Moloka'i Read online

  Later, Henry’s brood gathered round as he handed out the presents he never neglected to bring home from faraway ports. They were modest gifts, befitting a seaman’s wages, but Papa had uncommonly good taste and always chose something to charm and delight them. Dorothy was presented with a pretty string necklace beaded with dozens of small, imperfectly shaped pearls, each plucked from the ocean floor by native divers in Rarotonga. Sarah was thrilled to receive a pair of silver earrings from New Zealand, though the silver in them probably wouldn’t have filled a tooth. Kimo got a box of Chinese puzzles; Ben, a picture book from Tokyo, and another from Hong Kong.

  Rachel knew what Papa had brought her, of course. What he always brought her: a doll from one of the countries he’d visited. Already she had a sakura-ningyö, a “cherry doll” from Japan; a pair of Mission Dolls from China; and a rag baby from America, purchased on Papa’s last trip to San Francisco. What would it be this time? Rachel could hardly contain herself as Papa pulled the last gift box from his suitcase.

  “And this one’s for Rachel,” he said, “from Japan.”

  Rachel was crestfallen. She already had a Japanese doll! Had Papa forgotten? Trying not to betray her disappointment, she tore the lid off the box, stripping away the tissue paper enfolding the doll. . . .

  That is, assuming it was a doll. Rachel stared in confusion at the contents of the box, which appeared to be . . . an egg. A large wooden egg, no neck, a fat body, a bundled scarf and winter clothes painted on—Humpty Dumpty, but with a woman’s face. Hilda Dumpty?

  Rachel was surprised at how heavy it was, and entranced by its odd appearance. “What is it?” she asked.

  Her father scolded, “But you’re not done opening the present!” He pointed at the egg. “Hold the bottom with one hand, the head with the other. Then pull.”

  Rachel did as she was told—then jumped as the egg popped apart, and a second egg fell out! This smaller one resembled a man with a painted-on farmer’s outfit; but when Rachel began examining it her father wagged a finger: “Still not finished!” Rachel pulled apart the second doll to discover yet a third one, a young girl-egg this time.

  Everyone laughed at the expression on Rachel’s face as she kept finding littler and littler dolls growing younger and younger, seven in all—the last an infant in painted-on swaddling, made of solid wood.

  “They call ’em matryoshka,” Papa explained. “Nesting dolls. From Russia.”

  “But you said they were from Japan.”

  “I got ’em in Japan. Japan’s next door to Russia. You like?”

  Rachel beamed. “They’re beautiful, Papa.”

  That night Rachel carefully weighed where to place the nesting dolls on the coffee-crate shelf that held the rest of her collection. Farthest to the left was the cherry doll, a beautiful Kabuki dancer in a green silk kimono, holding a tiny fan. Next to her were the Chinese Mission dolls: a yellow-skinned amah, or nurse, carrying a little yellow baby on her back. And lastly, the rag doll from America, a cuddly infant with a sweet moonlike face, which Rachel sometimes took to bed with her. She remembered then what Papa had said about Japan being “next door” to Russia and she placed the matryoshka beside the Japanese cherry doll, then stepped back to admire her collection.

  Behind her, she heard a familiar voice. “She fits right in, eh?”

  Rachel turned. Papa was standing in the doorway. “Your Mama says you got to say your prayers and get your sneaky little hide into bed.”

  “Sarah’s not in bed yet.”

  “She will be after her bath.”

  “Will you sing me a song first?” This, too, was old custom between them.

  Papa smiled. “Prayers first.”

  Rachel hurried through her evening prayer, then eagerly jumped into bed. Papa closed the bedroom door, pulled up a chair beside her, and sat. “So, which one you want to hear?”

  Rachel thought for a moment, then announced, “ ‘Whiskey Johnnie.’ ”

  Her father glanced furtively toward the closed door, then back to Rachel. “How ’bout ‘Blow the Man Down’?”

  “ ‘Whiskey Johnnie’!” Rachel insisted.

  Papa sighed in surrender. He leaned forward in his chair and in a deliberately low voice began to sing:

  “Oh whiskey is the life of man

  A Whiskey for my Johnnie.

  Oh I’ll drink whiskey whenever I can

  Whiskey, Johnnie.

  Bad whiskey gets me in the can—”

  “A Whiskey for my Johnnie!” Rachel joined in. Together they sang two more stanzas, until Rachel burst out giggling and Papa, also laughing, patted her on the hand. “That’s my chantey girl,” he said with a grin. He kissed her on the forehead. “Now go to sleep.”

  Rachel’s eyes drooped closed. Snug beneath her woolen blanket, she slept soundly that night—dreaming she was on a schooner plying the sea, bound for the Orient, destined for adventure.

  C

  loser to home, Fort Street School was a big one-story house surrounded by a whitewashed picket fence, arbored by the leafy umbrellas of tall monkeypod trees, with a long porch and white wooden colonnade that would not have looked out of place in southern Virginia. The morning after Papa came home began as usual with the students reciting the Lord’s Prayer, then in chorus singing “Good morning to you” to their teacher; after which they opened their Tower grammars and followed along with Miss Wallis as she recited the alphabet. But in what seemed like no time at all another teacher, a gray-haired Hawaiian woman, appeared in the classroom doorway.

  “Miss Wallis? A moment, please?” Normally quite unflappable, today the older woman looked wan and shaken, almost as if she were about to cry. “Students, I have a . . . an announcement. It is with great sadness that I must tell you that our king”—her voice broke as she said it—“King Kalkaua . . . is dead.”

  She seemed about to elaborate—then, unable to go on, simply said, “Under the circumstances, Principal Scott has dismissed classes for the day.” And she hurried on to the next classroom, the impact of her news rolling in wave after wave through each grade of the primary school.

  Students slowly filtered out of the schoolhouse. Rain was falling in a gray mist, the skies seeming to weep along with the people Rachel encountered in the streets. Stunned and grieving, they gathered in small groups from which rose a spontaneous, collective wail unlike anything Rachel had ever heard before—a deep woeful cry that seemed to come from a hundred hearts at once. Its raw anguish frightened her, and she ran home to find both Mama and Papa in tears as well. Rachel, for whom death was still just a word, tried to comfort them, though not quite understanding why: “It’s all right, Mama. Don’t cry, Papa.” Dorothy took her daughter in her arms and wept, and soon Rachel began to feel that she should be crying too, and so she did.

  The king had left in November on a goodwill trip to the United States—Hawai'i’s most important trading partner and the homeland of most its resident foreigners—and for weeks his subjects had been awaiting his return aboard the USS Charleston from San Francisco. But this morning the city’s official lookout, “Diamond Head Charlie,” spotted the Charleston steaming toward Honolulu with its yards acockbill, its flags at half-mast . . . which could mean only one thing. The news was telephoned from Diamond Head and quickly spread across the city like a shadow across the sun; the festive banners and bunting put up in anticipation of Kalkaua’s return were quickly torn down and replaced with solemn black crepe.

  The king’s body lay in state in 'Iolani Palace for the next fifteen days, during which time nearly every resident of Honolulu, and many from the neighbor islands, came to pay their respects. The Kalamas were six among thousands who queued up outside the palace for hours so that they might be able to briefly file past their monarch’s casket.

  The king had succumbed, it was now known, to a haole sickness called Bright’s Disease. Old-timers in the crowd found this a melancholy echo of what had befallen Kamehameha II and his queen, both of whom had died after contracting mea
sles on a trip to England. The first of the haole diseases had sailed into Hawai'i on the smiles and charm of Captain Cook’s crew: syphilis and gonorrhea. Others soon followed: cholera, influenza, tuberculosis, mumps, diphtheria. One outbreak of smallpox alone took six thousand lives. Hawaiians, living in splendid isolation for five centuries, had no resistance to these new plagues that rode in on the backs of commerce and culture. Before Cook’s arrival the native population of Hawai'i was more than a quarter of a million people; a hundred years later, it had plummeted to fewer than sixty thousand.

  Kalkaua’s people were mourning more than the passing of their king.

  No one understood this better than Henry, who in his lifetime had now seen the deaths of four kings. As he and his family finally entered the palace they heard choirs chanting dirges, the ritual laments echoing throughout the vast ornate halls. But in the flower-decked throne room, a dignified silence prevailed. Flanking the coffin were twenty somber attendants holding royal staffs that looked to Rachel like spindly palm trees sprouting feathers instead of fronds. The casket, carved of native woods, was adorned with a silver crown and draped with a golden feather cloak, bright as sunlight. As the Kalamas approached it they now saw, behind thick plate glass, the familiar whiskered profile of David Kalkaua, his head pillowed, looking as if he were merely asleep.

  Tears sprang suddenly to Henry’s eyes. He thought of the prophecy—made over a century ago by the high priest Ka'opulupulu, who told the ruler of O'ahu that the line of kings would come to an end at Waikiki, and that the land would belong to a people from across the sea. O'ahu was soon conquered by armies from across that sea—Maui and, later, the island of Hawai'i—and now Henry wondered if he were seeing the other half of the prophecy coming true, if soon there would be an end to the line of kings.

  As they passed by the casket Henry and Dorothy each grazed the tips of their fingers against the glass, until the grief of those behind them pushed them on, and out.

  On the 15th of February, a somber Sunday, the king was finally laid to rest, beginning with a simple Anglican ceremony inside the throne room, as outside a long line of citizens, again including the Kalamas, stood coiled around the palace. At the conclusion of services a long procession of mourners left 'Iolani Palace on a solemn march to the Royal Mausoleum in Nu'uanu Valley. In years to come Rachel would remember only a few of these hundreds upon hundreds of marchers: the torch bearers representing the symbol of Kalkaua’s reign, “the flaming torch at midday,” now quenched; the king’s black charger, saddled backward, the horse’s head bent low as though it too understood grief; pallbearers carrying the king’s catafalque, flanked by two columns of brightly plumed standard bearers; and the carriages bearing his widow, Queen Kapi'olani, and his sister Lili'uokalani, now Hawai'i’s first reigning queen. The moment the king’s casket left the palace grounds the air was shaken by the guns of the battleships Charleston and Mohican in the harbor, firing a cannonade in salute, along with a battery emplacement atop Punchbowl Hill. At the same instant, church bells all across the city tolled at once. Rachel clapped her hands to her ears; the noise was almost too much to bear, but she would never forget it, its violence and its majesty. And when the last official members of the cortege left the palace grounds, the procession was joined by those dearest to the late king— his subjects. Hundreds of ordinary Hawaiians who stood twined around the palace now took up the rear of the cortege, a human wreath slowly unfurling itself as the procession wended its way into the green hills above Honolulu.

  Rachel understood only that death was a kind of going-away, as when her father went away to sea; but since her father always came back she could not imagine the king would not as well. And so as his casket receded into the distance she raised her hand and waved to him—as she did her father when he boarded his ship and it sailed out onto the open sea, disappearing over the edge of the world.

  T

  hat moment came, as always, too soon. Papa was home only six weeks before he had to ship out again, this time for San Francisco and, after that, South America. But because he spent so much time away from his children, Henry always did his best to cram six months’ worth of activity into the breathless space of one or two, taking them fishing for shrimp in Nu'uanu Stream or riding the waves at Waikiki. The latter had to be managed with stealth and discretion, since Mama had accepted the missionaries’ proscription against surfing, seen as a worthless, godless activity; Papa would spirit the children away on some pretext, recover his big redwood surfboard from its exile at his friend Sammy’s house, then, one child at a time, paddle out beyond the first shorebreak and instruct them in the ancient art of “wave sliding.”

  Another day Papa packed everyone up in their rickety old wagon and took off up a winding six-mile road to Mount Tantalus overlooking the city. The road meandered through bowers of stooped trees bent low over the dirt path, the foliage at times so thick it seemed they were driving through a tunnel of leaves, the air sweet and loamy. At a lookout high above the city they sat and ate a picnic supper; Rachel peered down at the green V of the valley, at the doll’s houses of Honolulu spread out below that, and at the long sweep of coastline from Diamond Head to Kalihi Bay. Thrilled and amazed that she could see so much all at once, she gazed out at the thin line separating blue ocean from blue sky and realized that somewhere beyond that were the distant lands her father knew—the lands of cherry dolls and matryoshka, moonfaced rag dolls and little yellow amahs.

  The day he left, the whole family accompanied Papa to the harbor—Rachel up front in Mama’s lap, Ben, Kimo, and Sarah riding in the back of the lurching wagon. Papa tied up at the Esplanade, his children putting on a brave face as they escorted him back to the SS Mariposa, all of them quietly determined not to cry.

  But almost as though someone were taking their secret thoughts, their hidden grief, and vocalizing it, there came—from the pier immediately ahead—a terrible, anguished wail. It was not one voice but many, a chorus of lament; and as the cry died away, another promptly began, rising and falling like the wind. It was, Henry and Dorothy both knew, not merely a wail, but a word: auw, Hawaiian for “alas.” Auw! Auwwayy! (Alas! Alas!)

  It sounded exactly like the cries of grief and loss that Rachel had heard the day the king had come home. “Mama,” she said, fearfully, “is the Queen dead, too?”

  “No, child, no,” Dorothy said.

  Moored off Pier 10 was a small, decrepit interisland steamer, the Mokoli'i. A distraught crowd huddled behind a wooden barricade, sighing their mournful dirge as a procession of others—young and old, men and women, predominantly Hawaiians and Chinese—were herded by police onto the old cattle boat. Now and then one of the people behind the barricade would reach out to touch someone boarding the ship: a man grasping for a woman, a child reaching for his mother, a friend clasping another’s hand for the last time.

  “Ma'i páké,” Kimo said softly.

  “What?” Rachel asked.

  “They’re lepers, you ninny,” Sarah admonished. “Going to Moloka'i.”

  “What’s a leper?”

  Someone in the crowd threw a flower lei onto the water, but contrary to legend, it was not likely to ever bring any of these travelers back to Honolulu.

  “They’re sick, baby. Very sick,” Mama explained. Rachel didn’t understand. The people didn’t look sick; they didn’t look much different than anyone on the other side of the barricade.

  “If they’re sick,” Rachel asked, “why isn’t someone taking care of them?”

  No one answered her; and as that word, leper, hung in the still humid air, Dorothy dug her fingers into Rachel’s shoulders and turned her away from the Mokoli'i.

  “Come on. Go! Alla you, go!” Henry and Dorothy shepherded their children away from the pier, away from the hapless procession marching onto the grimy little steamer, away from the crowd that mourned for them as though they were already dead; but they couldn’t escape the crowd’s lament, the sad chorale which followed them like some plaintive ghost
, all the way to the Mariposa.

  Auw! Auwwaay! Alas, alas . . .

  Chapter 2

  1892

  W

  aimnalo Plantation, twenty miles up the twisting windward coast from Honolulu, lay spread in a horseshoe valley at the foot of the imposing Ko'olau Range—high jagged peaks with faces like those of worried old men, deep vertical furrows worn by the passage of time and water. Thousands of acres of taro, maize, and sugarcane fanned out from the base of the mountains, the property of a half-Scottish, half-Hawaiian nobleman; cradled among the fields were the sugar mill, ranch buildings, and laborers’ camps, the latter segregated by race.

  It was suppertime in the camps, and the smell of baking bread and roasted pork, of cabbage and sweet potatoes and fresh fish, hung in the air around the big brick communal ovens. Just as pungent was the smolder of sugarcane as lunas—overseers—supervised a rare afternoon fire, burning away the sword-shaped leaves to harvest the cane itself. Children raced and played, weaving among women cooking and men, their backs aching and their hands coarse, returning from a long day in the fields.

  The young man in the brown suit and hat walked alongside but apart from the weary column of field hands; his collar, cuffs, the crease in his pants were as crisp as a new dollar bill. He walked briskly, but not so briskly that he didn’t have time to smile at little keiki or give a friendly nod to women as they pulled steaming loaves of bread from the ovens. No one failed to smile back, less from aloha than fear.

  He stopped at one of the small plantation cottages, a well-kept house painted forest green with white trim and squatting on a raised slatted foundation several feet off the ground. He climbed the steps to the tiny porch, knocked on the door. It was a few moments before the knock was answered, and when the door opened he faced a short, stocky woman squinting nervously at him: “Yes?”