Things Bright and Beautiful

by Anbara Salam

And Aru was right, there was something evil.

  There was something dark in that forest and it had crept inside his body. It was wearing his face as a mask. It had used him to kill Marietta, and now it was trying to kill him. His body was trying to burn it out. But only God could burn it out from his soul.

  19

  Jonson rose early to the sound of parrots fussing in the bushes overhanging his porch. They weren’t exactly squawking, so much as singing in poor voices. When he opened his front door, they gathered in a bouquet and fluttered into the sunlight. The sky was an unapologetic blue, so solid and ceramic-looking it seemed as if he could reach out and crack it with the tip of a hammer. He could tell it was going to be a scorcher. Even by 7 a.m., sheets of hot air were rising from the grass.

  When Garolf tapped at the door frame of the kastom bank, Jonson was sitting at his desk, absent-mindedly running the back of his hand over his face, wondering if he needed a shave.

  ‘Good morning,’ Garolf said.

  Jonson rose to shake his hand. ‘Surprised you didn’t send Ephraim,’ he said.

  ‘I need to go to Noia Saruru anyway, Leen has a calf he’s going to sell me.’

  ‘A cow? For what – milk?’ The image of fresh cream spread across scones flashed before Jonson’s eyes.

  Garolf sighed. ‘How am I going to use a calf for milk if its mother is in Noia Saruru? And you think I want to drink the cow’s milk? I thought you were well educated.’ He gestured towards the wooden desk burrowed with wormholes, the notebooks warped and rumpled with humidity.

  ‘Fine,’ Jonson said, snapping his ledger shut. ‘Anyway, don’t you want your employees back? They’re in the nakamal.’

  They walked east through the village to the nakamal. The day was now brewing fierce heat and it pulsed from the earth in waves. Jonson heard the audible plunk of a drop of sweat rolling off the tip of his nose and landing in the dirt.

  Garolf pulled his shirt away from his skin and shook it in billows. ‘Today’s going to be a bad one. There’ll be a storm later.’

  ‘I hope so. Your workers are going to roast otherwise.’

  When Jonson poked his head into the nakamal, he could smell the runaways before he could see them – unwashed human, and soiled baby linens. He was also surprised to see Patro Tarileo perching on the stool. Patro was bouncing the baby up and down in his arms, making whistling noises.

  ‘Those are them?’ Garolf gestured at the bedraggled captives.

  Jonson leant against the door frame. ‘Who else would they be, for goodness’ sake?’

  Garolf looked them up and down. ‘The Reunion is passing soon. Be ready,’ he said. He stared at the baby a beat longer, then walked out of the hut and nudged Fritchard, who was lying in the shade under the nakamal thatch. ‘Get them a bucket of water.’

  Jonson nodded at Patro. ‘Good to see you.’ He looked around the base of the stool to see if Patro had brought any deposits for the kastom bank.

  Patro pulled his thumb out from in between the baby’s fist. ‘The whiteman in Bambayot is sick,’ he said.

  ‘The Pastor?’

  Patro raised his eyebrows in a ‘yes’.

  ‘How sick?’

  ‘Bad sick. He’s got a fever.’

  ‘Has he any medicine?’

  ‘The Pastor’s wife said no to leaf medicine. She asked for you to come quickly.’

  Jonson rubbed his forehead with his knuckles. If the man had malarial fever, and no medicine, he would most likely die. And if he didn’t die now, he would probably die during the next bout, or the next. There wasn’t much he could do, other than take him Atabrine tablets, and hope for the best. Still, if his wife had called for him, it was his duty to go. As an administrative officer, but also as a gentleman.

  He blinked out into the sunlight. ‘When is the Reunion passing?’

  ‘Two, maybe three days,’ Garolf said.

  Jonson gestured back towards his house, and Garolf walked beside him. ‘I’ll join you on the boat. The Pastor in Bambayot has fallen ill.’

  Garolf wrinkled his nose. ‘Not another one. You’ll need your tweezers.’

  Jonson sighed. ‘I think it’s more likely malaria. His wife asked for me to come to help her.’ After a moment he added, ‘Urgently.’

  Garolf raised an eyebrow. ‘Urgent like DeWitt?’

  ‘I think if we’d reached DeWitt levels of urgency, Bule would have said something by now.’

  Jonson had maintained a polite distance from Reginald DeWitt, a paunchy, balding American with a glass eye. When DeWitt turned up at weddings with a copy of Baebol Long Bislama in lieu of a gift, Jonson would hide in the nakamal until he’d given his speech and left. When DeWitt married a thirteen-year-old girl from Wansan, the family made no objections, and Jonson bit his tongue. When DeWitt declared his pregnant wife was carrying the prophet John Frum, Jonson left him to his incarnate messiah, assuming the happy couple would soon be taking their progeny to Tanna where he could be worshipped with the proper adherence. But DeWitt began leading hectic parades up and down the coastal path, adorned with a frangipani crown, and reciting Isaiah 53, over and over. At that point, even his generous bride price wasn’t enough to quell local gossip. His wife was kidnapped by sympathetic locals in Kumuvete, and returned to her aunt and uncle. DeWitt hanged himself from an outcrop below Pilgrim’s Rock, in Central. His body was partially buried under a sparkling pile of guano before anyone found it.

  ‘And are you ready for tonight?’

  Jonson snapped back to attention with difficulty. ‘What’s tonight?’

  Garolf frowned. ‘The hunt! Best eating of the year!’

  ‘Oh, the hunt’s tonight? Damn, and my generator’s out.’

  Garolf threw a damp arm over Jonson’s narrow shoulder. ‘There wouldn’t be any meat left for your stupid cooler once I’m finished, anyway.’ He patted his belly with his free hand.

  They waited in Jonson’s house for the hottest part of the day to pass. Jonson sat in his bed trying to read his latest Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night, until the sweat trickled down his arms and he left moist thumbprints on the paper. He spread a towel over his thin mattress and lay prostrate for an hour, scratching at the drops crawling over his brow. Outside, the three empty petrol canisters on his porch expanded with the heat, pinging and clattering. He closed his eyes and fell into a somnolent daze, conscious of the muggy air against his cracked lips.

  When he felt his own brain was baking in his head, he rose, the room swirling, and knocked on the door frame of the spare room. Completely nude, Garolf was leaning against the window frame, fanning himself with a woven pandan fan usually carried by old ladies on their way to church.

  ‘Swim?’

  Garolf nodded, heavily pulling on his shorts. ‘But –’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Not in the cove – we might scare away the dugongs.’

  Jonson sighed. ‘Stream, then.’

  They trudged through the village, passing villagers napping under trees and dogs sprawled dolefully under hedges. Jonson had left his sandals outside his front door and the soles were scorching, the rubber stiff and tight from the heat. The stream at the top of the village had thinned to a trickle, drawing back to viscous mud around the edges. Jonson crossed into the middle of the stream bed and lay flat on his back, fully clothed. The mud was glutinous and sticky as warm custard. An icy gurgle of water splashed over the top of his head and sprinkled his neck and shoulders. Garolf spread out in the coarse grass under a breadfruit tree and waited his turn.

  ‘Wait –’ Garolf sat up on his elbows.

  Jonson opened his eyes just enough to gaze through his white lashes. ‘Wait for what?’

  ‘Listen! I knew it would rain.’

  Jonson heard the distant grumble of thunder, and smelt the faintly chemical smell of electricity.

  ‘Come on –’ Garolf knelt and offered him his hand.

  Half coated in mud, Jonson squinted up into the hills of Central, where a grey mist zipped thr
ough the forest. Within minutes, it was raining bullets of warm water that splattered crowns of mud in the air. Jonson and Garolf stood gratefully in the downpour until they heard whistles by the shoreline. High up on the verge overlooking the ocean, three teenage boys in tattered shorts were pointing out over the water.

  ‘The dugongs! The storm’s already brought them in, I told you it would,’ said Garolf.

  ‘You said nothing of the sort!’

  Villagers woke from their naps, ventured out from their shelters, and ran through the stream to the shore to watch the hunt. Jonson saw Titus splash past, his T-shirt tucked into the back of his shorts like a diaper. ‘Who’s watching the Tonks?’ he shouted.

  Titus shrugged. ‘I put a namele leaf on the door – the tabu will stop them from getting away.’

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake.’ Jonson tugged Garolf’s arm. ‘No one’s guarding the nakamal.’

  Garolf groaned.

  Jonson jogged down to the nakamal, expecting to find it empty. As he approached, he saw a namele leaf had been nailed into the thatch above the nakamal doorway. But when he put his head through the doorway of the hut, the couple sat up groggily from the benches where they had been dozing.

  ‘They’re still here,’ he said, as Garolf arrived behind him, breathing heavily. ‘We’ll have to take them with us to the hunt.’

  Coughing, Garolf rapped against the door frame. ‘Come out,’ he shouted. First the man, then the woman filed out of the hut, the baby napping against her shoulder. They were limp with sweat, their faces shining. The woman cupped her hand over the baby’s head against the rainfall.

  ‘All right, move along,’ Jonson said, ‘to the coast.’

  The couple stood still, looking deferentially at Garolf.

  Jonson sighed. ‘What’s his name again?’

  Garolf chewed his lip. ‘Probably Nguyen.’

  ‘Nguyen,’ Jonson said, loudly, ‘come along. It’s manatee for lunch.’ Garolf opened his mouth to correct him and Jonson threw up his hands. ‘I know – they’re not the same thing. He’s hardly going to know, is he?’ He pointed at the Vietnamese man, who was wiping raindrops off his brow. Jonson clapped his hands. ‘Go, go!’

  He ushered the couple through the village, watching the twitching face of the sleeping baby bobbing up and down over the woman’s shoulder. They waded through the slimy mud in the rising stream, then down the shingle path that led to Bwatapoa’s grey pebble beach. Hermit crabs disturbed by the rain crawled along the shoreline rocks. A crowd of villagers had gathered by the spit of land at the north of the beach to watch the dugong hunt, and two teenage boys were knee-deep in the water, fussing over Dyson Bule’s dugout canoe.

  In the front of the canoe, Dyson was tightening the vine tied around his spear. His son, Wistly, was crouched in the back, bailing out water with a rusty tunafish can. Dyson nudged the boys away from the canoe with the handle end of his spear, and Wistly paddled the boat through the channels in the reef and out into the deep water.

  Garolf ordered his runaways to the back of the beach where a crop of mango trees framed a boulder. He took a seat a few metres in front of them, in the shelter of a banana palm. Jonson walked down to the shore and waded ankle-deep into the surf, where grey worms were wriggling in the sand. He shielded his eyes from the foggy haze of rain on water, and watched Wistly manoeuvring the canoe around the plane wreck.

  Wistly paddled further north, then lifted his oar and let the boat float. Dyson was crouched at the prow of the canoe, peering into the water. Wistly turned and hissed towards the shore. The boys crowded on the beach shoved each other until silence fell. Dyson stood, and raised his harpoon. He hurled it into the water, losing his balance momentarily. The spear struck something below the surface, the handle bobbing above the waves. Dyson pulled on the rope attached to the catch, then lifted the tail of a dugong from the water. Wistly shuffled forward in the canoe, and together they grappled with the tail, holding the animal down in the churning grey until the tail grew limp.

  From around the lip of the cove, another canoe paddled into view. Jonson didn’t recognize the fisherman, but he was grinning in victory. Trailing behind his canoe was the body of a second dugong. Cheering, the two teenage boys swam out towards the boat to get closer to the victory, only to turn around and swim back to shore again alongside the canoe. In the shallows, the fisherman of the second canoe wrested his spear from the animal’s flank. Jonson stepped back as six men ran forward to lug the dugong out of the shallows and up on to the beach, where they laid its blunt head across a makeshift bridge of flat stones.

  ‘It’s definitely pregnant,’ Jonson shouted to Garolf, scrutinizing the protruding curve of its belly.

  Garolf gave him a thumbs up. ‘How many kilograms?’

  ‘How should I know?’ Jonson yelled. ‘Come see for yourself.’

  Garolf grimaced. ‘I like my meat cooked.’

  The fisherman jumped out of the canoe to a chorus of appreciative whoops. Striding up the beach, he approached the animal and raised his bushknife. He smacked the dugong once across the head. A spurt of blood ran from its tiny eyes and from a white gash in its neck.

  Garolf winced, averting his head.

  ‘They’re going to ask you next,’ Jonson called to him in a sing-song voice.

  Garolf looked around. ‘Where’s Chief Tabi?’

  ‘No idea. Haven’t seen him in weeks.’

  ‘Damn.’

  Sure enough, once the fisherman had made the first cut, a young boy ran up to collect Garolf and then, overcome with shyness, averted his face and giggled. Garolf sighed and walked over to the beast. He straddled the glistening body of the dugong. At six foot long, it wasn’t even as tall as Garolf, but its swollen stomach gave it the bell-shaped heft of a submarine. Its grey hide was scored with nicks and scratches, its dog-like snout crusted with black sand. Garolf put his hand on the mound of its still-squirming belly, and pulled out his hand-knife. He felt for the top of the animal’s ribs, then stuck in his knife between the bones. Its fat was so thick, he barely sliced through the creamy white flesh. Garolf wiped off his hands on his shorts and gestured for the fisherman to continue his work.

  As women gathered round to help carve up the animal, Dyson’s canoe paddled to the shore and he shouted for help. Jonson felt rather sorry for him; after all the ceremony for the first animal everyone had forgotten about Dyson’s catch. A group of teenagers and clapping children ran down to drag Dyson’s dugong to shore.

  Now the air pressure had dropped, Jonson was growing chill from the rain, and he joined Garolf crouching under the banana palm. He turned behind them to inspect the couple and the baby, which was mewling softly. The man had pulled a pile of leaves from a mango tree, and was wiping the baby’s behind and throwing the leaves into the brush.

  When a young girl collected Garolf to attend to the next dugong, he performed a cursory incision and returned, frowning. ‘Second one’s not so fat.’

  ‘Don’t sulk, there’s plenty to go around.’

  Garolf picked at his fingernail. ‘I suppose. And the bulls haven’t even arrived yet,’ he said cheerfully.

  The rain sluiced diluted blood from the two dugongs down the beach, running pink loops between the pebbles. Dyson’s wife, Cynthia, knelt by the larger of the animals and plunged her hands into the cavity, pulling out the white ropes of its intestine on to the beach. Using her bushknife, she cut beneath its ribs, and lifted from the body the quivering sac of the calf. Carrying the jellied bundle down to the water’s edge, she rinsed it in the surf until it leached yellow.

  ‘They should save some for the Tonk,’ Garolf said, gesturing behind him into the bushes, ‘the fat’s good for nursing mothers.’

  Jonson turned to the Vietnamese couple. The man had the baby across his shoulder, and was licking his lips, over and over. As Jonson watched him, he crossed himself. When he glanced at the woman, he realized she must have already been looking at him, since she met his stare directly. Her eyes flicke
d to the squirming caul of the dugong calf, then back to meet his. Her expression was cool, evaluative, her gaze steady.

  ‘I get the feeling she’s lost her appetite,’ he said.

  20

  On one of Aru’s visits to the invalid in Mission House, Bea was busying herself in the kitchen, spooning weevils out of the powdered milk. She heard Aru’s footsteps cross the living room as he left through the front door. Seconds later, there was a knock on the frame.

  Bea approached the door in disbelief. ‘Mr Aru – but please come back in!’

  He took a step away from the front door.

  ‘Mrs Anlon, the Pastor has requested I take over the church duties until he regains his health,’ he said, into his sandals.

  Bea wiped her hands on the sides of her dress. ‘Well, yes, of course, that would be splendid of you.’

  Aru nodded and looked over her shoulder towards Max’s room.

  ‘Would you like to come back in?’ Bea put her hand on the door to open it again.

  ‘No, thank you.’

  Bea dropped her hand. ‘I can’t begin to thank you for visiting the Pastor. I know it brings him great comfort.’

  Aru lingered in the doorway. ‘Will you be attending service on Sunday?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Aru fingered the lintel. ‘And your friend?’

  Bea looked around her hopelessly, thinking of New Dog, before she realized he meant Santra. She laughed. ‘Oh, no. I doubt it.’

  ‘You should bring her,’ Aru said.

  ‘The next time I see her,’ Bea smiled, ‘I’ll ask her to join us.’

  Aru nodded again, and turned to walk back to the village.

  That Sunday, Bea kissed Max on his hot forehead while he struggled and muttered. She collected her fan and her Bible, and took her customary place in church. The service began much as normal. Aru strummed his ukulele on the front right-hand side of the church, accompanied by several rounds of hymns, courtesy of the church singers.

  Then, Sousan was given the honour of distributing the ‘altar wine’ for Communion. Except, of course, there was no wine. Instead, there was a Vietnamese rose-flavoured cordial incrementally watered down with warm rainwater, and passed about in one large plastic beaker. Each villager took a sip from the cup, and, in lieu of bread, helped themselves to a fragment of SAO breakfast crackers from a ‘plate’ of banana leaves.