Hawaii by James A. Michener
“Yes,” she said.
“I understand,” he replied. Then, putting the lamp down he started to question her, but she asked, “Did bad men whisper you?”
“No,” Whipple replied. “It occurred to me that I hadn’t seen Mun Ki for some time and I recalled his itching legs. I was in bed, Mrs. Kee, and it suddenly came to me: ‘Mun Ki has leprosy,’ so I came out here, and I was right.”
“Morning come next day he go away?”
“Yes,” Dr. Whipple said matter-of-factly, but the terror of his words overtook him and he said in a shaking voice, “Mrs. Kee, let us all pray.” And he kneeled in the little shack, and asked his maid to do the same, and he formed Mun Ki’s doomed hands into a Christian temple, and prayed: “Compassionate and merciful God, look down upon Thy humble servants and bring courage to the hearts of these needful people. Help Mun Ki to face the next days with a fortitude of which his gods would be proud. Help Mrs. Kee to understand and accept the things that must be done.” His voice broke and for some moments he could not speak; then, through tears that choked him he begged: “Compassionate God, forgive me for the terrible duty I must discharge. Forgive me, please, please forgive me.”
When the prayer was said he slumped upon the floor and seemed not to have the strength to rise, but he did so and asked Nyuk Tsin, “Do you know what I must do?”
“Yes, Doctor. Tomorrow police.”
“I must,” he replied sorrowfully. “But you can stay here as long as you wish, and all your children,” he assured her.
“I kokua,” she said simply.
He had to look away from her face as the crushing force of this word struck him, for he knew what it meant: the banishment, the horrors of the leper settlement, the sons lost forever … He thought: “I would not have the courage.” Then he recalled that it had been Mun Ki’s plan to abandon Nyuk Tsin as soon as they got back to China, and to take her children from her, and now she was volunteering to go kokua with him. Slowly he raised his head and looked at Nyuk Tsin. She was a small Chinese woman with not much hair, slanted eyes, brown wrinkles about her mouth, but she was his sister, and he stepped forward and kissed her on each cheek, saying, “I should have known that you would go kokua.” He turned away to stanch his tears and then asked brightly, like a minister, “Now, what can we do about the children?”
“Tonight I fix one boy here one boy here one boy here, all fix.” She told him which families would take whom, and when this was explained she asked, “Tomorrow police?”
“Yes, I must. In God’s mercy I must.”
“I know, Doctor. Long time ago I speak my husband, ‘Police go,’ but we hope.”
“God will forgive those who hope,” the old man said.
As soon as he was gone, Mun Ki was out of bed, explosive with energy. “We will run to the hills!” he swore. “The police will never find us there.”
“How will we eat?” Nyuk Tsin pleaded.
“We’ll take food,” Mun Ki explained excitedly. He had visions of a free life in the mountains. He and Nyuk Tsin would work for nobody and maybe even the sores would go away. “Hurry!” he cried. “We must be gone before the police come.”
Nyuk Tsin looked at her husband with incredulity. How could he hope to lose himself in the hills back of Honolulu, when the police would be on his trail within six hours and when every Hawaiian who saw two Chinese struggling through the trails would know they were mai Pake? It was ridiculous, insane, as impractical as the reliance upon the quack doctor, and she was about to tell him so, but then she looked in a new way at her quixotic husband and saw him as a temporary assembly of earth and bone and confused desire and a pigtail and hands that would soon fall apart with leprosy. He was a man who could be very wise and the next minute quite stupid, as now; he was a human being who loved children and old people but who was often forgetful of those his own age. He was a mercurial gambler charged with hope: he had hoped that the quack doctor could cure him; now he hoped that somehow the forests would hide him. But above all he was her man: even though he was a Punti he had chosen her as his woman, and she loved him more than she loved her own sons. If he had this crazy desire to try his luck once more in the hills, she would go with him, for he was an obstinate man and sometimes a foolish one, but he was a man who deserved to be loved.
It was two o’clock in the morning when Nyuk Tsin finished hiding in high places anything that might hurt her children. Then she went to each child as he slept on the long polished board and fixed his clothes, so that in the morning when the boys were discovered, they would be presentable, and she straightened her bed. Then she took her husband’s hand and led him out the Whipple gate and up toward the mountains back of Oahu. She did not depart unnoticed, for Dr. Whipple, unable to sleep, had kept watch on the Chinese quarters, suspecting an attempted flight, but when it eventuated, and he saw the thin little Chinese woman guiding her doomed husband toward the hills, he could not bring himself to stop them or to sound an alarm, and when she carefully returned to close his gate lest his dogs escape, he prayed: “May God have mercy upon those who hope.” At first he was inclined to go down and bring the Chinese babies into the house, but he thought: “That might arouse somebody. Anyway, I’m sure Nyuk Tsin left them in good condition.” So he sat by the window, guarding the house where the babies slept.
But after a while his New England conscience, undaunted by forty-eight years in the tropics, made him reason: “The children must not be left in that contaminated house another minute. Rescue now might save them from the disease, whereas an hour’s delay might give it to them,” so in the darkness before dawn he led his wife to the Chinese house, gently wakened the children so as not to frighten them, undressed them so that not a shred of their old garments came with them, and carried them into the Whipple home.
When this was done, Dr. Whipple studied his watch and thought: “Nyuk Tsin and her man have had two hours’ lead. It will be all right to call the policemen,” and he sent a servant after the officials. When they arrived he reported: “Mun Ki has leprosy. We must burn the house and everything in it,” and with his own matches he ignited both the Chinese house and the cooking shed. Then, pointing to the Nuuanu Valley, he said, “I think they headed for those hills.”
Throughout the morning he expected the police to appear with the two Chinese, but their capture was delayed. The afternoon also passed, and so did the evening, without the Whipple servants’ being apprehended. This seemed strange to the doctor, and early next morning he inquired of the police what had happened.
“There’s no trace of them,” the officers explained.
“I’m sure they went up the Nuuanu,” Dr. Whipple assured them.
“If they did, they vanished,” the police replied.
An ugly thought came to the doctor and he asked, “Did you look at the foot of the Pali?”
“We thought of suicide,” the police assured him, “and we studied the Pali rocks, but they didn’t jump.”
Day by day the mystery deepened. Nyuk Tsin and her dream-spinning husband had accomplished the miracle Mun Ki had relied upon: they had fled to the mountains and had somehow disappeared. Fortunately, the quack herbalist and his two spies had had the good luck to report Nyuk Tsin’s suspicious behavior to the police before Dr. Whipple did: “We are sure she is hiding her husband, who is mai Pake.” So they got their reward, and the herbalist often pointed out to his friends: “If I had waited till next morning, the leper would have been gone and I would have received nothing. This proves that it is always best to perform your duty promptly and let the sluggards lie abed lazily till the next convenient day.”
At the end of a week the police came again to Dr. Whipple and confessed: “We’ve been to every grass house between here and the other seacoast. No Chinese. We’ve been wondering if your servants could have doubled back and gone into hiding somewhere right around here. You spoke of arrangements made by the woman to give her children away. Which families did she choose?”
A minute sear
On the night that Nyuk Tsin led her husband through the Whipple gate, and then turned back to close it lest the dogs escape, she walked rapidly toward the mountains, and as she stepped boldly forth Mun Ki, trailing a few paces behind, could not help seeing her big, unbound feet and he thought: “On a night like this it’s all right for a woman to have such feet.” But reflection on this ancient problem that separated the Punti and the Hakka served to remind him of the mournful fact that he would never again see his village, and he grew disconsolate and lost his optimism and said, “It will soon be morning, and they will find us.”
His wife, who originally had advised against this ridiculous attempt to escape, now became the one who urged her husband on, assuring him: “If we can get even to the lower hills before dawn, we will be safe,” and she began to formulate stratagems, one of which she put into effect as dawn broke.
“We will hide beneath those thickets,” she said, “close to the road where no one will look.”
“All day?” her irresolute husband asked.
“Yes. There’s a trickle of water running through and I have some balls of cold rice.”
They approached the thicket from a roundabout way, so as not to leave footprints leading into it, and when daylight brought travelers to the road, none saw the leper and his kokua. Nor did the police when they hurried past. Nor did the children on their way to school. All day stouthearted Nyuk Tsin kept her man hidden, and for long periods they slept, but when Mun Ki was sleeping and his wife was awake, she was distraught by the manner in which her man shivered, for leprosy seemed to be accompanied by a slow fever that kept an infected man forever cold and stricken with trembling.
That night Nyuk Tsin wakened her husband, counted her rice balls, and started on up the mountainside. She did not know where she was going, for she was impelled by only one driving consideration: the longer they evaded the police, the longer they were free; and such a simple doctrine anyone could understand. They grew hungry, cold and weak, but she drove them both on, and in this manner they escaped capture for three days, but they approached starvation and exhaustion.
“I have no more strength to walk,” the sick man protested.
“I will lend you my shoulders,” Nyuk Tsin replied, and that night, with Mun Ki hanging on to his wife’s back, but using his own sick legs to walk whenever he could, they made some progress toward their unknown goal, but it was cruelly evident that this was the last night Mun Ki could move, so when morning came his wife bedded him down in a hidden ravine, washed his face with cold water running out of the hills, and set forth to find some food.
That day it rained, and while Nyuk Tsin sloshed through the mountains gathering roots and trying vainly to trap a bird, her afflicted husband shivered on the cold ground while surface water crept in below his shoulders and hips, soon making him wet and colder still. It was a dismal, hungry night, with a handful of roots to chew and not even a remnant of hope to rely upon; and it became Mun Ki’s intention, when morning came, to crawl out to the highway and wait until the searching police found him.
But Nyuk Tsin had other plans, and in the hour before dawn she told her shivering husband, “Wu Chow’s Father, stay here and I promise you that I shall return with food and help.” She smoothed the damp earth about him and saw with dismay that it was going to rain again that day, but she told him to be of cheer, for she would soon return. Crawling carefully among the trees parallel to the highway, she looked for narrow trails leading off into the hills, and after a while she came upon one, well trod, and this she followed for several hundred yards until she came upon a clearing in which an almost-collapsed grass shack stood, with a three-hundred-pound Hawaiian woman sitting happily in front. Cautiously, but with confidence, Nyuk Tsin walked down the path to greet the huge woman, but before the Chinese maid could speak in explanation of her unexpected appearance in the clearing, the big Hawaiian woman asked, “Are you the Chinese who is mai Pake?”
“My husband, hidden in the ravine, is the one,” Nyuk Tsin replied in Hawaiian.
The big woman began to rock back and forth on her unsteady chair, lamenting, “Auwe, auwe! It is so terrible, the mai Pake.” Then she looked at the Chinese and said, “For three days the police have been here every day, searching for you.”
“Could you please let us have some food?” Nyuk Tsin begged.
“Of course!” the big woman cried. “We don’t have much. Kimo!” she called unexpectedly, and from the lowly grass house a big, fat, lazy Hawaiian man appeared, with no shirt and a pair of almost disintegrating sailor’s pants held up by a length of rope. He was not shaved or washed and apparently he had slept in his pants for several months, but he had a huge, amiable, grinning face.
“What is it, Apikela,” he asked, using her Biblical name Abigail.
“The mai Pake is hiding in the ravine,” Apikela explained. “He hasn’t eaten for four days.”
“We better get him some food!” Kimo, the Biblical James, replied. And he hurried back into the grass house and soon reappeared with a ti leaf full of poi, some baked breadfruit and a few chunks of coconut. “No rice,” he joked.
“I’ll take it to the sick man,” Nyuk Tsin replied.
“I’ll go with you,” Kimo volunteered.
“It isn’t necessary,” Nyuk Tsin protested, for she did not want to involve these kind people with the police.
“How are you going to carry him back here?” Kimo demanded.
Nyuk Tsin could scarcely believe the words she was hearing. Without looking at Kimo she asked softly, “Then I can hide him here … for a few days?”
“Of course!” Apikela laughed, rocking back and forth. “Those damned police!”
“It’s a terrible thing to catch sick men and send them to a lonely island,” Kimo agreed. “If a man’s going to die, let him die with his friends. He’s soon gone, and nobody is poorer.” He wrapped up the food and said, “Show me where the poor fellow is.”
But now Apikela rose and said, “No, Kimo, I’ll go. If police are on the road it will be better if I am the one they question. Because I can claim I’m on my way to work, and if they come here it will look less suspicious if you are asleep in the house as usual.”
Kimo considered this logic for a moment and agreed with his shrewd wife that things would give a better appearance if the day’s routine were not broken, so he went back to bed; fat Apikela marched slowly down the path; and Nyuk Tsin kept up with her by creeping through the rain forest, and the two women had progressed only a little way when Apikela stopped, motioned to the Chinese and said, “It would seem more reasonable if I had two chains of maile about my neck. Go back and ask Kimo for them.” And when the huge woman had placed the spicy maile leaves about her shoulders, the procession resumed.
Her strategy was a good one, for when she reached the highway, with Nyuk Tsin cowering behind in the forest, police came by on horses and asked, “Have you seen the mai Pake Chinese?”
“No,” she replied blandly.
“What are you doing abroad so early, Apikela?”
“Gathering maile vines, as usual,” she said.
They saw the vines and believed. “If you see the Chinese in your clearing, come out to the road and report them.”
“I will,” the gigantic woman agreed, and slowly she moved on down the road.
Now Nyuk Tsin ran ahead, and it was fortunate that she did so, for when she reached the spot where she had left her husband, she saw that Mun Ki had disappeared, and she experienced a moment of despair, but she was soon able to pick up his tracks through the muddy leaves and she guessed that he was headed toward the highway, to give himself up. In panic Nyuk Tsin followed his trail and saw him just as he was about to climb an embankment and cry to passing strangers. Leap
“Where?” he asked, sure that his wife’s empty hands proved the hoax.
“There!” Nyuk Tsin replied, and through the trees that edged the highway she pointed to the figure of a huge woman, rolling and wheezing along in a tentlike brown dress made of Boston fabric. She wore maile chains about her neck and an unconcerned, happy smile upon her enormous brown face.
“Who’s that?” Mun Ki whispered.
“Apikela,” his wife replied, and darted out to haul the Hawaiian mailegatherer into the forest. The big woman looked at the leper’s sad condition and tears came into her eyes. Handing Nyuk Tsin the bundle of food, she gathered the scrawny Chinese to her capacious bosom and whispered, “We will take care of you.”
For nearly a month Apikela and her slothful husband Kimo sequestered the Chinese, sharing with them their meager supplies of food. Because there were now four to feed, Apikela had to go each day into the forest to gather maile, which her husband prepared for market by skillfully slitting the bark, cutting out the pithy core, and leaving a fragrant supple vine that could be woven into leis. Periodically he lugged the maile into Honolulu, peddling it among the flower merchants. With the money thus gained he would shoot a few games of pool, buy some breadfruit, a little pork and some rice. Since Hawaiians rarely ate rice, this purchase occasioned comment, which Kimo rebuffed by observing, “I’m switching to rice so I’ll be smart, like a Pake.”
Once when big, lazy Kimo ambled home with rice, Nyuk Tsin bit her lip and asked, “Why do you do this for us, Kimo?” And Apikela interrupted, saying, “When we were children going to the church we were often told of how Jesus loved the lepers, and it was a test of all good men how they treated those who were sick. And no leper ever came to Jesus without receiving aid, and no leper will come to the house of Kimo and Apikela to be turned away.”