Moloka'i (49 page)

Ballard delivered a clear and concise argument against Crossen, but Rachel was only half-listening; all the talk about Crossen’s service record had convinced her that this was going to be a whitewash, that the United States armed forces were not going to come down hard on one of their own, much less one who had had the tragic luck to be infected with this disease of savages and sent here. The court adjourned for the five members of the commission to consider the verdict, and Rachel was not surprised when they returned after less than an hour’s deliberation.

The president of the commission asked Major Ballard, “Have you any evidence of previous convictions?”

Ballard presented the court with the record concerning the attack on the Chinese prostitute: Crossen had not been tried and convicted for the assault, merely disciplined. Then to Rachel’s puzzlement the commission promptly adjourned again and closed the courtroom.

On their way out Ballard threw her a small smile.

Not long afterward the courtroom was opened again and it was announced that “all the members present concurring,” Gabriel Tyler Crossen was hereby found guilty on one count of unlawful possession of alcohol; one count of disturbing the quiet of the night; two counts of assault with intent to commit bodily harm; and one count of manslaughter.

Rachel’s heart leaped at the pronouncement, even more so when the colonel went on to specify the sentences: six months apiece for alcohol possession and disturbance of the peace, ten years’ imprisonment in the assault on Felicia, five years in the assault on Rachel, and twenty years in the death of Kenji Utagawa.

Crossen sat there like a bird shot out of the sky.

It was a grand total of thirty-five years imprisonment for Crossen—but imprisonment where? No prison on O'ahu would have, could have, taken him; and so Gabriel Crossen was sentenced to serve his term in Kalaupapa. Rachel would have preferred hard labor on a chain gang but the humiliation she saw in Crossen’s face when the commission rendered its verdict—he was now a leper
and
a felon—gave her some sweet, if scant, satisfaction.

Unfortunately the Kalaupapa jail was not built or provisioned for long-term incarceration, and to Rachel’s dismay it was decided that the prisoner could serve his sentence in a room in the Bay View Home in what was already, after all, forcible confinement. Rachel was appalled. It was almost as though nothing had happened—as if this man had murdered her husband and as punishment they had merely given him another room—with an oceanfront view!

But as she returned to the emptiness of her home she came to realize that the simple fact was this: Kenji was dead, and no degree of justice, no manner of incarceration, could bring him back.

In the end Rachel merely avoided the intersection of Puani Street and Damien Road, where Bay View Home perched on a bluff overlooking the shoreline. And even as she had to suffer the presence of her hated enemy, Crossen, in her midst, the enemy inside her launched a surprise attack.

_______

W

artime life in Kalaupapa was not too removed from its peacetime existence. Many residents already grew vegetables for their own consumption and now these tiny plots of land were proudly declared “victory gardens.” Poultry and hog raising increased to supplement occasional shortages of meat from Honolulu. Fresh milk was a memory—only powdered was available—and gasoline was rationed here as it was throughout Hawai'i. The only real hardship was the suspension of steamer service:
sampans
now carried all supplies and mail to Kalaupapa, but rough seas often forced the small Chinese skiffs to anchor at Kaunakakai instead. From there the cargo had to be sent down the
pali
trail, arriving days later. Mail and newspapers took much longer to reach the settlement’s residents, isolating them more than they had been in many years.

By the end of 1943, as the world outside was sundered by war, Rachel found her body ravaged by a newly resurgent
ma'i p
k
—Haleola would have said “emboldened.” After years of feasting merely on nerves,
bacillus leprae
now began making a meal of her flesh as well. Skin that had been blemish-free but for a few florid patches of skin now erupted in ugly purple bruises. Dr. Sloan explained that these were a result of the bacillus tearing down the walls of tiny blood vessels in her skin; as the tissues broke down, blood congested in purple welts. And because the blood was poorly circulated, the ulcers wouldn’t heal. “I thought the bug only liked to eat my nerves,” Rachel said.

“I’m afraid its appetites have changed. Perhaps your resistance has been lowered by stress, or perhaps this is simply the course the disease would have taken in any event, but . . . it’s clearly becoming more lepromatous in nature. I’m sorry to say it does happen.”

Over the next twelve months Rachel’s body began to resemble, more and more, those of the friends and family she had lost over the years. Her skin became lax, losing much of its collagen substrate; hair follicles were destroyed in the process and her eyebrows fell out. Leilani in similar straits had simply sketched in a new pair with an eyebrow pencil, so now Rachel did the same, giving herself Carole Lombard’s brows one day and Katharine Hepburn’s the next. When her eyelashes were the next to go, she ordered false ones from a beauty supply store in Honolulu, but never had the nerve to wear them.

The bacillus, summering in the cooler regions of her body, settled in the air-cooled tissues of her nasal passages, which swelled as if from a bad cold—a cold that never went away. Rachel found it increasingly difficult and painful to breathe through her nose, but when she breathed through her mouth the increased intake of air cooled her throat, and the bug prospered there as well. Her voice became chronically hoarse; ulcers on her tonsils had to be removed.

She buried H
ku in the spring of ’45, as she had so many other souls she had loved, even as the ulcers spread from her arms and legs to her chest and face. Sister Catherine insisted on dressing Rachel’s sores herself. Both women had seen hundreds of cases like this, but now it was happening to Rachel and in a way it was harder on Catherine than it was on her patient. Rachel had been the beautiful little girl who had grown up and never stopped being beautiful: in a garden of misery she was the rare bud that flowered, bloomed. Catherine now spent hours cleaning Rachel’s sores, applying fresh bandages, chatting away as she’d done with so many others over the years—and then upon returning to her convent room she would collapse into tears, as she hadn’t since her earliest days at Kalaupapa.

Rachel’s joints ached and polyneuritis lit a match to new nerves, but she accepted the new parameters of her disease without complaint. She was hardly alone: Hokea’s hands, his artist’s hands, were slowly turning inward on themselves to the extent he was barely able to pick up a paintbrush any longer; David was fighting what the doctors called “leprous fever” and his skin, too, was ulcerating. Rachel felt her resistance to the bacillus being slowly worn down, as the surf wore away the volcanic shore, and it seemed to her just as natural a process: in the rock’s erosion, after all, the sand of the beach was born. Without Kenji she found it hard to summon the reserves of strength she needed to fight the disease; found it harder to care whether she lived or died.

As the war in the Pacific finally ended amid a conflagration of atoms, the war within Rachel grew no less heated. Her limbs became swollen with edema, so painfully she could barely walk. Catherine brought her back, after all these years, to Bishop Home, to tend to her; but as Rachel’s body exploded into full-blown lepromatous leprosy it became necessary to transfer her to the hospital, where Dr. Sloan could more adequately care for her.

Her memories sustained and comforted her through fever and pain: she thought of Mama and Papa, their little house near Queen Emma Street, the happy years before Inspector Wyckoff took them all away from her. Uncle Pono lived again in fitful dreams, sometimes as himself, sometimes as an owl telling a bawdy joke. Haleola was at her bedside in the moments before dawn, assuring her everything would be all right, that she loved her, would always love her. And at night as Rachel struggled to breathe, she took in gasps of air tasting of Kenji, the scent of his skin, the breath they’d shared in their kisses.

And sometimes—as on the morning of April 1, 1946—she would dream again of being Namakaokaha'i, her waves rolling across burled coral beds, scattering moonlight, cresting higher and higher the farther she traveled over the reef. She was a colossus of water and motion soaring toward the black crescent of 'Awahua Bay, her soul perched on the curling lip of the wave, riding it in the only way she could now; she felt the
mana
, the power in her waves, felt the rumble in her ocean depths. . . . .

She woke, but continued to feel it: a roar in her bones, a vibration coming not from within but without. It was 6:45 A.M., and though the ward seemed quietly normal, some inner sense of dread propelled Rachel painfully to her feet, out of bed, and to the nearest window.

She gasped at what she saw. Out at sea, a wave at least twenty feet high was rolling shoreward—a wall of water pushing up from the ocean floor, as unexpected as lava spilling from a dead caldera, its great rumbling mass resonating inside her.

The rumble turned explosive as the wave crashed into the Kalaupapa coastline, completely engulfing it; even the tall spire of the lighthouse was nearly swamped. Rachel feared that the wave’s reach would extend inland to Kalaupapa itself, but it stopped just short of that.

Cries rose up from the startled town; in the hospital, patients and doctors alike flocked to the windows.

The lights in the ward winked out.

Rachel watched in awe as the massive wave receded back into the sea . . . peeling back the ocean over the reef, where fish now flopped and flailed helplessly on the exposed seabed . . . dragging out to sea great handfuls of uprooted trees and broken timber.

Moments later, the next wave arrived.

A series of six huge waves came and went in pulsating surges, shattering whatever remained of the structures unluckily situated at the shore. By now the streets of Kalaupapa were filled with people racing for high ground—sick people crying
“Tsunami!”
as nature played yet another mean trick on them, God’s last best joke at their expense. It was, after all, April Fool’s Day.

When the waters at last subsided Rachel was amazed to see the lighthouse still standing, but little else along the shore: no trees, certainly no houses. Massive boulders torn from the seabed lay scattered along a beach denuded of sand.

There was no running water in the settlement, the pipes from the reservoir having been smashed to pieces; likewise no electricity. The administration building had been spun around on its foundation, as if someone had played spin-the-bottle with it. Headstones in the cemeteries were strewn about like dice in a crap game. But the only homes destroyed were beach houses owned by patients whose primary residences were in the main town. No one was killed or injured. It soon became apparent that Moloka'i had been remarkably fortunate, despite heavy damage to the island’s East End; on Maui the village of H
na had been nearly obliterated, and Hilo on the Big Island was largely underwater. All told, one hundred and fifty nine people died throughout Hawai'i in the
tsunami
.