Hawaii - James Michener [343]
And then the leprosy, which had been accumulating in enormous reserves throughout his body, burst forth horribly in many places and he could not leave the stone house Nyuk Tsin had built for him. She could provide him with no medicine, neither for his awful sores nor for the pneumonia that attacked him. She could get him no choice food . . . just salt beef and poi. There were no blankets to ease the hard earthen bed. But there was Nyuk Tsin's patient care, and as ghastly days progressed, with death extremely tardy, she sat with her husband and attended to his last instructions.
"You are obligated to send money to my wife," he reminded her. "And when the boys are married, send word to the village. Try any ventures you wish, for these are my lucky years."
As death approached, he became unusually gentle, a poor wasted shadow of a man, a ghost, and he told the self-appointed governor of the settlement, "The fan-tan game belongs to you." At the very end he said to Nyuk Tsin, "I love you. You are my real wife." And he died.
She scratched his grave into the sandy soil, choosing the side of a hill as she had promised, where the winds did not blow and where, if there was no tree, there was at least a ledge of rock upon which his spirit could rest on its journeys from and to the grave.
Nyuk Tsin now turned her house into a hospital, and no longer were stumps of human beings seen abandoned in open fields. She cared for them until they died, and there were sometimes five or six days in a row when she never saw a whole living person. She cared for those who were beyond the memory of God, and there was no human being so foul in his final disintegration but that she could tend him. In Honolulu the government could find no way to send medicine to the abandoned, nor bandages nor even scalpels to cut away lost members, but Nyuk Tsin devised tricks of her own, and many Hawaiians blessed her as the Pake Kokua. If anyone had asked her: "Pake, why do you work so hard for the Hawaiian lepers?" she would have replied: "Because Kimo and Apikela took me in."
In these days she formed one habit. As each dusk came she sat apart and took off all her clothes. Starting with her face she would feel for signs of leprosy, and then her breasts, and then her flanks. She studied each hand with care and then inspected her legs. Finally she lifted her big feet and looked at each toe in turn, and when she was satisfied that for another day she was free of leprosy, she dressed and went to bed. She had to perform this inspection at dusk, for the government in Honolulu could not find the funds to provide the lepers with lamps and oil, so that when night fell, the utter blackness of hell descended upon the lazaretto, and ugliness rode the night. But Nyuk Tsin, even though she was now an unattached woman, was left alone, and she slept in peace, for she knew that so far she was not leprous.
In early 1873 word was sent to Nyuk Tsin that in reward for her help at Kalawao she would be permitted to return to civilization, provided that upon her arrival in Honolulu three doctors would certify that she was free of leprosy. The news excited much discussion among the lepers, but one reaction dominated: although all were sorry to see her go, none begrudged her the right. So in the period between ships this twenty-six-year-old Chinese girl moved about the peninsula of Kalawao. She climbed up to the crater where the volcano which had built the island had once flourished, and she crossed over to the westward side of the peninsula where, in her opinion, the tiny settlement of Kalaupapa offered a much better home for future lepers than the eastern side at Kalawao. But mostly she looked at the towering cliffs