Hawaii - James Michener [78]
Pa and his rugged crew were further surprised when it came time to set the course back to Havaiki-of-the-North. This time Teroro would not permit them to follow his earlier reckless path far out to sea; he required them to take the cautious route to Nuku Hiva, where in all prudence they replenished their stores, so that in the heartbreaking doldrums they had adequate food and water, especially for the children, who suffered intensely in the heat, for try as they might, they could not make their stomachs into tight hard knots. They were hungry and they said so.
At last the stars of the Little Eyes were overhead, and the canoe turned joyously westward before the wind. Now Teroro conducted daily lessons for every man and boy aboard the canoe: "You know the island lies ahead. What signals will prove the fact?" And every male above the age of six became a navigator, and Marama, taking the place of old red-eyed Teura, became the seer, collecting omens; and one day a boy spotted a black fork-tailed bird attacking a gannet, who had caught a fish; and Teroro showed all how to read the wave echoes as they bounced back from unseen Havaiki; but the most solemn moment came when Marama, reading her clouds, saw fire upon them, and she knew that the goddess Pere had lighted a beacon for her voyagers, and it was to this cloud of fire that Teroro directed his canoe.
As the craft neared shore Teroro faced one last odious job, but he discharged it. Moving among the men and women he told each: "The children are no longer yours. They must be shared with those on shore, and each child shall have many mothers."
Immediately a wailing set up, for on the long voyage men and women in the canoe had grown inordinately attached to the children, and the wild young things had found mothers and fathers whom they liked. "He is more than my son!" a woman cried, holding to her breast a nine-year-old boy with a broken tooth.
"No," Teroro said firmly. "If it had not been for the women on shore, pleading for children, I would not have thought to bring any. They must have their share. It is only just."
So when the canoe landed, there was a moment of intense anguish as the women from shore, too long without the sound of children, hurried down and saw the boys standing awkwardly by the mast and the little girls holding onto men's hands. The women on shore could not see the new pigs or the promising breadfruit or the bananas. All they could see were the children, and when the first child stepped ashore, a woman ran frenziedly to him with food, but the child drew back.
It was in this manner that Teroro, bearing in his hands the rock of Pere, stepped ashore to become the compassionate and judicious priest of Havaiki, with his gentle wife Marama as associate and seer, and with the volcano goddess as his special mentor. The pigs and the breadfruit and the children increased. Marama's flowers burst into brilliance. And the island prospered.
III
From the Farm of Bitterness
A THOUSAND YEARS after the men of Bora Bora had completed their long voyage to the north, a thin, sallow-faced youth with stringy blond hair left an impoverished-looking farm near the village of Marlboro, in eastern Massachusetts, and enrolled as a freshman at YaleCollege in Connecticut. This was the more mysterious for two reasons: to look at the farm one would never suppose that its owners could afford to send any of their ten children to college; and, having decided to do so, the parents must have had deeply personal reasons for sending a son not to Harvard, which was only twenty-five miles away, but to Yale, which was more than a hundred miles to the south.
Gideon Hale, a gaunt man of forty-two who looked sixty, could explain each matter: " Our minister visited Harvard and he assures us the place has become a haven for Unitarians, deists and atheists. No son of mine shall be