Hawaii

  “Liholiho King. My husband Kelolo is working hard. He is going to buy a ship. Aloha, Malama.”

  When this exacting task was completed, the huge woman heaved a sigh and pushed the letter toward Jerusha and Abner. Then women came in to lomilomi her, and she smiled proudly from the floor as Jerusha said, “I have never known a person to learn as fast as Malama.” When Keoki translated this, his mother stopped smiling and brushed away the lomilomi women, saying, “Before long I shall write to the king of America … in your language … and I shall use all twenty-six letters.”

  “She’ll do it!” Jerusha said proudly.

  “Now, little daughter,” Malama said, “you have taught me well. You must go home and rest. It is Makua Hale who shall teach me now.” Dismissing Jerusha she rolled over on her belly again, propped her chin in her hands, stared at him intensely and commanded, “Tell me about your god.”

  Abner had long anticipated this holy moment, and he had constructed a patient, step-by-step explanation of his religion, and as he began to speak with Keoki’s help, he sensed that the huge woman on the floor was passionately eager to know all that he knew, so he worked with special care, choosing each word exactly and consulting often with Keoki as to its translation into Hawaiian, for he knew that if he could win Malama to the side of God, he would automatically win all of Maui.

  “God is a spirit,” he said carefully.

  “Can I ever see him?”

  “No, Malama.”

  She pondered this for some moments and said, “Well, I could never see Kane, either.” Then she added suspiciously, “But Kelolo has often seen his goddess, Pele of the volcanoes.”

  Abner had sworn to himself that he would not be led down by-paths. He was not here to argue against Kelolo’s miserable assortment of superstitions. He was here to expound the true faith, and he knew from experience that once he started on Kelolo’s gods he was apt to get tangled up in irrelevant arguments.

  “God is a spirit, Malama,” he repeated, “but He created everything.”

  “Did he create heaven?”

  Abner had never confronted this problem, but he replied unhesitatingly, “Yes.”

  “Where is heaven?”

  Abner was going to say that it is in the mind of God, but he took the easier course and replied, “Up there.”

  “Are you certain in your heart, Makua Hale, that your god is more powerful than Kane?”

  “I cannot compare the two, Malama. And I cannot explain God to you if you insist upon comparing them. And don’t call Him my God. He is absolute.”

  This made sense to Malama, for she had witnessed the white man’s superior power and knew instinctively that his god must also be superior, and she was gratified to hear Abner proclaim the fact. On this principle she was ready to accept his teaching completely. “God is all-powerful,” she said quietly. “Then why did he bring the sailors’ pox to infect our girls? Why does he make so many Hawaiians die these days?”

  “Sin is permitted by God, even though He is all-powerful, for it is sin that tests men and proves them in God’s eyes.” He paused, and Malama indicated to one of her many servants that they must keep the flies off the missionary, too, and soft feathers swept his neck and forehead. Although he appreciated the attention, he felt that Malama’s instructions had been an interruption consciously commanded by the woman to provide time for her thinking, so he added gravely, looking directly at the chieftain, “If you continue in sin, you cannot know God.” Pausing dramatically and bringing his face close to hers, he said with great force, preparing the way for the great decision that would later become inevitable, “Malama, to prove that you know God you must put away sin.”

  “Is it possible that the Alii Nui herself is sinful?” Malama asked, for her religion took care of this problem by postulating that the acts of the alii were the acts of gods.

  But she was to discover that in Abner Hale’s new religion the answer was strikingly different. Pointing his forefinger at the prone woman he said firmly, “All men on earth are totally depraved. We abide in sin. Our natures are permeated and corrupted in all parts of our being.” He paused, then fell to his knees so that he would be closer to the Alii Nui, and added, “And because kings have greater power, their sin is greater. The Alii Nui is the most powerful woman in Maui. Therefore her sin is greater. Malama,” he cried in the woeful, desperate voice of John Calvin, “we are all lost in sin!”

  A child cried in one of the surrounding huts, and Malama asked, “Is that baby filled with sin, too?”

  “From the moment that child was born … No, Malama, from the moment it was conceived, it was steeped in sin. It was drowned in mortal vice, horrible, perpetual, inescapable. That child is totally corrupt.”

  Malama pondered this and asked tentatively, “But if your god is all-powerful …” Then she stopped, for she was willing to accept Abner’s earlier answer. She thought aloud: “God has arranged sin to test us.”

  Abner smiled for the first time. “Yes. You understand.”

  “But what will happen, Makua Hale, to that baby if it is not rescued from sin?”

  “It will be plunged into fire everlasting.”

  “What will happen to me, Makua Hale, if I am not saved from sin?”

  “You will be plunged into fire everlasting.” There was a pause in the grass house as Malama shifted her weight on the tapas. Rolling over on her right side, she leaned her jawbone on her right hand and motioned Abner to sit on the tapa near her.

  “What is the fire like?” she asked quietly.

  “It leaps about your feet. It tears at your eyeballs. It fills your nose. It burns incessantly, but you are constantly re-created so that it can burn you again. Its pain is horrible beyond imagining. Its …”

  Malama interrupted, asking weakly, “Once I traveled with Kamehameha to the edge of a burning lava flow, and I stood with him when he sacrificed his hair to appease Pele. Are the fires worse than that?”

  “Malama, they are much worse.”

  “And all the good Hawaiians who died before you came here, Makua Hale? Are they living in that perpetual fire?”

  “They died in sin, Malama. They now live in that fire.”

  The huge woman gasped, took away her right elbow and allowed her head to fall onto the tapa. After a moment she asked, “My good uncle, Keawe-mauhili? Is he in the fire?”

  “Yes, Malama, he is.”

  “Forever?”

  “Forever.”

  “And my husband Kamehameha?”

  “He is in the fire forever.”

  “And that baby, if it dies tonight?”

  “It will live in the fire forever.”

  “And my husband Kelolo, who swears he will never accept your religion?”

  “He will live in the fire forever.”

  “And I will never see him again?”

  “Never.”

  The remorselessness of this doctrine overcame Malama, and for the first time she sensed the truly awful power of the new god, and why those who followed him were victorious in war and could invent cannon that swept away tribal villages. She fell to sobbing, “Auwe. Auwe!” and thought of her good uncle and her great king wasting in fires eternal, and her servants brought cool cloths to ease her, but she brushed them away and continued weeping and beating her huge breasts. Finally she asked, “Can those of us who are still alive be saved?”

  This was the question that had once given Abner most trouble: “Can all be saved?” and it stunned him to hear it coming so precisely from the mouth of a heathen, for it was the touchstone of his religion, and he replied, “No, Malama, there are many whom God has predestined for eternal hellfire.”

  “You mean they are condemned even before they are born?”

  “Yes.”

  “And there is no hope for them?”

  “They are predestined to live in evil and to die into hellfire.”

  “Oh, oh!” Malama wept. “Do you mean that that little baby …”

  “Perhaps.?
??

  “Even me, the Alii Nui?”

  “Perhaps.”

  This awful concept struck Malama with great force. It seemed a lottery of life and death … a god throwing smoothed pebbles into a rock hole … and sometimes missing. But it was the god who missed, and not the pebble, for unless the god had wanted to, he need not have missed. With pebbles he was all-powerful.

  Then Abner was speaking: “I must confess, Malama, that all who slide into evil do so by the divine will of God and that some men are destined from birth to certain fire, that His name may be glorified in heaven because of their destruction. It is a terrible decree, I do confess, but none can deny that God foresaw all things for all men before He created them. We live under His divine ordinance.”

  “How can I be saved?” Malama asked weakly.

  Now Abner’s face became radiant, and his infusion of spirit transferred itself to the weeping woman, and she began to feel in the grass house a consolation that would never depart. “When God foredoomed all men,” Abner said forcefully, “His great compassion directed Him to send to us His only begotten son, and it is Jesus Christ who can save us, Malama. Jesus Christ can enter this house and lift you by the hand and lead you to cool waters. Jesus Christ can save us.”

  “Will Jesus save me?” Malama asked hopefully.

  “He will!” Abner cried joyously, clasping her huge hands in his. “Malama, Jesus Christ will enter this room and save you.”

  “What must I do to be saved?”

  “There are two things required, Malama. The first is easy. The second is difficult.”

  “What is the easy one?”

  “You must go down on your knees before the Lord and acknowledge that you are totally corrupt, that you live in sin, and that there is no hope for you.”

  “I must confess those things?”

  “Unless you do, you can never be saved.” Now the little missionary became once more the stern teacher, for he withdrew his hands, moved away from the prone chieftain and pointed at her: “And you must not only say the words. You must believe them. You are corrupt, Malama. Evil, evil, evil.”

  “And what is the second task?”

  “You must work to attain a state of grace.”

  “I don’t know what grace is, Makua Hale.”

  “When you have honestly confessed your corruption, and when you plead for God’s light, some day it will come to you.”

  “How will I recognize it?”

  “You will know.”

  “And when I have found this … What is the word, Keoki?”

  Her son explained again and she asked him, “Did you find grace?”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  “Where?”

  “On the stone pavement in front of Yale College.”

  “And was it a light, as Makua Hale says.”

  “It was like the heavens opening up,” Keoki assured her.

  “Will I find grace?”

  “No one can say for sure, Mother, but I think you will, for you are a good woman.”

  Malama pondered this for some time, and then asked Abner, “What things have I been doing that are sinful?”

  For a moment Abner was tempted to believe that this was the instant when he must excoriate the evil ways of the Alii Nui, but a more sober judgment prevailed and he restrained himself, saying, “Malama, you learned how to write in only thirty days. It was a miracle. Therefore I think you can perform the greater miracle that awaits.”

  Malama, loving praise and steeped in it since her first days as the Alii Nui, firmed her jaw and asked, “What is required?”

  “Will you take a walk with me?”

  “Where?”

  “Through your land … through the land you rule.”

  Malama, exhilarated by her success in learning, agreed, and summoned her land canoe; but with all the able men in the mountains seeking sandalwood, there were none to man the carrying poles, and Abner raised his first disturbing question: “Why do you allow your workingmen to toil like slaves in the hills?”

  “They’re after sandalwood,” Malama explained.

  “For what?”

  “For Kelolo’s ship.”

  “Is the ruin of a beautiful island worth a ship?” Abner asked.

  “What do you mean, Makua Hale?”

  “I want you to walk with me, Malama, and see the fearful price Lahaina is paying for the sandalwood that Kelolo is seeking in the mountains.” So Malama summoned her maids-in-waiting, and a procession was formed that would, in time, modify the history of Hawaii. The little missionary limped in front, accompanied by towering Keoki. Behind them marched gigantic Malama in a blue and red dress. On her right walked the handmaiden Kalani-kapuai-kala-ninui, five feet tall and two hundred and fifteen pounds, while on the left puffed Manono-kaua-kapu-kulani, five feet six inches and two hundred and eighty pounds. Side by side, the three alii women filled the road as Abner began his perambulatory sermon.

  “A ship at this time, Malama, is merely a vanity. Look at the walls of the fish pond. Crumbling.”

  “What does it matter?” Malama asked.

  “If the fish escape, the people will starve,” Abner said.

  “When the men come back … from the sandalwood …”

  “The fish will be gone,” Abner reported dolefully. “Malama, you and I will rebuild the fish pond.” And he stepped into the mud, calling her after him. Quickly, she perceived what he was teaching and ordered her handmaidens to help, and the three huge women plunged into the fish pond, pulling the back hems of their new dresses forward and up between their legs like giant diapers. Giggling and telling obscene jokes which Abner could not understand—among themselves they called him “the little white cockroach”—the alii mended the breaks, and when they were finished, Abner hammered home his lesson: “The wise Alii Nui commands the fish ponds to be patrolled.”

  A little farther on he pointed to a grass house that had burned to the ground. “Four people died there, Malama. A wise Alii Nui would outlaw the use of tobacco.”

  “But the people like to smoke,” Malama protested.

  “And so you let them burn to death. Since I came to Lahaina, six of your people have burned to death. A wise Alii Nui …”

  “Where are you taking me?” Malama interrupted.

  “To a spot a little farther under the kou trees,” Abner explained, and before long he had Malama and the women standing beside a small oblong of freshly dug earth, and she recognized it immediately for what it was. She preferred not to speak of this little plot of earth, but Abner said, “Beneath here lies a baby girl, Malama.”

  “I know,” the Alii Nui said gently.

  “The child was placed here by her own mother.”

  “Yes.”

  “Alive.”

  “I understand, Makua Hale.”

  “And while the child was still alive, the mother covered it with earth and stamped upon the earth until the little girl …”

  “Please, Makua Hale. Please.”

  “A wise Alii Nui, one who sought grace, would order this evil to be stopped.” Malama said nothing, and the procession marched on until it reached the spot where three sailors were buying whiskey from an Englishman, and on the arms of the sailors were the four pretty girls whose father had paddled them to the Thetis on its arrival. “These are the girls who will soon die of sailor’s pox,” Abner said mournfully. “A wise Alii Nui would outlaw whiskey and keep the girls from going to the ships.”

  They passed the taro patches, rank with weeds, and the little pier with bales of goods from China waiting in the sun and rain. No men were in the fishing boats. When the circuit was at last completed, the little missionary pointed at the platform of stones in Malama’s own front yard and said, “Even at your door you harbor the evil old gods.”

  “That’s Kelolo’s temple,” Malama said. “It does no harm.”

  At the mention of the absent chief, Abner knew that the ultimate moment had come, the one toward which he had been building. He ask
ed Malama to dismiss her attendants, and when they were gone he led the huge chieftain and Keoki to a smooth spot under the kou trees, and when all were comfortably seated he said forcefully, “I have taken you on this walk, Malama, to show you that God appoints a woman His Alii Nui for a reason. He gives you great power so that you may produce great good. More is expected of you than of ordinary people.”

  This made much sense to Malama, for the tenets of her old religion were not markedly different … only the interpretation. If a man was an alii, he was expected to die in battle. A woman alii must appear noble and eat enormously so that she seemed bigger than she was. In all religions there were duties, but she was not prepared for the one which the little missionary was about to propose.

  “You will never enter a state of grace, Malama,” Abner said slowly, “so long as you commit one of the gravest sins in human history.”

  “What is that?” she asked.

  Abner hesitated, and the concept he now had to discuss was so loathsome to him that he rose, drew back a few steps and pointed at the Alii Nui: “You have as your husband your own brother. You must send Kelolo away.”

  Malama was appalled at the suggestion. “Kelolo … why he …”

  “He must go, Malama.”

  “But he is my favorite husband,” she protested.

  “This relationship is evil … it is forbidden by the Bible.”

  At this news a benign light of comprehension shone over Malama’s face. “You mean it is kapu!” she asked brightly.

  “It is not kapu,” Abner insisted. “It is forbidden by God’s law.”

  “That’s what kapu means,” Malama explained patiently. “Now I understand. All gods have kapu. You mustn’t eat this fish, it is kapu. You mustn’t sleep with a woman who is having her period, it is kapu. You mustn’t …”

  “Malama!” Abner thundered. “Being married to your brother is not kapu! It’s not some idle superstition. It’s a law of God.”

  “I know. I know. Not a little kapu like certain fish, but big kapu, like not entering a temple if you are unclean. All gods have big and little kapus. So Kelolo is a big kapu and he must go. I understand.”

  “You don’t understand,” Abner began, but Malama was so pleased with her comprehension of this aspect, at least, of the new god, that she was spurred to action, and she summoned her servants in a loud voice.