Moloka'i

  The man tipped his hat to her. “Health Inspector Nakamura. Sorry to bother you at dinnertime, but could I please speak with”—and here he consulted a notepad in his hand—“Kapono Kalama?”

  Margaret Kalama shook her head. “Not here.”

  “Is he still working?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know where he is.”

  Inspector Nakamura glanced inside. A boy and girl sat at a small table, their eyes big with fear, their dinners going untouched. “May I come in?” he asked.

  “If you want,” she said, not pleased about it.

  There wasn’t much to see. A small living area, a bedroom in which both adults and children slept with a single window looking out on the back yard. The mattresses, covered with bedsheets made from hundred-pound sugar sacks, lay flat on the floor with not an inch below to harbor a body. He opened a closet, saw only clothes, shut it. As he walked back into the living room, he smiled at the children: “Please. Your food’s getting cold. Go on, eat.” He noticed there were four place settings, four hot plates of cabbage and fish and fresh bread.

  On his way out he handed Mrs. Kalama a business card and said, “Please tell your husband I’d like to see him at his earliest convenience.” As the door closed on him he hurried down the porch steps, checked the wash house—all five compartments, one for each family, were empty—then entered the back yard where the Kalamas kept ducks, chickens, rabbits, and a small taro garden. He noted the way some of the taro plants, right under the bedroom window, had been stomped flat; noted too the footprints in the soft red earth. He followed them out the yard and down a dusty corridor that bisected the cane field; after twenty feet the tracks veered off into the cane, disappearing amid the closely planted stalks.

  It was harvest time and the cane was at its tallest, standing almost six feet high. A man could, and often did, hide in the thicket of cane for days if he had to. Nakamura frowned. He was certain Kalama hadn’t had time to get very far, but searching the thicket would be a long and no doubt fruitless task. Trying to enlist assistance from the plantation workers would be useless: no one would aid him, he knew, except perhaps the Scottish lunas.

  He stood there considering his choices, listening to the faint rustle of cane stalks in the breeze, breathing in the sweetly acrid smell of the cane fires.

  And then he smiled.

  After a brief conversation with the overseers, the inspector climbed atop the miniature saddle-tanker locomotive used to ferry the cane across the plantation. From up here he could see the entire breadth of the cane field. Now too he saw a luna directing his men to set a fire in the center of that field; saw the first lick of flames consume the green swords of the leaves; and watched as a thick pillar of brown-black smoke rose into the sky.

  In no time at all the radius of the fire had expanded a good fifty feet, a swath of flame and smoke marching to the sea. Not long after, Nakamura heard coughing from deep inside the cane thicket as the smoke enveloped it, and then the frantic rustling of stalks as someone rushed to escape the oncoming blaze.

  Nakamura jumped off the locomotive and raced down the perimeter of the field—just in time to see a lanky, frightened Hawaiian man come stumbling out of the cane, coughing and wheezing. Nakamura jumped him; the man went down, offering no resistance.

  Pono lay on the ground, half blinded, the tears in his eyes not from the smoke but from the thought of what he was about to lose. His cheek had been abraded by the bramble of cane, but the livid red blemish beneath his left eye was a wound of a very different sort, and a mark—permanent and ineradicable—of his shame and his fear.

  P

  apa had come home from South America in time for the Christmas of ’91, bringing with him the usual fine assortment of gifts (including, for Rachel, an Argentine peasant doll from Buenos Aires). There had been a feast on New Year’s Day at Aunt Florence’s; Rachel was disappointed when Uncle Pono didn’t tease and play with her but sat by himself in a corner, seeming withdrawn and depressed. And then in April came the shocking news that Pono had been arrested as a leprosy suspect and sent to the Kalihi Receiving Station on the western flank of Honolulu, where his case was to be “evaluated.” For a lucky few, this could mean a diagnosis of some unrelated, relatively benign disease like scabies or scrofula; for most it meant being branded a leper, forcibly detained in the hospital at Kalihi for months or years, and ultimately, exiled to Kalaupapa on the remote northern tip of Moloka'i.

  Rachel understood only that Uncle Pono was sick in the hospital, but when she asked if they could go see him, her mother snapped out a brusque “No” and changed the subject. Henry Kalama did visit his brother at Kalihi, but no one considered, for reasons obscure to Rachel but obvious to all the adults, bringing children along . . . even if it had been allowed.

  Everyone in the 'ohana, the family, pitched in to help provide for Pono’s wife and children, who were not only deprived of husband and father but of his income as well. Margaret and the children went to live with Pono’s sister Florence and her husband Eli; Dorothy’s brother Will, the fisherman, helped out with a portion of his weekly catch; and Dorothy and Henry lent what small financial assistance they could, even as they struggled to come to terms with what had happened to Pono. That first night Rachel and Sarah could hear (through the walls, thin as a ginger cracker, separating the girls’ room from their parents’) the sound of their father weeping for the older brother who had taught him how to swim and how to surf; weeping as if for one already dead. And the girls cried as well, for Uncle Pono and for Papa, so obviously in pain.

  Before any of the children left the house after hearing the news, Mama took them aside and cautioned, “You don’t tell nobody about this, understand? Not your friends, not your teacher, not Mr. MacReedy at church, nobody. You don’t even talk about it to each other, you understand?” The children all nodded. Mama added, “Or else.” They nodded again, and true to their word they didn’t even talk about it among themselves, though not out of fear of what Mama might do to them. No, it was the fear they saw in Mama’s own eyes that cowed them into silence. They had never seen Mama truly frightened before, never imagined it possible; and as that was far more terrifying to contemplate than any disease, they were only too happy not to speak, even to think, about poor Uncle Pono and this terrible thing called the ma'i pk.

  P

  apa shipped out again in June, but out of concern for Pono he signed on for a shorter stint, a voyage of five months rather than eight or ten. For Rachel life went on as before, though over the summer relations with her sister became more strained than usual, a result of what came to be known as “the soup trouble.”

  Playing in the back yard with her friends Aggie and Elsa while Mama and Sarah were out, Rachel thought it might be fun to play at cooking dinner. The big steel tub Mama washed clothes in made an excellent saucepan; an old broom, a fine stirring spoon. She and Aggie filled the tub with water brought bucket by bucket from the cistern, and then Rachel considered what kind of “soup” to make.

  She knew not to waste food, so each ingredient for Mama’s chicken stew had to have its own pretend equivalent. Rachel chose two pair of her own white socks, each rolled into a ball and looking, sort of, like a peeled Irish potato. (She threw in a pair of Papa’s brown socks to represent the local sweet potato.) A handful of Mama’s green silk handkerchiefs, bought by Papa in Hong Kong, made convincing enough cabbage leaves, particularly when wet. Sarah’s yellow felt hat was an adequate summer squash, and a pair of her bracelets, made of orangish koa wood, bobbed on the surface like sliced carrots. Aggie kicked off her sandals and dropped them into the mix, where they doubled nicely for boiled chicken legs.

  Elsa added a pinch of garden soil as a condiment.

  They were enthusiastically stirring their “soup” when Mama and Sarah came home from the grocer’s. Sarah let out a shriek when she saw her felt hat swirling beside Aggie’s dirty sandals; Mama expressed little appreciation for her handkerchiefs’ resemblanc
e to cabbage; and Rachel was rewarded with a couple of swats across her behind and no dinner for the night. “I should make you eat your own soup!” Mama threatened, but didn’t. Rachel was baffled; she’d thought she was being so responsible, not using real food, only clothing that Mama would eventually wash anyway! Couldn’t anybody see what a good job she’d done?

  In retaliation the next day, Sarah stripped all of Rachel’s dolls of their clothing and played mix-and-match with them: the sakura-ningyö was wearing an Argentine peasant’s outfit, the Chinese amah had apparently taken up kabuki dancing, and the rag baby from America was buck naked with its swaddling wrapped like a turban around its head. The baby the amah had been carrying now dangled like a tassel from the window curtains.

  The soup reached a boil, so to speak, a few days after the start of school. The students were spilling out of the schoolyard, Rachel and Aggie already headed down Fort Street, giggling and talking, when Sarah began pacing them. Slowly Rachel became aware that her sister seemed to be juggling a pair of Easter eggs as she walked.

  Easter eggs? In September?

  “Hey,” she called to Rachel, “you think these’d break if they fell?”

  Not eggs. Matryoshka. Sarah had two of the nesting dolls and was doing a pretty fair job of keeping them both aloft as she ambled along. Rachel attempted to grab them but Sarah just weaved away:

  “Let’s make an omelet,” she taunted. “A pretend omelet.” She let one of the nesting dolls fall, then caught it just in time. “Oops!”

  “Gimme those!” Rachel yelled, making another lunge for her sister. This time Sarah couldn’t weave away in time and Rachel collided with her; the two of them went toppling into the street and the nesting dolls flew from Sarah’s hands like skeet shot into the air.

  In moments they were kicking and scratching and biting each other, tumbling around in the dusty street like rabid cats; classmates cheered them on, until the sounds of battle reached the schoolhouse and a young teacher came running out to pull them apart, not without some effort.

  “Stop it! Stop this at once!” The teacher pulled Rachel to her feet, then Sarah, interposing herself between the combatants. “What started this!” she demanded to know.

  “She took my matryoshka!” Rachel cried.

  “She used my hat in her soup!” Sarah accused.

  The young woman stared blankly at them. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said, “and I don’t care! Young ladies, especially sisters, do not fight like cats and dogs in the street.” The teacher was obviously an only child. “Are either of you hurt?”

  Their clothes were filthy, their noses runny and their hair a mess, but otherwise they seemed intact. “If I catch you fighting again, I assure you, you’ll both live to regret it! But for now the worst punishment I can think of is to send you home to explain this to your parents.”

  With a glare she sent them on their way. Sarah shot her sister a last withering look, crossed the street and soon vanished from sight. Rachel retrieved her scuffed nesting dolls and straggled home, where Dorothy took one look at her and nearly had a stroke: “Rachel! What is it, what happened?”

  “Nothing, Mama. I just got in a fight.”

  Dorothy grabbed a clean towel, wet it; she hoisted Rachel into her lap and wiped at her daughter’s dirty face. “Who? Who’d you fight with?”

  Rachel shrugged. “Some wahine at school.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Nobody, Mama. It don’t matter.”

  Dorothy sighed, wiped Rachel’s nose. “You’re one beautiful mess, you know that? One beautiful—”

  Dorothy felt something wet fall on her foot, unexpected as a drop of rain on a sunny day. She looked down and saw blood trickling down the back of Rachel’s leg.

  “Stand up,” Mama told her. “Turn round.” Dorothy lifted Rachel’s skirt. She had scratches all over her legs and on the back of her left thigh there was a patch of pink skin the size of a half dollar with a nasty bleeding gash in the middle. “Rachel! How come you didn’t tell me?”

  “Tell you what, Mama?”

  Rachel craned her head around and saw the cut for the first time. She was surprised to see it, but felt no pain; it was like watching someone else bleed.

  “Okay, this gonna sting a little.” Dorothy carefully dabbed at the wound, cleaning out the dirt and the small particles of stone in the cut. But Rachel didn’t flinch. “You okay, baby?”

  “I’m fine, Mama. It don’t hurt at all.”

  Dorothy examined the cut. Not very deep, probably wouldn’t even need stitches, but . . . She dabbed at it again, almost trying to provoke a response from Rachel, but not a twitch of pain wrinkled the girl’s face.

  “You tell me you don’t feel that?” Dorothy asked.

  Rachel proudly shook her head. “Uh uh.”

  Anxiously, Dorothy put the tip of her finger against the rosy skin surrounding the wound, pressing her fingernail ever so slightly into the flesh. “How about that? You feel that?”

  Smiling, Rachel shook her head again.

  Dorothy dug her nail into the skin on one side of the cut, then the other. Rachel made no response until her mother reached a point outside the rose-colored blemish. “Ow! That hurt.”

  As Dorothy bandaged the cut, she told herself, There’s nothing to worry about; maybe she pinched a nerve, like Henry did that time he hurt his back, that’s all it is. She gave Rachel some candy; the thought of punishing her for getting into a fight never even entered her mind.

  That night, after Rachel had thanked God for somehow distracting Mama from punishing her, she lay in bed wondering where Papa was now, what stars he saw in the sky, until she heard her sister’s voice, softer than usual. “Rachel?”

  She turned on her side and looked across the room, lit only by a stipple of moonlight through lace curtains. “Yeah?”

  “You didn’t get hurt, did you?”

  “Not much. Just a little cut. How ’bout you?”

  “Uh uh.”

  Sarah didn’t say anything more, the moon rose higher and the room fell dimmer, and soon they were both asleep. Dorothy, however, was not resting nearly as well.

  S

  he gave Rachel’s cut two weeks to heal, then one morning before school took her daughter aside, away from prying sibling eyes, and said, “Let me see that cut again, okay?” Trying to conceal the anxiety in her voice.

  “It’s better, Mama.” Rachel lifted her skirt as Dorothy examined the site of the wound. The cut was healed but the pink blemish remained; and now it seemed flaky to the touch. Rachel didn’t notice the worry in her mother’s face; nor did she see the small pin her mother quietly extracted from a pincushion, the tip of which she now touched to the rosy spot on Rachel’s thigh.

  Rachel didn’t notice that either. Queasily, Dorothy put a little more pressure on the pin.

  Rachel said, “How does it look, Mama?”

  Dorothy lightly poked the pin all over the blemished skin—not hard enough to puncture it, but enough that Rachel should have felt the pinprick. “You . . . feel that, baby?”

  “Feel what, Mama?”

  In desperation Dorothy jabbed the pin into her daughter’s flesh. A tiny bubble of blood erupted from the skin, but Rachel didn’t flinch—didn’t cry out—didn’t even realize she had been pricked.

  Dorothy felt light-headed; faint. She struggled to keep her voice calm and her hand steady. “Needs . . . a little more time to heal,” she lied, applying a fresh bandage, one that covered the entirety of the blemish. “You just keep this on, understand? Keep it on.” Rachel promised that she would, and within minutes was off to school.

  Dorothy was not a woman easily brought to tears, but now she sat in the empty house and wept freely. This couldn’t be, not her Rachel, she couldn’t have the ma'i pk—could she? Could it be something else, anything else? Wedded to her grief was a terrible panic: if only Henry were here, someone to share the anguish and the shock, someone to help her figure out what to
do next. But Henry would not be back for another month, and something, she knew, had to be done in the meantime.

  If she brought Rachel to a haole doctor, and if it was leprosy, the doctor would report it to the Board of Health. That left a kahuna as her only recourse—but as a Christian she had been told that kahunas were charlatans, ignorant holdovers of a heathen religion. She was a good Christian woman who loved her church, who wanted to believe and to embrace its proscriptions.

  Yet she loved Rachel too, and if a heathen could save her daughter’s life—save her from banishment . . .

  There were kahunas who were also Christians—who had reconciled the old ways with the teachings of Christ the Savior—and it was to one of these that Dorothy went, a thin, bony old man named Ua. She told him about the blemish on Rachel’s skin, its color and insensitivity to pain. She told him about Pono, and tears welled in her eyes as she spoke. Ua put a comforting hand on hers and said, “Don’t worry.” He got up and began taking down jars from a shelf, jars filled with leaves and powdered herbs and other, odder things Dorothy did not recognize.

  “This,” he explained, showing her cuttings from a plant with oblong leaves, yellow flowers, and narrow seed pods, “is used to clear disruptions of the skin. I’ve had good results with it.” He put them in a large bowl along with four sea urchin shells, a teaspoon of salt, and papaya and kukui-nut juices. Then he picked up an empty jar and got to his feet. “Excuse me. One more thing I need.” He left the room, calling out a name; Dorothy watched as a little girl appeared, took the empty jar, then hurried away. She returned minutes later, the jar filled. As Ua reentered and poured the yellow fluid into the bowl there was no mistaking the familiar pungent smell.

  “Has to be from a child, you see,” Ua said by way of explanation. “No good otherwise.” Dorothy smiled uncertainly, watching as he pounded the ingredients together into one pulpy mix, like some strange poi.