Moloka'i (2 page)

Henry Kalama, a happy grin on his broad friendly face, hefted his suitcase as though he were about to throw it. “ ’Ey! Little girl! Catch!”

Rachel giggled. Henry ran up and Dorothy gave him a reproachful look: “Good-for-nothing rascal, where you been the last eight months?” And she kissed him with a ferocity that quite belied her words.

“Papa!” Rachel was jumping up and down, and now Henry scooped her up in his big arms. “ ’Ey, there she is. There’s my baby!” He kissed her on the cheek and Rachel wrapped her arms around his thick neck. “I missed you, little girl,” he said in a tone so gentle it made Dorothy want to cry. Then he looked at his wife and added, with exaggerated afterthought, “Oh. You, too.”

“Yeah, yeah, same to you, no-good.” But she didn’t object when Henry kissed her again, still holding Rachel in one arm, the five-year-old making an
Eee-uu
face. Dorothy lifted her husband’s duffel bag with one hand, slipped the other around his waist, and the three of them started through the crowd, a winch’s chain chattering above them as it yanked an enormous crate into the air.

“You sell the other
keiki?”
Henry asked, noting the absence of his older children.

“In school. Rachel oughtta be, but—”

“Where’d you go this time, Papa?”

“Oh, all over. One ship went to Japan and China, this one stopped in Australia, New Zealand, Samoa . . .”

“We got your letter from Samoa!”

On short notice Dorothy organized a feast to celebrate Henry’s return. Dorothy’s brother Will brought twenty pounds of fresh skipjack tuna he’d caught in his nets that morning; Henry’s sister Florence made her best
haupia
pudding, rich with coconut cream; and Rachel helped her mother and Aunt Flo wrap ti leaves around the fresh beef and pork Papa bought at Tinker’s Market, the first meat they had seen in weeks.

Friends and family crowded into the Kalama home that night, laughing and eating, singing and talking story. Rachel sat, as she often did at such gatherings, on the lap of her tall, rangy Uncle Pono—Papa’s older brother, Kapono Kalama, a plantation worker in Waim
nalo. “ ’Ey, there’s my favorite niece!” he would say, hoisting her into his arms. “You married yet?” Rachel soberly shook her head. “Why not?” Pono shot back. “Good-looking girl like you? You gonna be an old maid, you wait much longer!” When Rachel did her best not to laugh at his teasing, Pono resorted to tickling—and as she curled up like a snail in his lap, giggling uncontrollably, he’d say, “See, pretty funny after all, eh?”

Later, Henry’s brood gathered round as he handed out the presents he never neglected to bring home from faraway ports. They were modest gifts, befitting a seaman’s wages, but Papa had uncommonly good taste and always chose something to charm and delight them. Dorothy was presented with a pretty string necklace beaded with dozens of small, imperfectly shaped pearls, each plucked from the ocean floor by native divers in Rarotonga. Sarah was thrilled to receive a pair of silver earrings from New Zealand, though the silver in them probably wouldn’t have filled a tooth. Kimo got a box of Chinese puzzles; Ben, a picture book from Tokyo, and another from Hong Kong.

Rachel knew what Papa had brought her, of course. What he always brought her: a doll from one of the countries he’d visited. Already she had a
sakura-ningyö
, a “cherry doll” from Japan; a pair of Mission Dolls from China; and a rag baby from America, purchased on Papa’s last trip to San Francisco. What would it be this time? Rachel could hardly contain herself as Papa pulled the last gift box from his suitcase.

“And this one’s for Rachel,” he said, “from Japan.”

Rachel was crestfallen. She already had a Japanese doll! Had Papa forgotten? Trying not to betray her disappointment, she tore the lid off the box, stripping away the tissue paper enfolding the doll. . . .

That is, assuming it
was
a doll. Rachel stared in confusion at the contents of the box, which appeared to be . . . an
egg
. A large wooden egg, no neck, a fat body, a bundled scarf and winter clothes painted on—Humpty Dumpty, but with a woman’s face. Hilda Dumpty?

Rachel was surprised at how heavy it was, and entranced by its odd appearance. “What
is
it?” she asked.

Her father scolded, “But you’re not done opening the present!” He pointed at the egg. “Hold the bottom with one hand, the head with the other. Then pull.”

Rachel did as she was told—then jumped as the egg popped apart, and a second egg fell out! This smaller one resembled a man with a painted-on farmer’s outfit; but when Rachel began examining it her father wagged a finger: “Still not finished!” Rachel pulled apart the second doll to discover yet a
third
one, a young girl-egg this time.

Everyone laughed at the expression on Rachel’s face as she kept finding littler and littler dolls growing younger and younger, seven in all—the last an infant in painted-on swaddling, made of solid wood.

“They call ’em
matryoshka,”
Papa explained. “Nesting dolls. From Russia.”

“But you said they were from Japan.”

“I
got
’em in Japan. Japan’s next door to Russia. You like?”

Rachel beamed. “They’re beautiful, Papa.”

That night Rachel carefully weighed where to place the nesting dolls on the coffee-crate shelf that held the rest of her collection. Farthest to the left was the cherry doll, a beautiful Kabuki dancer in a green silk kimono, holding a tiny fan. Next to her were the Chinese Mission dolls: a yellow-skinned
amah,
or nurse, carrying a little yellow baby on her back. And lastly, the rag doll from America, a cuddly infant with a sweet moonlike face, which Rachel sometimes took to bed with her. She remembered then what Papa had said about Japan being “next door” to Russia and she placed the
matryoshka
beside the Japanese cherry doll, then stepped back to admire her collection.

Behind her, she heard a familiar voice. “She fits right in, eh?”

Rachel turned. Papa was standing in the doorway. “Your Mama says you got to say your prayers and get your sneaky little hide into bed.”

“Sarah’s not in bed yet.”

“She will be after her bath.”

“Will you sing me a song first?” This, too, was old custom between them.

Papa smiled. “Prayers first.”

Rachel hurried through her evening prayer, then eagerly jumped into bed. Papa closed the bedroom door, pulled up a chair beside her, and sat. “So, which one you want to hear?”

Rachel thought for a moment, then announced, “ ‘Whiskey Johnnie.’ ”

Her father glanced furtively toward the closed door, then back to Rachel. “How ’bout ‘Blow the Man Down’?”

“ ‘Whiskey Johnnie’!” Rachel insisted.

Papa sighed in surrender. He leaned forward in his chair and in a deliberately low voice began to sing:

“Oh whiskey is the life of man
A Whiskey for my Johnnie.
Oh I’ll drink whiskey whenever I can
Whiskey, Johnnie.
Bad whiskey gets me in the can—”

“A Whiskey for my Johnnie!”
Rachel joined in. Together they sang two more stanzas, until Rachel burst out giggling and Papa, also laughing, patted her on the hand. “That’s my chantey girl,” he said with a grin. He kissed her on the forehead. “Now go to sleep.”

Rachel’s eyes drooped closed. Snug beneath her woolen blanket, she slept soundly that night—dreaming she was on a schooner plying the sea, bound for the Orient, destined for adventure.

C

loser to home, Fort Street School was a big one-story house surrounded by a whitewashed picket fence, arbored by the leafy umbrellas of tall monkeypod trees, with a long porch and white wooden colonnade that would not have looked out of place in southern Virginia. The morning after Papa came home began as usual with the students reciting the Lord’s Prayer, then in chorus singing
“Good morning to you”
to their teacher; after which they opened their Tower grammars and followed along with Miss Wallis as she recited the alphabet. But in what seemed like no time at all another teacher, a gray-haired Hawaiian woman, appeared in the classroom doorway.

“Miss Wallis? A moment, please?” Normally quite unflappable, today the older woman looked wan and shaken, almost as if she were about to cry. “Students, I have a . . . an announcement. It is with great sadness that I must tell you that our king”—her voice broke as she said it—“King Kal
kaua . . . is dead.”

She seemed about to elaborate—then, unable to go on, simply said, “Under the circumstances, Principal Scott has dismissed classes for the day.” And she hurried on to the next classroom, the impact of her news rolling in wave after wave through each grade of the primary school.

Students slowly filtered out of the schoolhouse. Rain was falling in a gray mist, the skies seeming to weep along with the people Rachel encountered in the streets. Stunned and grieving, they gathered in small groups from which rose a spontaneous, collective wail unlike anything Rachel had ever heard before—a deep woeful cry that seemed to come from a hundred hearts at once. Its raw anguish frightened her, and she ran home to find both Mama and Papa in tears as well. Rachel, for whom death was still just a word, tried to comfort them, though not quite understanding why: “It’s all right, Mama. Don’t cry, Papa.” Dorothy took her daughter in her arms and wept, and soon Rachel began to feel that she should be crying too, and so she did.

The king had left in November on a goodwill trip to the United States—Hawai'i’s most important trading partner and the homeland of most its resident foreigners—and for weeks his subjects had been awaiting his return aboard the USS
Charleston
from San Francisco. But this morning the city’s official lookout, “Diamond Head Charlie,” spotted the
Charleston
steaming toward Honolulu with its yards acockbill, its flags at half-mast . . . which could mean only one thing. The news was telephoned from Diamond Head and quickly spread across the city like a shadow across the sun; the festive banners and bunting put up in anticipation of Kal
kaua’s return were quickly torn down and replaced with solemn black crepe.

The king’s body lay in state in 'Iolani Palace for the next fifteen days, during which time nearly every resident of Honolulu, and many from the neighbor islands, came to pay their respects. The Kalamas were six among thousands who queued up outside the palace for hours so that they might be able to briefly file past their monarch’s casket.

The king had succumbed, it was now known, to a
haole
sickness called Bright’s Disease. Old-timers in the crowd found this a melancholy echo of what had befallen Kamehameha II and his queen, both of whom had died after contracting measles on a trip to England. The first of the
haole
diseases had sailed into Hawai'i on the smiles and charm of Captain Cook’s crew: syphilis and gonorrhea. Others soon followed: cholera, influenza, tuberculosis, mumps, diphtheria. One outbreak of smallpox alone took six thousand lives. Hawaiians, living in splendid isolation for five centuries, had no resistance to these new plagues that rode in on the backs of commerce and culture. Before Cook’s arrival the native population of Hawai'i was more than a quarter of a million people; a hundred years later, it had plummeted to fewer than sixty thousand.