The Shark God

by Charles Montgomery

  No thunder. No blinding clouds. No ghosts. Carter’s tale didn’t match up to my own miracle stories at all. It did not seem like proof of anything more than the power of psychology. I wanted to ask him how miracles worked, what demons looked like, how he thought evil and goodness might interact with atoms and molecules in order to change events in the material world. What about the guns that melted into snakes, the helpful crocodiles, the walking sticks that hung in midair? Did he believe these things really had happened or not?

  “Why can’t you just let the stories be?” he asked.

  “Because I would like to know they are true.”

  “Ah,” he said. “You want proof.”

  “I made it rain by blowing on a kastom stone,” I offered, hoping he would see that I was a believer, too. What he saw was my hunger, my childish urgency.

  He sighed. “Look, our knowledge of truth, the truth about that which is life-giving and eternal, it exists beyond the bounds of rationalism. Faith carries us closer, but in the end we can’t describe it. We just don’t have words for it. At the end of the day, we are reduced to telling stories about that mystery. That’s what I know.”

  “But guns turning into snakes…”

  “Did Jesus actually walk on water? My answer would be, yes, he did, in his disciples’ memory of him. He did in their faith experience. The walk on water could not be captured on video or analyzed by a scientist, and yet it was profoundly true for those who witnessed it.”

  The white tasiu refused to be pinned in the magic debate. He drifted between metaphor and an amorphous mysticism. It took many hours of conversation, months of reflection, and the death of our friends to understand his message. What I now think the brother was saying was that stories are containers for spiritual truths. What I think he was saying is that it was the apostles’ faith in such miracles that enabled them to surmount fear and chaos in order to lay the foundations for their church. The miracle was made true because it was believed. But did the miraculous moment lay in history, in imagination, or somewhere in between?

  The Canadian scholar Northrop Frye argued that it was a mistake for biblical scholars to attempt to divine the boundary between historical and mythical truth. Frye, who was a United Church minister, insisted that the key to understanding the Bible was to see it entirely as a work of metaphorical literature. Some parts of the New Testament may be historically accurate, but they are accurate only by accident. The Bible’s writers—none of whom actually met Jesus—were not at all interested in historical reporting because they were tackling the much more important task of imparting a grand metaphor. And that metaphor was the life of their Messiah, who was, as they say, the word made flesh.

  “Jesus is not presented as a historical figure,” wrote Frye, “but as a figure who drops into history from another dimension of reality, and thereby shows what the limitations of the historical perspective are.” The Bible, he concluded, was more true because of its counterhistorical nature.

  Frye could just as easily have applied his theory to Melanesia. If people used myth to express spiritual truths, then it made sense for miracles to be attributed to the tasiu, who embodied everything that Melanesians had come to see as holy. People felt their goodness, their glow. Stories about the tasiu began with observed events, but, as Frye would have it, these were not always enough to convey the force of the holiness that people felt. So the storytellers dramatized the observed moment with symbolism. A lightning strike. A helpful crocodile. Whatever. They did what storytellers have done since the beginning of time: they embellished in order to elevate their formless truths and place their stories in the mythical realm.

  The key to finding God, Frye said, was imagination.

  My great-grandfather would have been appalled by Frye. He insisted that a man had no business serving as a religious teacher if he denied “the plain facts of the Gospel record.” Biblical miracles were rock solid. The incarnation and the resurrection of Jesus were nonnegotiable. But how did Henry Montgomery know these things? Where did his certainty begin? I searched through his writings for answers, and what I found was an infuriating smugness: “Our faith rests on a revelation from above. God has spoken to us, and we have heard His voice and have been assured that it is the voice of God Himself,” he wrote in Life’s Journey, a series of essays published in 1916. In other words, God was true for Henry because he believed, because he had faith. In one essay he personified Faith as a feminine spirit. He gave her a voice. Faith pitied and chided skeptics, reminding them that she was above proof, “but I am more certain to your heart and life because I am seen by better eyes than your bodily eyes. Your soul and spirit have eyes too. That is how you see me and accept my message from God.”

  All this was infuriating, and seemed unfair, too. Henry Montgomery got his proof. He got his miracle, in the form of a personal visitation from the Holy Spirit that Easter morning in his Irish garden. All I wanted was more of the same. I wanted the tasiu to make their walking sticks hang in midair for me. I wanted them to beguile crocodiles. I had not yet considered that my great-grandfather was a teller of mythical stories. I had not yet considered that his miraculous visions, and my own, could be expressions of the soul’s other way of seeing. I was not yet ready to consider the idea on which Frye and the white tasiu likely agreed: the measure of a miracle’s truth was not the accuracy of the event so much as the quality of the faith it inspired.

  Brother Richard said that magic did not count as a miracle unless it led to God. That is why he was so worried about the Melanesian Brotherhood. Faith in the power of the tasiu and their walking sticks was verging on idol worship. People were forgetting that those walking sticks were merely symbolic. Some members of the order had even begun to believe they could direct supernatural power. All this talk of guns turning into snakes was causing them to develop a sense of invulnerability and spiritual pride. It was a trap, and it could only lead to more fear and superstition. What the islanders needed, said the white tasiu, was a new kind of story, one that would lead them closer to the transcendent vision of the New Testament.

  I did not see the tasiu bend bullets or cast out demons. I did not see them turn machine guns into snakes. But I did see something of their power, which was not as I imagined. And I did see the beginning of a story that would carry them through a great darkness and back into the light, a story in which the brotherhood would give up their mana but be utterly reborn. And like the New Testament, like the myth of Bishop Patteson, that story would be about suffering as much as it would be about rebirth.

  I was sitting on the veranda at the Chester Rest House one morning when the MV Temotu appeared like a great white lie in the port. I saw her tie up to one of the cement piers. Then came the Eastern Trader, following like a mongrel after its master. I ran down to swear at their crews. Where the hell had they been? West, they said. When would we be leaving for Santa Cruz?

  “Tomorrow,” said one sailor with a chuckle.

  “Tomorrow, someday—or tomorrow, the day after today?”

  “Tomorrow, tomorrow, of course.”

  I was about to leave when I spotted a burly tasiu climbing over the ship’s rails; it was Clement, the gun brother who had promised to be my source. He was lumbering toward a Toyota Hilux with a white flag mounted on the roof of the cab. The flag had a black cross stitched to it. There were more tasiu inside the truck. It was the disarmament gang.

  “Where are you going?” I demanded.

  “CDC-1,” said Brother Clement. “Criminal activity. We’re on a mission.”

  CDC-1 was part of a giant swath of plantations east of Honiara once run by the foreign-owned Commonwealth Development Corporation. During the tension, the company had evaporated and its Malaitan workers had been run off the island. Now the people who considered themselves to be the traditional owners of the plantation lands were fighting over the spoils.

  “I’m coming with you,” I said.

  “Yes, you are coming!” said Brother Clement, as though he had
planned it all along.

  We stopped at the Sweetie Kwan store, where I bought bread, peanut butter, and sticks of tobacco for everyone. Then we were off: stereo blasting, cigarette smoke pouring from the windows, betel spit flying.

  The driver, who would not tell me his name, threw on a New Caledonian reggae cassette.

  “We will call him Driver X!” said Clement, who sat in the front seat, chewing and toying with his medallion. The necklace was strung with hundreds of tiny dolphin’s teeth. I sat in the backseat, flanked by Brothers Floyd and Nicolas, who sang and giggled and tickled me until I had to slap them. Another brother huddled in the truck’s box. I recognized him as Francis, the white tasiu’s best friend. Francis had soft skin and straight hair, marks of Polynesian, rather than Melanesian, ancestry. He was born in faraway Tikopia. I couldn’t see his eyes through his wraparound sunglasses. He was very quiet. I concluded that he was not so important.

  I wish that I had known then about the fate Brother Francis would meet on the Weather Coast. I wish I had known then that he was the beginning of a new story and the end of my own.

  Driver X threw on a Bob Marley cassette and cranked up the volume. We rocked out of town, past the rusting remains of World War II Quonset huts, past the garbage mountains and the hundreds of betel nut stands, past Jimmy Rasta’s bottle shop and the airport. We crossed the Alligator Creek Bridge, which seemed to have forgotten the battle that had been fought across its span. Grass was beginning to sprout through the concrete.

  We howled like teenagers. We sang along with the music: Let’s get together and feel alright. There was trouble ahead, but we were blameless. It was a road trip. I felt as though we should have been drinking Slurpees spiked with vodka and throwing beer cans at street signs. None of the tasiu was over thirty.

  There was no traffic after Alligator Creek, but sometimes we saw people on the road, hiking with gas jugs or plastic baskets on their heads. Driver X slowed to pick them up, but Brother Clement stopped him.

  “No! Official business! Very important! Very dangerous!” bellowed Clement.

  “Commando unit! Strike force! Bruce Willis!” shouted Floyd.

  “Army! Army!” chanted Nicolas, poking me beneath the ribs and saluting. “Yumi stap insaed long army!”—We’re in the army.

  Brother Francis just smiled and waved at the foot travelers. We didn’t stop for anyone.

  Soon the countryside changed. There was nobody left on the road—which had once been a paved highway but was now disintegrating, clawed by great forests of grass and fern and woody shrubs pushing in from both sides. We passed the bullet-riddled shell of a gas station and later a health clinic, also abandoned. The journey began to feel less festive.

  The next bridge required four-wheel drive. It had been bombed to stop the Malaita Eagles from getting too far out of Honiara, but the bombing had been halfhearted. The bridge had not been destroyed but had simply sagged into the riverbed. The midday air thickened. It dripped with bad memories and a hazy, shapeless malevolence. The brothers stopped singing.

  We approached what looked like a lemonade stand. Its occupant, who wore a camouflage sun hat, stood up, rubbed his eyes, and motioned for us to stop. Clement spoke to him in mumbles, and the man waved us on.

  “Which side is he on?” I asked.

  “This week, he is Gold Ridge,” said Clement.

  A junction in the road and another guard hut. Men leaned against what looked like a giant outhouse, erected in the middle of a side track. Its walls were solid and windowless except for a horizontal slit in one wall, from which a gun barrel pointed. The shack gave off a puff of smoke, and then it lurched forward. The shack was not an outhouse. It was a homemade tank. Its gun barrel shifted and remained trained on our truck as we rolled away again.

  The situation on the plantations was not simple, Clement said. Sometimes the plantation villages fought with each other. Sometimes they fought with a faction based at Gold Ridge, in the hills near the abandoned mine. The previous day, a boy from Matepona, a village just past CDC-1, had been kidnapped by the Gold Ridge militants. The police were still too afraid to cross Alligator Creek, so it was up to the tasiu to perform the rescue.

  We stopped at a clutch of tin-roofed bungalows hopping with children and clucking chickens in order to pick up the boy’s father. He was a weak-looking man with gray hair and glassy eyes. His name was Johnson.

  “Where is Junior? Where is my boy?” he said somewhat rhetorically, since by this point we had established that the Gold Ridge boys had kicked the shit out of Johnson Junior, then taken him back to their base. Why had they kidnapped him? Johnson had no idea. His was a good Christian family. Clement tapped his feet impatiently.

  Johnson, his wife, and his brother hopped in the back of the truck with Brother Francis, who smiled at them but remained silent. We headed east, past another roadblock, past rows and rows of neglected oil palms, their shaggy tops casting mottled shadows on the jungle that had begun to rise, unchecked, beneath them. Bushy vines climbed up the palm trunks, arcing into the sky above the fronds. I once heard someone describe the Solomons as a green desert. Now I understood. Like the shifting sands, the jungle was always creeping closer, seizing on weakness, threatening to bury human industry in suffocating mounds, in an impenetrable, seething desolation of electric green.

  We pulled into a clearing. There was a sign: Tetere Police Post. But there were no police. The lawn was overgrown. A crowd of men waited in the shade of an oak tree.

  “The Gold Ridge boys,” said Brother Clement.

  Our arrival was not a surprise. That was obvious, because the Gold Ridge militants had hidden their guns. (People were careful around the brotherhood. If a tasiu saw your gun, he would insist that you hand it over.)

  The militants shifted nervously, glaring at Johnson like wolves assessing a wounded buck. Their leader was a fat man with silver aviator glasses.

  “Now we will straighten things out,” Clement whispered to me.

  “Welcome, tasiu, welcome,” said the leader. “This is just a family problem. We are sorry to bother you.”

  “Yes, said Johnson, who was slouching deferentially behind Clement. “Just a small problem. I just want my Junior back.”

  “And we want our machine gun back,” snarled the leader.

  “And no more bombing,” said a sinewy young man behind the leader, pausing to spit a great hork of betel into the grass no-man’s-land between us.

  Machine gun? Bombing?

  It was difficult to understand the exchange that followed. The militants were furious, and Johnson was vague. But gradually it became clear that Johnson and his boy were not as meek as they seemed.

  Apparently, a gang from CDC-1 had blocked the road between Gold Ridge and Honiara—roadblocks were a convenient way of extorting cigarettes and petrol from travelers. That was a month ago. The Gold Ridge gang was upset about this, even though they had blocked plenty of roads themselves. They made a retaliatory sweep through the plantations, beating the odd settler and stealing the odd pig. But when they hit Johnson’s compound, Johnson and his Junior fought back mightily, wrestling an SR-88 assault rifle from one of the attackers and sending the Gold Ridge gang running. Then Johnson Junior acquired some explosives and bombed a bridge on the Gold Ridge road. That’s why the Gold Ridge boys had hunted him down, and why he was now bleeding in a shack behind the police station.

  Nobody shouted. Johnson whimpered. At first the militants spoke in hushed, pleading voices. Clement tried to negotiate, but even as the militants deferred (“Thank you, tasiu, yes, tasiu, we are sorry, tasiu”), they grew more agitated and shuffled forward. They hissed like snakes and quivered with quiet outrage. The militants stopped chewing their betel. Clement chewed faster. A drop of red foam boiled at the corner of his mouth. Perspiration beaded on all our faces. The tension was nauseating. I wished I had not come.

  And then Brother Francis stepped forward. He wore a shy half-smile. He pulled off his wraparound sunglasses to reveal t
he eyes of a daydreamer. He did not look at Johnson or at the militants. He gazed at the trampled earth as though looking right through it, then toward the deep green folds of the highlands, then up at the sky, and then he bowed his head. The militants seemed transfixed by his movements, like charmed snakes. The bickering trailed off. Brother Francis spoke softly, and his voice was like a breeze blowing through the yard, rustling through the dry grass, easing the weight of the humid afternoon. I could barely hear him. At first I thought he was reasoning with the militants. But his murmurs were too melodic for that. I realized he was praying when I noticed two dozen other bowed heads. The militants unclenched their fists. The leader removed his aviator glasses. An immense calm fell on us all.

  And that was it. Within minutes, the problem was settled.

  We drove back to Johnson’s house, where his wife and his sister served us great lumps of taro in coconut milk. Johnson beamed. “You know, my boy didn’t blow up the bridge,” he said cheerily. “He just made a little explosion to scare those Gold Ridge boys away.”

  “Hem stret brotha,” said Clement. “But we need the gun.”

  “The gun?” said Johnson, smiling weakly.

  “The gun,” said Clement, rolling a fresh wad of betel around his gums.

  Johnson hummed and hawed. So did his brother and his wife. But they knew the game was up. Finally, someone produced a battered SR-88 assault rifle from inside the house. There was no ammunition. We took the gun with us. The agreement back at the Tetere police post had been for everyone to return the following day. The tasiu would bring Johnson’s gun. The Gold Ridge gang would bring Johnson Junior—alive. There would be an even trade, and then they would all make a picnic together. In fact, when the brothers returned the following day, they picked up Johnson Junior but informed the Gold Ridge boys that they were keeping the SR-88 so they could dispose of it in God’s name. Who could argue with that? The militants didn’t.