Horror in Paradise Read online

  ONE evening my father came in late to supper just as we had lighted the kerosene lamp and put it in the middle of the cleared dining table. He had been off seeing the superintendent about building the new school.

  “Hayashida is sick,” said my mother, “and wants to see you before you go to bed.”

  My father took a little hand lamp and went out into the tropic blackness, down the latticed walk to Hayashida’s little whitewashed house, where he lived with Kiko. The screen door banged after him, and he was gone a long time, while I watched the mealy damp baby moths who came under the lamp shade and got cooked on the kerosene surface of the silver lamp. Then the screen door closed lightly, and my father came back holding his lamp up.

  “Mama,” he said as he blew out the light and stood some distance from us, “Hayashida has a bubo under his arm as big as an egg.”

  He washed himself with kerosene and called up the doctor on the telephor.-, sitting down as he waited for a connection. Mother sent us to bed. We didn’t know what a bubo was.

  The next day the doctors—about four of them and several health officials—came to see Hayashida. They told my father to say that Hayashida had measles and dismiss the school indefinitely. This my father did, because he had to, although he hated to stand up before all his schoolchildren and tell a lie. Hayashida besides being our Japanese boy was the janitor of the school. He had swept it out on Monday afternoon just before he was taken sick.

  The neighbors knew what they knew—the measles story wasn’t very convincing. The doctors went in and out of the little whitewashed house where Hayashida lived, and Kiko could be seen standing limp against one window—all her lovely oiled hair pressed against the glass. We children loved Hayashida and Kiko. He was a big raw-boned Japanese, gaunt and yellow, and very merry. He had come to us right off a plantation when he couldn’t speak any English.

  Only Kiko could speak, because she had been a silkworm girl in Tokyo. Under the lattice of the passion vine over our door they stood beside each other and wished to come and work for us. Hayashida took care of our huge garden and the lawn; he clipped the hedges and swept the walks, and all afternoon long, while he ran the sprinklers and changed them, he kept our swings going too, and carried us around on his shoulders. Once a centipede crawled up inside his blue denim pants and he caught hold of the cloth and called to us to look while he squeezed it to death, so that it wouldn’t bite him. He also sang very sweet songs to himself in a high silly voice all the time he worked.

  Now with a great bang, we were overridden with doctors who tramped into our house and brushed past us children as if we didn’t even exist.

  “You’ve got to fumigate,” said one. “How solid is this house anyway?” and he poked at the new wallpaper and made a hole. “I thought so—built out of sticks,” he said.

  I wanted to yell at him for that; to bang him on the head; to tell him to get out of my house. While some of the strange men were talking to my mother, the same one who had broken the paper went over and yanked down the curtains.

  “Take down all the hangings,” he ordered my father.

  Then the death wagon came for Hayashida. They carried him out with masks over their faces and gloves on, and little Kiko walked sorrowfully after him in a kimono which she had ceased to wear since she lived with us. Now she reverted to a kimono, and carried a few belongings in a little handkerchief. She sat at his head in the wagon, and a few children were there to see what was happening. My father tried not to cry; so did we all. Hayashida was going for good. No one ever got well of the plague.

  “Good-bye, Hayashida,” said my father, “you have been a good boy with us.”

  Hayashida sat up in the wagon.

  “Will you take care of Kiko if I die, Mr. Taggard?”

  “Yes, Hayashida.”

  “If I get well, can I have my old place back?”

  “Yes, Hayashida.”

  So he went away. The doctors hurried him off to the receiving station and he was put in quarantine. Now two health officials fastened on us.

  “Take your children and go away for three or four days while we fumigate. Go anywhere. There is no danger. You haven’t been exposed. Go visit friends. Don’t let anybody know. There mustn’t be a scare. This is only the sixth case. We must keep it quiet.”

  “I won’t go to a friend’s house,” replied my indignant mother. “Where shall we go? There isn’t a place in the world.”

  “You’ve got to get out for about four days,” they said savagely, wishing she wouldn’t quibble with them.

  I started to take down some dresses.

  “Little girl,” one of them bawled at me. “Don’t touch those things. Get out of the house in the fresh air. You can’t take anything with you.”

  So we went, headachy and driven, forlorn in our old clothes, about four o’clock, knowing that all the neighbors down the long road to the streetcar were looking out from behind the doors and whispering that there was Plague in our family.

  The streetcars go very fast in the Islands, because there are such long stretches. They are open—a row of seats and a roof. On these flying platforms you go across rice fields and wait at switches for the other car; you climb a hill with a drone, and then branch off into Palama where the Japanese live.

  At four o’clock on a school day it seemed strange to be riding through Palama. Dimly, the reason for this ride—the distinction of having Plague in the family, the awful importance of an event that seizes you the way a cat does a rat, the very great satisfaction of having something happen that is huge and terrible, that may end in darker, grimmer events—all this was in our minds as we went through Palama, looking at the Japanese and Chinese, the children, the withered women in their flat-chested black sateen coats and earringed ears. On all the faces that turned up to our car as it danged its bell through the crowded streets and down across the bridge, I extended the now gently painful knowledge that Hayashida would die, that our house would be fumigated and that my head ached and my feet were cold.

  On we went through Honolulu, past the hardware store where the Sherwin Williams paint folders were tucked in little boxes—(we always helped ourselves to the little booklets with their shiny inches of blue and tan); past our little church looking brown and dusty on a weekday with the shutters closed and the bougainvillea vine next it blooming cerise in the heat; past the Palace, the Opera House, the statue of Kamehameha, where the idiot Portuguese boy stood all day, worshiping and rubbing his hands; past the rich people’s houses on the way to Waikiki.

  Waikiki was our heaven always. It was always reserved for the greatest occasions of joy. A sharp turn—our car was running wildly over the swamp in the stiff breeze from the sea, with Diamond Head lifted up, brown as a niggertoe nut, running parallel with our track. Another curve and wind and a switch, and the smell of salt/and the first turn of a wave, between two hedges as we started up again, running headlong into Diamond Head,—headlong for the place where the water came into the arm of the old brown-purple mountain.

  (Oh, the sea, the sea, the sea, the sea, the waves; the high clouds; the bright water, the crazy foam on the surf away out, the blue limpid lovely empty water. Oh, the sea.) So I cried to myself, and got up to stand on the seat

  “Sit down,” said my mother wearily. She had a headache, I could tell.

  We sat fixed, waiting for the great joy of seeing it suddenly, as we knew we would—the mountain, the surf running in with its arched neck and blowing mane, the dizzy blue water level on the sand. There it was. Oh, sea, sea. My brother and sister wouldn’t sit still. My father cheered up, and lifted his head and his dreamy gaze to focus on it; my mother sat dully, because her head ached so. I could tell, by the narrowed slits of her eyes. She didn’t look. The sun hit the water and the sunlight hit you as it shot off the surface. Black things danced in the air. It hurt between the eyes to look at it.

  We got off at the Waikiki Inn and my mother and father hurried ahead. We ran for the sand.

  They came
out of the office in a minute, looking very embarrassed and troubled and trying to look untroubled. A Japanese boy led them to a little cottage under some vines and unlocked the door. My mother looked in and then came down to get us.

  “You can’t go in the water today. I’m sorry. Get out right away. You look like little wild children. You mustn’t get wet,” she said in a lower tone when we came, holding up our skirts to our waists, all wet-legged from the first tumbled wave. “Mother doesn’t dare let you get in the water. One of us may have it.”

  With that her face looked so terrified and in such dull pain that we came limping in, letting down our dresses, and picking up our shoes and stockings. As we walked away from sand to grass lawn, the sea talked and roared and mumbled and swished at our backs. We didn’t dare even turn around.

  That night I was sick. The black dots in the air turned to balls of fire; the terrible sunlight on the water, the terrible water we couldn’t go in, that became noisy torment, throbbing like the heart in illness; fever that took the bones and broke them and wrenched the stomach. My mother was sick too. We were sick together. The others slept. I lay under the thick mosquito net as if I were as wide as the Pacific Ocean and the fever took one arm off to the east, the other to the west; my legs stretched into dimness, I gazed flat up-

  ward, fixed, at some immensity—I immense, and facing immensity. The kerosene lamp purred on the table, a yellow torment. My mother sat retching with a sick headache. Now and then she would come and bow her head on the bed outside the mosquito net and say, “Oh, Genevieve, will this night never be over?” and then she would vomit again.

  The sea rose outside in a great wind. A hard tropic tree scratched and clanged on the iron roof of the cottage. It was utterly black except for the torment of the little flame in the lamp. The ocean broke outside so near, the same wave sounds as in daylight, but so interminable at night, and no one to hear it, but us, me and my mother. The waves hit the shore like a blow on a wound; the lamp burned in its chimney stifling the air, never wiggling, just burning. Horror, the black death!

  She fanned me and called out that I was her first born, and rubbed the wet hair from my head and chafed my feet. Her hand on my legs made them limited again at the bottom of the bed, not so long that they had no feet as a moment before. “Oh, mother, will this night never end?”

  It ended—fear and a sick headache and a little fever—that was all. And I did not die except in some experience of the mind.

  Pacific Commercial Advertiser

  The Lanai Horror

  Although the Hawaiian people have always been kindly and gentle as a group, and even in the heat of battle seldom tortured their foes, they were victims of a cult of sorcery that sometimes caused outbreaks of fiendish fame. Such an episode took place as late as February 12, 1892, on the smaller island of Lanai.

  The kahuna anaana or sorcerer could be either male or female. His professional calling included murder, in which he was guided by a familiar demon. “He usually does his victims to death by secret administration of poison, or quite as commonly, perhaps, by some occult influence upon them, possibly of a hypnotic sort,” an editorial ran in the July issue of The Friend, a Protestant missionary journal founded in Honolulu in 1843. “He first establishes himself in business by killing one or more of his nearest relations. This creates for him a reputation of remorseless truculence, which makes him greatly feared, and ensures large emoluments. All these murders he professes to execute by means of his demon, often claiming to have produced deaths in which he really had no hand. Sometimes he overdoes the business, and has to fly before the wrath of the outraged people whom he has held in terror. This is very rare; their fear of his demon masters their anger.”

  The behavior of Pulolo, the sorceress of Lanai, follows the classic formula. Again to quote the article in The Friend, “A significant fact is that Pulolo learned her trade of sorceress during a residence of some years in this city. Under the fostering patronage of royalty for a little more than thirty years, Honolulu has grown to be a headquarters of superstition and a chief seminary of sorcery. This began when Prince Lot’s agent Kapu issued printed licenses to about three hundred kahunas or native doctors, with schedules of fees ranging up to fifty dollars. These kahunas rarely knew much of real remedies. Their chief stock in trade was the superstitious fears of the people, who would hire their incantations to propitiate or exorcise the evil demons that made them ill. In order to educate and develop those fears, they immediately formed private classes in idolatry and sorcery throughout the kingdom. Since then this culture of diabolism has gone steadily on. Fresh accessions of force were largely made to it during the late reign.”

  The story of the Lanai outbreak may best be told by quoting from successive issues of the Pacific Commercial Advertiser, a Honolulu newspaper which ran weekly from 1856 to 1888 and resumed publication daily in 1882. A sequel to the event described is to be found in The Friend for October, 1892: “The scene of the Pulolo murders and hoomanamana frenzy is at the steamer landing at the western end of the island. A curse rests on the place. The houses that stand there have been abandoned, and the place where the killing was done and where the bodies and the house were given to the flames is now but a bit of sand marked off by the stumps of the fence posts.”

  February 17, 1892.

  THE steamer Mokolii, which arrived on Tuesday, brings a strange story from Lanai. At the quiet little hamlet of Awalua, the landing at Lanai, there stood near the shore a grass hut, occupied by a family of about ten persons, one of them an old Hawaiian supposed to be crazy (pupule). A female kahuna attended the old gentleman. During the evening of the 12th inst., several bowls of awa were consumed by the family, the children included, to appease the aumakua deity.

  After the awa, it is conjectured that the entire party went to sleep, with the exception of the female kahuna, the spirit not allowing her to rest until the aumakua had brought the desired relief. The story goes that she waited until after midnight, when the aumakua, continuing conspicuous by his absence, she lost patience and determined to hasten the steps of the dilatory god by the application of fire to the house. The flames woke the sleepers, who rushed out of the burning hut. When nothing was left but ashes, it turned out that a young man of twenty was missing.

  And now comes the strangest part of the story. When the steamer Mokolii reached Lanai, an astonishing sight met their gaze. The once well-beloved occupants of the hut at Awalua were running wild on the rocks, clad in nature’s attire. The whole family had been seized with real or apparent insanity. When approached, they appeared to have lost all means of communication, and no intelligible account of their condition could be obtained. When the Mokolii left for Honolulu, Hon. F. H. Hayselden of Lanai had sent a boat to Lahaina to fetch Deputy Sheriff Makalua to investigate the matter. According to the chief officer’s story, it seems that the unfortunate young man who perished in the flames had a pretty wife, to whom another native in the same house had taken a fancy, and the belief is that the rest of the family, not being in sympathy with the husband set the house on fire, with the intention of murdering him.

  This is as much of this strange eventful history as has yet reached Honolulu. A family all going crazy at one fell swoop in an event unparalleled since the days of the Bacchic frenzy.

  February 22,2892.

  A horrible outbreak of heathenish superstition has occurred on the island of Lanai, leading to deeds of the most frightful violence, to the murder of a man, a woman, and a child, and the savage torturing of still another unfortunate. The first rumors of these shocking events reached Honolulu on the Mokolii last Tuesday. Yesterday the Kinau brought confirmation of these rumors, together with twelve prisoners, an entire family all charged with murder, some of them on three indictments. The names of the twelve [sic] persons are as follows: Kaaaio; Kala; Keliikuewa; Keola; Puulolo (wahine); Nawai (wahine); Kanae (wahine); Kahikina; Kanoenoe (wahine); and Kalakaa.

  The murdered persons are the three following: Kula (liil
ii) [infant], six years; Puni (wahine), sister; and Kaholokai.

  There are three charges of murder: (1) Puulolo (wahine) is charged with the murder of Puni (wahine); (2) all twelve are charged with the murder of Kala [sic: Kula], (Iiilii); and (3) Kahikina, Puulolo, Kakaio ([sic: Kaaaio], Kala, Keola, and Kealake [s/c: Kalakaa] are charged with the murder of Kaholokai.

  The police are cautious in their utterances, and it is difficult to ascertain the course of the whole dreadful history. Much of it will not be known until the trial; some of it will never be known. The following brief sketch of the facts is derived from the most trustworthy sources accessible.

  On Monday, the 15th inst., news reached Lahaina that murders had occurred at Awalua, on Lanai. The deputy sheriff dispatched Mr. Chillingworth, R. P. Hose, and other constables to the scene. They left Lahaina at 10 a.m. Tuesday, reaching Awalua at 12:30, where they found Puulolo (wahine) and Kealaka [sic] tied with ropes. It appears that sometime before the events described below, Puulolo had cured, or was credited with curing, a child of Kaholokai’s which had been very sick. This had gained for her the reputation of a kahuna, and she probably was convinced of the reality of her supernatural powers. The aumakua, or spirit, which had power over her was called Kihilikini. Acting under the guidance of this spirit, on the night of Thursday, February 11, she beat and killed her sister Puni, beating her to death with a club. Puni, it is said, had expressed disbelief in her power, which had angered her. The following night was marked by events still more bloodcurdling. The furious woman clubbed to death her nephew Kala [sic], a boy of six years, the rest of the family acquiescing or assisting. After this action was completed, the other members of the family held Paa, a young man of about thirty and a brother of the kahuna, while she burned him over the face, body, and arms with a flaming torch made of cloth dipped in oil or lard. Later in the night her fourth victim, Kaholokai, was seized and held while she beat him with a club until he became unconscious. At this point the rest left him and went away, leaving the murderess alone with the dying man, to whom she was supposed to have dealt the finishing strokes. The family returned and went to sleep, and early in the morning the fire was started which destroyed the hut. Into its flame the body of Kaholokai was thrown, the other corpses being left to die on the ground outside, where the sickening horror had been enacted.