“Will he allow it?” Teroro asked suspiciously.
“He is a priest of Oro,” Marama pointed out, “but he is also a Bora Boran, and he will understand our love of this island.”
It worked exactly as she planned, but when the time came for delivering the feather-draped red rock of Pere, the High Priest could not bring himself to place such treasure in the hands of a woman, insisting upon transferring the goddess directly to Teroro, and when the latter at last had the soul of Pere in his possession, the wild, passionate soul of the fire goddess, the mother of volcanoes, he wanted to shout in triumph, but instead he lay it aside as if it were only a woman’s god, a whim of his wife’s, and the High Priest thought the same.
The men were fattened and the food was packed. Twelve women were selected and put on starvation diets to prepare them for the voyage. King Tamatoa’s favorite wife was included, for everyone agreed that since their king had produced with his sister a royal heir of greatest sanctity, he should be encouraged to import at least one woman he loved. For seed crops the crew emphasized pigs, bananas and breadfruit. “How we yearn for sweet breadfruit,” they explained.
When all was ready, Teroro was startled to see Marama lugging toward the canoe a large bundle wrapped in leaves. “What’s that?” he cried.
“Flowers,” his wife replied.
“What do we want with flowers?” Teroro protested.
“I asked Pa and he said there were no flowers.” Teroro looked at the other crew members, and they realized for the first time that Havaiki-of-the-North owned no natural blooms. Even so, the bundle seemed excessively large.
“You simply can’t take that much, Marama,” he protested.
“The gods like flowers,” she replied. “Throw out one of the pigs.”
The idea was so offensive that the crew would not consider it, but they did compromise on this: they would put back one of the smaller breadfruit, but they all considered Teroro’s woman demented.
Then came the task, most joyous and exciting of all, of selecting the children. The men wanted to take only girls, while the women wished only boys, so that the compromise of half and half pleased no one but did have certain sense to commend it. The ten children selected ranged from four years old to twelve: dark-haired, deep-eyed, grinning, white-toothed children. Their very presence made the canoe lighter.
But when all had stepped aboard, Teroro was unaccountably depressed by the gravity of the task he had undertaken, and this time with no guile he went gravely to the High Priest and pleaded: “Bless our journey. Establish the tabus.” And the High Priest arranged the gods on the side of the voyagers and cried in a high voice, touching the food for the animals, “This is tabu! This is tabu!” And when he had finished, the canoe somehow seemed safer, and it set forth for the long voyage north.
It had barely escaped from the lagoon when Pa, the shark-faced, went for the offensive statue of Oro, to throw it into the deep, but to his surprise Teroro restrained him and said, “It is a god! We will place it reverently on the shore of Havaiki-of-Red-Oro,” and when he had led the canoe to that once-hated island, slipping ashore where no lookouts could intercept him, he placed Oro in a sheltered position among rocks, and built a palm-leaf canopy; and he was overcome with the awareness that never again would he see Havaiki, from which he had sprung, and while the canoe waited, he stood on the shore of the ancestral island and chanted the story of the brave, lost people of Havaiki-in-Asia, who had set out upon innumerable voyages, never to return. This was his land, his home, and he would know it no more.
Pa and his rugged crew were further surprised when it came time to set the course back to Havaiki-of-the-North. This time Teroro would not permit them to follow his earlier reckless path far out to sea; he required them to take the cautious route to Nuku Hiva, where in all prudence they replenished their stores, so that in the heart-baking doldrums they had adequate food and water, especially for the children, who suffered intensely in the heat, for try as they might, they could not make their stomachs into tight hard knots. They were hungry and they said so.
At last the stars of the Little Eyes were overhead, and the canoe turned joyously westward before the wind. Now Teroro conducted daily lessons for every man and boy aboard the canoe: “You know the island lies ahead. What signals will prove the fact?” And every male above the age of six became a navigator, and Marama, taking the place of old red-eyed Teura, became the seer, collecting omens; and one day a boy spotted a black fork-tailed bird attacking a gannet, who had caught a fish; and Teroro showed all how to read the wave echoes as they bounced back from unseen Havaiki; but the most solemn moment came when Marama, reading her clouds, saw fire upon them, and she knew that the goddess Pere had lighted a beacon for her voyagers, and it was to this cloud of fire that Teroro directed his canoe.
As the craft neared shore Teroro faced one last odious job, but he discharged it. Moving among the men and women he told each: “The children are no longer yours. They must be shared with those on shore, and each child shall have many mothers.”
Immediately a wailing set up, for on the long voyage men and women in the canoe had grown inordinately attached to the children, and the wild young things had found mothers and fathers whom they liked. “He is more than my son!” a woman cried, holding to her breast a nine-year-old boy with a broken tooth.
“No,” Teroro said firmly. “If it had not been for the women on shore, pleading for children, I would not have thought to bring any. They must have their share. It is only just.”
So when the canoe landed, there was a moment of intense anguish as the women from shore, too long without the sound of children, hurried down and saw the boys standing awkwardly by the mast and the little girls holding onto men’s hands. The women on shore could not see the new pigs or the promising breadfruit or the bananas. All they could see were the children, and when the first child stepped ashore, a woman ran frenziedly to him with food, but the child drew back.
It was in this manner that Teroro, bearing in his hands the rock of Pere, stepped ashore to become the compassionate and judicious priest of Havaiki, with his gentle wife Marama as associate and seer, and with the volcano goddess as his special mentor. The pigs and the breadfruit and the children increased. Marama’s flowers burst into brilliance. And the island prospered.
III
From the Farm of Bitterness
A THOUSAND YEARS after the men of Bora Bora had completed their long voyage to the north, a thin, sallow-faced youth with stringy blond hair left an impoverished-looking farm near the village of Marlboro, in eastern Massachusetts, and enrolled as a freshman at Yale College in Connecticut. This was the more mysterious for two reasons: to look at the farm one would never suppose that its owners could afford to send any of their ten children to college; and, having decided to do so, the parents must have had deeply personal reasons for sending a son not to Harvard, which was only twenty-five miles away, but to Yale, which was more than a hundred miles to the south.
Gideon Hale, a gaunt man of forty-two who looked sixty, could explain each matter: “Our minister visited Harvard and he assures us the place has become a haven for Unitarians, deists and atheists. No son of mine shall be contaminated in such a den of iniquitousness.” So seventeen-year-old Abner was packed off to Yale, which remained a haven for the honest if austere precepts of John Calvin as expressed in New England Congregationalism.
As for the money, gaunt Gideon explained: “We are practicing Christians adhering to the word of Calvin as preached by Theodore Beza in Geneva and by Jonathan Edwards in Boston. We do not believe in painting our barns in worldly displays of wealth, nor in painting our daughters to parade their concupiscence. We save our money and apply it to the betterment of our minds and the salvation of our souls. When my son Abner graduates a minister from Yale, he will glorify God by preaching the same message and exhibiting the same example. How did he get from this farm to divinity school? Because this family practices frugality and avoids worldly exhibit.”
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p; In his senior year at Yale, emaciated Abner Hale, whose parents did not allow him enough money to live on, experienced a spiritual enlightenment which changed his life, impelling him to unanticipated deeds and imperishable commitments. It was not what the early nineteenth century called “conversion,” for Abner had undergone this phenomenon at eleven, while walking at dusk from the far fields to the milking shed. It was a wintry Marlboro night, and as he walked through the crackling stubble, frost on his breath, he heard a voice cry distinctly, “Abner Hale, are you saved?” He knew he was not, but when he replied, “No,” the voice kept repeating the inquiry, and finally a light filled the meadow and a great shaking possessed him, and he stood in the fields transfixed, so that when his father came for him he burst into wild tears and begged: “Father, what must I do to be saved?” In Marlboro his conversion was held to be a minor miracle, and from that eleventh year his pious father had scrimped and borrowed and saved to send the predestined boy to divinity school.
What thin-faced Abner experienced at Yale was far different from conversion; it was spiritual illumination on a specific point and it arrived through a most unlikely person. A group of his worldly classmates, including his roommate, the young medical student John Whipple, who had once smoked and drunk, came by his room as he was writing a long report on “Church Discipline in the City of Geneva as Practiced by Theodore Beza.”
“Come along to hear Keoki Kanakoa!” his rowdy classmates shouted.
“I’m working,” Abner replied, and closed his door more tightly against temptation. He had come to the part of his paper in which Beza had begun to apply the teachings of Calvin to the general civil life of Geneva, and the manner in which this was done fascinated the young divinity student, for he wrote with some fervor: “Beza constantly faced the problem which all who govern must face: ‘Do I govern for the welfare of man or for the glory of God?’ Beza found it easy to give his answer, and although certain harshnesses which the world condemned did unavoidably occur in Geneva, so did the Kingdom of God on earth, and for once in the long history of civilization, an entire city lived according to the precepts of our Divine Father.”
There was a rattling at his door and wiry John Whipple stuck his head in and called, “We’re saving a seat for you, Abner. Seems everyone wants to hear Keoki Kanakoa.”
“I am working,” Abner replied the second time, and carefully he closed his door and returned to his lamp, by whose amber light he wrote painstakingly: “The Kingdom of God on earth is not easy to attain, for mere study of the Bible will not illuminate the way by which a government can acquire sanctity, for obviously if this were the case, thousands of governments that have now perished and which in their day attended to the Bible would have discovered the godly way. We know they have failed, and they have failed because they lacked a man of wisdom to show them.…” He bit his pen and thought of his father’s long and gloomy battle with the town fathers of Marlboro. His father knew what the rule of God was, but the fathers were obstinate men and would not listen. It was no surprise either to Abner or to his father when the daughter of one of these perverse men discovered that she was going to have a baby out of wedlock, although just what this sin involved, Abner did not fully know.
“Abner!” a stentorian voice called from the hallway. “It is your duty to hear Keoki Kanakoa.” The door was thrust open, revealing a chunky little professor in a waistcoat too tight and a stock too dirty. “In the interests of your soul you should hear the message of this remarkable young Christian.” And the man came over to the desk, blew out the light, and dragged his reluctant pupil to the missionary lecture.
Abner found the seat which handsome John Whipple had saved for him, and the two young men, so unlike in all ways, waited for the chairs on the college platform to be occupied. At seven-thirty President Jeremiah Day, calm but glowing with spiritual fire, led to the farthest chair a brown-skinned, white-toothed, black-haired young giant in a tight-fitting suit. “It is my honor to present to the students of Yale College,” President Day said simply, “one of the most powerful voices in the world today. For when Keoki Kanakoa, son of a ruler of Owhyhee speaks, he speaks to the conscience of the world; to you young men who have already committed yourselves to Christ’s ministry, the voice of Keoki Kanakoa brings particular challenges.”
At this, the young giant, standing about six feet five and weighing more than two hundred and fifty pounds, rose and graced his audience with a dazzling smile, after which he raised his hands like a minister and prayed: “May the good Lord bless what I am about to say. May He open all hearts to hear.”
“He speaks better than I do,” John Whipple whispered, but Abner was not amused, for he wished to be back at his books, feeling that he had come close to the heart of his essay on Theodore Beza when his professor insisted upon dragging him to the lecture by this barbarian from Owhyhee.
But when the brown-skinned giant launched into his message, not only Abner Hale but everyone else in the auditorium listened, for the engaging young savage told how he had run away from an idol-worshiping home, from polygamy, from immorality, from grossness and from bestiality to find the word of Jesus Christ. He recounted how, after landing from a whaling ship in Boston, he had tried to gain entrance to Harvard but had been laughed at, and how he had walked to Yale College and had met President Day in the street and had said to him, “I come seek Jesus.” And the head of Yale had replied, “If you cannot find Him here, this college should be dissolved.”
Keoki Kanakoa spoke for two hours. Sometimes his voice fell away to a whisper as he spoke of the evil darkness in which his beloved islands of Owhyhee festered. Again it rose like a thundering sea when he told the young men of Yale what they could do for Christ if they would only come to Owhyhee and circulate the word of God. But what had captured earlier audiences throughout New England, and what now completely absorbed the men of Yale, so that no one stirred even at the end of two hours, was Keoki’s impassioned story of what it was like to live in Owhyhee without Christ. “When I was a boy,” he began softly, in the fine English he had mastered in various church schools, “we worshiped dreadful gods like Ku, the god of battle. Ku demanded endless human sacrifices, and how did the priests find victims? Before a sacred day my father, the Governor of Maui, would tell his assistants, ‘We require a man.’ Before a battle he would announce, ‘We require eight men,’ and his assistants would then gather and say, ‘Let’s take Kakai. I am angry with him,’ or perhaps, ‘Now would be a good time to get rid of that one and take his lands.’ And at night two conspirators would creep secretly from behind while a third would walk up boldly and say, ‘Greetings, Kakai, how was the fishing?’ and before he could reply …”
At this point giant Keoki had been coached by his missionary preceptors to pause dramatically, wait, then hold aloft in his enormous hands a lethal length of coconut-fiber rope. “While my father’s agent smiled at the victim, one conspirator crept up and pinioned his arms. The other slipped this rope around his neck … like this.” And slowly he twisted his two great hands together, compressing the rope into a tight knot. Making a strangling noise in his throat, he allowed his big head to fall on his chest. After a pause, while his enormous frame seemed to burst from its ill-fitting American suit, he slowly raised his head and disclosed a face masked in pity. “We do not know Jesus,” he said softly, as if his voice were coming from a sepulcher.
Then he swept into his peroration, his voice hammering like thunder and tears splashing down like rain, so that the terror of his youthful days became clearly visible throughout his body. “Young men of God!” he pleaded. “In my father’s islands immortal souls go every night to everlasting hell because of you! You are to blame! You have not taken the word of Jesus Christ to my islands. We hunger for the word. We are thirsty for the word. We die for the word. Are you, in your indifference, going to keep the word from us forever? Is there no man here tonight who will rise up and say to me, ‘Keoki Kanakoa, I will go with you to Owhyhee and save three hundred t
housand souls for Jesus Christ’?”
The gigantic man paused. In deep and honest grief his voice broke. President Day poured him a glass of water, but he brushed it aside and called, through choking sobs, “Will no one go with me to save the souls of my people?” He sat down, quaking in his chair, a man shattered by the revelation of God’s word, and after a while President Day led him away.
The impact of Keoki Kanakoa’s missionary sermon struck the roommates Hale of divinity and Whipple of medicine with stunning force. They left the lecture hall in shocked silence, brooding upon the misery depicted by the Owhyheean. In their room they did not bother to relight the lamp, but went to bed in darkness, weighed down by the indifference with which Keoki had charged them. When the awfulness of this indifference finally penetrated his conscience, Abner began to weep—for he had grown up in an age of weeping—and after a while John asked, “What is it, Abner?” and the farm boy replied, “I cannot think of sleep, seeing in my mind those human souls destined for all eternity to everlasting hell.” From the manner in which he spoke, it was evident that he had been watching each separate soul plunge into eternal fire, and the misery was more than he could bear.
Whipple said, “His final call keeps ringing in my ears. ‘Who will go to Owhyhee with me?’ ” To this Abner Hale made no reply.
Long after midnight, when the young doctor could still hear his roommate sobbing, he rose, lit the lamp, and began dressing. At first Hale pretended not to know what was happening, but finally he whipped out of bed and caught Whipple by the arm. “What are you going to do, John?”
“I am going to Owhyhee,” the handsome doctor replied. “I cannot waste my life here, indifferent to the plea of those islands.”
“But where are you going now?” Hale asked.
“To President Day’s. To offer myself to Christ.”
There was a moment’s hesitation while the doctor, fully dressed, and the minister, in nightgown, studied each other. It was broken when Abner asked, “Will you pray with me?”
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