Still, not a single Tahitian had embraced Christianity fully until 1815, when the king of Tahiti—King Pōmare—sent all his holy idols to a British missionary in Papeete, along with a letter, in English, saying that he wished for his old gods to be committed to flames: he wanted to become a Christian at last. Pōmare hoped his decision would save his people, as Tahiti was in much distress. With every new ship came new plagues. Whole families were dying—from measles, from smallpox, from the dreadful diseases of prostitution. Where Captain Cook had estimated the Tahitian population at two hundred thousand souls in 1772, it had plunged to some eight thousand by 1815. Nobody was exempt from illness—not the high chiefs or the landowners or the lowborn. The king’s own son died of consumption.
The Tahitians, as a result, began to doubt their gods. When death visits so many homes, all certainties are questioned. As maladies spread, so spread the rumors that the God of the Englishmen was punishing the Tahitians for having rejected His son Jesus Christ. This fear readied the Tahitians for the Lord, and King Pōmare was the first to convert. His initial act as a Christian was to prepare a feast and to eat the food in front of everyone without first making an offering to the old gods. Crowds gathered around their king in panic, certain he would be struck dead by the angry deities before their eyes. He was not struck dead.
After that, they all converted. Tahiti, weakened, humiliated, and decimated, became Christian at last.
“Weren’t we fortunate?” Reverend Welles said to Alma. “Weren’t we fortunate, indeed?”
He said this in the same sunny tone with which he always spoke. This was the puzzling thing about the Reverend Welles. Alma found it impossible to comprehend what, if anything, lay behind that eternal good cheer. Was he a cynic? Was he a heretic? Was he a simpleton? Was his innocence practiced or natural? One could never tell from his face, which was perpetually bathed in the clear light of ingenuousness. He had a face so open it would shame the suspicious, the greedy, the cruel. It was a face that would shame a liar. It was a face that sometimes shamed Alma, for she had never been candid with him about her own history or motives. Sometimes she wanted to reach down and take his small hand in her giant one, and—forgoing their respectable titles of Brother Welles and Sister Whittaker—to say to him simply, “I have not been forthright with you, Francis. Let me tell you my entire story. Let me tell you about my husband and our unnatural marriage. Please help me to understand who Ambrose was. Please tell me what you knew about him, and please tell me what you know about The Boy.”
But she did not. He was a minister of the Lord and an honorable, married Christian. How could she speak to him of such things?
The Reverend Welles told Alma his entire story, though, and held little back. He told her that, only a few years after King Pōmare’s conversion, he and Mrs. Welles, quite unexpectedly, had another baby girl. This time, the infant lived. Mrs. Welles saw it as a sign of the Lord’s approval—that the Welleses had helped to Christianize Tahiti. As such, they named the child Christina. During this time, the family was living in the nicest cottage in the settlement, right next to the church, in the very cottage where Sister Manu now lived, and happy they were indeed. Mrs. Welles and her daughter grew snapdragons and larkspurs, and they made a right little English garden of the place. The girl learned to swim before she could walk, like any other island child.
“Christina was my joy and my reward,” said the Reverend Welles. “But Tahiti is no place, my wife believed, for an English girl to be raised. There are so many polluting influences, you see. I disagree, but that is what Mrs. Welles thought. When Christina became a young woman, Mrs. Welles took her back to England. I have not seen them since. I will not see them again.”
This fate seemed not only lonely to Alma, but terribly unfair. No good Englishman, she thought, should be left here, all by himself in the middle of the South Seas, to face his old age in solitude. She thought of her father in his last years: What would he have done without Alma?
As though reading her face, the Reverend Welles said, “I long for my good wife and for Christina, but I have not been completely without the company of family. I consider Sister Manu and Sister Etini to be my sisters in more than name. At our mission school, too, we have been fortunate enough over the years to have raised up several brilliant and good-hearted students, whom I regard as my own children, and some of them have now become missionaries themselves, you see. They now minister to the outer islands, these native students of ours. There is Tamatoa Mare, who brings the gospel to the great island of Raiatea. There is Patii, who extends the Redeemer’s kingdom to the island of Huanhine. There is Paumoana, tireless in the Lord’s name in Bora-Bora. All of them are my sons, and all are much admired. There is such a thing in Tahiti called taio, you see, which is a kind of adoption, a means of making strangers into your kin. When you enter into taio with a native, you trade genealogy, you see, and you become a portion of each other’s lineage. Lineage is most important here. There are Tahitians who can recite their lineage back thirty generations—not unlike the begats of the Bible, you see. To be entered into that lineage is a noble honor. So I have my Tahitian sons with me, so to speak, who live amid these islands, and they are a comfort to this old man.”
“But they are not with you,” Alma could not help but say. She knew exactly how far away Bora-Bora was. “They are not here to help you, nor care for you should you need them.”
“You speak the truth, but it is a comfort merely to know they exist. You think my life quite sad, I fear. Do not be mistaken. I live where I am meant to live. I could never leave my mission, you see. My work here is not an errand, Sister Whittaker. My work here is not a line of employment, you see, from which a man may retire into a comfortable dotage. My work is to keep this little church alive for all my days, as a raft against the winds and sorrows of the world. Whosoever wishes to board my raft may do so. I do not force anyone to come aboard, you see, but how can I abandon the raft? My good wife accuses me of being a better Christian than I am a missionary. Perhaps she is correct! I am not certain I have ever converted anyone. Yet this church is my task, Sister Whittaker, and thus I must stay.”
He was seventy-seven years old, Alma learned.
He had been at Matavai Bay longer than she had been alive.
Chapter Twenty-four
October arrived.
The island entered the season the Tahitians call Hia‘ia—the season of cravings, when breadfruit is difficult to find and the people sometimes go hungry. There was no hunger at Matavai Bay, thankfully. There was no abundance, to be sure, but neither did anyone starve. Fish and taro root took care of that.
Oh, taro root! Tedious, tasteless taro root! Pounded and mashed, boiled and slippery, baked over coals, rolled into damp little balls called poi, and used for everything from breakfast to communion to pig food. The monotony of taro root was sometimes interrupted by the addition of tiny bananas to the menu—sweet and wonderful bananas that could nearly be swallowed whole—but even these were now difficult to come by. Alma looked at the pigs longingly, but Sister Manu, it appeared, was saving them for another day, for a hungrier day. So there was no pork to be enjoyed, simply taro root at every meal, and sometimes, if one was lucky, a good-sized fish. Alma would have given anything to have a day without taro root—but a day without taro root meant a day without food. She began to understand why the Reverend Welles had given up on eating altogether.