Hawaii - James Michener [166]
"In Lahaina there will be people to care for the boy," he argued desperately.
"No," Abner refused. "It would be unnatural."
'What can I do with the boy?" Brother Abraham begged.
The question was abhorrent to Abner, who replied, "Why, Brother Abraham, you will care for him, and bring him up to be a strong man."
"I don't know about these things," Brother Abraham mumbled.
"Cease!" Abner cried sternly. "It is your duty to learn," and he turned the distracted missionary around and sent him back to Wailuku and the responsibility of his child. When the ungainly man had left, Abner remarked hotly to the messenger, who could not understand, "I think that if he had had courage, his wife need not have died. If he had kept her at Hana, and done the best he could, all would have been well. Sister Urania was killed by the long climb to Wailuku. And the poor thing, eight months with baby."
These thoughts drove him to the contemplation of his own wife, and he became afraid that news of Urania's death in childbirth might have an adverse effect upon her, so he devised an illogical plan for suppressing the news. He reasoned, more from hope than from common sense: "It will be some time before word of this bad business reaches Lahaina. I shall say nothing of it to my dear wife." He entered into a solemn compact with himself and even called God to witness, but when he reached home and saw the way in which Jerusha's six little curls fell beside her face, and the manner in which she leaned forward in eagerness to greet him after their first days of separation since marriage, his words were faithful to the pledge, but his actions could not be, and he looked at her with such love and apprehension that she knew instantly what had happened. "Sister Urania died," she cried.
"She did," Abner confessed. "But you will not, Jerusha." And for the first time he called her by her name.
She started to ask a question, but he grasped her harshly by her two wrists and looked hard into her brown eyes. "You will not die, Jerusha. I promise you by God's word that you will not die." He released her and sat on a box, holding his tired head in his hands, and said, half ashamed of what he was about to admit, "God protects us in the most mysterious ways, Jerusha, and although my thoughts may in some respects seem horrible, nevertheless they are true. 1be-lieve that God took me to the death of Sister Urania so that I would be prepared when your time came. Now I know what to do. I know what Brother Abraham should have done. Jerusha, I am prepared, and you will not die." He leaped to his feet and screamed, "You . . . will . . . not . . . die!"
More than anything else in life he wanted, at that moment, to sweep his wife into his arms and embrace her with kisses, wild bellowing kisses like the sounds of animals in the meadows at home, but he did not know how to do this, so all of his love expressed itself in this one profound resolve. "You will not die," he assured his wife, and from that moment on, no woman in a remote outpost, far from help, ever faced her last days of pregnancy with a sweeter resolution.
BUT IF ABNER thus found spiritual triumph in his missionary home, he encountered a fairly solid defeat at Malama's grass palace, for when he went to give the Alii Nui her day's lesson, her found that Kelolo had not moved to the new house built for him, but lived as usual with his wife. "This is an abomination!” Abner thundered.
The two huge lovers, well into their forties, listened in embarrassment as he explained again why God abhorred incest, but when he was finished,