Moloka'i

by Alan Brennert

  He wrapped the pulp in coconut fibers and squeezed the juice into another jar, which he now presented to Dorothy. “Apply this to the blemish three times a day for the next five days,” he directed. “Pray each night for the Lord God Jehovah to add his love and power to this medicine, and at the end of that time the blemish should be gone.” Dorothy took the jar and gratefully paid him his two-dollar fee—a great deal of money, but if this worked it would be worth ten times that, a hundred times!

  Dorothy dutifully prayed and applied the medicine to Rachel’s blemish—in the morning, after she came home from school, and at bedtime. Rachel blanched at the smelly concoction and soon learned to hold her breath when it was time for an application; even as Sarah and the boys began to wonder how bad this cut could be if Mama were still treating it weeks later and coddling Rachel like a baby.

  At the end of five days, miraculously, the blemish disappeared and Dorothy thanked God for His goodness in saving her daughter. She sang joyously in church that Sunday; the tension in the household, which Rachel could detect but not understand, dissipated. After church Mama stopped at Love’s and bought Jenny Lind cake for everyone.

  Two weeks later, the blemish reappeared.

  Ua gave Dorothy another remedy, this one made from the yellow, milky sap of the Hawaiian poppy. She applied it twice a day, but not only did the blemish not go away, at the end of a week’s time Dorothy could see that along the edges of the pink skin a small reddish ring, like a crater of flesh, was beginning to form.

  Dorothy’s despair deepened; she spent each day in a state of frantic worry and helpless depression. She prayed to God for mercy for her child, but there was only one prayer he answered: at the end of October, Henry came home.

  After the initial shock and grief and disbelief, Henry knew exactly what had to be done.

  “We need ho'oponopono,” he said, and Dorothy knew he was right.

  H

  o'oponopono meant “setting to right,” but it was more than a word, it was a process—part of family life in these islands for centuries. Hawaiians believed that physical problems were often the result of interpersonal relations that had gone wrong, and ho'oponopono was designed to expose the underlying causes. Sometimes a kahuna led these gatherings, sometimes a family elder; for reasons of discretion it was decided that Henry’s father, Maka, frail but clear-headed at seventy-two, would be the group leader.

  Rachel, Sarah, and their brothers understood little more than that Rachel was sick—though Rachel swore she didn’t feel sick—and that this was being done to help her. In addition to Rachel’s immediate family, the other participants included Margaret, Will, Florence and Eli. The family gathered in a rough circle on the floor of the Kalama home, and Grandpa Maka opened with a prayer:

  “Lord God Jehovah, creator of all things, listen to this humble, loving appeal from Your children. Spirits of our ancestors, join with us in finding the cause of Rachel’s illness and setting it to right.”

  Maka began by asking each of Rachel’s siblings if they were bearing any anger toward their sister. Kimo and Benjamin both looked startled and confused by the question; no, they each said, why should they?

  “And you, child?” Sarah squirmed under Grandpa Maka’s calm gaze. “She ruined my hat,” she said finally. “She’s always doing something.” Out came the litany of Rachel’s transgressions against Sarah. Maka listened patiently to them, then said, “Do you know what kala means?”

  Sarah frowned. “To forgive?”

  “More than that: to let go. And when you forgive your sister—when you let go of your anger—you forgive yourself as well.”

  “But my hat—”

  “Is the love you felt for this hat more important than your sister’s life? What if your anger is what’s sickening her? Do you still want to hold onto it so jealously?”

  Sarah thought about that, then shook her head. “No,” she said. “Not if . . .” She looked at Rachel. “I don’t want you to be sick, Rachel.”

  “So can you kala your sister?”

  With apparent sincerity she said, “Yes. I kala Rachel.”

  “Rachel, do you kala Sarah?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.” Maka nodded. “It’s good that Sarah owned up to her anger, and that she was able to let go of it. But . . .” The grandfather’s steady gaze swept across them all. “I wonder that something so easily forgiven could be the cause of so grave a sickness. Does anyone else here feel that there is something unsaid? Something to do with Rachel, that needs to be set right?”

  Silently the adults searched for an answer in each other’s faces, until one of them finally spoke up.

  “I do,” said Henry.

  His father nodded his approval. “Go on.”

  After a moment’s hesitation Henry said, “Before Rachel was born, I had a dream.” That piqued everyone’s curiosity: dreams were often as significant as the waking life. “I dreamt Dorothy and me were on a mountaintop. Lying on our backs, looking up into the sky, me stroking Dorothy’s stomach, feeling our little girl kicking inside.” He smiled; Dorothy looked surprised and touched. “It was a bright, clear day. The sky above us was blue and forever, and I looked up at it and thought: Aouli. ‘Blue vault of heaven.’ Just came into my head: Aouli.”

  There were murmurs from the other adults, confused glances among Rachel and her siblings. Grandpa Maka just nodded. “An inoa p,” he said. To the puzzled children he explained, “A ‘night name’—a name found in a dream. It comes from the next world, and once the name is spoken, it must be bestowed on the child.”

  He turned again to Henry. “You knew that, didn’t you? That the name must be given, or the child will sicken, perhaps even die?”

  Rachel felt suddenly afraid. Was she going to die? Was that what this was about?

  “Yes,” Henry said. “I knew.”

  “But you kept the dream to yourself.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  Henry looked down. “Because I knew how my wife felt about such things,” he said, startling Dorothy. “The old ways, the old language . . . She wanted all our children to have Christian names, to celebrate Jehovah.”

  Dorothy pointed out, defensively, “It’s the law. The king decreed it, that every child have a Christian name!”

  “Is Kimo not Kimo despite what is written on his birth record?” Maka turned to Henry. “This is why Rachel is sick. Because you heard her night name and you ignored it. If she is to be well, she must be given her inoa p.”

  T

  hat night some roasted pork, coconut pudding, baked fish and a little poi was burned in a fire in the Kalamas’ back yard—a sacrificial offering, given up to God or gods, as the family prayed. At the feast that followed, Grandpa Maka spoke aloud his granddaughter’s new name for the first time: “May the Lord God and our ancestors be pleased. Let us eat, drink and celebrate the health and long life of this girl, Rachel Aouli Kalama!”

  The family applauded and cheered; and Rachel basked in the love and concern she felt from all around her, even Sarah. Though she only vaguely understood what had happened here today, she knew that all these people had come here to help her, and that pleased her. She turned the new name over in her mind: Aouli. She didn’t feel like an Aouli, she felt like Rachel. But why couldn’t she be both? She smiled to herself, starting to like the sound of it, and she thought, Everything will be all right. Her left foot was starting to itch and she reached down to scratch at it, but she knew in her heart that all would be well; that with so many people around her, loving and praying for her, everything would turn out just fine.

  Chapter 3

  O

  ur Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done—”

  Along with the rest of her class, Rachel spoke the prayer as automatically as she could count to ten, but her mind was elsewhere—mostly on the various indignities she had lately been forced to suffer. It was bad enough that Mama refused to remove the band
age on her thigh, long after the cut had healed; bad enough that she also made Rachel wear frocks with long frilly skirts; but now, the supreme embarrassment, her mother actually insisted that Rachel wear shoes to school. She tried to tell Mama it wasn’t necessary, that the itching she’d felt in her left foot had gone away—she no longer felt anything in that spot, nothing at all—but Mama wouldn’t listen. “You’re gonna wear shoes or your backside is gonna be as red as your foot!” she warned, Rachel grudgingly submitting. And if it wasn’t enough that Rachel’s feet were suffocating, her friends seemed to delight in teasing her about it—accusing her of putting on airs—and had lately even taken to calling her “Little Miss Shoe.”

  “Good morning to you; good morning to you—”

  Today the second-graders were singing a greeting not just to their teacher, Miss Johnson, but to a visitor—a blank-faced haole in a business suit. It was not the man’s first visit to their classroom, nor would it be his last.

  “Class,” Miss Johnson said, “you remember Inspector Wyckoff from the Board of Health. Please sit quietly at your desks and hold out your hands as Mr. Wyckoff passes.”

  As usual the man made his way down the first aisle, surveying the hands presented for his inspection. Sometimes it was just a quick glance, his gray gaze sweeping once over a child and then on to the next; at other times he might take a student’s hand in his, noting the color and texture of the skin, turning it over to study the palm; and only then he would move on.

  Rachel watched as the inspector—bounty hunter, some whispered—stooped to examine a bruise on a boy’s knee. Now Rachel began to feel self-conscious about her own blemish, hidden beneath bandage and skirt. As Mr. Wyckoff probed the child’s bruise with the tip of a pen, drawing a wince from him, Rachel thought about the red spot on her foot and how the strap of her sandal didn’t seem to chafe there as it did her other foot. By the time the inspector reached her she was nervously tapping her foot against the leg of her desk; as he took her hand he looked up, sharply. “Please don’t do that,” he said in a flat tone that instantly froze Rachel’s foot. His gaze lowered again to her hands. He turned them over, first the left, then the right; carefully scrutinized the bed of her nails; and just when his interest was beginning to alarm her, he looked up—and smiled! “Long life-line,” he said, tapping a finger on her palm. “Means a long life, eh?” Rachel didn’t know what to say to that so she just returned his smile. He gave her back her hand, moved on, and she exhaled in relief. There was obviously nothing wrong with her after all!

  The inspector continued without incident until he came to Harry Woo in the back row. He gave Harry the same scrutiny he’d lavished on Rachel, then went a step further. He reached out, took one of the boy’s earlobes between his fingers, and pinched. Rachel winced, but Harry didn’t. Mr. Wyckoff asked for his name and address—the class shuddering as one—and jotted the information in a small notebook. When he had completed his inspection of the class he thanked everyone for their cooperation, smiled at Miss Johnson, and left.

  The next day Harry Woo did not come to school; nor the day after; nor for the rest of the term. After the third day Rachel asked one of her classmates where he was and the girl whispered back, “He has the separating sickness.” Rachel thought of Uncle Pono, of the bandage on her thigh, and then did her very best not to think about it anymore.

  W

  hen Papa came home again in October it was a source of amazement to his children that Mama actually succeeded that first Sunday in dragging their father into church. True, he did stifle the occasional yawn, but he came quickly awake when the minister launched into that week’s sermon, titled “Leprosy and the Hawaiian People.” Henry and Dorothy tried not to show more than casual interest: since Pono had lived in Waimnalo, no one here suspected the Kalamas had a relative in Kalihi Hospital.

  A full-blooded Hawaiian in his fifties, with a fringe of graying hair and a white beard, Reverend Waiamau was a charismatic preacher who began by detailing the history of the disease in Hawai'i: how it may have come from China (hence ma'i pk, “Chinese sickness”); how Hawaiians seemed to be particularly susceptible to it; and how in 1865 the foreigners in His Majesty’s government convinced Kamehameha V that unless something were done the scourge would be the death of the Hawaiian race. The result was an “Act to Prevent the Spread of Leprosy,” mandating the arrest of all suspected lepers, and even (for the first eight years) confiscation of all their worldly assets to pay for the costs of exiling them to Kalaupapa.

  Soon the disease would earn another name as well: “the sickness that tears apart families.”

  “Some say the ma'i pk affects our people so disproportionately,” the pastor said, “because we Hawaiians value family and community so much that we would rather shelter a leprous friend or relative than see him cast out of our midst. Others simply blame bad hygiene—too many hands eating from the same calabash.

  “But perhaps there’s more to it than that.” He fixed his congregation with a sober look. “There are those, indeed, who say leprosy is more than a physical ailment; it is a moral disease as well.

  “Some medical men—including the former physician for the Moloka'i Leprosarium, Dr. George Fitch—believe that leprosy is actually a fourth stage of venereal disease. The syphilitic becomes, in time, the leper. Syphilis was the great scourge of our nation in the early years of this century; and now this disease born of impurity and immorality may have festered into an even deadlier plague, one that threatens our people with extinction!”

  As the pastor’s voice grew in intensity, his parishioners shifted uncomfortably in their seats, but they hung on every word, none more keenly than Dorothy.

  “Could this be the true source of leprosy? Not bad hygiene, not leprous touch or breath. Unchastity. Immorality.” His voice fairly boomed now. “Too long have we turned away from the sin and vice in our midst, condoning it by our silence and inaction! And now its offspring comes—grown like a mold from the culture of our lust and laziness—and my children, it comes to kill us! To burn the very memory of us from the earth as lava boils away the sea, and if we let it happen, then we deserve it!

  “Will you let it happen? Or will you show the sinner there is no place for him in society? More important—will you acknowledge and repent the sin in your own hearts, and cast it out even as we must cast out the leper? To save our nation, will you first save your own souls?”

  His flock responded with enthusiastic cries of “Yes!” and “I will! I will!” And as Dorothy joined in she began to understand the guilt and shame she was feeling; began to see what God was trying to tell her, the message he had writ plain and which only now she began to comprehend.

  In the weeks to come she and Henry would argue more than in all their twelve years together. Rachel and Sarah, lying awake in bed, didn’t understand all of the shouted words in English and Hawaiian that bled through the bedroom wall, but the tone of them was painfully clear.

  “He’s your brother! That’s all I’m saying.”

  Henry was adrift, confused at the bitterness in Dorothy’s tone. “So?”

  “So, this didn’t come from my brother.”

  “How the hell do you know that?” Henry asked, irritated. “This sickness, it hides in the body a long time. How do you know Will doesn’t have it, too?”

  “Because he doesn’t!” she snapped. “Will is a good man, a moral man!”

  “And Pono isn’t?” Henry said in disbelief.

  “Pono’s a dog. He flirts with any wahine he sees—even me, his brother’s wife! Margaret says he’s slept around plenty on her.”

  “That’s between Margaret and Pono,” Henry said, reeling. “And we don’t know for sure it came from Pono! Maybe it did, maybe it didn’t!”

  She gave him a stink-eye look, cold and direct, and Henry was wounded to see the anger in once-loving eyes.

  “Maybe it didn’t,” she said flatly.

  Something about the way she said it rankled Henry all the more. “What�
�s that supposed to mean?”

  “I’m just agreeing. Maybe it came from somebody else.” She kept on giving him the stink-eye. “Lots of leprosy in those places you go to, eh? Shanghai. Hong Kong. Lots of cheap pk whores with dirty kohes.”

  Henry was stunned, as much by her use of the word for a woman’s private parts as by her accusation.

  “That’s got nothing to do with anything,” he said. “Eight, nine months I’m away from home, maybe once or twice I get lonely, it doesn’t mean anything!”

  “I see you get the pala,” and here she used the Hawaiian word for gonorrhea, “but it goes away and I think, ‘It doesn’t matter. Forget about it.’ Reverend Waiamau, he’s right, we look away when we shouldn’t.”

  “You think I’m a leper?” Angrily he stripped off his shirt, threw it aside. “You know my body—you seen any sores?” He yanked off his pants, one leg at a time, stood naked before her. “You see any now?”

  “Like you say,” she replied, unimpressed. “It hides in the body.”

  They looked at each other, and there seemed to be nothing more to say. Henry pulled on his pants, stalked out of the bedroom and curled up on the mat on the living room floor. But he couldn’t sleep, and after an hour he slipped quietly into his daughters’ room and stood by Rachel’s bed, watching her sleep. Moonlight, through lace curtains, fell in bright freckles across his daughter’s face, as though prefiguring what was to come for her. Henry’s eyes brimmed with tears. He dropped to his knees, knelt beside Rachel, and prayed as he scarcely ever had before. Dear Jesus, he said, please spare her, spare my daughter. If I’ve sinned, punish me, give me the leprosy, not her. It’s not fair!

  But as with the handful of other times he’d spoken to God, he could not tell whether anyone had heard. He knelt at Rachel’s side a long while, pleading for mercy, trying to will the sickness from her body into his; and when he finally grew sleepy he went back to the bed he shared with Dorothy and he touched her on the hip, that tender graze that always meant I’m sorry. But if Dorothy felt it she didn’t show it; and Henry knew then that this trouble would not pass as others had before.