Part Three in the Scarlet Series
By
LANI YOUNG
Scarlet Redemption
Copyright © 2019 Lani Wendt Young
All rights reserved.
Cover Design - James Quizon
Interior Format by Sharp Design Concepts
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Title Page
Author’s Note
Also by Lani Young
In memory of Peka.
Prologue
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Read More
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
ALSO BY LANI YOUNG
THE SCARLET SERIES
Scarlet Lies
Scarlet Secrets
Scarlet Redemption
THE TELESA SERIES
Telesa – The Covenant Keeper
When Water Burns
The Bone Bearer
I am Daniel Tahi
THE TELESA WORLD SERIES
Ocean’s Kiss
Pacific Tsunami – Galu Afi
Afakasi Woman – A Collection of Short Fiction
IN MEMORY OF PEKA.
Who showed me how God loves.
When we were small, Aunty Filomena would tell us fagogo. If Mother was in the room, the fagogo were all from the Bible. A mish-mash of Jesus feeding the multitude with loaves and fishes, Daniel in the lion’s den and the ten wise virgins. Mother would nod and smile with sanctimonious approval, adding in her lua sene worth every so often. She especially liked Bible stories with women in them and would give Aunty Filomena reminders when she stalled. Or she would butt in and take over altogether. Unlike Aunty, Mother’s fagogo always had a moral added to them, that she elaborated on at length. Just in case we missed them.
“Bathsheba – remember girls, that’s what happens when a woman doesn’t live a modest life. King David was such a righteous man that even God himself said David was a man after his own heart. But Bathsheba tempted him beyond what a man can handle. Flaunting her nakedness like that. You must never forget the power that your body can have on a righteous man. It’s your responsibility to be the purifying influence that a man needs.”
“Delilah.” A grimace. “Look what happened to poor Samson, what Delilah did to him with her manipulative evil ways.” And off she would go, reciting the lurid tale of Samson’s demise.
I myself always thought that Samson was a wimpy loser so easily tricked. All muscle and no brains. Delilah was clever and impressed me with her smarts. Now there’s a girl that will go far in life! I kept that to myself of course. It wouldn’t do for the daughter of a faifeau to admit that she fan-girled the skanky Delilah after all.
I would have preferred to hear about Jael the warrior who delivered the people of Israel by driving a stake through Sisera’s forehead. Or Deborah the kickass Prophetess. But they were the kind of Biblical women that Mother preferred to pretend didn’t exist.
We sisters knew better than to make any edits or contributions when Mother was doing the fagogo. Instead we would listen and nod with pious silence as we worked on our crocheting, making doily cloths for the church altar. Mother insisted that we learn all the Christian missionary womanly arts – cooking, sewing, embroidery as well as crochet. She let Aunty teach us how to weave mats but only because ie toga were making a resurgence and she wanted us to be able to join the annual parading of fine mats with the other women of the village. It would be shameful for her if we didn’t participate. So our evenings were spent on industrious crafts, made bearable by storytelling.
But as soon as Mother was out of hearing, we would pester Aunty for the real fagogo. The stories she kept hidden in her heathen heart. Stories of blood clots and stalker eels that terrorized girls called Sina. Dangerously beautiful aitu like Telesa who lured unsuspecting fair-haired men to vague illicit activities in the bush. The giant Vaea who wept for his love Apaula and turned into a mountain. The rascally Ti’iti’i who used sly ingenuity to bring us fire from the earthquake god. We could listen to her fagogo for hours.
My favorite was of Nafanua. But I didn’t like to share it with the others. No. I would wait until they had drifted to sleep and then I would snuggle a little closer to Aunty and ask her for the story of the war goddess. Like any good fagogo, there were many variations of the Nafanua story, but I had my preferred version – the one Aunty Filomena had woven just for me, based on all my suggestions and questions. This is why I love fagogo. Because the best tellers weave the tale to suit the listener. And Aunty Filomena was one of the best. She would sit a little taller, clear her throat and assume the solemn tone that she reserved for the greatest of all the warriors in our history.
Nafanua didn’t have a mother. Not really anyway. That could be what first endeared her story to me. She was a blood clot, found in the ocean by Saveasiuleo, the god of Pulotu – what the palagi would call, the ‘underworld’.
Saveasiuleo raised Nafanua as his own. He taught her how to fight, how to lead, navigate by the stars, recognize the best moon for planting, how to make fire, hunt, carve, make canoes, houses and shark traps, how to strategize and know your enemy better than yourself. By the time she was ten years old, Nafanua had mastered every weapon from the shark tooth war club to the finely woven garrote cord. She knew every plant for healing, and every leaf and root for poison. She knew the faalupega for every village and could recite the gafa and ancestral origin for every family in Samoa. She was skilled in oratory and could entrance any audience with her storytelling. In short, Saveasiuleo taught Nafanua everything she needed to know so she could be the greatest chief and warrior the earth had ever seen.
In our retelling of the fagogo, Saveasiuleo wasn’t the terrifying demon of the usual legends. Sure he was strong and fierce and could assume the form of a giant eel. But he was also kind and loving, funny and fond of jokes, protective of his daughter and incredibly proud of her. (Yes, I’m well aware that a therapist would point out that Saveasiuleo was everything that my own father was not. Let’s not go there right now.)
Nafanua was everything that Mother didn’t want us to be. The kind of Samoan woman that the missionaries had tried their best to eradicate. In my mind’s eye Nafanua looked a lot like Serena Williams and the warrior guards in the Black Panther movie. And with a generous measure of the captain of the New Zealand women’s rugby team, the Black Ferns. But she had my face. (Of course.) And unlike me, she wasn’t afraid. Of the dark. Of the auntie’s whispers in jeering corners. Of centipedes. Or of the bite of the salu when Mother got angry. Nafanua wasn’t even afraid of God. (Who we knew looked like Father with a Moses beard.) Because she was a god herself and didn’t need to bow to anyone. God or man. Or Jesus.
But she was still a girl of flesh and bone amongst spirits in Pulotu and Nafanua had always longed to visit the world of mortals. The question was, how was she to get there? How do you go from the spirit world to the land of the living? She asked her father often but he woul
d tell her to be patient. “You are not ready my child. Wait. Learn. Train. Prepare. One day.”
Finally, the day came when she was able to make that journey. There was a war happening on Savaii and the people cried out for deliverance. Saveasiuleo decided it was time for Nafanua to ascend and take her place as the leader he had prepared her to be. Before she left he gave her gifts. War clubs, intricately carved and infused with the love, hopes and fears of a father for his beloved child. And he instructed her how to make the means of her passage, using the sacred wood of the Toa tree.
Nafanua followed his instructions. She cut down a toa tree and over many days and nights, she forged the Ulimasao, stripping the wood of its bark, sanding and polishing it to perfection. Fashioned in the shape of a paddle, she would use it to traverse the endless, treacherous waters that separate Pulotu from the land of the living. And once she got there, she would use it’s merciless precision and power to slay her foes. Her father taught her the words to chant over the Ulimasao as she carved it and together their song would resonate through the fire-lit darkness. But there was only so much Saveasiuleo could do in the making of the Ulimasao because it needed to be Nafanua’s weapon. Her journey. Her strength and courage that would take her from Pulotu to the above world. It would be she alone to wield it. And she alone would be responsible for the destruction it wrought.
“Remember my child,” said Saveasiuleo as he farewelled Nafanua. “A true warrior knows there is a time to fight, to kill. And a time for mercy. A time to walk away. The key is knowing the difference.”
I think about that Ulimasao often. How a paddle can serve as a weapon. How it can take one from a place of darkness, a place of spirit where one is unburdened by the feelings and cares of a physical body, to a place of light, both golden and freeing.
I often ask myself, how do we fashion our own Ulimasao? A paddle that can take us from our places of darkness and deadness – to a place of light and life? I wonder, where is my Toa tree? Can a person be that for us? Or is it a journey that one must take alone? And why would you want to?
There is safety in the dark. A kind of comfort in the absence of light and knowing and seeing. Remembering hurts.
Turning your face to the sun is painful.
Why would you want to?
Sixteen years ago
Aunty Filomena knows what’s wrong with me even before I do. It’s the vomit that gives me away. I’m throwing up in the bathroom for the third time this week. Quietly so Mother doesn’t hear me. But Aunty Filomena does. She’s waiting for me in the hall when I open the door. A look of gentle sadness in her eyes.
“Scar, you ma’i.” It’s not a question.
Sick. Yes, I’m sick. I nod my head and it’s a signal for the tears to come. Aunty enfolds me in her arms and soothes me as I sob on her shoulder.
“Aua te popole,” she says, “Everything will be alright.”
She asks me awkward questions. About my bleeding. When was the last time? I don’t know.
She tells Mother for me. While I sit in the corner, waiting. I’ve heard the horror stories. The whispered faikala’ring of aunties and cousins, about what happens to bad girls who do bad things and get pregnant. Cousin Tisa got a big stomach when she was still in school. Thus ruining her chances for the Miss Samoa pageant that everybody always said she would be a sure win for. Her boyfriend was the Head Boy of Samoa College and very handsome. She tried to hide it for as long as possible. Until they couldn’t dismiss it as her eating too many keke pua’a. Tisa was expelled. Her aunties shaved all her hair off. Her father beat her so bad the whole village could hear her screams for help. Father has never beaten any of us. I wonder if this will be when he uses more than words to punish one of his daughters?
Mother gasps loudly. Then she comes at me, a wild light in her eyes. I shrink back. Aunty Filomena steps in between us, holding mother away as her arms flail at me.
“No,” she tells Mother. “She’s just a child. Leave her.”
Mother wilts in Aunty Filomena’s arms. Cries. I am sad for her. Part of me feels guilty that I have brought this shame on her.
The rest of me feels nothing. Thinks nothing. Says nothing.
I am not here. I am far away. I am Nafanua in Pulotu. I’m not leaving. No Toa tree for me. I am the darkness and the darkness is me.
Mother doesn’t ask me who made me ma’i. But I tell her anyway. She flinches and slaps my face before Aunty can stop her.
“Never say that again. You hear me? Filthy liar. I told you before not to spread lies about your Uncle.”
I’m scared of what Father will do to me when she tells him but she surprises me. Mother forbids Aunty to speak of my pregnancy to anyone. Especially not to Father. She takes me to the house with a three-legged dog outside. Where the grim faced woman makes me hurt. Makes me scream, muffled sounds against the ripped piece of lavalava that they have tied across my mouth to keep me quiet. Makes me bleed. Gushing rushes of blood. I think I am dying. In the blurred haze of pain that seems to last an eternity, I want to die. Mother anchors me to this earth. Pinches me with vicious ferocity as she tells me to BE QUIET.
“This is what you get for being a bad girl,” she mutters against my ear. “A dirty girl who sins against God.”
Then to the abortionist she says piously, “So many prayers for this girl, so much teaching her and still she goes astray, but we will never give up on this lost sheep.”
There’s a look of disgust on the severe woman’s face. She turns to me with the first hint of compassion in her dark eyes. “It’s nearly finished,” she says. “Be strong.”
Finally it is finished. The evening shadows are coming and Mother is impatient to go home. Father will be expecting her to serve his dinner.
The woman washes her hands in the paipa and explains to mother what medicine I need, what we should do to prevent infection – but Mother doesn’t listen. She pays the woman with a fistful of money then hustles me out to the car.
The Bible says God sees everything. You can’t hide anything. No act is unseen. No sin goes unpunished. It was foolish of mother to think otherwise. To presume that Father would not find out. Father was God’s mouthpiece after all. He spoke for God, he acted for God. His wrath was inevitable. God’s justice is over all.
The police come to our house. I am playing aki with my sisters in the back fale. Cross-legged on the dusty ground, arranged in a circle as we each take turns to expertly wield the aki stones we have gathered over several years. It’s not easy to find five stones that can fit in the palm of your hand, and still be used for a game of aki. They can’t be river smooth or flat because then you can’t pick them up easily. They need to have ridges and texture. But not too much because then they hurt when you catch them. They need some weight to them too. If they’re too lightweight than you will throw them too high. And of course the five stones must complement each other, ridged contours fitting into each other so they’re a neat bundle in your closed fist.
Tamarina nudges my arm – which makes me falter and miss my aki stone. “Look what you did!” I snap at her, ready to fight for my right to have another turn.
She points and mouths, Leoleo.
Me and Naomi turn to look as three police get out of their truck and go inside. Two men and a woman in blue uniforms.
They meet with father in his study for a long time and when they leave, father calls for mother to join him. And then me. I need to go toilet, but it doesn’t seem like the right moment to say so.
“Scarlet,” he points to a spot beside the bookshelf. “Stand over there.”
Mother is in a chair in the centre of the room. Crying silently.
Father sits behind his desk, formal and severe.
“What did you do?” he asks mother, with his calm, measured voice. “The police. Tell me their story is lies. Tell me.”
More silent tears.
I am often afraid of Father, but today, I am afraid for mother. There’s a purple vein bulging in father’s right temple.
The one that always threatens to pop when he’s giving a particularly vehement sermon. His fingers are tightly clenched on his pen. The one stamped with Oxford University, Faculty of Theology and Religion. It’s his favorite pen and I’m worried he’s going to snap it. Will Oxford send him another one?
I wish mother would answer. Say something.
Father is impatient. He stands and thunders in his STRIKE YOU DOWN voice, “Speak woman. It’s lies, isn’t it? Tell me you didn’t do this.” He turns to me, “Did your mother take you to that place of murder? Of evil?”
My every thought stutters. What place? Where? What’s he talking about? I throw mother a panicked look. Does she understand? Help.
“Answer me Scarlet!”
“I don’t know,” I say.
Mother whispers into the tightly bound quiet. “It’s true. I took her there. To see that nurse.”
Then I know what Father’s talking about. God sees everything.
Father recoils. “Murderer,” he says. He walks around the desk so that he’s standing in front of mother. He hits her. A swift backhand to the face. No sin goes unpunished.
The sound is a splintered rupture of everything I know about our world, about who my parents are. I have never seen Father hit our mother before. He’s never hit us children either. Mother is the giver of the biting hot salu sting. The one who pinches us viciously in church if we are restless. And fuki’s our hair on the rare occasions that we dare answer her back.
There is a scream clawing inside me that wants to get out. Mother sways in her seat and her cheek is flushed red. Father’s ring has cut her lip and there’s blood. She wipes it away with a quick movement of her hand.
Father turns to me. Advances. “And you. My own flesh and blood. Only fourteen. Harlot. How could you do this thing?” With each word and each step closer, his voice gets louder. A righteous lion that rages and roars against wickedness. God’s wrath is inevitable.
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