The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature

by Jane Stafford

  I wished, gentlemen, with a fervour foreign to my young life, that it had been in company other than that of Puti Hohepa and his brat that we had made our necessary parting. I wished we had been alone. I did not want to see him diminished, made ridiculous and pathetic among strangers, while I so brashly joined the mockers. (Were they mocking?) Impossible notions; for what was there to offer and how could he receive? Nothing. I stroked Fanny’s arm. Old man Hohepa got up and unchained the dog and went off to get the cows in. He didn’t speak; maybe the chocolate old bastard was dumb, eh? In a minute I would have to go down and start the engine and put the separator together. I stayed to stare at Fanny, thinking of undone things in a naughty world. She giggled, thinking, for all I know, of the same, or of nothing. Love, thy sunny trystings and nocturnal daggers. For the first time I admitted my irritation at that girlish, hiccoughing, tenor giggle. But we touched, held, got up and with our arms linked went down the long paddock through the infestation of buttercup, our feet bruising stalk and flower. Suddenly all I wanted and at whatever price was to be able, sometime, somewhere, to make it up to my primitive, violent, ignorant and crazy old man. And I knew I never would. Ah, what a bloody fool. And then the next thing I wanted, a thing far more feasible, was to be back in that room with its shade and smell of hay-dust and warm flesh, taking up the classic story just where we’d been so rudely forced to discontinue it. Old man Hohepa was bellowing at the dog; the cows rocked up through the paddock gate and into the yard: the air smelled of night. I stopped; and holding Fanny’s arm suggested we might run back. Her eyes went wide: she giggled and broke away and I stood there and watched her flying down the paddock, bare feet and a flouncing skirt, her hair shaken loose.

  Next afternoon I finished ploughing the river paddock, the nature of Puti Hohepa’s husbandry as much a mystery as ever, and ran the old Ferguson into the lean-to shelter behind the cow shed. It was far too late for ploughing: the upper paddocks were hard and dry. But Puti hoped to get a crop of late lettuce off the river flat; just in time, no doubt, for a glutted market, brown rot, wilt and total failure of the heart. He’d have to harrow it first, too; and on his own. Anyway, none of my worry. I walked into the shed. Fanny and her daddy were deep in conversation. She was leaning against the flank of a cow, a picture of rustic grace, a rural study of charmed solemnity. Christ knows what they were saying to each other. For one thing they were speaking in their own language: for another I couldn’t hear anything, even that, above the blather and splatter of the bloody cows and the racket of the single cylinder diesel, brand-name Onan out of Edinburgh so help me. They looked up I grabbed a stool and got on with it, head down to the bore of it all. I’d have preferred to be up on the tractor, poisoning myself straight out, bellowing this and that and the other looney thing to the cynical gulls. Ah, my mountain princess of the golden chords, something was changing. I stripped on, sullenly: I hoped it was me.

  We were silent through dinner: we were always silent, through all meals. It made a change from home where all hell lay between soup and sweet, everyone taking advantage of the twenty minutes of enforced attendance to shoot the bile, bicker and accuse, rant and wrangle through the grey disgusting mutton and the two veg. Fanny never chattered much and less than ever in the presence of her pappy: giggled maybe but never said much. Then out of the blue father Hohepa opened up. Buster, you should make peace with your father. I considered it. I tried to touch Fanny’s foot under the table and I considered it. A boy shouldn’t hate his father: a boy should respect his father. I thought about that too. Then I asked should fathers hate their sons; but I knew the answer. Puti Hohepa didn’t say anything, just sat blowing into his tea, looking at his reputedly wild daughter who might have been a beauty for all I could tell, content to be delivered of the truth and so fulfilled. You should do this: a boy shouldn’t do that—tune into that, mac. And me thinking proscription and prescription differently ordered in this farm world of crummy acres. I mean I thought I’d left all that crap behind the night I stumbled along Rideout Road following, maybe, the river Alph. I thought old man Hohepa, having been silent for so long, would know better than to pull, of a sudden, all those generalisations with which for seventeen years I’d been beaten dizzy—but not so dizzy as not to be able to look back of the billboards and see the stack of rotting bibles. Gentlemen, I was, even noticeably, subdued. Puti Hohepa clearly didn’t intend to add anything more just then. I was too tired to make him an answer. I think I was too tired even for hate; and what better indication of the extent of my exhaustion than that? It had been a long summer; how long I was only beginning to discover. It was cold in the kitchen. Puti Hohepa got up. From the doorway, huge and merging into the night, he spoke again: You must make up your own mind. He went away, leaving behind him the vibration of a gentle sagacity, tolerance, a sense of duty (mine, as usual) pondered over and pronounced upon. The bastard. You must make up your own mind. And for the first time you did that mum had hysterics and dad popped his gut. About what? Made up my mind about what? My black daddy? Fanny? Myself? Life? A country career and agricultural hell? Death? Money? Fornication? (I’d always liked that.) What the hell was he trying to say? What doing but abdicating the soiled throne at the first challenge? Did he think fathers shouldn’t hate their sons, or could help it, or would if they could? Am I clear? No matter. He didn’t have one of the four he’d sired at home so what the hell sort of story was he trying to peddle? Father with the soft centre. You should, you shouldn’t, make up your own mind. Mac, my head was going round. But it was brilliant, I conceded, when I’d given it a bit of thought. My livid daddy himself would have applauded the perfect ambiguity. What a bunch: they keep a dog on a chain for years and years and then let it free on some purely personal impulse and when it goes wild and chases its tail round and round, pissing here and sniffing there in an ecstasy of liberty, a freedom for which it has been denied all training, they shoot it down because it won’t come running when they hold up the leash and whistle. (I didn’t think you’d go that way, son.) Well, my own green liberty didn’t look like so much at that moment; for the first time I got an inkling that life was going to be simply a matter of out of one jail and into another. Oh, they had a lot in common, her dad and mine. I sat there, mildly stupefied, drinking my tea. Then I looked up at Fanny; or, rather, down on Fanny. I’ve never known such a collapsible sheila in my life. She was stretched on the kitchen couch, every vertebra having turned to juice in the last minute and a half. I thought maybe she’d have the answer, some comment to offer on the state of disunion. Hell. I was the very last person to let my brew go cold while I pondered the nuance of the incomprehensible, picked at the dubious unsubtlety of thought of a man thirty years my senior who had never, until then, said more than ten words to me. She is too good for you: only six words after all and soon forgotten. Better, yes, if he’d stayed mum, leaving me to deduce from his silence whatever I could, Abora Mountain and the milk of paradise, consent in things natural and a willingness to let simple matters take their simple course.

  I was wrong: Fanny offered no interpretation of her father’s thought. Exegesis to his cryptic utterance was the one thing she couldn’t supply. She lay with her feet up on the end of the couch, brown thighs charmingly bared, mouth open and eyes closed in balmy sleep, displaying in this posture various things but mainly her large unconcern not only for this tragedy of filial responsibility and the parental role but, too, for the diurnal problem of the numerous kitchen articles, pots, pans, plates, the lot. I gazed on her, frowning on her bloom of sleep, the slow inhalation and exhalation accompanied by a gentle flare of nostril, and considered the strength and weakness of our attachment. Helpmeet she was not, thus to leave her lover to his dark ponderings and the chores.

  Puti Hohepa sat on the verandah in the dark, hacking over his bowl of shag. One by one, over my second cup of tea, I assessed my feelings, balanced all my futures in the palm of my hand. I crossed to Fanny, crouched beside her, kissed her. I felt embarrassed and, gentlem
en, foolish. Her eyes opened wide; then they shut and she turned over.

  The dishes engaged my attention not at all, except to remind me, here we go, of my father in apron and rubber gloves at the sink, pearl-diving while mum was off somewhere at a lynching. Poor bastard. Mum had the natural squeeze for the world; they should have changed places. (It’s for your own good! Ah, the joyous peal of that as the razor strop came whistling down like tartar’s blade.) I joined daddy Hohepa on the verandah. For a moment we shared the crescent moon and the smell of earth damp under dew, Rideout Mountain massed to the west.

  I’ve finished the river paddock.

  Yes.

  The tractor’s going to need a de-coke before long.

  Yes.

  I guess that about cuts it out.

  Yes.

  I may as well shoot through.

  Buster, is Fanny pregnant?

  I don’t know. She hasn’t said anything to me so I suppose she can’t be.

  You are going home?

  No. Not home. There’s work down south. I’d like to have a look down there.

  There’s work going here if you want it. But you have made up your mind?

  I suppose I may as well shoot through.

  Yes.

  After milking tomorrow if that’s okay with you.

  Yes.

  He hacked on over his pipe. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes is Fanny pregnant? What if I’d said yes? I didn’t know one way or the other. I only hoped, and left the rest to her. Maybe he’d ask her; and what if she said yes? What then, eh Buster? Maybe I should have said why don’t you ask her. A demonstrative, volatile, loquacious old person: a tangible symbol of impartiality, reason unclouded by emotion, his eyes frank in the murk of night and his pipe going bright, dim, bright as he calmly considered the lovely flank of the moon. I was hoping she wasn’t, after all. Hoping; it gets to be a habit, a bad habit that does you no good, stunts your growth, sends you insane and makes you, demonstrably, blind. Hope, for Fanny Hohepa.

  Later, along the riverbank, Fanny and I groped, gentlemen, for the lost rapport and the parking sign. We were separated by just a little more than an arm’s reach. I made note then of the natural scene. Dark water, certainly; dark lush grass underfoot; dark girl; the drifting smell of loam in the night: grant me again as much. Then, by one of those fortuitous accidents not infrequent in our national prosings, our hands met, held, fell away. Darkness. My feet stumbling by the river and my heart going like a tango. Blood pulsed upon blood, undenied and unyoked, as we busied ourselves tenderly at our ancient greetings and farewells. And in the end, beginning my sentence with a happy conjunction, I held her indistinct, dark head. We stayed so for a minute, together and parting as always, with me tumbling down upon her the mute dilemma my mind then pretended to resolve and she offering no restraint, no argument better than the dark oblivion of her face.

  Unrecorded the words between us: there can’t have been more than six, anyway, it was our fated number. None referred to my departure or to the future or to maculate conceptions. Yet her last touch spoke volumes. (Unsubsidised, gentlemen, without dedication or preamble.) River-damp softened her hair: her skin smelled of soap: Pan pricking forward to drink at the stream, crushing fennel, exquisitely stooping, bending ….

  And, later again, silent, groping, we ascended in sequence to the paternal porch.

  Buster?

  Yair?

  Goodnight, Buster.

  ’Night, Fanny. Be seein’ yuh.

  …

  Fourteen minute specks of radioactive phosphorus brightened by weak starlight pricked out the hour: one.

  In the end I left old STC in the tractor tool box along with the spanner that wouldn’t fit any nut I’d ever tried it on and the grease gun without grease and the last letter from mum, hot as radium. I didn’t wait for milking. I was packed and gone at the first trembling of light. It was cold along the river-bottom, cold and still. Eels rose to feed: the water was like pewter; old pewter. I felt sick, abandoned, full of self-pity. Everything washed through me, the light, the cold, a sense of what lay behind me and might not lie before, a feeling of exhaustion when I thought of home, a feeling of despair when I thought of Fanny still curled in sleep. Dark. She hadn’t giggled: so what? I changed my fibre suitcase to the other hand and trudged along Rideout Road. The light increased; quail with tufted crests crossed the road: I began to feel better. I sat on the suitcase and rolled a smoke. Then the sun caught a high scarp of Rideout Mountain and began to finger down slow and gold. I was so full of relief, suddenly, that I grabbed my bag and ran. Impetuous. I was lucky not to break my ankle. White gulls, loam flesh, dark water, damsel and dome; where would it take you? Where was there to go, anyway? It just didn’t matter; that was the point. I stopped worrying that minute and sat by the cream stand out on the main road. After a while a truck stopped to my thumb and I got in. If I’d waited for the cream truck I’d have had to face old brownstone Hohepa and I wasn’t very eager for that. I’d had a fill of piety, of various brands. And I was paid up to date.

  I looked back. Rideout Mountain and the peak of ochre red roof, Maori red. That’s all it was. I wondered what Fanny and her pappy might be saying at this moment, across the clothes-hanger rumps of cows. The rush of relief went through me again. I looked at the gloomy bastard driving: he had a cigarette stuck to his lip like a growth. I felt almost happy. Almost. I might have hugged him as he drove his hearse through the tail-end of summer.

  (1965)

  Phillip Wilson, ‘End of the River’

  With the motor-bike banging away beneath us it was like watching a movie flashback to be riding on the pillion behind Anthony to the lower reaches of the river. We had heard the big fish were lurking there, and it took me back ten years to the days when we had gone fishing together on the Waikato, camping out in the open for weeks before the beginning of the new term. He had both our rods balanced across his knee, and I had the rest of the gear slung in a bag over my back. This was the outing we had been promising ourselves for some time, ever since he had told me he had been picked to go to Rome, to study for a Doctorate. In a way it was his own private farewell to arms.

  It had been quite a triumph for him, everybody said, to have won his achievement so young, and there was quite a bit of envy among those of us who knew him well. It wasn’t just because he was the only Catholic among us. What aroused us more than anything, I suppose, was the fact that it was because of his religious beliefs, the very thing that used to make us feel superior to him, that he was getting the kind of opportunity which was denied to others whom we thought more worthy. And I, who had been his closest friend, the only one with whom he had persisted in corresponding during the war when we were so completely cut off from one another, I who should have had the least cause for envy, was wrenched with despair that life should have treated him so well and me, with my jaunty, self-assured nihilism, so shabbily.

  It was typical that he was not a bit triumphant about his success, but had only smiled benignly when I accused him of it, admitting his good fortune with a quiet grin on those blubbery lips that seemed designed more for sensual enjoyment than for the ascetic life he had laid out for himself. Yet it must have been there before the war, that determination to make a name for himself in his chosen field, even in those student years when we were both involved to within an inch of our physical capacities in Latin texts and the literature of the seventeenth century, but with such, as I saw now, disparate aims. How much more must the exaltations and groanings of Crashaw and Donne, or the blind severities of Milton, have affected him than they did me, who thought I had penetrated to the very sap of their divine wisdom? And how he must have laughed at old Herbert, whom I had worshipped second to the greatest of them for his calm Protestant faith amid all that torment. In my blindness I had not seen that it would inevitably lead to something like this, and I was paying for it now, remembering that he had not only made no excuse for his beliefs but had even hinted once or twice at his theological aims. Loo
king back, I had to admit that there had been a certain steadfastness about him that we didn’t have, and a humility too, something that we in our arrogance could not understand.

  Now, in the moment of his impending departure, I could see the thinness of the thread which had held us together for so many years. There had been nothing emotional in our friendship at first. It was based on the fact that he had always had an answer to my arguments and I the perfect rebuttal, as I thought, to his. We had been thrown together through a spirit of competition, because we were both near the top of our class, fighting for the scholarships that were invariably awarded to someone else. And liking the texture of each other’s minds we had stuck together, arguing with the prodigious gravity of young men, sharpening our minds and realising our dependence on each other only when we were apart. It may have been because I was younger than he was, and less sure of myself, but often when my intellectual conviction deserted me and I saw the darkness of unbelief stretching out like a sea, suggesting everything but yielding nothing as true and faithful as his own spiritual refuge, I had wondered who would be proved right in the end. It was always my buoyant Marxism against the solidity of his ancient hierarchy, and I could not conceive of any battle being won by the spirit of conservatism among men who were free and without fear. Yet the pattern of our own lives was proving me wrong, and while the last and most important scholarship had been won by him after all, I was left with no other outlet for my energies than a schoolteacher’s classroom. He would come back, if he did, one of the most important men in New Zealand in some ways, while my own liberalism would expire among acrid chalk-dust and the crude guffaws of boys.

  Was I wrong after all? I only knew that when he went he would take with him my assurance, for it had been supported largely by the wall of his argument. Unknowingly I had leant on him, and without him I would be lost. At any rate, on that day at the end of 1941 when we were all unceremoniously conscripted into the army after our students’ year of grace, myself to end up in the sweat of an air force squadron in the Pacific and he in the equally debilitating humidity of a naval patrol off the coast of West Africa, there was no tear in the shabby garment of our friendship. So that now, in the autumn of 1950, we were trying to experience it all again in one last glorious burst before he departed for his long-sought Armageddon and left me to vegetate on these barbaric shores.