Moloka'i

by Alan Brennert

  Rachel explained her reasons and assured her, “Don’t worry. You don’t have to do anything more than show up.”

  Catherine thought about that a moment, then picked up one of the shovels and climbed into the wagon.

  “Sister,” Rachel warned, “you do realize this won’t be a Christian service?”

  “At the moment,” Catherine admitted, “I’m not sure I care.”

  Everyone climbed into the wagon as Rachel took the reins. But instead of turning left toward the coast road and the grim necklace of cemeteries garlanding the shoreline, Rachel turned right. Catherine had assumed Haleola would be laid to rest in the graveyard reserved for Hawaiian and Buddhist burials; but as soon as Rachel turned onto Damien Road the sister knew where they were heading.

  When they reached the eastern shore, Rachel brought them to a certain abandoned cottage whose disrepair brought tears to her eyes. She tied up the wagon, watered the horse from an old cistern, then began distributing shovels in a businesslike manner. Catherine took hers a little queasily but would not shirk the task. A week ago she might have quailed at it, but just now she was not nearly as concerned with propriety.

  They followed Rachel into a back yard overrun with pili grass and lantana; Rachel hacked away at the scrub with her shovel until she was able to see the small wooden marker at the rear of the property. Rachel weeded Keo’s grave as the others cleared another plot beside it. By the time they’d finished they were soaked with perspiration—all before they’d even turned an ounce of soil.

  As her shovel bit into the yielding earth Catherine’s mind began circling Death again, gazing into a black sun which seemed to pull her ever closer. She fought off its terrible gravity by concentrating on her obligation to Haleola, but even that led to thoughts better left untouched: here she was, digging a heathen grave for a woman who had been a kind of priest of a pagan religion, and yet she did not hesitate; in fact she rather relished it. Was this the act of a true bride of Christ?

  Halfway through the dig a confused Brother Dutton appeared just beyond the broken stone fence bordering the property. He saw a sweaty quartet of girls and one grimy nun digging a hole six feet deep by three feet wide. With trepidation, he called out, “Sister?”

  Catherine winced to herself but replied cheerily, “Mr. Dutton. Hello,” not pausing in her toil.

  “And, ah, what exactly would you all be up to here?” he asked nervously.

  “Isn’t it obvious?” Catherine asked. “We’re digging our way to China.”

  The girls chuckled. Brother Dutton smiled wanly. No fool, he said, “This is hardly consecrated ground, Sister.”

  Sister Catherine stopped digging, straightened, and looked at him. The words emerged from her mouth without any prior consultation with her brain:

  “It seems to me, Mr. Dutton, that in its own way, this whole peninsula is consecrated ground.”

  He considered that, and after a moment he nodded.

  “I take your point, Sister.” He gave them a little salute with the fingers of one hand, then walked away.

  When the grave was at last dug they stripped off their clothing—only Catherine retained her underclothes—and washed away the dirt and sweat in the ocean. But Catherine found that the sea was nowhere near as cleansing as it had been on that distant night with Sister Victor, failing utterly to purge her doubt and anger.

  Shortly the mourners began arriving on horseback and in wagons. There were fewer than Rachel would have liked, a reflection not on the esteem in which Haleola had been held but on the transience of life in Kalaupapa. Haleola had outlived most of her friends and patients. They, Rachel hoped, had already gathered on the other side of life to welcome the healer who had tended them through illness, alleviated their pain, delivered their babies.

  But Ambrose Hutchison was here, and a subdued and respectful George Wakina, and a dozen others who now gathered with Rachel on this side of life. Rachel, standing beside Haleola’s coffin, felt a flutter of stage fright, but in her mind’s eye she saw the words she needed to speak, like lessons on a chalkboard.

  “Lawa, Pualani, 'eia mai kou kaikamahine, Haleola,” she intoned somberly. (Lawa, Pualani, here is your daughter, Haleola!)

  Ambrose, a Catholic, was dismayed, but others recognized the ancient words and picked up the call to ancestors. Lawa, Pualani, here is your daughter, Haleola!

  “Keo, here is your beloved wife, Haleola. Pono, here is your lover. Grief for our home without our friend!”

  The ritual reply echoed in the gathering dusk. Grief for our home without our friend!

  Rachel, Leilani, Francine, and Emily lifted the casket, one to each corner, and gently lowered it into the grave, the head of the coffin facing east. Rachel then stood at the foot of the grave and declared in a resonant, confident voice: “Haleola, 'eia no 'oe ke hele nei!” (Haleola, here you are departing!)

  The words thundered in her chest, filling her with pride and a solemn grace. “Aloha wale, e Haleola, kaua, auw!” (Boundless love, O Haleola, between us, alas!)

  Are you here, Auntie? she wondered. Have you taken the form of a shark in the sea, or a bird in the trees? Was this the farewell you would have wanted?

  Catherine, helping to shovel the soft earth into the grave, was both touched and disturbed that she should be so moved by this pagan rite. After the grave was rounded with earth the mourners embraced Rachel and shared their love and memories of Haleola. Catherine stared down at the freshly turned mound and tried to offer up a prayer, but none would coalesce in her mind. Instead she felt anger, anger that she should be here beside this grave and not at another, more distant one. Rage blossomed again in her breast, hot tears sprang to her eyes. No! No! She couldn’t let anyone see her like this. She turned her face away but knew she could not contain the rage with a mere glance; in a panic she hurried away from the grave and the mourners. The crash of the surf against the shoreline sounded a call to her, promising in its fury to drown out the fury in her own heart, drawing her to it.

  When the last mourner had headed back to Kalaupapa, Rachel lingered at the graveside saying a private, silent good-bye. It was only when she reached the wagon that she noticed all her friends were gathered there save one.

  “Where’s Sister Catherine?”

  No one seemed to know.

  Why would the sister leave without saying anything? And where would she go? Something about it struck Rachel as terribly wrong. “Wait here,” she told the others. “Maybe she went to see Brother Dutton.”

  Rachel went to Baldwin Home, but the sister wasn’t there. She walked across the road to St. Philomena’s Church, but Catherine was neither inside the chapel nor outside paying her respects at the grave of Father Damien. Nor was there was any sign of her farther down the road, at the nascent Federal Leprosy Investigation Station.

  She asked a young boy, fishing along the shore, whether he had seen a nun go by within the last half-hour.

  He had, and pointed the way down the coast.

  Rachel thanked him and quickened her pace, each breaking wave trumpeting her own anxiety and fear, a fear she could not quite put a name to.

  And then with a rush of something that wasn’t quite relief, she saw her.

  Catherine stood on the edge of a low bluff perhaps ten feet high—a bluff that looked down on a lava outcropping vaguely resembling a human hand, its black fingers poking into the turbulent sea. The wind whipped the waves into wild geysers spuming high into the air. With each gust the sister’s habit flapped and billowed like a Halloween ghost, and in fact Rachel’s first thought was that she looked like a soul ready to leap into the p, the next world.

  Rachel’s fear found its name and she cried, “Sister!” over the roar of the surf.

  In the distance the sister turned, saw Rachel, and smiled cheerlessly.

  Rachel started toward her.

  Sister Catherine turned away sadly, then stepped off the bluff and into the raging sea.

  Rachel screamed, running so fast she could b
arely take in air. At the edge of the bluff she saw the sister bobbing in the frothing surf between jagged, unforgiving rocks like the teeth of the wicked Namakaokaha'i.

  Rachel knew this spot, knew the water was deep enough that the fall, at least, would not kill anyone. She leaped in after her friend, plunging into high winter waves.

  Once submerged, she fought against the treacherous current and kicked herself upwards. Her wet clothes slowed her ascent, but finally her head broke the surface—only to be immediately inundated again in the spray of a crashing wave. She could scarcely find enough air to breathe.

  Through eyes stinging with salt she saw Catherine, less than ten feet away, but unlike Rachel the sister was making no effort to resist the buffeting waves. Rachel swam toward her, but the swells slapped her back and she lost two feet of headway for every foot she gained. She watched helplessly as Catherine was thrown up against a huge lava rock and lost to sight amid an explosion of surf.

  Rachel took in the biggest gulp of air she could and dove underwater. Here below the stormy surface it was a little calmer, but the currents were still perilous.

  Up ahead she saw one of the sister’s legs jutting at an odd angle into the water, a plume of blood trailing from it. Rachel mustered every bit of strength she had, got halfway there, broke surface briefly to take in more air, then dove under again.

  The sister’s leg floated in a red haze ahead of her.

  When she thought she was close enough Rachel propelled herself to the surface and up to Catherine’s side.

  The sister appeared to be semiconscious and Rachel grabbed her just as a wave in turn grabbed them, lashing the women against a rock. Rachel twisted her body to take the brunt of the impact; it knocked the breath from her, but somehow she managed to hold on to Catherine. Gathering her strength in the brief pause between waves, Rachel swam for shore with one arm, the other holding tenaciously onto Catherine. The waves battered them, but though aching and bleeding Rachel was able to reach the tip of one of the smaller lava fingers poking into the sea. She waited until the tide ebbed away from them, then pushed Catherine up and onto the tiny promontory. Once she was perched there, however precariously, Rachel pulled herself up as well.

  Rachel took in ragged breaths of air as the waves impotently pounded the rocks around them. The scrape of the lava stone on Catherine’s face roused her from her stupor, and she looked around her for the first time.

  “Oh, God,” she whispered.

  Rachel cradled her in her arms. “How do you feel?”

  With each breath Catherine felt a sharp stabbing pain in her side. “I . . . think I broke some ribs.”

  “Your leg’s banged up pretty good too. Let me take a look.” She raised Catherine’s sodden skirt and saw that her right leg was swollen, bloody, and projecting at an unnatural angle from her hip. Rachel winced.

  Now Catherine noticed, for the first time, Rachel’s own injuries: bruised arms and legs; an array of bleeding cuts; a swollen, battered foot.

  “Oh, no,” she said through sudden tears. “Rachel, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry!”

  Rachel held her as she wept, stroking her wet hair as Catherine had once stroked the young Rachel’s.

  Within a few minutes they heard the clatter of wagon wheels above them and Rachel shouted for help. She was rewarded, moments later, by the appearance of Emily on the precipice, a look of pallid shock on her face.

  “Jesus Christ! What happened!”

  Before Catherine could speak Rachel called up, “I slipped and fell into the water! The sister jumped in after me. Her leg’s broken!”

  Leilani, similarly horrified, appeared next to Emily. “Hold on, stay there. We’ll carry you out!”

  As Emily and the others scrambled down the bluff, Catherine started to say something but Rachel pegged her with a look that said Don’t. Catherine’s eyes reflected gratitude and guilt. Rachel’s foot throbbed. She took a deep breath and sighed.

  “If you don’t mind my saying, Sister,” she said wearily, “this has been a hell of a bad day.”

  D

  r. Goodhue confirmed that Catherine had indeed broken a pair of ribs, one of which had come uncomfortably close to puncturing a lung; and that her right leg was fractured in four places, including an especially messy impacted fracture of the tibia where the ends of the broken bones had been repeatedly driven into one another. He set the bones and applied a cast up to her hip, but since he’d had to remove some of the splintered bone he told her there was a good chance her right leg would always be slightly shorter than her left. Catherine assured him she was just happy to be alive. Which, oddly enough, she was.

  Rachel had fractured only the metatarsus in her left foot but her lacerations, abrasions, and contusions had to be carefully cleansed of bits of rock and coral, then disinfected with carbolic acid. Goodhue insisted she stay overnight in the infirmary, and that night, as she and Catherine lay in adjoining beds, Catherine told her everything: her father’s death, her mother’s suicide, her anger at God leading to a moment of dark impulse. “I honestly don’t know how it happened. One moment I was just thinking about jumping, and the next I was doing it.” She hesitated. “Do you know what I was thinking when I jumped?”

  Rachel shook her head.

  “I thought, ‘I’m coming, Mama. I’m coming, Papa. Wherever you are, your Ruthie’s coming to join you.’ ” Her eyes filled with tears again. She looked away and for a minute the only sound in the ward was the sister’s weeping.

  Then Rachel said, “Mama used to tell me that God saw everything—knew everything—even what was in our hearts.”

  “Yes,” Catherine agreed, “especially there.”

  “So He’d know, wouldn’t He, what kind of pain was in your mama’s heart when she took that medicine?” She didn’t wait for a reply. “So why can’t you trust that God knows enough not to blame her for what she did?”

  Catherine thought about that. “Well, whether He does or not . . . even attempting suicide is a sin, so perhaps my salvation is as uncertain as my parents’. That should shame me, but . . . I find it oddly comforting.”

  Rachel smiled. “You’re not disappointed I saved you?”

  “Oh, Lord, no! I can never thank you enough, Rachel. I’m just sorry that I endangered you. You pulled me from the abyss . . . and an awfully soggy one at that,” she added with a laugh.

  After a moment, Rachel said with faintly disguised amusement, “Your real name is Ruthie?”

  Now Catherine smiled. “Ruth. Only my father ever called me Ruthie.”

  “So why aren’t you Sister Ruth?”

  “It doesn’t work that way. The church gives us our religious names. Actually priests can choose their own but nuns take what they’re given.”

  They fell into a companionable silence and Rachel’s thoughts drifted back to how this day began, to Haleola lying so still in her bed, and to the empty house that awaited her tomorrow.

  Now Rachel said softly, “I miss my makuahine,” and Catherine heard again the voice of the little girl she first met fifteen years before. The cast on her leg prevented her from reaching all the way over to Rachel, but she held out her bruised right hand and Rachel reached the rest of the way with hers, their fingers knitting together.

  “I miss mine and yours,” Catherine said, and they stayed like that, holding each other’s hands, until sleep claimed their battered bodies and exhausted souls.

  W

  hen her cast came off eight weeks later Sister Catherine’s right leg was, as Dr. Goodhue had feared, slightly shorter than the left; she would have some small difficulty walking for the rest of her life. She didn’t mind. It was a minor disability compared to that which most residents of Kalaupapa had to bear, and if anything it helped her feel their pain more acutely; she no longer felt at such a great remove from them, as in her own small way she came to understand the tyrannies of weakened flesh.

  “And perhaps,” Father Maxime said, “it comforts you that your body now reflects the damage
you feel in your soul.” She allowed as he might be right.

  Rachel’s injuries healed more quickly, and even the pain of going home to an empty house subsided after a while, though a day did not go by that she did not feel her aunt’s absence. Word that her third skin snip was negative buoyed her spirits, as did the news, relayed by Goodhue, that the Board of Health had asked the legislature to pass a statute legally recognizing the parole of patients whose leprosy had gone inactive. Rachel’s hopes would now have the weight of law behind them.

  Then, on a Thursday evening in March, something nearly as remarkable happened for the people of Kalaupapa.

  That night, virtually the entire population of the settlement—a thousand residents from both Kalaupapa and Kalawao—gathered out under the stars for a purpose none of them knew. When they arrived at the grandstand overlooking the baseball diamond, they saw two visitors setting up what looked like a large sheet of white canvas near home base. Rachel took a seat in the second row and thought she had an idea of what it might be: the canvas, the odd mechanical contraption some distance away, reminded her of the magic lantern shows she had seen as a child in Honolulu. Was that what this was?

  Once the grandstand was filled, Superintendent McVeigh settled the crowd and handed the proceedings over to a dapper haole in his forties, who stood in front of the canvas sheet.

  “Good evening. Aloha.” He smiled without self-consciousness at the maimed, misshapen audience gazing at him with such curiosity. “My name is R. K. Bonine. I’ve been asked by the Board of Health to introduce something new to Kalaupapa—something many of you have probably never seen, but which we hope will soon become commonplace here.

  “I’m a photographer, from a family of photographers. My father documented the tragedy of the Johnstown Flood, while my brother Elias has recorded, in stereographic photographs, the scenic glory of the American West. But my work differs a little from theirs: I take moving pictures.” He smiled at the blank looks he saw in the crowd. “Some of you, the more recent arrivals, may know what I mean by that. As for the rest—well, why don’t I just show you?”