Hawaii - James Michener [240]
Abner, his mind now beautifully clear, looked at his imperious inquisitor and saw him once more as the black-frocked judge he had been on that visit to Yale in 1821. He thought: "Brother Eliphalet moves about the world dispensing advice and thinks that by coming to Lahaina for a few days he can detect where we have gone astray. What does he know of cannon? Has he ever faced a rioting mob of whalers?" And with a sense of deep sorrow Abner discovered: "He will never know." Then, his mind still competent, he developed an equally haunting thought: "I doubt that anyone will ever know . . . except Jerusha and Malama. They knew."
"Farewell, Brother Abner," Eliphalet Thorn called.
"Farewell, sir," Abner replied, and the packet stood out to sea.
IN THE YEARS that followed, Abner became one of the human signposts of the old capital, an increasingly befuddled man, limping about the city, stopping to adjust his brains and clicking his head sideways to relieve passing darts of pain. He no longer lived in the mission house, for others came to assume the major responsibilities of the church, but he frequently preached in flowing Hawaiian, and whenever it was known that he would occupy the pulpit, the church was crowded.
For all official duties he continued to wear the shiny old clawhammer coat he had bought in New Haven and the black beaver hat. His shoes and other apparel he got as best he could from the charity barrels, and in time his life settled into a perfected routine, marked by three recurring highlights. Whenever a new ship anchored in the roads, he would hurry down to the pier and ask its people whether, in their travels, they had come upon the Hawaiian girl Iliki. "She was sold from here to an English captain and I thought that perhaps you might have intelligence of her." No one had.
His second calendar-marking moments came when, from the rude desk in the grass house in which he now lived, he released for printing another of his metrical renderings of the Psalms in Hawaiian, and when the printed sheets appeared, he would distribute the Psalms to his parishioners, and at the next church service would lead them in singing their praises.
The final triumph, of course, came whenever he received mail from his children in America. His sister Esther, now married to a minister in western New York, cared for the two girls, while the boys were the responsibility of the Bromleys. Each of the children's portraits had been drawn in black pencil at a studio in Boston, and they now looked down gravely from the grass wall: handsome, sensitive, alert faces.
Micah, having graduated with top honors from Yale, was already a minister, preaching in Connecticut, but the most exciting news was that Lucy had met young Abner Hewlett, studying at Yale, and had married him. It was Abner's intention to send his old friend Abraham Hewlett a brotherly letter of congratulation upon the joining of the two mission families, but he could not forget the fact that Abraham was married to a Hawaiian, nor could he forgive; and the subsidiary fact that the Hewletts were prospering exceedingly with their lands, and were now wealthy, did not alleviate Abner's distrust of anyone who would consort with the heathen.
One of the saddest aspects of these years was the fact that all who witnessed the visible impairment of Abner's faculties could at the same time observe John Whipple's cultivation of his. Always a handsome young man, he now flowered into an enviable maturity: he was tall, lean, sharp-eyed, and bronzed from surfing. His jaw was prominent, and the fact that he had a heavy beard, which he shaved twice each day, gave him a dark, manly look, which he accentuated by wearing dark suits very closely fitted with six-button waistcoats. His black hair, at forty-four, was untouched by gray, whereas Abner's was actually whitened, so that to see the two men