Moloka'i (28 page)

“But the bones were only
part
of Pele’s body, and while her sister was lulled into believing she’d won, Pele traveled to the Big Island, going far inland—far out of the sea’s reach—and digging a hole so deep that her sister could not breach it. The sea goddess raged in defeat and returned to Tahiti. Pele and her family have lived ever since in K
lauea.”

Rachel gave a low whistle. “I guess I’m lucky my sister only got me sent to a leper colony,” she said with a smile, then worked up the nerve to ask something she had long wondered. “Auntie? Do you . . . still believe in the old gods? Are they still real to you?”

Haleola seemed surprised, even amused, by the question. “Aouli,” she said, “is a daughter ‘born from the brain’ of her mother any less believable than a virgin who gives birth to the Son of God?”

“That wasn’t what I asked.”

“I know.” Haleola stood, a bit shakily, and sighed. “I wish that I had been born fifty years before I was,” she said. “Before the
kapus
were overthrown. When things were more certain. All my life I’ve lived in two worlds—the world my mother raised me to believe in, and the world around me. As a healer I was taught that sickness came from the soul, from a person’s past actions and state of mind. Yet I’ve seen with my own eyes the tiny creatures that live in our blood, the ‘microbes’ that supposedly make us sick. Which do I believe? Maybe both.”

She looked around her, at the lush green slopes of the crater, teeming with life; at the ocean pounding the lava coast as if Namakaokaha'i were still futilely battering her sister’s bones; and up at the towering face of the
pali
. She smiled.

“I’ll tell you what I believe in,” she said. “I believe in the
'
ina
—the land and the sea and the air around us. When our ancestors first saw the fury of the surf or the angry fire spitting from volcanoes, they saw that there was a power to these things that they could not explain. They knew they had
mana
—power. And they do. Can you look at the beauty around us, Aouli, and doubt that there is
mana
in this crater, and in the land and sea and sky that surround it?”

“No,” Rachel allowed.

“No land is more beautiful,” Haleola said, “and therefore more powerful. That is what I believe in, Aouli. I believe in Hawai'i. I believe in the land.”

S

ister Catherine dropped into the confessional’s seat and said in a trembling voice, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. My last confession was on Friday last.”

Father Maxime André clearly noted the distress in the sister’s voice and waited to hear of its cause.

“I have questioned God’s will. I have felt anger toward Him. I have doubted His wisdom. And I still do.”

“Sister, what has caused you to doubt?” he asked.

“I don’t know where to begin.” And she didn’t know Father Maxime half as well as Father Wendelin, who’d left Kalaupapa after friction with superiors in Honolulu. “My . . . father committed suicide. When I was seventeen.”

“I’m sorry.”

“He hadn’t seemed depressed or anxious,” Catherine went on. “He wasn’t in any financial trouble, or having an affair. One day he just took out his pistol and shot himself. Left a note saying he was sorry, but no more.

“My mother came to blame herself. She thought, when the man you’ve loved all these years is so troubled that he’s driven to kill himself, shouldn’t you know? Shouldn’t you be able to see it coming? And then it’s a small step to wondering, Maybe it’s my fault. Maybe I failed him as a wife. What did I do? What did I fail to do?

“Well, ever since, Mama would have trouble sleeping. She’d spend half the night awake sometimes; I used to hear the floorboards groan as she paced the house. Her physician, Dr. Almont, prescribed laudanum to help her sleep.”

“Laudanum. That’s tincture of opium, isn’t it?”

“Yes. And it did help. We all knew she’d become addicted to it, but . . . the alternative seemed somehow worse. And now my brother telephoned today to tell me”—her voice caught—“last night Mother took a fatal overdose of laudanum and died in her sleep.”

“Catherine. Dear God,” Maxime said softly. “I’m so sorry.” He added hopefully, “Was it an accident?”

Catherine shook her head, though he couldn’t see. “No. Quite deliberate. She left a note.” She added quietly, “There’s no way I can get back to Ithaca in time for her funeral. I’m going to miss my mother’s funeral.”

She began to weep.

“Sister,” Father Maxime said, “you’ve nothing to confess to. You’ve had an awful shock, of course you’ll experience some doubt, some—”

“Listen, Father, please listen.” She wiped away tears, tried to order her thoughts. “When my father killed himself, our parish priest took the view . . . the charitable view . . . that my father had not been in full possession of himself. He’d had a drink that night, and Father Bernds took that into consideration and concluded that my father’s suicide was not a mortal sin; and that therefore he could be given a church burial.

“I don’t know if Father Bernds was right. I don’t know what sort of reckoning my father had with God. But—”

Maxime said, “Your mother was under the influence of an opiate. This wasn’t a rational decision—”

“It was
very
rational! She’d planned it for weeks, hoarding enough medication to do the job. She put her legal affairs in perfect order, to lessen the burden on her children. And she left a long note apologizing to us, saying she was simply tired of living with the guilt and the grief, and all she wanted was for the pain to end.

“But now I’m frightened, Father . . . so frightened . . . that far from being over, her pain is just
beginning.”

She wept inconsolably now, and Father Maxime left his side of the confessional and came over to Catherine’s; he squatted beside her, took her trembling hands in his. “She was not in her right mind when she did this,” he insisted.

“What about my father? Was
he
not in his right mind?”

The priest hesitated. Catherine asked, “Is it a mortal sin to love someone as much as my mother did? To feel such guilt for his death that you can’t bear it another day? Is that a sin punishable by damnation?

“Tell me, Father, that my mother is in Heaven. Tell me she’s with my papa, and God has forgiven them both.”

Father Maxime looked helplessly at her. She broke down again, and wordlessly—for he had no words—he took her in his arms and cradled her; offering her not God’s comfort but his own, merely human, consolation.

O

n a stormy winter’s day in January, as Haleola felt the rain in her bones and listened to its comforting percussion on the roof, she received her first portent. As she sat sewing, her house—closed tight against the damp cold—was suddenly suffused with a familiar fragrance: that of the sweet purple flowers of the silversword plant, which Haleola had once witnessed in rare bloom on the Haela'au trail. The silversword didn’t grow on Moloka'i—even on Maui it could only be found on the slopes of Haleakal
and in the West Maui mountains, and it bloomed only in summer. But its scent now seemed to fill the room as vividly as if she were sitting on the terraced slopes above Lahaina!

“Aouli?” Rachel glanced up from
The Sea Wolf
and looked at Haleola. “Do you smell that?”

Rachel’s nose twitched. “Smell what?”

“Oh . . . nothing. Never mind.” Haleola, still breathing in the fragrance, wondered whether this was perhaps a trick of memory. She decided to enjoy the remembrance, if that was what it was, for as long as it lasted . . . about five minutes, after which it dissipated as though she were descending a trail into a valley, leaving the silversword high on the slopes above.

But Maui came to her in other ways as well. That night she dreamt she was floating on the surface of the sea, drifting with the current and gazing down at brilliant yellow, white, and purple coral reefs passing below her. Even in dream she recognized where she was: Olowalu, just below Lahaina, a favorite swimming spot of her youth. She was delighted to be back, pleased that everything she saw was familiar as an old friend: a great blue bush of branching coral, schools of striped and yellow fishes fluttering around it like butterflies; pink brain coral looking as if plucked from some inhuman skull; spidery little crabs skittering through a crevice in a mountain of bright green lobe coral. She smiled and floated toward a bulbous mass of white coral, another friend of days gone by. . . .

And then one of the white coral heads opened a pair of eyes and looked at her.

Its black irises expanded in the gloom, the eyes slowly tracking her as she floated past, and Haleola panicked; she shut her eyes, as if by doing so she could shut these others too.

When she opened them again, she was no longer in the water but on the beach with Keo and the children and their old dog, the one they had found as a puppy with its jaw broken. Haleola had mended the pup, and they named it Papa Ku'i, “jawbone.”

They were sitting on the sand at K
'anapali, a pig roasting in a pit. Keo asked her to take some pork from the pit, but she was somehow afraid. The flames seared the pig’s skin, blistering it black, but no matter how much Keo begged her to go to the pit she wouldn’t do it.

Papa Ku'i began to howl.

Haleola woke.

She knew at once what she had just experienced: a “revelation of the night.” The opening eyes, the pit, the howling dog—all of these were portents of death.

In her dream she had been afraid; here in the cool quiet night a great calm surrounded her. All this was as it should be; she’d been granted a glimpse into the future that would allow her to make the most of the present.

It was four in the morning but Haleola rose immediately, unwilling to waste even a moment. By candlelight she wrote letters to her sons and had them sealed before Rachel stirred at seven. The rain’s persistent monotone on the roof became more inconstant, then ceased entirely, though a wet wind still ruffled the palm trees. Haleola was outside frying eggs on the griddle of the stone oven when Rachel came out, stifling a yawn. “Auntie, I’d have done that.”

“You were sleeping.” Haleola handed her a calabash and smiled. “I wanted to cook today. Have some
poi.”