Hawaii - James Michener [181]
And on his way home, he stopped at the new house outside the wall and said, "Kelolo, will you work with me tonight?" And the outcast husband agreed, and they gathered Keoki, too, and Noelani and went to the mission house.
"The laws must be simple," Abner said with a show of statesmanship. "Everyone must understand them and approve them in his heart. Kelolo, since you will be the man who will have to organize the police and enforce the laws, what do you think they should be?"
"The sailors cannot roam our streets at night," Kelolo said forcefully. "It is at night that they do their damage." So Lahaina's first and most contentious law was written into Abner's rudely folded book: "A drum will sound at sunset, at which signal all sailors must return to their ships on pain of instant arrest and incarceration in the Lahaina jail."
"The next law?" Abner asked.
"There must be no more killing of girl babies!' Noelani suggested, and this became law.
"The next?"
"Should we stop the sale of alcohol altogether?" Jerusha asked.
"No," Kelolo argued. "The storekeepers have already paid for their supplies and they would be ruined."
"It is killing your people," Abner pointed out.
"I am afraid there would be riots if we stopped the sale," Kelolo warned.
"Could we stop the import of new supplies?" Jerusha proposed.
"French warships made us promise to drink lots of their alcohol each year," Kelolo pointed out.
"Could we forbid sales to Hawaiians?" Jerusha asked.
"French warships said we had to make the Hawaiians drink their alcohol, too," Kelolo explained, "but I think we should refuse to do so any longer."
Without ever insisting upon his own opinion, Abner extracted from his group a short, sensible body of law, but when it was finished he saw that one of the most typical of all Hawaiian problems had been overlooked. "We need one more law," he suggested.
"What?" Kelolo asked suspiciously, for he feared some action against kahunas and the old gods.
"The Lord says," Abner began in some embarrassment, "and all civilized nations agree . . ." He paused, ashamed to go on. After a moment's hesitation he blurted out: "There shall be no adultery."
Kelolo thought about this for a long time. "That would be a hard law to enforce," he reflected. "I wouldn't want to have to enforce that law . . . not in Lahaina."
To everyone's surprise, Abner said, "I agree, Kelolo. Perhaps we could not enforce it completely, but could we not get the people to understand that in a good society, adultery is not encouraged?"
"We could say something like that," Kelolo agreed, but then a look of considerable perplexity came over his features and he asked, "But which adultery are you talking about, Makua Hale?"
"What do you mean, which adultery?"
Kelolo, Keoki and Noelani sat in silence, and Abner thought they were being obstinate until he realized that each was thinking very seriously. In fact, he saw Kelolo's fingers moving and judged that the big alii was counting. "You see, Makua Hale," the tall nobleman said, "in Hawaii we have twenty-three different kinds of adultery."
"You what?" Abner gasped.
"And this would be our problem," Kelolo carefully explained. "If we said simply, 'There shall be no adultery,' without indicating which kind, everyone who heard would reason, 'They don't mean our kind of adultery. They mean the other twenty-two kinds.' But on the other hand, if we list all the twenty-three kinds, one after the other, somebody will surely say, 'We never heard of that kind before. Let's try it!' and things would be worse than before."
"What do you mean, twenty-three kinds?" Abner asked weakly.
"Well," Kelolo replied, from expert knowledge, "there is a married man and a married woman. That's one. Then there's the married man and the wife of his brother. That's two. Then the married man and the wife of his son. That's three. Then we have the married man and his own daughter. That's four."
"That's enough," Abner protested.
"It goes on through brothers and sisters, boys and their mothers, almost anything you could think of," Kelolo explained matter-of-factly.