Moloka'i (12 page)

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. “Well, 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.

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,
Lo, beauty springing from the breast of pain!—
He marks the sisters on the painful shores,
And even a fool is silent and adores.

“When we first saw this,” Leopoldina told her, “I said to Mother, ‘Why, it’s beautiful! It’s lovely, isn’t it?’ ”

“But Mother looked uncomfortable; embarrassed. ‘Yes, of course, it is,’ she replied. ‘But . . . ’

“ ‘But what?’ I said. ‘Isn’t it flattering?’ ”

“ ‘Mr. Stevenson is a dear man,’ Mother finally said, ‘but we’re not the ones to be flattered.’ And she bid me to look out on the lawn at the leper girls who were running on lame feet, playing croquet with crippled hands.

“ ‘There is beauty,’ she said, ‘in the least beautiful of things.’ ”

T

he girls’ dormitories, Rachel was aggrieved to discover, were not bleak prison cells but clean, cheerful bungalows providing shelter—or as Mother Marianne would have had it, sanctuary—for some eighty girls and women. The walls were whitewashed and hung with dozens of pictures in a variety of frames, the beds neatly made with frilly comforters; at the head of each bed were private altars of cards, letters, photographs, dolls. Rachel immediately became the center of attention among her new roommates.

“Hi, I’m Emily, who are you?”

“You’re Rachel, right? You kick pretty good.”

“That’s my bed, you can’t have it.”

“Wanna play marbles?”

“What toys do you have?”

Rachel stubbornly resisted all attempts to get her to play, or anything else that might contradict her single-minded dislike of this place. Sister Catherine issued Rachel a wine-colored uniform and assigned her a bed; Rachel refused to put on the uniform and only grudgingly accepted the bed when the groundskeeper, Mr. Kiyoji, came in with her steamer trunk and needed someplace to put it.

Emily, half-Chinese and half-Hawaiian with a long cascade of black hair down her back, bounced gregariously onto Rachel’s bed. “So where you from?”

Rachel grudgingly admitted she was from Honolulu.

“Ooh, big city girl! I’m from Kapa'a. On Kaua'i.”

There were only two girls who hadn’t approached Rachel, both bedridden and asleep on the other side of the room, and now her curiosity got the better of her anger. “Are those two real sick?” she asked Emily.

Emily gave them a sad glance. “Yeah. That’s Josephina. And Violet.” She added in a low tone, “They won’t be here much longer.”

Rachel wasn’t quite sure what she meant by that and didn’t inquire further for fear Emily would tell her.

One of the sisters now entered the room and announced that it was time for class; a collective groan went up as the girls assembled in a ragged line for school.

Class was held only three hours each day. The books were old and had DISCARD stamped in red ink on the inside front cover; the crayons were neither as plentiful nor as colorful as those provided at Fort Street School; and the classroom lacked even a globe of the world! After school came lunch, and after lunch there were chores to be done—sewing, washing dishes, mopping floors. This did nothing to endear Bishop Home to Rachel. After chores the girls were allowed to play, but because of the worsening storm they had to do so inside. Rachel used the time to unpack. Her roommates, all enthusiastic collectors of dolls, gathered round to admire hers. Rachel reluctantly accepted their compliments and let them examine her
kabuki
dancer and Mission dolls and
matryoshka
.

By the time the girls finished dinner, the storm had become quite frightful: the wind howled around their dormitory, uprooting shrubs and snapping off tree branches, which then slammed into the side of the cottage so loudly that Rachel jumped and screamed.

“It’s okay,” one girl assured her, “it’s just the devil-winds.”

“ ‘Devil-winds’?” Rachel repeated, eyes wide.

“Ah, they just call ’em that ’cause they’re so nasty,” Emily said. “Come in alla way from the Pelekunu Valley.”

“Last year a devil-wind ripped a porch roof clean off!” someone else added gleefully. The walls of the cottage groaned under the howling onslaught of wind. The constant howl, the alarming sound of branches snapping in two like breaking bones, terrified Rachel.

Then to make matters worse, after lights were snuffed out for the night her roommates decided that this was the
perfect
time to tell ghost stories in the dark.

“There’s a
hala
tree in Kamalo,” a girl named Hazel intoned with the requisite quiet dread, “and a long time ago, two
keiki
, boy and a girl, used to play under it, and talk about how they were gonna get married when they were older. ’Cause they loved each other very much, you know?

“But then the girl’s family had to move—on account of their taro farm was flooded and no good—to O'ahu, where her papa could get work. Well, she tells her boyfriend and he’s real sad. After she leaves Moloka'i, he cries, night after night, to think he’ll never see her again . . . and late one night, while everybody’s asleep, he takes his sister’s jump rope and he brings it to the old tree, ties one end around his neck and the other to a branch—and—”

She made an upward yanking motion with her fist that made Rachel jump, then opened her hand and slowly moved it back and forth, miming the swing of the boy’s body.

“After that, whenever anyone plays under that tree . . . they start choking. They grab themselves, like this”—her hands closed around her own throat—“and they fall to the ground, like something’s strangling ’em!

“Soon as they’re taken out from under the tree—they stop choking. They’re fine, like nothing ever happened. Pretty soon no one goes near the
hala
tree ’cause they know about the choking ghost, ’ey? Except . . .

“Years later, a lady comes to Kamalo. Says she grew up there; says she’s looking for a boy she used to know. Lonely lady. Never married. Somebody tells her, ‘The boy you seek is under the
hala
tree at the edge of town.’ The people who tell her, they follow to make sure she’s okay, to pull her away if she starts choking. But she sits down under the tree, leans up against the trunk, closes her eyes. No choking, no strangling. The people see a smile come onto her face, and they hear her say, ‘Oh. Oh, how I’ve missed you!’ And then nothing else for maybe ten minutes. Then she opens her eyes, gets up, and leaves.