The Shark God

by Charles Montgomery

  David had spent the last three years trying to figure out how to build a hospital wing that the ancestor-worshippers would actually use. He had won the trust and friendship of the pagan chiefs. That’s why he could not let me just wander up the mountain. Not now.

  “Because of the devil priest,” said Geri.

  David smiled the smile of a teenager whose mother had embarrassed him. “A kastom priest has died,” he said. “They will be killing pigs up there, putting on a mortuary feast. All my contacts will be mourning. Nobody is allowed to travel in the district. It’s a matter of respect. That’s one thing.”

  “The other?”

  “Well, you don’t just wander into Kwaio country without the permission of a chief.”

  “Like the Italians did,” said Geri.

  “Who are these Italians?”

  David sighed. The previous month, he said, a party of white men and women had arrived on the mail plane. They said they were doctors and were here to help. They found a guide and headed for the hills. It didn’t go well at all. The doctors didn’t heal anyone, but they did break all kinds of tabus. The worst thing they did was to carry toilet paper into the villages. It was unused, of course, but the unclean association was a screaming affront to the ancestors. The bumbling Italians made it back down to Atoifi, but a mob of angry pagans cut them off en route to the airstrip. The Kwaio wanted compensation. The Italians tried to negotiate. Big mistake. Machetes were drawn. One Italian was sliced pretty badly—he almost lost an arm, said David. Finally, the visitors agreed to patch things up the Kwaio way. They held a compensation ceremony and took the next plane out.

  “You have to understand the pagans are incredibly suspicious of outsiders. They still haven’t gotten over the 1927 massacre.”

  “So what am I going to do?” I asked, simultaneously irritated and vaguely relieved.

  “Well, the next plane should come through in four days. You could stay here and talk to our patients,” David said.

  “We have worship tomorrow,” said Geri hopefully.

  David watched me grimace. “Or you could get out of the district. Leave the area of mourning, steer clear of anywhere the Italians walked. There is a Christian chief down in Sinalagu who might help you. Peter Laetebo. He worked with Roger Keesing back in the sixties.”

  “Sinalagu!” Geri sang out. “The youth group is putting on a worship there tomorrow. You could go with them, ’specially if you paid for their gas.”

  I would have retreated to Honiara the next day if there had been a plane out. I felt crushed by the sodden sky, harassed by the mountains that seemed to want to push the entire mission into the sea. It was all wrong, this place, and also my being here. But the plan was set. I would follow the ghost of William Bell into Sinalagu Harbor, find my heathens, and get the hell out.

  I left Atoifi at dawn in an aluminum runabout loaded with ten scrubbed Christians and one portable karaoke machine. We pushed through the barrier reef and headed south. The heavy sky had pressed the ripples out of the sea. Six black dolphins leapt in the distance. We skirted a series of ragged limestone cliffs that eventually ruptured, providing a passage into a vast, diamond-shaped lagoon. The boatman deposited the Adventist youths at the north end of the lagoon, where coral grew in the shallows like giant clumps of rotting cauliflower. Then we headed for the southern corner of the harbor, where the mountains were higher and steeper. The boatman pointed to a low bluff. “Mr. Bell,” he said. “That’s where they killed him.”

  He cut the outboard engine and lifted it from the water. We poled through the shallows toward a cluster of huts on stilts. Gounabusu. I hopped out and sank to my knees in muck. The boatman went home. The villagers ignored me completely until I found Peter Laetebo, the chief. He was an ancient and vaguely muddled fellow. He had wrapped a dirty yellow dishtowel around his waist like a sarong, and his belly trembled above it like a deflated balloon. He took me to someone’s hut, where we sat on a wooden bench and I tried to explain myself to a rapidly expanding jury. One by one, the village men came in, and I handed out my business card, which read “journalist.” The chief smiled and nodded knowingly. On his right sat a burly young man who wore a thick shell money necklace and a Pearl Jam T-shirt; he had bleached his hair blond. Pearl Jam was silent, but I could tell by the way he nodded he was my ally. Things were going quite well, I thought, until the one-eyed man arrived.

  He said nothing at first. He just gazed at me with that one angry eye while pus oozed from the other. He wore a bandanna around his head and an army fatigue vest. He slapped his thigh with his machete. It looked sharp. He stroked the hairs on his chin.

  “White men are millionaires,” he said in pidgin.

  “Pardon?”

  “I want to know why you stap here.”

  The other men fell silent. I explained myself again and threw in a blurb about promoting tourism or something equally beneficial. I watched the one-eyed man’s fingers tighten around his machete.

  “This is my land. Those gardens up there on the hill belong to mifala. We don’t need white men to come and steal the stories blong mifala. We don’t need another Keesing to make himself rich from our culture.”

  Keesing? How strange, I thought, as blood rushed to my cheeks. The anthropologist had spent two decades mucking about the bush with the pagans. He didn’t get rich, and he was never particularly interested in the Christians down here on the coast. I didn’t say any of these things.

  The one-eyed man held my business card up with both hands, then slowly ripped it in two. We all watched the pieces flutter to the floor. I thought about William Bell seated at his tax-collecting table, and compulsively I stood up, perhaps shaking just a little. This was a Christian mission village. Christians didn’t chop visitors to bits.

  “Um,” I said. “Sorry. Um, there must be a mistake. I must have made a mistake.”

  “Yes! You sorry! You should have asked before coming here. You no ask. Yu mas stap insaed long kanu blong yu and go nao.”

  I had decided that looking at the one-eyed man was a bad idea since I could not keep my gaze from shifting over to that right eye socket, where sometimes a tiny bloodshot sliver of eyeball did appear. I looked instead at the floor, wondering why the chief and the others weren’t helping me. What felt like hours passed before the one-eyed man finally stomped down the stairs and trudged away across the dirt.

  “Everything is fine, mate,” said my ally with the bleached blond hair. He spoke in English with an unmistakable Aussie accent. “I’ll take you into the mountains tomorrow. But now, you should come to my house. Right now.”

  The chief nodded gravely.

  My ally introduced himself as Roni Butala. His house was a tin-and-timber shack on the other side of the village, past the South Seas Evangelical Church. I made myself small on Roni’s veranda and accepted a cup of tea from his mother. Roni called together a few cousins, then disappeared. The cousins remained. Two of them carried long bush knives. One had a bow and arrow.

  “Maybe you should stap inside,” Roni’s mother said nervously.

  An hour later, Roni returned with the one-eyed man, who had adopted a more diplomatic aspect.

  “Everything is fine,” said Roni.

  “You are welcome here,” said the one-eyed man, whose name was Samuel. “Yu savve walkabaot.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  Samuel offered me his hand.

  “Come back inside long house,” Roni’s mother called to me, urgently now.

  I accepted Samuel’s hand. His palm was sticky, like wet tobacco. He shook mine aggressively. He sneered at me, then retreated.

  “We will have to give him some money before you leave,” said Roni.

  “Roni!” squawked the mother from the veranda. “Oh, Roni! Why did you let fren blong yu shake the hand of Samuel? This is bad. Oh, this is bad tumas.”

  “What is she talking about?” I asked Roni. He just rolled his eyes. But I already knew Samuel’s handshake was more than a handshake. Th
ere was a coldness I couldn’t seem to wipe from my palm.

  That night, Peter Laetebo joined Roni and me on the veranda. The chief had put on a button-down business shirt. In the lamplight, I could see his facial tattoos shine beneath his white stubble. They looked like unfinished games of tic-tac-toe. The chief wanted to storian. He had been a pagan priest when he met Keesing, the anthropologist, back in the 1960s, he announced.

  “But you’re a Christian now,” I said.

  “Hem i tru tumas ia,” the chief said, slapping his knee proudly. “When I was a heathen, life was good, but it was expensive. Every time my pikinini got sick, I had to give up money and pigs to the devils…”

  “Ancestors,” said Roni under his breath.

  “One day soniboy blong mi got sick,” said Peter. “Fever, belly-run. I was tired of sacrificing so I brought the boy down to the mission here. The pastor put his hands on soniboy and prayed: not long, two, three hours, nomo. Then the boy woke up and started to cry. I said, ‘Disfala God, hem i tru wan!’”

  Peter had moved his family down to Gounabusu and learned to follow the new tabus. The South Seas Evangelical Church forbade alcohol, tobacco, and betel nut. It forbade any kind of ancestor tribute. Women had to cover their breasts. Those things were a bother. But Christian life helped the chief to save money: he could keep all his pigs for himself, and he didn’t have to spend weeks in isolation after sacrifices. So Peter the pagan priest was now a church elder.

  Peter couldn’t talk for long. His second son was now gravely ill, and the pastor hadn’t been able to help. Peter would be sitting at the boy’s side for the rest of the night.

  “What about you, Roni? Are you a Christian?” I asked when Peter left us.

  Roni looked at his mother and hesitated. “We have church in the morning, mate,” he said. “I’ll take you up the mountain after that.”

  I went to bed—or rather, to my grass mat—and hoped, silently, that Roni would rescind his offer. I longed to leave East Kwaio. There was a diffuse hostility to the place, something beyond the heat, the stickiness, the constant drip and rot, beyond even one-eyed Samuel’s anger. I felt it spreading through my joints like a poisonous ache. I felt it in the damp night air as I lay awake on the floor of Roni’s house. I felt it through the sleepless night, and then I felt it amplified by the sound of a church bell, which began clanging long before dawn.

  My legs and feet had been scratched countless times during my trek across the island. What began as nicks had suddenly developed into spectacular abscesses. Purple blisters spread out under my skin. They were streaked like marble with faint intrusions of pus. An inexplicable boil had risen on my little toe and was threatening to erupt. My head throbbed. What was it I wanted from the pagans? I couldn’t remember. What could they possibly have to say about the spiritual crisis of the Solomons? I couldn’t imagine.

  Roni’s mother greeted me on the veranda. “Oh, no!” she said when she saw me. “Oh, Roni! Mi tellem yu finis for no lettem Samuel for touchim disfala fren blong yu!”

  Roni put a hand on my forehead. “Fever,” he said. “Now you must climb the mountain with me. It will take kastom medicine to fight a curse like this.”

  I wanted to tell Roni that it was not Samuel’s handshake that had made me sick. It was the bad air, the unwashed hands, the mosquitoes, the septic sludge that dribbled into the harbor, the sickening heaviness of the air. It was climate and biology that had got to me, just as it had got to Europeans for centuries. The Australian navals who had charged into the Kwaio bush looking for Bell’s murderers in 1927 experienced the same thing. Many were carried back down to their ship on stretchers, covered in septic ulcers, shivering with malaria, and dripping with diarrhea.

  Just to spite Samuel, we put on clean shirts and attended Sunday mass, which was a show of pure evangelical anarchy. Hands waved. Eyes rolled. The people reassured their god. They shouted that he was the greatest, the mightiest. “Hallelujah!” they wailed. “Hallelujah!”

  Roni and I slipped out midprogram. We followed a trail that zigzagged up the mountainside, through sweet potato gardens, limestone rubble, and fallow patches choking with woody brambles. The slope was steeper than the tin roof of the church. The air was dead calm and cruelly hot. My clothes were soaking wet.

  “You were loud in church this morning,” I said to Roni. “So you are a Christian.”

  “When in Rome,” he said, gazing up into the forest.

  “Come on, Roni, which side are you on?”

  “I am on the side of my ancestors, that’s which side.”

  Roni had grown up in Gounabusu. He was a smart kid. He had won a scholarship to Massey University and spent four years in New Zealand. That’s why his English was so good. The Kiwi girls loved Roni, but he was startled by their kastom. One white girl invited Roni home to meet her parents in the suburbs. When she put her arm around him and told her father, “This is my boyfriend,” Roni screamed and fled. Later, the girl explained to him that in New Zealand it was an honor to be introduced to your girlfriend’s father. Roni told her: “If your father was Kwaio, he would have taken a knife and killed me.”

  Roni had studied plant science and fraternized with the granola crowd. He returned to Malaita as an environmentalist. He also carried a new sense of Kwaio otherness and took to wandering up into the hills, and into the past. He smoked and storied-on with the patriarchs and pagan priests. He grew dreadlocks—not matted like Bob Marley’s but braided as he imagined his ancestors’ had been. (Roni’s dreads were gone now. His mother had finally ordered him to cut them off. She was worried the ancestors would recognize Roni as one of their own and try to influence him.) Now he was helping to rebuild the traditional school that Keesing had once established on the mountainside, a place for the pagans to learn to write down the names of their ancestors, to pass on their kastom, and to study mathematics, so they would know when the Christians were trying to cheat them.

  “So you really are a pagan,” I said.

  “I went to Christian school. I believe in God. I know he is powerful. But if I had to choose,” he said, “I would choose the ancestors.”

  “I don’t understand. If you believe in the Christian God, then you must believe he is more powerful. That’s what the church teaches.”

  “Look. Up there,” he said, pointing to a nearby ridge. Most of the land had been cleared, but a clump of trees had been left on the crest. “Those forests are tabu. That’s where people keep their ancestors. Now imagine you lived here. When you died, your children would take your skull and put it in the kastom hut so your grandchildren could make sacrifices to you, and so you could stay with your own land forever. That’s our kastom. That’s what I want.”

  We pushed on, climbing up into the shadows of the rain forest. Roots splayed out from great tree trunks like webbed feet. Vines trailed overhead. Condensation dripped from ferns. We splashed up a creek bed, past tiny clearings thick with taro and papaya. We climbed into the soft belly of a slow-moving mist. It was cooler there. I forgot my headache, forgot the malevolence of the mountain, didn’t think twice when a face appeared through the leaves, then disappeared with a rush of breath.

  We rounded a bend and stepped into the iron age. The clearing was all blackened palm stumps, smashed limestone, and fresh-churned mud through which pigs rooted vigorously and women dashed, bare breasts swinging. The women ducked into the doorways of thatch huts and watched me from the shadows. I could see the glowing embers of their tin pipes. The face from the mist appeared at the top of the clearing, a teenage boy in soccer shorts, now wielding a machete the length of his torso. Beneath him, sitting on a white rock, cross-legged, stoking a pipe and smiling like a garden gnome, was Roni’s friend Diakake Doaka, who was introduced as chief but may have been more of a priest, and who liked to be called Jack. He had the same worn fishing hat as Henry Fonda in On Golden Pond. Jack may have been an eloquent orator in the Kwaio tongue, but he had an even worse grasp of Solomons pidgin than I. Much of what I pass on her
e is Roni’s translation of our conversation.

  Jack was pleased to see Roni. He was particularly relieved to see me. He told me he had had a dream about me the previous night. “The grandfathers told me you were not welcome in Gounabusu,” he said. “You must never sleep there again. The Christians will try to poison you.”

  Jack seemed gratified when I told him that I was ill and that I was keen to see the kastom doctor Roni had promised me.

  “Soon,” said Jack with a satisfied chuckle. “The lamo is on his way.”

  In his book Kwaio Religion, Keesing wrote that the Kwaio worldview is reflected in the social geography of their settlements. The men are literally on top. Jack’s village matched Keesing’s description. The highest point in the village was dominated by the priest’s hut, where sacred things were kept. (There were skulls inside, but I didn’t see them. Being sullied by my time in Gounabusu, I wasn’t allowed to so much as peek in the doorway.) It was a quaint cottage, the only one in the village surrounded by plants and a bamboo fence. Next down the slope was the unmarried men’s clubhouse. This was my favorite: a fort raised on stilts six feet off the ground that looked like the kind of playhouse an investment banker might build for his kids. It had a neat pitched roof and a timber floor, on which were scattered pieces of a radio. (A functioning radio would have been useless anyway, because the price of batteries had tripled since the tension began.)

  In the middle of the village were a couple of communal huts, where women cooked and children rolled in the dirt. Smoke rose from one thatch roof like steam from a wet lawn. The communal huts had special rooms just for pigs. “Our pik-piks are important,” said Jack. “We love them almost as much as our sons. No good suppose somebody steal ’em.” Farther downhill were the women’s communal sleeping huts, which were austere. At the bottom corner of the village, where all the mud and pig piss eventually trickled, was a tiny hovel, not much bigger than a doghouse. A shy girl peeked out from behind. I tried not to gawk at her. This was the place where women waited out their monthly menstruation time.