Breakfast: porridge, toast (holding the bread on a fork to the fire, the oven-cloth wrapped round the hand), honey, marmalade, homemade bread, butter from their own churn, milk mixed with hot water. Taking curds and clods of grass to the fowls, while the dogs frisked across the paddock in the bright frenzies of early morning. Taking the bowl of hot mash, sneaking the little potatoes Mum had boiled in their green jackets. Washing in cold water with the basin on a box beside the tank-stand, the nip of late frosts still in the air, telling Mum that she’d washed the night before and hadn’t done anything since to get dirty. Cleaning teeth with salt, brushing hair.
Off down the road to school, chasing Kepa, passing him, laughing, bare feet dusty or moist with dew.
She learnt french knitting and made a scarf for Sarah—still the same Sarah, dirty now, battered, restuffed, torn and patched, lost many times, hidden for days on end by the others in an effort to force her to ‘grow up’, but still cherished, conversed with, fed, barbered, manicured. Netta made a teapot-stand of raffia for Mum, but it was seldom on the table as Mum was in the habit of using a square of ochre huckaback she had won for saving the coupons in packets of tea. Handwork was the only activity she enjoyed at school other than games, and she looked forward to the day when she would be a senior like Rebecca and allowed to use bamboo and leather, and make rubber dolls, perforating the edges with a punch with a spiky wheel that you turned to the size you wanted. The morning talks were all right, too, to listen to; but it was different when the turn was hers. She stood with her hands gripped behind her, tramping her feet, twisting her head to stare desperately at the green world through the window while the class waited, tittering.
‘You can talk, all right, Netta,’ the teacher said. ‘But I notice it’s always at the wrong times.’
At seven, she had her only birthday party. In the morning, as a special treat, she was allowed to ride with Dad from the shed to the gate on the sledge with the creamcans. She told Miss Rogers at playtime, and during the day was growled at only twice. She didn’t have to do her work after school, but helped Mum lay the table. She went to feed the dogs; and when she returned, at her place at the table were a cake of scented soap, a bag of walnuts, lollies, sixpence, a piece of cloth from Mum to make a new dress for Sarah, a pencil-case with a painting on it of a trellis covered with flowers and in the sky two birds like melted capital Vs; and from Mutu, some birds’ eggs on a string in a powder-box lined with cotton wool. With the tea there were tins of peas and peaches, and a cake with seven candles. Kepa growled, as he always did, because he had to wear a white shirt; he protested that they weren’t going to church. Afterwards they played catchers with bat and ball, and she cried because Mutu with his long arms and big hands kept catching her out and she didn’t have long enough turns.
‘It’s my birthday!’
‘You still got to play the rules!’
After dark she was allowed to sit up longer than usual; but Rebecca stayed up, too, to put her to bed, and that spoilt it. She wished it was only her with Dad and Mum; it wasn’t Rebecca’s birthday. There was a fight next day when Kepa ate half the walnuts, and she never found out who took her lollies.
The cat had kittens and she loathed her father when he put them in a sack, tied with flax to a pole and plunged it into the drain. He told her he was putting down some corn to go rotten; but she knew he would never use a stagnant drain to prepare such a table-delicacy as kanga pirau. She was never permitted to know where the kittens were buried, so she threw some flowers into the drain where Dad had stood during the execution. To make up for it Dad gave her a pup, but she never cared for it because it never came when she called. It began to worry the sheep on Rangi Fisher’s place over the hill and had to be shot.
Of her first visit to the coastal town twenty miles away she remembered little except the crowds of people, the cars, and the thrilling smells of fruit-shops and pharmacies. She bought a slate and coloured chalks to practise her writing on rainy days. She had a rag to clean it but Kepa used to lick it, spitting on it and rubbing with his lips, to provoke fights. It lasted a week before it was shattered against the bed-post.
Her job in summer was weeding the garden. Bare except for bloomers and a straw hat, she worked listlessly on rows of carrots; the more weeds she pulled out the worse the patch looked. The trouble was that when she worked over one small area she tried to get every single weed and the rest of the garden remained overrun. If she went first over all the garden, pulling the biggest weeds, then over again pulling the next-biggest, the results were better; then Dad didn’t growl at her and say, ‘Where’s your eyes, girl? Where’s your kanohis?’
She fetched water from the tank for Mum in the kitchen; and if she dried the forks and spoons she was allowed to lick the baking-dish.
One Saturday morning, carrying their lunch in a flax kit, she went out fencing with her father, riding with her hands on his hips, enjoying the roll of the old horse as it climbed over drains and plodded through swamps. At lunchtime Dad lit a fire in the shade of a beech and cooked a steak, holding it on a curl of fencing-wire gripped in his handkerchief. Blood and fat dripped hissing into the flames and the smell was so hungry and juicy that she had to start on the bread before the meat was ready. Dad made tea in a billy, tapping the sides with his sheathknife to make the leaves settle, and they drank from the lid.
Netta’s job was to gather the chips from the strainer-posts and put them in the kit to take home for kindling. She was so eager that Dad had to tell her not to come too close to the axe, to wait until he was finished or she might be knocked flying.
That was a day she always remembered: the sky without a cloud, the cool bush, the radiance of the distant sea. Dad wasn’t the least bit gruff or strict, and they sang songs as they rode home through the shadows at sundown, tired and tingling with sunburn.
3
Treated as an adult in so many ways at home, it irritated Netta to be a tiny tot at school, drawing on the blackboard while the older children wrote in ink in exercise books covered with wallpaper. At home she had a proper garden, yet at school the tiny tots were permitted only to plant wheat in painted eggshells while the top standards tended the school plot. She made little progress with reading, sums and story-writing; but her printing and, later, writing became models for the class: clear, round, firm. During the dry subjects she dug her pencil into the carvings on the desk, shuffled her feet and yearned to be outside in the sun.
With other girls of her age she delighted in giving cheek to the boys and taking refuge in the girls’ dunny, as had been done for generations; the tin at the door was bent and blackened where innumerable girls had seized it and swung swiftly round, in their speed to hide. Notices began to appear around the school: N.S. x x x D.J…. or A.K. or R.N…. all boys willing to have their names linked with hers, though she had no particular interest in them.
The spring planting came and Dad put her in charge of a large section of the main house-garden. When the setting sun spread Mokamokai’s shadow over the farm, she went with her mother to potter among the rows of seedlings, planting, peeling off dead leaves, pulling weeds, picking flowers for the front-room vases. She noticed that Mum seemed to prefer her company in the garden; they hummed songs in unison as they worked.
She begged so hard that one night she was allowed to go eeling with her brothers. A fire was set on a special cleared patch beside the creek with stones for a hearth. The pile of wood had been brought with great labour from the bush, with the sarcastic comment from Dad that if it had been wanted for the house nobody would have been nearly so industrious. They lit the fire, tossed in the lines, and sat solemnly awaiting bites. Further down the creek was the eel-weir Dad had made years before, the wire-netting ripped, the stakes leaning with the current. The boys neglected it, preferring to work with lines pakeha-style. Nobody talked; it was believed that vibrations carried down the line and scared the eels away. Netta’s job was to keep the fire stoked. The damp wood popped, embers poured from
the stones to hiss into the water, and from the boys came quiet snarls. She was bored; she stared at the reflections in the water and itched for something to happen.
Kepa jerked his line and stood up. In an instant she was numb with excitement.
‘Get out the road! Quick!’
He drew the line in. By the light of the fire she saw a black thing like a wet bike tyre, screwed-up and writhing. She sprang forward and grabbed it, screamed at the cold slimy touch and almost tripped into the creek. Kepa stamped it flat with his boot and slashed its mouth with his knife, disengaged the hook, and threw the still squirming eel into a sack. As he rebaited and rested his line, Netta frantically brushed her hand along the grass in an effort to scrape off the slime and the phosphorus which glowed with a greenish unearthly pallor. She tried scratching it with her fingernails but it clung firmly; her hand had a stiff, starchy feel. Then her foot caught in a protruding root, she hovered a moment and with a loud thwack, belly-flopped into the creek.
‘Get her out!’
‘No, let her drownd!’
‘Send her home!’
‘Spoil our eelings!’
Curses.
Crying, cold, her shoes squelching with muddy water, she walked home with Mutu carrying the lantern across rough paddocks, stepping over drains, miserable and ashamed.
‘We not taking you again. You stir up the mud, spoil our eeling.’
‘I don’t want to go stupid eeling anyway.’
Mum kissed her and heated a flat-iron in the oven to warm her bed.
The boys caught five eels. Netta told them she didn’t want to eat any, next day, because she hated the sight of them. Her mouth watered as she sneaked a look at the pieces frying in the pan; gutted, skinned and cut up, they twitched as if still alive. While the rest of the family ate greedily with their fingers, sucking at the bones and spitting them on to their plates, she munched a piece of toast and was haughtily polite and contemptuous.
‘Erw! Oo-wh! I say! Ahem! Erw!’ Mutu mocked, clipping his words.
While washing the dishes she devoured the leavings.
Life became very tough. Not enough money was coming in. Dad got rid of the old car. They stopped sugar in tea and milk-and-water, they had only treacle on porridge. There was no gingerbread, no raisins, no icing on cakes—themselves rarities now; no new clothes, no toys, no cordial for hot days, no fruit except from their own few trees. The boys went swimming in worn-out school pants, the girls in torn bloomers; they all used one tattered towel and fought over who should have it first, while it was dry. To celebrate birthdays they were allowed to take a few apples and a tin of bread and butter down to the river for an hour or two. The ancient enamel wash-basin was so full of holes it had to be discarded, and they used a cut-down kerosene tin with the sharp edge turned over a piece of fencing-wire. They stopped getting the Weekly News and the daily newspaper. Small round pieces of steel with screws through the middle were used to mend pots, but they never lasted long, and the mended pots never sat properly on the stove.
Dad was morose and gloomy in the evenings. The farm’s mortgage indebtedness, coupled with poor returns and the impossibility of getting adequate credit for grass-seed and fertiliser, made him increasingly suspicious of pakeha commercial practice, which he did not understand. The Government’s Native Department was of little use to him; its local representative he considered to be of inferior lineage and an upstart, bent on advancing himself with his pakeha superiors at the expense of the Maori farmers of the district.
He began to drink. At weekends he rode the horse to Wiki Paretahuri’s shack at the pah, drank home brew, and arrived home full of abuse. He took to punishing the boys with a rope for laziness or imagined lack of respect.
Netta was watering her garden one evening when she heard cries from the cowshed. She knew it was Kepa’s turn to get the cows in, and she had heard him claim that it wasn’t, it was Mutu’s. She dropped her tin and raced to the shed. Six heifers stood placidly watching as Kepa lay on the pipeclay, hands to his head, while his father lashed him with the rope. She grabbed the end and pulled on it with all her strength, convinced from her brother’s cries that he was at the point of death. Dad jerked the rope away and she sprawled forward, grazing her knees.
‘Get away from here.’
‘I won’t!’
‘You want some too, then, eh?’
Kepa sobbed: ‘Let him hit me if he wants to, don’t let him hurt you.’
She lay on the ground, crying, while the thrashing went on.
At last Dad threw the rope aside.
‘When I tell you to do a thing, you do it!’
He went into the shed, breathing heavily. Kepa stood up, wiped his face, and giggled. He lifted the leg of his trousers: he wore underpants, old swimming trunks, and two pairs of shorts.
‘I got two shirts on, too,’ he said. ‘If I know I’m in for trouble I get ready for it.’ He jerked his head towards the shed. ‘He get sick of it quicker than us, I think.’
As Dad’s drinking increased, so did the severity of the beatings. He gave them hidings with rope, manuka sticks tied together, or the leather strap which hung with the Farmers’ Catalogue at the side of the mantelpiece, its authority invoked with meaningful glances at mealtimes. Mutu took the strap and threw it into the river on the way to school. Useless! Dad replaced it with a chunk cut from a played-out belt of the milking machine with twice as much sting in it.
At Christmas, all the children had sores on their legs where they had been laid open by the manuka. They shared the terror of lying in bed late at night awaiting the sound of their father stumbling, sometimes crawling, across the veranda after a bout at the pa, gurgling snatches of chants and hymns. As they hauled him home when he had lost his way in grass only knee-high, they shared the humiliation of realising that this empty-eyed, tangle-haired creature was their father, drain-weed reeking on the knees they had lately loved to climb, cow-manure befouling the hands that used to stroke their hair.
And then, in the last days of January, the hidings suddenly came to an end. For years Dad had waited for an opportunity to clear an acre of scrub at the rear boundary of the farm. One evening at tea he said, half to himself, that he needed the acre badly, but with all the other work he had to do, holding the land already in use, he would have to bring in a gang of scrubcutters to do the job; but that was no good, because the land wouldn’t show an immediate return and he’d have to pay out money he couldn’t afford. He shook his head and fiddled with his cup of tea.
Next day Mutu stole the kitchen matches from the mantelpiece and took Netta and Esther to the bottom of the manuka ridge. They gathered dry grass from the bottom wire of the hay-paddock where the sweep had missed it; Mutu piled it in a heap in the thickest part of the scrub and lit it. The manuka, though green and vigorous, took the flame instantly. Terrified, they watched the fire sucking and hissing up the hillside, swaying and spreading with the breeze. It roared to the top and engulfed the fences. The children panicked. They raced home, stumbling over the uneven stubble, shouting to their father. He sprang on the horse and galloped to see. The fire had burnt itself out except in the thickest patches; the battens of the fence were charred, but the strainer-posts held firm. The children were white with terror when he rode home. He looked at their faces, and laughed.
‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘I should’ve thought of that myself. But if I did, I’d cut along the fence-line first.’
They relaxed, and broke into nervous giggles.
Dad’s face grew fierce.
‘Mutu! You’re not to touch the matches! You understand?’
The boy nodded and hurried outside.
Netta hid in a corner of the kitchen. She heard her father pull a chair to the table, still chuckling. Mum stood in bare feet lifting lids off pots on the stove to prod the vegetables.
‘Those kids,’ Dad said. ‘I think they save me money, you know?’
The hillside continued to smoulder into the night. Through th
e smoke the full moon looked like a new penny.
(1960)
James K. Baxter, ‘The Maori Jesus’
I saw the Maori Jesus
Walking on Wellington Harbour.
He wore blue dungarees.
His beard and hair were long.
His breath smelt of mussels and paraoa.
When he smiled it looked like the dawn.
When he broke wind the little fishes trembled.
When he frowned the ground shook.
When he laughed everybody got drunk.
The Maori Jesus came on shore
And picked out his twelve disciples.
One cleaned toilets in the Railway Station;
His hands were scrubbed red to get the shit out of the pores.
One was a call-girl who turned it up for nothing.
One was a housewife who’d forgotten the Pill
And stuck her TV set in the rubbish can.
One was a little office clerk
Who’d tried to set fire to the Government Buildings.
Yes, and there were several others;
One was an old sad quean;
One was an alcoholic priest
Going slowly mad in a respectable parish.
The Maori Jesus said, ‘Man,
From now on the sun will shine.’
He did no miracles;
He played the guitar sitting on the ground.
The first day he was arrested
For having no lawful means of support.
The second day he was beaten up by the cops
For telling a dee his house was not in order.
The third day he was charged with being a Maori
And given a month in Mount Crawford.
The fourth day he was sent to Porirua
The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature Page 84