Hawaii - James Michener [235]
"Sail from the Land of the Little Eyes, Southward, southward To the oceans of burning heat . . ."
By morning he had entered exactly those oceans, and without water or food he paddled resolutely into them, a near-blind, toothless old man, bearing his god and the relics of the woman he had loved.
JERUSHA ENJOYED for less than three years the clean wooden house her father had sent her, for perversely, although she had managed to maintain her health in the grass shack, she could not do so in her comfortable home. "She's worked herself to death," Dr. Whipple said bluntly. "If she'd allow Hawaiian women to care for her children ..."
Abner would not hear of this, so Whipple suggested, "Why not send her back to New Hampshire? Three or four cold winters with lots of apples and fresh milk. She'd recover." This time it was Jerusha who was adamant.
"This is our island, Brother John," she insisted stubbornly. "When I first saw it from the railing of the Thetis, I was afraid. But through the years it has become my home. Did you know that some time ago Abner was invited to Honolulu, but it was I who refused."
"Then I can give you only one medicine," Whipple concluded. "Less work. More sleep. More food."
But with four children and a girls' school, Jerusha found little time for resting, until at last she awakened one morning with her entire chest in a viselike grip that she could not adequately describe, except that she found much difficulty in breathing. Abner placed her beside an open window and hurried to fetch the doctor, but when Whipple reached the room, Jerusha was gasping horribly.
"Put her to bed, quickly!” John cried, and when he lifted his friend's wife, he was appalled at how little she weighed. "Amanda," he thought, "weighs more than she." And he sent the children, running by themselves, to Captain Janders" home, and then he said quietly to Abner, "I am afraid she's dying."
There was no need to whisper, for Jerusha sensed that she was near death, and she asked if Amanda and Luella could come into the room, and when the women were there she sent for her children and said that she would like to hear, once more, the great mission hymn, and all in the room, including the dying woman, chanted:
"From Greenland's icy mountains,
From India's coral strand;
Where Africa's sunny fountains
Roll down their golden strand;
From many an ancient river,
From many a palmy plain,
They call us to deliver
Their land from error's chain."
"We have labored to do so," Jerusha said wanly, and seeing that death was strangling at her throat, Amanda Whipple began to whisper the hymn that had launched them on their individual adventures on the golden strands. "Blest be the tie that binds," Amanda began, but Abner could not join in the painful words, and when the wavering voices reached the poignant second verse, which seemed written particularly for those who travel in God's work to far places, he fell into a chair and held his hands before his face, unable to look at the frail figure on the bed who sang in the perfect fellowship of which she was tie symbol:
"We share our mutual woes;
Our mutual burdens bear;
And often for each other flows
The sympathizing tear."
"My beloved husband," she gasped in great pain, "I am going to meet our Lord. I can see . . ." And she was dead.
She was buried in the Lahaina church cemetery, with a plain wooden