The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature

by Jane Stafford

  Her servants were baffled, but obedient. As a young man Comte Armand had been fond of experiments, the old steward reminded them when they sat at talk over supper in the kitchens. ‘Model farms and what-have-you. And this is better than the time the Baroness’s father and the Comte took to playing with gunpowder. I hope we won’t see any of that again.’

  ‘Maybe the Baroness is keeping a panther,’ one of the footmen said, and was quelled thoroughly by a look.

  Aurora hauled the sheep one at a time up the staircase from the coach house. Their small cloven feet skated awkwardly on the waxed floor. She tethered both animals to the legs of Sobran’s bed.

  When she arrived an hour later with the goats, Sobran sat up.

  ‘The firstlings of my flock and the fat thereof,’ Aurora said in a droll, explanatory way—quoting Genesis on Abel’s offering to God. She was out of breath.

  Sobran stared at her, dull-eyed, then lay down again.

  Aurora struggled upstairs with feed for the sheep and goats, then water, put all within their reach. The sheep were already on their knees, panting, a look of fever in their eyes.

  Aurora went away to rest.

  In the morning, after talking to her maid at breakfast, Aurora went to see for herself the strange, grey-eyed knife-grinder who had turned up before dawn with his donkey, wares and whetstone, and offered to sharpen every blade in the house. The cook and seamstress gave him work, for his feet were blood-blistered inside his shoes and his donkey’s hair was pasted to its hide with sweat. Aurora asked him—as her servants had—how far he had come. He replied that he’d ridden and walked for three days just to get here, hadn’t worked as he travelled, knew he’d make good money at Vully as he had after the harvest every year. And when Aurora told him it was too soon to sharpen, oil, and store the vine knives he just looked at her in incomprehension with eyes that seemed to stare through all the miles he’d come to get there.

  Aurora paid him well, offered to put him up till the harvest was over. Then she went to the coach house.

  All the animals were on their knees, muzzles touching the floor, not starved, but shrunken somehow.

  Sobran was awake and looked at her. He seemed no worse than he had been. So Aurora went to fetch some more sheep. The shepherd wanted to know what she had done with the other two, and said that he’d heard about the goats.

  ‘Do you like your place?’ Aurora asked him.

  He blushed. The Baroness had never before taken his enquiries as insolence. He did as he was told, sent a boy to drive the sheep to the courtyard by the coach house where she wanted them. She sent the boy away. Then she stood a moment and looked about her at each window in every wall that wasn’t blind, the courtyard silent and hot, herself alone, for almost everyone was across the river, harvesting. One by one Aurora herded or hauled the sheep indoors and upstairs.

  At dusk Aurora sat on the stairs outside Sobran’s room, now and then taking a sip from a bottle of port wine. The stairs were foul with sheep droppings. Aurora had cleared a place with her boots, but the stairwell stank.

  The room above was silent: flies arrived periodically, then fell. Aurora heard them come, then freeze in action, heard their stumbling buzzing against the floor, then further silence. The freshest sheep were still breathing. The first lay deflated, dead, tongues like ramps put down from their mouths to let something disembark. They had died comatose, without a struggle. The animals didn’t seem afraid, and Aurora could smell snow—over the sheep shit, and wild onion stench of the animals’ ketotic breath—more powerful than a range of mountains, a scent thick and narcotic, like a whole world of ice.

  Sobran was conscious, unchanged, and Aurora had begun to think that the angel—that pulseless, warm corpse—was somehow making an exception of his friend while his body plundered the life of every other living thing near him.

  As the light turned from bronze to blue Aurora heard dogs begin to bark. From their kennels Vully’s hounds gave cry, several house dogs joining in, and the sheepdogs, all together. They ceased at once also, a moment later, as if clubbed down into whining quiet. Aurora heard the wind. A tide of insect bodies rippled across the floor, then the shit and snow smells crested like a flood breaking a levee, and came out of the door and down the stairs at her, pushed by a powerful aromatic—carnations, or cinnamon apples, something domestic, but with the force of a glacier behind its sweetness. A sensation came with the scent, as though someone were blowing lightly in both Aurora’s ears. She dropped the bottle, which rolled intact to the foot of the stairs. She got up, dizzy, and slowly climbed, the ringing in her ears louder now, like a great steel hoop rolling on its edge.

  Aurora saw the wings when she looked into the room. She thought, for a fraction of a second, that the angel was up, and in the air. The wings were furled, black shot with red, bronze shot with blue, iridescent white, six wings with one body between them, massive, half-armoured, and the armour gleaming with uncut stones in green and iron-black. Aurora saw white flawless skin, several thick ropes of black plaited hair. Her eyes stung, she fell to her knees and put her face against the floor.

  Sobran felt himself separated from Xas. Hands sorted his fingers from his angel’s, prised them apart, rolled him, then lifted him up into the air. He was dropped, then steadied and pushed away by sandalwood-scented wings. He looked up into a face, met a gaze, equitable, grave, terrible. It was like finding himself in the path of a meteor. He staggered, fell, scrambled back and huddled with Aurora.

  As soon as the strange angel spoke, the noise in their heads stopped. He had seen the sheep and goats. He said, ‘Someone here has been using the intelligence that God didn’t give them.’ He spoke in the Parisian of Aurora’s peers, as if knowing to whom he should attribute this ‘intelligence’. He looked at Aurora and then said, ‘I need a selection of the newly sharpened knives—fruit knives with thin blades, the heavy knives used to joint fowl, a cleaver. I need fresh linen, bandages, needles, silk thread.’ When she didn’t move he said, ‘Are you thinking of asking a question?’

  Aurora got up and went to do as she was told.

  The archangel—Sobran knew who it was—turned back to the bed and stripped the sheet from Xas, so that it flew out and settled neatly over four stuporous sheep. Lucifer rolled Xas on to his side to inspect the wound. Sobran stole a look at the face, saw calculation, squeezed his eyes shut, waited a moment, then looked again. Xas was face down, his wings spread so they arched off either side of the bed. Lucifer had walked to the double doors, there leaned to shake salt—Sobran supposed—out of his hair. He said something in the language Xas had once used to speak endearingly to Sobran’s dog, Josie, a language of supple, complex syllabics. He spoke quietly but with great passsion. There was a multiple tiny ticking and every parched leaf on the tree tops by the double doors detached itself and fell in unison. Lucifer stopped speaking, was completely still for a moment, then stepped back, closed the doors, shot the bolt and came back into the room, the floor quivering under his tread. Sobran saw the candles and lamps ignite as the archangel approached the bed, and fire erupt in the cold coals of the fireplace.

  Sobran felt that he was experiencing each instant twice—like the touch of a snowflake, first a dry, soft contact, then as the flake melts against skin a second strike of cold.

  Lucifer came right up to Sobran and crouched, bent his head, face still well above Sobran’s. He was very tall, nearly eight foot, but not attenuated and big-hipped as giants usually are. He was immense and perfect. His wings spread out around him on the floor, perfumed and opulent. Sobran saw the long scars on the archangel’s chest, under ropes of pearl in every shade from white to blue-black. Lucifer took Sobran’s face between his hands and compelled the man to meet his eyes.

  He said, ‘I will cut off his wings and you can keep him. He’ll always have to wear a shirt—but you can keep him.’ He spoke in the dialect of the Chalonnais, his diction as crude as Sobran’s grandfather the boatman’s had been. He released Sobran and got up.
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  The man found that, although he could think, he couldn’t pray. He heard the door, then saw Aurora come in with a sewing kit and knives bundled in cloth like a babe-in-arms. She went straight to the archangel and put both parcel and kit into his hands. He placed them on the foot of the bed, reached back to lift the ropes of pearl over his head, looked about for somewhere to put them—and strung them over the drooping head of the last conscious sheep.

  Lucifer set to work, turned one of Xas’s wings this way and that, studying its physiology, exploring the downy hollow where the wing joined a saddle of wing muscle across the angel’s spine. He felt with his fingers and considered. He took a knife in hand, shrugged back the plait that slithered across his shoulder, then flattened the arching joints of his own top wings down so that they didn’t obscure the light.

  ‘No!’ Sobran said. He wasn’t able to find his feet so shambled across the room ape-fashion on feet and knuckles. He seized the wrist of the hand that held the knife (one of the fine fruit knives, Aurora saw, a knife with a short curved blade).

  ‘Any display of defiance of authority will find favour with me,’ the archangel said, ‘but you haven’t picked a good moment.’

  Sobran squeezed his eyes shut, averted his face, but held on.

  ‘I’m sure you won’t love him any less,’ the archangel went on in a sweet blithe tone, ‘if there’s a little less of him.’ Then he said, in a voice that had hooks, ‘I want you to help me, Jodeau. Help me hold his wing.’

  Sobran didn’t respond.

  Lucifer flicked him off, abrupt, brutal, and Aurora saw for an instant what she thought were real feelings—a species of envy or unhappiness no more profound than human envy or unhappiness, but sharper, concentrated.

  The archangel made a cut, slid the knife in under skin, leaving skin spare to seal a great wound where wing joined the body.

  Aurora and Sobran crouched, near each other, but not touching. Sobran wept, his arms wrapped around his head. Aurora watched. She saw cuts through flesh so bloodless it only oozed; she saw the knives changed, but not change hands; a joint boned, blood paint the surgeon’s beautiful arms. Lucifer straightened, raised a wing, one end ragged meat, and pressed his face into its feathers, stood holding it against his side, where it looked like a slight woman limply inclined against a strong man. Then he dropped it and followed it with his eyes to see it too had draped the one upright and several prone sheep. He stiffened, then stooped, pulled the wing aside and began to gather goats and sheep, the back legs of several in each hand. He held his arms out from his sides and the animals dangled in bunches, one sheep kicking faintly. The archangel went to the double doors, unbolted them and tossed the dead animals out. He wiped his hands on his own cheeks. He was speaking again, low, maddened, indecipherable.

  When he came back he began, with a steady hand, on the second wing. Aurora could now see white in his eyes, which had seemed all iris. As he finished with the small knife, and went to put it down, he seemed to think again, and instead thrust it into the rounded muscle of his own shoulder, as though it was handier there. Blood, red and faintly luminescent, trickled down his arm.

  He freed Xas’s other wing, dropped it, surveyed his work, and began to trim the surplus of downy skin so that it could be closed in two neat seams over each wound. From the sewing kit he selected a needle and yellow silk thread, broke the thread across his teeth, as a seamstress might, and threaded a needle. He began to match cut muscle to muscle and reattach them, pinching slippery elastic ends of tendons together, then stitching.

  ‘More candles,’ he said after a time. ‘Even I can’t work well in this light.’

  Aurora went to find more candles. She was weak and unsteady, her clothes as wet with sweat as had been that cloth with which the surgeon had covered her own face. It was raining beyond the coach house door; there was moisture dark on the flagstone floor and the ground sparkled. She found some candles in the coach house and didn’t need to go out.

  Lucifer had three needles in his arm alongside the knife, none sharp enough now. He let Aurora light the candles, looked into her eyes as if searching her thoughts, as if he had to look to know—just like everyone else. His eyes were black, very wide spaced, as patient as the eyes of an ox, and as cold as the river.

  He made his first seam along the line of the excision. Then, as he saw what shape it took, he laughed once and bitterly—for each excised wing left a scar that curved six inches below and parallel to the top of Xas’s shoulder, then straight down beside his spine, then curved again shallowly, under his shoulder blade towards his side. A capital J on the one side and, on the other, a mirror image of a capital J.

  The last thread cut, knife and needles pulled from his shoulder, Lucifer gathered Xas in his arms and lay down with him, his bloody arms crossed behind Xas’s head and wings encasing them both so that together they were a great chrysalis.

  Hours passed. Aurora fell asleep.

  Lucifer got up after dawn, opened the other leaf of the double doors, and came back to look at Xas in the morning light. He bent his fair, blood-mottled face down to Xas’s and kissed him once, beside his mouth, as though deflected at the last moment by some prohibition. He went to the windows, thought of flight, but looked down and jumped instead.

  Aurora went to see what he was doing, found him relieving the dead sheep of his strings of pearls. Apparently an archangel could be as forgetful as any human in the thick of things. He looked up at her, in the daylight as colourful as the dusky, jewelled tropical moths in her husband’s butterfly collection. Selecting one strand of pearls he tossed them up to her. She caught them—and he smiled at her, sad and charming and reprehensible, then took off. The wind his wings made knocked her over.

  (1998)

  Witi Ihimaera, from Bulibasha

  There are some souls like Grandfather Tamihana, whom God signs contracts with before they are born. You can tell who they are when something shows up in the manner of their birth or in their accomplishments as young men and women.

  How else can you explain how some people are blessed in terms of physical attributes and others not? Why some are tall and others are not? Why some have fabulous hair which they keep all their lives and why others, like me, will always worry about losing theirs before they are thirty? God also marks such souls with a special blessing. In some cases it is astounding beauty, like Helen of Troy or red-headed Rhonda Fleming. In my grandfather’s case, it was physical strength and sporting prowess.

  This is why, although sometimes stirred by the sentimentality of our family meetings, I always hated the homestead drawing room. It was a shrine to blessed people, a testament to physical prowess and virility, neither of which I possess.

  Look at all the photos on the wall—Grandfather as teenage sports champion in boxing, track and field, javelin, discus; as representative team member of rugby, hockey, swimming, sprints and even playing polo with the Pakeha at the showgrounds. He is a stunning sight, his physique scarcely fitting into his clothes. He has the wide open smile of a careless youth with the entire world at his feet.

  Now look at the photo of Grandfather with his parents. They are short and stunted, unlike their god of a son. See? He was born that way.

  And look at all the silver trophies and shields. Not all of them have been won by Grandfather, yet he so inculcated his sons and daughters with the drive for physical and sporting excellence that, as they grew, they began winning prizes for him. That too is part of his physical triumph. His physical achievement lives on in us.

  Did I say us? In this holy of holies, it is strength rather than intelligence which is worshipped. You will find no trophies of mine here, though there may be a couple of certificates for being third in class stuck away in a drawer. This room makes it clear: I am no use whatsoever to Grandfather.

  I was in a foul mood when I walked in to breakfast. With all the men gone, the only ones left in Waituhi were the old women, girls or the useless.

  ‘How come,’ I asked Aunt Ruth
, who was packing up the cutlery for Mahana Two, ‘we pray all the time?’

  ‘The family that prays together stays together,’ she said in a sing-song way. ‘You know that.’

  Yeah yeah.

  ‘But we weren’t always like this,’ Aunt Ruth said. ‘Not as pious and church-going. If your grandfather hadn’t met the angel—’

  Glory dropped her spoon. ‘Met the angel?’ she repeated, her eyes widening.

  Aunt Ruth sighed, looked at her watch and glared at me as if it was all my fault.

  ‘In those days,’ Aunt Ruth said, ‘the sky wasn’t cluttered with planes and satellites. God’s angels were still able to get through to earth with messages for the faithful.’

  Aunt Ruth had an unswerving belief that the First World War was when humans began to lose their godliness. It had something to do with the use of mustard gas on the Western Front; God’s voice had come through pretty regularly until then. The gas infiltrated into His kingdom and affected His throat, then just when He recovered He found all the frequencies jammed by the radio.

  ‘Your grandfather was twenty-three in 1918.’ Aunt Ruth said. ‘He wasn’t exactly an ungodly man, but he wasn’t a godly man either. He was an ideal choice for a visitation by an angel. He bowed to no man and he bowed to no god. He believed in what he saw and he believed in a man’s strength. He thought man was an animal like any other beast of the field or fowl of the air’—like all the Mahanas, Aunt Ruth had a penchant for the well-turned biblical phrase—‘and that at the end of your life you went away, found a place to die, and got on with dying. Furthermore, there was no Hereafter. How could there be? You couldn’t see God, could you? Therefore God could not exist. You couldn’t see an afterlife, could you? Therefore that did not exist either! Yes, a man’s own strength, that’s what your grandfather believed in.’

  Aunt Ruth pointed through the door of the kitchen into the drawing room. She motioned to one of the photographs of Grandfather, the one hanging next to the oval photo of Grandmother Ramona in 1914. In it was the evidence above any other that Grandfather was exactly how his reputation has captured him. ‘Tamihana Mahana, Wrestling Champion, Gisborne District, 1914–1920, undefeated.’