There was no body for the wake. We stood by the open grave and watched as the men lowered the plain ʻōhiʻa wood coffin. There was a large banana stump inside, symbolic of my mother’s body.
Reverend Parker had been hesitant to do this because it seemed too close to the ignorant Hawaiian superstition that he was trying to stamp out, but he made the concession because I had insisted and those who might be possible converts were still too few for his liking. The missionaries had only arrived in Hawaiʻi ten years ago, and though they had ingratiated themselves with our aliʻi and brought about many changes, their proselytizing was still slow to progress in some of the more rural areas.
The rough black cloth of my mourning dress grated against my skin. This too was a concession, not to our beliefs this time but to my mother’s new ones. I could not help but wear a patterned kīkepa of kapa barkcloth that I had just completed over it though, the deep yellow from the ʻolena I had dyed it in standing in contrast to the black. It was the rich color of the yellow ʻōʻō bird feathers used to make ahuʻula cloaks for our aliʻi. I had spent many hours laughing and smiling with my mother to the rhythmic tapping of the kapa beaters she had taught me to use, so I could not look at the yellow patterned barkcloth without remembering her. The amused sharpness in her voice when she would yell at me, “Kaiuli, stop staring at the ocean and concentrate on the kapa!” or “Kaiuli, don’t beat the kapa so hard just because you’re mad at your cousin!” The way the ends of her hair turned ʻehu from being in the sun so much. Even the particular calluses on her hands from the kapa beaters that differed from the ones she had from fishing. The kapa wrapped around me made me feel my mother more than all of these other funerary rites Reverend Parker told us had to be done.
I stepped back from the empty grave, unable to keep staring at the box that wasn’t my mother. It was not that his sermon wasn’t comforting. He knew all of us, convert and “heathen” alike, were grieving, and his words were mostly soothing. Parker continued on, “Here we have brought the glorious light of salvation to a great multitude living in the darkness of heathenism.” I cocked my head at that. How different our understandings of the world are. For him, darkness was ignorance and evil. For us, pō, darkness, was, or at least had been, the source of growth, like the richness of fertile soil.
“Oh, when shall the true light of the gospel prevail here? Lighting the lamp of wisdom for the blessing of these sinners,” he cried out plaintively. I let my mind wander from Parker’s sermon. The darkness was not what was holding us back; it was what we were created from. Our genealogies stretched back uncountable generations to the Kumulipo, the source of darkness. We had been born from pō, as had the ʻāina we stood upon and all of the things around us. It was the darkness that made us who we were.
At that point I was paying the content of Reverend Parker’s sermon little mind, but as his words washed over me, my pain seemed to lessen. It was an odd feeling amongst all this grief though because it wasn’t that his words necessarily helped heal the wounds in my naʻau, but it was as if they just made me think of my mother less often. All my memories of her were so bittersweet, and even the happiest ones brought me pain, but as Reverend Parker spoke those memories seemed like sand being washed away with the tide. Bit by bit the sand was carried away until the shore was only worn lava rock. I could remember that we had beaten kapa together, that we had gathered limu and fished from the shore, but I was having a harder time picturing her in those memories. I had not lost anyone so important to my life before; it was like an island losing its backbone of mountains, so maybe this forgetting was what healing felt like.
As the good reverend continued his sermon, I watched his self-appointed helper Kamakaʻoi sneer at the barkcloth kīkepa and malo that some of us had insisted on wearing instead of Western clothing. I was perhaps not as kind as my mother because I could not stand him. I always got a shuddery feeling in my naʻau, what we called manene, when he was around. Like when you are in the deep sea and start to wonder what is swimming below you. And that manene had been building all morning. I glared at Kamakaʻoi’s retreating back.
He was not even from around here. He had shown up around the time that Reverend Parker had and attached himself to the mission like an ʻopihi to a rock. The missionary was gracious enough to him, but I got the impression that it was Reverend Parker’s sense of charity that kept Kamakaʻoi around rather than any real fondness, because Kamakaʻoi’s condescension and sneering attitude had probably actually driven away more converts than the reverend had been able to add to his flock. He had not even baptized him like he had the others. The previous missionaries had been slow to offer baptism, not trusting that people’s conversions were true. Reverend Parker had changed that, but in Kamakaʻoi’s case, he may have still had his doubts, the reverend’s open nature standing in stark contrast to Kamakaʻoi’s bristly ungenerous manner.
Kamakaʻoi had argued loudly against my mother’s inclusion in the church, saying she would not be a welcome addition to the congregation. He even tried to talk her out of it himself one day. “There is no place for you in the Lord’s light,” he had growled at her while she was cleaning her catch in a tide pool.
I turned away from him, but I could feel his presence as he ranged around the periphery of the crowd, haughty in his ill-fitting stiff-collared shirt and trousers with a dark look in his eyes, his hard-soled shoes cutting sharp tracks into the hot sand.
“Pua ka wiliwili, nahu ka manō.” When the wiliwili blossoms, the shark bites. That’s what everyone said when my mother disappeared fishing the inner reef near Kaiolohia. People had kind smiles on their faces when they would pat my hand and say, “Everyone knows this, Kaiuli.”
My mother knew it too though. Probably better than they did. That’s what was so confusing. Our family was of the sea. Had been for uncounted generations. Fishing, diving, gathering, paddling, even surfing, these were things as natural to us as the salt air we breathed. All of us had grown up to feel comfortable and confident in the ocean. We were at home there as much as we were on land.
And my mother wasn’t the only one missing. Four other people were gone. But the wiliwili wasn’t even in bloom. Some other season was dictating the shark’s bite. They had disappeared over the last few months, all near or on the ocean.
My family knew better than most, but we all accepted that there was a price that people who live by the sea pay. Storms. Swells. Shallows sickness. Sharks. We are used to losing people, but never like this. Never so many, and never without a single trace.
The whispers had begun that there had to be a kupua around, a hungering shark’s jaws hidden between its shoulder blades. It is the only possible reason, they said. The ocean is never as ravenous as the creature who shifts between man and shark. The shadow in the sea devouring more than the waters that surround it.
The rumors had reached Rev. Parker, and he was using the occasion of the funeral to reassure us that the real kupua was actually our ignorance of the Lord and that keeping faith with the Almighty is what would save us from that kupua. He told us to abandon the darkness of our heathen beliefs that the land and sea were our family, because the Lord was our Father, and He would care for us.
Josiah Parker was newly arrived in Hawaiʻi, coming with the third company of missionaries from Boston, though he himself was from, in his words, “a North Carolina family of boondoggling hornswogglers.” We liked him better than the other missionaries who had traveled to the mission station in our moku. He seemed less dour, for one. The others often looked like they had just stepped on a rotten noni fruit, especially when we spoke our language around them. But Reverend Parker always looked to be on the verge of a smile, his eyes alight as if everything he saw pleased him. This won him more converts than any of the previous missionaries, and many felt lucky that he had arrived just in time to comfort us now that all these disappearances were happening.
Most of the village had gathered at Lord’s Bounty, where the reverend gave his sermons. We had always known it as Kamaluniu, named for the pleasant shade provided by the coconut groves there, but Reverend Parker saw how much food the groves provided for us and renamed it. He and the other church members used the name so much that even those the reverend hadn’t yet been able to convert have taken to calling it Lord’s Bounty, its older name nearly forgotten.
I couldn’t bring myself to call it Lord’s Bounty though. Names were so important to us; to change something’s name was to change its essence. Like mine, for example. Kaiuli, the dark sea. It had not always been my name. My mother gave me it when I was six years old because one day when a big swell was running, I snuck out of the house and paddled out with my uncle’s heavy wooden surfboard.
When the sun came up, their frantic searching found me way out in the dark blue water just past where the big waves were breaking, and I was crying. Not because I was scared, but because I was frustrated that I hadn’t been strong enough to paddle into the set waves that were coming in. When my mother saw my tears, she laughed uproariously and said that she was going to call me “Kaiuli” from then on. When I asked why she wanted to change my name, she looked at me very solemnly and said, “You truly belong to the deep ocean, and I did not know it until today. Your name will ensure that you always maintain your connection with the water. Names tell us who we truly are.”
So Lord’s Bounty would always be Kamaluniu to me. I had too many memories at Kamaluniu for it to be anything else. I had grown up there gathering coconuts for haupia and fronds for baskets with my cousins. There were so many of us that all the elders shook their heads and referred to us as the mumulu iʻa, the swarm of fish. My cousin Puaʻilima and I had spent many hours cooling off in the shade after helping our families clean and lay out fish to dry. My mother would always sneak the two of us some dried ʻōhua before the catch was divided amongst the families because we were the youngest. Those memories always brought a smile to my face.
Reverend Parker mirrored my smile back at me as he closed his sermon:
“Sister Lydia was one of the first to see the light and renounce her heathen name. She left behind the darkness, and her ignorance was erased in the light of the Lord. Her disappearance is a reminder that the darkness of ignorance and the specter of heathenism must be ever held at bay, so let us redouble our prayerful efforts and give her soul comfort.”
Some of the gathered faithful murmured their assent, ʻae and ʻo ia falling quietly from their lips. Kamakaʻoi glared at the use of our language. The reverend often admonished us to learn English, so we could benefit in the wider world.
As the gathering broke up into smaller knots of conversation, Reverend Parker approached me with a look of genuine sorrow upon his face. I thanked him for the hua ʻōlelo he had said for my mother, as we believed that words carried both life and death. He patted me gently on the hand and said, “Your mother’s memory will always live on in our hearts, dear.”
Others from the congregation came after to offer their condolences. “Sister Lydia is with our Lord now.” “Sister Lydia has the meekness and gentleness of Christ.” “Sister Lydia is such a virtuous woman.” “The gentlest woman I have ever known is Sister Lydia.” All they had were those phrases though. No stories or memories.
My grief felt hollow like the ʻōhiʻa coffin. How could my pain be real if these people who had known my mother so long seemed to lack any connection to her? I felt like they were just going through the motions without having any memories of who she really was, but I scolded myself for being uncharitable.
Truthfully, I felt like I did not know who this Sister Lydia was. Kind of. She was a loving woman who cared for me so well and gave me everything I needed. But she was also quick-witted and sharp-tongued, peals of laughter following her wherever she went as she playfully excoriated all her friends, of which there were many.
She was so strong too. Under the dresses she had begun to wear after her starting to attend Reverend Parker’s services, her arms and legs were corded and ropey from hauling nets and helping to launch the canoe and carrying the catch in to distribute and the forty thousand other daily duties that built such a strength in her. I even remember her hiking up her skirts and sprinting through the shallows to chase away an errant reef shark that was coming too close to where we were cleaning the day’s catch.
And she had a fiery temper and swore like a sailor, most of the English she knew actually being swear words she learned from sailors when she went to trade her fish and seaweed at the port. Even that poor shark got an earful from her as she was running towards it, splashing and yelling to scare it off. But as my grandmother would say with a smile when she witnessed someone who had exhausted my mother’s patience wilting before one of her very imaginative and descriptive tirades, sometimes we were given names like hers, Kahiau, which meant gentle, that were more aspirational than descriptive.
So I wasn’t sure who this Lydia they were talking about even was. It was as if my living, breathing, flawed, lovely mother had been replaced with this saintly Sister Lydia. It felt like my memories of her were fading already, replaced by these vapid stories of Lydia, like looking at her through the cloudy glass the foreign sailors brought on their ships. I didn’t know what was worse, the forgetting itself or the realization that I was forgetting. Kahiau had only been gone a week, and sometimes I thought I would catch a glimpse of her around Kamaluniu. Turning a corner I would see my mother’s smiling teasing face, or someone reaching for a fish at the market would remind me of her dark skin and hair bleached ehu from long hours in the sun, the set of someone’s shoulders made me think of the patient way that she taught me about reading the tide by looking at the moon. I even called out to someone one time because I was so sure it was my mother, but it was just a stranger with no recognition in her eyes.
I walked with my cousins away from Kamaluniu, still trying to hold onto memories of my mother, idly chatting with the rest of the mumulu iʻa. We chatted about fishing and where the tide was bringing up the best seaweed and places we could surf away from the judgmental eyes of the missionaries. Our talk turned inevitably to the kupua though, and Reverend Parker’s talk of conversion. A handful of the younger cousins had decided to convert, and we teased them that they wouldn’t be able to surf anymore.
They had been warned that sharks fed at dawn and dusk, and what was worse, the wiliwili were beginning to blossom. Maybe they had made a mistake coming out into the water while the sun was still below the horizon. Sometimes they had gotten in the water this early so they could surf before the day’s work, but the waves were flat and no one was out in the eerily still water.
The youngest started to cry because she was cold. The others tried to shush her, but she began to thrash her arms in the water, upset. Everyone looked around nervously, hoping she was not drawing undue attention.
A splash sounded in the darkness, the noise carrying across the still water, and they drew the little one to their side. Something approached. A shadow. A low buzzing began in their ears, increasing in intensity as it grew closer. As the first light began to chase the shadows from the land, a voice spoke.
“My good people, rejoice in your faith in the Almighty. It is He who shall erase your ignorance and protect you from the demons and the darkness.”
Four more people had gone missing one morning. Reverend Parker looked upon us kindly, knowing that we were in danger of drowning in an overwhelming tide of grief. I was mostly just numb from all this loss, but his words were a balm to the converts, a reminder that they were not alone. The disappearances made me wonder about converting as well. Maybe Reverend Parker really could protect us. The number of converts was going up, and our numbers were going down, which made sense, but it seemed like something more. Dozens had gone missing in such a short time; it was like I couldn’t even remember all of them. Perhaps the kupua was eating not just their physical bodies, but our memories of them as well.
A score of us had gathered at Kamaluniu for the sunrise sermon that Reverend Parker had called. He said that the hikina a ka lā would be a symbolic new beginning for the village. My cousin Puaʻilima and I stood in the blue hour before the sun rose listening to him speak until the red morning light began to gently spread across the sky. We were going to gather limu after the service, so we were both dressed in simple muʻumuʻu, though Puaʻilima had a few of her customary namesake ʻilima blossoms tucked into her hair, and I had adorned my muʻumuʻu with a kīkepa of yellow patterned kapa. I had thought it would look pretty, but it might have been a mistake because I kept having to fidget with it during the sermon, as if it had a particular weight and meaning to it.
“It is the darkness inside of you that we must vanquish, just as the light of the rising sun pushes back the shadows. Your continued belief in the superstitions of your ignorant ancestors who did not know the word of God is the true monster that haunts you.
“But here, at Lord’s Bounty, it is in the embrace of the Lord that you will find safety. All your sins and darkness will be taken from you, and you will be welcomed into the light.”
As I stood there, I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck and there was a faint ringing in my ears. Kamakaʻoi ghosted up through the crowd behind me so closely that I could feel his breath on my skin, and muttered, “Stay away from this place, little crab. It is best to stick to your heathen ways instead of bringing your profane darkness here to Kamaluniu.” His voice sounded like stones rolling in the shorebreak.
I turned to snap back at him, but he was gone, melting back into the dawn light’s long shadows.
After the sermon was done, Puaʻilima and I walked down towards the shore to gather our limu and collect some ʻōhua to dry. But just after we left the palm grove, Kamakaʻoi stepped out from the bushes along the path, and said, “Leaving the Lord’s light at Kamaluniu when the sun is not yet all the way risen? Don’t you fear the darkness?”
“Kamaluniu? Where is that?” Puaʻilima asked.
Kamakaʻoi gave a sharp shake of his head, eyeing the two of us intently, but continued on as if he hadn’t heard, “Be gone from here, you little crabs. Scamper off back to the sea, where the sharks feed at dawn and dusk.” He sneered at us before walking away, and called over his shoulder, “Because who knows how that hunger might affect a kupua?”
Puaʻilima cringed and I turned to comfort her. “You are a beast!” I yelled at Kamakaʻoi but he had disappeared again, the bushes near the path shivering as if he had brushed through them. “We can’t let him scare us, e kuʻu hoa. Reverend Parker said that you have nothing to fear as long as you keep faith in the Lord.”
She nodded at me gratefully, and said, “But you don’t believe in their ways, Kaiuli. Aren’t you afraid?”
“I may not follow their beliefs, but what Reverend Parker says does bring me something like comfort. Plus, what do I have to be afraid of? Kamakaʻoi? He is a petty jealous man, but he is just a man.”
“Haven’t you heard the stories though, cousin? People say he is the kupua. People say no one knew him before he came to our village a year ago. People say that the reason he took to wearing Western clothing so quickly was because he wanted to hide the shark jaw on his back.” I didn’t know who these “people” were, but Puaʻilima shuddered as a cloud slid before the rising sun, casting us into shadow again.
“That’s nonsense, Pua. Reverend Parker said that the old akua have no power anymore, and even our own aliʻi don’t seem to worship them anymore. Plus would a powerful man-eating kupua dress so badly? Did you see his shoes?” I nudged Puaʻilima, and she tittered, forgetting her fear.
As we made our way down to the beach, I realized that it had been so long since I had been to the ocean. I tried to make the best of it, so Puaʻilima and I joked about Kamakaʻoi’s clothing a little more, which somehow led to us telling stories about our favorite foods to eat. Puaʻilima was laughing and smiling, her worries about the kupua forgotten. I didn’t want to tell her that I thought I heard something following us in the underbrush as we walked. After my mother disappeared, I had grown increasingly uneasy around the ocean as well. It just did not seem like the place for me, so maybe that was coming into play as well.
I rummaged in my satchel and drew out the wooden-handled skinning knife I used to gut fish. Puaʻilima looked down at what I was doing and I saw fear creep back into the set of her shoulders. “I thought I saw a crack in the handle last time, and I wanted to check it.” Her eyes widened, but she nodded like she believed me.
We walked in silence a bit more until we got to the beach and saw the mounds of seaweed that the high tide had washed up. At least we did not have to go too near the water. I kept my knife out, ostensibly to clean the coral rubble and sand from the limu, but we both knew the real reason.
As we combed through the piles of seaweed, seeking out our preferences like manauea (hers) and wawaeʻiole (mine), Puaʻilima’s movements were tentative and nervous, and she kept flinching at every splash of the ocean. My movements were surprisingly fluid though I was uneasy too. I used to feel drawn to the ocean, “a need to get my gills wet” as my mother used to say. I would even ache to feel the sun burning my shoulders as I paddled out to surf, but now I felt almost a mild revulsion to the ocean. But my discomfort would only make Puaʻilima more worried, so I thought to distract her, asking, “Did you hear Old Lady Walania is in a punalua relationship with two younger men? My mother always used to say that Walania’s rocking chair was big enough for two.” Though I was joking, tears sprung to my eyes at the thought of my mother. Fewer than I had expected though. Every day I thought of her less, so maybe Reverend Parker’s sermons really were bringing me healing.
Puaʻilima chuckled and said, “Your mother sounds like such a ribald woman. I would like to meet her sometime.” I cocked my head at the odd comment, confused. Puaʻilima had grown up with my mother taking care of her and had attended the wake with me. I shook the comment off and Puaʻilima continued on, making a joke about how even an old lady like Walania’s wilting blossoms come alive when the honeycreeper’s bill drinks their nectar. I gasped in mock horror, and said, “Reverend Parker better convert you soon. Your filthy soul needs saving!”
My distraction backfired, however, as Puaʻilima responded, “I think that I actually am going to convert. But why do you think that Reverend Parker hasn’t baptized Kamakaʻoi yet? He was one of the first in the flock.
“What if it is because he knows Kamakaʻoi is a monster?” she asked, looking around quickly, her eyes coming to rest on the sea.
While Puaʻilima was looking outward, I felt the manene in my gut, that shuddery feeling when danger is near, and movement caught my eye inland. Kamakaʻoi was standing near the treeline, above the tide line. His head turned toward us like he had caught our scent, and he stood there regarding us silently, his long tangled hair framing eyes that were flat and black. Puaʻilima was still distractedly looking out at the ocean, and he turned and melted back into the shadows, nodding at my knife and smiling as he left.
“What are you looking at?” Puaʻilima asked worriedly.
“Nothing,” I responded, thinking of Kamakaʻoi’s smile and how a moment before he turned into the shadows, the light hit his face just so, and I thought I had seen another row of teeth in his mouth.
Each step they took down the dark path echoed in the eerie stillness. Even the wind seemed to hold its breath as it watched. And then a low thrumming seemed to fill the air, though they could find no source for it.
The sound got more insistent the closer they got to the shore. It was like a buzzing just below their hearing, like voices speaking to them from another room. It grew to a high urgent throbbing ululation. Just as it reached its crescendo at the edge of comprehension: a shadow in the shape of a man.
It spoke from the darkness and told them to come no further, that they should beware of sharks at dawn and dusk. In quavering voices, they told the man that they wished to heed his warning, but that they would find safety at the shore and had to go on. He sneered and bade them pass, the sound tapering off, now like a quiet echo in their ears. An ʻilima blossom fell from the hair of one of them as they edged past him and was ground under the footsteps of the rest.
As they continued on, they heard something rush past them in the underbrush headed towards the water, and by that time the ringing in their ears was so quiet that they did not notice that it had begun to sound like anguished wailing.
More people had disappeared. I don’t even remember how many it was at this point. There was no individual grief anymore, just a heavy pall that hung over us like rain-laden clouds above the mountains. I felt as if I had suffered a great loss but I couldn’t put a name to it. We were all scared. No one went anywhere alone, not even to relieve themselves, and we kept torches burning well into the day to drive away any hint of darkness or shadow. Only the converts seemed to feel some sense of safety at Lord’s Bounty. Something sat funny with me when I said that name, but I was not sure why. The converts mostly kept to themselves though, bustling about Lord’s Bounty building wooden frame houses and even a church that Reverend Parker said looked just like the mission church back in Boston.
After our old gods had been burned or hidden away just before the missionaries arrived, many of us felt unmoored. We were told that the only Pō, the only darkness, was the ignorance from which we were born. Our land, our elder sibling, was a lonely and terrifying place now that the 400,000 akua who inhabited every stone and tree and reef of our ʻāina no longer spoke to us. Or maybe they kept speaking but we had forgotten how to listen to their voices.
Some of us stubbornly kept to our traditions, giving offerings and speaking to the akua in secret, but a lot of us, like me, did not know what to do. With the kupua taking so many, Reverend Parker’s promises of safety called to me. The converts all had each other, and I was all alone. Unlike the other people of Lord’s Bounty, I had grown up without any family around. No parents, no cousins, just me. Most of my childhood was just a jumbled haze of nameless faces. Reverend Parker had offered me the fellowship of the church. He was so confident in the power of his akua, his God, and I don’t remember a single one of his converts disappearing.
He looked at me now, his eyes projecting love and care towards me. “You are making a wise decision, dear. We are indeed blessed that you have decided to allow the Lord’s light to wash the darkness from you.”
I was to be baptized that day at the shore near Lord’s Bounty. It was a small dawn ceremony, just Reverend Parker and four of his fellow missionaries who were traveling to the different mission stations. Reverend Parker said that our relationship to God was personal, not for the consumption of others, so he would introduce me to the congregation this morning after the rites.
I was clothed in a plain white robe and a pretty patterned piece of kapa dyed with ʻolena that I had found just lying around at home, while Reverend Parker and the others wore their simple dark suits. Reverend Parker led me by the hand down the sand as his brethren accompanied us with torches that they set up on the beach. Reverend Parker looked back at me as we stepped into the water and put a very comforting look on his face. The low-heeled boots I was wearing slipped on the exposed limestone reef we walked on in the shallow water. I felt so ungainly in the water, but he had me firmly.
As we got deeper into the water, I looked about nervously. The tide was coming in and everything in the ocean seemed to be moving and trying to pull me deeper into it. In the early morning darkness, the entire ocean felt like a shadow trying to swallow me. I did not like the feeling of being in the water, had in fact never been comfortable in the ocean. It was not a place for people, but the reverend had me and kept us moving out until the water was up to my chest.
I began to shudder, maybe from the cold, maybe from being out in this water, but it felt to me like the manene I had felt when Kamakaʻoi was around. I began to thrash, looking around to see if the kupua was nearby. My breathing was becoming wild, fast in and out of my nose, my chest heaving. I thought I heard a buzzing sound.
Reverend Parker turned to me though, with such a benevolent look fixed upon his face. “It is okay, my child. I am right here. This will all be over soon.”
My breathing calmed a bit, though the shivering manene continued. It was just the chill of the water. And that sound was probably just the blood rushing in my ears. Once the darkness came to an end and the sun rose some more, it would be warmer. Where were the others though? It was still dark and the ocean held so many terrors. What if the kupua had gotten them? I started to look around wildly again, hoping to see them in the darkness. Why was I here in the ocean? It was not my place.
Reverend Parker, that serene and gentle look of his unwavering on his face, intuited what I was feeling, and said, “Relax, dear. They will be joining us soon. They are just taking care of something first.” I breathed in slowly through my nose and then out through my mouth. Focusing on his voice helped me drown out the buzzing. I continued to shudder, but some of it seemed to be anticipation for what was coming.
He began to speak in a sonorous voice, addressing me and his unseen helpers that he knew to be coming. “Divine grace is available to all.” Here, he looked at me and nodded reassuringly.
“Yea though they be heathen or the firmest of believers, the light of the Lord may shine upon all who would accept it. They have only to forsake the darkness.”
I heard splashing as the reverend’s helpers made their way through the shorebreak and into the deeper water carrying a burden between them. It was as if a shadow hovered over what they carried and the sound began to thrum louder in my ears. I turned to see what it was, but Reverend Parker spoke again, drawing my attention back to him.
“It is through this baptismal sacrament that forgiveness may be gained. Even for those who would betray the church, betray me.”
The splashing grew louder, and I heard a deep growling. I turned, and it was Kamakaʻoi, bound by ropes and held fast by the helpers. His stiff collared shirt was rumpled and sodden, and he seemed to have lost his shoes in whatever scuffle had taken place with the missionaries. His long matted hair whipped about as he struggled powerfully, but he could not escape. His eyes were wild and seemed to be only black pupil. When they came to rest upon me, he shouted, “Kaiuli! Do not go through with this! You must remember!”
Reverend Parker smiled at Kamakaʻoi, but his eyes were hard. “You have dealt falsely with me, but your heathen words are mere stones before the march of progress. Your darkness can no more stop the works of God than stop the sun from shining.”
Kamakaʻoi began to thrash even harder, and amid the splashing, I heard the tearing of linen, as his shirt caught on something sharp on his back. “Kaiuli! Kaiuli! Do not forget who you are! Who we all are. We are the darkness,” he roared. The helpers fought to get him back under control, and Kamakaʻoi’s shirt finally ripped all the way across his back. Through the tear, I could see the mouth of a shark between his shoulder blades.
I began to scream as they continued to struggle next to me. My voice mixed with the thrumming sound, getting higher in pitch and more intense. I stared into the shark’s jaws, past the rows and rows of ripsaw teeth and saw the black of night. It was the shadow in the sea, the lightless depths of the ocean. Everything Reverend Parker had warned me about. But as the sound crescendoed, the darkness lent clarity. The sound was not a buzzing, but a din. The voices of thousands of generations. What I saw in the dark was not terror, but peace. Growth. Something beckoned to me from its depths. It looked like pō.
“Fear not, my child!” Reverend Parker called, turning my face toward him and ending my reverie. He had a firm grip upon my chin and was staring intently at me. “The Lord makes the sun rise on the good and evil alike, so we may still find redemption even for those who undermine our efforts to bring salvation. Soon the sword of Spirit, His word, shall draw after this heathen abomination.”
“Kaiuli! There is still time! Do not let him make you forget! He will take away our names, our connections. Everything! He will cast us from the darkness and all that we are!” Kamakaʻoi looked at me desperately, willing me to see the ancestors that he carried with him. He was unable to change completely, but his fierce shark eyes held the wild depths of our people’s darkness in them. “I failed with your mother and now with you. This is why I did not want you near Kamaluniu,” he panted.
Kamaluniu? Where was he talking about? The name sounded familiar but my mind had become as turbulent as the seas around us. Reverend Parker intoned powerfully, “You are safe from this creature. I too thought he was one of us until I saw him try to convince you and your cousin not to join the church.”
Cousin? I had no cousin, no family. Parker continued, “But no matter. The baptized die to all their sins, but are given a new life in Jesus Christ! You need only leave the darkness behind.”
The reverend’s words had my mind spinning and the buzzing was so insistent.
“Kaiuli! Don’t give in! Remember Kahiau and Puaʻilima and the others! Remember pō!” The cords in Kamakaʻoi’s neck stood out and he tried to pull away from the missionaries holding him. “Kaiuli, there is no place in the Lord’s light for you!”
Reverend Parker laid his hand upon my forehead, I tried to look at Kamakaʻoi again, but then I was underwater. “Let the darkness be cast from you, my child. I baptize you: In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Through this ceremony, I also christen thee, that you may be reborn as Sister Elizabeth.”
When I broke the surface of the water again, I emerged into the light. The sun had risen, and I was in a peaceful daze. There before me was the smiling face of Reverend Parker, a look of compassion in his eyes. And behind him, a battered and disheveled man with no shirt being held up by the reverend’s helpers. A cloud passed briefly in front of the sun casting me for the briefest moment into shadow, and my ears rang slightly. It was probably from the water, though I thought I could hear a faint voice at the edge of my hearing calling out to me.
Who was Kaiuli?
