Moloka'i

  The face above that smile sent a little shiver of adrenaline through Ruth’s body: the man’s nose was very nearly flat, the merest of ridges; his toothy smile gave him the skeletal grin of a skull, or a jack-o’-lantern.

  “Mom,” Peggy whispered.

  “Quiet,” Ruth said firmly. But despite her tone she felt flustered: she didn’t want to stare, but was afraid to look away, lest he be offended by that as well.

  The man said cheerfully, “Ruth Harada, right?”

  He extended a hand to her. Both were gnarled and deformed, even more than her mother’s had been, but Ruth clasped the offered hand without flinching, smiled, and said only half-seriously, “Yes, how could you tell?”

  “Aw, I’d know Rachel’s daughter anywhere! I’m Hokea. Your mom and me, we go way back.”

  His handshake was soft and gentle, like the brushing of a leaf.

  “You’re the painter,” Ruth recalled. “She spoke very highly of your work.”

  He seemed pleased by that. “Good lady, your mama. Always came back to see us, at least once a year. Never forgot. Everybody’s very sorry.”

  “Thank you.” Hokea’s natural ebullience was becoming more noticeable than his disfigurement. Ruth introduced Peggy, whose nervousness was hardly concealed by her smile.

  Hokea took Peggy’s hand. “Ah, such a beautiful girl! Rachel always said how pretty you are, but eh, face it, what else grandmothers gonna say? ‘My daughter’s keiki, she sweet but ugly’?” Peggy laughed at that, and her mother could see a little of the tension leave her face. “You two want to come with me, I’ll take you into town.”

  As they followed him to the parking lot he explained, “Rules say you can’t go nowhere by yourself,” then with another smile, “except maybe to the potty.”

  “Now there’s a welcome exception,” Peggy laughed.

  “You know we even used to have separate potties here? Not men and women—patient and kokkua. Big signs posted everywhere. No more though. No more quarantine either.”

  “Yes, we heard,” Ruth said. “Since when, last year?”

  He nodded, pointing them toward a ’57 Chevy sitting alone in the lot. “Nobody ever has to come here if he don’t want to, ever again. It’s over, done, pau.” He spat out the word with no small satisfaction.

  Ruth and Peggy got into the back seat as Hokea slipped behind the wheel. Ruth was a tad apprehensive at the thought of him driving, but his clawed hands had no difficulty operating the gearshift and he effortlessly steered the vehicle onto the narrow road to town.

  As Hokea and Peggy chatted, Ruth gazed at the landscape rolling past. She had been to Maui, of course, to visit Rachel, but never to Kalaupapa, and she was surprised at how beautiful it was, how vibrant the colors: the rich green mantle of the pali, the black lava coastline shadowed against a tourmaline sea. She remembered Manzanar as nearly colorless: steel gray barracks and the dun of the desert sand, the frequent dust storms leeching even the sky of color. But the pali, though not as tall as Mount Whitney, was nearer to the village than Whitney had been to Manzanar, and loomed as an even more forbidding barrier than the wintry peaks of the Sierras.

  Equally forbidding was the large number of cemeteries they passed on the way to town: a seemingly endless garden of crosses and headstones overrunning the shore. But eventually it did end, and then they were in a sleepy little village of cozy cottages sprouting TV antennas, neatly trimmed lawns, white picket fences. There were cars in every driveway, all without license plates, and people out weeding in their gardens. They passed a fire station, a general store, a gas station, even a bar. It all seemed perfectly normal.

  And all at once it dawned on Ruth: I was born here. This is where I was born!

  “It’s so lovely,” Peggy said softly.

  Hokea nodded in agreement. “I know people on the outside, they say, ‘Times are tough.’ Hard to make a living, you know? We don’t have to worry about that here. Or about people giving us the stink-eye. Most of us, we’ve been here all our lives; this is home.” He added, “Now we only hope we get to stay.”

  “What do you mean?” Ruth asked.

  “I’m on the Kalaupapa Patients Council, I hear things. The legislature swears we can stay here the rest of our lives, but you can’t tell me the State of Hawai'i wouldn’t love to move us all to the hospital in Honolulu. And the minute they do, you bet your sweet behind they’ll sell alla this land to Sheraton or Hilton for a big resort. Been talk about it for years. The land’s too valuable.

  “To them it’s just real estate, but to us it’s a lot more. The government forced us to come here, and now that it’s the only place we know, now that it’s home, they want us to give it up?” He shook his head. “We won’t go without a fight, though. Not this time.”

  Ruth was touched by the passion in his voice, but apologetically he said, “Eh, listen to me! Running off at the mouth when you’re here to bury your mama. I’m sorry, you want me to take you to her?”

  “Can we go to her house first?”

  “Oh, she gave that up when she moved to Maui. Six weeks ago, when she come back to Kalaupapa, she went straight into the hospital, she was so sick. Lotta patients here die of kidney trouble, you know; the drugs we take for leprosy, they’re hard on the kidneys.”

  “I know.” Ruth remembered her last conversation with her mother; with Sarah gone, Rachel wanted to spend her final days here among her Kalaupapa 'ohana. Though Rachel had only just been to California, Ruth offered to fly her back again so she could care for her in San José; but Rachel had been adamant. This was where she wanted to be buried, and this might as well be where she died.

  “I got all her stuff at my place,” Hokea said. “Except for the books, she gave those to the library here.”

  Hokea’s house was impossibly, magnificently cluttered. Ruth and Peggy were astonished by the hundreds of canvases hung, stacked, and stored in every nook and corner: oils and watercolors and sketches of Kalaupapa and Kalawao, the rugged coastline, Father Damien’s church, Baldwin and Bishop Homes. “You must’ve painted every square inch of this peninsula twice over,” Ruth marveled.

  Hokea chuckled. “Yeah, and I painted over plenty more ’cause I couldn’t afford new canvas.”

  “Excuse me for asking,” Peggy said, “but how do you paint with your—hands like that?”

  “Oh, no problem.” He reached for a device lying on a table, slipping his right hand through a metal loop that Ruth now saw was attached to a brush. “One of our people, Kenso, came up with this for forks and spoons, so if you’ve got no hands you can wrap it around your wrist and use it to eat. He made me one for my brushes.”

  He slipped it off again and took them into the living room, where three large cartons were neatly stacked: “Here’s your mama’s stuff, all except the books. And her Sunday dress, she wanted to be buried in that.”

  The first carton contained clothing that Ruth and Peggy decided to donate to Goodwill, with the exception of one particular dress that Ruth now set aside. In the second carton were photographs and the accumulated bric-a-brac of a lifetime, which Ruth would keep; while the third box held Rachel’s treasured doll collection. Some of them, like the Chinese mission dolls and the sakura-ningyö, were so tattered and worn they seemed as if they might fall apart at a glance. Others were newer: a papier-mâche folk doll from Mexico; a wooden kokeshi bought in Tokyo; a stuffed koala bear from Australia; and others purchased on Rachel’s various travels over the past twenty years. These would occupy places of honor in Ruth’s home as well as in Peggy’s and Donald’s . . . all but one.

  Tenderly Ruth took out an old, handmade doll with cloth “skin” the color of Ruth’s own, a round face and black hair, wearing a miniature kapa skirt. The tiny shell lei around its neck had long since broken apart, but it still wore a pin where a note had once been affixed.

  “Is this the one?” Peggy asked.

  Ruth nodded. She turned to Hokea.

  “I’m ready now,” she said.

 
At the funeral home, Ruth and Peggy were left alone with their mother and grandmother, laid out in her Sunday dress in a casket she had selected herself. Rachel’s face showed the scoring of time, certainly of tragedy, but also of a life well lived: of laughter and adventure as much as grief and ill fortune. Even now, in the lines around her mouth, Ruth saw the ghost of a smile haunting her mother’s face. She touched her cheek, and she and Peggy sat and visited with her again, one last time.

  After Ruth finalized the funeral arrangements, Hokea took her and Peggy on a walking tour of Kalaupapa, starting with the grave of Mother Marianne near the convent where a handful of Franciscans still lived and worked. On the grass nearby Peggy was amused to see a pair of painted lava rocks. One bore a bright yellow happy-face, while its companion urged the passerby, SMILE—IT NO BROKE YOUR FACE! And automatically Ruth did smile, thinking of Manzanar and how even there children had laughed and played, people had danced and made love, babies had been conceived.

  Along the way Hokea introduced everyone they happened across. Ruth and Peggy met Kenso Seki, the resourceful tinkerer who’d invented the fork-and-spoon device as well as special hooks that allowed fingerless hands to button shirts and open flip-top cans. Lively and charming, he wore clip-on sunglasses perpetually tilted up like a blackjack dealer’s visor and gave them a tour of his workshop. They stopped for soft drinks at Rea’s Store—actually more of a saloon—owned and operated by Mariano Rea, who, Hokea told them later, used his profits to fund college educations for scores of nieces, nephews, and cousins in his native Philippines.

  When Hokea first entered Rea’s with Ruth and Peggy, someone cried out, “ ’Ey, Hokea! What, you robbing the cradle again?”

  “Ah, piss off, same to you.” Hokea laughed, then explained to Ruth, “My last wife, she was ten years younger’n me, and nobody ever lets me forget it.”

  “Hokea, how many wives have you had?”

  “Only three. My first one died, second we get divorced but still friends, third left me for an older man.” He laughed again. “True story.”

  Ruth smiled. Love, marriage, divorce, infidelity . . . life was the same here as anywhere else, wasn’t it? She realized now how wrong she’d been; the pali wasn’t a headstone and Kalaupapa wasn’t a grave. It was a community like any other, bound by ties deeper than most, and people here went to their deaths as people did anywhere: with great reluctance, dragging the messy jumble of their lives behind them.

  That afternoon most of Kalaupapa’s remaining residents clustered around an open grave in the Japanese cemetery along the coast. It was a bright, clear day, the tradewinds brisk, the surf lapping up nearby Papaloa Beach, where, Ruth knew, her mother had spent many happy hours riding the waves. She would have paid good money to have seen that! A Buddhist priest chanted a stra, and toward the end of the ceremony, when the time came for eulogies, of which there were many, Ruth chose to speak last.

  “My mother Rachel was a remarkable woman,” she told the crowd, her voice quaking a bit with stage fright, “but you’ve all known that even longer than I. I’ve been privileged, these past twenty years, to discover just how remarkable. I’m lucky, you see: I had two mothers. One gave life to me; one raised me. But they both loved me. You know, some people don’t even get that once.

  “It took me a while to say the words ‘I love you’ to my makuahine. It was a different kind of love than I felt for my oksan, but founded on the same things. I cherished my adopted parents for the home, the love, and the past we shared. I cherished Rachel for the love she showed me, the past she opened up to me, and the home I never knew: this place. The people she cared for. All of you.

  “There’s only one disadvantage, really, to having two mothers,” Ruth admitted. “You know twice the love . . . but you grieve twice as much.”

  She paused to collect herself, trying to order her thoughts, to remember all she needed to remember. She took a wrinkled slip of paper from her purse and studied the words written on it. She glanced down into the casket, and in halting Hawaiian she said:

  “Pono, Haleola, 'eia mai kou keika hanauna, Rachel!”

  Some of the mourners were puzzled, but one old-timer recognized the words and repeated the call to ancestors: “Pono, Haleola,” he said, his aged treble sounding quite clear and strong, “'eia mai kou keiki hanauna, Rachel!”

  Now Peggy spoke, her voice as resonant and proud as her mother’s “Henry, Dorothy, 'eia mai kou kaikamahine, Rachel! Henry, Dorothy, here is your daughter, Rachel!”

  A few more mourners picked up the chant, some in Hawaiian, some in English.

  “Kenji-san, 'eia mai kou wahine male, Rachel,” Ruth said. “Kenji, here is your wife, Rachel.” She gazed into her mother’s face, beautiful in eternal repose, and struggled a bit with the next words: “O Rachel, here you are departing! Aloha wale, e Rachel, kaua, auw! Boundless love, O Rachel, between us, alas!”

  As the mourners repeated that last word, Ruth heard for the first time the resonant Hawaiian wail of “Auw! Auw!” which sprang from every heart at once, and she was moved because it so precisely echoed the grief in her own.

  Peggy handed Ruth three things: a small dish of poi; the dress Rachel had been wearing that day at the Hotel Saint Claire; and the cloth doll in its kapa skirt which Henry Kalama had painstakingly fashioned for his little girl, seventy-six years before.

  Ruth tucked them all in the casket beside her mother.

  “Here is food, clothing, and something you loved,” she said. “Go; but if you have a mind to return, come back.”

  She leaned over her mother, tenderly kissed her wrinkled forehead, and told her again that she loved her.

  Peggy did the same, bidding aloha to her Grandma Rachel before she was overcome by tears.

  The casket was lowered; within twenty minutes an earthen blanket had covered it and Rachel Aouli Kalama Utagawa slept again beside her beloved Kenji.

  Ruth thanked each guest for coming, listening to their memories of Rachel with the same fond fascination as she’d listened to her mother’s stories; then, when only she and Peggy and Hokea were left, Ruth asked him if they might be alone for a moment, and Hokea obligingly walked down to the adjacent Mormon cemetery. Ruth and Peggy sat on the ground facing the two graves and Ruth took her daughter’s hand in hers. Except for the metronome of the surf a calm silence surrounded them, tranquil beyond words. The air was moist and sweet. The ocean was pale green shot with blue, cresting white. The blue vault of the sky was bright and sheltering. For a long while they sat serenely in this most serene of places, gazing out at waves rolling in from afar to break gently on the peaceful shore.

  Author’s Note

  O

  n December 22, 1980, the Kalaupapa peninsula was designated a National Historical Park and its residents were, as per Public Law 96–565, “guaranteed that they may remain at Kalaupapa as long as they wish.” As of this writing, there are approximately thirty-one individuals with Hansen’s disease living there in quiet dignity.

  A novel is by definition a work of fiction, but this particular novel is set in a real place where real people lived and died—people to whom I felt accountable as I tried to tell a story that would also be true to their stories. By interweaving real-life patients and caregivers with my fictional cast of characters, I sought to blur the lines between fact and fiction; but now I think it’s important to redraw those lines, however briefly, in order to acknowledge a few of the people whose lives have inspired and enriched this book.

  Some are known to us today only as names in the superintendent’s annual report: the storekeeper George Kanikau, the baker A. Galaspo, nursery matron Lillian Keamalu, and her predecessor Mrs. Kaunamano. Some still speak to us from correspondence long buried in the files of the Board of Health. J. D. Kahauliko, in a letter dated February 1, 1866, wrote, “An opportunity has been afforded me to inform you how we are getting along in Molokai,” and who notes “we are in great need for a water calabash . . . therefore we the patients at Kalawao do hereby beg t
hat you will give us a water-cask for us, do not refuse, but give it to your servants the Lepers.” Other residents have found some small posterity in accounts by the journalists who occasionally visited Kalaupapa, for example Annie Kekoa, “a half-white telephone operator from Hilo, on Hawaii, daughter of a native minister . . . without blemish, and very charming—educated and refined, with the loveliest brown eyes and heart-shaped face,” in the words of Char-maine London, wife of Jack London.

  Ambrose Hutchison’s life is better documented. Born at Honom'ele, Maui, in 1856, he arrived at Kalaupapa on January 5, 1879, where, he later wrote, “we were left on the rocky shore without food and shelter. No houses were provided for the likes of us outcasts.” What Haleola saw on her first day at the settlement—a sick man in a wheelbarrow dumped on the threshold of a “dying shed”—was what Ambrose saw on his first day. Much of his life was dedicated to the welfare of the community to which he had been exiled: he served as chief butcher, then manager of the Kalawao Store, and finally as either resident or assistant superintendent over a period of fourteen years. He helped improve the quality of health care and nutrition at the settlement and did his best to assure that newcomers to Kalaupapa were given, upon arrival, a place to live and (as Dr. Arthur Mouritz observed) “hot coffee and warm food.” He spent nearly fifty-four years in Kalaupapa.

  In real life Samson “Sammy” Kuahine’s song, “Sunset of Kalaupapa,” was performed on bandleader Harry Owens’ television show in November of 1950 and was probably composed earlier that year. I sacrificed chronological accuracy for what I felt was the greater truth of including this only known musical composition by a Kalaupapa resident.

  Some fictional characters in this book are based on real people. The artist Hokea, for example, was inspired by resident Edward Kato, also a painter of churches (as well as the rock that exhorts visitors to SMILE—IT NO BROKE YOUR FACE!), though there the resemblance ends. Like Rachel, after quarantine was lifted, Edward Kato enthusiastically traveled the world, visiting nearly every continent on the earth long denied him. And one of the Franciscan Sisters of Charity did in fact suffer a nervous breakdown and was forced to leave Moloka'i—but since much of my character’s psychology and background had to be created from whole cloth, I elected to call her Sister Victor instead of the woman’s real name.