Read Moloka'i for Free Online

pincushion, the tip of which she now touched to the rosy spot on Rachel’s thigh.
    Rachel didn’t notice that either. Queasily, Dorothy put a little more pressure on the pin.
    Rachel said, “How does it look, Mama?”
    Dorothy lightly poked the pin all over the blemished skin—not hard enough to puncture it, but enough that Rachel should have felt the pinprick. “You . . . feel that, baby?”
    “Feel what, Mama?”
    In desperation Dorothy jabbed the pin into her daughter’s flesh. A tiny bubble of blood erupted from the skin, but Rachel didn’t flinch—didn’t cry out—didn’t even realize she had been pricked.
    Dorothy felt light-headed; faint. She struggled to keep her voice calm and her hand steady. “Needs . . . a little more time to heal,” she lied, applying a fresh bandage, one that covered the entirety of the blemish. “You just keep this on, understand? Keep it on.” Rachel promised that she would, and within minutes was off to school.
    Dorothy was not a woman easily brought to tears, but now she sat in the empty house and wept freely. This couldn’t be, not her Rachel, she couldn’t have the ma'i p k —could she? Could it be something else, anything else? Wedded to her grief was a terrible panic: if only Henry were here, someone to share the anguish and the shock, someone to help her figure out what to do next. But Henry would not be back for another month, and something, she knew, had to be done in the meantime.
    If she brought Rachel to a haole doctor, and if it was leprosy, the doctor would report it to the Board of Health. That left a kahuna as her only recourse—but as a Christian she had been told that kahunas were charlatans, ignorant holdovers of a heathen religion. She was a good Christian woman who loved her church, who wanted to believe and to embrace its proscriptions.
    Yet she loved Rachel too, and if a heathen could save her daughter’s life—save her from banishment . . .
    There were kahunas who were also Christians—who had reconciled the old ways with the teachings of Christ the Savior—and it was to one of these that Dorothy went, a thin, bony old man named Ua. She told him about the blemish on Rachel’s skin, its color and insensitivity to pain. She told him about Pono, and tears welled in her eyes as she spoke. Ua put a comforting hand on hers and said, “Don’t worry.” He got up and began taking down jars from a shelf, jars filled with leaves and powdered herbs and other, odder things Dorothy did not recognize.
    “This,” he explained, showing her cuttings from a plant with oblong leaves, yellow flowers, and narrow seed pods, “is used to clear disruptions of the skin. I’ve had good results with it.” He put them in a large bowl along with four sea urchin shells, a teaspoon of salt, and papaya and kukui -nut juices. Then he picked up an empty jar and got to his feet. “Excuse me. One more thing I need.” He left the room, calling out a name; Dorothy watched as a little girl appeared, took the empty jar, then hurried away. She returned minutes later, the jar filled. As Ua reentered and poured the yellow fluid into the bowl there was no mistaking the familiar pungent smell.
    “Has to be from a child, you see,” Ua said by way of explanation. “No good otherwise.” Dorothy smiled uncertainly, watching as he pounded the ingredients together into one pulpy mix, like some strange poi .
    He wrapped the pulp in coconut fibers and squeezed the juice into another jar, which he now presented to Dorothy. “Apply this to the blemish three times a day for the next five days,” he directed. “Pray each night for the Lord God Jehovah to add his love and power to this medicine, and at the end of that time the blemish should be gone.” Dorothy took the jar and gratefully paid him his two-dollar fee—a great deal of money, but if this worked it would be worth ten times that, a hundred times!
    Dorothy dutifully prayed and applied the medicine to Rachel’s