Daughter of Moloka'i

by Alan Brennert

  “She’s a remarkable woman,” Rachel said. “Kenji and I couldn’t have wished for a better mother to love our akachan.”

  * * *

  As winter gave way to spring, Etsuko’s stamina diminished and she became so short of breath that Dr. Higuchi prescribed the use of an oxygen tank, kept beside her bed. Ruth took to sleeping on a futon next to her in case she needed help. Once Etsuko woke in the middle of the night, gasping for breath; Ruth jumped up and put her oxygen mask on. Gratefully Etsuko took in the air, but it was terrifying for Ruth to see her mother struggling to breathe.

  In midsummer, Ruth wrote to Rachel:

  Christmas seems so long ago. When you were here she was lively, still eating at the dining table. All that winter she asked whether the bird of paradise had bloomed yet, but it never did. I think she’s hoping that if the crane flower blooms, she might reap some of its legendary longevity. Even I’m praying for it to bloom, hoping it might inspire her to keep fighting.

  Oh Rachel, this is so hard. When Papa died it was sudden and distant, like a bolt of lightning. This is slow and invisible, like gravity dragging her down each day. It breaks my heart to watch.

  By October Etsuko was almost totally bedridden. She could barely consume more than a few bites before feeling full. Her feet became swollen with edema and her once-fine features became puffy as her face took on more fluid. Ruth became adept at turning her over in bed to prevent bedsores, and perhaps once a week Etsuko would allow her or Frank to put her in a wheelchair and take her into the backyard for some fresh air. The bird of paradise was lush with leathery, bluish-green leaves, but the only other growth was a purplish basal sheath that stubbornly declined to bloom.

  Etsuko was mortified when Ruth would give her a sponge bath, but she was also grateful for her tender ministrations. And she felt the need, on a morning when she was having less trouble breathing than usual, to tell her that.

  “Dai,” she said softly, faintly.

  “Yes, Okāsan?”

  “You have been a gift to me,” she said, smiling, “and a joy I never dared dream of after the doctors told me I could never have another child.”

  “No, Mama. You were the one who gave me the gift. The gift of a home, a family, and love.” Tears welled in her eyes. “I love you so much.”

  “I love you, butterfly. I have since the moment I saw you. And I am so proud of the woman you have become.”

  When Frank came home he looked in on Etsuko, who was asleep, then joined his wife in the kitchen. “You look exhausted,” he told her.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “She’s not going to die in a hospital. Not like Papa.”

  Frank thought that might not be up to her. But he just nodded.

  The next morning, Ruth rose early. Her mother was still sleeping with no apparent discomfort, so Ruth slipped quietly out of the bedroom and into the kitchen. She stood by the sink washing off fresh oranges to squeeze for juice, when she happened to look up and out the kitchen window.

  In the garden a fire-red flower was opening in the dawning light.

  Ruth raced into the backyard. The bird of paradise was magnificent. From the boat-shaped sheath a long-stemmed flower had emerged, flame-red with a blue arrowlike tongue. It did, in fact, look like a crane.

  Frank saw her in the yard and joined her. “I’ll be damned,” he said. “Sure took its own sweet time.”

  Ruth grinned and hurried into the house to announce, breathlessly, to her mother: “It’s bloomed!”

  “What?” Etsuko said in disbelief.

  “The bird of paradise—it’s beautiful!”

  Etsuko’s face lit up with an excitement Ruth hadn’t seen in months. “I want to see,” she said, sitting up. “Take me out to see it!”

  Ruth and Frank got Etsuko into a bathrobe and then her wheelchair. Ruth wheeled her out of the house and down a wooden ramp Frank had built over the back steps, then to the garden. Etsuko was thrilled by what she saw.

  “Ohhh,” she said softly, “it is beautiful. Like the ones in Hawai'i.”

  Ruth pushed her wheelchair close enough so that Etsuko could reach out her hand and just lightly graze the delicate, bright orange blossom.

  Etsuko’s smile was nearly as bright.

  Ruth and Frank were willing to stand there as long as Etsuko wanted to, as long as her strength held out. Finally she said, “I’m ready to go in now.”

  “We can come out again later,” Ruth said.

  Etsuko nodded, still smiling.

  She ate a little more than usual at breakfast, slept through lunch, but woke in midafternoon and was surprisingly chatty, telling Ruth stories she had never heard before—of childhood neighbors in Hōfuna, of her voyage to Honolulu to join Taizo. She was livelier than Ruth had seen her in months. After dinner she tired and was asleep by seven, though not before she told Ruth, “Tomorrow morning I would like to go out and see the flower again.”

  “That can be arranged,” Ruth agreed with a smile.

  “Good night, butterfly. I love you.”

  Ruth kissed her on the cheek. “I love you, Okāsan.”

  Etsuko was asleep within minutes.

  The next morning Ruth woke around dawn, and as a red-gold light filtered through the bedroom blinds, she immediately sensed a stillness to the room.

  Her mother was no longer breathing.

  She went to her, touched her hand. It was cold as a night at Manzanar.

  Ruth looked at her mother through a veil of tears, but she knew what had to be done next. She went into the bathroom, ran some water into a cup, and returned to her mother’s bedside. Ruth dipped two fingers into the water, then touched them to Etsuko’s lips, moistening them one last time in a ceremony called matsugo-no-mizu, “water of the last moment”—done in hopes of reviving the deceased.

  If only it could.

  Ruth bent down, tenderly kissed her okāsan’s forehead, then went to Frank and the two of them cried together. When she was ready, she picked up the phone and called Horace.

  * * *

  According to tradition, funeral arrangements were to be made by the eldest son—and since Horace was Buddhist and Ruth was not, it was he who scheduled the funeral with Reverend Hojo and arranged for Etsuko’s body to be laid out, in a simple white kimono, for the tsuya, “the passing of the night.” Stanley’s family flew in from Portland, and Don and Peggy arrived that evening. The all-night vigil was long and arduous for Ruth, but even more painful was what followed the next day. Tradition decreed that at the crematorium the family witnessed the sliding of the deceased’s body into the cremation chamber, ate a meal while the ashes cooled, and then used chopsticks to pick the bones of the deceased out of the ashes and place them in an urn. Ruth could barely keep her lunch down during this ceremony, but steadied herself with the knowledge that this was what her mother would have wanted.

  Later, after the ashes were interred, everyone went to the Harada home to eat, drink, and remember Etsuko. But after the hours spent at the crematorium, Ruth desperately needed fresh air; she went into the backyard, followed shortly after by Ralph, who was carrying two glasses of sake. He handed her one. “You looked like you needed this.”

  Then his attention was caught by the bird of paradise.

  “So that’s what that looks like?” he asked. “Like one of the paper cranes we had to burn after Pearl Harbor.” He took a step closer. “That fiery orange blossom—damned if it doesn’t look like a phoenix rising from the ashes.”

  Ruth understood, at last, what the crane flower had represented to her mother. It wasn’t Hawai'i, as much as she had loved Hawai'i. It wasn’t good fortune; and it wasn’t longevity. No, not even that.

  It was rebirth.

  Chapter 20

  1965

  Ruth took a breath of the moist tropic air, fragrant with plumeria and jasmine; it was like breathing in tranquility itself. She loved making this drive. The Haradas had been to Maui once before, two years ago, to visit Rachel and Sarah, but already the island
felt like a second home. She drove south down the Honoapi'ilani Highway; the windward face of the West Maui Mountains, misted blue in the morning light, wore a turban of white clouds. They passed fields of waist-high sugarcane bowing in the wind; brown columns of burning cane smoke, sweetly pungent, flavored the air. At the island’s isthmus they turned up what was once called the Pali Road. The coastal drive presented one awe-inspiring view after another: the lighthouse at McGregor Point, steadfast as crashing waves battered the headlands below it; Pāpalaua Beach, where tangled kiawe trees hunched over a narrow strip of pristine white sand; Olowalu Tunnel, which looked as if it had been punched out of the mountainside by the demigod Māui himself; and acres of green, terraced farm fields draping the leeward slopes of the mountains.

  When they reached the sugarcane fields above Lahaina, Ruth turned left on Prison Street, then right on Waine'e Street. A block down she could see the familiar white bungalow beneath the green umbrella of a banyan tree, its garden ablaze with orange helliconia, anthuriums, and birds of paradise. Ruth felt a sting of remembered pain but reminded herself that Etsuko would have wanted her to feel happy upon seeing these beautiful flowers.

  Rachel and her sister, Sarah, emerged from the little house. Rachel, now seventy-nine, still had a youthful air of enthusiasm; Sarah, only two years her senior, somehow looked much older. Both were smiling at their guests.

  “Aloha,” Rachel greeted Ruth, then gave her a hug. Ruth hugged Sarah as Frank embraced Rachel. But when Don, now twenty-eight, approached Sarah, she just looked at him blankly: “I’m sorry, do I know you?”

  “Sarah, for heaven’s sake, it’s Don,” Rachel said, “my grandson.”

  “Oh! Yes, of course, Donnie. I’m sorry, what was I thinking?”

  The worry that flickered across Rachel’s face did not escape Ruth.

  The house was decorated with rattan chairs and burnished wooden tables hand-carved by Sarah’s late husband. The Haradas took their bags into the bedrooms once occupied by Sarah’s four children, now grown.

  At lunch—including a delicious salad of Kula lettuce and fresh tomatoes from Sarah’s garden—Rachel wanted to know all about Peggy’s new job at a veterinary clinic in Modesto as well as Don’s work as a staff oceanographer at Scripps. They were both happy in their work and their parents were obviously very proud of them.

  Later, when they were alone, Ruth asked Rachel, “Is there something wrong with Sarah?”

  “She’s getting a little senile,” Rachel admitted. “Forgetful, has trouble staying focused … and she gets flustered while driving. Luckily I can walk to Nagasako’s Supermarket to do our grocery shopping. But when either of us needs to see a doctor in Kahului, I grit my teeth and pray when she gets behind the wheel.”

  “Do her children know about this?”

  Rachel nodded. “Ellie is the only one who still lives on Maui, upcountry in Makawao. So far I can take care of Sarah on my own, but if there comes a point when I can’t, I’m not sure what we’re going to do.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “With my brother Ben gone”—Rachel’s eyes clouded over—“Sarah is the last of my family. She still recognizes me, but I dread the day she doesn’t.”

  That evening the whole family had dinner at the Lahaina Broiler, through whose windows they could see the islands of Moloka'i and Lāna'i, swaddled in clouds on the horizon. “When are we going to take a trip to Moloka'i,” Ruth asked Rachel, “so I can see where I was born?”

  Rachel seemed uneasy. “There are more pleasant places we can visit.”

  “But you speak with such love of the people there—your ‘Kalaupapa family.’ I’d like to meet them.”

  “I do love them,” Rachel said. “But look at this way: How enthusiastic would you be about taking us on a sightseeing trip to Manzanar?”

  Ruth saw her point. “Not very, I suppose.”

  “Don’t worry,” Rachel said, “you’ll get to see Moloka'i—eventually.”

  Ruth chose not to ask her mother what she meant by this.

  * * *

  The next morning Frank, Don, and Peggy were out the door by seven for a diving trip to Olowalu. After breakfast Ruth told Rachel and Sarah that she would like to pay her respects to their mother, as she had on her previous trip to Maui. They seemed quite moved by this, and soon Ruth was driving them to the little red-clay cemetery at the southern tip of Kā'anapali. Ruth gazed down at the simple stone marker that read DOROTHY KALAMA 1861–1933 and thought about the grandparents she had never known, the loving stories Rachel told of Dorothy’s courage and Henry’s devotion.

  Rachel was gazing up the coastline at the adjacent Kā'anapali Beach Resort: a thousand acres of green rolling golf course, man-made lagoons, and a three-mile strip of lovely white sand. So far the only hotels on the beach were the Kā'anapali Hotel, the Royal Lahaina, and the Sheraton Maui, the latter’s buildings perched almost impudently atop the high lava outcropping now called Black Rock but once known as Pu'u Keka'a—a leina a ka 'uhane, where the spirits of the dead were said to have made the leap into the next world.

  Ruth noticed her distraction. “Rachel? Something wrong?”

  “Oh, I was just thinking about the history of this place. Centuries ago the ali'i—Hawaiian royalty—would come to Kā'anapali for recreation. Sugarcane and taro was grown here. Then, after the missionaries arrived, they planted prickly kiawe trees to keep the kanaka from holding their so-called ‘pagan’ rituals on the beach.” Sarah, a devout Christian, rolled her eyes. “Up until six years ago, there was a lush kiawe forest here,” Rachel said. “Today it’s a golf course.”

  “Kiawe trees are ugly and thorny,” Sarah said. “Things change, Rachel.”

  “I suppose so. But Mama wanted to be buried here so she’d always be in sight of Moloka'i. Now she also has a fine view of the eighteenth hole.”

  Sarah took Rachel’s clawed hand and cupped it tenderly.

  “She can still see Moloka'i,” Sarah said. “But she doesn’t need to, because you’re here to visit her every Sunday.”

  Ruth smiled at them, at the obvious love between the sisters despite their differences.

  “Mama managed to hide my leprosy from the authorities for months after she discovered it,” Rachel told Ruth. “I last saw Mama as I was taken aboard the boat to Moloka'i—I saw the love and heartbreak in her face. That’s why, when my brother Kimo came down with it, she hid him upcountry in Kula. To Hawaiians there’s nothing worse than breaking up the 'ohana. If a family member becomes sick, you care for them, you don’t abandon them. That’s why Hawaiians called leprosy the ma'i ho'oka'awale—‘the separating sickness.’”

  Moved by this, Ruth said, “Rachel—Mother—there’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you. I know what it means to be Japanese because my parents taught me about honor, courtesy, filial piety, hard work. But—what does it mean to be Hawaiian? What should it mean to me, being Hawaiian?”

  Rachel considered that. “It’s more than just bloodlines, though that’s part of it. It’s a way of life, a way of looking at life.”

  Surprisingly, it was Sarah who turned to her sister and suggested, “Kahakuloa?”

  “What’s that?” Ruth asked.

  “A small village on the windward side of the north shore,” Rachel explained. “A few dozen families live there, all Hawaiian. They live according to the old ways—doing their own farming, fishing, getting all they need to live from the 'āina. It’s probably the closest thing to Old Hawai'i that’s left on Maui.”

  “Can we go?”

  “I have a friend there, and I’m sure he’d welcome us, but it’s a bit of a rugged trip. The highway narrows to one lane along the cliffside and turns into a bumpy dirt road for long stretches.”

  “Sounds like an adventure,” Ruth said with enthusiasm.

  “Well,” Rachel said, smiling, “that’s one word for it.”

  * * *

  There was no shortage of scenic views on the way to Kahakuloa, so Rachel and the Haradas
packed a picnic lunch and got an early start. Frank drove past Kā'anapali and, farther north, through the pineapple fields of Kapalua. The highway narrowed to two lanes and began a slow ascent into the mountains, winding along sea cliffs overlooking Mokulē'ia Bay and its neighbor, Honolua Bay. They stopped to watch the surfers riding Honolua’s wavebreaks and to take in the beauty of its turquoise waters. Later they did the same at Honokōhau, where surfers climbed like billy goats over the boulder-strewn beach to get at the big waves rolling in.

  A few miles past Honokōhau, the highway abruptly ended, turning into a rough, unpaved road—County Route 340, also called the Kahekili Highway, after the last king of Maui. The road shrank to a single lane clinging to the side of a cliff, with no guard rail on the driver’s side, just blue sky and a sheer hundred-foot drop. Frank took it slow and in stride—until a big Ford pickup truck suddenly appeared from around a blind curve.

  “Jesus Christ!” Frank blurted as he slammed on the brakes.

  Ruth’s breath caught in her chest.

  The truck came to a stop just a few feet away in front of them; then it just sat there and idled, waiting. Ruth began breathing again.

  Frank turned to Rachel in the back. “What does he expect me to do?”

  “On these roads, the bigger vehicle has the right of way,” she said calmly. “He wants you to back up.”

  “Back up? We’re on the edge of a goddamn cliff!”

  “There was a turnout about three hundred feet back,” Rachel advised. “Just back up very slowly until you reach it. Drivers here do it all the time.”

  Seeing his family’s terrified faces actually bolstered Frank’s nerve. “Okay, boys and girls,” he said, turning back, “here goes nothing.”

  Frank backed up a foot at a time, white-knuckling the wheel. The truck squeezed past them with only inches to spare. As he passed, the truck driver smiled and waved, as if this happened every day, which apparently it did.