Moloka'i (22 page)

But Bishop Home was currently in the grip of an epidemic even Dr. Goodhue couldn’t treat, one that periodically afflicted all Bishop girls. It was an outbreak of restlessness and rebellion which the nuns called “spring fever”—as though it were spread by pollen—but which even they knew was the girls’ natural enough desire for greater freedom in leading their lives. The latest flare-up had been ignited by the sisters’ strict rules regarding courtship. A girl and a boy were permitted only supervised visits on convent grounds, each lasting no more than an hour. After a chaste courtship, if the couple chose to marry they did so with the nuns’ blessing.

But before that first chaperoned visit prospective suitors had to be approved. A sixteen-year-old girl, Louisa, wished to see a young man named Theo, but Mother Marianne considered him a troublemaker—reprimanded by Brother Dutton several times for insolence and truancy—and refused to grant him the privilege of courting Louisa.

That night the older girls—Rachel, Emily, Francine, Louisa, a Filipino girl named Cecelia, and the recently arrived Hina from East Moloka'i—swapped grievances after lights-out.

“They treat us like little
keiki,
” Louisa griped, to somber nods all around.

“No,” Emily corrected her, “they treat us like prisoners!”

“We
are
prisoners,” Cecelia said.

Rachel told how she’d tried to give a simple thank-you to Nahoa and been thwarted; the girls groaned in unison.

Doing her best impression of Sister Leopoldina, Francine said airily, “ ‘Why girls there’s so much for you to do here, if you desire social companionship there’s church, and the funeral societies—’ ”

Hoots and hollers drowned out the remainder of Francine’s impersonation.

“Oh, yes,” Rachel said, “the funeral society! Just the place to meet men—if you don’t mind them a little cold and moldy!”

“ ‘You know, girls’ ”—Francine glowered—“ ‘when you abandon chastity, you open the doors to Hell!’ ”

“Can’t be worse than Kalaupapa,” Emily noted, and everyone dissolved into laughter again.

Hina, who had quietly taken all this in, suddenly announced, “Hey, who wants to go to a party Friday night?”

“Not another church social,” moaned Louisa.

“No no no,” Hina said. “Friend of mine’s throwing one. In Kaunakakai.”

There was a long startled silence.

“Kaunakakai?” said Rachel. “But that’s topside.”

“Yeah, so?”

“We can’t go topside,” Louisa protested.

Impatiently Hina snapped, “Hey! Wake up! It’s alla same island! Kaunakakai’s only twelve miles from here.” She rolled her eyes. “Look. Simple. Right after sunset we go up the
pali,
my friend Luka meets us at the top with a wagon, we go party, be back here by dawn! If we’re lucky, sisters don’t even know we were gone.”

It was a bold, audacious idea. All of them had occasionally fantasized about escaping, but no one had ever suggested escaping
temporarily
.

A suddenly less militant Emily said, “That’s crazy. How do we get up the
pali?
”

Excitedly, Rachel pointed out, “I climbed a quarter of the way up once with the sisters! It’s not so hard.”

“Don’t they have guards up there?” Louisa asked. “With guns and dogs?”

Francine shook her head. “No more dogs. McVeigh got rid of ’em.”

“What if they find out at the party that we got leprosy?” Cecelia wanted to know.

Hina shrugged. “Nobody care.”

“I don’t know ’bout this,” Louisa said, hesitant.

“Oh, I forgot,” Hina said acidly, “we’re
prisoners
.”

Silence all around. Emily thought a moment, then said emphatically, “Hell we are.”

B

y late afternoon on Friday, as soon as it was judged dark enough, Hina led the half-dozen conspirators off the convent grounds and along the curving black sand beach that lay between Kalaupapa and the
pali
. At the base of the cliffs a thick stand of pandanus trees hid the girls from sight as they started up the narrow trail. Rachel, right behind Hina in the lead, craned her neck to take in the towering face of the
pali
: from down here it looked alarmingly sheer, relentlessly vertical. But she reminded herself that mail carriers made their way down each week, that even cattle were driven down the trail. How hard could it be?

Each girl wore her wine-colored uniform and carried a change of clothes in a knapsack slung across her back: the white gowns with pink or blue sashes that Bishop girls were supposed to wear only on special occasions. Well, Rachel thought, this sure qualifies! They joked and laughed as they made their way along the switchbacks that zigzagged up the
pali,
and the mood was jolly for the first half hour or so. But then the constant to-and-fro of the turns became tiresome, and the trail itself, crumbling a bit with each step, sent loose gravel tumbling onto the girls taking up the rear. Cawing gulls dropped other presents on their heads. Laughter fell into short supply.

Sometimes the trail was canopied with vegetation; sometimes it clung rather precipitously to the
pali
. Rachel made the mistake of looking down and felt a jab of vertigo as she realized she was virtually suspended hundreds of feet in the air—and the only thing that kept her from plummeting down was a frangible ledge of earth barely a foot wide in spots.

Wild goats clung to even narrower ledges above them, and as the goats scuttled back and forth their hooves dislodged more dirt and gravel onto the girls. Soon, the path narrowed even more, and was now decorated by the occasional bleached bones of a cow that had been unsuccessfully herded down. Looking at the carcasses, buzzing with flies, Rachel had a sudden unwanted vision of her body lying pulped at the foot of the
pali
.

As they ascended into clouds floating a thousand feet above Kalaupapa, visibility decreased to zero and sprinkles of rain added to their misery. The trail grew muddy and slippery and Emily lost her footing; Rachel grabbed her by the wrist, saving her from joining the cattle.

Emily got shakily to her feet, nodded gratefully at Rachel. “Thanks.” Then she said to Hina, “Alla same island, huh?”

Hina just shrugged.

It was among the longest two hours of Rachel’s life, and except for her journey to Kauhak
, the filthiest—by the end of the climb their faces and dresses were caked with mud. But at last they reached the summit and stood on solid rock overlooking the peninsula. And as they gazed down and saw the white and green bungalows of Bishop Home shrunk to the size of pebbles, it occurred to all of them at the same time:
they were out.
The hold the sisters had over them was gone, left behind like the clouds they had pierced. They could go anywhere, do anything they wanted.

And what they wanted was to go to a party.

A padlocked gate was easily surmounted. They climbed over it and hiked through an arbor of trees, emerging into a green meadow grazed by cattle, when they heard a voice.

“S–Stop!”

They turned, unsurprised, and saw a young guard in his twenties, startled by this procession of young women with muddy faces. He was holding a shotgun in his right hand but it was pointed at the ground; the thought of aiming it at them seemed not to have occurred to him.

Hina smiled.
“Aloha,”
she said cheerfully. The other girls added their greetings as well.

The guard just stared at them. Occasionally girls from Bishop Home climbed the
pali
for sport, but not this late in the day and certainly not unescorted by nuns. “What—what are you doing up here?” he stammered.

“Oh, just goin’ to a social,” Hina said casually. She turned to the others and announced, “We better change.”

As one, the Bishop girls dropped their knapsacks onto the grass, and began stripping off their purple uniforms.

Blouses and skirts fell to the ground in heaps. None of the girls was wearing any underclothes, and the young man found himself staring at six unabashedly naked women.

“No worry,” Hina said as opened her knapsack, “we gonna be back by dawn.”

Emily passed around a canteen so that each of them could wash up with a little water. “Girl’s gotta look good if she’s goin’ to a social,” Emily winked to the guard. They all took slightly longer than necessary to remove clean clothes from their knapsacks.

The guard was blushing, but no one saw him turn away either. The girls stepped into clean dresses, adjusted straps, slipped on fresh sandals.

“Hina,” Rachel asked as she stuffed her dirty uniform into her knapsack, “we change again on the way down?”

“Sure, sure. Can’t go down in these.” Hina hiked up her skirt, asked the guard, “You be here when we get back?”

He made no response at first, then slowly nodded.

“We’ll see you later then, ’ey?” Hina signaled the girls to follow, blowing the guard a kiss as they passed; he watched, nonplussed, as the girls sauntered up the trail to Kala'e. As they rounded a bend Rachel looked back and saw that the guard was still staring. She waved at him. After a moment he waved back.

They ran laughing through pastures scattered with guava trees, finally reaching the government road where Hina’s friend Luka (alerted by a clandestine telephone call) waited in a rickety old wagon. And then they were off, the wagon bouncing over roads rougher than anything Rachel had known on O'ahu. She watched the landscape roll past, green hills and deep valleys, endless acres of arable land. Most of this, Hina told them, had once belonged to High Chief Kapu
iwa, who became Kamehameha V; now it was the property of the American Sugar Company. “Some day
haoles
gonna own everything except the nose on your face,” Hina predicted.

In the vastness of these open spaces, even the air tasted different to Rachel. It tasted of freedom.

On the outskirts of Kaunakakai, houses began springing up along the road, everything from tumbledown shanties to fine whitewashed cottages on stilts. Even the most ramshackle of them seemed to sit regally amid acres of taro, pineapple, or coffee. The wagon slowed to allow a man on horseback to cross its path; the handsome rider smiled and tipped his hat at the wagonload of pretty, giggling girls. Then a gust of wind blew Rachel’s hair back into her face, and with the wind came—something else.

It was a voice raised in song—a beautiful voice. A man’s voice, not low and deep but high and sweet, singing in some unfamiliar language:

“E lucevan le stelle

ed olezzava la terra . . .”

No; not totally unfamiliar. Rachel had heard something like it at the docks once, spoken by a sailor, or a stevedore, a man from . . .

Italy! That was it!

The wagon started moving again but Rachel cried out, “Wait!” and jumped out of the cart. Who on earth could be singing so sweetly in Italian, here in the wilds of Moloka'i?

“O! dolci baci, o languide carezze—”

She probed the darkness for the owner of the beautiful voice, but saw no one. Now she noticed, too, that the singer was accompanied by a piano, equally invisible. And there was something else about it, some unique quality of sound Rachel couldn’t quite identify.

Emily jumped out of the wagon to join Rachel. “Who’s that singing?”

“I don’t know, but it sounds like it’s coming from over there.” She started toward a small clapboard house standing about fifty feet in from the road.

“Rachel, come on, come back!” Hina called out. To her dismay the other girls, out of curiosity, got out and followed Rachel down the path to the house. “Aw, hell!” Hina swore, and went after them.

A
haole
man sat in a rocking chair on the
l
nai
—the porch—his eyes closed, a blissful smile on his face. There was still no sign of the singer himself, but as Rachel drew nearer she noticed an unusual device on a wicker table beside the man. It looked like a fancy shoebox made of dark polished wood, with a crank on the side. Atop the shoebox was a mechanical apparatus of some kind, inside which a grooved cylinder was rotating. But most strikingly, rising up out of the box was an enormous metal funnel—black with golden highlights, twice the size of the box itself—which resembled nothing so much as the trumpet-shaped flowers of a morning glory.