Hawaii - James Michener [333]
There was no law in Kalawao and there was almost no humanity. What made the situation doubly terrible was that regularly the ugly little ferryboat Kilauea appeared offshore with an additional cargo of lepers, and when they were thrown ashore with nothing, Big Saul would move among them telling them the ultimate, terrifying truth: "Here there is no law."
After six weeks of keeping the beautiful young wife Kinau a prisoner, during which time more than eighteen men enjoyed her unmarked body, she was turned loose for whoever wanted her. She was allowed one flimsy dress, but the way in which she wore it proved that she had by God's grace lost her mind. She could remember nothing of what had happened to her, and she walked in a daze, unable to focus on the present, so that for a space of three or four months whatever man wanted her simply grabbed her and took her to where he slept on the cold earth and played with her for as long as he wished. Then he shoved her along, and she moved like a ghost, her dress askew and no flowers in her matted hair, until some other man wanted her, and then she was his. The women of Kalawao felt sorry for her, but each had her own problem, so that no one tended the poor crazy girl.
In the fourth month, in February of 1871, that is, the virulent leprosy that abided in Kinau broke loose, and within the space of a few weeks she became a horribly riddled thing, a walking corpse with thick, bloated face, shivering lips about to fall away and sickening illness in her breasts. Now men left her alone, but in her dementia she took off her flimsy dress and exposed the sores of her body. She walked slowly from Big Saul to his first lieutenant and then on to his second, whimpering, "Now I should like to lie with you again." She became such a sore on the community that men could not stand seeing her approach, her body falling apart, and finally Big Saul said, "Somebody ought to knock that one on the head." So on a dark night, somebody did, and she lay dead in the path for two days before she was finally dragged away for burial.
Of course, no woman was safe on Kalawao, for Big Saul and his men were free to take whom they liked, and those who arrived on the beach with no men to protect them suffered grievously, for they were 'usually women not far advanced in the disease, and to be raped repeatedly by men with no faces or with hands eroded to stumps was unbearable, but there was no escape, and Kalawao was filled with women who fell into a kind of stupor, crying to themselves, "Why has God punished me?"
It must not be assumed that women were blameless for the degeneration that overtook Kalawao, for there were many presentable women who felt: "I have been abandoned by society. There is no law here and no one cares what I do." Such women helped the men brew a raw and savage liquor from roots of the ti plant, or muddy beer from stewed sweet potatoes, and for weeks at a time, whole sections of the leper population stayed madly drunk, coursing loudly through the settlement, brawling, screaming indecencies at the general population and winding up in some public place naked and lustful, there to indulge themselves with one another to the applause of cheering witnesses. Those who inflamed these orgies and who seemed to enjoy them most were women, and it was not uncommon in those days, when no priests or ministers or government officials were present to protect order, to see a half-naked woman, at the end of a nine-day drunk, stagger into a public