by G. W. Kent
But Kella was different. He was neither wholly a Lau man nor yet a white lackey. He occupied a strange, undefinable middle area and so was unpredictable. If Kella decided to come looking for Pazabosi, he would surely find him. So be it. Pazabosi was ready for him.
Two ancient bushwomen emerged from one of the larger huts in the village, shepherding before them three beautiful young Sikaiana women in their late teens. The girls were naked, except for brief thongs of banana fibre between their legs. True to the traditions of their island they were lovely almost beyond belief – high-breasted and slim-legged.
They were Polynesians, their smooth skins a burnished dark gold. Their lustrous dark hair had been brushed to a high sheen and fell luxuriantly to their shoulders. When they smiled respectfully at the old chieftain, they revealed perfect, gleaming white teeth.
All the torments of sexual passion had long since departed Pazabosi but he returned the smiles of the young women. Sikaiana girls from their outlying atoll north-east of Malaita were reputed second in comeliness only to the extroverted women of New Georgia in the Western Solomons. For Pazabosi, the Sikaianans possessed the additional advantage of belonging to a clan committed to his movement. Their island leader had been perfectly happy to send three of his most prized practitioners in the art of love on the long voyage across the seas, to the Malaitan bush.
Pazabosi nodded his satisfaction and stood up. ‘Come.’ He instructed the giggling and acquiescent women. ‘I will show you where you must go.’ He paused and added drily, ‘I’m sure you already know what to do!’
12
COCONUT BOSS
As the sun appeared over the horizon, Kella beached his canoe on the shore of the bay of John Deacon’s copra plantation. He dragged the canoe up the sand and then walked along the footpath between the coconut palms towards the Australian’s house.
Green-grey clover, planted to keep down quick-growing weeds, spread densely between the palms. Kella flexed his shoulder gingerly. It was still sore but mobile enough for his needs.
He noticed with approval that the plantation was still well maintained. Deacon was a harsh and unforgiving man but a good coconut boss. Hundreds of acres of straight grey trunks, thirty feet apart, admitted the same amount of sun everywhere.
At the tops of the trees, attaining a height of sixty feet, were the massive coconuts, half-hidden among great palm fronds. The large leaves that had fallen to the ground had already been swept into piles, ready for burning.
Hearing the approach of the police sergeant, Deacon came limping out of his wooden bungalow in a clearing.
‘No appointment,’ he chided. ‘Jeez, you’re growing slack, Kella.’
The sergeant grinned, aware of the whisky on the other man’s breath. It was widely known that visitors to the plantation were discouraged. Even touring government officers had to use the radio network in advance if they wanted to drop by.
‘How do you know I’m not here to take my land back?’ he inquired softly.
‘You wouldn’t know what to do with it,’ said Deacon. ‘It takes magic bilong whitefella to run a place as inherently crook as this. Want some breakfast?’
‘I’ve eaten,’ Kella told him. ‘I’m here to ask a favour.’
‘So what else is new? Tell me as we walk. I haven’t made my morning rounds yet.’
The two men fell into step. Deacon was short and stocky, in his mid-fifties, with a florid complexion and an irascible manner. He limped as he kept up with the islander. One leg was shorter than the other as the result of taking a raft of Japanese tracer bullets in his leg when he and Kella had raided an enemy ammunition depot on Guadalcanal eighteen years before.
The Australian had lived in the Solomons for almost thirty years, following a variety of nomadic occupations, including gold miner, trading-boat skipper, and bêche-de-mer fisherman. None of these ventures had paid off and it was generally assumed that Deacon also engaged in less legal practices on the side. Soon after the war had ended, unexpectedly he had produced enough money to take out a long lease on the copra plantation from Kella’s father.
‘How’s it going?’ asked the policeman.
‘With first-grade copra falling to less than seventy dollars Australian a ton? Don’t ask, mate!’
Deacon was always overly pessimistic. On this plantation he was able to produce three-quarters of a ton of copra to the acre, compared with the half ton grown by most. Kella also knew that, strictly against the terms of his contract, the Australian was also earning another couple of thousand dollars a year from the seashells he was taking clandestinely from the beach and lagoon.
The labourers, all Lau men, were beginning to emerge from their dormitories to start their day’s work. They recognized Kella and waved cheerfully at him. Deacon shouted at them in pidgin, ordering them to get to work. Philosophically the men spread out among the trees in groups of four. Each labourer carried three sacks, which had to be filled with fallen coconuts and carried to the processing plant. Tractors began to cough to life and head for the passages between the trees.
Outside the drying sheds more islanders sat cutting coconuts into halves with machetes and gouging out the white meat in two movements. The raw meat was being carried by other labourers into the sheds, where it would be raked out and dried on wire racks above rows of wood-burning ovens.
Kella inhaled the familiar sickly-sweet odour of burning wood and roasting copra. One day several of his brothers would want to take over the plantation. So far Kella had persuaded them to wait. Deacon was aware of this. Kella could not be sure whether the Australian was grateful or not.
‘So what do you want me to do?’ asked Deacon.
‘I want you to take someone to Honiara for me in your cutter boat,’ said Kella. ‘Today, if possible.’
‘Sure,’ said Deacon sardonically. ‘Bring me a bucket of sand and I’ll sing you the Desert Song.’ He saw Kella’s expression. ‘You’re serious, aren’t you?’ he asked. ‘What’s the game?’
‘Somebody’s trying to kill a sister from the mission,’ said Kella. ‘She’s not safe on Malaita. I don’t know anyone I can trust to do this, except you.’
He told Deacon about the attempts on Sister Conchita’s life at the mission station and in the swamp. When he had finished the Australian nodded thoughtfully.
‘You were lucky in that swamp, mate. Four shots fired at you, and all you end up with is a flesh wound. Either the other bloke’s a bad shot, or he liked you too much to want to hurt you badly. I wish I’d been that lucky in the war. That female God-botherer goes around asking for trouble, if you ask me.’
‘I heard that she reported you to Customs for trying to smuggle shells out of the country,’ said Kella. ‘What are you worrying about? I bet you had them well stashed away before they searched you.’
‘That’s not the point. She reported me.’
‘I was going to do the same thing myself one day, when I got round to it.’
‘You’re different. You’re …’
‘Black?’ suggested Kella.
‘I didn’t say that, mate.’
‘You meant it though. I can report you because I’m a copper and Melanesian. But the sister’s white. She broke the code, didn’t she? Whities stick together.’
‘By God, we’ve had to in this place!’ burst out Deacon. ‘If we didn’t we’d all have had our throats slit by now.’
‘Thanks,’ said Kella.
‘I didn’t mean you, Ben; you know that. You and me have always got on all right, but us expats have always been in a small minority in the Solomons. I’ve been in the islands for thirty years. We’ve only survived because we’ve looked out for each other. Anybody who didn’t help his oppos didn’t last long. And this kid comes out and starts reporting me. It ain’t right.’
‘If it’s going to be a problem I’ll get someone else to take her to the capital.’
‘No, you’re all right, mate. I’ll take her. Screw her. I owe you big-time. She’ll be right.’
‘All right,’ said Kella, unconvinced. ‘But if you do take her, behave. Once you hold a grudge against someone—’
‘I told you, she’ll be right.’
They rounded a corner and the plantation manager let out a bellow of wrath. One of the labourers was throwing stones at the green young coconuts in an effort to dislodge them. The islanders were paid by the number of sacks they filled in a day. If there were not enough fallen ripe nuts some of them would surreptitiously try to increase their rate by shaking the immature fruit from the trees. Cursing vigorously, Deacon hobbled in the direction of the offending young islander.
Kella walked back towards the beach. He wondered how much longer Deacon would last on Malaita. The crude, blasphemous courage which had made him such an effective guerrilla leader against the Japanese was not endearing him to the new brands of islanders, who had at least a junior primary education and were well enough aware of the increasing drift to get rid of expatriates from the islands. The days of the old colonial taskmasters were almost over. That was probably the main reason why Deacon was hitting the bottle so hard.
An old and rusted American landing barge was half-submerged out near the reef. Kella’s mind went back to the days in 1942, when he and Pazabosi and half a dozen others had served under Deacon on a whaleboat equipped with several machine guns, in which they had made a number of raids on Japanese coastal positions.
It had been a close thing as to which of the pair had been the most bloodthirsty, thought Kella. Deacon had fought with a cold, controlled anger, while Pazabosi had been the more frenzied and volatile in their bloody skirmishes in the war, which lasted a little more than six months before the Japanese had been driven out of the Solomons.
Deacon hobbled up behind him. He seemed to know what Kella was thinking about as the islander stared out at the wreck of the landing barge.
‘How old were you when you joined us on the Wantok?’ he asked.
‘Fourteen,’ said Kella.
‘Christ! As young as that? I suppose you must have been. I remember when they brought you back from secondary school in Fiji to act as an interpreter between the Yanks and the natives. You stuck it for about a month and then got yourself back here and asked if you could do some real fighting with us on the whaler.’
‘I soon got enough of that.’
‘You were bloody good at it, mate. So was that old bastard Pazabosi. Sometimes I thought you were both going to heave me over the side and fight your own war against the Japs, because I wasn’t tough enough for you.’
There had been little chance of that, thought Kella, remembering the iron discipline imposed by the Australian skipper on malcontents, supplemented by vicious floggings over an oil drum with a rattan cane.
‘Have you heard anything of Pazabosi lately?’ he asked.
‘Haven’t seen him for years. We were never mates. He went to ground and lay pretty low when the Marching Rule uprising collapsed after the war. I did hear lately that he was recruiting the natives for another go at the Brits, but there are always stories like that going the rounds. Why are you interested?’
‘An American anthropologist has gone missing up in Kwaio country. I’m supposed to find him and bring him back.’
Deacon whistled. ‘Well, if he’s gone up into the mountains, Pazabosi will certainly know about it. If he gives the word the Yank will be chopped down like a small tree. You’re not going to be crazy enough to go after him?’
‘I thought I might go as far as the killing ground.’
‘Then you’re out of your bloody mind,’ said Deacon vehemently. ‘I would have thought your last caper up there would have warned you off that place.’
‘I’ll be careful.’
‘You always had to do things your own bloody way,’ said Deacon, ‘even when you were a kid. All right, I can’t stop you. I’ll pick up your nun and run her back to Honiara for you.’
After the plantation manager had left, Kella continued to stare out at the reef. He wondered why the normally heedless Deacon had been so eager to stop him going up into the mountains. The Australian had always been a shrewd operator, with an eye to the main chance. Perhaps he had his own agenda. With his days in the Solomons numbered he could be looking round for one last money-making venture.
Then there had been his reaction to Kella’s account of the pursuit in the mangrove swamp. Deacon had claimed to have heard nothing of the matter. Yet he knew that four shots had been fired at them. Kella was sure that he had not mentioned this when he had given Deacon an edited version of the events of that night.
13
PRAYING MARY
The queue of women and children outside the Sulufou clinic already snaked around the island, although it was only ten o’clock in the morning. The news that the Praying Mary had reopened the island clinic had spread all over the lagoon. Across the water, canoes were heading for Sulufou from most of the other artificial islands.
The government rural health clinic consisted of a concrete floor and a tin roof, balanced on betel-wood posts. The walls were constructed of interwoven sago-palm leaves. The interior was divided into a large room used for medical inspections, and several small empty wards, each with a bed and a mattress.
On one of the exterior walls was pinned a poster issued by the Agriculture Department. In cartoon form it showed the amount of copra needed in order to purchase different items. The average amount produced after a day’s work should earn the labourer enough to buy a bicycle, while seventy-five filled sacks were sufficient for the purchase of a motorcycle.
Sister Conchita stood at a table in the centre of the main room of the clinic, the sleeves of her habit rolled up, as she did her best to deal with the endless line of patients before her. After each one had left she entered the details of her diagnosis and treatment into a logbook.
She had come across the clinic on one of her earlier perambulations of the island. She had been informed that it was only opened for one day approximately every three weeks, sometimes not that often, when a government launch would deliver a medical orderly for a few hours, and then take him back to Auki, the district centre.
Sister Conchita had also noticed that the key to the main medicine cabinet had been deposited trustingly on a hook on the wall. Furthermore, the box was plentifully supplied with ointments, bandages, plasters, gauze, ether, tweezers, a magnifying glass and even several phials of aspirins and bottles of medicine.
Admittedly there were also handwritten warnings in pidgin, ordering the villagers not to touch any of the medical supplies. Sister Conchita consoled herself with the thought that she was not a villager and that she had ministered to plenty of patients at Ruvabi mission; it would be a shame not to offer her services to the islanders while she happened to be in the area. In any case, it had always been her philosophy that it was better to apologize profusely after the event than to neglect an opportunity when it arose. Besides which, she thought, the islanders had told her that it had been at least a month since a medical orderly had visited Sulufou.
There were no men in the queue outside the clinic, and no one at all from the bush villages. It was against the custom of the pagan mountain dwellers to adopt the white man’s medicine, while the saltwater men would accept no help from a white woman. Even so, there was plenty to be done with the women and children who had come to be attended at the newly opened medical centre. Sister Conchita’s morning passed in a whirl of bandaging and prescribing. She attended to pregnancies, doled out chloroquine to malarial patients and sulfa tablets for abdominal pains, massaged and put compresses on strains, and applied pressure to bleeding wounds.
At one o’clock in the afternoon, she took a short break and carried a bottle of water to the door. Shyly a village woman brought her a plate of taro. The queue waiting patiently outside seemed to extend as far as ever. As she watched, a small flotilla of canoes headed out from the mainland and pulled in at the artificial island’s wharf. Half a dozen male malaria eradication sprayers, on a perio
dic anti-mosquito tour of the artificial islands, leapt out of the canoes and advanced cheerfully on the houses. They wore khaki shorts and shirts and were carrying backpacks, jets and nozzles.
The old village men gossiping lethargically in the shade of a canoe shelter glared at the noisy new arrivals. The itinerant sprayers, trained and dispatched in groups by the Department of Health, had a not undeserved reputation for routinely trying to seduce local girls on their travels. Oblivious to the disapproval of the elders, the sprayers carried on with their work, leering and calling out licentiously to the younger women in the line for the clinic.
Sister Conchita looked on idly, preparing to go back inside the clinic. She became aware that one of the malaria sprayers was looking at her with some intensity. He was the biggest member of the team, broad-shouldered and tall. The nun recognized his stare. It was one that she had encountered a number of times since she had come to the Solomons. Most of the islanders were perfectly prepared to welcome expatriates, or at the very least ignore them as alien beings beyond their comprehension. A few, however, especially the better educated, actively resented the presence of the white strangers in their land. The big worker was plainly one of these. He was glowering at her, making no effort to disguise his antagonism.
Sister Conchita wondered whether she should try to talk to the big islander, but decided against it. There was something forbidding about his lowering presence that made it seem likely that he would resent any overtures made to him by one of the outsiders he so clearly disliked. In any case, she had work to do. She went back inside the clinic.
The first part of the afternoon was as busy as the morning had been. Sister Conchita continued to attend as best she could to fractures and dislocations. She dabbed arnica on bruises and placed cold compresses on skin rashes, weighed babies and stitched wounds. She was in the process of making a paste of water and soda bicarbonate powder to apply to a sea-urchin sting suffered by an eight-year-old boy, when the clinic door was flung open and a flustered middle-aged woman thrust her head into the room.