Breaking Connections

by Albert Wendt

  ‘Hey, how come you’re all Hori and Coconuts and ya don’t like kaimoana? It’s our soul food, guys!’ Aaron whipped them.

  ‘Yeah, what kinda Polynesians are ya?’ Daniel joked. Laura waited for the warriors’ reactions.

  Aleki the not-so-brave ventured out first. ‘That’s not fair,’ he attacked Daniel. ‘We’re not country Polynesians – we’re from the city, and it’s not our fault …’

  ‘Not our fault our bloody parents didn’t raise us on kaimoana,’ one of the girls claimed.

  ‘True, but don’ ya wanna give it a try?’ Keith urged.

  ‘I wanna try – and I will try, but don’ expect me to like it jus’ ‘cause I’m Māori,’ Tahu countered.

  ‘Good on ya, Tahu,’ Mere ruled. ‘Some of us don’t like the raw stuff either, even though our tūpuna were cannibals.’

  ‘Okay, but you miss out on the best taste on God’s earth,’ Lemu declared, and moved with Aaron towards the laundry and the seafood.

  ‘There goes a Hamo cannibal,’ Daniel whispered to Laura as they followed.

  ‘I’m not coming,’ Mere declared. ‘I don’t want to see the enlightened cannibals preparing the live kaimoana for the feast.’

  Aaron and Lemu held small scrubbing brushes as they stood over the tub of mussels. ‘Right,’ Aaron said to the warriors who’d gathered round. ‘We have to scrub them clean first.’ With the tap running over the mussels, he leaned forward and scooped one up. With quick, vigorous motions, he scrubbed off the dirt and mud and then pulled out the beard. ‘See, as clean as my face.’ Lemu did the same with the next three mussels.

  ‘I’ll have a go, Uncle,’ Tahu volunteered. Aleki also stepped forward. They were handed the scrubbing brushes, and they moved to the tub.

  ‘Its easy, enjoyable work, guys,’ Aaron encouraged the others. He stepped back with Lemu and, with mounting pleasure, enjoyed the sight of their wards taking turns cleaning the kūtai.

  ‘Right, that’ll be enough mussels for tonight,’ Aaron said, later. ‘You’ve done a great job, guys.’ The proud warriors parted and let him and Lemu back to the tub.

  They watched, fascinated, as Aaron picked up two mussels. He laid one on his left palm, and, in one swift motion, which made them gasp aloud, raised the other in his right hand and brought it down on the first. KKRRAACCK! The smashing sound shot through them like a rifle blast, and they cowered. Laura gritted her teeth, her eyes clenched shut.

  ‘Look, look!’ Aaron declared. Laura and the warriors forced themselves to look. He ripped open the smashed mussel in his left hand, raised one half of the live creature to his mouth and, with an absolutely delighting slurp, sucked it into his mouth. ‘Ka pai, delish!’ he exclaimed.

  ‘Ahh – yuck!’ Tahu and Aleki and a few others cried. Aaron rolled his eyes, scooped up the other half and slurped it into his mouth and down his gullet.

  ‘Shiit, Aaron, you can’t do that!’ Laura heard herself exclaiming.

  ‘Yeah, they’re alive!’ Tahu and Aleki chorused, straightening up and challenging Aaron, who backed off, mockingly. Daniel tried to grab Laura’s hand but she was away, heading back to the house.

  ‘Okay, okay,’ Lemu intervened. He showed them the Swiss army knife in his right hand, and pulled out the main blade with his thumbnail while they watched, hoping he was going to show them a more humane way of treating the kūtai.

  Lemu picked up a mussel, cradled it in his left hand and used the shiny blade to slit it open. Then, grinning and nodding, he laid the mussel open on his palm, inviting them to taste it. Daniel was dying to eat a raw mussel, but he waited and watched the warriors. ‘It the best taste,’ Lemu invited.

  It was one of the girls, Fatu, who first stepped forward, holding out her left hand, and avoiding looking at the opened creature. ‘Good, you brave girl,’ Lemu congratulated her, as he used the blade to push the mussel off the shell into her hand.

  ‘You’re a true wahine toa,’ Aaron encouraged her.

  Fatu closed her eyes, raised the shell to her mouth – as her comrades oohed – and slurped the mussel straight down her throat, without chewing it.

  ‘Right on, girl, right on!’ Aaron cheered.

  Daniel asked Lemu for a mussel, and his father prepared one quickly and handed it to him. Daniel picked the orange, yellowish mussel out of the shell and, dropping it into his mouth, said, ‘Gosh, gosh, it’s great’, as he chewed it, the pulp tasting of the fresh morning sea.

  Despite all this enticement, – Lemu even ate four raw mussels rapidly, one after the other – only Tahu and one other warrior and the remaining girl tasted a mussel each. Tahu boasted that he loved it.

  Then Fatu stepped up and, with obvious passion and delight, gobbled up two more. To the envy of the others, Daniel, Aaron and Lemu declared her ‘a true disciple of Tangaloa.’

  ‘We like them cooked, Koro.’ Tahu, Aleki and their mates tried to excuse themselves.

  Daniel opened the sack of live crayfish in the next tub and emptied them into the tub. The crayfish immediately became a mass of scrambling movement. The warriors crowded round, hugely curious about the red-blue and black spindly creatures which, as they flapped and crawled and gasped, bled a clear jelly-like substance that soon covered their bodies. ‘How many do we need?’ Daniel asked Aaron.

  ‘We gotta have a lot of those,’ Aleki said. ‘I like those, but cooked.’ The others agreed with him.

  ‘Are you going to eat – to eat those – those kōura raw, Koro?’ Tahu asked Lemu, his whole manner exuding distaste.

  ‘The Japanese eat them raw.’ Daniel frightened them further.

  ‘Ahhh, fuck that!’ Fatu, the raw mussel addict, cried, and then clamped her hand over her mouth when she realised what she’d said in front of her elders. ‘Yeah, yuck!’ some of the others chorused.

  ‘We in Samoa not eat them raw.’ Lemu settled their fears.

  ‘I’m going to cook them simply, very simply,’ Aaron said. ‘Five minutes in boiling water until they turn red, out and into our mouths and hungry bellies.’

  ‘We cook the pāua on the barbecue,’ Lemu said. ‘Quick till they open, then we eat them.’

  When they got back to the tent and barbecue with the prepared seafood, Daniel asked Laura if she could take their warriors and set the tables in the tent.

  With the lamps blazing above them and the kaimoana laid out on the tables, they struggled hard to hold at bay their demanding, irresistible hunger, while Lemu said the karakia. C’mon, c’mon, Daniel urged his father silently. ‘Amene,’ Lemu ended, and everyone was into the food.

  With the exception of Fatu, everyone dug into the cooked mussels and crayfish tails, but most of them avoided the cooked pāua. Lemu, Aaron, Paul, Keith and Daniel ravaged the bowls of raw mussels and pāua, which Lemu had sliced into thin slices, eating hunks of fresh bread with it. When they finished that, they turned to the cooked kaimoana. Aaron, Daniel, Paul and Keith, like their warriors, preferred the crayfish tails.

  Lemu focused on the crayfish heads, which the others were ignoring. He broke the heads open, and used his first two fingers to scoop out the rich yellowish material in the centre of the shell and thrust it into mouth. Then, with his fingers again, he cleaned out the insides of the head, sighing and sucking and sighing as he chewed and then licked his fingers. By the time he was wrecking his third head, the powerful musky tangy smell of the insides dominated every other smell in the tent. Then Lemu stopped eating the insides and turned to the legs, which he pulled out one by one. Using his teeth, he bit through the the shells of the legs, pulled out the flesh with his fingers and thrust it into his humming mouth. It was methodical, thorough; a technigue acquired over his lifetime of eating seafood, as Daniel had observed. The others watched, fascinated.

  When Lemu pulled out the large claws, which had thick thorny shells, they waited expectantly. Lemu didn’t hesitate: he thrust one of
the claws between his teeth and, with one massive bite, broke the shell down the middle. Then with another less fierce bite, he crunched the rest of the shell into pieces. He picked away the shell and was left with the succulent sweet flesh. He was just raising this to his mouth when he caught Laura and most of the warriors gazing at him. He extended the meat to Laura, who, without hesitation, accepted it, and started eating. Lemu bit through the second claw, got out the meat and gave it to Tahu. The others began to slip over to him, wanting the same treatment.

  ‘Hey, Koro, how come your teeth can do that?’ Tahu asked.

  Lemu pulled back his lips and, showing his teeth, with white meat caught in between them, said, ‘’Cause I am Samoan, and my teeth is tough from eating anything.’ Tahu and some of the warriors laughed.

  They didn’t hear the car crunching to a halt at their front gate, didn’t hear the loud rapping on the gate and then someone calling, until they stopped laughing at Lemu’s performance and Laura said, ‘Hold it, I think someone’s at the gate.’

  Daniel sprang up and headed to the front. It was odd that Mere was following Daniel; Laura would realise why later. The others started clearing the tables and loading the leftovers, scraps and rubbish into the bins.

  Laura sensed it first, and turned in the direction of the gate: two Pākehā policemen, in full uniforms and helmets, were talking to Daniel and Mere and walking towards the tent. Laura’s attention automatically swung to Aaron, who, though he was washing the dishes with his back to the gate, she sensed was aware of the policemen. Many of the warriors grew silent and, while they worked, kept observing the policemen. Paul and Keith stopped working and moved out to meet their visitors. Laura wasn’t worried, because she saw that Mere was talking amiably. Cherie and Langi and Kepa were now standing in front of the tent. Only Lemu, who was drying the dishes, seemed unaware of what was happening.

  Mere brought the policemen, whose uniforms now shone in the light of the lamps, over to the others, and introduced them to Keith and Paul, then, a few paces later, to Kepa and the women. Laura realised she was tense. Daniel came and stood close to her.

  Mere introduced the policemen. ‘Laura and everyone, these are Sergeant Trevor Dickson and Corporal Greg McCormack.’

  The taller policeman, the sergeant, who had deep wrinkles on his face and grey eyes that kept searching the tent, smiled and said, ‘Good evening, folks; we’re the Waioha Beach police. Welcome to Waioha!’ Laura extended her hand and he shook it, with a powerful grip.

  Some of the children nodded nonchalantly; the others, led by Tahu, kept their eyes on Aaron who turned round and just nodded. On seeing the policemen, Lemu put his wet teatowel down. Nodding politely, he hurried over and bowed to the sergeant, then shook his hand. Aaron moved up and stopped beside Laura.

  ‘We just thought we’d come by and welcome you to our little settlement,’ Sergeant Dickson declared. ‘We should have come yesterday, but we didn’t know you were here until some of your kind neighbours rang and told us, so here we are.’ Grinning, he added, ‘We don’t usually get such large groups of you here,’ – Aaron tensed immediately; Laura could feel it and was frightened by it – ‘but we welcome all types of people in Waioha.’ Laura noticed the bald corporal was now moving round the tent inspecting everything, and her tension mounted. Aaron’s eyes kept following him.

  ‘Thank you for coming to welcome us, Sergeant,’ Mere interrupted him. ‘So far we’ve had a marvellous reception from the nice people of your community who reported our presence to you.’ Still the sergeant made no move to leave, and his corporal continued his search. ‘And please tell your companion there is nothing worth looking for here.’ This time Mere’s voice was commanding, fearless. The sergeant turned to her, and she refused to look away. ‘If you don’t have a search warrant, then tell him to stop,’ Mere ordered.

  ‘This is not a search,’ the sergeant insisted. Laura’s heart sang when she felt Mere’s mana looming above the sergeant, who hesitated and then looked away from her. The corporal stopped his search and started wandering back to the sergeant.

  ‘Looks like you jokers had a good feed of seafood, eh?’ the corporal commented, smiling. ‘We don’t encourage the overfishing of our shellfish …’

  ‘This home belongs to Mister Brent Knowing, doesn’t it?’ The sergeant tested Mere again.

  ‘Yes,’ Aaron interrupted. ‘And when you ring him to confirm that, give him my name: it is Aaron Whairangi. Do you want me to spell it out for you, Sergeant?’

  ‘No, I won’t forget that name,’ the smiling sergeant promised, as he started to move back.

  ‘And, Sergeant Trevor Dickson, I certainly won’t forget you.’ Aaron said.

  Mere, Cherie, Langi and the other adults, with the exception of Aaron, casually closed round the policemen, and accompanied them to the gate.

  ‘Fuck them!’ Aleki snapped. The other warriors erupted similarly.

  ‘Stop, taihoa!’ Aaron halted their defiance. ‘Not here, not openly.’ He didn’t bother to explain what he meant, but they obeyed him, and continued whispering among themselves as they finished

  their chores.

  They heard the crunching of tyres on gravel as the policemen left. Soon the others came back with large bottles of lemonade, which Mere opened and shared out. ‘The bastards nearly spoiled our feast,’ Daniel said.

  ‘They would’ve if they’d come earlier,’ Langi said. The others, including the warriors, continued to voice their condemnation.

  ‘What do you think, Koro?’ Mere asked. ‘I respect your wisdom, Koro.’

  ‘It is over, we leave it and have good holiday,’ Lemu advised.

  ‘You heard our rangatira,’ Mere declared. ‘We leave it and go on enjoying ourselves in this marae called Waioha. It is our marae.’ Lemu raised his glass of lemonade, and everyone drank to Waioha. ‘And my brother, Aaron, you will obey that too,’ Mere instructed.

  Aaron laughed and said, ‘Don’t be silly, sis, I won’t disobey our koro. He provided today’s marvellous feast.’ Laura scrutinised the other adults: they still looked sceptical about Aaron’s declaration of obedience.

  ‘Promise me,’ Mere said. Aaron looked away and nodded.

  ‘Because we all had an exhausting day today, tomorrow is a rest day for just hanging round here and going swimming, if you want to,’ Keith announced. The others concurred.

  21

  The next morning, while they were cooking breakfast, Laura and Daniel within themselves savouring the memories of their night together, Tahu said, ‘Uncle, Uncle Aaron wants you to go with us into Waioha after breakfast.’

  Daniel slid out of himself. ‘Who else is going with us?’ he asked.

  ‘Aleki and Fatu,’ Tahu replied. ‘I think Uncle wants us to meet some of his friends – they have kids my age.’ Because he was still full of Laura and his wild memories, Daniel didn’t consider it an odd reason, and said yes to Tahu.

  During breakfast, while he was eating with Laura and Mere and Kepa, he mentioned it casually, and didn’t catch the slight hesitation in Mere’s eyes. But Laura did, and she asked him why they were going into Waioha.

  ‘Aaron wants me to meet some of his cousins here. He also wants their kids to meet some of ours.’

  ‘But why just you?’ Laura asked. Daniel shrugged his shoulders again. ‘Don’t you think it’d make sense for Mere to meet them too?’ she asked.

  ‘I guess so,’ he replied. He got up and hurried to Aaron, who was sitting at the warriors’ table, eating.

  ‘Hey, bro, I’m sure it’d be great for Mere to meet your mates,’ Daniel said. Laura glimpsed annoyance in Aaron’s stance, in the tensing of his shoulders.

  ‘That’s okay, Dan, it makes sense for our rangatira to meet our Waioha cousins,’ Aaron admitted.

  When they were getting into Aaron’s black truck later, Laura discerned that Kepa wanted to go, and she sugge
sted that to Mere, but Mere just caressed Kepa’s shoulder, once, and slid into the front seat beside Aaron. Daniel slid in after her.

  Tahu, Aleki and Fatu were already in the back seat, feeling privileged they’d been chosen.

  Aaron kept the truck at a steady pace. Daniel was again snared in the wondrous world of Laura and becoming sexually aroused, but, ten minutes or so into their trip, Mere’s insistent silence started edging into his attention.

  Aaron’s cousins’ house was at the end of a gravel road pressed up against the foothills behind the town, shaded, surrounded and screened from view by what Aaron identified for the warriors as kahikatea, rimu, tōtara and other native trees. The wild stand of bush made the property conspicuous in a largely treeless neighbourhood.

  In the tar-sealed driveway was an old Ford Falcon that needed painting, a new Holden truck and a grey Mini Minor. There was no one in view. Aaron stopped the truck near the driveway, and they got out. ‘Wait here,’ Aaron told them.

  He wove his way past the vehicles and turned on to the front veranda, and they saw him knocking on the front door. The door swung back and in the doorway stood a white-haired Māori man, who whooped at seeing Aaron. He flung his arms round Aaron, who also hugged him tightly, then leaned in to hongi him, pushed him back and, gazing at Aaron’s face, said, ‘Eh cuz, ya look jus’ like ya mum.’

  ‘So he does have cousins in Waioha,’ Mere said. The warriors were already moving up the driveway.

  The man’s hollow-cheeked face was stubbled with grey hair, and revealed he had three missing front teeth when he went to greet and hongi Mere and the others. Close up and despite the white hair, Daniel estimated him to be only in his forties. Dressed in a crumpled blue tartan shirt and tight jeans that emphasised his bow legs, he exuded a confidence that he tried to hide as he repeated his name: ‘Name’s Mike, Mike Poutama.’