The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature

by Jane Stafford

  And then, his loneliness would end.

  One of the pioneers, one of the titans, talking and moving and shouting and sweating and swearing, without knowing what or whom he was doing it for. For the country, or himself, or maybe the free world.

  Or, maybe, for Archie Mell who ran the taxi business, the cinema, the rental car agency and sold beer and spirits wholesale, or for that fellow Mosom who ran the store and was a JP and looked at you with hard pig’s eyes as if he thought you were just a bit of dirt, a no-good louse.

  Who else could he, and all the others, do it for? Or what else? The legend? Of course, the legend of men who are giants and roam the countryside and master nature; the legend of lands that flow with milk and honey.

  And it was good to feel that he himself, by doing that, by swearing and sweating and smelling and going, might just make it and get into the legend.

  (1967)

  James K. Baxter, from ‘Pig Island Letters’

  to Maurice Shadbolt

  1

  The gap you speak of—yes, I find it so,

  The menopause of the mind. I think of it

  As a little death, practising for the greater,

  For the undertaker who won’t have read

  Your stories or my verse—

  Or that a self had died

  Who handled ideas like bombs,

  In that bare southern town

  At a party on a cold night

  Men seen as ghosts, women like trees walking,

  Seen from the floor, a forest of legs and bums

  For the climbing boy, the book-bred one.

  And this, the moment of art, can never stay.

  Wives in the kitchen cease to smile as we go

  Into the gap itself, the solid night

  Where poor drunks fear the icy firmament:

  Man is a walking grave,

  That is where I start from. Though often

  Where the Leith Stream wandered down

  Its culvert, crinkled labia of blossom

  On the trees beside the weir

  Captured and held the fugitive

  From time, from self, from the iron pyramid.

  These were diversions. Give my love

  To Vic. He is aware of

  The albatross. In the Otago storms

  Carrying spray to salt the landward farms

  The wind is a drunkard. Whoever can listen

  Long enough will write again.

  2

  From an old house shaded with macrocarpas

  Rises my malady.

  Love is not valued much in Pig Island

  Though we admire its walking parody,

  That brisk gaunt woman in the kitchen

  Feeding the coal range, sullen

  To all strangers, lest one should be

  Her antique horn-red Satan.

  Her man, much baffled, grousing in the pub,

  Discusses sales

  Of yearling lambs, the timber in a tree

  Thrown down by autumn gales,

  Her daughter, reading in her room

  A catalogue of dresses,

  Can drive a tractor, goes to Training College,

  Will vote on the side of the Bosses,

  Her son is moodier, has seen

  An angel with a sword

  Standing above the clump of old man manuka

  Just waiting for the word

  To overturn the cities and the rivers

  And split the house like a rotten totara log.

  Quite unconcerned he sets his traps for ’possums

  And whistles to his dog.

  The man who talks to the masters of Pig Island

  About the love they dread

  Plaits ropes of sand, yet I was born among them

  And will lie some day with their dead.

  7

  This love that heals like a crooked limb

  In each of us, source of our grief,

  Could tell us if we cared to listen, why

  Sons by mayhem, daughters by harlotry

  Pluck down the sky’s rage on settled houses:

  The thin girl and the cornerboy

  Whose angers mask their love

  Unwind, unwind the bandages

  That hide in each the hope of joy.

  For me it is the weirs that mention

  The love that we destroy

  By long evasion, politics and art,

  And speech that is a kind of contraception:

  A streetlight flashing down

  On muscled water, bodies in the shade,

  Tears on a moonwhite face, the voice

  Of time from the grave of water speaking to

  Those who are lucky to be sad.

  8

  When I was only semen in a gland

  Or less than that, my father hung

  From a torture post at Mud Farm

  Because he would not kill. The guards

  Fried sausages, and as the snow came darkly

  I feared a death by cold in the cold groin

  And plotted revolution. His black and swollen thumbs

  Explained the brotherhood of man,

  But he is old now in his apple garden

  And we have seen our strong Antaeus die

  In the glass castle of the bureaucracies

  Robbing our bread of salt. Shall Marx and Christ

  Share beds this side of Jordan? I set now

  Unwillingly these words down:

  Political action in its source is pure,

  Human, direct, but in its civil function

  Becomes the jail it laboured to destroy.

  9

  Look at the simple caption of success,

  The poet as family man,

  Head between thumbs at mass, nailing a trolley,

  Letting the tomcat in:

  Then turn the hourglass over, find the other

  Convict self, incorrigible, scarred

  With what the bottle and the sex games taught,

  The black triangle, the whips of sin.

  The first gets all his meat from the skull-faced twin

  Sharpening a dagger out of a spoon,

  Struggling to speak through the gags of a poem:

  When both can make a third my work is done.

  Nor will the obituary ever indicate

  How much we needed friends,

  Like Fitz at the National

  Speaking of his hydatid cyst,

  A football underneath the lung,

  Or Lowry in Auckland: all who held the door

  And gave us space for art,

  Time for the re-shaping of the heart:

  Those whom the arrow-makers honour least,

  Companions to the manbeast,

  One man in many, touching the flayed hide gently,

  A brother to the artist and a nurse.

  The trees rustle as October comes

  And fantails batter on the glass,

  Season when the day nurse tuts and hums

  Laying out pills and orange juice

  For one who walks the bridge of dread

  As oedema sets in,

  While through the bogs and gullies of Pig Island

  Bellies are beaten like skin drums

  In pup tents, under flax or lupin shade,

  As if the sun were a keg. And this man

  On the postman’s round will meditate

  The horn of Jacob withered at the root

  Or quirks of weather. None

  Grows old easily. The poem is

  A plank laid over the lion’s den.

  (1966)

  Marilyn Duckworth, ‘Among Strangers’

  When she was quite young and in her first job she had had an extended affair with a married man. Although they had done practically everything you could think of together, it hadn’t been a particularly sexual relationship. It was more that they shared a sort of physical telepathy such as she imagined identical twins or even a brother and sister might feel.

  After it
finished she gave up trying to attract men. It wasn’t so much a self-inflicted punishment for her guilt as mixed hope and fear that one day she may look into someone’s eyes and find herself again. After all, one likes to think one is unique and has only one reflection. Another would be too much and make less of the first. But as time wore on the dream that this might happen persisted. She began deliberately looking for herself. Of course she was not to be found. From being reputed cold she became labelled promiscuous, when she was neither. Sometimes at night when she was feeling alone and strange and sat looking out the window, not crying, simply accepting the flat blanket of stillness that was stifling both her tears and laughter, she would see him stroking his mouth in the same way she was doing herself.

  Until one evening she was at a very formal party in a large house which had been rented for the occasion. Perhaps it was the cheap sherry but suddenly she heard herself making empty conversation and thought—I’ve put on so many skins. Who am I now? And it occurred to her that he might also have been changing separately, until neither of them existed any more. She panicked, moved quickly—for no reason—towards the door, and struck her hip against the trestle table which was laden with hams and chicken pieces. A man with glasses interrupted her hidden pain to introduce himself. She knew him slightly and answered his polite questions about her job. Then she said—

  I’m sorry, I’ve got no questions to ask you. I don’t know why I come to these things.’

  He looked startled, but pleased at the same time, as if she had said something witty. And then she decided—you can fall in love quite satisfactorily with strangers. She had done it before her affair with Will and it had been fine. The telepathic nonsense was unnecessary and unusual—even, in its way, limiting.

  She began to feel light-headed with relief. They talked and then moved on to different groups. She knew she was drunk and went for a walk upstairs in the big house, noting trivial details—scratches in the dark wood, a warped window-sash—joyfully. When she came back down the stairs, floating on alcohol, he was at the bottom, standing with a group of people. He didn’t seem to look to see her coming, but put his arm out so that she glided down into it. He asked ‘Where did you go?’ as if he had a right to know.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Don’t get lost, will you?’

  ‘I’m lost already. No one will ever find me now,’ she said, snatching at her receding bitterness.

  ‘Perhaps no one has ever tried,’ he said.

  That was when she should have said—yes, once. But don’t look at me like that. You don’t know what I’m talking about. But she said nothing. She stood on her toes and looked into his eyes and was so annoyed at what she didn’t see that she breathed onto his glasses. They laughed. It was a joke.

  His girlfriend came up and said something in her tight black voice, to match her frock, which neither of them heard and she had to repeat.

  The wedding was a very formal affair, in white of course, because of his mother who was religious in a drab sort of way. But they had kept the guest list small—only close relatives and friends. She looked very young and bridal. But afterwards at the reception, when it was all done and her bridesmaid said ‘I know you’ll be happy,’ she shocked the girl by bursting into tears.

  ‘But whatever is it?’

  ‘I don’t know. I just can’t think what I’m doing among all these strangers.’

  ‘Strangers? Your best friends? Your family? Mike? What are you talking about? It’s reaction. It’s moments like these you need a martini. Let me get you one.’

  She was happy. They had a large house, a mixture of healthy children, intelligent friends. She sang over the household chores, learned to think kindly of her neighbours. She also learned a wifely possessiveness which made her hate herself for having taken even the smallest thing from another man’s wife. She never flirted, partly because of her remorse, but mainly because she was happy and knew she was happy—as happy as anyone is meant to be.

  She heard Will spoken of from time to time among her acquaintances but never flinched at his name. She didn’t ever ask after him, although she had a horror of his dying without her knowing. But he did recur in dreams regularly, until she became used to this and resigned. It was just another mild inconvenience, like the bad slope on the path—something one lived with. Perhaps he haunted her in smaller ways, as when she shot through a red light, unthinking, or developed an imaginary tumour of the brain and thought—but Will would behave this way.

  She became tremendously absorbed in her children. They were talented in their various ways and made her life eventful and exciting. Her two sons grew up and went to medical school in Dunedin. Her eldest daughter became engaged to a law student.

  The wedding was again a formal affair. This time it was she who wanted it that way. The guest list was longer. The two younger girls were bridesmaids to their sister. The reception was a frighteningly noisy affair, mainly because of some young relatives of the bridegroom who were drinking champagne and stout. An aging uncle was also down from Auckland, jammed into a small armchair and making his particular brand of folksy remark. Someone was taking away her empty glass when she heard the uncle say—

  ‘Funny sort of breakfast. Why don’t people go in for real breakfasts at weddings? Rashers and eggs and a nice bit of black pudding—better than all this rubbish.’

  It was the black pudding that did it. The remembered smell brought a whiff of other breakfasts, other times—her last breakfast with Will, all those years ago, naked apart from a dressing gown. The impact of the memory was astonishing and attacked her taut nerves quite without warning. She put the small cream handkerchief over her face. She could hide the tears but there was no disguising the shaking. She stumbled though chairs and went out to the garage to sit in the car.

  The double doors were open and the sun streamed in across the car leather. She watched her tears run in the car mirror, noting the lines etched above her nose. They were ugly tears. She thought: What have I been doing, living my life among strangers? However did I get so involved with strangers?

  ‘Look at me,’ she muttered, seeing her crow’s feet in the car mirror. ‘And nothing has happened to me for twenty-five years.’

  What?’ squeaked her younger daughter, coming within earshot. They had been sent to find her.

  ‘Go away,’ said the older girl severely, taking charge. ‘It’s nothing really. Mothers always cry at weddings. It’s nothing.’

  And perhaps it was.

  (1968)

  Provincial Gothic

  Hone Tuwhare, ‘The Old Place’

  No one comes

  by way of the doughy track

  through straggly tea tree bush

  and gorse, past the hidden spring

  and bitter cress.

  Under the chill moon’s light

  no one cares to look upon

  the drunken fence-posts

  and the gate white with moss.

  No one except the wind

  saw the old place

  make her final curtsy

  to the sky and earth:

  and in no protesting sense

  did iron and barbed wire

  ease to the rust’s invasion

  nor twang more tautly

  to the wind’s slap and scream.

  On the cream-lorry

  or morning paper van

  no one comes,

  for no one will ever leave

  the golden city on the fussy train;

  and there will be no more waiting

  on the hill beside the quiet tree

  where the old place falters

  because no one comes any more

  no one.

  (1964)

  Ronald Hugh Morrieson, from The Scarecrow

  The same week our fowls were stolen, Daphne Moran had her throat cut.

  Big dunce that I was at school, my essays, if not my spelling, used to be thought quite good, and I was a keen reader which is probably why I
now presume to set myself up as the chronicler of Klynham’s hour in the limelight. This was certainly the most hectic and the darkest chapter in the whole history of the town and, just like I have heard said ‘Murder will out,’ it seems to me that the true story is bursting to be told sooner or later. It may be that I am biting off more than I can chew in tackling the job, but who, I ask myself, is going to come to light if I do not accept the challenge? Who was more constantly mixed up in every scene than little me? But nobody! And whose family knew more of any ins and outs that I may have missed myself than my own family? Echo answers: whose!

  So it looks like it is over to me to go ahead and, in retrospect, piece together the entire grisly and dramatic episode. Nearly all should turn out to be a genuine blow-by-blow account. Some of it will have been told to me, of course, and some extra elusive bits and pieces may force me to use my imagination; but surely I get some licence if I am really going to blow the top off that strange affair at last. Grant me a little licence, then, is my plea.

  In Treasure Island I liked the sound of ‘The same broadside I lost my leg, Old Pew lost his deadlights.’ When I get around to writing myself, I decided, that is how I am going to sound. It is harder than it looks. The opening sentence of my story is as near as I can get. The two crimes, the one so trivial and the other so diabolical, do belong to the same story, but only because a young girl took a newspaper from her aunt’s basket, and a man whose every breath was a whiff of brimstone thought he was haunted. Klynham is two hundred and fifty miles from the city. In the city the trams clanged and the newsboys shouted; the autumn dusk was ruddy with the glare of lights. In our little town a horse would clip-clop along the dead centre of the main street at noonday; at nightfall, the lights from kitchens shone out over backyards, and the street lamps which glimmered into life were few and far between. There was a street lamp outside our tumbledown house and the moths it attracted looked as big as bats.

  The name is Poindexter. It is a rather impressive name, I have always thought, and yet we were just about the most no-account outfit in the town. This is the voice of Edward Clifton (Neddy) of the Poindexter ilk and I should know.