Hawaii - James Michener [320]
These were the years when an otherwise decent man would study his enemy's face, and when he saw a pimple or impetigo or eczema he would denounce his enemy, and the man would be hunted down, arrested and thrown into the cage. There was no appeal, no hope, never an escape. The doomed man had only one chance to enjoy even the meanest decencies during the long years of his exile: if some unafflicted person, fully aware of her actions, volunteered to accompany him to the leper settlement, she was free to go in expectation of making his inevitable death a little easier. The saintly persons who stepped forward to share the hell of leprosy became known as the kokuas, the helpers. Mostly they were Hawaiian women who thus surrendered their own lives to aid others, and sometimes they themselves contracted the awful disease and died in exile; so that from those agonizing years the word kokua was to gain a special meaning, and to say of a woman in Hawaii, "She was a kokua," was to accord her a special benediction unknown in the rest of the world.
Therefore, in the middle of September, when Nyuk Tsin was pregnant with her fifth child and when it became wholly apparent to her that Mun Ki would not be cured and that the quack's herbs were of no use whatever, she waited one day until the evening meal ended and then she sent the children away and knelt before her husband, sharing with him the resolve she had made more than a month before: "Wu Chow's Father, I shall be your kokua."
For some minutes he did not speak, nor did he look at the woman kneeling before him. Instead, he slowly picked up one of her needles and stuck it carefully into each finger of his left hand. When he had tested his fingers twice he said, "There is no feeling."
"Shall we hide in the hills?" she asked.
"No one has spied upon me yet," he replied. "Maybe next week the herbs will work."
"Wu Chow's Father," she reasoned, "the doctor is a quack."
He put his hand upon her lips and said, "Let's try once more."
"We have almost no money left," she pleaded. "We must save it for the children."
"Please," he whispered. "I feel sure that this time the herbs will work."
So she took the last precious dimes and reals of her family and plodded down to Iwilei in the hot September sunlight, and when she entered Rat Alley, she noticed that two men watched her carefully, and first she thought: "They think I am one of the girls," but quickly she realized that they were not looking at her in that way, and she gasped: "They're spies, watching to see who visits the doctor. If they report Mun Ki they'll get a little money." So she hurried down a different alley and then up another and finally slipped into the doctor's office.
He was happy and hopeful. "Is your Punti husband getting well?" he asked graciously. And something in the man's manner that day cautioned Nyuk Tsin and she lied: "He's very grateful to you, Doctor. All the sores have gone and much of the itching in his legs. It's been a wonderful relief to us."
The doctor was surprised at this news and asked, "But nevertheless you wish a few more herbs?"
"Yes," Nyuk Tsin replied, sensing a great evil about her. "A little for the legs, and he'll be cured."
"He'll be cured?" the doctor repeated curiously.
"Yes," Nyuk Tsin explained, feigning happy relief. "It seems not to have been mai Pake after all. More like a sore from the taro patch."
"Where does the cured man live?" the doctor asked casually, as he filled the jar, and the manner in which he spoke convinced Nyuk Tsin that he was in league with the spies outside, and that he was turning over to them the names of his clients, so that after the afflicted Chinese had used up all their funds on herbs, he could squeeze a few more reals from the government as a reward for turning them in to the leper authorities.
"We live at Malama Sugar," Nyuk Tsin said quietly.
"Nice plantation," the doctor replied casually.