“Aren’t you afraid,” she asked, “of becoming a leper yourself?”
Damien paused, then answered quietly, “Sometimes I think I already am.” He added, “But if God chooses for me to share the burden of leprosy with my children, then I will rejoice in it. Whatever God does is well done.”
After a moment Damien bowed his head respectfully and left. She watched him go, then turned back to the sea. Far down the coast she saw the flicker of torches, heard the distant sound of drums blown up on the wind. It was probably the bonfire at the crazy pen being lit, the hula drums being sounded; but Haleola chose to believe it was the marchers of the night, come to take Keo to the p, the world beyond. “Come back,” she told him, softly into the wind, “if you are of a mind to.” But he never did.
F
ourteen years later, a lanky man with a similarly impish smile had landed at Kalaupapa, his cane digging into the hard ground as he limped up the rocky embankment. As he reached the top, he straightened, looked around, stabbed the tip of his cane into the earth as if planting a flag and announced, “I claim this land in the name of me, and hereby declare myself a Provisional Government!”
Everyone at the landing—including Haleola and Ambrose Hutchison—laughed. The man gave his name to Ambrose as Kapono Kalama, “but you can call me President Pono.”
Ambrose smiled. “Do you have a place to stay, Mr. President?”
Pono said, “Why, I thought I’d just seize your property.”
Haleola smiled to recall it. She was still gazing at Pono, thinking of the ways he was like Keo and the ways he was not, when Ambrose’s wagon arrived at Bishop Home. St. Elizabeth’s Convent, a modest one-story white building with green shutters, was home to the Franciscan sisters. Behind it stood four pleasant, whitewashed cottages, two of which served as dormitories for leprous girls—many of whom, clad in identical wine-colored dresses, were out playing kickball on the lawn. They quickly encircled the wagon, eager to meet the new arrival. Sister Catherine suggested that perhaps Rachel would like to play with them while Pono and Haleola spoke to Mother Marianne. As Rachel kicked the ball back and forth with the other girls under Catherine’s watchful eye, another nun—older and considerably less friendly—took Pono and Haleola to the convent. They couldn’t enter, of course, but the sister showed them to lawn chairs and a table, where they were shortly joined by Mother Marianne Cope—a small, handsome woman with a serene smile. She turned to the nun who had brought them. “Sister Victor, would you mind bringing some tea and honey for our guests?”
Sister Victor, it was apparent to all, was not pleased at the request; she gave her Mother Superior a sullen nod, then disappeared, grumbling, into the convent.
Mother Marianne wasted little time getting down to business. “Inasmuch as you’ve been here less than a year, Mr. Kalama, perhaps you weren’t aware that we at St. Elizabeth’s have been charged by the Board of Health with the safekeeping of all leper girls under the age of sixteen, even as Brother Dutton cares for the boys.
“Mrs. Nua, I gather you’ve been at the settlement almost from the beginning. You’ve certainly seen what can happen to children in Kalawao—forced into servitude, into prostitution, abused or violated . . .”
“Kalawao is a different place than it was twenty years ago,” Haleola pointed out.
“Not different enough, I’m afraid. Men and women still brew and consume vast amounts of alcohol. The dreadful hula is still danced, and promiscuity has not, alas, gone out of style.”
Just then Sister Victor returned carrying a serving tray holding three teacups, a jar of honey, and a pot of tea. She half-placed, half-dropped the tray smack onto the table, jostling the teapot precariously.
“Tea,” Sister Victor said brusquely, then turned on her heel and vanished back into the convent.
Mother Marianne winced slightly. “My apologies for Sister Victor. She’s been feeling out of sorts for . . .” With a rueful sigh: “About two years, now.”
She poured each of them some tea—their teacups were different from hers, no doubt only for lepers—then picked up a slip of paper she had brought with her. “Perhaps this will help. Mr. Kalama, do you read English?”
Pono nodded tightly and took the paper. At the top of the page were the words Rules and Regulations for the Bishop Home; the first paragraph read:
The “Bishop Home” has been established for girls of all ages and unprotected females, married or unmarried, who, having contracted leprosy, have become helpless and have no relatives at the Settlement able properly to care for them.
The nun helpfully pointed out the third paragraph.
It is compulsory for girls arriving at the Settlement under the age of sixteen years to enter the Home, unless they have parents, near relatives, or guardians at the Settlement who are competent to, and who will take proper care of them.
“Ah!” Pono said, seizing the opportunity to produce his own document. “It’s very clear, then! My brother Henry asked me to take care of her. Wanted her to live with me. Right there, see what he says to me?”
The Reverend Mother scanned Henry’s letter. “Yes, I see.”
“It appears to me,” Haleola said, “that that letter makes Pono Rachel’s guardian.”
“Yes,” Mother admitted, “that clearly is her father’s intention. However, as you see, the rules plainly require ‘relatives or guardians . . . who are competent to, and who will take proper care of them.’ ”
Pono bristled at the intimation. “You think I can’t take care of my own niece? That I’m too sick?”
“Mr. Kalama, I’m sure you love Rachel. But as much as you love her and might try to protect her, could you watch over her every moment of the day? Could you guarantee no evil-minded man would force himself on her as she plays by the pali?
“Here she would be shielded from all that. By removing her from day-to-day contact with immorality and paganism, we save both her body and her soul.”
There it was: Kamiano’s favorite word. She means me, Haleola realized. Not just who I am, but . . .
“By immorality,” she said, “do you mean Pono and me?”
Mother Marianne looked genuinely regretful. “I’m sorry,” she said. “But the blunt fact, Mr. Kalama, is that you are a married man. And you are currently living in an unchaste manner with a woman not your wife. That is not, in all candor, the sort of moral influence which I can call proper and competent to care for Rachel. And I would be remiss in my duties if I allowed Rachel to live with such an influence.”
“My wife divorced me!” Pono snapped. “I had nothing to say about it!”
“The Church,” she reminded him, “does not recognize divorce.”
Haleola spoke up, carefully considering her words.
“Do you wonder, Sister, why so many at Kalawao are . . . ‘unchaste’? It’s not hard to understand. A woman feels a man inside her and feels life. The act they engage in is the one from which all life springs, and for that moment they can feel that they are living, not dying.” She looked the nun squarely in the eyes. “Would you take that away from us too, Sister? As everything else has been taken?”
Mother Marianne’s cheeks were pink with embarrassment, but her composure did not slip.
“God has not been taken from you,” she replied evenly. “By forsaking the pleasures of this world, you assure yourselves the joys of the next.”
Her tone was not harsh; it was even gentle, in its way. Pono, sensing the nun’s intractability, said, “Can I at least see my niece occasionally?”
“Of course. You may visit her anytime you wish.”
She smiled and stood, the discussion clearly over. As Haleola walked away with Pono, she had already resolved to help him compose a letter to the Board of Health contesting the convent’s claim on his niece—even as she wondered how on earth they would explain this to Rachel.
“Did you like playing with the other girls?” Haleola asked her when they returned to the front lawn. Rachel nodded enthusiastically. “We
ll, good. Because you’re going to stay here with them for a while.”
“But I don’t want to,” Rachel said without a moment’s hesitation. “I want to go back with you and Uncle Pono.”
“Oh, you’ll see plenty of us,” Haleola said, hoping that wasn’t a lie, “but . . .”
Pono said, “It’s just for a little while,” but Rachel recalled how she was supposed to have been at Kalihi only a little while too. “Nobody wants me!” she said angrily.
Haleola took her hand in hers. “We want you, little Aouli. We do! But so do the sisters. They think you’ll be happier here in these nice houses, with other little girls to play with.” Out of the corner of her eye Haleola saw the young sister, Catherine, watching, a look of what seemed honest pain on her face.
“We’ll come visit tomorrow,” Haleola promised. She and Pono each hugged Rachel, kissed her on the cheek, and turned to go.
But the sight of their imminent departure panicked Rachel, and she ran screaming after them. She grabbed Pono by the leg, clinging to him desperately: “No! Please! I’ll be good, don’t go!” Her heart breaking, Haleola bent down and wrapped her arms around the frightened girl. “Ssshh, sshhh,” she comforted her, even as Pono gently stroked the girl’s face. “We’ll be back, Aouli. I swear it, I swear it on my husband’s grave.” She held her until the tears ran their course and Rachel’s fear abated . . . then reluctantly handed her over to Sister Catherine, who gently took her by the hand and led her away. Rachel turned around for one last glimpse of her uncle, watching as he and Haleola got into Ambrose’s wagon, the ocean framed behind them, rain clouds gathering like smoke above the water—and as the wagon rattled away down the dusty road, Rachel was stubbornly determined that she would hate it here.
Chapter 6
1893–94
S
ister Mary Catherine Voorhies was gruesomely ill. She had spent the better part of an hour here in the infirmary, dressing the sores of leprous girls and women, outwardly exhibiting nothing but compassion and good cheer. With thick swabs she cleansed pus from ulcers as though she were polishing tableware, scooped maggots from dead flesh like ants, snipped away skin as if cutting cloth for a dress pattern. She smiled into ravaged faces, said prayers with the devout or the merely frightened, made small talk—“talked story”—with all of them, and somehow managed to keep the bile from rising too far up her throat. As if the sight of worms infesting a living person’s body wasn’t enough, the uniquely nauseating smell of the sores—the death-gasp, as it were, of millions of leprosy bacilli—nearly made her gag, her esophagus constricting against her will. It was only then she allowed herself a moment’s relief. Walking across the room for a bandage she didn’t need, gratefully stealing a breath of fresh air from an open window, she would then return to work before anyone could guess how weak and frightened she truly was.
With each new patient she was convinced that her strength would give out and she would be forced to surrender the contents of her stomach—as she had, to her mortification, on the steamer trip from Honolulu two weeks before. If there was anything less decorous than a vomiting nun, she was hard-pressed to think of it.
There had been nothing in the life or experience of Ruth Amelia Voorhies, of Ithaca, New York, to quite prepare her for what she found on Moloka'i. Her father had owned a bakery and her family had enjoyed a relatively comfortable, uneventful existence—right up until the day Harold Winchell Voorhies shot himself in the head with a pistol, for reasons unknown. He left his family financially sound but otherwise sundered. Ruth’s mother never stopped blaming herself, for what she didn’t know; her brother’s anger fell on everyone but the cause of it, forever beyond his reach; her sister Polly, two years older, became pregnant by a married man and was sent away to relatives in Albany, where the child was given up for adoption.
Ruth grappled with her grief in her own way, her parish priest showing her the balm and comfort of God; within a year she had entered the novitiate. After taking her vows, she served two years in the Motherhouse in Syracuse before volunteering for the third contingent of Franciscan sisters bound for Hawai'i.
Before coming to Moloka'i she thought she knew something of pain and suffering.
She knew nothing.
She finished bandaging a young woman’s sores, then vigorously washed up with carbolic acid. Her hands looked almost as red and raw as a leper’s. She took a deep breath of air from the window above the sink and felt a little better. She reminded herself that St. Francis himself had been afraid of leprosy; and despite, or because, of that fear, he had kissed a leper’s face.
She forced a smile and turned to the next patient, a girl of perhaps fifteen who held out a bandaged arm. “Hello,” the girl said shyly.
“Hello. I’m Sister Catherine. Forgive me, but I’m afraid I don’t know everyone’s name yet.”
The girl’s face was free of blemishes; it was hard to imagine there was anything wrong with her. “I’m Noelani.”
“A pretty name for a pretty girl. Shall we get that bandage changed, Noelani?” She started unwrapping it, folds of cloth coiling on the floor at her feet.
But as the last swath of linen dropped away, it revealed not an ulcerous sore but a ring of dead flesh, black as char, surrounding a gaping cavity in the skin . . . exposing the raw, corded muscle beneath.
Catherine let out a horrified cry.
She didn’t know which was worse, the sight of the wound or the realization that she had just revealed herself as a fraud. Immediately Sister Leopoldina was at her side:
“Oh! Sister,” she said, putting a hand on Catherine’s arm, “I’m sorry, did no one tell you? It’s gangrene, the poor dear cut herself and didn’t know it—they can’t feel it, you know, it became infected and Dr. Oliver dressed it himself. I’m so sorry, you should have been told!”
Catherine felt the bile rising in her throat and feared that this time she would not be able to keep it down. “I’m sorry . . . may I—”
A quick nod from Leopoldina sent Catherine rushing outside. She ran behind the cottage, dropped to her knees . . .
But nothing happened. Her nausea abated; she breathed in the fresh ocean breeze and felt a bit calmer.
“Sister Catherine?”
She looked up. Sister Victor, of all people, was gazing down at her, a frown amplifying her normally sullen expression. “You look dreadful,” she said bluntly.
“Thank you,” Catherine sighed. “That had somehow escaped my notice.”
Face softening, Sister Victor bent down beside her. “It’s difficult, isn’t it?” she said with atypical gentleness. “At times almost more than one can bear.”
Relieved to hear this echo of her own fear and doubt, Catherine asked, “How do you bear it?”
Sister Victor’s lips pursed in an unhappy smile.
“Like this,” she said. “Like you’re bearing it now.”
Catherine got shakily to her feet. “How long have you been here, Sister?”
“Two years. Heaven help me, it feels like twenty.”
Leopoldina now appeared from around the corner of the infirmary. “How are you feeling, Sister? Can I get you anything?”
“No, I’m all right. I’m sorry, Sister, I shouldn’t have left like that.”
Leopoldina smiled with her usual cheer and kind-heartedness. “Nonsense, nothing to apologize for. Why don’t you go to the convent and lie down for a while?”
“No, I’m fine. I’ll be right back in, just give me a moment.” She gave what she hoped was a reassuring smile and watched Leopoldina disappear again around the building.
In a low voice Sister Victor said, “I think she’d smile like that even if she were sitting in a boiling pot, being picked at by cannibals.”
Catherine laughed despite herself. “That’s terrible.”
“You see, Sister? That’s all we have to do. Learn how to smile in the cannibal pot, and life would be so much easier.” She patted Catherine’s shoulder, went on her way.
&n
bsp; Catherine took a deep breath of the briny air, then returned to the horrors inside the pleasant little whitewashed cottage. Somehow she made it through the rest of her shift, and was puzzled when at the end of it Leopoldina took her aside. “Sister, I’d like to show you something.”
“I know what it can be like here, for a newcomer,” Leopoldina said as they crossed the lawn to the cottage that served as the girls’ dining room. Inside three young girls sat at an expensive Westermeyer piano, pecking out simple tunes on the keys. “Mr. Stevenson bought this for us,” Leopoldina explained, and indeed Catherine had already heard of the visit to Moloka'i, five years before, by the famous English writer Robert Louis Stevenson. He’d played tirelessly with the girls, talked story with residents—endearing himself to everyone with his openness, humor, and the simple respect he afforded the lepers, whom he treated as people he wanted to get to know and not as objects of fear, pity, or revulsion.
As Leopoldina rummaged for something in a cabinet drawer, Catherine watched the three girls somehow making music with hands whose fingers were being slowly stolen away, the bones resorbed back into their bodies. But they giggled as they poked out off-key renditions of “Chopsticks” and “Frère Jacques,” and Catherine marveled at their perseverance and good cheer.
“Ah, here we are,” Leopoldina said. She handed Catherine a slip of paper. “This was written for us by Mr. Stevenson while he was here.” On the paper were penned eight handwritten lines:
To see the infinite pity of this place,
The mangled limb, the devastated face,
The innocent sufferers smiling at the rod,
A fool were tempted to deny his God.
He sees, and shrinks; but if he look again,