Hawaii (71 page)

FROM THE FARM OF BITTERNESS 355

time he had kissed a girl and he felt for a moment as if a family of dolphin had struck the ship, and he drew back amazed, at which the tall island girl laughed and teased: "I do believe you've never kissed a girl before, Reverend Hale."

"I haven't," he admitted.

"Did you enjoy it?" she laughed.

"It's something that should be saved for a starry night aboard ship," he said slowly, taking her properly into his arms.

Rafer Hoxworth, who had planned these events, watched with gratification as young Micah Hale became increasingly entangled with Malama. Nevertheless, he experienced contradictory emotions toward the boy: he despised him and wanted to hurt him in some tormenting way; yet at the same time he saw constantly how much the young minister, resembled Jerusha Bromley, and when at meals the young fellow, spoke so intelligently of America's destiny, Hoxworth was proud; so that on the seventh day he announced unexpectedly to his wife, "By God, Noelani, if the boy wants to marry Malama, I'll say, 'Go ahead.' We could use him in the family."

"Don't intrude into the Hale household again," his wife pleaded. "Besides, what would you do with A minister in the family?"

"This one won't be a minister long," Hoxworth predicted confidently. "Too much get-up-and-go."

That afternoon Captain Hoxworth called his daughter to his book-lined cabin and said, "Malama, you intending to marry young Hale?"

"I think so," she replied.

"My blessing," Hoxworth said, but when his daughter brought her suitor, trembling, into the cabin to plead for her hand, Hoxworth subjected the young man to a humiliating examination, focused primarily on money and the inevitability that a clergyman would never have-enough of it to support a ship captain's daughter, particularly one who had expensive tastes, and after about fifteen minutes of this, Micah Hale, who had boxed at Yale and who had worked hard in the wagon train crossing the prairies, lost his temper and said, "Captain Hoxworth, I didn't come in here to be insulted. A minister has a fine, good life, and I will hear no more of your abuse."

He stamped out of the cabin and ate his next three meals with the crew, and when Malama, in tears, came to find him he said proudly, "I'll come back to your table when the captain of this ship personally apologizes." After another day had passed, during which Noelani and her daughter cajoled Captain Hoxworth with assurances that Micah had acted correctly, the gruff captain surrendered, rammed a cigar into his teeth, and of his own accord sought out the young minister. Thrusting forth a huge hand he said with a show of real acceptance, "Glad to have a man like you in the family, Mike. I'll perform the ceremony tomorrow morning."

He hated the young man, yet he wanted him for a son. Partly because he knew that such a marriage would infuriate old Abner Hale

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and partly because he sensed that a half-caste girl like Malama required a strong husband, he proceeded with the ceremony, and as the ship passed into tropical waters, he assembled all hands aft, stood Malama and her mother to starboard and young Micah Hale to port, and bellowed forth a wedding service which he had composed himself. At the conclusion he roared, "Now if the groom will kiss the bride, we'll issue a triple ration of rum for all hands. Mister Wilson will divide the crew into halves. One half can get blind-drunk now, but the other half must wait till nightfall." It was a wild, joyous ocean wedding, and when the Carthaginian reached Honolulu, Captain Hoxworth immediately transshipped the newly married couple to Lahaina, for he was still not allowed to visit that port.

As the island boat entered Lahaina Roads, boxed in as it was between the glorious islands, Micah caught his breath and looked alternately at the wild hills of Maui, the soft valleys of Lanai, the barren rise of Kahoolawe and the purple grandeur of Molokai. He whispered to his wife, "As a little boy I was brought to that pier to see the whales playing in these roads, and I always thought of this water as the reflection of heaven. I was correct."

Now the packet began discharging its passengers into the crowd of islanders who regularly jammed the little pier to greet any casual ship, but before Micah and his wife could disembark, some men at the rear shouted, "Let him through!" And with intense joy, Micah discovered that the newcomer was his father, whom he had not seen for nine years.

"Father!" Micah shouted, but Abner had not been told that his boy was aboard the packet, and kept moving forward in his accustomed way, limping more, cocking his white head on the right side and stopping occasionally to adjust his brains. Coming upon a sailor he grabbed him by the shirt and asked, "On your travels did you by chance come upon a little Hawaiian girl named Iliki?" When the sailor said no, Abner shrugged his shoulders and started back to his grass hut, but Micah vaulted over the railing that separated him from the crowd and rushed to overtake his father. When the white-haired clergyman�then only forty-nine years old�realized that it was his son who stood before him, he stared for a rnoment, approved his handsome appearance and said, "I am proud, Micah, that you performed so well at Yale."

It was a curious greeting, this reference to Yale above all other values involved at the moment, and Micah could only grasp the diminishing shoulders of the old man and embrace him warmly, whereupon Abner's mind cleared perfectly and he said, "I have waited so long for you to take over the preaching in our church." Then, behind his son's elbow, he saw a tall, lovely olive-skinned young woman approaching and instinctively he drew away.

"Who is this?" he asked suspiciously.

"This is my wife, Father."

"Who is she?" Abner asked, afraid.

"This is Makma," Micah explained with tenderness.

FROM THE FARM OF BITTERNESS 357

For a moment the beloved old name confused Abner Hale, and he tried to clarify his thoughts, and when he had done so he bellowed, "Malama! Is she Noelani Kanakoa's daughter?"

"Yes, Father. This is Malama Hoxworth."

The trembling old man retreated, dropped his cane and slowly raised his right forefinger, leveling it at his daughter-in-law. "Heathen!" he croaked. "Whore! Abomination!" Then he looked in dismay at his son and wailed, "Micah, how dare you bring such a woman to Lahaina?"

Malama hid her face and Micah tried to protect her from his raving father, but scarifying, unforgivable words poured forth: "Ezekiel said, "Thou hast gone a whoring after the heathen!' Get out! Unclean! Abomination! Foul, foul in the eyes of God. I will never see you again. You contaminate the island."

There was no halting the fiery old man, but in time Dr. Whipple rescued the bridal couple and led them to the refuge of his home, where he bluntly explained to the weeping Malama that Reverend Hale sometimes seemed insane, probably due to the fact that her father had once kicked him in the head. "I am so ashamed," she replied. "I will go to him and assure him that I understand."

Micah could not stop her, and she hurried along the brook, past the mission house and up to the grass shack into which she saw Abner Hale disappear in tottering rage. "Reverend Hale!" she pleaded. "I am sorry that . . ."

He looked out from his shack and saw a woman who seemed much like Noelani, more like Rafer Hoxworth, and she was his son's wife. "Abonimation!" he rasped. "Whore! Contaminator of the islands!" And as she gazed in horror, he limped over to the wall, reached up and ceremoniously ripped away the pencil sketch of his elder son. Tearing it into shreds, he threw them at Malama, whimpering, "Take him from Lahaina. He is unclean."

Those were the circumstances under which Micah Hale, most brilliant of the mission children, resigned from the ministry and became partner with Captain Rafer Hoxworth, a man he feared and who hated him, but they formed a brilliant pair�Hoxworth bold and daring, Hale most far-seeing of the Hawaii traders�and in time all ports in the Pacific became familiar with the trim ships which flew the blue flag of the H & H line.

11

IV

From the Starving Village

IN THE YEAR 817, when King Tamatoa VI of Bora Bora and his brother Teroro fled to Havaiki-of-the-North, there to establish a new society, the northern sections of China were ravaged by an invading horde of Tartars whose superior horsemanship, primitive moral courage and lack of hesitation in applying brute force quickly overwhelmed the more sophisticated Chinese, who vainly and at times only half-heartedly tried to resist them. As the difficult years passed, Peking fell, and the coastal cities, and it became apparent that the Tartars had entered China to stay.

The effect of the invasion fell most heavily upon the great Middle Kingdom, the heartland of China, for it was these lush fields and rich cities that the Tartars sought, so toward the middle of the century they dispatched an army southward to invest Honan Province, some three hundred and fifty miles below Peking and south of the Yellow River. In Honan at this time there lived a cohesive body of Chinese known by no special name, but different from their neighbors. They were taller, more conservative, spoke a pure ancient language uncontaminated by modern flourishes, and were remarkably good farmers. When the Tartar pressures fell heavily upon their immediate neighbors to the north, those neighbors supinely accepted

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FROM THE STARVING VILLAGE

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the invaders, and this embittered the group of which I now wish to speak.

In a mountain village, in the year 856, the farmer Char Ti Chong, a tall, thin man with handsome high-boned face and a profusion of black hair which he wore in an unruly manner, swore to his wife Nyuk Moi, "We will not surrender these good lands to the barbarians."

"What can you do?" his stolid, sensible wife countered, for in her twenty-three years with Char she had heard some fairly far-reaching promises, most of which had come to nothing.

"We will resist them!" Char proposed.

"With grain stalks as an army?" Nyuk Moi asked wearily. She was a thin, angular woman who seemed always on the verge of complaining, but her life was so difficult that she rarely wasted her strength in whining. Her hopeful father had named her after the most beautiful object he had seen, a scintillating pendant resting among a rich man's jewels; unfortunately, she had not lived up to this name, Nyuk Moi, Plum Jade, but she possessed what was better than beauty: an absolutely realistic evaluation of life. "So you are determined to fight the invaders?" she asked.

"We will destroy them!" her husband repeated stoutly, certain that his boasts had already made his lands more secure.

They were not good lands, and in other parts of the world they would hardly have been deemed worthy of defense, for although the Middle Kingdom contained many rich fields, farmer Char had none of them. His three acres lay tilted skyward at the point where the rocks of the Honan mountains met what might charitably be called the arable fields. There was no running water, only sporadic rainfall, and the soil was not markedly productive. But largely because of Char's endless effort, this land did sustain a family of nine: Char, his wife Nyuk Moi, his old and battle-worn mother, and six children. The living was not good, for the Chars had no ducks or chickens, and only two pigs, but it was no worse than that enjoyed by most of the other families in the mountainous village.

What the invading Tartars would have done with this walled-in village, had they ever got to it, was a mystery, for they could scarcely have squeezed out of it a single grain of wheat more than it already yielded, and if they took much away, the village would starve, but it became a fixation with Char and his friends that the Tartars, after satiating themselves with Peking, were certain to burst into this ancient village, so that the farmers formed the habit of convening each night in the farmhouse of their wisest member, General Ching, to discuss plans for the defense of their land, for now there was no government to protect them.

This Ching was not a real general, of course, but merely a stocky, red-faced wanderer who had chanced to be near Peking one day when the emperor's henchmen required an army in a hurry. Ching had been swept up, and in a long campaign found that he liked

military life, which was a disreputable fact in itself. After the war, which proved fruitless, for the Tartars quickly overran the very areas Ching had been pacifying, he returned home to the mountain and to his resolute, stubborn associates, regaling them month after month with stories of his campaigns in the north.

"We will place men here and here," stout-hearted Ching proposed. He was a courageous man of whom it was said, "He can march forty miles in a day and fight that evening." He had a broad, resolute face, and in many of the things he did in the years following his impromptu military service he displayed great fortitude, so that although he was clearly a braggart, men did not begrudge him his title of general and listened when he predicted: "The Tartars will approach our village by this route. What other way would a sensible general choose?"

But before General Ching's theories could be tested, an enemy far worse than the Tartars, and far more familiar, descended upon the village. The rains did not fall as required, and a hot sun blazed remorselessly in the copper sky. Seedlings withered before the middle of spring, and by midsummer even drinking water was at a prohibitive premium. Families with old people began to wonder when the ancient fathers and mothers would die, and babies whined.

Farmer Char and his wife Nyuk Moi had lived through four famines and they knew that if one practiced a rigid discipline and ate the roots of grass and chewy tendrils dug from the forest, there was always a chance that one's family would survive. But this year the famine struck with overpowering force, and by midsummer it became apparent that most of the village families must either take to the road or die among the parched and blazing hills. Therefore, when the sun was most intense, Char and his wife fetched mud bricks from the almost vanished village stream and walled up the entrance to their home, placing a cross of black sticks where the door had been. When the house was almost sealed, Char went inside and weighed for the last time the little bag of seed grain upon which life would depend when his family returned next spring. Hefting it in his hand, he assured his miserable group: "The seed grain is now locked inside. It will wait for us."