Hawaii - James Michener [148]
Amanda Whipple, a truly devout woman, heard these strange words and caught their full savor. At first she was afraid to look at her scientifically minded husband, for sometimes his thoughts were difficult to follow, but the implications of this blasphemous conclusion no one could escape, and at last she turned to look at John Whipple, thinking: "One person can never understand another." But instead of censuring the young doctor for his irregular thoughts she looked at him analytically for the first time. Coldly, dispassionately, carefully, she looked at this strange cousin who stood beside her in the hot Hawaiian sunlight, and when she was finished studying him, she loved him more than ever.
"I do not like such words, John," she admonished.
"I had to speak them," he replied.
"Do so, always, but only to me," she whispered.
"It will be very difficult to understand these islands," John reflected, and as he and his wife watched the sea, they noticed the nymph Noelani--the Mists of Heaven--paddling her board back out to the deeper ocean where the big waves formed. Kneeling on her polished plank, she bent over so that her breasts almost touched the board. Then, with powerful movements of her long arms, she swept her hands through the water and her conveyance shot through the waves faster than the missionary boat was being rowed. Her course brought her close to the Thetis, and as she passed, she smiled. Then, selecting a proper wave, she quickly maneuvered her board, and finding it properly oriented, rose on one knee. From the missionary boat John Whipple whispered to his wife, "Now she will walk upon the waters." And she did.
When the Thetis sailed, Abner and Jerusha, feeling dismally alone, had an opportunity to inspect the house in which their labors for the next years would be conducted. Its corner posts were stout trees from the mountains, but its sides and roof were of tied grass. The floor was pebbled and covered with pandanus, to be swept by a broom of rushes, but its windows were mere openings across which cloth from China had been hung. It was a squat, formless grass hut with no divisions into rooms. It had no bed, no chairs, no table, no closets, but it did have two considerable assets: at the rear, under a twisting hau tree, it had a spacious lanai--a detached porch-- where the life of the mission would be conducted; and it had a front door built in the Dutch fashion so that the bottom half could remain closed, keeping people out, while the top was open, allowing their smiles and their words to enter.
It was into this house that Abner moved the furniture he had brought out from New England: a rickety bed with rope netting for its mattress; rusted trunks to serve as closets; a small kitchen table and two chairs and a rocker. Whatever clothes they might require in years to come they would get only through the charity of Christians in New England, who would forward barrels of cast-off garments to the mission center in Honolulu, and if Jerusha needed a new dress to replace her old one, some friend in Honolulu would pick through the leftovers and say, "This one ought to fit Sister Jerusha," but it never did. If Abner required a new saw with which to build even the minor decencies of living, he had to hope that some Christian somewhere would send him one. If Jerusha needed a cradle for her babies, she could get it only from charity. The Hales had no money, no income, no support other than the communal depository in Honolulu. Even if they were fevered to the point of death they could buy no medicine; they had to trust that Christians would keep replenished their little box of calomel, ipecac and bicarbonate.
Sometimes Jerusha, recalling either her cool, clean home in Walpole, its closets filled with dresses kept starched by servants, or the two homes that Captain Rafer Hoxworth had promised her in New Bedford and aboard his ship, understandably felt distressed by the grass hut in which she toiled, but she never allowed her feelings to be discovered by her husband