Calling the Gods

by Jack Lasenby

  “What’s that?”

  “It makes better bread than barley and oats. We traded for it in Thorn. It should do well here.”

  “You wait till you taste wheat bread,” Katerin told Ansik. She was easier with us now.

  “We’d better plant half this, grow a crop for more seed before we think of eating it,” said Tobik.

  At the narrow neck of the peninsula, around the point from the Great House, we put up a fence using the taw trees as posts, filling the gap between the rails with stakes and marnoo brush. The cliff the other side of the peninsula would hold the sheep, and if they came down to the beach on our side it wouldn’t matter; we’d have to bring them down to the yards at night anyway.

  “They’ll need somebody to keep an eye on them during the day,” said Petra. “Katerin’s handy with a sling, as well as a bow. And Pelt’s silent with the sheep, but you want to hear him when there’s wild dogs around.”

  “Ruka and Peck will give Katerin a hand, and she can show them what to do,” I decided. “Flick and Tack, too. If they’re any good, they’ll learn from Pelt.”

  Now the sheep were looked after, Petra got Ansik to bring some clay from along the beach, rolled a length of it between his hands, and draped it over a stick.

  “That should bake,” he grunted. He rolled more clay into long, thin sausages, wound them round and round on top of each other, smoothing them inside and out, forming the base and walls of a pot.

  It looked easy till we tried. Jenek laughed at the pot he tried to make himself, saw me looking, and nodded. I knew what he meant: we had done the right thing, taking in Petra.

  To her own surprise and delight, Larish produced a fair-shaped pot.

  “You’ve got the hands for it,” Petra told her.

  He set some pots to dry in the sun, then tried baking them in the fire. Most broke, but he kept on, making a fiercer fire, trying out the clay. One day, he made an oven against the cliff, of stones stuck together with clay. When it had dried, he loaded the upper part with bowls and mugs he and Larish had made, closed it with a flat stone and lit the fire underneath, keeping it going all night and into the next day. The following afternoon, he broke open the oven and took out the pots, some in bits, but others baked hard, a brownish-orange.

  “Petra says what we’ve got to do now,” said Larish, “is to glaze them.”

  Ansik looked at her.

  “You remember it on the pots we had at Hornish, the ones from Lador that held water?”

  With Larish helping, Petra baked bricks and built what he called a kiln, much bigger than the oven. He hopped and swung himself around the shed on his powerful arms, agile, intent.

  “It’s much hotter, the kiln,” Larish said, “so it makes better pots. And Petra’s found sand he thinks will melt and make a glaze.”

  I smiled and held back Enna. She was crawling now, and wanting to look at the pots and bowls, at the kiln, at everything that might burn or hurt. “Careful,” I warned her. “Hot.”

  “Hop.”

  “Hot. Hurty.” I sucked in air as I said it, and Enna tried to copy me, and to crawl back to the hot bowls and pots. As ever, Lorne came to the rescue, piling shells and twigs in a heap, distracting her. She spent hours with the baby, singing, picking the daisies that flowered along the beach, and making chains of them for Enna to tear apart.

  When Pelt brought down the sheep in the evening, and made sure Katerin and the boys had them yarded up, he came to the Great House and checked on Enna. He guarded her, turning her back if she crawled near the fire or towards the water. We watched with astonishment, all of us but Katerin and Petra.

  “We used the sheep dogs to look after the babies in Karo,” said Katerin. She gave her sharp laugh. “Pelt will train Flick and Tack to help with Enna, just as he’s teaching them on the sheep.”

  “We could do with more like Pelt,” I said. “If the village is to survive we need lots of babies.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The Old Man’s Story (4) How Many You Need to Survive

  The first time I saw the chimney of Selene’s Great House, I remembered our mother rowing us ashore each summer at Ross’s Bay, just around from the mouth of the Purangi.

  Mrs Ross’s husband had been a kauri bushman, and she lived alone in the cottage he built around a huge chimney when they were young. She was bent over, walked with a crooked stick, and had a talking cat who told her what the weather was going to be. Best of all she was cross-eyed, and she’d shake hands with each of us in turn while staring in the wrong direction, repeat our names, and say goodness how we’d grown.

  Inside her chimney were benches either side of the fire, what Mum called inglenooks, where we sat and tried to get the cat to talk before running outside to pick Mrs Ross the plums she couldn’t reach in her overgrown orchard, and to fill her a couple of four-gallon tins with water that spouted from a gutter chiselled through a rock ledge up the gully.

  Selene’s family and their inglenook chimney existed, or were going to exist several hundred years into the future, and here they were reminding me of those summers at Mercury Bay in the nineteen-thirties, half a century ago. Richly confused, I murmured:

  Time present and time past

  Are both perhaps present in time future,

  And time future contained in time past.

  I don’t know whether I’ve got more comfort or uncertainty from the Four Quartets; they’ve stood beside me a while now.

  Years after those visits with Mum, I sailed the dinghy out to Ross’s Bay, but the cottage and its inglenook chimney had gone. Sheep grazed and tea-tree huddled in the groin of the hillside where the orchard had been. The only evidence of that vanished life was the stone gutter still spouting water up the gully. I filled my billy and boiled up, thinking. Later I rowed out to the reef and caught a snapper for my tea, rolled myself in the sail and went to sleep under the pohutukawas, listening to the glut and chuck of the tide coming in among the rocks, and dreaming of childhood and that curious thing, time.

  Now, half a century on, I thought again of old Mrs Ross’s lonely cottage. Had there once been a settlement at Purangi, and why had it disappeared, and would that happen to Selene’s village, too?

  In worn tunics and sacks through that first bitter winter, Tobik and Jenek set crayfish pots and caught enough to make it worth keeping a holding tank off the beach. Now and again, they went out to Table Island for the hapuku they called groper, but they were fishing richer waters than the diminished sea of my time: often they went only as far as the reef in the bay and caught blue cod and tarakihi. Occasionally they even caught hapuku at the reef — there to feed on the tarakihi, Jenek thought.

  Whatever they didn’t eat at once, they smoked, dried, or salted in barrels of tawa and kahikatea. They split the staves, chamfered their edges to fit snug, and cut the supplejack to bind the barrels together, all with just axe and knife.

  They even found and restored the old chimney somebody before me had dug out of the cliff with a crowbar. A new smokehouse up on the ledge, and it worked as well as ever. I found it hard to believe that chimney had survived while things more substantial — such as the road and railway bridges — had vanished.

  Some of the rock outcrops around the harbour were in fact discoloured blocks of concrete from my own time, I realised later, but apart from them and the occasional deciduous and exotic trees, as well as the cutting at the foot of the peninsula, and one or two signs of the old road formation around the harbour, the twentieth century had vanished like old Mrs Ross and her inglenook chimney. Apart from the Forestry botanists, who even dreamt of pines disappearing? Some sort of blight or insect attack, perhaps. I thought of the persistence of the native bush.

  Those youngsters worked in all weathers, putting little value on discomfort because they had no choice, but come dark they couldn’t get into their Great House and its snug chimney fast enough. They were limited by the daylight until Ansik chipped and hollowed out a burl of hard rata for Selene. She f
illed it with clay and sand, poured in fat, and stuck a flax wick in the middle, making a slush lamp that smoked and stank. I watched the economy of her least movements, their grace, and thought of Yeats’s, “How can we know the dancer from the dance?”

  “When we have enough whale oil to burn,” Selene said, “we’ll have some real light.”

  With a few of those slush lamps, the rope and net-making now went on inside the Great House at night.

  Spring came, their winter-sown barley was well up, and their oats. I saw the youngsters dig heavy crops of potatoes. Not surprising, when I thought of the eel grass, seaweed, kelp, dung, and fish guts that went into their compost. Just as they were good at fishing, so they understood gardening.

  They’d brought a fair-sized white potato and a yellow one with them. A red-skinned variety from Table Island was only the size of marbles, but Selene reckoned all it needed was good soil for a couple of seasons.

  “If you want to take from the soil, you have to feed it.” She sometimes sounded so old — then I remembered she was passing on information to the younger kids despite the limitations of what the ungodly of my own time call “an oral culture”.

  Their crops, fruit, and vegetables were mainly descendants from today, I thought, and that made me look at sparrows, blackbirds, insects, and other survivors. It wasn’t the nearly clean sweep I’d thought at first.

  Tobik and Jenek explored the country around the inlet and brought home wild pork and goat meat. They turned up with live piglets, kids, and even a couple of pups. The place was looking more like a village and I could tell that’s what Selene wanted, not just the handful who arrived in two boats.

  One or two or a handful can live — and die — on their own, like old Mrs Ross at Purangi, but it makes it easier if there’s enough to share the work around. Years before, I’d read Lévi-Strauss’s description of the Nambikwara people and their poignantly small numbers. Selene seemed to understand intuitively one of his great implications: the fact that you need a fair number if you’re going to survive beyond the life of the individual; she was determined her village was to have a history; she knew survival is only a beginning.

  I wondered if she could conceive of a world in which humanity had become epidemic. Somewhere between my time and Selene’s, catastrophe had taken a hand, and I thought I knew something of what happened, was, is yet to happen.

  “When a community becomes too numerous … it can only endure by secreting enslavement. … Once men begin to feel cramped … they are in danger of … denying one section of the species the right to be considered as human.”

  I could see there was still a bit of ill-feeling between Selene and Larish, something to do with whatever had happened back in Hornish. It lurked under the surface, revealing itself from time to time like a pouring reef that exposes stone fangs as the swell sucks back, then lurks again under a rocking hill of water, a swirl of kelp.

  Larish could work when she wanted to, but didn’t exactly push herself. Selene tried to lead without bossing too much, but Jenek was quick to stir up anyone not pulling their weight. The rest took it well, coming from him, and Selene seemed happy about that.

  Larish was forever trying to attract Jenek, and if he wasn’t around she’d act up to Tobik. I wondered if she’d set them against each other, but both boys were busy, working like grown men. They even seemed to ignore her, quite deliberately at times.

  The family didn’t have a lot of leeway. They now had food in plenty, and they were good at preserving and storing it, but if a crop failed, if one of the older boys was hurt, they’d be in for it. Selene understood that, and Tobik. I was reminded of my own time in the bush, the exhilaration and fragility of living alone, hard up against nature, then I’d think again of the great madness of our time: overpopulation.

  Next time I saw the family, they’d picked up a half-crippled man and his daughter, Petra and Katerin. Where they came from, I never found out, but they’d brought seven sheep and a well-trained heading dog. Those sheep and the extra two pairs of hands changed Selene’s inlet village.

  The family built a post-and-rail fence across the neck of the peninsula, where today the road runs through a deep cutting. By their time it was a shallow gully chocker with tawa, and they used the trees as posts, chopping slots to take the ends of the rails. The horizontal rails themselves were tawa poles, the space between them packed with brush to keep in the sheep.

  Ruka and Peck each carried a sling and a spear, and they spoke often of killing wild dogs. Their own pups, Flick and Tack, now worked the flock with Katerin and Pelt. Each night, they brought the sheep down to the yards, Pelt silent, the pups yelping and looking guilty when he nipped them.

  About that time, Jenek and Tobik came in with two more wild pups, one a dingy brown dog, the other with white feet and a patch on the chest, a handsome bitch. This time the older boys kept them for their hunting.

  Everyone helped fill in the walls at one end of a thatched firewood shelter with clay-daubed tea-tree brush, closing off a good-sized room, with chimney, door, and shuttered window. Larish moved in with Petra, and the family feasted. It was another step towards Selene’s idea of a village.

  Petra didn’t seem to have much to say, leaving it to Larish to do the talking, and got on with what he was good at. They built a kiln, and started making glazed pots: mugs and bowls, and then big storage jars. Larish’s enjoyment of the work, Petra’s company, and her importance as his speaker gave her increasing confidence.

  Their work was so important, they stayed at the village while the rest spent a day sailing the sheep up the inlet to Mallard Creek, and washing them in the fresh water. Petra had sharpened some crude shears, and he showed the others how to clip the wool, then he and Larish got straight on to carding it with rough-toothed wooden paddles, making yarn on drop spindles, and filling baskets with balls of yarn.

  Everyone gave a hand at night, and I heard Lorne scorning the younger boys.

  “You stop spinning as soon as you start talking.”

  “We do not.”

  “You do so. You can’t do more than one thing at a time.”

  “That’s because our tongues aren’t hinged in the middle.”

  A long silence.

  “That’s why our yarn’s more even than yours,” said Ruka, “because we’re not chattering all the time.”

  “See. You’re feeling your tongue to see if it’s got a hinge.”

  “I were not.”

  “You was so.”

  I grinned and tiptoed to my cottage on the seawall. When I looked again, the Great House and the squabbling had vanished.

  One morning, the rest of the family came down the harbour, shouting and laughing with two well-trussed wild sheep in each boat. A ram got away the first night and was killed by wild dogs, but the other three quietened down.

  They brought another three sheep down, and this time Pelt took over and didn’t allow Ruka and Peck to lose any of them. With a fair supply of wool, Larish and Petra now wove blankets, experimenting with goat hair as well. Petra had also rigged up a bigger loom on which they were weaving flax for sails, and he built a larger kiln.

  You’d hardly call it a village yet, but Selene’s family was growing. And when the pohutukawas flowered something happened that made sense of all the effort they’d put into the upside-down tree in their Great House.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  A Dark and Secret Thing

  Larish and Petra were busy at the kiln in their shed one day, the others were all out fishing and hunting, and Lorne and I took the chance to finish off several little jobs while Enna was asleep.

  “We will do the winnowing on the threshing floor,” I said, and watched Lorne’s face fall.

  It had been Tobik’s idea to clear several broad, shallow pans above the beach, fill them with seawater, and let it dry. We had already collected two barrels of salt. Further up, we levelled a large circle, lined it with clay which baked hard in the sun, and made a threshing floor. When
we cut our first crops of oats and barley, we stacked most, but some of the stalks we spread and trampled, keen to try the new harvest. Tobik joined two sticks with a short rope.

  “You hold one, thump the other down on the heads, and the rest of the seeds come out. That’s the idea,” said Tobik, with a serious look, and took a bit of skin off his forehead, his first thump.

  I kept a straight face, but Peck and Ruka rolled spluttering on the ground.

  “That’s the idea.”

  “Hold one and thump your head with the other.”

  Tobik gave them his slow grin.

  We all had the same trouble, and dared not work too close, but got better at using Tobik’s flails. The seeds still mixed with broken bits of straw and husks we had scooped into flax baskets ready to winnow.

  “Do we have to use the flails?” Lorne asked.

  “No flails,” I said, and Lorne skipped. “This breeze will do the work for us.”

  We laid a spare sail on the threshing floor, another downwind, and tossed the oats from a wooden shovel, the heavy seeds pattering on to the first sail, the husks and broken straw drifting on to the other. By the time Enna whimpered, we were pouring the clean seeds into a sack.

  Lorne ran to her as I gathered up the second sail full of chaff for the pigs and goats. I would have hung the sack of oats, but Enna bellowed for me.

  “Here I am.”

  We sorted potatoes that afternoon, tossing out bad ones for the pigs, setting aside cut ones to eat that night. With other patches yet to be dug, the crops from Hornish seed alone would fill two pits, enough to carry us through the hard weather, with plenty over for planting. Jenek was already talking of an early crop next summer.

  “Next time we will grow twice as much,” I told Lorne. “The same with the oats and barley.”

  “Will we eat all that?”

  “Jenek and Tobik eat as much as the rest of us put together, and Peck and Ruka will be eating like them before long. It is good to have plenty on hand; anything left over the pigs will turn into meat.” I smiled at Lorne and thought as I had before how helpful she was, how good with Enna, how unlike her sister.