Moloka'i by Alan Brennert Page B

refused to enter it, standing in the doorway and examining Keo from a distance. He gave her something he called salicylic acid, but this too proved no help.
    Keo was semiconscious and she was holding him, telling him she loved him, when another figure appeared in the doorway—knocking, in haole fashion, on the door frame.
    She was surprised to see it was the priest, Kamiano.
    “May I come in?” he asked in Hawaiian.
    “My husband is very sick.”
    “I know,” Damien acknowledged. “Would he . . . like to receive the sacraments?”
    “We are not Christian.”
    “It’s never too late to come to God. I can baptize him now, before . . .”
    “No, thank you,” Haleola said coldly.
    The priest took a step inside. His tone grew more emboldened. “For your husband’s sake, consider. Would you deprive him of the joys of heaven?”
    Haleola ignored him. Damien’s tone became harsher. “Would you condemn him to everlasting perdition?” he asked. “A moment in hell contains a thousand tortures. Is that what you want for your husband—eternal torment? Because make no mistake,” and here his voice fairly boomed, “that is precisely what awaits him if he dies a sinner!”
    Something cold and angry broke loose inside Haleola.
    “My husband is a good man!” she cried, as vehemently as Damien. “An honest, loving, decent man! He gave me three beautiful sons—sheltered us with his tenderness—never let us go hungry or homeless! And now you tell me he’s a ‘sinner,’ that he’s going to burn in some fiery place forever, you dare to tell me that?
    “If that is your God, Father Kamiano, your Jehovah, who would condemn a kind and tender man to hell for the sin of not believing in him—then I shall follow my Keo to hell, as I followed him to this one, and together we spit on your God and his heaven!”
    She spat enthusiastically at his feet, and for once in his clerical life Damien was speechless.
    “Leave our home! Leave my husband to die in peace!”
    Damien looked at her evenly and honestly, nodded once, then did as he was asked.
    Keo died within the hour.
    Haleola prepared his body for burial in the traditional manner, wrapping it in layers of kapa cloth, and dug a grave behind their house. She placed into the grave a haunch of the roast pork that Keo enjoyed so much, as well as some items of clothing; then called out to his ancestors, “Haku, Ano, 'eia mai kou mamo, Keohi.” (Haku, Ano, here is your descendant, Keohi.) Tenderly she placed Keo’s bundled body in the grave, his head aligned toward the east, and said, “Keo, here you are departing. Go; but if you have a mind to return, here is food, here is clothing. Come back, and know you are always welcome in my heart.”
    She closed the grave over him, burned a small piece of sandalwood, and spoke a last prayer: “Aloha wale, e Keohi, k ua, auw .” (Boundless love, O Keohi, between us, alas.)
    That night she couldn’t sleep, and went outside to take in air sweet with the fragrance of the pandanus fruit that grew near the pali . At the edge of a bluff she looked down at foaming surf breaking violently on jagged rocks, as it always did at Kalawao: never a gentle meeting of land and sea, always a noisy thrashing, as if in restless sleep.
    She heard footsteps behind her, and a moment later she heard someone speaking utilitarian Hawaiian: “My condolences. For your husband.”
    She turned. Damien’s voice was no longer a thundering bludgeon, but soft and subdued. “He must have been a fine man, to have been loved so much.”
    The hellfire preacher was gone and in his stead was the builder of orphanages. “You must understand,” he said. “Christianity is an evangelical religion. It is our duty to share the glory of it. If I allowed someone to die without repentance, it would be as if I saw a man trapped in a burning house and made no effort to save him.”
    Haleola shook her head. “Your religion is all about being miserable, and wretched. Ours had