Douglas smiles shyly at the man. He is not like the chattering tourists or the boisterous river men, but gentle in a way that puts Douglas at ease. ‘Are you a farmer around here?’ he asks.
The man smiles. ‘You guessed well. I am down with my wool bales.’ He frowns. ‘I hope the steamer can fit them aboard, for I am dead in need of the money. That is a great crowd of travellers to fit aboard.’
‘I expect there will be room for goods on the foredeck. You are lucky to be at the start of the trip. There are bales waiting at two other landings downriver.’
‘You are a riverboat man then?’
‘Fireman,’ says Douglas proudly.
The farmer looks at him more closely then, leaning forward in the dark. His face is strained and tired. ‘Ah,’ he says. ‘I used to work on the river. Snagging.’
Douglas whistles. ‘That’s a hard life, they say. You must be stronger than you look.’
The farmer laughs. ‘Thanks for the compliment, lad. What do they call you?’
‘Douglas. Douglas McPhee.’ He offers his hand.
The man in the shadows stands suddenly without taking the offered hand. ‘McPhee? Are you one of Angus McPhee’s?’
Douglas stands too, taken aback by this sudden change of manner. ‘Yes, sir,’ he says, ‘but … not …’ He cannot think what to say. ‘I am a river man, not a sawmiller,’ he says at last.
The farmer sighs. ‘Yes. Yes. Well.’ He picks up his old coat, shakes it and drapes it over one broad shoulder. ‘I must be on my way,’ he says. ‘Back to the farm.’
He walks away without another word, up the bank and into the black edge of the bush.
‘What did I do wrong?’ Douglas says aloud, dismayed to see his new friend disappear so suddenly. He picks up his instrument again but has lost heart. His fingers slow, then lie still on the strings. He stares into the dark, waiting for Stella to finish her work. From the crew’s hut above, laughter and argument break the peace of the night, but Douglas is not of a mind to join them.
There is a sudden movement beside him and Douglas jumps as the farmer sits easily, settles his back against a tree trunk as if nothing has happened.
‘I’m back,’ he says, offering his hand now. ‘Danny. Most call me Dannyboy.’
Now it is Douglas’s turn for shock. Stella’s husband!
‘I did poorly,’ says Danny, smiling, ‘to walk out on you so sudden.’
Douglas breathes more easily. ‘Mr O’Dowd?’ he says, feeling for the right words. ‘I do no harm to your wife. We are friends is all.’
Danny frowns. His mind seems to be elsewhere. ‘What harm would you do? You have met her, then?’
‘Does she not mention me?’
‘She sometimes tells about the doings down here.’ Danny gestures down towards the Houseboat. ‘But I never heard her mention a Douglas McPhee.’
Douglas is excited by this piece of news. She is hiding her feelings from her husband! He wants to ask about her — what she is like at home, at the farm — but can’t find the words.
Finally it is Danny who speaks. ‘Your name,’ he says, ‘shocked me. It came too sudden. It was rude to walk away.’ He smiles and Douglas recognises the charm. He had imagined someone older, inarticulate and dull.
‘Mr O’Dowd …’
‘I’m Danny to my friends.’
‘Mr … Danny. My sister. It was an accident. The blow of the raft did not cause her to fall.’
Danny smiles. ‘I know that, lad. Stella told me. No doubt she had it from you. I was right glad to hear it.’ After another silence he adds, ‘You have a very pretty sister.’
Douglas wants to reply, ‘And you have a pretty wife,’ but all he says is, ‘Bridget? Yes, she was pretty.’
‘Still is, to my mind. What was she like before …’
To begin with, Douglas is happy to speak of his sister. ‘She was so different from now. I suppose some would call her noisy. She was full of life, jumping here and there, shouting to look at this, look at that. Never still. Friends with everyone …’ He stops speaking, remembering the overheard words on the boat.
‘Go on.’
But Douglas finds he doesn’t want to remember the old Bridget any more. Bridget is dead. Bridie is a different person — gossiped about, perhaps behaving shamefully. No longer really his sister. He shakes his head and lets the silence grow between them.
In the dark Danny stirs, goes to speak, and then coughs as if to silence the thought. He picks up Douglas’s banjo and picks at it idly. The single notes sound sweetly — a tune familiar to Douglas but one he can’t place. The discovery that Danny is a good musician grates. Danny stops mid-phrase with a strummed chord and lays the banjo down again. Douglas, lost in his own thoughts, stares out at the darkening river.
‘There is another side to that day …’ says Danny at last. ‘The day your sister …’ The words tail off and silence settles again between them. From the Houseboat comes a splash. Perhaps Stella is throwing scraps overboard. Lights flicker now in the rows of cabin windows on the lower deck. Well-shod feet clip along the decks as the tourists go back and forth from the bathrooms in the stern. A bright half moon rises above the bush on the opposite bank, sending a shimmering pathway across the water to link the busy Houseboat with the wilderness all around.
Danny’s hands are clasped between his knees. Moonlight turns his narrow face into a landscape of bright planes and dark shadows. He speaks as if to himself, looking down at his hands, which twist and knot with a life of their own as he tells his story.
‘Stella’s brother Pita was with me that day. He was drunk and goading me. I should have kept my anger inside but all the terror of that crash, and then seeing the girl — your sister — dead, as I thought …’ Danny growls like an angry dog. ‘My head filled with rage … I hit him hard enough to hear bones crack and sent him into the river senseless. In my rage I left him there and went to the girl — your sister.’ He groans. ‘Ah, sweet Jesus, I killed Stella’s brother — and my friend. I have killed a man I knew well. It turns like a knife in me every day since … It’s the dead man’s smashed face I see, and drowned Pita whispering in my ear that I must be punished for my sin.’ Danny shifts restlessly. ‘They all think him drowned. A simple drowned man, easy to mourn, no questions asked.’
Douglas clears his throat and Danny turns suddenly as if surprised so find him there.
‘Does Stella blame you?’ asks Douglas. He hopes to hear of a rift.
Danny hangs his head. ‘I cannot tell her. The words dry in my throat.’
‘But why would you tell me, then?’
Danny’s voice is glum. ‘Yes. Why? Sorry, lad — it just came out, like. Why would I put that burden on you and not on my own wife?’ He looks down to the dark and shining water as if he would find an answer. ‘It’s a strange thing. Perhaps because you are her brother. Bridie’s brother. I think of her too, every day. She brings a sweetness in all this sour mess. Why would that be, do you think? Your sister holds my heart in her soft hands. Sweet Bridie …’
Douglas is shocked to hear a grown man talk like this. He looks at the dark shape of him — a man he has only just met who has told him an uncomfortable secret. It is a puzzle what to do. ‘Stella says you have been silent around the farm since the accident.’
‘Stella told you this?’ Danny is sharp now, his shadowy eyes boring at him.
Douglas feels himself blush and is glad of the darkness. In truth, her remark was made to Mrs White, a conversation that Douglas overheard.
He fiddles with his banjo. ‘Perhaps she needed someone to talk to,’ he says, defiant in the face of Danny’s scrutiny, ‘if you do not tell her truths she should hear.’
‘Cheeky pup! What would you know?’ Danny shoots out a hand suddenly and Douglas flinches. But Danny is only grabbing a branch, hauling himself to his feet. He picks up his coat and is gone, for the second time, into the night, not waiting for a word with his wife, who is stepping quietly up the bank, leaving the tour
ists on board to sleep.
Douglas smiles in the dark. Her husband is rude, and a liar. Also possibly a murderer. He suspected as much.
Ruvey Morrow
Walk or boat to the wonderful Mineral Hot Spring ‘Wairoa’ (living waters) two miles above Pipiriki, and drink from this health giving fountain. See Dr. Wolhmann, Government Balneologist’s report on this water. Visit the Houseboat. Splendid Mineral Bath at Pipiriki. Thermal Springs. Also – FISHING, SHOOTING, CANOEING
A. Hatrick & Co. timetable brochure, 1908
WHEN BERT’S FATHER asked did we want a tangi for Pita up at his marae, neither of us had the stomach for it. I had no feeling he was dead; nor did Bert. He said if Pita were drowned and his body stuck under some rock or branches, surely the great flood three days later would have dislodged it. Drowned bodies have a way of appearing with the bloat anyway. Sooner or later, he said, the body would come past and someone would notice. Then there was the matter of the logs and what Bert thought he saw. His eyes are a touch milky these days and he must ask me to read the pigeon post — he hates that — but on the water he has a feeling for what is natural and what not, even if it is no more than blurry shapes. I would trust him to recognise a head from a branch. But was it a dead head, caught against the log, or someone stealing the logs and trying to sneak past Pipiriki unnoticed, or even Pita hiding? That boy could be up to no good as often as not.
They say a mother knows these things, but would I know about Pita? He goes away for months sometimes and I have no feeling is he happy or in trouble or hurt. I have to say that neither of my two children are as close as I would like. They have their troubles and their busy lives and I have mine and not much time for chit-chat in between. I see Stella from time to time. She will come down on the boat when the captain gives her a free passage and we two have a good gossip about life upriver and what everyone on the Houseboat is up to, how the farm is doing — usually poorly, though she is loyal to Danny, as is right and proper.
The strange thing is that the logs never came to light. Now a body might go missing, but three big totaras? Nothing could hide them. Even in the big flood surely they would fetch up above high-flood mark and we would hear. Bert says if they arrived on some farmer’s paddock he would likely get them sawn for a shed or house or sell them himself and ask no questions. I still say we would hear. There are not many secrets don’t come upriver or down with the deckhands or the captains. The post office here is not the only way news gets to Pipiriki.
So we said thanks but taihoa about the tangi and hoped for better news.
SIX MONTHS LATER we were beginning to wonder. Pita loved his river — if not his parents — and would not be away so long unless something bad had happened. I saw Bert throw a bunch of leaves on the water one day. He stood there, downriver of the landing where the big willow leans over. Perhaps he was hiding his fears from me or maybe just being private, but I usually knew where Bert was. From the kitchen door I could just see him standing with the pale new willow leaves weeping down around his shoulders, just a shadow behind that curtain. Very still, he was. I had a feeling he was talking or chanting. Then he raised his arms wide to each side, pointing upriver and down. After a minute or two he turned away and went back to his work down at the landing. Tears were running down my cheeks. I thought then, maybe my boy is drowned; maybe Bert knows.
THAT WOULD BE about the time our Bridie began to show. Oh dearie me, I thought, whatever are we going to do about this? We all loved her by now, and cared for her when we could. Her life was different but not unhappy. But Bridie with a baby was another matter altogether. We treated her like a child herself, for that was her nature now. She learned little things, sometimes a bit of a song. I tried to teach her the use of a spoon but she never was good at it. A cup she could manage. The Sisters taught her to bow her head and say a word before she ate anything, but I doubt she understood why or what she mumbled. She would sit still as a rabbit in church, smiling wide at the candles, looking this way and that at the Sisters and the priest in his fine vestments, and breathing the incense like the rest of us, but nothing of the words went in, any soul could see that.
The thing is, she is not a child but a grown young lady. Washed and brushed she would pass as a fine miss with prospects until you came close and saw the way her eyes wandered. Or watched her walk in that loose, dreamy way that is somehow different from a lady with her wits about her. At times she is downright beautiful. But for all that, I doubt any man at Pipiriki or the mission or at the village across the river would take advantage of her. The Sisters have taken her in and you can slide down to the fires of hell if the Sisters or Father Soulas put in a bad word. Anyroad, all us at Pipiriki House and those at the store and the settlers hereby, we all had a soft spot for our little wanderer. She belonged to us.
I knew there’d be trouble, though, when Angus McPhee found out. He was such a righteous man, all matters black or white to him with no space in between for grey — or even a splash of colour, it seemed to me. Did the man even know how to smile? Those Presbyterians are a dour lot; Father Soulas is right about that.
McPhee never heard that Bridie was with child from any a one of us. First I thought it was Hape Chase, the bullocky, got the news to McPhee, but he swore blue he never said a word. No, it was a group on a coach tour, we heard later, who came up on the Waimarie and stayed the night at Pipiriki House. It must have been a night when Bridie was around. I would let her in the kitchen for a bowl of soup with bread crumbled in it — she was never good at the chewing — and give her face a good wash if I had a spare minute. My guess is they saw her alone on the road with her belly all out in front, her feet bare and her pretty locks in a tangle. Those smart ladies would not turn a hair if they saw one of the Maori girls in such a state, but a white woman was different in their eyes.
So when the tourist coach brought them up to Pike’s Hotel in Raetihi they reported her to the constable there — ‘our duty to see the poor simpleton looked after’, or some such pious nonsense. Then off they went next day in their coach to see the wonders of the mountains and Lake Taupo and the marvellous geysers at Rotorua, which none of us at Pipiriki have ever seen. Nor would want to when we have the superior views of our own river every day of the year. Behind them they left a storm ready to break. In the shape of Angus McPhee.
Tim Naylor said later that it was his duty to report the matter to the father. ‘When a complaint is laid,’ he said, ‘it must be followed up. That is the law.’ But he said it shamefaced. A constable out on the wild edges, like he was, learns to bend the rules or he would have a riot on his hands.
Which is exactly what we all had once McPhee found out that his daughter — who he had not visited once in six months — was ‘defiled’, as he put it.
Down he came from Raetihi, his horse all in a lather, his little mouth writhing from that bristle of red beard.
‘Why have I not been told?’ he shouted, and flung his reins at Bert as if my husband had nothing to do but stand around waiting to serve his needs. ‘Where is the man who has taken advantage of my daughter?’
He could not even wait to come inside or to make a civil greeting before he was shouting for all the tourists within earshot to hear him, casting slurs upon the good name of every man and boy in the settlement. Oh, I was mad as a hornet! If only Mr Hatrick had been on hand to cut him down to size.
‘Where is she?’ he bawled, looking around at the bushes as if she might crawl out.
‘With the good Sisters,’ said I, hoping it might be the truth, and that the mention of the blessed ladies might calm him. But not a bit of it. Mention of the mission seemed to throw him into an even greater rage.
‘I trusted those people!’ he shouted. ‘That nest of Satan. Those foul Papists have defiled her. An innocent!’
He stood at the foot of the grand steps to the House, one hand on the urn with the potted fern, for all the world as if he were delivering some important oratory. The tourists, just back from their nice summer w
alk to the falls, stood listening with interest and beginning to gossip.
Proper or not, I had to stop it, so I gave Bert the nod. My good husband took the man by the arm, quite rough, as he would a drunken deckhand who might make a nuisance of himself in front of the guests, and led him away around to the kitchen door before he could protest. You could always count on a moment’s peace while McPhee got over his surprise at being handled by a ‘native’.
‘Now,’ said Bert to him, once McPhee was safely inside away from gawkers, ‘first, we are mostly good Catholics here so we don’t like any talk against our Sisters or the priest.’
Bert was as angry as me, that was plain. When he squares his shoulders and widens his eyes in that warrior way he can cast fear in even McPhee, I was pleased to see.
‘You lay any accusations on the mission at Hiruharama,’ he growled, ‘and there will be no more supplies up to you from here. Any goods for McPhee might stay and rot in Mr Hatrick’s shed for all any will care down this way.’
That was clever of Bert, for Angus McPhee does not like to be hit in the pocket. For a moment his face went still as he totted the risk, but his fury got the better even of his greed.
‘They must face the consequences of their evil ways,’ he cried. ‘You are no better if you shelter such depravity!’
Depravity! The Sisters and Father Soulas! The man was beyond rational thought. Later, thinking about that unnatural fury, I wondered if it was the man’s own guilt was fuelling his outburst. Maybe people up in Raetihi had heard the news too and were looking askance at a father who would abandon his poor sick daughter to lechers. Perhaps the wretched man’s soiled reputation was more hurtful to him than his daughter’s plight. That might be closer to the bone.
Anyroad, I could see the man would not be appeased and was set to ride down to the mission with his wild ranting.
Landings Page 14