Calling the Gods

by Jack Lasenby

  The same light air carried us back. Tobik and Jenek had built their frame around the roots, dug out shingle, and slid skidding logs under the trunk.

  “What’s the smell?”

  We sat in a circle around the pots, unwrapped the sacks, and dipped out the dark par soup with scallop and mussel shells, and ate the groper steaks. The par meat was crisp outside, tender inside. Tobik and Jenek gorged on the fried cheeks, spat bones, sucked out the groper eyes.

  “Nothing better,” Tobik gasped.

  “That’s why I can see underwater,” Jenek told Lorne. “All the fish eyes I’ve eaten.”

  “Can he, Selene?”

  By the time we scrubbed the pots, our tree was moving uneasily, the outer end lifting. We pulled down on poles, levering against short logs.

  “Get out of the way,” Jenek yelled. Shingle poured aside as the tree stirred, slid down the skids, rode out, and lay like a whale.

  We rowed, one of us to each oar. The log turned and dragged behind, roots rising high, carved black and white by the severe moon. We made the little beach before the tide turned, anchored boats and log, and Larish and Ansik took first watch.

  “Wake us at once,” mumbled Jenek, and he and Tobik slept. For a while, I kept an eye on Larish sitting with Ansik. I knew he would stay awake.

  I woke and took over. Ansik gave me a hand to move the boats and the tree into deeper water, warmed his cold legs by the fire, then joined the others on the mingi bed. Wrapped in sacks, I chanted whale songs into the moon’s dazzle across the bay. Before low water, I heated the soup and cut more groper steaks.

  The boats swung, pointed out to sea, and I brought them in. The tree turned its length ponderously. We were on our way before light, Lorne, Ruka, and Peck asleep again, our huge tow lunging behind. I would have rowed, but Tobik grunted.

  “Have a rest, Selene. Tide’s doing most of the work.”

  At the inlet, we all gave a hand pulling to make sure our log wasn’t carried up the southern arm; once in the entry, the strong current swept us home while we rested on the oars, looking at the log behind and back at each other, grinning, awed.

  The boys rigged blocks, and by next day had the tree clear of the water. Over several more days, levering, shifting the cradle they’d built to skid over log rollers, they worked it on to the terrace.

  I was beginning to feel anxious, but getting the tree into just the right position couldn’t be hurried; raising its roots high on a ramp of earth and logs took longer still. Jenek and Tobik drove wedges, levered, working persistent, the blocks now anchored to mercy trees on the cliff above. We dug in stout posts for the walls, their circle complete except where the tree lay on its ramp.

  One afternoon as Tobik pulled ropes and Jenek drove a wedge, the tree lurched, slid, and stood upright, the squared end of its trunk resting on the whale’s backbone deep in a hole, the massy tangle of roots holding up the sky. We shouted, secured the trunk with poles from the heavy wall posts, and tamped the hole full, driving soil with thick rammers.

  We pulled down the ramp, carried away basket after basket of sand and dirt. “Remember the wheelbarrows at Hornish?” said Jenek. “I never thought to bring a couple of iron wheels.”

  “I thought about making one out of wood,” Tobik said. “But there’s never enough time.”

  We fixed poles between the wall posts, some cut and fitted — mortise and tenon joints Jenek called them — so the structure became ever stronger. Some poles Larish lashed with split supplejack, knotting it cleverly so the pattern would show inside.

  Then we raised heavy beams and laid them like spokes of a great wheel from the roots to the top of each wall post. Above that, Jenek and Tobik fixed a straight post to what tap root the tote tree had, and from it they fastened angled rafters to the ends of the horizontal beams, sticking well out so the thatch would carry the rain clear of the walls, as Tobik had said.

  One of those rafters slipped, came down, brushed Ansik and sent him toppling, the rest of us screaming. Ansik laughed, but Jenek said, “What if it had hit Selene? We’d better take our time.”

  “We haven’t much,” I told him.

  Tobik and Jenek fitted the light poles called purls between the rafters, and the skeleton of our Great House was complete. That night we ate smoked groper and crayfish.

  Next morning Ruka, Peck, and Lorne handed up bundles of reeds. Jenek and Tobik pinned them tight against each other on the purls and passed the plaited flax through to Larish, who stood on the horizontal beams, knotting and tying from inside. The first double layer of bundled reeds went around the bottom of the circular roof, the next layer overlapping the first by a good half, so each layer was two bundles thick.

  “No climbing on the thatch now. I did once at the old fishing camp, and my father had to re-thatch the holes I made with my feet.” Lorne found that so funny, I had to tell the story again.

  As Tobik and Jenek worked up the roof, each circle of thatch took less time, and they finished the peak with several layers of bundles bent over at the top, their pegs and flax fastenings pushed through for Larish to fix. I looked up at the pattern the reeds made, admired the even crisscrossing of her lashings as Tobik lowered himself through the last gap.

  “If the peak is well-finished, the rest of the roof will shed rain, too,” Jenek called down, imitating old Patrik the thatcher’s voice so we laughed, Larish loudest of all.

  “I wish it would rain,” Ruka said.

  We were standing outside, looking at Jenek lashing a last double bundle of reeds at the peak. A deft twist, he trimmed it with his knife, and there were a whale’s great flukes rising as it dived. My spine thrilled, as I knew it for another sign. We stared at the god as Jenek came down the ladder, followed him inside through the gaps in the unfinished walls, and stared up again. The roots fanned, twisted and bent as if growing around the beams. I looked at the airy spaces between them and the rafters, and thought of what old Kelak had said. That night we feasted and slept under the roof of our Great House.

  “It’s warmer than living under the sails.”

  “It’ll be a lot warmer when we finish the walls.”

  We filled the gaps between the posts with screens of marnoo brush. Halfway up to the point, we had found white clay below the cliff. Mixed to a slurry and daubed into the thick brush, it dried airtight.

  “Once the door and window are closed, and the chimney built, it’ll be like home,” said Peck.

  Outside a gap between two heavy posts, Tobik and Jenek put up two much taller poles, made a framework, and lined it with rocks well above their heads. The chinks between we stuffed with clay, as the boys closed in the slant to the throat of the chimney above. After a few days, I lowered myself carefully, knelt, prayed to the god beneath the tree, and lit a small fire on the hearth, a bigger one the next day, and a bigger one the day after, the clay baking hard as stone.

  From poles across the chimney, we hung pots by their handles, but for most cooking we stood them among the coals. The chimney was wide, and seats built across both sides held us all.

  Winter was bitter now, and I finished patching the children’s tunics and tried to do something with Jenek’s and Tobik’s.

  “You will just have to cut holes for your heads and arms in a couple of sacks,” I said, “and pull them over your tunics, if you’re going to keep warm.”

  They laughed, but that is what they did in the worst weather. They still got wet through, but the woollen cloth of their old tunics under the sacks kept them warm, they said.

  I had thought of asking Larish to keep an eye on the little ones, but knew she would think I was telling her what to do.

  “Don’t worry,” said Ansik, understanding what was concerning me. “I will keep an eye on the children.”

  I would have hugged him, but he might not like that. Besides, it was better to avoid giving Larish any cause for complaint. Ansik was her brother after all, though both he and Lorne kept out of her way.

  Jenek and Tobik spli
t tote planks and pegged them together for the door into the Great House. The inner post stood in a rock-lined hole, its upper end seized in a plaited ring of split supplejack so the post turned and the door opened; a rope from the upper corner to a suspended stone made it swing shut by itself. Ruka and Peck would not stop playing with it.

  And then, as they fitted shutters to the window, I could wait no longer. On the great trunk of the upside-down tree I hung the fire-blackened, ancient knife of Selene from the ashes of Hornish, and under the wooden map of the gods’ journey my waters broke and I gave birth to Ennish’s daughter.

  Chapter Twenty

  The Old Man’s Story (3) The Significance of the Tree

  Time past or time future, mine or theirs, I got used to seeing Selene and her family. I often had to put two and two together, trying to understand what had been going on. That happens with anyone you haven’t run across for a while, but with this lot it was trickier. I did try speaking to them, but the only response I got was from Selene herself, who might pause, look as if she were thinking about something, and go on with whatever she was doing.

  She was keen to make a start on their Great House, as I heard them call it, but Jenek and Tobik insisted they first get all the materials ready. I admired their organising sense, but understood Selene’s reason for wanting it finished.

  Halfway up the steps to my car one morning, I glanced down the channel to see what the traffic was like on the bridge — I was going over to the supermarket — reeled, and grabbed a branch, one of the pohutukawas I’d planted to hold the cliff.

  “Take it easy, you old coot,” I told myself, and took another look.

  Not only was the channel twice as wide, but both the road and rail bridges had disappeared, the long mounds of the approaches, abutments, piers, and all. Gone.

  It took me a dizzying moment to work out that I was in that other time, or their time was in mine. The much bigger channel must be the reason why the inlet hadn’t just kept filling in. I wondered about the current that set down the coast from the north, if it had altered so the bay outside had been dredged and deepened by its vast, continuous force. That might account for the wider channel, but the bridges? I thought of the word my friend Gordon had used: plunge.

  There was such a tidal movement up and down the inlet that many of the sandbanks of my time had vanished. However the changes had occurred, tsunami, earthquake, epidemic, whatever the furious disasters had been, they must have stopped development — that propagandist usage so beloved of mayors and land agents: the spread of housing, suburban roads, the silting up of the harbour, all the consequences of our insane overpopulating.

  Not only that, but the shops and buildings across on the other side had gone, and the spit of sand they’d been built on was now covered with pohutukawas. All our flimsy traces had been wiped out but for two boats sweeping in on the tide, something towing behind them. For a moment I thought Selene’s family had found one of those Maori canoes with a towering stern-piece fretted, scrolled, and pierced by light shattering off the sea.

  After storms in the bush, I’d often seen trees, matais especially, that had come down across a rock or another log and snapped right through. This was a big totara, and it had smashed off below the first branches; at the other end its sprawl of roots lifted high above the water.

  The next time I saw them, that amazing pair Jenek and Tobik had raised the tree till it stood upside down on a whale vertebra they’d buried down a hole. The tree became the centre post for their building, its knuckled roots splaying beams like spokes to the circular wall, as if they’d grown that way. They reminded me of a picture of Paul Bunyan squeezing fistfuls of iron ore and coal so railway lines sprouted between his knuckles.

  Above that, Jenek and Tobik had rigged a high post with rafters angling down all around. It was a powerful, shapely structure, the intricacy of roots at its centre baroque.

  I could hardly believe what they’d managed. They were just kids, really. Jenek would give anything a go; Tobik was more thoughtful, methodical. They were a good pair. Of course, they had the help of that priceless assistant necessity; there was nobody else to do any of it for them. Even so, I looked at the effort they put into towing the totara home and raising it, and wondered at its significance to the family.

  They did a good job of the thatching, topped off with a double bundle of reeds in the shape of a fluking whale diving through the roof. When I was a young joker in the Waikato, I once saw a cocky finish thatching a haystack with a straw device like an animal of some sort, and somebody said, “That’s a bit superstitious, isn’t it?”

  “We always did it at home. The old man said it kept away lightning and witches.”

  “I thought we came out to this country to get away from that superstitious rubbish.”

  I asked the two men what they meant, but neither bothered to reply to a boy.

  Now I heard Peck telling Ruka and Lorne that the roots, the beams, and the spaces between them and the rafters were the map of the whales’ journey.

  “Selene told me so,” Peck finished. I grinned to myself and thought about the sense of purpose and confidence the youngsters had, its maturing effect on the lot of them. But there was something more than that. Something to do with manners.

  Peck and Ruka were as rough and tumble a pair of young boys as any, but careful around Selene, with a fair bit of respect and affection, it seemed. Tobik and Jenek took the trouble to explain things to them, to include them, but didn’t take any nonsense. I thought about it and decided they’d learned how to behave as part of surviving, unlike the children and many of the adults of my own time, who weren’t living hard up against unforgiving nature. Selene’s family gave up much of their childhood for survival, again a sacrifice to Anangke.

  The only one who didn’t fit the general pattern of behaviour in the family was Larish. The boys as well as young Lorne were wary around her because she was inclined to lash out.

  When I saw them again the Great House was finished, and Selene had given birth to a baby girl named Enna after her father, Ennish. It sounded as if he died in a boat, about the time they left Hornish.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Abundance

  Enna,” I said, so the others would know her name. All the journey I had held her inside me making her, as the Great House now held us all, making us a family.

  “Enna,” they all said.

  “Daughter of Ennish.” That was Jenek.

  “What can I hear?”

  “Rain. To welcome Enna.”

  I listened to its rich hush on thatch and sea, and was filled with a sense of abundance. Nine, I thought.

  Ruka and Peck worked their net and brought home fish, mussels, and pars, as well as bright shells, pebbles, and feathers for Enna. Tobik and Jenek brought down bundles of white fibre left from the rotted flax leaves, to make ropes.

  “We cut and laid a fresh lot of flax,” said Jenek. “There’s pig sign up the creek, and we might have heard dogs.”

  Next time they took Ruka and Peck and brought home three live piglets.

  “Selene, we got chased up a tree, me and Ruka. The old sow chased Jenek while Tobik grabbed a piglet. Then she chased Tobik, while Jenek grabbed one. They squealed louder than Enna.”

  “All right,” said Larish. “We can imagine it.”

  “When we climbed down they squealed again, and she chased us all the way to the boat, and Jenek caught another piglet, and she nearly got him that time.

  “That old sow, she swam halfway down the inlet after the boat,” Peck told Lorne. “Better not go outside tonight.” He rolled his eyes. “She’ll be waiting for you, dribbling, and licking her chops.”

  Lorne looked and I shook my head. She leaned against me.

  “Anyway,” Lorne said, “that old sow will be looking for you, not me. You’d better not go outside tonight, Peck.”

  “Not just goats,” said Jenek when he and Tobik brought home a couple of kids. “Milk and cheese. Enna’s bringi
ng us luck.”

  “And goat hair.” Tobik paused and asked, “Does anybody remember how to spin and weave?”

  We turned over the garden, digging in seaweed, kelp, and eel grass, and I thought of the roots of our fruit trees taking hold like ourselves. We put in winter sowings of oats and barley, and planted early potatoes, our own from Hornish, and the little red ones from Table Island. We transplanted spinach and chard seedlings, and soft thistle that grew sweeter than the wild stuff.

  The first time Enna smiled at Ruka, he muttered something and backed away. With Peck, he now hung over her, grinning and nodding, laughing when they got a smile.

  When Jenek and Tobik stole a couple of pups from a wild litter they found under a hollow stump, Ruka and Peck begged for them. Flick and Tack scampered and tumbled after Ruka and Peck; the piglets fattened; the kids grew. Ruka and Peck followed bees to their hive, half-filled a cooking pot with dark marnoo honey, and got well stung.

  “Always put cold water on your stings, and a dab of the honey itself,” I heard Ansik tell them.

  As we sat in the chimney, making staves for barrels, Tobik wove a supplejack pot with a funnel mouth that let crayfish in but would not let them out. When it did not work, he rebuilt it. Baited with fish heads, it caught three crays out at the reef. At once, we made several more.

  “We need a holding tank,” Jenek said when they sailed home, crayfish clacking and bristling all over the bottom of the boat. They lashed together a frame of poles and wove it over with supplejack. Moored off the beach, the door in its top just awash, the tank held the crays we couldn’t eat at once. Ruka and Peck fed them mussels.

  “It makes them taste better.”

  “How do you know?” Lorne asked.

  “At Hornish,” said Peck, “the men said that.” And I wondered again at what the children remembered and forgot.

  With the flax fibres we made twine, twisted it into strands, the strands into ropes. We mended the nets, and began making a new one with a smaller mesh.