Hawaii (47 page)

He sat on the floor with Pupali, no light showing, and asked in broken Hawaiian, "Why do you take your own daughters to these evil men?"

"I get cloth and sometimes even tobacco," Pupali explained.

"Don't you see that some day your daughters may die from the sailors' disease?" Abner pleaded.

"Some day everybody dies," Pupali rationalized.

"But is a little money worth this to you?" Abner argued.

"Men like girls," Pupali said truthfully.

"Do you feel no shame in selling your own wife to the sailors?"

"Her sister takes care of me," Pupali said contentedly.

"Are you proud when the sailors bum down the houses?" Abner pressed.

"They never bum my house," Pupali replied.

"How old is your prettiest daughter, Pupali?"

Abner could hear him suck in his breath in pride. "Iliki? She was born in the year of Keopuolani's illness."

"Fourteen, and probably already sick to deathl" *1

"What do you expect? She's a woman."

On the spur of the moment Abner said, "I want you to give her to me, Pupali."

At last something was happening that the rough old man could understand. Smiling lasciviously he whispered, "You'll enjoy Iliki. All the men do. How much you give me for her?"

"I am taking her for God," Abner corrected.

"I know, but how much you give me?" Pupali pressed.

"I will clothe her and feed her and treat her as my daughter," Abner explained.

"You mean, you don't want . . ." Pupali shook his head. "Well, Makua Hale, you must be a good man." And when morning dawned, Abner, in the dust of riots, started his school for Hawaiian girls. His first pupil was Pupali's most beautiful daughter, Iliki, and when she appeared she wore only a thin slip about her hips and a silver chain around her neck, from which dangled a whale's tooth handsomely carved with these words:

Observe the truth; enough for man to know Virtue alone is happiness below.

When the other island families saw what an advantage Pupali enjoyed by having his daughter as an observer within the missionary household, for she could report on the strangest occurrences, they offered their girls, too, which nullified Pupali's superiority, so that he countered by enrolling his other three daughters, and when the next whaling ship touched port, matters were different. Before, sailors had instructed the Lahaina girls in profanity in the steaming fo'c's'ls; now Jerusha taught them cooking and the Psalms in the mission garden, and her ablest pupil was Iliki, Ee-Lee-Kee, the Pelting Spray of Ocean.

ABNER WAS NOT PRESENT to congratulate Iliki on the August afternoon when she first wrote her name and carried it proudly to her father, for that morning had brought an exhausted messenger to Lahaina. He had run across the mountains from the other side of the island, blurting out so bizarre a story that Abner summoned Keoki to translate formally, and the young man said, "It is truel Abraham and Urania Hewlett have marched all the way from Hana, at the opposite end of Maui."

FROM THE FARM OF BtTTERNESS

235

"Why didn't they take a canoe?" Abner asked, puzzled.

Keoki Tapidly interrogated the gasping messenger and then looked blank as the man explained. "It's hard to believe," Keoki muttered. "Abraham and Urania set out yesterday morning at four o'clock in a double canoe, but at six o'clock the waves were so great that the canoe broke apart, so Abraham brought his wife ashore through the surf. Then they walked forty miles to Wailuku, where they are now."

"I thought that trail was impossible for women," Abner argued.

"It is. The worst on Maui. But Urania had to make it, because next month she is due to have her baby and they wanted to be with you."

"What can I ..." Abner began in bewilderment.

"They are afraid she is dying," the messenger said.

"If she's dying . . ." Abner was sweating and nervous. "Well, how did she get to Wailuku?"

With gestures, the messenger explained, "The paddlers from the wrecked canoe tied vines under her arms and pulled her up the gullies. Then, when it came time to go down the other side, they grabbed the vines . . ."

Before the tired messenger could finish, Abner knelt in the dust and raised his hands. He could visualize Urania, a dull woman and frightened, undergoing this tremendous trip, and he prayed, "Dear Heavenly Father, save Thy servant, Sister Urania. In her hours of fear, save her."

The messenger interrupted and said, "Abraham Hewlett says you must bring your book and help him."

"The book?" Abner cried. "I thought. . ."

"They need you now," the messenger insisted. "Because when I left she seemed about to have the baby."

The idea of assisting at a birth appalled Abner, but he hurried out to the garden where Jerusha was teaching her girls, and from his frightened look she knew that some new island crisis had occurred, but she was not prepared when he said, "Sister Urania was trying to reach us for help, but she has had to stop in Wailuku." The Hales had never spoken of Urania's pregnancy, just as, for reasons of delicacy, they had never mentioned Jerusha's, trusting that by some miracle the baby would either be born without trouble or wait until Dr. Whipple happened along. Now,_under the coconut trees, they had to acknowledge imminent facts.

"I will take Deland's Midwifery and do what I can," Abner said dully, but what he wanted to cry was: "I will be with you, Jerusha! By the will of God, I will see that your baby is well bom."

And she replied, "You must help Sister Urania," but what she intended was: "I am afraid, and I wish my mother were here."

So the two young missionaries, each so desperately in love but lacking capacity to speak of it to the other, because they judged that Congregationalism would not approve, looked at each other in the noonday sunlight, and then looked away; but it was Abner who broke, for when they had gone inside to pack Deknd it was he who could

not control his hands, and the package fell awry and the crucial book fell onto the dusty floor, and when he kneeled to recover he hid his face in his hands and sobbed, "Sister Urania, may God spare you!" But it was another name he longed to say.

The journey on foot from Lahaina to Wailuku, on the other side of Maui, took Abner and the messenger high into the mountains, and as they hiked over barren and rocky fields, with sweat pouring from them, they came upon a cloud of dust, and it was Kelolo and his lieutenants, driving their men down to the plains with a vast cargo of sandalwood. For an instant Abner was infuriated and admonished the chief: "While you cut sandalwood, your town diminishes." But before he heard Kelolo's justification�"These are my men. I do with them as I please."�he saw that many of the servants were carrying not sawed trunks from grown trees but saplings and roots grubbed out of the soil.

"Did you take even the new trees?" Abner asked in disgust.

"It is my sandalwood," Kelolo explained.

"You faithless servant," Abner cried and limped on.

When they reached the topmost ridge and could see the houses of Wailuku below, Abner paused to wipe away his sweat and thought: "If it is such hard work for us to climb this little hill, how could Urania have bome her journey?"

In the village of Wailuku they found out. When the canoe in which they were journeying broke up, Abraham had pushed and hauled his wife more than forty miles overland in an effort to join with the Hales at Lahaina, and this had precipitated her labor pains. Now they were bogged down in a trader's shack, helpless in panic.

It was a miracle that Urania, after such a trip, was still alive, but it was a greater miracle that Abraham had not thought to enlist the aid of Hawaiian midwives at his home mission, for they were some of the most highly skilled in the Pacific and within ten minutes would have diagnosed Urania's case as one of simple premature birth brought on by exhaustion. Had the Hewletts relied on them, they wouM have produced a clean birth and a healthy baby; but for the Hewletts to have accepted their aid would have meant admitting that a heathen, brown-skinned Hawaiian knew how to deliver a Christian white baby, and such an idea was unthinkable.

"I was sorely tempted to call in the local midwives," Brother Abraham confessed to Abner, when he ran up to meet the limping traveler, "but I was ever mindful of Jeremiah 10, verse 2: "Thus saitl the Lord, Leam not the way of the heathen.' So I have brought my wife to her own people."

Abner agreed that he had acted wisely, and for a moment the two young men congratulated themselves on their righteousness, but then Abner asked, "How is Sister Urania?"

At this question poor Brother Abraham was seized with a blush of respectability which made it almost impossible for him to say the words, but finally he blurted out: "She seems to have lost a great deal of her water."

FROM THE FARM OF BITTERNESS 2B7

In the growing dusk Abner looked sickly at his companion, then started feverishly unpacking his handbook. Thumbing it awkwardly he found a section titled "The Dry Delivery," and as he read it hurriedly, he became quite ill in the stomach, for the news was ominous, but when he looked up and saw how hopeless Brother Abraham was, he gritted his teeth and said boldly, "I should like to see Sister Urania."

Hewlett led him toward a low grass hut in which the Englishman who traded at Wailuku lived, but both the man and his wife were absent in Honolulu, and the house was surrounded by fifty or sixty natives, sitting on the ground and watching the amazing white men. Abner made his way through them, and with his medical book under his arm, went into the mean house to greet the frail woman with whom he had shared the tiny stateroom on the Thetis. "Good evening, Sister Urania," he said solemnly, and she replied bravely, "It is so consoling to meet again one with whom we journeyed on the small ship." And for a moment they spoke of happier days.

Then Abner asked, "Sister Urania, when did your . . ." He paused in acute embarrassment, and then finished with a rush: "Your kbor pains, how long have they been occurring?"

"They started at six this morning," Urania said. Abner stared at her blankly, but his mind thought fiercely: "Oh, Godl That was when she was climbing the last gullies!"

He mopped his forehead and said slowly, "That was twelve hours ago. Presumably then, Sister Urania, the child will be born at midnight." He consulted his watch: six hours to go.

Aching with embarrassment, he asked, "Your pains. Have they been frequent?"

"I don't think so," she replied.

"Excuse me," he said, and fumbled for his book of instructions, but the light was so bad that he could not read, and he directed Brother Abraham to fetch a kukuinut lamp, and by its flickering, wavering light he picked out the words that would guide him. "Have we a sheet of tapa?" he asked, and when one was found, he cut it into halves, twisted them to make ropes, knotted one end and tied the other to the foot of the bed. "You must pull on these knots, Sister Urania," he instructed her. "In a dry delivery you will be called upon for extra work."

Instantly he was sorry he had said these words, for Urania looked np in terror and asked, "Have I done something wrong?"

"No, Sister Urania," he assured her. "With God's help we shall do well."

Instinctively, she took his hand and whispered, "My cherished husband and I are so glad that you came." But when Abner, blushing like a child, wanted to examine her stomach, as the handbook directed, both he and the Hewletts thought it proper that she first cover herself with all of her personal clothing plus a stout sheet of tapa. Feeling through the several layers, Abner gravely announced: "There seems nothing awry."

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HAWAII

But his head was snapped back by a sudden scream from the bed and an automatic tightening of the ropes. He hurried to the sputtering kmp and studied his watch. In tour minutes another cry and another straining. Sweating, he leafed through his book and found reassuring news. Hurrying back to the bed, he announced happily: "Sister Urania, things are going well. Now time will work with us."

At this news Brother Abraham grew a ghastly white and it was obvious that he was going to be very sick, so Abner left the straining woman and ran to the door of the delivery room, crying in Hawaiian, "Somebody come in here and take care of Reverend Hewlett!" Two experienced midwives, who understood husbands, laughed hilariously and rescued the missionary, who was, as they had predicted in obscene asides to the gathering, conspicuously nauseated, but while the midwives comforted him other Hawaiians whispered, "Isn't this a strange way to do things? Our best midwives outside the hut caring For the husband, while a man who knows nothing is inside, caring for the mother."

"I?s the way they do it in America," a listener explained.

Suddenly the midwives dropped Hewlett and listened acutely to Urania's cries, and it was sardonic that through the night these women, merely by listening, knew better what was occurring inside the hut than Abner, who was there with his book.

Hewlett, stabilized after his sickness, wiped his watery blue eyes and made his way back into the hut, demanding, "When will the

child be bom?"

"Brother Hewlett!" Abner cried in exasperation. "Unless you can make yourself to be of service, you will have to remain outside."

"When will the child be born?" the distraught man begged. Once more Abner went to the door and called for the midwives, who recovered Abraham and made him stay with them.

The pains now came at constant intervals, and Abner, checking his book constantly, found occasion to say, "Sister Urania, it does seem as if God were supervising us tonight."

"I am now in your hands, Brother Abner," the weak woman replied. "You must do with me as you require."

Later, Abner recalled that she had said these words with marked lassitude, and shortly thereafter he looked at her with horror and realized that she had not experineced a pain for some time and that she was still. Panic captured him, and he felt her wrists, but they seemed cold, and he ran to the door, shouting, "Brother Abraham! Come quickly!" And when the husband stumbled into the room, Abner reported, in a ghostly voice, "I fear she is dying."