Hawaii - James Michener [216]
Jerusha found abiding joy in these days, for her nine years in Lahaina had taught her how to master life within a grass house. Her two great enemies were bedbugs and cockroaches, but scrupulous cleanliness controlled the first and meticulous care in wrapping every edible crumb in time dismayed the roaches so that they marched away to some more careless house. Even so, the grassy walls, lined though they were with smooth and fragrant pandanus matting, were convenient hiding places for all kinds of insects, and often at night one would roll over on his pallet and hear the squashing sound of some hard-shelled vermin being crushed. Nor could the dust from the pebbled floor ever be adequately controlled. But life was possible, and at times even palatable.
There was some talk between Amanda Whipple and Luella Janders that their patient sister Jerusha was killing herself in the damp grass shack, and together they sent a petition to the mission board in Honolulu begging for some lumber. "Our husbands have volunteered to build a decent house for this Christian and long-suffering woman, if you will but supply the timbers," they wrote. But since one of the signatories was Amanda Whipple, who was known to have encouraged her husband when he abandoned the mission, and since Whipple had twice been additionally censured for marrying American sailors to Hawaiian girls, the petition came to naught, and Jerusha continued to live and work inside the dark, damp grass shack.
Abner, had he known of Amanda's move, would have been outraged, for he stubbornly maintained his original conviction: "We have been sent here as the servants of God. Through gifts to the mission, He will provide for us as He deems best." It was, however, trying to Jerusha to see her four children clothed only in such remnants as the mission board could send her from the charity barrels, and she tried her health still further by constantly ripping apart gift clothing, smoothing out the larger pieces of cloth thus provided, and sewing them into new garments for her children. On one point, however, she was adamant: "We have got to have books for Micah. If you don't write to the Board demanding them, I shall have to." She was not above stopping whaling captains on the streets and begging them for any books which they might have done with and which her brilliant son could read. "I am trying to teach him all he requires for entrance into Yale," she explained. "But he reads so fast and understands so well . . ." In one way or another she got the books.
Each year Jerusha had had one moment of complete motherly happiness; it coincided with the arrival of the annual gift box from her parents in Walpole, New Hampshire. Each November they dispatched it, but she could never be certain when a ship's captain would knock on her Dutch door, saying, "We've a box for you, ma'am." How exciting it was to get that message, but how infinitely more exciting to see her family standing in a circle as Abner ripped away the top. There were dried apples, and spiced pears and hard dried beef. "These pants will be for Micah," Jerusha would say carefully, lingering over each item. "And this dress will fit Lucy. David can have this and Esther this." On the succeeding Sunday, at least, Jerusha could look back over her shoulder as her children marched to church in their new clothes, and she could be proud of them. She always allowed the box to stay in the house long after it was empty, and whenever she looked at it she could recall the cold winters of New Hampshire and the smell of cider.
A major reason why Abner would have found it impossible to accept aid from the Whipples was this: a phrase of John's kept running through his mind and seemed to him to summarize the apostasy