Hawaii (64 page)

Abner, stunned by this double apostasy, began to mumble: "They can't go back to Kane! They know the catechism. Keoki's been to Yale. They're Congregationalists. They're members of my church and I forbid it."

But the apostasy, complete though it was, formed merely the prelude to an event of much greater significance, for from the group of kahunas, whose night of triumph this was, a tall priest stepped forward bearing a black tapa, such as Abner had not seen before, and after a passionate prayer to Kane, this priest swirled the tapa wide in the night air, and when it was completely unfolded, brought it down about the shoulders of the brother and sister, crying: "From this moment on, you shall share forever the same tapa!" And he led the couple toward the waiting house.

The drums leaped to wild rhythms. Dancers created violent gestures which erased memories of earlier beauty, and the kahunas chanted: "Noelani and Keoki are married." Abner could tolerate no more. He leaped from his hiding place, swinging his stout club and shouting, "Abomination! Abomination!"

Before the astonished gathering could apprehend him, he leaped to the altar and with a mighty swipe of his club sent the sacred stone of Kane spinning into the dust. In fury he kicked at the maile branches and the ginger. Then, dropping his club, he marched solemnly to the married couple, ripped away the black tapa, and cried, "Abomination!"

By now the Hawaiians were recovered from their amazement, and Kelolo, aided by two kahunas, pinioned Abner, but they treated him gently, for they knew he was the priest of the other god, and what he had done was only his duty. So Keolo pleaded softly, "Dear little friend, go home. Tonight we talk with other gods."

Abner broke loose and pointed his finger at Keoki, crying, "In God's eyes this is an outrage." Keoki looked at him glassily, and Abner cried, "Keoki, what has happened?"

The giant alii stared at his old friend and mumbled, "I begged you, Reverend Hale, to make me a minister. If your church doesn't want me . . ."

"A minister?" Abner shouted, and suddenly the hideousness of this night�the hulas, the living stone, the drums and the kahunas�overwhelmed him and he began to laugh hysterically. "A minister?" he repeated several times, until Kelolo placed his hand gently but firmly over the missionary's mouth and had him dragged away from the ceremonies, but the God-driven little man struggled loose and rushed back almost to the bridal couple before he was apprehended.

"Keoki!" he shouted. "Are you proceeding with this marriage?"

"As my father before me," Keoki replied.

"Infamous!" Abner moaned. "It puts you outside the pale of civilized . . ."

"Hush!" an imperious voice commanded, and Abner drew back. It was Noelani who came close to him and said softly, "Beloved Makua Hale, we are not doing this to hurt you."

Abner looked at the beautiful young woman with flowers in her

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hair and he argued, with equal control, "Noelani, you are being tempted by these men to commit a grave sin."

The Alii Nui did not argue, but pointed instead toward the dark hills, saying, "In former days we followed our own gods, and our valleys were filled with people. We have tried following yours, and our islands are sunk in despair. Death, awful sickness, cannon and fear. That is what you have brought us, Makua Hale, although we know you did not intend it to be so. I am the Alii Nui, and if I die without child, who will keep the Hawaiian spirit alive?"

"Noelani, dear little girl of my hopes, there are dozens of men . .. right here . . . who would be proud to be your husband."

"But could their children be designated Alii Nui?" Noelani countered, and this line of pagan reasoning so infuriated Abner that he drew back and cried in dismal voice, "Abomination! Malama would curse you from, her grave!"

Later, Kelolo confessed that he should have kept silent, but he could not, and asked tauntingly, "What directions do you think Malama gave me when she whispered on her deathbed?"

In horror the little missionary, his pale face and watery blond hair shining in the torchlight, stared at Kelolo. Could what the alii said be true? Had Malama commanded this obscenity? The repulsiveness of this possibility was more than he could accommodate at the moment, and he stumbled from the compound while the kahunas restored Kane, and the drums resumed their nuptial beat.

Bedazed, Abner moved along the dark and dusty road whose stones in recent years had witnessed so many changes. He saw the shadowy houses of the king and the wooden stores of the Americans who had scorned God and fought the mission. In the roads the whalers were snug-anchored, his permanent enemies, and at Murphy's grog shop somebody was playing a lonely concertina. How alien these things were to his lacerated spirit.

In the deep night he left the town and climbed a barren field strewn with rocks, and when he stumbled upon a clump of dwarfed trees he sat among their roots and looked back at his silent parish as if he were no longer responsible for it. To the south he could see the monstrous torches of the pagans. In the roads he could spot the swaying night-lights of the whalers, and between lay the grass-roofed shacks of the people. How miserable and grubby this town really was, how pitiful. What a minimum impression he had made upon Lahaina, how inconsequential his accomplishments. Malama had tricked him. Keoki had betrayed him. And Iliki was God knows where. Now even the gentlest of them all, Noelani, had turned against him and had rebuked his church.

For nearly ten years he had worn only one coat; God had not once sent him a pair of trousers that fitted; he had acquired only such learned books as he could beg from distant Boston; his wife had slaved in a wretched hut; and he had accomplished nothing. Now, as dawn began breaking over his little town, he studied in humiliation of spirit the shimmering sea, the mocking whalers and the palace grounds

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where the torches were slowly burning out. And he wished ardently that he could call down upon this entire congreation, saving only the mission house and its uncomplaining occupants, some awful Biblical destruction.

"Floods! Winds from the hills! Pestilence! Destroy this place!" But even as he begged God to inflict such punishment, the perverse lesser gods of the vicinity were preparing to launch what would be his crowning humiliation, for in the night that was to follow, the goddess Pele herself would visit once more her devotee Kelolo, and the upshot of this ghostly convocation would haunt Abner Hale for many months.

When John Whipple, rising early to sweep out the store, saw Abner staggering down from the hills back to town, he ran out and grabbed the little man, asking, "Abner, what has happened?"

Hale started to explain, but he could not pronounce the vile words. He hesitated dumbly for a moment, his eyes failing to focus properly, and then he pointed at a group of Hawaiians coming along the road from the palace. They wore maile in their hair, and a light step; they carried a drum and walked in triumph as they had a thousand years before, and Abner said weakly, "Ask them." And he stumbled off to bed.

Later that day he dispatched a letter to the missionaries in Honolulu reporting: "At four o'clock this morning, January 4, 1832, in the old palace of Malama the kahunas triumphed and the dreadful deed was done."

In daylight, when the auguries were studied and the kahunas were satisfied that a good marriage had been kunched, they assured Keoki: "This night you have done a fine thing for Hawaii. The gods will not forget, and when your child is born you will be free to go back to your own church once more and become a minister." But Keoki, shivering from the burdens which the gods throw upon some shoulders, knew that this could not be.

At the following dusk Kelolo, gratified that he had protected the succession of his family in these heavenly islands, walked among the shadows and as he did so he met, for the last time on earth, the silent, delicate form of Pele, keeper of the volcanoes, dressed in silken robes, with strange glasslike hair standing out in the night breeze. She obstructed his pathway beneath the palms and waited for him to approach her, and Kelolo could see that her face was radiant with contentment, and when she took her place beside him, walking mysteriously through whatever trees came into her way along the narrow path, he felt tremendous consolation. And they continued thus for some miles, each happy in the other's company, but when the walk ended, Pele did what she had never done before. She paused dramatically, raised her left hand and pointed south, directly through the Keala-i-kahiki Channel and onto Keala-i-kahiki Point, and she stood thus for some minutes, as if commanding Kelolo with her fiery yet consoling eyes.

He spoke for the first time and asked, "What is it, Pele?" but she was content merely to point toward Keala-i-kahiki, and then, as if

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wishing to bid farewell to this great alii, her dear and personal friend, she brushed past him, kissing him with fiery lips and vanishing in a long silvery trail of smoke. He stood for a long time, engraving in his memory each incident of her visit, and that night when he returned to his solitary shack outside the pakce grounds he took down his two most sacred treasures: the whitened skull of his wife Malama and a very old stone, about the size of a fist, curiously shaped and well marked. It had been given him more than forty years before by his father, who had averred that the occult powers of the Kanakoas derived from this stone, which one of their ancestors recovered on a return trip to Bora Bora. It was, his father had sworn, not merely sacred to the goddess Pele; it was the goddess; she was free to roam the islands and to warn her people of impending volcanic disasters; but her spirit resided in this rock, and it had done so for generations out of mind, long, long before even the days of Bora Bora. And through the night Kelolo sat with his treasures, trying to unravel the divine mystery of which they were the most significant parts. In the morning his confusion was clarified, for a swift ship sped into Lahaina Roads with news that a massive surge of the volcano on Hawaii was threatening the capital town of Hilo and the citizens prayed that the Alii Nui Noelani would enter upon the swift ship and return, to stop the flow of lava that must otherwise wipe out the town.

When the news was brought to Noelani, her impulse was to send Kelolo instead, for he was the friend of Pele. Furthermore, her discussions with Dr. Whipple had satisfied her that volcanoes were the result of natural forces whose eruption could almost be predicted scientifically, and she realized that the island stories of Pele were nonsense, but before she could discuss these conclusions with the messengers from Hilo, Kelolo hurried up and said, "You must go, Noelani. If Pele is destroying Hilo, it must be in punishment, and you should go where the lava is white-hot and remind her that Hilo loves her."

^'You are the friend of Pele," Noelani replied. "You must go."

"But I am not the Alii Nui," Kelolo said gravely. "Here is a chance for you to win the people to you forever."

"I cannot believe that Pele has anything to do Noelani objected.

"I saw her last night," Kelolo said simply. "I talked with her."

Noelani looked at her father in amazement. "You saw Pele?" she demanded.

^"1 walked with her for two miles," Kelolo replied.

"DTid>,She g'Ve ^�U any message?" Noelani asked incredulously.

No, Kelolo lied. "But of course she warned me of the volcano on Hawaii. Yes, she pointed toward Hawaii." But he knew that she had not done this; she had pointed in quite a different direction

^And you wish me to go to Hilo?" Noelani asked.

"Yes, and I will entrust to your care a stone that will enable you to halt the lava," Kelolo assured her.

And it was in this way, in the year 1832, that the Alii Nui Noelani

anything to do with this lava,"

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Kanakoa left Lahaina with the curse of Abner Hale in her ears� "This is madness, an abomination"�carrying a sacred stone and traveling by ship to the port town of Hilo, where from the bay she could see the overpowering advance of glowing lava, rolling slowly upon itself and crushing in fiery embrace all it encountered. The town was obviously doomed; by the next night the lava must encompass it, and from shipboard there seemed no use for a young woman to try to stop it.

But the local kahunas breathed with relief when they saw Noelani alight, laden with the mana that heals, and start her painful climb to the lava face. Behind her streamed the entire population of the town, save only the local missionaries who were outraged by this heathenish performance. Up through the palm trees at the edge of town, through the nau brushes, and on into the scrubby brush marched the solemn, hushed procession. Now only a few yards ahead lay the crawling, crackling snout of lava: as each new flow cascaded down the mountainside it sped over former flows that in the meantime had cooled, using them as a passageway to lower ground, and as the living white-hot flow came to the dead tip of old lava, it poised a moment in the air, then rushed out in many new directions, consuming here a tree, there a house and beyond a pigpen. There would be a hissing and crackling of fire, and the doomed object would burn away in a sudden, fatal gasp. Then, as the ugly snout cooled, it formed a channel for the next burning flow.

It was to this creeping, crawling, devouring face that the young woman Noelani journeyed, and as she approached the living fire she underwent a transformation, for what she had been summoned to do was no less than to confront the fire goddess herself and to challenge her in a work that had been carried on by volcanoes since long before the coming of the Polynesians, and in the mystery of these last moments, in the awful inner fires that were burning away at her reason, Noelani lost all sense of ever having been a Christian. She was a daughter of Pele, one in whose family the very being of the goddess had resided, and now, returning to the suzerainty of the fire goddess, Noelani pknted her feet before the on-surging lava and decided that here she would stand and if need be, die.