Hawaii - James Michener [363]
In late 1883 he returned to Honolulu with a cargo of new orange trees from Malaya; some excellent coffee beans from Brazil; the amazing torch ginger flower, a red slashing thing; and a tall, dark Spanish wife Aloma Duarte Hoxworth, who quickly bore him a son whom she insisted upon calling Jesus Duarte Hoxworth and whom Honolulu called Jadey, derived from his initials. Aloma Hoxworth was a sensation in the islands, for she was by nature an exotic creature and she quickly announced to her husband that his days of roistering on Rat Alley were ended. But it was easier for her to issue such instructions than to enforce them, so one night when Whip came home from delightful hours with a Chinese prostitute, Aloma Duarte tried to carve him up with a long knife. She gashed him badly across the scar in his left cheek, but before she could strike again he kicked her in the stomach, knocked her breathless against the wall, and proceeded to break her jaw and wrist.
"No one comes at me with a knife," he explained publicly, and when the -once-beautiful woman was mended she decided to bring brutality charges against him in the Honolulu courts, but against her stood the mute testimony of the jagged gash in Wild Whip's cheeks, and her lawyers advised her to drop charges. When she did so, Micah Hale, Bromley Hewlett and Mark Whipple visited her and advised her that they were ready to provide her with a small but adequate annuity if she would agree to leave the islands.
"There's no place for you here," Micah explained.
"I'm taking Jadey with me," she threatened.
"Whip won't allow that," her father-in-law warned.
"Jadey is for me!" Aloma Duarte stormed.
"He belongs in the islands," Micah reasoned with her, and in the end she left exactly as the family had originally planned, with exactly the annuity they had suggested. In New York she told a friend, "I was more afraid of the three bearded ones than I was of my husband. He comes at you with his fists, but they soft-talk you to death. In Hawaii they run things pretty much their own way. But they were generous."
And west of Honolulu, the once barren lowlands that had formerly required twenty acres to nourish a cow, blossomed into the lushest, most profitable agricultural lands in the world. When the sugar cane stood eight feet tall, bursting with juice, for mile after mile you could not see the red volcanic soil, nor could you see the water that Wild Whip had brought to it. All you could see was money.
IN 1885 Nyuk Tsin could no longer postpone decision about her sons, and as she studied Ah Chow, Au Chow, Fei Chow, Mei Chow and Oh Chow she realized both how difficult her job was going to be and how important. At Iolani, the Church of England school, she was giving the boys the best education available to them on the islands. Had they been able to get into Punahou, they would have learned more and would have associated with the missionary children who were destined to rule Hawaii, but for both financial and social reasons, entry there was forbidden, and they had done well at the second-rate school.
But now the older boys were ready for advanced education, and it was clear that each merited college and university. They were bright boys, well behaved, industrious and alert. Their pigtails were well tended and they had learned to keep their nails clean. They had good teeth and clear skins. They were reasonably good at games and spoke four languages with skill: Punti, Hakka, Hawaiian and English. Each was above high-school ability in mathematics and abstract reasoning, and to choose among them the boy on whose shoulders the entire burden of the family should fall was difficult indeed.
Nyuk Tsin was confused as to which of her boys ought to go to America, nor could she decide what he ought to study when he got there. In early 1885, therefore, she began her long inquiry, starting with Uliassutai Karakoram