Moloka'i

by Alan Brennert

  There was silence a long moment.

  “Tell us again about the eyes,” someone said, and so she did.

  I

  f most spirits were lighter these days at Kalaupapa, Gabriel Crossen’s were not. Reports of his courageous shipmates aboard the Nevada—weathering a hail of enemy fire as they struggled to get their ship clear of the harbor—plunged him into a foul depression. War was raging outside, friends were dying, becoming heroes, and he was denied the chance to take his place alongside them. His death, when it came, would be far from the scene of battle: a sickly, anonymous end of no great moment or valor.

  Though all liquor in the territory had been banned by the military government, Crossen had no trouble finding enough of it to try and deaden his reignited pain and anger. Once more Rachel and Kenji heard the sounds of shattering glass from next door, or as on one summer night had their sleep broken by a guttural curse, followed by a soft wet sound and a woman’s cry.

  Kenji immediately went for the police, and in minutes constables were rapping on Crossen’s door. “Open up!” a burly officer ordered, Kenji and Rachel a few paces behind. When no one answered he bellowed, “Nice door. Gonna be firewood in a minute if you don’t open it!”

  Finally the door opened to reveal a disheveled, obviously pie-eyed, Crossen. “What is it!” he snapped, his indignation compromised by the slur in his voice.

  The constable shouldered him aside and entered to find empty whisky bottles strewn about and a subdued Felicia wrapped in a towel, her left eye swollen and a cut above it bleeding. “What happened, Miss? Are you all right?”

  Felicia nodded and told them, none too convincingly, that she’d fallen and hit her head. “I’m just clumsy, ’ey?” She laughed, but her attempted gaiety made Rachel sick.

  Despite pleas from Rachel and the police, Felicia would not change her story. Crossen looked smug, right up until the moment the constable announced he was citing the haole for possession of alcohol, drunkenness, and “disturbing the quiet of the night.” Crossen was grabbed none too gently and propelled out of the house; he glared at Kenji and Rachel, then was squeezed into a car and escorted to the Kalaupapa jail, where the sheriff showed him to a tiny cell in which he ignominiously spent the night.

  Thereafter he was more circumspect about his drinking, but the drinking didn’t stop, nor the occasional cry from Felicia—quickly stifled and later denied. Rachel and Kenji never failed to call the police, but Felicia continued to protect her lover; though on more than one occasion enough evidence of drunkenness was found to incarcerate Crossen. After several such incidents the military provost from Kaunakakai sentenced Crossen to a week in jail, which sobered him up for nearly an entire month; after which he again fell off the wagon, and the cycle repeated itself.

  More than once Rachel sought Felicia out, begging her to leave Crossen. But the ma'i pk was flowering in the girl’s system and her lovely features were becoming its misshapen petals; she was afraid no one else would ever want her. “When he’s hitting you he’s lashing out at the disease he hates,” Rachel told her. “He won’t keep you around much longer.”

  “He loves me.” Felicia seemed to cling to the words. “He says he’s sorry, and he loves me.”

  “It won’t stop, Felicia, until you leave him.”

  “He loves me,” she said, and left Rachel instead.

  Finally, on a warm still night in January, Rachel and Kenji awoke to a curse.

  “Stupid Portagee bitch!”

  Next came the sound of harrowed flesh. And like a man going to war, Kenji calmly got out of bed, pulled on his trousers, and slipped on his shoes. “That’s it,” he said, and something in his tone chilled Rachel.

  “I’ll call the police,” she said.

  “Yes, that’s worked so well in the past.” Kenji zipped his pants; shook his head. “Men like Crossen,” he said coldly, “understand only one thing.”

  Rachel got out of bed. “Kenji, please, don’t do this.”

  “Then what do I do? Just lie here and listen to her whimper? Hope to God that he doesn’t kill her one of these days? Do we just sit here and listen as he murders her?”

  In her uncertain silence they heard the crack of Crossen’s hand and a wail of pain from Felicia, and then Kenji was out of the house and down the front steps and onto Crossen’s porch, Rachel close behind. He didn’t knock, just pushed open the door and barged inside.

  Over Kenji’s shoulder Rachel saw Felicia lying on the floor, face-down in a pool of her own blood. Crossen was standing above her, kicking her in the side with his foot. Her body convulsed, turning half over with the force of his kick. “Get up!” he was screaming at her. “Get—”

  Kenji moved faster than Rachel had ever seen him—he was at Crossen’s side in three quick steps. With his left hand he grabbed the haole’s shirt, yanked him around, and drove the fist of his right into Crossen’s startled face. Rachel heard the crack of snapping bone and saw blood spout from Crossen’s nose. Crossen staggered back into a wall; Rachel ran to Felicia and helped her to her feet.

  Crossen quickly regained his footing, staring at Kenji with cold fury. “You Japs are good at sneak attacks.”

  “And you’re pretty good at beating up women.”

  Crossen lunged at him, his whole body—younger and less ravaged than Kenji’s—driving into his opponent like a truck. Kenji lost his breath, felt a rib crack, burning in his side as he fell backwards onto a table. Crossen was suddenly on top of him, hammering him with blows to the head; it was all Kenji could do to raise his arms in a futile attempt to block the punches. Through blood and sweat he looked up and saw Crossen’s face, transcendent with rage, ecstatic with hate.

  He’s going to kill me, Kenji thought, almost outside of himself. He had no doubt of it.

  Then Rachel was grabbing Crossen from behind, the fingers of her good hand digging into the haole’s left eye, popping it like a grape. Her wet fingers found the hard bone of his eye socket.

  Crossen screamed and lashed out. The flat of his hand dropped Rachel like a stone. As she fell she saw Felicia rush past her and out of the house. Please bring help was all she could think as she struggled to remain conscious.

  As he saw his wife fall, Kenji’s pain seemed to fall away, too; he got to his feet and delivered a hard right cross to Crossen’s jaw. Blood was pouring from Crossen’s gouged eye, but he still gave as good as he got, driving his fist into Kenji’s bruised and battered face.

  Rachel looked up to see Kenji falling not two feet away, his body turning as it dropped, head canted to one side, forehead slamming into the doorjamb.

  She would never forget the sound.

  She would never forget the blood, spurting from the wound in a torrent.

  She would never forget.

  She crawled to her husband’s side even as constables took the porch steps two at a time and rushed inside. An officer grabbed Crossen roughly but all Rachel saw, all she cared about, was the face looking up at her, the head she now cradled in her lap. Kenji was unconscious but she spoke to him anyway, whispering over and over, “I love you, I love you, don’t go . . .” She stroked his cheek with her hand, imploring him to stay, telling him how much she needed him; but by the time Dr. Fennel arrived in a mad rush, Kenji was no longer breathing. Her husband’s sutured eye looked up at her, open in death as it had been in sleep, as Rachel’s tears fell on his face and commingled with his blood: the last thing they would ever share.

  Chapter 20

  1943–48

  T

  he bright red lacquered torii gate—Kenji used to joke that it always looked to him like a garish monument to the value of π—welcomed mourners through its ceremonial arch and into the tiny one-room temple. Erected in 1910 as a social hall for the settlement’s Japanese population, the building soon took on a religious function as well, as a site of weddings and worship for Kalaupapa’s Buddhists. The number of guests now crowding inside strained its modest capacity. There wasn’t a person in town who h
ad not known and liked the manager of the Kalaupapa Store, with one grim exception; and many were gathering to pay tribute to him.

  Rachel greeted each visitor warmly but the weight of the past few days was apparent on her. Yet despite the strain, she was glad she’d decided on a traditional Buddhist wake. Kenji’s body—resting in an open casket surrounded by white lilies—had lain in the spare bedroom once occupied by Leilani, a glum Hku lying nearby the coffin, standing a last watch over his master. Rachel had gone in now and then to bring an offering of food or drink, to touch his face or say some private words to him. The presence of her husband’s body in the home they’d shared made it somehow easier to accept his death, much as her preparation of Haleola’s body had done years before.

  But her grief was still vast, and her anger so fierce and raw it frightened her. Had she owned a gun she would have long since marched into the Kalaupapa jail and shot Crossen dead with neither a moment’s hesitation nor a single regret. She’d been prepared to lose Kenji to leprosy, but not to this. Not to anger and hatred—a hatred which had infected her in turn, for she was possessed by an incendiary fury which she could not imagine would ever be extinguished.

  Now Kenji lay here in the temple—behind a candled altar bearing his kaimyo, his death name, in Japanese characters—as mourners made offerings of incense and a priest chanted a stra over the body, and one person after another stood to offer heartfelt eulogies. David Kamakau spoke of finding and losing a brother in Kalaupapa; Mack and Ehu and Abelardo called the store more of a home than the ones they lived in; other customers simply told of Kenji’s generosity with his time, his efforts to find and order certain items for them, favorite foods or little luxuries which obviously meant a great deal to them. One young woman told of how as a child she had returned a cloth doll, chewed and shredded by her dog, that she’d purchased at the store. Kenji saw it was beyond repair and ordered her a new one, then told her how the Japanese believed that dolls had souls, and when they were no longer able to be loved they needed to be given proper burials, so their doll-souls could be put to rest. He placed it in an old shoe box, making sure its head faced north, as was proper; lit some incense; chanted a brief stra; and then he and the girl buried it beneath a pandanus tree.

  Rachel had never heard this story before; Kenji, typically, had not thought to tell her. And when it was her turn to speak Rachel rose and said simply, “My husband thought he’d given up his career when he came to Kalaupapa. But listening to all of you today, I see how wrong he was. He had a career, a valuable one. A noble one.”

  She went to the casket and touched her fingers to Kenji’s cold lips, then walked through a mist of tears back to her seat beside Sister Catherine, where her strength finally failed and her legs buckled. Catherine caught her and held tight to her hand as the ceremony concluded; and soon the funeral procession was on its way to the Japanese/Hawaiian cemetery along the windswept coast.

  As Kenji’s casket descended into the grave the awful finality of it engulfed Rachel like a wave, and with an intensity of pain far exceeding any she had ever felt from leprosy. She wanted to jump into the open grave, to let the earth swallowing Kenji swallow her as well; she already felt dead in everything but name. What remained to be taken from her? She longed to be enfolded, welcomed, into the earth—to breathe no more, love no more, hurt no more.

  She thanked everyone for coming, accepted their condolences, but her heart longed for Kenji and her thoughts were about nothing but being with him. When the mourners returned to their automobiles to form a daisy-chain winding back toward town, Rachel stayed behind to watch the last shovel of earth patted into a freshly-turned mound. And when she finally turned and walked away, it was not toward town, but north, to Papaola Beach.

  There she sat and contemplated the constancy of the surf: waves crashing onto the sand, then receding with a sigh, the alternating roar and hush a kind of stra she found comforting. Deep in her grief the ocean spoke to her, consoled her, reminded her of the covenant they’d entered into years before, one Papa had explained to his little girl the first time she’d ventured into the ocean. The sea, he told her, was always in command, humanity an invited guest; those who did not respect that did not return. Rachel had ridden the waves—had lived or died—at the sea’s pleasure. She had accepted its primacy, had given herself over to it time and again—so why not now?

  Without quite realizing it, Rachel slipped off one shoe, then the other. She started to rise . . .

  But before she could, she heard someone say, “Hi, mind if I join you?” and turned in annoyance to see Sister Catherine lowering herself onto the sand. How long had she been there, watching?

  “Actually,” Rachel said, “I’d prefer to be alone just now, if you don’t mind.”

  Uncharacteristically, Catherine did not oblige.

  “Ah. Too late,” she said with a sigh. “Once these old bones are down I’m afraid it takes a while to get them up again.” She settled in on the sand, smiling the pleasant smile reserved for those occasions when she was being particularly stubborn. Rachel frowned.

  “In that case maybe you should start getting up now,” she suggested, just as stubbornly.

  “Oh, I have plenty of time. Don’t you?” Catherine looked out at the crashing surf, the tide lapping up the beach like a beckoning friend. “The ocean is at its most seductive, don’t you think, when it’s most dangerous?”

  Rachel sighed. “Catherine, what are you doing here?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. Returning a favor?” The elderly sister studied her a moment, then asked gently, “So how are you feeling?”

  “I’m just grand. Why do you ask?”

  Catherine nodded, understanding the bitterness. “After my father died a friend of mine tried to comfort me, and I made the mistake of telling her, ‘You have no idea what I’m going through.’ She took great offense at this—an acquaintance of hers, someone she’d worked with, had died in a shooting accident. ‘Death is death,’ she said.”

  “Spoken,” Rachel said, “like someone who’s never lost anyone they loved.”

  “And yet there’s some truth in it too. All the girls I’ve watched die, over the years—I barely knew some of them, but still they haunt me. Their deaths diminish me—perhaps not as much as my father’s, but they do diminish me.

  “I don’t presume to know what it’s like, Rachel, losing a husband. But I knew Kenji and I grieve for him, and for you, even if I can only imagine what you’re feeling.”

  Rachel looked away a moment, then heard herself say, “I want to kill him.”

  “Crossen?”

  Rachel nodded. “I’d do it in a minute if I could. Does that shock you?”

  “No. Grief and anger doesn’t shock me.” Catherine paused. “Rachel, do you remember that day at the convent when we saw the old biplane? Remember what I said?”

  Rachel laughed without amusement. “I don’t even remember what I said.”

  “ ‘Who can doubt the presence of God in the sight of men whom He has given wings.’ I recall that so precisely because I’ve had time to consider my error.” She smiled. “God didn’t give man wings; He gave him the brain and the spirit to give himself wings. Just as He gave us the capacity to laugh when we hurt, or to struggle on when we feel like giving up.

  “I’ve come to believe that how we choose to live with pain, or injustice, or death . . . is the true measure of the Divine within us. Some, like Crossen, choose to do harm to themselves and others. Others, like Kenji, bear up under their pain and help others to bear it.

  “I used to wonder, why did God give children leprosy? Now I believe: God doesn’t give anyone leprosy. He gives us, if we choose to use it, the spirit to live with leprosy, and with the imminence of death. Because it is in our own mortality that we are most Divine.”

  The foaming waves retreated down the beach as tears welled in Rachel’s eyes.

  “I don’t want to be strong,” she said softly. “I want to be weak and be with Kenji.�
�

  “If you’re weak, you won’t be with him.”

  “Yes? Who will I be with, then? You? Your parents?” The words, out in a rush, were instantly regretted.

  Catherine was unfazed. “Possibly,” she admitted, adding with a sly smile, “So do you really want to risk purgatory with me there harping at you about it for all eternity? Is that your idea of a good time?”

  Rachel laughed—ruefully, but she laughed.

  “When you put it that way,” she said, “hell, no.”

  Catherine smiled; stood. “Well put. Hell, no.”

  As she gave Rachel a ride home in the convent’s old jalopy she asked, “Are you going to stay on at the store? I’m sure you could have the manager’s job, if you asked.”

  “No, I don’t want to be there without Kenji. Maybe I could work more hours at Bishop Home?”

  “We’d be happy to have you.”

  When they reached Kaiulani Street Catherine offered to stay, but Rachel shook her head. “I’ll be all right.” Catherine hugged her, promised she’d come see her tomorrow, then drove off. Rachel walked up the path to her home and tried not to see the empty house, Crossen’s house, next door.

  Hku, dozing on the porch, barked a welcome and jumped up on her, his paws muddying her mourning dress; she’d never been happier to see him. “Hey, keiki,” scratching his gray head, “you hungry?” He followed her in and she opened a can of dog food, but within minutes she regretted having sent Catherine away. Everywhere she turned there were reminders of Kenji: his reading glasses half-open on an end table; a store ledger he’d been writing in that night; the pipe he would occasionally smoke, its bowl upturned, a slight fragrance of cherry tobacco clinging to the air. In these small things she felt his absence, not his presence, and it was suddenly too much to bear. She sank onto the couch, an aching vacuum inside her sucking the air from her lungs. She hung her head and wept fiercely, the emptiness inside her growing larger, not smaller; she felt as though it would grow so large it would suffocate her just as surely as the sea would have. And when she began to wish that she’d given herself to the ocean after all, she felt a familiar tickle on her face, and looked up to find Hku beside her, licking first her cheek, then her hand. She was certain his brown eyes reflected grief—as when Setsu had died and he had lain by the door for weeks, waiting for his sister to come home—and she wrapped her arms around his neck and hugged him gratefully.