Telegram Home

by Kirsten McKenzie

  Colin rushed over, ‘And I can help carry the baby,’ he said, trying to lift the basket from her.

  ‘I’m fine,’ Aroha said pulling away.

  ‘No you’re not. Look, I’ll carry the little one for a while. You lead the way, and when we’re further away from the soldiers, you can leave me on the side of the road. It’s not like I can be much worse off than I am now, but I don’t fancy my chances in this forest. There’s nothing to eat to start with and I’d starve to death in the first couple of days.’

  Aroha weighed his words but when Colin took the basket, it was as if he’d extinguished the bands of fire across her shoulders, which decided for her and she didn’t protest as he slung it over his own skinny back. She could let him travel a little way with them, she’d welcome the company, but that meant feeding him too.

  She left him standing with the baby on his back, as she scooped up a handful of the squirming white grubs from the rotting log disturbed by the soldiers. Selecting a plump specimen, she popped the creature into her mouth and swallowed it. Then she held one out to Colin.

  ‘Bolt it down, and you won’t even taste it. They’re tasty cooked but we can’t light a fire now. Something is better than nothing, right?’

  Colin had paled as soon as she’d bitten into the first one but took the slug-like creature from her, and without thinking too much about what he was about to do, threw it into his mouth, clamping his fingers on his nose, and chewing faster than he’d ever chewed before. His body threatened to expel the foreign object, and he had to swallow it back down a second time after. Colin tried not imagining that the grub was inching its way back up from his stomach. So when Aroha offered him another, he couldn’t say no fast enough. Hungry was better than living with worms inside him, eating their way out.

  ‘It’s okay. That one did the job. Thanks.’

  Aroha laughed, shoving the remaining grubs into her mouth and chewed, all with a smile on her face — one which transformed the sadness living in her eyes, into something magical. And in that moment, she was the most beautiful woman in the world. And Colin lost his heart to her.

  The soldiers carried on, leaving an empty road churned into a muddy morass, pockmarked with pools of rain. Winter flexed its fingers as the trio walked along the road’s edge. They weren’t the only ones on the road, but the other travellers gave them no bother.

  Colin couldn’t stop thinking about the white worm she’d fed him, replaying the moment it had been in his mouth, worrying whether he’d chewed it enough to make sure it was dead, or had he had swallowed it, leaving it alive enough to crawl back out. His stomach heaved, and he coughed in response, his damaged lungs refusing to let in the frigid air. He had to stop to catch his breath whilst trying not to disturb the child sleeping in the basket on his back.

  It was all Aroha could do to not seize the baby from him and run. She’d forgotten about his coughing the night before. Had she exposed her child to death once again? Was this boy sick with the white man’s disease? Would he pass his sickness onto her child, killing another one of her babies, leaving her with nothing?

  ‘Are you sick?’ she asked, forcing the words out.

  ‘It’s a just a problem I have with my lungs from when I swallowed too much water after our boat sank. I really am lucky to be alive… although sometimes it’s hard to remember that,’ he laughed. ‘I should be a clerk, sitting in a nice cosy office in Dunedin, by a roaring fire, shuffling paperwork for a fat lawyer or banker. Warden Price offered to help me find a job, and I should have listened to him. This cold isn’t helping any.’

  Aroha released the breath she hadn’t realised she was holding.

  ‘I’ll take you as far as the nearest marae, they’ll be able to point you towards the gold fields, and from there I go south to my people,’ she said, wondering all the time if that was the right choice. Or whether carrying on was a foolhardy decision. Her heart was telling her to go home, that it wasn’t safe here, for anyone. Her brain told her it wasn’t safe anywhere.

  The Tribe

  As they walked, Colin quizzed Aroha about herself and her family. She struggled with her answers — her emotions so raw he didn’t need a translation. Love and loss transcend the language barrier. In comparison, his life was as bland as the tasteless bread he’d been eating on this journey. If he never ate another mouthful of damper, it would be too soon.

  Colin tried to ignore the hunger in his belly and shook his head when Aroha offered him a bite of the remaining mutton chop she’d held back the night before. Even he recognised that the mother needed the food more than he did, given she was eating for two. At this point in time he’d probably eat a handful of the hideous white grubs she’d forced him to swallow that morning, a lifetime ago. His feet screamed at the cold, a cold which tore at the rest of his body. He imagined surviving a winter in this cruel country would be beyond him.

  ‘You need something for those,’ Aroha announced, during a break as he sank to the ground, poking at his hobbled feet, his socks reduced to woollen decorations for his ankles.

  Colin watched in fascination as Aroha settled the dozing baby before stripping the fronds from a cabbage plant tree next to them and began plaiting sections of the strips.

  ‘What are you making?’

  ‘Paraerae,’ she said, not bothering to provide the English translation.

  Colin rolled the word about on his tongue, but the tricky vowels shed no further light on what she was making.

  ‘Sandals,’ Aroha clucked, like exasperated mothers the world over when faced with a foolish child.

  ‘You’re making me sandals?’ he asked incredulously.

  Aroha rolled her eyes, and stripped more fronds from the now half-naked cabbage tree, tearing the fronds into thinner strips to weave a double-plaited sole. Every so often she’d cast a glance over the baby before returning her attention to sandals emerging between her hands.

  The dizzying movement of Aroha’s slender fingers was almost too much to watch, so Colin let his gaze wander over the landscape. The thousand shades of green and brown embraced him — colours as unfamiliar to his life in Wales as the feelings were which threatened to overwhelm him every time he caught Aroha’s eye.

  After what only seemed like minutes, Aroha passed him a pair of woven sandals, just as the baby woke from her nap. So while he pulled on the sturdy footwear she fed the child, angling her body away from him.

  He stretched out his legs to admire the workmanship of the sandals, and after standing, he jumped for joy given the relief they provided from the rough ground — his soft Welsh feet unsuited to running around the countryside barefoot.

  ‘How are they?’ Aroha asked.

  ‘They are amazing. Thank you. Not sure I’d go back to wearing boots after this,’ he joked, bringing a smile to Aroha’s sad eyes.

  ‘Good. Let’s go, I want to be off the road as soon as possible. Can you hear that?’ Aroha said, looking off into the distance.

  Colin cocked his head. He heard nothing but birdcall and the icy wind punishing the high branches above them.

  ‘Soldiers, lots of them. We’ll have to go back into the bush to skirt around them. Trust me,’ she said, patting his hand, her touch sending shivers up his arm.

  With his feet encased in Aroha’s handmade sandals, he agreed. He didn’t know where there were going, but as long as it wasn’t near the soldiers Aroha feared so much, he’d follow her anywhere.

  Colin jumped at every shadow in the rich Waikato forest, his nerves fraught. He was hungry and cold and tired, but at least his feet weren’t being ripped to shreds anymore which was the only high point in the punishing trek Aroha lead them on. Under pain of torture, there was no way he would have been able to find his way out of this labyrinth and he’d probably die of starvation trying. There was food available — an abundance of bird life followed their trail through the trees, chasing the bugs and beetles they disturbed, but Aroha had forbidden any form of fire for fear of being caught by the soldiers, or the o
thers, although she refused to elaborate on who the others were. Her face as dark as the falling light when he pressed her. She’d stopped talking then, her silence as disquieting as the path she was following.

  At one point, Aroha paused beside a giant of a tree, its girth more than double the width of his arms. The bark slashed with horizontal scores, all the way up and around the back. He watched as the girl ran her fingers over the mutilated bark. The marks confused him. If someone had been trying to cut down the giant tree, they’d been going about it the wrong way. And he couldn’t fathom how anyone could have made the cuts so high up.

  ‘What happened to the tree?’

  ‘Gum-diggers,’ Aroha replied. ‘Stupid men who know nothing, including where to find Kauri gum.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For this,’ Aroha said, scuffing the leaf rot away with her foot and scrabbling around in the dirt. She presented Colin with a palm-sized lump of gum. Not the beautiful, polished Kauri gum you’d see set in jewellery or for sale in an antiques shop, but a dirty, crusty yellow rock, far lighter than it looked, and New Zealand’s largest export earner, thousands of tonnes shipped overseas for use as resin.

  Colin examined the rock, and the light caught a fragment of its smooth, golden surface, allowing a glimpse of its true beauty to emerge.

  ‘You can carve it,’ Aroha suggested. ‘That’s what Wiremu did, my husband.’

  Colin nodded. He’d heard about Wiremu’s death at the hands of the Jowls. One reason never to go to Auckland. Colin pocketed the gum, an idea bubbling away. He’d carve it as a gift for Aroha, he used to whittle wood back home. She’d said that the name Aroha meant love in English, so he’d make the piece into a heart — an easy shape to start with.

  Aroha navigated their way through the oppressive forest, disentangling themselves from monster trees and spiky shrubs, flightless birds and the bulging eyes of prehistoric lizards which would haunt Colin’s nightmares.

  ‘Step where I step,’ she’d said.

  And he had, recognising the unmistakable odour of waterlogged ground, not quite the peat bogs of home, but something just as dangerous — impossible ground for an army to cross. And in the last pink blush of dusk they arrived at a Māori settlement.

  Cautious eyes watched them as they stepped through the fortified entrance of the settlement — entrenched parapets with deep ditches on either side, Roman-like in their construction. Aroha held her chin high, to conceal the quivering inside. Here she was, not of the tribe whose land she walked, hoping to throw herself upon their mercy, but with no claim to their help, no history. She only had hope.

  Warriors stood on the parapets, weapons in their hands, assessing whether the unlikely trio posed any threat. Hidden from view were three ancient ships guns, traded years before the troubles started. Also now lost, was the body of the former East India gunner forced to train the warriors in using the guns. The lack of ammunition no obstacle — before their arrival, the women of the village were preparing improvised shells from iron chains and nails and old pound weights they’d collected. Their industriousness hastily concealed from the visitors.

  ‘Kia ora,’ came the voice of an older woman stepping forward, her chin adorned with the traditional moko — a facial tattoo of the Māori.

  Relief washed over Aroha at the sound of the woman’s voice, and she all but fell at her feet, leaving Colin standing awkwardly behind with the baby.

  Moments later, eager hands plucked the babe from the basket, ignoring Colin’s protestations, whilst still more hands helped Aroha up before guiding her to the meeting house, ignoring Colin.

  In her heavy English clothes, Aroha looked more like an interloper than someone who belonged. The other women wore an uneasy mixture of native and English clothing, making them an unusual sight to behold.

  ‘You travel alone?’ they asked.

  Aroha nodded, the weight of her journey falling from her shoulders, and the memory of Colin’s company conveniently forgotten.

  ‘You take a big risk,’ the woman replied.

  ‘I know, but I’m returning to my family.’

  The group murmured their understanding.

  ‘How far do you go?’

  ‘To Taranaki,’ Aroha replied.

  ‘You’re welcome to stay, but trouble comes this way. More soldiers come every day, on land and the river. It would be safer for you to move on as soon as you can, before… before we tire of their demands.’

  Aroha had no knowledge of what the woman spoke of. Wiremu had told her of the warmongering filling the papers — the inflammatory proclamations of the Governor planning the fall of the Kīngitanga. But she had no idea that the soldiers on the edges of the settlement were manning the Queen’s Redoubt, preparing for the army’s attack of inland New Zealand. None of them knew.

  One woman tossed her head towards Colin, who was shuffling his feet in the gathering dark.

  ‘Your husband?’ she asked, her contempt unmistakable.

  ‘A companion,’ Aroha replied, embarrassed that she’d forgotten about the boy. No, a man — a man who’d made her laugh and who had, for the short time they’d been together, made her feel safe.

  ‘He sleeps with you?’

  ‘No, no, just a companion. We haven’t… my husband died,’ she faltered, blushing as she considered what could have been. ‘He’s searching for his brother-’

  ‘A soldier?’ The woman spat.

  ‘No, not a soldier, a miner.’

  ‘Just as bad, the yellow fever infects them all. Turns them feral as they burrow into the earth. We’ve nowhere for him to sleep, he should move on,’ she said, before adding ‘Unless he’s prepared to fight.’

  ‘Please? For one night? Then he just needs directions to the new gold mine, the one the men are travelling to. That’s where his brother will be.’

  The woman beckoned to Colin. The conversation between the women conducted in their native language and Colin looked lost, although it wouldn’t have been hard to understand the general gist of what they said.

  ‘We can stay tonight and eat with them. Tomorrow they’ll show you the way to the nearest mine, and your brother,’ Aroha translated, nodding at the older woman as she spoke, checking that she’d interpreted the woman’s answers correctly.

  Colin almost corrected Aroha then, about his brother, but the moment wasn’t right. He should have just told her in the beginning, that Isaac had died, but he didn’t want it to seem like he was looking for sympathy when she had her own grief to bear. The word mine made him frown; he’d expected to work outside, panning for gold like his brother had, in Bruce Bay. He hadn’t escaped from the prospect of spending a very short life working in the Welsh coal mines only to work down a shaft in New Zealand.

  Despite Colin’s misgivings about the terminology the Māori had used, the heavy atmosphere changed, and other members of the tribe joined them to eat and share tales of their travels around the most welcome of fires. Colin’s sandals were much admired, with Aroha’s fine weaving praised. Someone handed a warm jacket to Colin, who sighed with relief as he donned the jacket, too grateful for its added warmth to wonder how an English overcoat came to be in the tribe’s possession.

  Colin felt his skin prickle, as if someone was staring at him from the darkness. It was more than that, there was a vibe coursing through the women gathered by the fire, and the men who’d joined them. They seemed on edge, as if they too felt the eyes of someone watching them from the dark.

  He tried to shake the feeling off, because for the first time in weeks, he had a full stomach. It wasn’t a bed he slept in, but on woven mats on the floor. Sated and warm, pushing away the niggling doubt that something was wrong, he slept like a king, trusting that the hospitality he’d enjoyed that evening would continue through the night.

  And on the other side of the room, Aroha was experiencing the same relief of a full stomach, a warm bed and a happy baby. But it wasn’t just the food and the warmth which filled her heart, it was the people who s
urrounded her. Her people. As she drifted off into her first full night sleep since the death of her husband, little did she know that this would be the last such sleep she’d experience.

  The Soldier

  The experience of Warden William Price and Annabel Lester on the road was as far removed from that of Colin Lloyd as a pampered house cat was away from an African lion.

  Price had received his orders to travel north to the Waikato. Almost every available soldier called to bolster the defences of the army, ready for an expected attack on Auckland.

  As they moved north, men mustered to his side, and provisions obtained. As with any army, there were enough women travelling on their coattails for Annabel to merge seamlessly with the crowd. Nobody ever asked what had happened in Dunedin between Annabel and the Bishop; she was just one more woman to help with cooking and mending and tending.

  Although they hadn’t journeyed as a couple, Annabel hadn’t attracted any trouble from the men they collected on the way. Price making it explicit to the men that Annabel was off limits.

  The worst of the weather was behind them, but inland the nights were bitterly cold. The roads were not city roads but dirt tracks forged by heavy carts pulled by beasts. They’d eaten more dinners made from the flanks of fallen bullocks than Annabel would care to remember.

  Hot showers, television, libraries and coffee shops were distant memories, ones she tried not to think about. But at night she pined for the ease and simplicity of just ordering a curry — butter chicken with garlic naan, poppadoms and onion bhaji. She’d never bothered learning the recipe for a chicken curry so couldn’t try replicating it. Spices were a foreign word here. She hadn’t been the best of cooks before she’d arrived in New Zealand, and not much had changed.