Hawaii - James Michener [327]
"When will the child get here?" the people asked.
"As soon as a ship leaves from the leper island," Nyuk Tsin replied, and the intended parents shivered with apprehension.
On the way back to the quarantine station, Dr. Whipple drove a short distance up Nuuanu Valley to the land which he had given Nyuk Tsin. Placing stones at the corners of a seven-acre field, he assured her, "Mrs. Kee, I have entered this plot at the land court and paid taxes on it. When your husband dies, because he can't live much longer, you come back here and start a little garden and get your children back with you."
From the carriage Nyuk Tsin looked at the wet land, and it seemed impossibly beautiful to her. "I will remember this land," she said in Hawaiian.
But when Dr. Whipple started to turn the horses around, he saw coming toward him two huge Hawaiians, and when they detected Nyuk Tsin in the carriage, they cried, "Pake, Pake! We have come for the children!"
They ran as fast as their enormous bulk permitted and caught hold of their friend's hands. "Surely you will let us keep the children for you," they pleaded.
"You have such a small house," Nyuk Tsin protested.
"It's big enough for children!" Apikela cried expansively, opening her arms like swinging gates. "Please, Pake wahine! You'll let us have the children?"
Nyuk Tsin spent some time considering this strange request, and she wished that Mun Ki were present to help her, but she was sure he would approve her conclusion: "The Punti and the Hakka families might grow weary of our children, even though we are all from the Carthaginian. But Apikela and Kimo will love them forever." So Nyuk Tsin spoke for her family: "We will give the children to you." And she asked Dr. Whipple to drive back to the houses where the children were and she explained to the Chinese: "It will be better this way because Apikela and Kimo will be able to keep all the children together. But I hope, for my husband's sake, that you will give them some money from time to time."
"Money? For keeping children?" fat Apikela asked in astonishment, and Nyuk Tsin thought how strange it was that Chinese families with good jobs always found it difficult to accept one strange child, but Hawaiians who had nothing could invariably find space for one child, or three, or five. She last saw her boys heading back up the Pali, one baby in Apikela's arms, one in Kimo's, and the two older boys trudging happily behind.
When the time came for the panel of doctors to certify that Mun Ki was indeed a leper, and therefore subject to banishment for life without right of appeal, they reported: "Aggravated case of leprosy. Lesions both external and internal. Banishment to Kalawao imperative." The papers were signed. The three doctors left, and Whipple said to the condemned man, "Mun Ki, wherever a human being goes, there is a challenge. Be the best man you can, and your gods will look with favor upon you. And may my God in His heaven protect you. Good-bye." Bowed with the grief that comes upon all men who watch the swinging changes of life, Dr. John Whipple went home.
Two days later forty condemned lepers were assembled and marched through the streets of Honolulu toward the pier where the leper ship, Kihuea, waited. As the ghostly men and women walked, the citizens of the city drew back in horror, for some hobbled along on feet that had no toes and other stared vacantly ahead from horrible faces that had no cheeks and whose lips and noses had fallen away. In silence the doomed lepers approached the Kilauea, a small, snout-nosed little craft of four hundred tons with a grimy smokestack and filthy decks. Forward, some cattle had been tethered for the short, rough haul to the leper colony, and as the ship rocked slowly these beasts lowed mournfully. When the lepers appeared,