Hawaii - James Michener [155]
Malama pondered this and asked tentatively, "But if your god is all-powerful . . ." Then she stopped, for she was willing to accept Abner's earlier answer. She thought aloud: "God has arranged sin to test us."
Abner smiled for the first time. "Yes. You understand."
"But what will happen, Makua Hale, to that baby if it is not rescued from sin?"
"It will be plunged into fire everlasting."
"What will happen to me, Makua Hale, if I am not saved from sin?"
"You will be plunged into fire everlasting." There was a pause in the grass house as Malama shifted her weight on the tapas. Rolling over on her right side, she leaned her jawbone on her right hand and motioned Abner to sit on the tapa near her.
"What is the fire like?" she asked quietly.
"It leaps about your feet. It tears at your eyeballs. It fills your nose. It burns incessantly, but you are constantly re-created so that it can burn you again. Its pain is horrible beyond imagining. Its . . ."
Malama interrupted, asking weakly, "Once I traveled with Kamehameha to the edge of a burning lava flow, and I stood with him when he sacrificed his hair to appease Pele. Are the fires worse than that?"
"Malama, they are much worse."
"And all the good Hawaiians who died before you came here, Makua Hale? Are they living in that perpetual fire?"
"They died in sin, Malama. They now live in that fire."
The huge woman gasped, took away her right elbow and allowed her head to fall onto the tapa. After a moment she asked, "My good uncle, Keawe-mauhili? Is he in the fire?"
"Yes, Malama, he is."
"Forever?"
"Forever."
"And my husband Kamehameha?"
"He is in the fire forever."
"And that baby, if it dies tonight?"
"It will live in the fire forever."
"And my husband Kelolo, who swears he will never accept your religion?"
“He will live in the fire forever."
"And I will never see him again?"
"Never."
The remorselessness of this doctrine overcame Malama, and for the first time she sensed the truly awful power of the new god, and why those who followed him were victorious in war and could invent cannon that swept away tribal villages. She fell to sobbing, "Auwe. Auwe!” and thought of her good uncle and her great king wasting in fires eternal, and her servants brought cool clothes to ease her, but she brushed them away and continued weeping and beating her huge breasts. Finally she asked, "Can those of us who are still alive be saved?"
This was the question that had once given Abner most trouble: "Can all be saved?" and it stunned him to hear it coming so precisely from the mouth of a heathen, for it was the touchstone of his religion, and he replied, "No, Malama, there are many whom God has predestined for eternal hellfire."
"You mean they are condemned even before they are born?"
“Yes."
"And there is no hope for them?"
"They are predestined to live in evil and to die into hellfire."
"Oh, oh!” Malama wept. "Do you mean that that little baby ..."
"Perhaps."
"Even me, the Alii Nui?"
"Perhaps."
This awful concept struck Malama with great force. It seemed a lottery of life and death ... a god throwing smoothed pebbles into a rock hole . . . and sometimes missing. But it was the god who missed, and not the pebble, for unless the god had wanted to, he need not have missed. With pebbles he was all-powerful.
Then Abner was speaking: "I must confess, Malama, that all who slide into evil do so by the divine will of God and that some men are destined from birth to certain fire, that His name may be glorified in heaven because of their destruction. It is a terrible decree, I do confess, but none can deny that God foresaw all things for all men before He created them. We live under His divine ordinance."
"How can I be saved?" Malama asked weakly.
Now Abner's face became radiant, and his infusion of spirit transferred itself to the weeping woman, and she began to feel in the grass house a consolation that would never depart. "When God foredoomed all men," Abner said forcefully, "His great compassion directed Him to send to us His only begotten son, and it is Jesus Christ