciously accepted her as part of the family. She couldn’t help but wonder if this was what life with Kenji’s family might have been like, had they both not had Hansen’s disease and been ostracized by his relations. But then, had they not been sent to Kalaupapa, she and Kenji might never have even met, much less married, on O'ahu.

  Before dinner began, Jiro rose, held up his third glass of sake, and declared in a tone both sober and tipsy: “Thank you all for this warm welcome back to your shores. But there is one who could not sit among us today, and I must honor his memory. To Taizo—my brother, my family, my friend.”

  Ruth would have preferred not to be reminded of an absence that still stung, even today—but, like everyone else, raised her glass in honor of her otōsan.

  * * *

  As dusk fell, the teenagers gathered around the television set, watching The Jack Benny Program, followed by Steve Allen’s comedy-variety show. In the backyard, the adults stood or sat in lawn chairs to drink—beer, wine, or sake—or to smoke or make small talk. Etsuko sat at the far end of the yard chatting with Stanley and his family; Frank stood with Ruth’s other brothers, talking sports; and Ruth, Jiro, and Nishi were chatting near the kids’ old swing set, now rusting in place. Jiro was on his fifth glass of sake and even more voluble—and sentimental—than at supper.

  “Ahhh, Dai,” he sighed, “I would give my left arm to have your father here today.”

  “I know, Ojisan. That was a lovely toast.”

  But Jiro’s rush of sudden guilt could not be quelled. “I failed him at Tule Lake as I had failed him too many times before.”

  “Uncle, I’m sure that isn’t—”

  “On my honor, Dai, I wish it had been me they had taken away that day, me they had put in that stockade—”

  “What?” Ruth said with a gasp.

  “Jiro! Be quiet!” Nishi said, poking him in the side.

  “What do you mean, taken away? What … stockade?”

  “Five weeks they left him in that hellhole! Cold blustery winds by day, freezing temperatures at night—it should have been me, not Taizo…”

  “When he is drunk,” Nishi said urgently, “he makes up nonsense—”

  No—whatever her uncle was talking about, Ruth had the chill instinct that it was far from nonsense. She thought of Etsuko and felt a flush of panic, but was relieved to see her mother sitting at the opposite end of the yard, laughing with Stanley, apparently not having heard any of this.

  Before Jiro could compound his mistake, Ruth quickly took him by the arm. “Uncle, come, let’s go for a walk,” she said, pulling him away.

  “No, no,” he drunkenly resisted, “I must tell you, I must apologize—”

  She yanked on his arm hard enough to make him wince. She half whispered, half hissed, “You’re so damn eager to lose that arm? I’ll take it off for you if you don’t shut up and come with me!”

  Ruth walked Jiro and Nishi down the block until they were far enough from the Harada home for no one there to hear.

  “All right, Ojisan,” Ruth said, “what do you mean, my father was ‘taken away’? He was arrested?”

  Jiro nodded.

  “Your father did not want you or your mother to know,” Nishi said.

  “My mother’s not going to know. But I have to know what I’m protecting her from. Why was he arrested?”

  Jiro’s response was to start sobbing again, so it fell to Nishi to tell Ruth the truth: how Taizo had been arrested trying to help a friend; how he was beaten, interrogated, thrown into a flimsy tent and left there for seven weeks in the bitter cold; and how he was removed only when he fell ill with pneumonia.

  “They killed him,” Jiro spat out between sobs. “Bastards!”

  Ruth was stunned; overwhelmed. It was bad enough that her father had died at Tule Lake, but now to learn that it hadn’t been just a random event, an act of God, but the direct result of brutal mistreatment …

  She told Nishi, “Take him to Taketa’s Coffee Shop and pour as much coffee into him as it takes to sober him up.”

  Nishi nodded. “I am so sorry, Dai. You were never supposed to know.”

  And I wish to God I didn’t, Ruth thought. She walked back home and into the backyard as casually as she could manage.

  Frank came up to her. “There you are. Where are Jiro and Nishi?”

  “Jiro had a little too much to drink. Nishi took him to get some fresh air.”

  Ruth hurried inside, into the empty kitchen. She braced her arms against the sink, her rage growing like a fast-moving wildfire. She went to the fridge and pulled out a bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon. After a few swallows she began to relax a bit. After five minutes she had finished the bottle and felt composed enough to go back outside and socialize with her guests. Things will be fine, she told herself. Her mother would never know. Never.

  Within the hour the party began to break up, just as Jiro and Nishi returned. Jiro’s face looked ashen, as if he might have thrown up along the way, but he was sober. He and Nishi were staying with Horace in Florin, and before they left, Jiro found Ruth and privately, respectfully, bowed to her.

  “My apologies, Dai,” he said. “For everything.”

  She nodded and tried to smile.

  That night, once she and Frank were alone in their bedroom, she closed the door and locked it—something she never did—and Frank knew at once something was wrong. “What is it, hon?”

  She didn’t reply, just held onto him and wept without words, wept for her father and the tortures he had gone through—the old wound of his death, barely healed, now torn open again, bleeding rage and grief and sorrow.

  * * *

  Try as she might, Ruth could not banish from her thoughts Jiro’s drunken, but accurate, words: They killed him.
Bastards! It was like knowing a murder had been committed but being helpless to tell anyone, to do anything to right the wrong. But she could not exhume the crime without grievously hurting her mother. She just had to learn to live with it.

  So she beat back the rage that was pounding in her temples and covered it with a smile and a cheerful tone. Frank had taken vacation time during Rachel’s visit and they took her on day trips to Sausalito, Santa Cruz, and the Napa Valley. The only one who couldn’t join in was Peggy, who was volunteering full-time at Dr. Nealey’s veterinary clinic this summer; the work experience would help when she was ready to submit her veterinary school application.

  But wherever they went, Ruth felt irritable—impatient in traffic crossing the Golden Gate Bridge, or annoyed at the crowds jostling her on the Santa Cruz boardwalk. At the end of each day she returned home drained and exhausted. But she lay awake for hours, feeling the rapid fire of her own heartbeat, finally sinking into anxious slumber.

  She woke at seven, barely rested. Frank said, “I’ll make breakfast, go back to sleep if you want,” but she couldn’t, everything had to seem normal. Peggy was feeding Max as Ruth came downstairs to the kitchen.

  “We’re not going anywhere today, are we?” Don asked as he tucked into his bacon and eggs.

  “Nope. Today is a free day,” Frank said, pouring coffee for Ruth.

  “Trish wants to go see Tammy and the Bachelor.” Trish was Trish Messina, Don’s girlfriend and also a student at San Jose State.

  “You need a lift?” Frank offered. “I’m headed in that direction myself. Car needs filling up after all that driving.”

  “Sure, thanks.”

  Both Don and Peggy shoveled down their food and were out of the house, along with Frank, before Ruth had finished her second cup of coffee.

  “We are abandoned,” Ruth said with an amused sigh.

  “At their age, butterfly,” Etsuko noted, “you and your brothers were seldom found in great abundance at home.”

  Ruth smiled. “You seem quite stoic, by the way, at the idea of Don dating a non-Japanese girl.”

  Etsuko shrugged. “I no longer care about such things. She has a good heart. I have decided that is all that matters.”

  Ruth stood and started to clear the kids’ place settings. “You and Rachel sit and relax. I’ll do the dishes.”

  Etsuko and Rachel sat chatting in the dining room, and in the kitchen, over the sound of running water, Ruth could make out their conversation:

  “—confess that I still wake up at night, expecting to hear the sound of Taizo’s breathing. Even today I find the silence … alarming.”

  Ruth’s eyes teared up and she felt her face grow flushed, not from the heat of the water but the seething temper she was laboring to control.

  “The silence,” Rachel agreed, “can be terrible. When I lived alone in Honolulu, sometimes I would go to the supermarket even if I didn’t need to buy anything—just to be among people, to hear their voices.”

  “I tell myself,” Etsuko said, “that Taizo might have died of pneumonia when he was twelve. He would never have married me, never had sons and a daughter and grandchildren that he loved. But the pneumonia did not take him that day, it let him live a full, rich, loving life, before finally claiming him in the end. I tell myself those years were a gift of fate.”

  Ruth’s rage erupted in a muscle spasm that made her hands clench.

  She heard a sound like the tinkle of wind chimes—then looked down and saw glass splinters falling into the suds like icicles into snow.

  She heard Etsuko call out, “Dai?”

  Moments later, Etsuko and Rachel hurried into the kitchen to find Ruth, blood dripping into the soapsuds.

  “What happened?” Rachel asked as Etsuko ran to Ruth’s side.

  “I … dropped a glass,” Ruth lied.

  Etsuko took Ruth’s left hand by the wrist and gently put it under the faucet, the stream of water washing away blood and small fragments of glass. The suds in the sink turned redder than clouds at sunset.

  Etsuko pressed a dish towel against Ruth’s bleeding palm. “Is your right hand hurt, Dai?”

  “No, I don’t think so. The dishrag must have protected it.”

  “Then use that hand to hold this as firmly against your palm as you can until we get to Dr. Higuchi’s.”

  “Okāsan, it’s nothing, I’ll be—”

  Rachel said, “Just keep pressing. Listen to your mother. To both of us.”

  * * *

  Dr. Higuchi cleaned out all the glass fragments and sewed five stitches in Ruth’s left hand. The other cuts were small enough to simply bandage. Ruth’s shock had worn off by the time the kids got home; she held up her swathed hand and quipped, “Look, I’m Boris Karloff in The Mommy.” They all laughed, even Frank and Etsuko.

  Rachel didn’t laugh.

  Frank grilled flank steaks and made French fries for dinner. Afterward the kids washed the dishes, prompting another joke from Ruth: “Dr. Higuchi says I need to keep this bandage on until Peggy leaves for college.”

  Again, everyone but Rachel laughed.

  Etsuko, exhausted by the day’s emergency, went to bed by nine o’clock. Rachel was with Frank and the kids in the living room, watching Perry Como, when she noticed that Ruth had slipped out of the room. She went into the kitchen, where she saw through the window that Ruth was outside sitting on one of her children’s old swings, slowly rocking herself back and forth.

  Rachel followed her into the backyard, sitting down on the swing next to Ruth’s. “Hi.”

  “Hi. Just needed a little quiet.”

  Rachel asked gently, “What’s been bothering you, Ruth?”

  “Just feeling rattled by the accident, that’s all.”

  Rachel shook her head. “No. You’ve been irritable all week, ever since the party for your Uncle Jiro.”

  “I’m fine,” Ruth said, irritated.

  “And you didn’t ‘drop’ that glass. If you had it would’ve broken in the sink, not in your hands. How did you cut yourself?”

  Ruth’s eyes flashed with annoyance. “What is this? Am I on trial for breaking a glass?”

  Rachel replied calmly, “I saw your father—Kenji—do something similar once. He was drinking a can of beer, trying not to hear the sounds of our neighbor Crossen hitting his girlfriend. When the girl cried out, Kenji tensed up and crushed the beer can. There was Schlitz everywhere, even on the ceiling. Took us hours to wipe it all off, and even then the house stank like a brewery for two days.”

  Despite herself, Ruth’s curiosity was piqued. “You’ve never mentioned he had a temper.”

  “Oh, when we first met he was angry all the time—angry at being in Kalaupapa, angry that he had his career, his future, taken away from him. I couldn’t blame him. After we married the anger went away—until Crossen moved in.” Rachel turned and looked at her. “So what are you angry about, Ruth?”

  Ruth winced. “I—I can’t tell you. My moth—Etsuko can’t ever know.”

  “It’s about your father? Taizo?”

  “I can’t say. I just can’t.”

  “All right,” Rachel said quietly. “I don’t need to know. But whatever it is, you’re bottling it up inside and not doing a very good job of it.”

  “What do you know about it?” Ruth said sharply.

  “You think I haven’t been just as angry as you are now?” Rachel said. “I saw Crossen beat my husband to death. I watched as he was convicted of manslaughter, only to be sent not to jail but to another room at Kalaupapa.”

  There was a fierceness in Rachel’s voice Ruth had never heard before.

  “Do you know what I did on the day I left Kalaupapa? Before I left? I went to Bay View Home, where Crossen was serving out his sentence because no jail in Hawai'i would take a ‘leper’ for a prisoner. I walked right into his room. I looked him straight in the eye and said, ‘I’m leaving.’

  “Then I smiled and said, ‘But you never will. Even if the sulfa drugs cu
re you, you’ll either be put in prison on O'ahu or just left here, in Kalaupapa … for the rest of your life.’”

  “Wow,” Ruth said softly.

  “It was the cruelest thing I’d ever done in my life. That’s how angry I was. But it felt like a weight had been lifted off me.” She paused, looked down, haunted by what came next. “At least for nine days.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Rachel sighed.

  “Nine days later, Kalaupapa’s superintendent, Lawrence Judd, called to tell me that Crossen’s body had been found floating in the waters of 'Awahua Bay. He might’ve been drunk, or it might’ve been a suicide. Maybe both. All at once I felt a different kind of weight. I still do.”

  Ruth was astonished by everything she had heard but managed to say, “But … you don’t know that you were the reason he did that!”

  “Just some kine coincidence, eh?” Rachel said, lapsing into Hawaiian pidgin for emphasis. “A nice thought. But I know.”

  “Even so, you could never have foreseen he’d kill himself.”

  “No, I couldn’t. And if I had the chance to do it over again, would I still do it?” She looked unflinchingly at Ruth and said, “I don’t know. You understand? You see now what anger does to you, where it can take you?”

  Rachel took Ruth’s hand in hers and said, “Today it just got you some cuts in your hand. Tomorrow, who knows?”

  Ruth said softly, “They killed him. The Army killed him.” And she poured out the story Nishi had told her. Rachel winced at the details, as bloody and brutal as what Crossen had done to Kenji.