Hawaii - James Michener [339]
More, they had a rude kind of spiritual peace. Mun Ki, sitting on the rocks by the sea, waiting for driftwood, often looked toward the cliff where his sure-footed wife risked her life daily in search of timber, and a change came over him. He was not aware of it, but Nyuk Tsin began to sense that her husband no longer felt inwardly ashamed of her Hakka strength. Once he had even gone so far as to admit grudgingly, "I watched you climbing on the high rocks. I would be afraid to climb there." This gave her much consolation, but the spiritual repose derived principally from another development. As long as the two Chinese had been total outcasts, even among the lepers, there had been a kind of enforced loyalty between them, for if either fought with the other, there was truly no hope left, so they were bound together by bonds of ultimate despair. But now that they were accepted into the full community, and were recognized for the prudent, loyal people they were, they were proved to be ordinary people, husband and wife, and they could argue about how the house should be built, and sometimes Mun Ki, his patience strained by his stubborn Hakka wife, would stomp off in anger, hobbling on his toeless feet to the beach, where he would sit with dying Hawaiian men and confess to them: "No man can understand a woman," and the suffering men would recount their defeats at the hands of women. Then, when the day was done, he would hobble back to his home and wait for Nyuk Tsin, and when he heard her coming his heart was glad. At one such conciliation he confessed: "If you were not my kokua, I should be dead by now," and with no pride of either Punti or Hakka he looked at her in the tropical dusk and said, "Dr. Whipple was right. Wherever a man goes he finds a challenge. Today the committee asked me to handle the distribution of food, because they know I am an honest man. In fact," he admitted proudly, "I am also on the committee itself."
They suffered one major worry: what had happened to their baby? In questioning the sailors from the Kilauea they discovered nothing.
Someone vaguely remembered that the child had been handed to a man on the dock at Honolulu, a Chinese perhaps, but he was not sure. With Dr. Whipple dead there was no way for Nyuk Tsin to send an orderly inquiry, so the two Chinese spent some months of quiet anxiety, which was heightened when an incoming leper said, "I know Kimo and Apikela. They gather maile, but they have only four Pake children." The parents fretted, but Nyuk Tsin often repeated: "Wherever the boy is, he's better off than here."
Mun Ki found escape from his worry through a fortunate discovery. One day while keeping guard at the beach, hoping for another timber, he happened to notice that some of the small black volcanic pebbles that lined the shore resembled the beans used in the game of fan-tan, and he started to gather them, and when he had well over a hundred of matched size he spent a long time searching for a completely flat rock, and although he did not find one, he did stumble across a slab which could be made reasonably smooth by polishing with another stone held flat against the surface. When it was ready he spread upon it the beanlike pebbles and began picking them up in his damaged hands, slamming them back down on the flat rock, and counting them out in fours. In time he became so skilled in estimating his initial grab that he could guess with fair accuracy whether the residue would be one, two, three or four; and after he had done this for some days he called to some Hawaiians and showed them the game. For the first two days he merely tested his wits against theirs, and it was one of the Hawaiians who suggested, "We could play a game with those pebbles," and Mun Ki replied casually, "Do you think so?"
Since no one had any money, they looked along the beach to find something they could use as counters, and they came upon some hard yellow seeds dropped by a bush that grew inland,