Moloka'i

  “No no no,” Hina said. “Friend of mine’s throwing one. In Kaunakakai.”

  There was a long startled silence.

  “Kaunakakai?” said Rachel. “But that’s topside.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “We can’t go topside,” Louisa protested.

  Impatiently Hina snapped, “Hey! Wake up! It’s alla same island! Kaunakakai’s only twelve miles from here.” She rolled her eyes. “Look. Simple. Right after sunset we go up the pali, my friend Luka meets us at the top with a wagon, we go party, be back here by dawn! If we’re lucky, sisters don’t even know we were gone.”

  It was a bold, audacious idea. All of them had occasionally fantasized about escaping, but no one had ever suggested escaping temporarily.

  A suddenly less militant Emily said, “That’s crazy. How do we get up the pali?”

  Excitedly, Rachel pointed out, “I climbed a quarter of the way up once with the sisters! It’s not so hard.”

  “Don’t they have guards up there?” Louisa asked. “With guns and dogs?”

  Francine shook her head. “No more dogs. McVeigh got rid of ’em.”

  “What if they find out at the party that we got leprosy?” Cecelia wanted to know.

  Hina shrugged. “Nobody care.”

  “I don’t know ’bout this,” Louisa said, hesitant.

  “Oh, I forgot,” Hina said acidly, “we’re prisoners.”

  Silence all around. Emily thought a moment, then said emphatically, “Hell we are.”

  B

  y late afternoon on Friday, as soon as it was judged dark enough, Hina led the half-dozen conspirators off the convent grounds and along the curving black sand beach that lay between Kalaupapa and the pali. At the base of the cliffs a thick stand of pandanus trees hid the girls from sight as they started up the narrow trail. Rachel, right behind Hina in the lead, craned her neck to take in the towering face of the pali: from down here it looked alarmingly sheer, relentlessly vertical. But she reminded herself that mail carriers made their way down each week, that even cattle were driven down the trail. How hard could it be?

  Each girl wore her wine-colored uniform and carried a change of clothes in a knapsack slung across her back: the white gowns with pink or blue sashes that Bishop girls were supposed to wear only on special occasions. Well, Rachel thought, this sure qualifies! They joked and laughed as they made their way along the switchbacks that zigzagged up the pali, and the mood was jolly for the first half hour or so. But then the constant to-and-fro of the turns became tiresome, and the trail itself, crumbling a bit with each step, sent loose gravel tumbling onto the girls taking up the rear. Cawing gulls dropped other presents on their heads. Laughter fell into short supply.

  Sometimes the trail was canopied with vegetation; sometimes it clung rather precipitously to the pali. Rachel made the mistake of looking down and felt a jab of vertigo as she realized she was virtually suspended hundreds of feet in the air—and the only thing that kept her from plummeting down was a frangible ledge of earth barely a foot wide in spots.

  Wild goats clung to even narrower ledges above them, and as the goats scuttled back and forth their hooves dislodged more dirt and gravel onto the girls. Soon, the path narrowed even more, and was now decorated by the occasional bleached bones of a cow that had been unsuccessfully herded down. Looking at the carcasses, buzzing with flies, Rachel had a sudden unwanted vision of her body lying pulped at the foot of the pali.

  As they ascended into clouds floating a thousand feet above Kalaupapa, visibility decreased to zero and sprinkles of rain added to their misery. The trail grew muddy and slippery and Emily lost her footing; Rachel grabbed her by the wrist, saving her from joining the cattle.

  Emily got shakily to her feet, nodded gratefully at Rachel. “Thanks.” Then she said to Hina, “Alla same island, huh?”

  Hina just shrugged.

  It was among the longest two hours of Rachel’s life, and except for her journey to Kauhak, the filthiest—by the end of the climb their faces and dresses were caked with mud. But at last they reached the summit and stood on solid rock overlooking the peninsula. And as they gazed down and saw the white and green bungalows of Bishop Home shrunk to the size of pebbles, it occurred to all of them at the same time: they were out. The hold the sisters had over them was gone, left behind like the clouds they had pierced. They could go anywhere, do anything they wanted.

  And what they wanted was to go to a party.

  A padlocked gate was easily surmounted. They climbed over it and hiked through an arbor of trees, emerging into a green meadow grazed by cattle, when they heard a voice.

  “S–Stop!”

  They turned, unsurprised, and saw a young guard in his twenties, startled by this procession of young women with muddy faces. He was holding a shotgun in his right hand but it was pointed at the ground; the thought of aiming it at them seemed not to have occurred to him.

  Hina smiled. “Aloha,” she said cheerfully. The other girls added their greetings as well.

  The guard just stared at them. Occasionally girls from Bishop Home climbed the pali for sport, but not this late in the day and certainly not unescorted by nuns. “What—what are you doing up here?” he stammered.

  “Oh, just goin’ to a social,” Hina said casually. She turned to the others and announced, “We better change.”

  As one, the Bishop girls dropped their knapsacks onto the grass, and began stripping off their purple uniforms.

  Blouses and skirts fell to the ground in heaps. None of the girls was wearing any underclothes, and the young man found himself staring at six unabashedly naked women.

  “No worry,” Hina said as opened her knapsack, “we gonna be back by dawn.”

  Emily passed around a canteen so that each of them could wash up with a little water. “Girl’s gotta look good if she’s goin’ to a social,” Emily winked to the guard. They all took slightly longer than necessary to remove clean clothes from their knapsacks.

  The guard was blushing, but no one saw him turn away either. The girls stepped into clean dresses, adjusted straps, slipped on fresh sandals.

  “Hina,” Rachel asked as she stuffed her dirty uniform into her knapsack, “we change again on the way down?”

  “Sure, sure. Can’t go down in these.” Hina hiked up her skirt, asked the guard, “You be here when we get back?”

  He made no response at first, then slowly nodded.

  “We’ll see you later then, ’ey?” Hina signaled the girls to follow, blowing the guard a kiss as they passed; he watched, nonplussed, as the girls sauntered up the trail to Kala'e. As they rounded a bend Rachel looked back and saw that the guard was still staring. She waved at him. After a moment he waved back.

  They ran laughing through pastures scattered with guava trees, finally reaching the government road where Hina’s friend Luka (alerted by a clandestine telephone call) waited in a rickety old wagon. And then they were off, the wagon bouncing over roads rougher than anything Rachel had known on O'ahu. She watched the landscape roll past, green hills and deep valleys, endless acres of arable land. Most of this, Hina told them, had once belonged to High Chief Kapuiwa, who became Kamehameha V; now it was the property of the American Sugar Company. “Some day haoles gonna own everything except the nose on your face,” Hina predicted.

  In the vastness of these open spaces, even the air tasted different to Rachel. It tasted of freedom.

  On the outskirts of Kaunakakai, houses began springing up along the road, everything from tumbledown shanties to fine whitewashed cottages on stilts. Even the most ramshackle of them seemed to sit regally amid acres of taro, pineapple, or coffee. The wagon slowed to allow a man on horseback to cross its path; the handsome rider smiled and tipped his hat at the wagonload of pretty, giggling girls. Then a gust of wind blew Rachel’s hair back into her face, and with the wind came—something else.

  It was a voice raised in song—a beautiful voice. A man’s voice, not low and deep but high and sweet, singin
g in some unfamiliar language:

  “E lucevan le stelle

  ed olezzava la terra . . .”

  No; not totally unfamiliar. Rachel had heard something like it at the docks once, spoken by a sailor, or a stevedore, a man from . . .

  Italy! That was it!

  The wagon started moving again but Rachel cried out, “Wait!” and jumped out of the cart. Who on earth could be singing so sweetly in Italian, here in the wilds of Moloka'i?

  “O! dolci baci, o languide carezze—”

  She probed the darkness for the owner of the beautiful voice, but saw no one. Now she noticed, too, that the singer was accompanied by a piano, equally invisible. And there was something else about it, some unique quality of sound Rachel couldn’t quite identify.

  Emily jumped out of the wagon to join Rachel. “Who’s that singing?”

  “I don’t know, but it sounds like it’s coming from over there.” She started toward a small clapboard house standing about fifty feet in from the road.

  “Rachel, come on, come back!” Hina called out. To her dismay the other girls, out of curiosity, got out and followed Rachel down the path to the house. “Aw, hell!” Hina swore, and went after them.

  A haole man sat in a rocking chair on the lnai—the porch—his eyes closed, a blissful smile on his face. There was still no sign of the singer himself, but as Rachel drew nearer she noticed an unusual device on a wicker table beside the man. It looked like a fancy shoebox made of dark polished wood, with a crank on the side. Atop the shoebox was a mechanical apparatus of some kind, inside which a grooved cylinder was rotating. But most strikingly, rising up out of the box was an enormous metal funnel—black with golden highlights, twice the size of the box itself—which resembled nothing so much as the trumpet-shaped flowers of a morning glory.

  With a start Rachel realized that the voice, the music, was coming out of that enormous metal flower!

  As Rachel and the others approached, the man on the porch opened his eyes, gave them a friendly smile, motioned them closer as the song concluded.

  “E muoio disperato!

  E non ho amato—”

  The voice soared to impossible heights, at once tremulous and strong, finishing with a flourish:

  “—mai tanto la vita!”

  The cylinder stopped rotating and the haole—amiable looking, bald but with a fringe of white beard—turned to greet his guests. “Aloha.”

  “Aloha,” Rachel said. Then, with a wondering glance at the machine: “What is that?”

  “A gramophone,” he replied, with a slight Irish accent. “You’ve never seen one?”

  “I have,” Hina said, bored. “Victrola?”

  “Columbia, actually. The horn’s a beauty, isn’t she?”

  “How’d that voice get inside the box?” Francine asked.

  “Ah, well,” the man said, pleased for the opportunity to show off, “it’s not in the box, it’s on this cylinder. It’s called a recording. Different sounds become different grooves on the disc, you see, and this stylus”—he pointed to a kind of needle—“turns them back into sound.”

  Francine eyed him dubiously.

  “Who was singing?” Rachel asked.

  “Ah, that was Caruso! The greatest tenor in the world.”

  Rachel eyed the wax cylinder on the gramophone. “Was this . . . ‘recording’ . . . made in Italy?”

  The man nodded. “Milan, I believe.” He cranked the phonograph, and in moments the same voice, with precisely the same inflections, again floated out of the horn.

  Rachel marveled at it. Here she was in Hawai'i, listening to a voice that had first stirred the air of Milan, Italy, on the other side of the world. Part of that distant place had been engraved onto the cylinder spinning in front of her, to be conjured up again anywhere, anytime. And not just a place to be conjured, but etchings of a past time brought to life again, at will. When this man Caruso died this recording would live on, the sound of his voice continuing to stir the air long after.

  “Who cares, a gramophone!” Hina shouted. “We got a party to go to!”

  Hina prodded the girls back to their wagon, Caruso’s canto di addio bidding them sweet farewell.

  Downtown Kaunakakai was a single street no more than three blocks long; it looked more like a plantation camp than a town. All of its businesses—including the biggest, Chang Tung’s general store—were closed, with the exception of a saloon owned, Hina said, by Rudolph Meyer’s son Otto. That was boisterously open, but Luka drove past it and down a side street to a little cottage. Inside and out there were people laughing, talking, drinking. Guitar music drifted out through the open door.

  Thrilled to be topside, pleased with their own daring and wickedness, the Bishop girls mingled with the other guests. Soon Emily was asked to dance and Hina was laughing with old friends. Rachel accepted her first beer ever; she took a swallow, started to blanch but turned it into a smile. Louisa seemed not to share Rachel’s distaste, downing three Schlitzes in rapid succession. Cecelia disappeared with a boy early on.

  Only the usually gregarious Francine shied from joining in the fun. Rachel noticed that she was hiding her disfigured left hand; nearly fingerless now, it never came out of her dress pocket. Rachel joined her and they listened to the guitarist singing and playing Hawaiian tunes. She was surprised to see that he strummed the strings not with his fingers but with a kind of steel bar; the result was music unlike anything Rachel had ever heard, the chords sounding almost crystalline. Someone passed a calabash of poi around the room and Rachel was about to dip into it when she stopped, realizing the risk to which she would be exposing the other guests. She passed the calabash on; a minute later she was disturbed to see tipsy Louisa scoop some poi from the bowl with two fingers, eat it, then take some more. Rachel tried to get Louisa’s attention but it was no use—her mind seemed to be somewhere between Moloka'i and the moon.

  A tall, good-looking young man came up and invited Rachel to dance. She knew how—the nuns had taught her—but she had never danced with a boy before and she felt her cheeks growing hot with embarrassment as he led her onto the makeshift dance floor.

  He took Rachel’s left hand in his and slipped his other hand around her waist. “I’m Tom Akamu,” he said.

  “Rachel Kalama.” Her skin tingled where he was touching it; she found it difficult to look at him without blushing.

  “I don’t see you here before,” he said. “You local?”

  She shook her head. “From Honolulu. I’m . . . visiting.” Technically it was true.

  “You pretty tall for a wahine. I like that. Not many girls I can almost look in the eye, you know?”

  They danced and talked about nothing in particular—how Tom was born in Hlawa Valley and now worked for the Moloka'i Ranch—and Rachel spoke about her family as though she had just left them for a pleasure trip and would be seeing them in only a week’s time, as though the last nine years in Kalaupapa had never happened. She liked the pretense; she liked the comforting sensation of normality she felt in this boy’s arms. Ever so gently he drew her closer, leaving no air between them. With more ease than she had expected she leaned her head against his shoulder, liking the feel of his chest rising and falling as they danced to the sweet strains of “Hali'alaulani.”

  “I am your new love to be kissed

  My flower, my lei, my love for you

  Is unforgettable . . .”

  Tom leaned in to her, his breath grazing her cheek. Rachel tipped her face up to meet his and his lips brushed hers. What began as the lightest of touches quickly became more urgent. Rachel’s whole body thrilled at the sudden, unexpected intimacy: a man she barely knew was kissing her, wanted her, and she found to her delight that she wanted him as well. She thought neither of her past nor her future; for a moment she was gloriously normal, a girl like any other in the arms of a boy who desired her.

  But as she reveled in the normalcy of her passion a voice within reminded her why she found it so exciting.

/>   you dirty leper

  She broke away from him, a reflex. Tom looked at her with confusion. “Something wrong?” he asked.

  He stepped toward her and she shrank back.

  “I—I’m sorry,” she said. “I . . . can’t.”

  She couldn’t bear the hurt and disappointment in his eyes. She turned and ran away, away from the sweet music and sweeter temptation—and past a knowing Francine.

  Rachel bolted out of the house, into the balmy night. She ran through the front yard and onto the dusty path on which Luka’s wagon sat, the horse gnawing at its bit. Tears blurred her vision as rain had that long-ago day at Bishop Home; after a few blocks she saw the backs of the buildings along Main Street, and rounded the corner.

  She hurried past the raucous laughter and loud music of the saloon, only slowing when she was safely past it. She paused in front of Chang Tung’s closed store and found herself peering into its window. Much of what she saw in it was familiar, but it was the unfamiliar which drew her attention: a cherry-red sign showing a regal woman in an ivory gown, carrying a feathered fan, promoting something called Coca-Cola (Delicious· Refreshing · At Soda Fountains · 5¢). A bottle whose yellow label identified it tersely and mysteriously as Bayer Aspirin. A hand-lettered sign announcing, Now taking orders for new “Gillette Safety Razor.” A handful of magazines stood propped up, covers fading in the sun: one showed a young couple riding in a shiny new carriage gliding horseless down a country road, giving Rachel her first glimpse of an “automobile.” Another magazine had fallen over and its back cover, upside down in the window, entreated Rachel to Take a KODAK with you—a “folding” camera a fraction of the size of the bulky tripod cameras she had seen in Honolulu as a child.

  It was like gazing into the future, except the future had already happened.

  “Rachel. You okay?”