The Shark God

by Charles Montgomery

  I felt the magic draining away from my journey, felt the miracles of the Nonotongere and Langa Langa Lagoon becoming hollow. These were empty miracles, junk-food miracles. They had left me unsated, always hungry for more. What a fool I had been to hunt for magic glitter, more proof of mana among the Melanesian Brotherhood. The white tasiu’s words returned to me like shouts across the lagoon: The measure of a miracle’s truth was the quality of the faith it inspired. Proof was the very opposite of faith.

  Here, at the end of the world, on the empty edge of things, I felt a sudden and terrible clarity. The miracle for which my great-grandfather waited decades did not contain even a whiff of mana. His god did not bring rain or thunder or wealth when it appeared to him so many years after his return from Melanesia. There was only the briefest moment of light in his Irish garden, and a question—“Lovest thou me?”—which most certainly came from inside the bishop’s own gut. The light and the voice were not proof of his faith but products of it, and yet they most certainly led him closer to the God of Love.

  I know this now, because I have found a conclusion to my own story.

  The last pieces of it arrived one afternoon, six months after I left Nukapu. I was sitting in my office on the far side of the Pacific Ocean, thinking about the day I had joined the tasiu on their mission to rescue Johnson Junior. I was considering Brother Francis, how he had murmured and chuckled and remained very small, so small that I had decided he was barely worth noticing until the moment he stepped forward and radiated something so good and true that the tension was washed from the afternoon and the men with anger and guns were made humble. And then I received the news I had been fearing for months.

  After I left the Solomons in November 2002, the country began to fall deeper and deeper into darkness, despite all the Melanesian Brotherhood’s efforts at disarmament and peacemaking. There was the corruption, of course, and the failed economy, and a general lawlessness. But these were nothing in comparison to the storm of violence that was building on the Weather Coast of Guadalcanal, where the warlord Harold Keke had gone berserk. Keke, the only militant leader not to have signed the peace accord in 2000, knew that his former allies in the Guadalcanal Liberation Front were joining forces with the police and that they intended to catch him, dead or alive. Anger, jealousy, and paranoia—and perhaps the bullet he had received in his skull back in ’99—had pushed him beyond the bounds of sanity. Keke imagined treachery in every face. He had razed villages and murdered dozens of people, including some of his own followers. A wave of refugees poured north from the coast to report the atrocities. One man, who had escaped by trekking thirty miles through the mountains, told a reporter that every house in his village had been burned to the ground and that Keke’s lieutenants had taken three men to the beach, where they were forced to parade naked and were beaten until all their bones were broken. Then the men were decapitated. Others were kidnapped and carried to Keke’s mountain camp, where they were tied up, beaten with sticks, and also dismembered. Heads, arms, and legs were dumped into mass graves like mannequin parts.

  Keke escorted former allies to the altar of his village church, where he demanded that the congregation deliberate on each victim’s loyalty before he cut off their heads. The blood trickled in the unceasing rain, through the soot-blackened mud of incinerated villages on darkness’s darkest coast, barely a mountain away from Honiara.

  In April, a pair of tasiu journeyed to the Weather Coast, bearing a message to Keke from the head of the order, the archbishop of Melanesia. Only one of them returned. The other died after three days of torture. The Melanesian Brotherhood was shaken but still not afraid. Brother Francis, along with five others, set out for the Weather Coast to retrieve the body of their dead comrade. The mission was a last chance to confront the warlord and convince him to return to the light before his fury spilled beyond the coast and infected the rest of the islands. The six brothers left their canoe on a beach near the village of Babanakira and hiked into the dripping jungle to search for Keke’s base.

  It was said that Keke had taken the six tasiu prisoner. It was said that Francis and his companions never stopped praying for their captor. It was true that, directed by the white tasiu, Richard Carter, thousands of Anglicans around the world began to pray, not just for the release of the captive brothers but for the return of Keke and his followers to the way of light.

  People were confident the brotherhood would triumph, as they always had, through their God-given mana. But weeks and months went by. Keke captured five more brothers and two of their novices, and the kidnappings became a wound in the soul of an already weak nation.

  By July, the government had given up. With even the Melanesian Brotherhood failing, it was time for foreigners to come and save Solomon Islanders from themselves. An Australian-led coalition of more than two thousand troops and police landed in Honiara. Keke welcomed the foreigners and invited the new acting police commissioner, an Australian, to meet with him. Keke informed the Australian that his men had already executed Brother Robin Lindsay, second-in-command of the tasiu; and young Brother Patteson Gatu-Young, who had once welcomed me to Tabalia with a song; and quiet Brother Alfred Hilly, who had unlocked the door for me late each night at Chester; and Brother Ini Ini Partabatu, who had confronted the Royal Solomon Islands Police about their beatings and extortion; and Brother Tony Sirihi, who had no parents.

  And Keke had also executed one more: my friend Brother Francis Tofi of the half-smile, of the whispered prayer among the militants, of the calming breeze at the Tetere Police Post.

  I turned from my computer screen to the light of afternoon and watched the buses and bank towers beyond my office window disappear behind the salty haze, and I did not know if I was crying for the dead, for myself, or for something shining and good that once called to me, dared me to believe, and then was gone again. I was swallowed by the useless, helpless urgency of too late, the thought that I had chased it all wrong, known it all wrong, and told it all wrong, too, and it was more than just a story, but now it had blown apart from the inside.

  I laid out my photos and notebooks, pored over my interviews and my scribbled observations of the tasiu, sifted, peered between the lines, searching for an answer to the searing question of Francis’s death. I read the histories again, and my great-grandfather’s diaries, and Campbell and Jung and Frye and even the Bible, and I let the pieces of the story flap in the wind that blew through my open window and scatter themselves across the floor.

  The answer came to me slowly, over days and weeks. The pieces stirred, shifted, and the shattered tower of memory began to reassemble itself, like those films of building demolitions shown in reverse; bricks and slate and window shards coming together again from the rubble, only the story was different than before. It wanted to be seen with new eyes. It wanted a new ending. It wanted to be a story of transformation.

  It began with temptation. Months before Brother Francis’s death, the bishop of Malaita had told me he was worried about the brotherhood. The tasiu were the bridge between the old religion and the new. They represented Melanesians’ ideas of holiness, but they also embodied their belief in mana. The bishop was concerned that all their alleged miracles—not to mention the sickness and death that sometimes befell those who challenged the tasiu—lured them toward the old thinking, the thinking of shamans and sorcerers, and away from a more mystical relationship with God.

  Beyond my grief, which was shapeless and confusing, I resolved to believe that, on this level, the brothers’ deaths were a kind of triumph. They knew Harold Keke was mad. They knew he had already killed dozens of civilians, one government minister, and at least one tasiu. And yet they journeyed alone to the darkest edge of their world. There, far from home and light and love, under the unceasing rain, amid the mud and the squalor, under the gaze of an illiterate psychopath, they had offered themselves up as martyrs.

  Their deaths would mirror those of their heroes, of Bishop Patteson, Stephen Taroaniara, Edwin Nobbs, Fis
her Young, and all the other fallen missionaries of Melanesia—and of Jesus. In one audacious leap, the brothers moved from mana, the hoarding of personal power advocated by the old cosmology, to self-sacrifice, the transcendental love and martyrdom of the new. They had abandoned the God of Power for the God of Love. And in their sacrifice, surely they would become more powerful, more illuminated, than they had been in their lives. That is the way martyrdom works. That is the geography of the hero’s journey.

  Richard Carter had tried to chart the brothers’ mystery for me. He had tried to explain that the stories that surrounded them were people’s attempts to get at the truth of things, truths that were so profound and elusive, so beyond language, that storytellers were forced to fall back on miracles to represent them.

  There is truth in myth; not just allegory, but a hint of the divine we cannot name—I’m sure that’s what the white tasiu meant. If this is so, then imagination is more than the ability to produce fiction. It is the expanse between the shores of historical fact and the truths of the soul. Mythmaking is an expedition to chart the hidden geography between matter and spirit. Miracles do contain truth, though, as Northrop Frye tried to explain, these were truths, above all, of the soul’s relationship with the universe. The story becomes a communion, because the story is the journey.

  It has always been the storyteller’s role to claim the lives of heroes, squeeze them into form, polish them, and adorn them so that they achieve a kind of mythic luminescence—not to turn them into fairy tales, but to allow the ideals they represent to shine more brightly. It is what the missionaries, including my great-grandfather, did for Bishop Patteson: “He died with a smile on his face,” said those who were not there to see Patteson’s last gasp. It is what mythmakers did for Joan of Arc, what Steinbeck did for Zapata, what an entire nation did for John F. Kennedy, sweeping away his sexual adventures, amplifying his speeches. It is what the world is doing now for the Dalai Lama, what we will soon do for Nelson Mandela. Isn’t it my job to do the same for Brother Francis? It is hard, when you are caught in the tide of the moment, to feel otherwise.

  I am close to understanding these things. I am close to understanding what my great-grandfather meant when he implored me to trust the eyes of my soul and my spirit. These are the eyes that see the part of ourselves we call God.

  I experienced three miracles in Melanesia.

  The tempest that fell from the sky above the Nonotongere—that was a gift.

  The vision of the shark boss and his circling shadow in Langa Langa—that was a decision.

  The third miracle would have to be told in order to live.

  I would like to trade my tempest and my circling shadow for another, clearer image of Brother Francis. Return with me now to the Tetere Police Post and the shade of that huge oak tree and the tension that showed in the twitching muscles of the young militants. Return with me to the very moment when Brother Francis stepped forward, removed his wraparound sunglasses, and began to pray. Would it be wrong for me to paint a faint, saintly glow around his head? It would be like the halo that surrounds the moon on a humid night, so faint it would be easy to believe I had imagined it. And the militants, didn’t they remove their sunglasses, too, and didn’t they wipe tears of shame from their eyes? Didn’t the cicadas cease their incessant whirring for the first time in months? Didn’t the wind rise, tear at the grass, and lift the dust so it swirled in a circle around Brother Francis, and weren’t his whispers amplified by it? And weren’t we all lifted? Didn’t we all hover there, for a moment, just above the rustling grasses, at once humbled, helpless, and yet buoyed by holiness? Would it be wrong for me to tell the story that way? Because this would be closer to the truth of things.

  And the miracles did not end on that afternoon.

  Four days after admitting he had killed my friends, Harold Keke released the rest of his hostages and gave himself up. His followers turned in their machine guns. Keke’s enemies among the police force and various militias also handed over hundreds of shotguns, pistols, and SR-88s to the Australian-led intervention force. Even Jimmy Rasta surrendered his arsenal. Within weeks, the country was proclaimed gun-free. It was the beginning of peace. There was dancing on Mendaña Avenue. At Saint Barnabas Cathedral, where the knotted palm leaves from Bishop Patteson’s death shroud had been preserved in a glass case, thousands of islanders gathered to mourn and praise the fallen tasiu.

  Richard Carter, now chaplain to the Melanesian Brotherhood, told the crowd that the tasiu had been instrumental in manifesting the new peace. It was the brothers’ captivity that had precipitated the foreign intervention. It was the influence of the second group of captured brothers that had softened Keke’s heart and encouraged him to surrender. God, said the white tasiu, was pouring out his grace through the martyrs’ deaths. The curse of violence had been lifted from the nation. Meanwhile, the brotherhood itself had been transformed by the ordeal. The tasiu had been humbled and purged of pride. They had been allowed a glimpse through the mystery of things to the promise of the eternal.

  Through their sacrifice, the martyrs had offered their country the greatest gift of all. They had laid the foundations of a new story, one far more potent, far deeper, than tales of bouncing bullets or magic walking sticks, one that reaffirmed the truths they had been telling each other for a century.

  The specifics of the martyrs’ final days were vague. People wanted details. They wanted pieces of their new myth. So the white tasiu shared with the crowd at the cathedral a tale that reflected the order’s holiness. The story had come by e-mail, from a Canadian traveler. It described a tense negotiation between militants at a police post on the plantations east of Honiara; how one quiet tasiu, who seemed at first not at all powerful or charismatic, had stepped forward and brought the two enemy groups together in a whispered prayer. “He radiated something so good and true and bigger than the moment, and the tension was washed from the afternoon, and the men with anger and guns were made humble.” And the people heard Carter’s eulogy and knew the tasiu had led them back into the arms of the God of Love.

  When I read a transcript of the eulogy and recognized my own words in it, I realized that, regardless of what had really happened at the Tetere Police Post, Brother Francis’s myth had begun its journey, and that if we told it well, it would grow through the decades until it was unquestionably true in its transforming power, as grand and shining as The Light of Melanesia. The story itself would be the miracle.

  Epilogue

  Do thou draw the canoe, that it may reach the land; speed my canoe, grandfather, that I may quickly reach the shore whither I am bound. Do thou, Daula, lighten the canoe, that it may quickly gain the land, and rise upon the shore.

  —Florida Islanders’ invocation of a frigate-bird tindalo, in R. H. CODRINGTON, The Melanesians

  By dawn the storm had engulfed Makalom. The scrub oaks groaned in the wind. Palms hissed. The surface of the lagoon vibrated with exploding raindrops. The wall of surf that marked the fringe of the reef had grown, and so had the swell in the open ocean beyond. The sandbar that trailed from my side of the island had been consumed. I stood knee-deep in the water and scanned the blackened swell for boats, but the world had disappeared.

  The fishermen’s sons yelled at me from shore. “Nobody will leave Nukapu until the storm has passed. Nobody will rescue you!” The boys were drenched, grinning. “You will stay on Makalom many, many days, unless!” bellowed the elder of the two above the roar of the storm.

  “Unless what?” I shouted back. I wanted to get as far as I could from Nukapu.

  “Unless yumi padel long Pileni,” shouted the younger. There was a village on Pileni, and a longboat with an outboard engine that could ferry me back to the trading post at Pigeon Island, then on to Santa Cruz.

  “But how will we find Pileni?” I asked. “We can’t even see past the edge of your reef.”

  The boys shifted in the sand, conferred with each other, considered the sky, then clapped their hands. “The
waves will tell us which way to go!”

  We pushed the fisherman’s dugout canoe out into the shallows. I jammed my pack into the bow, and the boys passed me a crude, hand-carved paddle.

  The surf had now wrapped itself around Makalom, rendering even the sheltered lee side treacherous. Each approaching wave sucked the reef plateau almost bare before rising to curl and collapse across the exposed coral. We measured the rhythm of the wave sets.

  Three rollers, then two calves, then a set of seven.

  A lull.

  We charged, paddling for all we were worth across a sheet of foam, cutting diagonally over the collapsing shoulder of the next wave and high along the crevassed edge off the reef; on over the abyss, rising, falling, rising again through the foothills of the Pacific. We left the scant shelter of Makalom’s wind shadow. The first gust hit us like an explosion, transforming the ocean into a confused stampede of chop, whitecaps, and spindrift.