Moloka'i (37 page)

It was while walking home from a screening of
The Tramp
that Francine stepped unknowingly—for she had no feeling left in her feet—on a rusty nail that penetrated her shoe. By the time she realized she’d been injured the foot had turned quite gangrenous. Dr. Goodhue was forced to amputate it, but the infection had already become systemic and Francine soon lapsed into a coma. Rachel and Kenji joined Francine’s husband, Luis, at her bedside, but in the early morning hours of June 30, 1915, Francine died without awakening. Luis was devastated; Rachel felt the loss almost as keenly.

Francine had been the last of the Bishop Home girls she had grown up with, and Rachel felt suddenly bereft. Emily, Francine, Leilani, Josephina, Hazel, Hina, Louisa, Cecelia, Bertha, Mary, Noelani, Violet . . . all gone now but for Rachel, alone on the shore. Kalaupapa seemed to thunder with the silence of their voices, their absence becoming a constant presence. For the first time in all her years on Moloka'i, Rachel slipped into depression. She steered clear of Bishop Home, corridors of memory that now evoked only pain, and feigned illness to Sister Catherine; illness that shortly seemed to become real. She began to experience fatigue, body aches, nausea and vomiting. Kenji, fearing influenza, rushed her to the infirmary and waited nervously in the waiting room as Rachel, in a cloth gown, was examined by Dr. Goodhue.

He took her temperature—only slightly elevated—and listened as Rachel recounted her symptoms, including “a little pain in my side”—she ran her hand up and down the right side of her abdomen—“like a pulled muscle.”

“Any surfing mishaps?”

She shook her head. “I haven’t been surfing lately.”

“Because you’ve been feeling depressed?”

Rachel nodded. “Since Francine.” Tears welled in her eyes. “Why are they all dead,” she said softly, “and I’m not?”

Goodhue sat down beside her. “The disease takes different forms in different people, Rachel. The stronger a person’s resistance, the milder the symptoms, the more slowly it progresses. Look at old Ambrose, he’s had it going on fifty years and I don’t count him out yet. You could easily live as long.”

“What if I don’t want to?”

Goodhue ignored that and said, “Let’s take a look at you.” He had her remove her cloth gown; his examination was brief but thorough. When he finished he had her put the gown back on, then asked, “Did you have your regular menstrual cycle this month?”

She was startled to realize that she hadn’t.

“Are you urinating more frequently these days?”

“Yes.”

“That’s due to enlargement of the uterus as it presses on your bladder. Also your vaginal tissues have a bluish tinge to them, as they retain more fluids . . . am I embarrassing you?”

Rachel felt numb, number than any leprous anesthesia of her flesh. “Are you sure?”

“There are no laboratory tests we can do at this stage, but I know the signs pretty well—my wife just had a boy. I’d say you’re about nine weeks along.”

Without a word or a thought for the doctor’s presence Rachel shrugged off the hospital gown, retrieving her dress from the hook on which she’d hung it.

“It’s not like it used to be, Rachel,” Goodhue said gently. “We keep them at Kalaupapa for up to a year, to see if they show any signs of the disease. With the proper permits you can visit them . . .”

Rachel stepped into her dress, slipped on her sandals, said, “Thank you,” and walked out into the waiting room. Kenji looked up, and knew at once something was wrong. “Rachel? What is it?”

Softly she said, “I’m pregnant,” and ran weeping from the hospital.

At home Kenji held her in his arms and comforted her. The birth of a child was a happy occasion anywhere but in Kalaupapa, and for any parents other than those afflicted with leprosy. Babies were never actually born with the disease, but only contracted it after sustained, intimate contact with an infected person. For thirty years now the policy at Kalaupapa had been to immediately remove infants from the custody of their parents, lest the child become infected as well.

Now Rachel had to ask herself, where was the joy in bearing a child she would never see grow up? A babe who would never remember her mother’s laugh, as Rachel remembered Mama’s? What was the point in bringing life into this world if it could never be part of
her
life?

Rachel wrapped her arms around Kenji and asked, “Do you want it?”

“I don’t think we have any choice in the matter.”

Rachel hesitated, then said quietly, “There are ways.” In the hush of his silence, she elaborated: “In the old days women ate the leaves of the
noni
bush three times a day. Or took hot infusions of
'awa
. . .”

Kenji just stared at her. Rachel shrugged. “Haleola thought I should know.”

“Is—that what you want to do?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know.”

He held her more tightly to him.

“Then wait until you do know,” he told her. “I almost did something in haste, once. I’m glad I didn’t; it would have been a terrible mistake.”

In the weeks that followed Rachel wondered every waking moment whether it was fair to bring a child into the world only to see it immediately orphaned. She wished she could find some faint wisp of happiness or excitement at being pregnant, and ached to talk about this with another woman; but all her closest friends were gone, and of course Sister Catherine was out of the question. Finally one night, in desperation, she closed her eyes and appealed to her
'aum
kua
for help, Pono or Haleola or whatever family gods might be hovering near; but when neither owls nor sharks appeared to counsel her, she sought refuge in sleep.

She opened her eyes in her dream and discovered to her surprise that she was no longer Rachel Kalama Utagawa. She was, in fact, no longer human. Her body was made not of blood and bone but of earth and stone: she was a colossus, towering thousands of feet above the ground. The bedrock was her spine, the rich earth was her flesh, and her face was fringed in green life: a living
pali
who felt every rivulet of water trickling down her valleyed cheeks, felt the flutter of bird’s wings in her tree limbs and the skittering of mice and lizards through her undergrowth. She felt as powerful as her stone heights and as fragile as her tiniest blade of grass. She knew all at once who she was: Haumea, mother of Pele, of whom Haleola had told her; “Haumea of four-thousand-fold forms,” from whom all the people of Hawai'i were descended.

No sooner had she realized this than another change came over her: a part of her broke off from her head, the earth and stone transmuting into water and salt, a child of the sea born from her brain—Pele’s sister, Namakaokaha'i. For a moment Rachel was both Haumea and her offspring, as a woman and her child are for a moment the same; and then she was just the child, a torrent of water cascading into the dry bed of the ocean, filling it with herself. She was Namakaokaha'i, goddess of the sea, angry from the very moment of her birth, strafing the surface of her waters with raging surf. She felt powerful, capricious, violent. She felt her body touching every continent on earth at once, felt the pull of the moon on her tides, felt waves rippling across her vast surface . . .

She woke.

And wide awake, felt the ripple of waves again, but this time within her.

In the quiet darkness Rachel touched her hand to her stomach. She felt as if a stone had been dropped deep inside her and the ripples were radiating outward, through blood and bone and organs up to the surface of her skin.

I am me and not me, she realized. This is no dream.

Only days later, she felt her baby kick for the first time—an extraordinary sensation, and one fiercely independent of her. It was the first willful act, the first assertion of its separate existence by this new life growing inside her. It was as if she were a garden, her flesh the loam from which new sprouts emerged: a medium, a culture, in which something new might flourish.

She told Kenji of her dream and of her belief that Haleola had sent it to her. She told him of being Haumea but more importantly of being Namakaokaha'i, as different from Haumea as could be imagined. As different, perhaps, as this child inside her would be from Rachel herself.

Her depression had given way to a characteristic determination. “I may never leave Kalaupapa,” she told Kenji, “but a
part
of me is damn well getting out of here.”

Her husband agreed. Once he’d aspired to make his mark on the world. “This,” he admitted, “is the only way I ever will.”

W

hat names are you thinking of?” Catherine and Rachel were sitting on Papaloa Beach, watching stiff autumn winds comb the sea.

“If it’s a boy,” Rachel said, “Henry, William, James, and Charles Jr. If it’s a girl, Mary, Emily, Anna, Jenny, and”—a hint of a smile—“Ruth.”

The sister was surprised and touched. “Really?”

“Well, it’s a joint decision—”

“Oh, of course. I understand.”

Rachel’s gaze wandered back to the high surf in the distance. “Those waves,” she said wistfully, “must be a good four and a half feet.”

Catherine laughed. “Stop torturing yourself. In your condition you might make a good buoy, but that’s all.”

Rachel sighed and patted her belly, the size and shape of an enormous conch shell. “Papa once sent me a stuffed doll from Australia—a kangaroo with a little joey in its pouch. That’s what I feel like right now.”

Catherine hesitated. “Rachel? Would you mind if I—”

Rachel nodded her assent and Catherine placed her hand tentatively on Rachel’s stomach. She wasn’t sure what she was expecting but all at once she felt a faint pulse in her fingertips and exclaimed, “I can feel its heart beating!”

Life—in Kalaupapa! It was enough to make Catherine forget, just for a moment, all the lives that had been lost here. A moment she would always cherish.

Rachel’s water broke late on a January morning, but she did not contact Dr. Goodhue. Her contractions began in mid-afternoon, and instead of Rachel going to the infirmary as she’d promised Goodhue she would, Kenji went to fetch the midwife they had secretly agreed to retain in the event Rachel went into labor after sundown. By having the child at home, at night, they would be able to delay its inevitable transfer to the authorities until morning, giving them a few precious hours alone with their baby. Other patients had done the same, and none of their children had ever, to the best of Rachel’s knowledge, come down with leprosy after only a few hours’ contact with their parents.

The midwife’s name was Dolores and she claimed to have delivered hundreds of children before her exile to Moloka'i. But they had to be circumspect. Rachel could not cry out too loudly, so she tried to swallow the pain of the contractions in deep gulps of air, attempting to transmute it, through some alchemy of the mind, into joy.

Alchemy, she soon discovered, was a myth.

By two A.M. the contractions were three minutes apart, a minute and a half in duration, and Rachel was biting on a towel to keep from screaming. This was far worse even than chaulmoogra oil injections; giving birth from the brain, like Haumea, seemed infinitely preferable. Dolores prepared a tea made of hibiscus bark to ease the pain and Rachel drank it down despite its acrid taste.

Rachel was pleased to find, however, that once she was fully dilated, the pain subsided and she could enjoy the exquisite sensation of seeing her baby’s head crowning between her legs. Dolores pressed down on Rachel’s abdomen and told her to push. With each push a little bit more of her baby’s pink head showed itself, like the sun reappearing after an eclipse; and then suddenly the baby was spurting out of her and into Dolores’s hands.

“Eh, it’s a
wahine!”
Dolores announced. She swiftly cut the umbilical cord with a knife, tied it up with thread, and handed the infant girl to her mother.

Rachel held her as she remembered holding the very first doll her parents gave her: tenderly, and with wonder that something so beautiful was hers. Kenji gazed into his daughter’s blue-gray eyes, the contours of which bore more than a slight resemblance to his own. Gently he dabbed at his daughter’s face with a soft towel, wiping away some of the birth fluids, and he smiled.

“You know, she looks like a Ruth to me,” he said, knowing that was Rachel’s favorite of all the girls’ names.

Dolores washed little Ruth in warm water as Rachel ejected the placenta; and when she was satisfied that all was well the midwife accepted her payment and sneaked away into the dark morning.

Kenji stroked a finger against his daughter’s cheek, soft and pliant. She smelled new, like the earth after a rain. He called her his sweet
akachan,
his baby. For a little while, now, he and Rachel could hold her, feel her softness, let her hear their heartbeats. They could kiss her, and caress her, and cup her tiny hands in theirs. They could see Ruth’s eyes on them and know that they were the first things she had seen in this life; and they could hope that some part of her might remember that. And when, too soon, the sun’s light slitted through closed shutters, they cradled their Ruthie against them one last time, kissed her and told her they loved her, bundled her in blankets and carried her outside and to the infirmary, where they gave her up; gave her freedom.