Moloka'i

by Alan Brennert

  And as it made its way toward the steamer in the distance Rachel knew now how her mother must have felt some twenty years before; knew the loss and longing that would nest forever in her heart; and knew that without question this was the worst, the most unbearable kapu of all.

  PART FOUR

  'Ohana

  Chapter 17

  1928–29

  S

  he woke early these days, rising before dawn to take the dogs—Hku and Setsu, brother and sister terrier mixes—for their morning constitutional. When Rachel’s neuritis was bothering her, she just walked the dogs around the block, pausing for Hku to pee on every scrap of vegetation he encountered (his sister, more dignified, merely sniffed). When Rachel was feeling better, as she was today, she took them to the beach, where the dogs played tag with the waves as the sky brightened above Papaloa.

  She kicked off her sandals and sat on the sand, keeping one eye on the dogs and one on a surfer paddling out toward the wavebreak. His surfboard was longer than most, a good fifteen feet, and narrower as well; but the real surprise came when he stood up on it. It floated higher on the water than the redwood boards Rachel had ridden, and it was fast, skimming the waves as if shot from a gun. More maneuverable, too—the surfer leaned to the right and the board responded smoothly, sliding up and down the face of the wave—and when the young man emerged from the water Rachel decided to get a closer look.

  “Nice board,” she told him, as Hku and Setsu orbited, casting cautious eyes on the stranger.

  “Thanks.” No more than eighteen, he brushed wet hair from his eyes and regarded her dubiously. “You surf?”

  “Not anymore,” Rachel said wistfully. “Can I look?”

  He handed it to her, flinching a little when he saw her right hand, contracted now into something like a question mark. He was still young and unblemished, but Rachel did not envy him that; she envied him his board!

  She didn’t try to lift it but just rotated it, its tip pivoting in the sand: “It’s so light!”

  “Yeah, ’counta it’s hollow.”

  “Hollow! You lie!”

  “Friend of mine back in Honolulu, Tom Blake, made it for me. Gonna get a patent, make plenty more.”

  “You new here?”

  He nodded. “Been on Moloka'i a week.”

  Rachel was bemused to see a small fin at the aft of the board. “Never seen one of these before either.”

  “Helps you turn. Makes it more stable. Want to try?”

  Rachel would have liked nothing better, but shook her head sadly. “Can’t,” she said. She lifted one of her bare feet, showing him how her toes were clawing, being resorbed into her body. “Shoots the hell out of your balance.”

  The young man winced.

  Rachel gave him back the board. “Mahalo.”

  “No mention,” he said. Hku and Setsu in tow, Rachel headed back to town, sobered by the queasiness in the surfer’s eyes. Most of the time she was barely conscious of her affliction; leprosy, like age, had crept up so stealthily she had scarcely noticed it. Hers was a borderline, or mixed, case of the disease, but tending more toward the neural form: her skin was still largely free from ulcers, the bacillus infiltrating instead her ulnar and peroneal nerves. It had taken the fingers from one hand and most of the toes from her feet, but this seemed a small sacrifice compared to the disfigurement and short life that was the lot of so many here. She was learning to write passably well left-handed, and as for surfing, well, she told herself that, too, was small sacrifice.

  At home she left the dogs to play outside as she padded into the house. The small moon of a clock face told her it was half past six; she sat on the edge of the bed and looked fondly at her sleeping husband. Kenji had a mixed case of leprosy as well, but in him it tended more toward the “lepromatous,” or skin-related. His eyebrows were long gone, and he’d had scads of tumors excised from his skin, removed these days with powdered blue stone or carbon dioxide “snow.” More serious was the damage that couldn’t be seen: a year ago the muscle that controlled his right eyelid became paralyzed and he found he could no longer close that eye. Left untreated this could have cost him half his sight, but Dr. McArthur caught it in time and arranged for him to go to Kalihi for corrective surgery. All the surgeons could do, though, was to suture the eyelid into a fixed position—leaving the eye open enough to permit some degree of vision, yet closed sufficiently to keep out irritants which might damage the cornea.

  So even as Kenji lay dozing his right eye remained half open: one eye squinting up at the ceiling, the other staring into a dream. Rachel didn’t know how he was able to fall asleep that way but Kenji assured her he’d had plenty of practice when the eyelid wouldn’t close at all.

  Slowly, now, his other eye opened.

  “Morning,” he yawned, his one eye perpetually drowsy.

  “Morning.” Rachel lit an oil lamp, there still being no electricity in private homes at Kalaupapa. Kenji glanced at the little wind-up clock. “I should get up.”

  Rachel slipped back into bed, snuggling close. “Why?”

  He smiled. “I don’t know; work?”

  “Don’t worry about being late. Confidentially? I’m sleeping with the manager.”

  “Ah,” Kenji grinned, “so you are,” as his mouth found hers and her arms wrapped around him, and the failings of their flesh were of no moment, their bodies sufficient to the need. And the need was as strong as ever.

  It was starting to rain when Kenji tardily opened up the Kalaupapa Store, management of which had been his these past five years. He was still being paid far less than a nonpatient would have received—pennies for every dollar he should have gotten. But his earnings had helped defray the cost of his “wasted” education, as he insisted on calling it, though not one word of thanks had ever come from his family in Honolulu. When he had gone to Kalihi for eye surgery, and he was back on O'ahu for the first time in fifteen years, no one had even come to the hospital to visit him. After that he stopped sending money home. “This is home,” he said simply, and never spoke otherwise again.

  Most days Rachel worked as Kenji’s assistant manager at the store, but Thursday was her day at Bishop Home, now a part-time position she’d returned to out of loyalty to Sister Catherine. She hurried through the rain to St. Elizabeth’s Convent, still haunted by the absence of Mother Marianne, who had died in August of 1918—just two weeks before Rachel received word that Henry Kalama had passed away at the Seaman’s Home in Honolulu.

  Inside it was obvious Bishop Home had not aged gracefully. The winter squall pelted the roof, which leaked like a colander: the newer drips wept slowly into shallow porcelain bowls while ones of long standing streamed into buckets. The floorboards were decrepit and dangerous, and drafts blew in around the edges of windows. Dormitories that had been nearly new when Rachel was a girl were now woefully inadequate, but lack of funds prohibited anything more ambitious than a yearly whitewashing. The whole settlement, for that matter, was feeling its age, even before the retirement of Superintendent McVeigh and Dr. Goodhue three years ago.

  As Rachel entered Catherine looked up from the bed she was stripping. “I think,” she said with trademark wryness, “we have more waterfalls in here today than on the pali.”

  Rachel glanced up at the ceiling and said, “Why don’t we just tile the floor and call this a shower?”

  “No money for tile,” Catherine quipped.

  But though Catherine’s spirit remained unbroken, at fifty-six the physical cost Moloka'i had exacted on her was apparent: with hair more gray than brown, a furrowed brow and weathered hands, hers was a palpable exhaustion born of hard manual labor and the death of children.

  Wielding a mop in her good hand, Rachel scrubbed down the already damp floor as Catherine gathered linens. They finished just as the current crop of Bishop girls escaped from school—as rambunctious a crew as Rachel and her friends had been. Thirteen-year-old Alice was the class rebel, who upon arriving at Bishop Home had stubbornly refused
to wear the wine-colored uniform. “Yow, those ugly,” she announced, and no amount of coercion could get her to put them on. Catherine figured to bide her time until Alice grew out of her old clothes; what she didn’t know was that Rachel had already conspired to buy Alice new ones, when needed, from the Sears catalog.

  —she’s thirteen now, too—day after tomorrow—

  Rachel pushed the thought away and helped Catherine with the laundry. By late afternoon the storm had largely passed but the voluptuous waterfalls cascading down the pali were still gorged with rain—some feeding pools of water so clear Rachel could see every pebble on the bottom. Admiring them from the lnai, Rachel was surprised to see Catherine, just minutes ago peppy and joking, now slumped at the far end of the porch, staring at a slip of paper.

  “Sister? What’s wrong?”

  Catherine looked up. A cataract of pain clouded her eyes. “My . . . sister Polly has died,” she said.

  “Oh, Catherine. I’m so sorry.”

  Catherine appeared uncomfortable. “Thank you, but . . . truthfully, Polly and I were never close. She could be selfish and bull headed—so could I, I suppose—and we always seemed to clash at the least provocation.”

  “You don’t hold the patent on that,” Rachel noted.

  Catherine glanced at the cascades spilling down the pali. “We used to play in falls like these. In Enfield Park.” She smiled at whatever memory Rachel couldn’t see and said quietly, “I always thought I’d get back someday, to visit her and Jack, but . . . too late now.”

  “For your sister, maybe,” Rachel said. “But what about your brother?”

  “You see how much work there is to do around here. How can I possibly leave?”

  Rachel shook her head, bemused. “Catherine, don’t you think you deserve a vacation every thirty years or so?”

  But the sister didn’t take the question in good humor. “We’re wasting time,” she said shortly. She slipped the letter into the pocket of her robe. “Let’s get back to work, shall we?”

  Rachel let the subject drop. She’d learned by now that when Catherine got her nose out of joint about something, there was no getting it back in place easily.

  At the end of the day she headed for Kenji’s store. It was nearly closing time, and as usual several customers dawdled near the cash register, shooting the breeze. Kenji listened patiently from behind the counter as the men held forth today on the subject of aviation, specifically the first nonstop flight from the mainland to Hawai'i—successfully undertaken by Army pilots last year, but overshadowed by the deaths two months later of ten fliers racing in an air derby from Oakland to Honolulu.

  Garrulous old Abelardo was of the opinion that commercial air flight between Hawai'i and the mainland would never be feasible. “The Army can afford it, but who else gonna pay dat kine money to sit in a little tin can when Matson Line give ’em a stateroom for half da price?”

  “Abe, you fulla shit.” Gus’s reedy voice was somewhat at odds with his thickset frame. “Them big dirigibles gonna be goin’ back ’n forth to San Francisco by ’35,’36.”

  “You’re both full of it,” said Walter, twenty-two and bespectacled, “I got a copy of Modern Mechanix that shows the underwater tunnel they’re gonna build between New York and France. They’ll do the same here, lay it down right next to the telephone cable.” This was met with hoots of derision from pretty much everyone in the room.

  “I think it’s gonna be blimps,” Rachel said. “We got so much hot air right here they’ll never run out of fuel.” This sparked much laughter but did not, as she’d hoped, end the discussion; they just started debating which of them was the bigger blowhard. Rachel would have kicked them all out long ago, but Kenji, far more patient and accommodating, let the conversation sputter to a natural halt before announcing, “Okay, boys, that’s all for today.”

  “Kenji, I forget, I gotta buy butter.”

  “Abe, you’ve been here five hours and you only just remembered what you came for?”

  “Eh, dese jackasses make anybody lose track of time.”

  “You don’t need us for that!” Gus taunted.

  “Eh, go to hell!”

  “Yeah, and he’s gonna go in a dirigible!”

  The friends left in a fading burst of laughter, Abelardo staying long enough to use part of a ration ticket to pay for a pound of butter, and at last Kenji was able to post the CLOSED sign on the front door. Rachel asked, “They been here all day, or does it just feel that way?”

  “Only a few hours. Evelyn Yamada was in before that, showing off pictures of her new granddaughter in Hilo. And Mack and Ehu, of course, arguing politics.” He opened the till and counted the day’s receipts, consisting primarily of ration tickets. “Father Peter dropped by, buying cigarettes and trying to pretend they were for someone else; he was quite chatty, but with that fractured English of his I’d be hard-pressed to tell you what we discussed.”

  “Don’t they all drive you pupule—crazy?”

  He shrugged as he closed out the cash register. “What can I do? Back in Honolulu they’d go to a saloon, have a few beers: but here, where else can they go?”

  “I’d tell them where to go.” Rachel switched off the electric lights granted the store but not their home. “But you, you’re a good man.”

  Kenji locked the door behind them. “No, I’m just pupule.” He slipped an arm around her waist and they began the short walk to their cottage on Kaiulani Street.

  T

  he SS Hawaii landed the next morning and Kenji was up early to pick up the weekly consignment for the store. Rachel had been a salaried employee for as many years as Kenji had been manager, and took her duties seriously. Even with her crabbed hand and neuritis she insisted on helping stack crates of canned goods and ten-pound bags of rice, flour, and cereal onto a rickety old hand truck, which Kenji then pushed the short distance to the store.

  While Kenji was gone, Rachel took inventory of the remainder of the consignment. Nearby, a clerk from the superintendent’s office—a bookish, middle-aged bureaucrat named Diedrichson—supervised the unloading of other provisions for the settlement. As always Diedrichson seemed to relish the opportunity to throw his weight around, waspishly snapping orders to workers who then transferred the supplies to either the storehouse or the Provision Issues Room.

  After counting all the crates of canned vegetables, Dinty Moore beef stew, and other nonperishables, Rachel glanced at Diedrichson’s manifest and couldn’t resist a little dig. “Why bother taking inventory? You already know what’s there. Same as last week. Same as every week.”

  Diedrichson seemed a bit ruffled by the question. “And what’s wrong with that?” he said. “There are places in this world where people would be damned grateful to know that come hell or high water there’ll be food on the table next week.”

  “What’s wrong,” Rachel said, not for the first time, “is that the food allowance for patients hasn’t changed in twenty years. Seven pounds of beef, twenty-one pounds of poi, per week, per person. God forbid they send us a few vegetables. I like beef and poi as well as anyone, but every week? Fifty-two weeks a year, for twenty years?”

  “That’s what ration tickets are for. So if somebody doesn’t want beef or poi, they can get rice or canned fish or whatever they want from your store.”

  “If we have it in stock. My point is, shouldn’t somebody at the Board of Health maybe think about what residents here need in 1928, and not what they needed in 1908? I bet you kkuas aren’t eating what you ate twenty years ago!”

  Diedrichson looked at her a moment as if processing a foreign and generally unwanted thought—then, to her surprise, his frown up-ended itself into a smile.

  “No. I suppose we’re not.” In a oddly confidential tone he added, “Look. If you want a little variety . . . maybe we can do something about that.”

  Startled by this sudden flexibility, Rachel said, “What do you mean?”

  “Maybe if we got to be better friends,” Diedric
hson suggested, “I could get you some of the kkua rations.”

  Rachel was too taken aback to respond. And just then Kenji returned from the store and Diedrichson hastily went back to his inventory. “Something wrong?” Kenji asked.

  “No,” Rachel said, red with embarrassment, “nothing.” She loaded more supplies onto the hand truck and studiously avoided making any further eye contact with Diedrichson.

  At the store, after she and Kenji finished shelving the new supplies, Rachel sat down to open a package—specifically addressed to her—that had come in on the same steamer. Inside a cardboard box, buried in a nest of newspaper like her long-ago matryoshka, lay a smaller box containing a set of combs and hair brushes made of “Pyralin,” a new kind of opalescent plastic that gleamed like mother of pearl.

  “They’re very pretty, aren’t they?” Kenji said.

  Rachel smiled. “Yes.”

  “A good choice,” he said.

  Rachel nodded.

  That night she placed the combs and brushes on a bed of tissue paper inside a gift box. She touched the smooth pearly surface of the combs, ran a finger over the brushes’ stiff bristles, then carefully swaddled tissue paper around them and closed the lid. She wrapped the box in white gift paper, tied it with pink ribbon and a big pink bow, and admired her handiwork a long moment. Then she opened the bottom drawer of her dresser, placed the gift box inside, shut the drawer and went to bed.

  In the middle of the night she woke, looked at the clock, and saw it was past midnight. Thinking of that night now thirteen years ago, Rachel found herself weeping. She tried to stop, tried at least to mute her sobs so Kenji wouldn’t hear, but in moments he was awake and she was being enfolded in his arms, and her pain was his as well.

  “I just wonder, sometimes,” she said after a while, “what she looks like now. How tall is she? How long is her hair? Does she braid it, or does she wear it long and loose? I’d give anything I own for a picture. Just one picture.”