Moloka'i by Alan Brennert

Haleola, was that of a woman trying very hard to think only pleasant thoughts, and not succeeding.
    “Good morning, Haleola. Pono.” Ambrose smiled at Rachel, but Haleola had no trouble reading the distress behind the smile. “Did you . . . sleep well, Rachel?”
    Rachel nodded, too busy eating her poi to do more.
    “Pono, Haleola, this is Sister Mary Catherine, from the Order of St. Francis. Sister, this is Kapono Kalama, his niece Rachel, and Haleola Nua.”
    The nun smiled with what seemed genuine warmth. “Aloha, Rachel. Welcome to Moloka'i.”
    Rachel, still chewing, mumbled a hello around her food. Sister Catherine laughed, a girlish laugh. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-two years old.
    “Pono, I’m sorry about this, but . . .” Ambrose sighed. “I’m afraid we have to take Rachel with us.”
    Pono didn’t quite understand. “What do you mean? Take her where?”
    “To Bishop Home. She has to stay there, Pono; she can’t live with you.”
    Pono jumped to his feet, glowering at Ambrose. “Why the hell not! She’s my niece!”
    Rachel put down her food, listening with alarm to the raised voices.
    Ambrose said, “The sisters prefer that all girls under the age of sixteen reside in their care, at Bishop Home.”
    “For their own protection,” Sister Catherine added, but this only inflamed Pono even more:
    “My brother asked me to take care of her!” he shouted, and the sister flinched, lapsing back into silence.
    Now Rachel began to cry, and Haleola squatted down to hold her. Pono glared at Ambrose. “You happy now? Maybe you like to sneak up behind her and say ‘Boo’? Yeah, look, she ain’t nearly scared enough!”
    “Damn it, Pono, I don’t—”
    “Ambrose, there must be some mistake.” Haleola’s tone was calm and conciliatory. “Why don’t we go speak with Mother Marianne?”
    She can’t be more stubborn, Haleola told herself, remembering earlier times on the island, than that old mule Damien.

    K
    alawao in 1879 was little changed from the village Haleola and her husband, Keo, had first come to nine years earlier. Life was still hard. The Hawaiian government provided each resident with a subsistence diet, but food shipments from Honolulu were subject to the weather and often delayed by storms or high surf. The sum of the average patient’s worldly goods was little more than a blanket, a pot and pan, a knife, a spoon, and an oil lamp. And though there were now four churches on the peninsula, there were still many exiles whose only creed was “In this place there is no law”—who abandoned all pretense at civility, as civilization had abandoned them. Why fear retribution for theft, for rape, when there was no punishment worse than the one to which they were already condemned?
    And then there was “the crazy pen.”
    The ramshackle grass house on the outskirts of town was a home for no one and everyone—a place for dancing, drinking, and losing oneself in the moment, because in Kalawao moments were all anyone could count on. A fire blazed outside as around it women danced the hula : not the decorous hula performed for kings and queens but a wildly sensual dance marked by a lusty gyre of hips.
    In those vanished days, Haleola would sometimes watch from the distant shelter of a pandanus tree. She had no desire to join in, to drink from the calabashes of beer or to feel the rough hands of drunken men on her body. She was here for the hula, and for the prayers, spoken over a makeshift altar inside the house, which preceded it:
“Collect of garlands, Laka, for you!
Heed our prayer, ’tis for life;
Our petition to you is for life.”
    How many Hawaiians these days even knew the hula ’s patron goddess and her two faces, gentle Laka and fierce Kapo? Yet in exile these people danced to Laka, turned their damaged faces to her, as two-fingered musicians magically coaxed rhythm from homemade drums. So loud were those rhythms that Haleola was oblivious to the sound of hooves