Moloka'i

  Then when she had cried herself out, she picked herself up and stumbled on.

  She felt like a storm cloud so sodden with rain it might burst at any moment. She had no idea how much time had gone by: one stretch of road looked no different than the last. For one awful moment she wondered if she were walking in a circle; could she even tell?

  And then up ahead she finally saw something other than rocks, mud, and bramble.

  On her left a narrow trail, splitting off from the main road, cut through the lantana. Rachel rushed toward it, nearly slipping again in her haste; she stood at the trail head, looking up. . . .

  Into more darkness. All she could make out of the trail was the next three or four feet. She tried to think: when they’d left Uncle Pono’s, she remembered, the wagon had traveled a little ways on a smaller road before turning onto the main road to Kalaupapa. So if this was that small road . . . it might lead straight to Uncle Pono’s house!

  She stood there, trying to decide which way to go. The wind cut her, and it was starting to rain again.

  Papa, where are you? You’d know which way to go!

  She felt another lick of rain on her cheek . . . then turned onto the narrow trail.

  After several minutes she realized the trail was sloping gently upwards, and the rain grew so heavy that she was forced to take refuge in the surrounding lantana scrub. The shrubbery did afford some shelter, but it also gave off a vile smell; the leaves were prickly and painful, and when the rain eased up after ten or fifteen minutes she was only too happy to continue up the trail.

  The higher she climbed, the bigger breaths she seemed to take. Now she started to notice debris scattered along the trail: a broken calabash; a spent shell casing from a rifle; a bandanna, caught on the branch of a shrub, flapping like a flag in the wind. She stared joyously at the bandanna—just a few more minutes and she’d be safe and warm in Uncle Pono’s house, she knew it!

  She trudged ahead. Then, all at once, she stopped.

  It was still as dark as the inside of her mouth, she could barely see a foot in front of her . . . but some sense other than sight caused her to halt.

  She wasn’t alone. Standing there, staring blindly into the dark, she heard the unmistakable sound of someone, something, drawing breaths from the same air as she.

  Frightened, she spun around, probing the darkness for some glimpse of . . . what? She didn’t know, and something stopped her from calling out.

  The breaths she heard were deep and ragged, and they were growing louder. Or maybe closer.

  She didn’t move, but heard the rustle of lantana scrub and then the squishing of soft mud being trod underfoot.

  She searched the dimness ahead . . . and saw, low to the ground, a pair of shiny little eyes flashing in the dark.

  Rachel screamed.

  The eyes jumped forward, out of the darkness.

  She leaped aside as a wild pig three feet tall charged her, black and horrible. It snorted ferociously, its snout missing her by inches as it stomped past.

  Rachel ran shrieking up the trail, her feet barely finding purchase on the slippery ground, her heart pounding as she imagined the pig snapping its jaws at her heel.

  In truth the animal gave up the chase much sooner than Rachel stopped running. When she finally realized that the pig wasn’t pursuing her, she paused a moment to catch her breath—then for good measure kept on running.

  She was startled when, a minute later, the trail suddenly came to an end: it sloped upward, culminating in a rocky lip of some kind. She had reached the top.

  But the top of what?

  Cautiously she climbed the last few feet of the slope and steadied herself on the edge of whatever it was she had found. She felt a little dizzy, as she had on Tantalus; she peered down but saw largely darkness.

  Largely, but not entirely. Below and to the right, no more than a hundred feet away, there was a light.

  A light burning in a house. And beside the house a horse was tied to a post, and beside the horse . . .

  Rachel could barely contain her excitement. She charged over the lip and called out, called for help.

  In a moment she needed it: carelessly she tripped over a tree root and went tumbling down a slope. Something sharp raked her left leg as she fell, and the thick trunk of a wiliwili tree rudely stopped her descent, the collision knocking the breath from her. She lay splayed against the tree, blood pooling beneath her leg, too dazed to even think about getting to her feet, and she wept out of humiliation as much as pain.

  After a minute she heard the sound of leaves being crushed underfoot—the pig again? She was relieved when she saw the figure of a man towering above her, dim against the tangled darkness of tree limbs and night sky. Then he spoke, in a harsh rasp, like paper being torn: “What in hell?” Rachel wasn’t scared, she’d heard voices like his at Kalihi; the leprosy tumors sometimes grew in a person’s throat, giving the voice a husky edge.

  He stooped down to get a better look at her. He was an old man, older than Haleola, his bald head brown as a coconut, his face a mass of tumors. “ ’Ey,” he said, “what do we got here?” He looked at her querulously and smiled. “How is it a pretty little girl like you comes falling out of the sky onto an old wiliwili tree?”

  He moved closer. Rachel flinched and shrank back.

  “It’s okay,” the man said, as gently as his raspy voice would allow, “I ain’t gonna hurt you.” He saw her injured leg, reached out and touched it tentatively. “Nasty cut,” he said. “I fix you up, all right?”

  He slid his hands underneath her back. Rachel let out a little yelp of apprehension as he scooped her up in his arms. He didn’t seem very strong, though, and his arms quaked as he lifted her; Rachel was afraid he might drop her, but he managed to carry her over to the tiny grass house, lit from within by the flicker of a paraffin lamp. Inside, there wasn’t much furniture, just a mattress, a chair, a table.

  Winded by the exertion, the man rested a minute, coughing a horrible racking cough. When he recovered he had her take off her wet clothes, all except her underwear; wrapped her in a dry towel; then had her step out of the underwear as well. He laid her on the mattress and said, “Now let’s take a look at that leg.”

  Judiciously he examined the gash below her knee and then wet a rag with water from a jug. “This is gonna hurt a little.” It did. Rachel winced as he swabbed dirt and blood from the cut, then bandaged it with a clean rag.

  Finally working up the courage to speak, Rachel said quietly, “Thank you.”

  “You can thank me tomorrow,” the man said, a comment Rachel didn’t understand. “You got a name?”

  Rachel hesitated, then told him her name.

  “I’m Moko,” he said. “Get some sleep. We’ll talk some more tomorrow, okay?”

  He covered her with a worn, dirty blanket and she suddenly realized how good it felt to lie down, to be warm and dry. She closed her eyes and fell quickly asleep.

  W

  hen she woke the lamp had gone out and hazy light filtered through the windows. The storm had passed, and she was alone. Her clothes, draped across the foot of the mattress, had been washed and dried in the sun. She slipped them on, and not long after, her rescuer entered the house, carrying an armful of papayas.

  “You hungry?” The moment he said it Rachel realized she was ravenous. She consumed three whole papayas and washed them down with a big glass of milk. She thanked him for breakfast, then asked, “Do you know my Uncle Pono?”

  The old man thought a moment. “Pono . . . Pono . . . he live in Kauhak?”

  She told him her uncle lived in Kalawao, and for a moment Moko seemed surprised. He rubbed his chin thoughtfully and finally said, “Pono . . . sure, I know him. He don’t live too far away.”

  Rachel was delighted. “Can you take me to him?”

  “Better see if you can walk first, okay?” At his urging she got up, and though her leg was bruised and achy, she was able to walk around the room without difficulty.
r />   “Good,” he said. “Let’s go outside.” She followed him out the door and into the cool morning.

  Rachel’s mouth opened in amazement.

  They were standing fifty feet below the upper rim of an enormous crater, shaped almost like an egg, two thousand feet long by fourteen hundred feet wide. It wasn’t simply a barren, rocky pit, but a green thriving world bursting with color and life. The slopes and floor of the crater were thickly forested: wiliwili trees blooming with bright red tiger’s-claw flowers; ironwoods carpeting the ground with feathery needles; Chinese banyans and Christmasberry trees, the last of their ripe red fruit spoiling on the ground. Nearly the entire bowl of the crater was overrun with some sort of vegetation. A handful of houses clung to its upper slopes, each surrounded by terraces of taro, sweet potato, sugar, beans, whatever would grow. Most houses had a horse outside; a few, like Moko’s, boasted a cow grazing in a field.

  In a hushed voice Rachel asked, “What is it?”

  “Kauhak. Used to be a volcano. Long time ago.”

  Fearfully, Rachel said, “Is it gonna blow up?”

  Moko laughed, a laugh that degenerated into a cough. “No, no, not any more. See, in here, we’re protected from the winds, the crops flourish. Lotta work, though.”

  He stooped down again to look her in the eye. “Now, you remember what I told you yesterday? How you could thank me today?” Rachel nodded uncertainly. “Well, you can do it by helping me carry some water from my well to the house. Can you do that?”

  “But I want to see my Uncle Pono,” Rachel said.

  “You will. But first you do this for me.” When she didn’t respond he pointed down to the center of the crater floor, where hazy sun gleamed off the mirror of a small lake. “You see that lake down there? They say it’s bottomless, that it goes straight down to the center of the earth. Thousands of years ago the people who used to live here buried their dead in that lake. That’s how this part of the island got its name. Makanalua—that means ‘the given grave.’ ” He added, “And that lake is where they put little girls who didn’t do what they were told.”

  Rachel gasped. She tried to imagine falling all the way down to that lake—so much more frightening than her little spill down the crater’s slope! Terrified, she meekly followed Moko to the well, quite a distance away. After he pulled up each pail of water Rachel dutifully hauled it back to the house, where she poured it into a cistern before returning to get the next bucket.

  By the time she had carried back ten pails of water she was growing tired and thirsty, and Moko let her drink some of the water and decided they had enough of it. “Can I see my Uncle Pono now?” she asked, but the old man said, “Gotta eat first, don’t we?” and led her to a vegetable patch where he showed Rachel how to harvest taro by grasping the stems below the heart-shaped leaves and yanking the purple tubers from the ground. “Do you know how to make poi?” he asked. Rachel nodded, enthusiastic at the thought of eating some. “I watched my Mama!” So they spent several hours cleaning the taro, boiling it in a pot under a fire out back, then slicing and pounding the cooked taro. It was a hard work, and Rachel’s hand began to cramp from so much kneading.

  But the poi tasted good, and when Moko asked her if she’d ever milked a cow, Rachel was taken with the novelty of the idea. It was fun for a while, but her hands were throbbing again at the end of it. She inquired again about Uncle Pono, but the sun had long since vanished below Kauhak’s western rim and shadows were swallowing up the crater. “We go tomorrow,” Moko promised, and as the green slopes around them were consumed by darkness Rachel felt exhausted, confused, and a little bit afraid.

  T

  he old wagon’s right front wheel was mired in the mud again, and for the fifth time that morning Catherine and Leopoldina got out, rolled up their sleeves, and applied shoulders to the cart until it rolled free. Their backs ached and their habits were caked with mud, but Catherine told herself this was no less than she deserved. She had owned up to her unforgivable behavior to Rachel, and after a stinging reproof Mother had sent her and Leopoldina in search of the missing girl. All morning it had been like this: they would travel half a mile along Damien Road, the wagon would lurch into the muck, and they would have to get out and push the cart free. On those rare occasions they were actually moving, they scanned the roadside for some trace of Rachel. At one point they were forced to stop a few yards east of the small trail leading to Kauhak Crater; then, after extricating their wagon wheels, they moved on.

  They reached Kalawao by noon and went directly to Pono’s house; but before Leopoldina could knock, Catherine heard something like a gasp from inside.

  She stayed Leopoldina’s hand, nodding toward a window. They approached it and Catherine took a quick peek inside.

  Pono was in bed, his arms wrapped around Haleola, who lay moving atop him; both were as naked as the day God brought them into the world. Catherine flushed scarlet, but before she could stop her Leopoldina stepped up for a look—her eyes at once resembling silver dollars.

  Pono’s color was not good, his gasps not entirely passionate. “I’m sorry,” he said between breaths, “just . . . just a—”

  Haleola looked worried. “Pono, are you sure—”

  “I want to,” he said, a desperate need in his voice.

  Catherine yanked Leopoldina away from the window and back to the wagon.

  “Well,” Leopoldina said.

  “I didn’t see Rachel inside,” Catherine said, “so I see no reason to interrupt them, do you?”

  “No no,” Leopoldina agreed.

  “Maybe Brother Dutton can help us.”

  They hurried over to the Baldwin Home for Boys, soon to be abandoned in favor of a new one under construction; scattered around the unpainted frame of the new buildings were dozens of eucalyptus saplings Brother Dutton had planted. The tall, bearded lay brother—come to Moloka'i to serve penance for sins he never spoke of, though it was said to involve alcohol and a failed marriage—quickly organized house-to-house search parties. One burly resident, apparently fearing discovery of his home-brewed liquor, refused the brother entrance to his home; Dutton stared him down calmly. “I dug graves for hundreds of men in the Civil War,” he told the man, “and I’ll likely as not bury you too. In the war I sometimes had to do a hasty job, and I imagine some of those old bones are still being gnawed over by dogs. I’d hate to be that sloppy again, but you never know, do you?” The man rubbed the bones of his wrist and stepped back to admit Dutton.

  But there was no trace of Rachel anywhere in Kalawao, and Catherine finally had to relay that disturbing news to Haleola. Pono was too frail to be of any help, but Haleola joined the two sisters as they expanded their search to include the coastline. Catherine would make her way to the edge of bluffs and peer down at sharp lava teeth fringing the maw of the sea. Each time she prayed she would not see Rachel’s tiny body impaled on the lava rocks or floating on the raging surf. She didn’t, but by evening she was overcome with guilt and fear—the fear that Rachel lay injured somewhere, or dying, was perhaps already dead, and it was all her fault. Leopoldina returned to St. Elizabeth’s to inform Mother Marianne, but Catherine remained at Kalawao, spending the night at Baldwin Home, where she prayed fervently for Rachel’s safe return and then cried herself asleep.

  M

  oko made a hearty breakfast, frying some eggs from his henhouse and serving them with more ripe papayas. They were out of milk and so he asked Rachel to milk the cow again; when she was finished she asked if they could go to Uncle Pono’s now. Moko said soon, soon, but soon somehow never came and she spent the morning on her knees, picking and cleaning sweet potatoes, taro, and carrots from the garden.

  By now Rachel was angry, and when Moko told her they would be washing clothes she refused and snapped, “I want to see my Uncle Pono!”

  “After we do wash, okay?”

  “No!” she shouted. “I want to see him!”

  The old man’s gnarled hand lashed out and struck her acro
ss her face. Not a slap like Sister Catherine’s, but a blow that staggered her, sent her tumbling to the ground.

  She lay there, blood trickling from her split lip, gazing up with terror at her attacker. “You forget what I said?” he barked at her. “About the lake, about what they do to little girls who don’t do what they’re told?”

  He grabbed her by the scruff of the neck and, with more strength than she had thought he possessed, lifted her three feet into the air. He shook her roughly, pointed her in the direction of the gleaming lake below. “You want me to throw you down there? Would you like that?”

  Rachel screamed and cried, begging him not to do it.

  “How long you think it’d take for you to fall? Long time, I bet. Let’s see, eh?”

  He swung her back as if preparing to cast her like a stone into the ocean. “No! No!” she shrieked. “Please!”

  But instead of hurling her to the crater floor he just tossed her aside—to land, messily, in the taro patch.

  She cowered as he stood above her. “Ready to do wash?” he asked.

  She nodded mutely.

  She spent the next hour drowning Moko’s dirty old clothes in a tub of soapy water, then rinsing, wringing them out, and laying them down to dry in the sun. When she was done he inspected her work and with a sunny smile declared, “Very good! Nice job! You hungry?” Cheerful again, he gave her more poi and let her drain two glasses of milk, and after her midday meal it was time to hoe and weed the garden.

  But the exertion of lifting and terrorizing Rachel had taken its toll on Moko; he seemed weak, fatigued. And as he sat in the shade of his house, watching Rachel work the garden, he actually dozed off.

  Rachel stared at him, her heart pounding as she contemplated this sudden opportunity. She looked up at the rocky crown of the crater rim, only a hundred feet above her, and then at Moko, slumbering not ten feet away.