Hawaii - James Michener [322]
When the prayer was said he slumped upon the floor and seemed not to have the strength to rise, but he did so and asked Nyuk Tsin, "Do you know what I must do?"
"Yes, Doctor. Tomorrow police."
"I must," he replied sorrowfully. "But you can stay here as long as you wish, and all your children," he assured her.
"I kokua," she said simply.
He had to look away from her face as the crushing force of this word struck him, for he knew what it meant: the banishment, the horrors of the leper settlement, the sons lost forever . . . He thought: "I would not have the courage." Then he recalled that it had been Mun Ki's plan to abandon Nyuk Tsin as soon as they got back to China, and to take her children from her, and now she was volunteering to go kokua with him. Slowly he raised his head and looked at Nyuk Tsin. She was a small Chinese woman with not much hair, slanted eyes, brown wrinkles about her mouth, but she was his sister, and he stepped forward and kissed her on each cheek, saying, "I should have known that you would go kokua." He turned away to stanch his tears and then asked brightly, like a minister, "Now, what can we do about the children?"
"Tonight I fix one boy here one boy here one boy here, all fix." She told him which families would take whom, and when this was explained she asked, "Tomorrow police?"
"Yes. I must. In God's mercy I must."
"I know, Doctor. Long time ago I speak my husband, 'Police go,' but we hope."
"God will forgive those who hope," the old man said.
As soon as he was gone, Mun Ki was out of bed, explosive with energy. "We will run to the hills!" he swore. "The police will never find us there."
"How will we eat?" Nyuk Tsin pleaded.
"We'll take food," Mun Ki explained excitedly. He had visions of a free life in the mountains. He and Nyuk Tsin would work for nobody and maybe even the sores would go away. "Hurry!" he cried. "We must be gone before the police come."
Nyuk Tsin looked at her husband with incredulity. How could he hope to lose himself in the hills back of Honolulu, when the police would be on his trail within six hours and when every Hawaiian who saw two Chinese struggling through the trails would know they were mai Pake? It was ridiculous, insane, as impractical as the reliance upon the quack doctor, and she was about to tell him so, but then she looked in a new way at her quixotic husband and saw him as a temporary assembly of earth and bone and confused desire and a pigtail and hands that would soon fall apart with leprosy. He was a man who could be very wise and the next minute quite stupid, as now; he was a human being who loved children and old people but who was often forgetful of those his own age. He was a mercurial gambler charged with hope: he had hoped that the quack doctor could cure him; now he hoped that somehow the forests would hide him. But above all he was her man: even though he was a Punti he had chosen her as his woman, and she loved him more than she loved her own sons. If he had this crazy desire to try his luck once more in the hills, she would go with him, for he was an obstinate man and sometimes a foolish one, but he was a man who deserved to be loved.
It was two o'clock in the morning when Nyuk Tsin finished hiding in high places anything that might hurt her children. Then she went to each child as he slept on the long polished board and fixed his clothes, so that in the morning when the boys were discovered, they would be presentable, and she straightened