It was a while, though, before I really understood this. No Maori will tell you everything all at once and Seven was no exception to this rule. And even when I thought I had some of the answers, I was aware that there were things I didn’t understand. This feeling of not quite getting what was going on would dog me whenever I was in New Zealand. Indeed, it seemed only to grow stronger with each visit. I like to think this is how astronomers feel: with each new discovery of something curious—quasars, black holes, dark matter—the universe grows not more comprehensible but less, though the hope endures of a simple, unifying explanatory narrative.
But back in the beginning, in the pub, I had only the merest signs to go on: the offer of a light, the flicker of a smile. It was like a code that needed cracking, a language that with effort one might finally comprehend. I was a tourist who should have been on a bus back to where I came from. Instead I found myself in a house long after midnight with a bunch of Maoris I didn’t know. That was the night I missed my bus and then I missed my plane.
3
Mangonui
About fifteen miles as the crow flies across the Bay of Islands lies the village of Mangonui. A settlement of some two hundred people, each of whom can claim all the others as his kin, Mangonui occupies a secluded spot on a branch of the Taimarie inlet. The water there is quiet, the fishing is good, the mudflats are full of shellfish, and there are oyster beds nearby. Maoris have lived there, off and on, for centuries. In the old days they probably came there in summer, when the fish and shellfish were fat, and went back to their inland homes at Waimate and Whakataha when the rain came and the chill wet winter wind began to blow.
The road to Mangonui is only paved halfway. After that it’s what they call “loose metal,” a slippery gravel surface that gives off clouds of dust. The road winds uphill and down, through pastures, over creeks, past long driveways that disappear over the top of a pasture only to reappear again as a ribbon in the distance between two fields. There are pine groves and pockets of manuka and great balls of gorse in the paddocks. The local Maoris, who know the road, drive fast, sliding round curves and flying over bumps. Occasionally someone hits a power pole, but usually only when they’re drunk.
About twenty minutes from the end of the sealed road, a narrower, bumpier road turns off and heads down in a sweeping curve toward the tip of a small peninsula that juts out into the bay. Mangonui sits on this finger of land, with one marae, or meetinghouse, at the first joint, and another at the knuckle. The presence of two such institutions in so small a place—where you cannot buy a newspaper or a quart of milk, where two or three hundred people have among them four or five surnames—suggests two things: a high degree of religiosity and a long-standing family feud, the one likely having to do with the other. On one side of Mangonui live the Ratana adherents, on the other the Rapana faithful, divided from each other by a consonant, a dirt road, and a lost ideological disagreement. Their dispute, once a matter of principle, has become a matter of habit, and just what originally caused it no one under seventy can now say.
Past the marae on either side are houses, sheds, a handful of gardens, a number of abandoned cars, the shingle, and the sea. Though set in a landscape of exquisite natural beauty, the houses are not much to look at. The nicest of them is the one that Seven’s father bought from the government in the early 1960s. It had been built for the Mangonui schoolteacher, who would have been a Pakeha, possibly with a wife, and it sat on a section of Crown land given to the government by Seven’s grandfather specially for the purpose. When a bigger school was built out on the main road to accommodate not only the Maoris but the children of the local Pakeha farmers, the Mangonui teacher’s house was no longer needed and, with the help of a government loan, Seven’s father took it up.
It was a beautiful little house, all handmade of kauri pine, with a wide overhang and casement windows and a set of outside stairs leading to the front door. It had a kitchen with a wood stove, a lounge with a fireplace, two bedrooms with a bath in between, an outside toilet, and a pair of water tanks that collected rainwater from the roof. It was perched on the side of a gendy sloping hill and gave a view of both marae and the road between them, and, beyond that, the inlet and the farther shore. Behind it, going up the hill, was a twisted lemon tree and a shed and a washing line with two forked props, and then, at the edge of the mown meadow, the beginning of the bush. A tangle of trees and creepers marked the top of the embankment, which dropped abruptly on the other side to the flat, where a cluster of houses sat separated from the beach by a shock of tufted grass and flax, like the crest of a giant bird.
This was the house that Seven grew up in. His parents raised ten children in its five rooms, his father working multiple jobs, often far from home, building houses, packing meat, picking vegetables. His mother ran the post office and telephone exchange from a cupboard inside the front door until the government closed the branch and moved the business into town. When I first met them, they were still living there, with the last of their children, a girl, who was then about thirteen years old. She had all to herself the room that had at different times contained every possible arrangement of beds (two sets of bunks; a bunk and a double; a double, a single, and a cot) and slept every possible arrangement of children (two boys in each bunk; four girls in the bed; all the younger children in one bed together, and a cot for whoever was the baby at the time). Her brothers and sisters had grown up and most had gone away, but a few remained in Mangonui, living in houses to either side, married with children of their own.
Seven’s father was a man of not very many words, at least not to me. He was a minister of the faith that the people call Absolute Maori, or Mana Motuhake, a Rapana offshoot with roots in the Anglican Church. He wore a blue cassock with a white surplice and a red stole and conducted the service entirely in Maori. It was wonderful to listen to—the way any language one doesn’t understand is wonderful—moving in a musical, purely emotional way. Seven’s mother was a fine singer with a big voice that filled the marae on Sunday mornings and kept the faithful on their toes in the whare kai, or communal kitchen, whenever there were church events. They were the traditionalists in Mangonui, and referred, in private, to their relations across the road as paki paki (meaning “clap clap”) because of their Pentecostal inclinations.
The day I arrived in Mangonui was hot and bright. I had gone to sleep in a house full of people and awakened to find the sun streaming in the windows and everybody gone. There were dishes with the remains of breakfast piled on the kitchen counter and cups with the dregs of the sweet hot drink that passes for coffee in New Zealand, a dusty, cocoa-colored powder, mixed with sugar, milk, and boiling water. But there was no one in evidence and the house seemed preternaturally still.
Seven must have heard me, though, because he suddenly materialized in the doorway.
“You want a cuppa?” he said.
We went outside and sat on the steps with our cups of coffee. I had a lot of questions. I wanted to know (again) how he spelled his name and how he pronounced it, and where he had come from, and what he was doing there, and who all those people were in the house, and what his relationship was to them. But I didn’t ask any of them just yet. The sun was warm and there were some little birds pecking about in the grass and flitting back and forth between the bushes.
“So,” I said, “what are you going to do now?”
“Heading out to Mangonui. Want to come?”
“Okay,” I said, “sure.”
We arrived at Seven’s parents just in time for lunch. They were having fish heads, boiled with slices of onion and salt in an enormous pot, and Maori bread with slabs of butter. Eating a fish head, as it turns out, is not as easy as you might think. The brain, a creamy, gelatinous substance, can get lost if you aren’t careful, and you have to suck the insides out of the eyes and spit out the clear thin case and the white marble of the eyeball.
My uncertainty about the process must have been obvious, because, before I knew what was
happening, Seven’s mother was back at the stove, battering and frying fillets of snapper just for me. She did it out of politeness for a Pakeha who plainly did not know what to do with a head, and I was grateful if somewhat embarrassed.
It was not much like the meals I had growing up. There was no more talking than what was needed to get something passed from the other side of the table. No one chatted about the weather or discussed political events. They ate with enormous concentration, not hurriedly, but with focus, and the only noise was the sound of sucking, as every bit of meat was extracted from the bones, and the clatter of silverware and dishes, and the quiet slurp of someone polishing off a drink, and, finally, the scrape of chairs pushing away from the table.
When the fish heads were all eaten and the bread was gone and everyone had had a big swig of water weakly flavored with powdered lemonade, we finished the meal with cups of tea.
“Milk?” asked Seven’s mother.
“Lemon, if you have any,” I said.
“Just like Dad. Faith, go get a lemon from the tree.” After that it became a point of honor for me to drink my tea with lemon, though I became aware that I was reducing the tiny stock of lemon juice—the tree, being old, was not much of a producer—and potentially, at least, depriving Seven’s father of one of his small pleasures.
Seven’s parents were discreet in their inquiries about who I was and what I was doing there, and they asked me almost nothing about myself. Finally, after dinner, his father, speaking quietly and looking past my head as though it would be impolite to confront me with a direct question, said “Your family, they’re far away?”
“They’re in Boston, in the United States,” I told him.
“Long way away,” he said. And then, after a pause, “You must miss your home.”
“I’m not sure I know where home is,” I replied with the insouciance of a twenty something. To which he said nothing.
I have since wondered what he must have made of such a remark. At the time I was deaf to its absurdity, but now I can’t help but think about the way it must have sounded to a man who lived on what could honestly be called ancestral land; who had never been farther than two hundred miles from the place where he was born; who, whether consciously or not, had spent much of his life defending his right and that of his children, against the pressures of commerce, modernization, and Pakeha land-hunger, to remain where he was. It’s possible that he pitied me, though more likely that, with the wisdom of a man who had fathered many children, he just recognized that I was young.
But if I was a mystery to them, they were certainly a mystery to me. I knew nothing about how even the most elementary things were done, and was, in the local parlance, completely “useless.” Offering to do the laundry for one of Seven’s sisters, I washed the dark clothes first instead of the whites and had to throw out a whole tub of water that should, at that dry season, have been used two or three times. Trying to help another sister shuck oysters, I only succeeded in irritating her by breaking the tip of my blade. I can still see her, in her gum boots and apron, a big woman on an upturned bucket, shaking her head and waving me away. I could not dig shellfish without slicing my hands, I could not pry sea urchins from the rocks, even in shallow water. And I inspired hilarity by going about with a sarong draped over my hat to protect my skin from the burning antipodean sun. The smallest children were cleverer, more useful than I. But mostly people were amused by my incompetence, and even I could see that it was funny.
I stayed in Mangonui for a week, camping with Seven in a shack by the sea with no running water, eating snapper that he caught with a hand line and cooked over a fire. When we needed more food, we turned up at a house, his mother’s or sister’s or sister-in-law’s, about the time that someone might be making supper. We had pork bones with dumplings and puha, a bitter weed that grows in orchards and along fence lines and sometimes beside the road. We had oysters and kina, or sea urchin roe, which is salty and strong, with a flavor like iodine, and addictive to those who are raised on it. We had pipi, a kind of sweet little clam, steamed just until they opened, and paua, or abalone, minced and sautéed in cream. We had lamb chops, and sausages, and “smashed” potatoes, buckets of loquats and passion fruit and plums.
Occasionally Seven had things to do. One day his father sent him to shoot feral cats in the bush at the bottom of the embankment. Another time one of his brothers wanted him to go out in the boat. They left early and were gone all day, returning about sunset with half a dozen sugar sacks full of crayfish and abalone. I spent much of this time sitting and watching the water. The beach was pebbly down by the waterline and littered with shells. The slope was gradual and the tide went a long way out and crept back slowly, lapping at the mud. Across the inlet the hills were darkly clothed with plantations of pine, and then gold and green where it opened out into pasture with scattered clumps of trees. There were no buildings, or roads, or houses to be seen in any direction and my mind invariably turned to the question of what it must have been like for the earliest settlers, with their European memories and their European eyes.
Sometimes I went for walks, wandering up the road or into the bush beyond the houses. I liked the drone of the cicadas in the midday heat, and the crunch of the dry grass, and the strange, pungent smell of something, an aromatic tree or shrub that I could never locate but that would suddenly surround me like some kind of enchantment and then vanish if I took another step. I got quieter and quieter as the days wore on, one hot, bright, summer day after another, and I found myself talking less and less. One day I said to Seven, “You know, I might stop talking altogether if I stay here too long.” He just laughed and said nothing.
It was on one of these days when I was on my own that I first met Kura, the second youngest of Seven’s sisters. She was about eighteen at the time, a handsome girl with thick, curly black hair, long legs, and a raucous manner. She had been slightly deafened in her youth, probably by an untreated ear infection, and had a tendency to shout. Perhaps because Seven was her favorite brother, perhaps because she was stuck at home and bored, we quickly became friends.
“I had this terrible dream last night,” she told me.
“What was it?”
“I dreamed that all my teeth fell out!”
I laughed. “That’s a classic dream, you know. They say it’s got something to do with sex.”
“Really?” she said. “Uh-oh. Don’t tell Mum.”
But what I thought it really had to do with was tooth decay. Kura and Seven were among the few young adults in Mangonui who still had all their own teeth. In fact, if anyone over the age of about thirty had a full set, you could be almost certain they weren’t real. And a couple of people I met had had all their teeth pulled while they were still in their twenties because it was cheaper than getting them fixed.
I found this very shocking and the irony of it was inescapable, at least to me. One of the first things eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century European visitors to New Zealand noticed was the Maoris’ dazzling white teeth, so very different from their own. But along with guns, germs, and steel, came flour and sugar, and a diet that has led not only to widespread obesity and diabetes but to rampant tooth decay.
The other person I got to know fairly well in Mangonui was an old lady named Nana Miri, who lived on the flat below the embankment, a stone’s throw from the sea. She was a small, energetic woman with strong features and a long plait of steel-gray hair, which she wore up in a bun. She had a taste for simplicity, clean lines and dark colors, and was always impeccably dressed. When she went out, she wore a yellow flax hat with a black band and black trousers or a long black skirt with a black or dark gray jersey. She carried a flax kit, or woven bag, a plain one for shopping, a patterned one for church.
Nana Miri was widely acknowledged to be one of Mangonui’s finest weavers, but she always asserted that her friend Ngaire was finer still. One day she took me to see some of the things that Ngaire had made. Her kits were yellow and black, or sometime
s red, made of fine, flexible flax and exquisitely patterned. They were considered great treasures by everyone who was lucky enough to be given one, as the knowledge of how to make them was disappearing along with the old ladies themselves.
Most of the people in Mangonui were cautiously polite in their dealings with me, though some, like Nana Miri and Kura, were more open and unguarded. But there were a few people in the village who made me nervous. One day Seven took me to see one of his cousins, a big, fearsome man with a lot of black hair who lived in a dark little cabin with his wife and a jumble of little kids. His wife was not, like Seven’s mother, a force of nature, but a famished-looking creature who’d been pretty once and who’d had five pregnancies in seven years, including a baby who had died for no apparent reason. To me it seemed that she worked like a coolie: cooking, washing, cleaning, even fetching her own water from the spring. She kept her head down and said little, and, though it might have been my imagination, I thought she kept a wary eye on her husband.
There were a certain number of women like her in Mangonui and a certain number of men like him. But Seven was nothing like them. He may have worn black leather and dark glasses like the rest, but he didn’t come across like a gang member. The difference was not so much what he wore as how he carried himself, how he dealt with other people, how he seemed to feel about the world. They said in his family that it was because he was both the youngest and the biggest of the boys. He never had a chip on his shoulder, never had to prove anything or show how powerful he was.
But even he took a certain pleasure in retelling the stories of his various fights: how he’d once hit a guy so hard the skin of his face slid sideways across his skull; how he’d caught another under the chin in the parking lot of a pub and lifted him clean off the ground; how he’d once popped one of his older brothers and run, terrified at what he’d done. He told these stories laughing, without malice, as though he was still surprised that any of it had ever happened, as though none of it, really, had anything to do with him.
Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All Page 4