Hawaii - James Michener [370]
On the day he sailed to America on the H & H liner Molokai, Nyuk Tsin climbed aboard a little island steamer and made her first pilgrimage to her husband's grave at the leper settlement of Kalawao, for she, too, was imbued with this sense of continuity, and if her ablest son was that day setting forth for a new world, it was only because the dead gambler Kee Mun Ki had been good to her. This time the island steamer did not swing around the peninsula and throw its passengers brutally ashore into the cold and unprotected hell of Kalawao. The vessel sailed directly to the pier at Kalaupapa, on the kindly side of the peninsula, and discharged its cargo decently. Doctors and nurses were on hand to assist the new lepers, and the big white Missionary Home for Lepers provided them a place to sleep. At the Missionary Hospital they still found no medicine that combated the disease itself, but they found charitable care that protected them from pneumonia and tuberculosis, which had once been so prevalent.
Nyuk Tsin walked through the clean new settlement and up past the volcano crater. Then she stopped and an ache past understanding assailed her, for she looked down upon the most beautiful sight she had ever seen. It was more dramatic than the hills of China, lovelier than the valleys of Honolulu. In the distance rose the soaring cliffs of Molokai, with white spray beating upon their rock bases and gossamer waterfalls leaping from their summits to fall three thousand silvery feet. The ocean was blue and the small islands that clustered offshore formed handsome patterns. The fields of Kalawao, now empty of lepers, were soft and green as they had been a thousand years before that horrible disease was known in the islands. Two vacant churches, one Protestant and one Catholic, stood where once there had been terror. The house she had built with her own hands no longer had a roof. "How sweet," she thought, "were the days Mun Ki and Palani and I spent there. Oh, how I wish I could see those two good men once more." In her mind's eye she saw them not with noses and lips falling away and with stumps of hands, but as men. "How I would like to see them once more playing fan-tan on the shore."
That night she spent at Kalawao in the home of a kokua she had known years before, and on the next morning at cockcrow, in the third hour, she left the house and went to her husband's grave, so that she would be there when his spirit rose to walk about the valley. In the moonlight she carefully replaced any rocks that had fallen away. She brushed the earth and pulled weeds. Carefully she erected a slab on which his name, Kee Mun Ki, had been printed in gold letters. Then she undid a bundle and ceremoniously placed a fine set of new dishes about the grave, putting into them the three required delicacies: roast pig, chicken and fish. On saucers she placed oranges, boiled rice, little cakes with caraway, and brown candies with poppy seed. Then she lit a small candle, so that its incense would infuse the atmosphere and make it congenial to the ghost, and when these preparations were completed, she waited for the dawn.
When her husband's ghost appeared he found no tree to roost in, as he would have expected in China, where trees were plentiful and where they were kept near graves for just that purpose, but he did find a perching place on the rocky cliffs that rose behind his grave, and there in the warm sunlight, away from the cold ocean breezes, he sat with his dutiful wife.
She explained in a quiet voice: "Three of the boys are married, Wu Chow's Father, and although I was not able to arrange perfect marriages with huge dowries, I did as well as could be expected. Mrs. Ching, as you would expect, argued very strongly against me, and at the last she even brought up an unpleasant fact. 'Your husband died of leprosy,' she said, but I didn't lose my temper, for there was more important business at hand, and at last she gave in.
"Ah Chow has four children, Au Chow