Things Bright and Beautiful

by Anbara Salam

  Aru and his ‘church singers’ were performing an exorcism.

  Max slunk back to Mission House, an odd prickling on the back of his neck. Surely, as the resident missionary, he should have been consulted. What was he to do? Entering the church like that, in the middle of all the commotion, would only have served to undermine his position. It would only have made it more obvious he hadn’t been invited. Instead, Max reasoned, he could ask Aru about it in private.

  Max sought him out later in the afternoon, and asked him to join him in the vestry. He sat down on the small bench in front of the table, while Aru lingered by the door.

  Max cleared his throat, ‘Forgive me, Mr Aru, but I couldn’t help overhearing the, uh, the disturbance from the church early this morning.’

  ‘Pastor –’ Aru dropped his head, then looked up at him again. ‘Pastor, this is dark praying. It was necessary.’

  A thrill passed through Max’s stomach. ‘Dark praying?’

  ‘Yes, Pastor. For the health of the young women in this village.’ Aru was nodding gently, as if in agreement with himself.

  ‘What –’ Max began, looking off at the corner of the door of the vestry ‘– what makes it “dark” as such?’

  Aru looked at him. ‘We pray to protect against the power of darkness.’

  Max sat back and crossed his legs at his ankles. ‘Do you believe the power of darkness was in Leiwas?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Aru said quietly. ‘It is all around us in the hills. The power of the Devil, and his servant Ukunu. We have to protect the innocent in Jesus from these dangers.’

  Max re-crossed his legs. Aru had something of a literal interpretation of sin, but this was not so unforgivable. ‘Mr Aru,’ Max began, smiling, so he might not seem as if he were rebuking the man. ‘Do you feel that Leiwas is still in danger?’

  ‘No.’ Aru shook his head. ‘For now, she is safe.’

  This answer did not much reassure Max. ‘May I ask?’ He maintained his smile. ‘I would like to know more about this risk. When you –’ he corrected himself hopefully ‘– if you feel, again, that Leiwas – or any other innocents – are in danger, perhaps you and I can talk more about it? Before you pray over them?’

  Aru broke into his small white smile. ‘Of course, Pastor.’

  After Aru had left, Max sat alone in the vestry. Aru was a gentle, kind man. It was undoubtedly part of the effort he had made while there was no missionary in the village. It was his way of trying to help a young woman under his care. Leiwas was sixteen or so. Perhaps it was a misunderstood fear of menstruation or another kind of female ailment. Perhaps pre-wedding jitters; Leiwas was afraid she might be found wanting in some way by her new husband. Max rubbed his fingers over the bristles of his moustache. He smiled to himself, sighing. This was where he could truly make a difference.

  In 1942 Max had accompanied the American troops to a base in Luganville, Espiritu Santo, a rabbit-shaped island in the New Hebrides, so large that the first explorer overenthusiastically declared it to be Australia. On Santo, Max was truly happy. He spent most of his time living with the soldiers, offering them advice and cigarettes, delivering services in the church on Sundays, and spending every other waking moment in the villages around Luganville working with the Australian missionaries to spread his faith. For Max, his faith was like his nationality; an immovable part of himself. The stories from the villages on Santo disturbed and sickened him. The men and women of the New Hebrides he met were truly ashamed of their cannibalism, the ferocity of the Big Nambas. All Max had to do was help the natives he met to understand how to turn their backs on their heathenish practices, and accept the Word of God.

  On Santo, no one had ever questioned his right to be there. Not all the boys came to see him with their problems, but they listened to him, though he was pretty near the same age as most of them. He ran services on Sundays, offered smokes and sympathy to anyone who wanted either, and travelled around the island in an open-backed truck for the rest of the time, visiting men building roads and airstrips. He learnt Bislama, and got a chance to meet the locals there. Even among the white men, he was something of a novelty – being six foot six, with red hair. He was invited into churches, to circumcisions, to pig-killing ceremonies. The top brass were keen on churchmen being there too, so he never had any problems. ‘Important for the morale of the boys,’ they said. It wasn’t just the Japs they were trying to flush out of the South Pacific – it was their lawlessness, their godlessness and, Max understood as time went on, their fearlessness.

  Luganville might have been the biggest city on the island of Espiritu Santo, but everyone called the city and the island by the same name: Santo. Before the war, Luganville hadn’t been much more than a squalid assembly of shacks looking out on to a rough, white-topped sea. But in ’42 when the Americans arrived, Santo was plugged full of money it had never even dreamed of. The Seabees built roads all over the island – great, flat roads. The Americans were young, brash and bored. They established three new hospitals, built Quonset huts that looked surreal nestling between the palm houses of the villagers. They rigged up unreliable electric lights, and ran outdoor cinemas from their generators.

  Santo had a feel to it. A feel that Max only later came to understand was excitement. Santo in the forties was close enough to the fighting on Guadalcanal to feel perpendicular to the action. It had enough tall-necked coconut palms and men with three-stringed guitars to be exotic. And the wealth the boys brought in, it made Max feel good. They built a new pool bar on the waterfront, shared smokes with the locals on the benches in Unity Park. They bought brown braids of tobacco from the market and sold on extra oil and rice. Kids on the street waved as they went by. It was the best three years of his life.

  At the end of the war, the same festive atmosphere continued even as they set about destroying the place. Orders came to trash everything – forklifts, oil, jeeps, cases of untouched tinned peaches. And so the whole lot went into the sea. Men with comically white ghost-shirts painted on their skin spent weeks driving trucks to Million Dollar Point, smashing years’ worth of equipment and supplies down into the waves. Lines of islanders watched on, whooping in amusement at the sudden madness that had overcome the GIs, or making frantic dives for cases of Coca-Cola, or barrels of oil as soon as they hit the water. It was a shameful waste as far as Max was concerned, but it was still kind of fun. Like stomping on your sandcastle after a day at the beach.

  Max was surprised to find himself disappointed the war was over. A lot of the men felt the same way. The lucky ones went home to a hero’s welcome – having spent three years drinking gin and tonic as guests of the British and French Administration. The unlucky ones had been on the outer islands trying to set up insane labour projects, or in New Guinea with the Australians. They turned up on Santo every four months, pock-marked with insect bites and riddled with worms. Their hair grown to their ears, half-baked with malaria, they nervously took in the flickering electric lights, smoked endless cigarettes, and frustrated the hell out of everyone else by draining all the day’s hot water in twenty-minute showers. Max listened to their stories – sleeping in the bush, surrounded by tattooed islanders, worshipping ancestors, cooking with hot stones, wandering around naked with red mats or straw nambas strapped to their groins. The men’s stories were laced with contempt for their peers, their three-year holiday on Champagne Beach, dipping in the Matevulu Blue Hole and frolicking with dolphins. While all the time they sweated themselves half to death in some smoke-hole in the jungle.

  But Max was impressed. These places were among the last serious challenges for a Christian. These people, living in wild, untamed jungle. Eating each other, killing their children, turning to witches and sorcerers for advice and spiritual guidance. The missionaries who had dared to make it that far hadn’t met with a happy fate. There were stories of white people arriving on outer islands and being immediately speared on their boats. In some cases, the missionaries had early successes, gaining converts, witness
ing to scores of people. Later, when those people caught European diseases from the missionaries and died, the villagers traced the cause of their death to their new religion, blamed the missionaries, then killed and ate them. It was exhilarating. Max had no desire to end up in the cooking pot of some bone-nosed island savage, but the idea that the Word was still unheard in these places – not denied, nor ignored, but unheard! That there were Christians who could bring the Good News to untouched communities – there could be no higher purpose.

  Max stood up and crossed to the doorway. He could hear the whine of Aru’s instrument being tuned. ‘Mr Aru,’ he called.

  Aru emerged from behind Othniel and Jinnes’ house, ukulele in hand. But now Max had summoned him, he wasn’t sure what more there was to say. After a moment’s pause, he gave him a thumbs up.

  Aru smiled and waved.

  The tension in Max’s chest relaxed. It was never going to be easy, weaning the natives off the corrupted parts of their faith. But such were the perils of the missionary life. And such were its pleasures.

  3

  ‘What do you think he’ll be like?’ Garolf slugged from his kava shell and walked to the back corner of the nakamal, where he spat on the dirt floor.

  ‘Thin. Little round spectacles. Poor bastard probably spent the whole journey up stopping at each village handing out trousers,’ said Jonson.

  Garolf laughed, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘Worse than Hardwood?’

  ‘At least this one’s a man.’ Jonson passed him the bowl of papaya, and Garolf took the last slice.

  The dinner ching boomed three times at the north of the village, and a chorus of whistles relayed the end of the day to those still at work in the coconut palms. Handknives clattered against stone, the pump squeaked as workers rinsed their hands and feet. As they filed slowly into the meal hall, a noisy brew of chattering voices echoed between the trees; coughs and giggles, a baby crying.

  Garolf stuck his head out of the nakamal door and whistled until a young Vietnamese man wearing jeans and a black T-shirt appeared in the doorway. Garolf pushed the empty bowl into the man’s hands, and he ran off towards the smoking bushkitchen. Garolf sat on the bench and sighed, crossing his hands behind his head. ‘Does this one have a launch?’

  ‘Not according to the LMS.’

  Garolf tutted. ‘Why do they even need more missionaries in Bambayot anyway? They’re all kranki down there.’

  Jonson fingered his empty kava shell. ‘Heaven knows.’

  I. A. M. Jonson was a Christian, but island spirituality confounded him. Superstitions about flesh-eating dwarves, gibbering about demons and devils, about flying sorcerers and magic leaves. And now all coated in a respectable churchgoing varnish. In his first four years on Advent Island, Jonson had endured the reign of two resident missionaries: first Reginald DeWitt, then Marietta Hardwood. He’d humoured the seven crusading missionaries who had travelled the island spreading the Word during his tenure. Three Americans, three Australians, and a Spanish Jesuit who’d caught crookworm and been housed in Jonson’s spare room for two weeks while village girls massaged his feet with coconut oil and picked out the parasites with a pair of tweezers. Jonson imagined Pastor Hanlon would be yet another of those stooped, sunken-looking men with a feathery patch of hair, drab and subtly faded like an old watercolour. Those men with too-large Adam’s apples and unnaturally clean, oversized bony hands with knobbly, chafed knuckles.

  ‘And he’s American?’

  ‘So I’ve heard.’

  ‘An American to save the day. Step in at the last minute? Help you out, huh?’ Garolf nudged Jonson, hard, in the ribs, and Jonson gripped the bench to catch himself from toppling over.

  ‘Very droll.’

  ‘At least it’s another whiteman for you.’ Garolf pulled a squashed, black cigarette from the front pocket of his shirt and lit it with a match. ‘A friend,’ he added, drawing a strand of tobacco from his lower lip.

  ‘A friend. How generous.’

  The nakamal ching struck. Jonson walked to the doorway of the hut and collected a refreshed bowl of papaya slices from the path. He watched as a middle-aged Vietnamese woman climbed the hill to the meal hall, chewing on what was presumably an errant slice of papaya. Jonson wrinkled his nose at the bowl, laying it on the bench and wiping his fingers with his handkerchief.

  ‘How is the health issue progressing?’

  Garolf cleared his throat. ‘Fine.’ He reached for another slice of papaya.

  Jonson raised his eyebrow. ‘Any more, uh, expirations?’

  Garolf sighed. ‘One last week. That’s good. Dying less quickly now.’

  The plantation hosted 133 workers, and also a constant rotation of fevers, coughs and influenza. Garolf hadn’t said the word out loud, but an outbreak of measles had claimed the life of six camp babies since the beginning of the year. Their tiny bodies were fresh bumps in the earth on the far side of the stream. Garolf had initially ordered the victims burned, but his camp manager, Ephraim Bule, had advised him the workers didn’t like that one bit. So instead he ordered white chopsticks from Port Vila, and offered small sacks of rice to the mourning parents.

  ‘Don’t tell the Pastor.’

  Jonson frowned. ‘Whyever would I do that?’

  From outside came the heralding cry of, ‘Whiteman!’

  Jonson looked down the nakamal path at the silhouette of a tall man ascending the hill against the pink glow of the sunset.

  ‘Dr Jonson, I presume,’ Max said, with a smile, as he approached.

  Jonson blinked up at Max’s great bulk. His broad nose was sunburnt and freckled, and his ginger hair was coarse and damp at the temples. He held a pipe between his teeth. Jonson shook his hand. And though his hands were clean, they were not in the least bony.

  ‘How do you do?’ Jonson cleared his throat. ‘It’s not Doctor, it’s only Mister.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Max. ‘Of course.’

  ‘You must be Pastor Hanlon.’

  ‘Please call me Max.’

  ‘I. A. M. Jonson.’

  Jonson was middle-aged, small-boned and short, with the grubby kind of a tan a pale man can only achieve in the tropics. His hair and moustache were the white-fat colour of Stork, and his eyes a diluted blue. The left side of Jonson’s face didn’t cooperate well with his right side, and when he spoke it was from one corner of his mouth.

  ‘This is Mr Garolf Sugarcraven.’ Jonson gestured to Garolf.

  Garolf stood to shake Max’s hand and, even slouched, his head scratched the thatch. His skin was dark brown, and his face was wide with high cheekbones. His black hair was slicked down in waves with coconut oil.

  ‘Ah, Mr Sugarcraven himself! I’ve heard great things about your plantations,’ Max said, although all he had heard was that his plantations processed copra.

  Garolf smiled, prompting two deep dimples either side of his mouth. ‘Thank you. Tomorrow I’ll take you on a tour.’

  ‘Would you care to join us?’ Jonson searched on the shelf under the bench and pulled out a clean shell.

  ‘Thank you, but I never got the hang of kava.’ Max ran his thumb along the strap of his island basket. ‘That numbness – I always feel a bit like I’m about to get a filling.’

  Jonson smirked.

  ‘Food, then?’ Garolf asked.

  Max glanced at his watch. ‘I don’t want to put you out – I know it’s early. Are you gentlemen eating?’

  Garolf fixed him with an incredulous look. ‘You really don’t drink kava, do you? No. We’re not hungry.’ He crossed to the nakamal door and whistled. A bare-chested teenage boy sharpening his bushknife with a leather strap answered with a whistle and ran down to the door.

  ‘Kakae,’ Garolf said.

  The boy nodded and ran to the meal hall.

  ‘How long did it take you to walk?’ Garolf said.

  ‘About ten days,’ Max said.

  Garolf struck another match and revived his cigarette. ‘Did you take the coastal
path?’

  Max’s eyelids fluttered. ‘Is there – is there another route?’

  ‘No,’ Jonson said.

  ‘So,’ Garolf rested his elbows on his knees. ‘Do you still have that kranki priest down there in Bambayot? What’s his name – Aru?’

  Max was startled. ‘He’s not exactly a priest.’

  ‘He owns the store, though?’ Garolf said.

  Max nodded, although ‘store’ was a generous interpretation. Aru’s shop was comprised of three shelves in a sheet-metal shack. His main trade was in slabs of pink soap and wide-toothed, white plastic combs.

  ‘You know –’ Garolf squeezed the end of his cigarette and inhaled the last of the butt ‘– his wife’s a vampire.’

  Max laughed, but Garolf was staring at him evenly.

  Jonson shook his head. ‘Leave the poor man alone, he can’t help it if his priests have vampire ex-wives flying around the forest.’

  Max looked uncertainly between them, unsure who was teasing whom.

  The ching on the path struck, and Garolf gestured Max towards the doorway. From the path, Max retrieved a warm banana-leaf parcel filled with slices of taro. He sat on the bench next to Jonson, and silently offered thanks to God before breaking the taro into chunks with his fingers.

  ‘So. Where was your old missionary, um, place?’ Garolf said.

  ‘My last station?’ Max caught a crumble of taro at the edge of his moustache. ‘I guess one could say I was last on mission in Venezuela. Though I was also in Santo during the war.’

  Garolf raised his eyebrows at Jonson. ‘The war, huh? Me and Jonson would love to hear storyan about the war. Brave Yankee Doodle Dandy helping us out on Santo.’

  Jonson rolled his eyes.

  Max smiled politely, swallowing a chalky mouthful. ‘Did either of you gentlemen have much contact with the former missionary?’

  Garolf scoffed. ‘Hardwood.’

  Max blinked at him before remembering the name stamped into the Bambayot Bibles. ‘Did you know her, Mr Sugarcraven?’