by Alan Duff
Find my sister at Falls Bath, by herself. Mud-grey water drops from a concrete pipe six feet above, feeding from a larger into the smaller, concrete-encased pool, through a twenty-foot length of eighteen-inch-wide pipe. The overflow goes down a channel that runs, eventually, to the river.
Mata's flushed cheeks say she's been here a while. A rock face overhangs half the pool in a semi-circle, ferns and stunted scrub sprout where they can take root. The noise of the water falling is constant and the enclosure makes it resonate: you have to half shout to be heard; the waterfall can't be turned off. We swim in the higher natural pool too, though some don't like the squelchy mud and sometimes you hit a hot vent spurting beneath. Two piwakawaka — fantails — chase each other and claim my sister's attention for a smiling moment. Older Maoris believe fantails carry all sorts of meanings depending on when and where you see them. Kids just think they're birds.
It's cold and I'm keen to get in the bath to warm up. Tell her, I heard from him again. She's happy for me, knows what how much I love hearing from him.
Why doesn't he send a photo so we know what he looks like?
I already know what he looks like. Proceed to give my description of a tall, lean man, very handsome, thick dark hair like his son's, musical and probably rich. Looks like Elvis.
What if he's not rich and doesn't look like Elvis?
That's not possible.
She tells me she's getting out, so I turn my back. She's nearly a woman now. My sister Wiki is ten, brother Manu seven. The age difference means we're not as close as Mata and I are. Says she has something to tell me.
I'm pregnant.
Oh? Well, you are nineteen. Thinking, Henry won't like this.
He's from my work. (My sister works at the telephone exchange in town, on the switchboard.) From the Far North.
Maori or Pakeha?
Yank, who cares? God, sometimes you are obsessed with who is white and who is brown. Does it matter?
Sorry.
He's Maori. Doctor said I'm nine weeks.
Does Mum know?
Yes, but not telling Dad. I'm leaving home, going to Auckland, start a new life. My sister looks happy. And if your American father ever turns up, you make sure I meet him or else.
I will, I promise her, and with a real sense of anything being possible now.
Will you call him Dad?
No way.
Why not, if he is your Dad? Would you ever call my father Dad?
For some reason her questions feel as if they've caught me. No, I say. Though I might: I've had my moments of wishing.
Moving costs money. Does your boyfriend have a car?
If you can call it that. Might not make it to Auckland.
Arguing with myself, this is your sister and you in the position to give her money, help her get away from Henry. How much? Fifty? A hundred? There goes my own car. But she's my sister, who comforted me when Henry's silence made me miserable. When Henry hit Mum who was it got us out of the house?
You can have a hundred quid to help. Now she has me smothered in sister's kisses. Don't thank me, thank my father.
Thank you, Elvis. She laughs. Or is it John Wayne?
Try both, I say.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
WALKING UP NEWLY SEALED ROAD, thanks to Henry. Doesn't feel the same as dirt and stones, slippery mud in the wet, a layer of dust in the long dry. Our town council must be sick of him with his never-ending demands to improve the services at Waiwera.
This is the third trip of surreptitiously carrying Mata's belongings to her boyfriend waiting in his car. Henry won't be happy even if she is legally allowed. He's the kind you have to ask permission to do anything he considers important. Her being pregnant Mata knows would only bring comparison to our mother having me. Me, I still think there's something sad about someone's pregnant kid leaving without saying goodbye. Even if it is Henry.
Houses like fluorescent paint daubs and light blotches appearing in and out of steam drifts, a good sky of stars above and a one-third moon portion. This is the last trip. I shake Lew's hand in the semi-gloom, he's fine looking, very polite, good enough for my sister. I hug and kiss Mata goodbye, she promises to write and thanks so much for the money they couldn't have done without it.
Watch the red tail-lights go past the carved tekoteko figures you can see their rounded head silhouettes in the car headlights, bump over the bridge planks, under the memorial arch, and that's my big sister gone. She was the best sister.
House lights change to smudges. The lit candles old people still use are pencil glows, every light source turned fuzzy, or gobbled up for some moments by the steam. Smell the candle wax on the breeze, drifts of tobacco aroma, see the splutter of kerosene lamp up at Merita's. She raved about Henry forcing the council to install electric lighting, yet often prefers to read her newspaper under the kerosene light, which from a distance throws a different hue, captures human forms and seems to slow them.
Cabbage and mutton smell emit from a steam box. Toby Taita is out on his steps singing like a mournful Negro. I'm captivated by his singing style; it's quite unlike most others round here, I've heard it on the radio. I stand listening till the song finishes. Toby lends me his acoustic guitar — or used to till my father made me rich.
Our landscape strange, eerie, with its human and creature-like noises: someone throttled, a life being slowly squeezed by a terrible force, conspirators whispering, desperate sips of breath like drowning, a geyser roaring — wasted sight spectacular stolen by the dark.
Shuffling figures, giggles, kids and youths, snatches of conversation from somewhere and nowhere, ghostly shapes flitting in and out of existence, someone lifting a steam box lid to take out cooked food, a stooped figure near the big boiling cauldron silhouetted and swishing, I know by the posture, a mutton-cloth bag of vegetables; figures coming and going from the baths keep getting claimed and revealed by the steam. Laughter, always laughter that only the sky can claim.
People in old weather-beaten armchairs and battered sofas on porches, spilled down wooden steps, they chat and smoke and hum, whistle, or just contemplate. A foot taps in time on hard surface to the accompaniment of strummed guitar, Django Reinhardt style, I know it from one of the singers in Henry's group who plays brilliant guitar self-taught, and who gave me a few impromptu lessons. Archie's advice: The key is to let go to the music, kid. The other to stretch your fingers so to find chords and combinations others don't, that's why Reinhardt is so good, because he pushes the limits of finger extension. With his deformed hand too.
Every one of us knows each step of the way, where the ground is prone to collapsing, little lurking fissures recently opened up, hot spots giving warning of worse to come soon, collapsing areas.
Up on the raised level of poured concrete surface and concrete bath tubs, heads and bodies in and out, laughter and talk aplenty; we recognise each other by shape and the dimmest overhead light the town council begrudgingly gave us, three lamps over a two-hundred-yard section.
To the changing shed, built on a working bee weekend by the senior men's rugby team at Merita's urging — she found the money from somewhere. Told the people, among ourselves we can't be dressing and undressing outside in the open like primitives, and can't bathe when it's raining anyway because our clothes get soaked. No windows, just an open slot at eye level to look out of, a place acquiring the odours of our bodily leavings.
A different modesty is required when everyone bathes nude, females covered by a towel right till the moment of immersion, males cupping a hand over genitals. In the warm waters a baby gently sloshed and Sunlight soap the size of its torso rubbed over its skin. Lovely; if we're lucky we'll get a hold and coo into its little innocent face staring up at the chosen kid with a canvas of stars on his head.
Old tattooed crones whose crinkly forms you brush against, who speak in Maori or English, tell stories of enemies thrown off Totara Hill bluffs, the usual of the lost status of captured warriors made slaves. Of the pride we ha
d as a race isolated from the rest of the world till the first European explorers came. Of our beloved original village twenty-five miles away but gone forever when the mountain blew up when Merita was a six year old.
Together, life in its different stages and ages, we stick with each other all the way to the grave.
A gathering of naked bodies in the dark with light from the universe, the nearer moon, maybe someone's lit a couple of candles and put them on the sill of glassless window in the changing shed, and ember pinpricks of cigarettes smouldering in the water-sloshing dark are still a form of light. And all light is love.
Mata and her boyfriend, their child inside her, will be driving through this night. I guess it is day in Mississippi if we're night here. Take our turns at being under the unspeakable vastness of black canopy peppered with stars, smeared with galaxies, being continually investigated by curious bright men trying to understand the impossible distances and epic scale. While we just see without having to understand.
The river gurgles below us, invisible unless it's caught a big full moon, rocks above the surface like sharp pointed heads of people treading water against the strong current.
On weekends, when we use the baths all day, it's any and every kid's job to control the channel flow. We move between the hot and cold, usually getting a little richer with each change: in the river till we can't stand the cold any longer; back immersed in our lucky warm waters while a cold rain hammers down, we sink to just heads showing, sweat chilling quickly on faces, smiles and cheeky grins plastered everywhere.
The overflow cut-out takes away our body grime, runs down to the river. There's the big natural bath too, cooled by a cold-water tap feed, the pipe runs over ground, corroding like everything here. The houses sit perched like on tiptoes to avoid the scalding heat. Or just succumb to the thermal corrosion in pictures of sag, rust, crumble and constructional droop. But as if with guarding eyes down on their children.
And now I have a secret. A reason for my name. Mrs Mac was right, Yank did isolate me. Without my knowing it had pointed me, my life, in a different direction. The money windfall has me feeling I'm holding back a guilty secret. For it's a ticket out of here, should I wish. Yet this is my home: I want to show my father the parts of Waiwera he did not see. Introduce him to the cast of Waiwera characters like out of a movie.
Chud once said to me, you're so lucky. Living in Henry's house and him never talking to you.
I said, that's lucky?
Sure. He's the big man round the village. If you were his son you'd be like some of the kids we know whose old man is real good at sport or something else. They can't live up to their father. Henry doesn't care if you fall into a hot pool and die. You don't exist far as he's concerned.
So your old lady, what does she do? Loves you ten times more to make up. And what does that do? Makes you strong, lucky boy, on your mummy's love. Where you get your confidence from. An old lady who tells you over and over, you're my special boy.
Chud in a good imitation of my mother's voice, and the exact wording of a refrain so familiar to me it must have stopped registering. Or felt as if it did.
But Chud was right. I just felt so loved. Which did make me lucky. A whole lot more now my father is on the scene, if yet to appear. What of Chud then? Well, his home situation couldn't be worse. But I'll help make up for it. He's my best friend, whatever he thinks. When we go to America together we'll get good jobs and become rich.
Just watch us, I tell the stars as all around my people laugh and talk, sing too. And the thermal heat never ceases its boiling.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
HENRY DID FIND OUT ABOUT Jess's first shock letter to me. No surprise in our tiny community — but surprisingly he did not lay into me, just made sarcastic comment that maybe my true feelings had been rekindled, maybe I'd disappear and go to America.
I think he was just being defensive. Even a little jealous, which kind of pleased and kind of did not. On the one hand it said he still had some feelings for me. But jealousy is never about love, it's about self.
I wrote back and informed Jess he had a son. Not as imposing obligation on him, he wasn't to know, just one of those things that happen. That I had no regrets once Yank was born as a mother is a mother no matter what. Besides, I wrote, you gave me the finest son and if you ever do meet him you'll agree.
If I believed in God I would be able to say, it is all part of His mysterious plan. But since I don't believe, it feels like my life was fated. How many other local women who had love affairs with Yank soldiers ended up having a child? For I am in no doubt whatsoever having Yank tainted me forever in the village's eyes, not just Henry's. I think it inhibited me from ever showing spontaneous gaiety, from going to a dance, dancing at a party. Even my normal desire to laugh felt curbed. I just went into my shell.
In replying to Jess I worried I was tempting fate. Yet his sudden coming to life again did not set my heart racing, rekindle any flames of love or even physical passion. When it should, given he freed in me not just the climax, but the notion such a thing was possible for a woman. Oh, how some aspects of growing up here make us ignorant and blind to life and its possibilities.
Yank also wrote and Jess wrote back to each of us expressing of course his own happy disbelief. Yank and I wrote again, but it was over a year before Yank got a reply. I'm sure he sent Yank money, though I wasn't going to ask my son. He always had a thing about money, a craving.
Or so I thought, till I realised he craved a life better beyond this village, much as he loved it and loved his friends. Like quite a few of the kids, my son wanted out of here. He'd stopped begging me to take him away from living with Henry, but it was still there, just suppressed.
Before every Christmas Yank spent endless hours in the river earning money so he could buy Christmas presents for me, his two sisters and Manu.
Always a most excruciating time. Yank and Henry's present-giving and-receiving ceremonies were done separately: never a present for each other, stepfather and my son. Eating our main Christmas meal was just as awkward, as we could hardly have two sittings. I couldn't see how Henry could keep it up, but he did.
Two photographs of Jess I'd kept hidden all the years; only ever looked at on the odd occasion, just to remind myself. Or sometimes if something in Yank's behaviour suggested his father's genes had come out.
Funny how a man assumed dead had changed three lives, and probably my other children's too. Even after Henry and I settled down into a routine of marriage, of a sort, his refusal to acknowledge Yank's existence kept a certain edge in our house. Henry got on with life, his job and duties towards the Waiwera community; resumed relations with me, but it would have been so much better if only he would have had something to do with Yank.
Like any woman I wanted more than just a functioning marriage. In a few years I'd be forty, with my kids all left home — what kind of life would I have to look back on? Other than raising four kids, what had been the point of my life since I only worked as a fill-in guide, and in the busy season as a receptionist checking hotel guests in and out?
Telling Henry that Mata had left home was almost as bad as revealing Yank's existence. For Henry believed he adored his first-born, when really you have to be there in the child's first years to bond with each other. Mata detested his violence, any violence. When Henry had had too much to drink and was in a mood he'd hit me but not as bad as some of the men in our village thrashing their wives and not as bad as our sensitive Mata perceived. I think her impression got cemented from her first encounter with Henry beating me up the day he got back from the war. Our daughter Wiki and son Manu he spoiled rotten. Doted on his mother too, though she stayed away from the house and never spoke one word to either me or Yank.
Funnily enough Henry didn't explode as expected about Mata leaving without saying goodbye — asking permission more like. He went for a long walk and when he came back presented a sombre figure, later asking about the boyfriend, was he a good young man, what kin
d of family did he come from. Said, I hope he makes a better father than I've been.
Could have knocked me over with a feather. In fact I said, you've tried to be a good dad with her. Not your fault the war took away your bonding years.
Villagers know each other's most intimate affairs, but damned if I was satisfying anyone's curiosity on the letters from America. And not as if I was the only woman from here to fall for a Yank.
But everyone needs to share things and there was one I trusted: Barney.
A man of routine who took his baths duty seriously, last thing at night blocking off the water feed from the boiling lake to the channels so the baths could cool to the right temperature. His favourite place was the wooden seat by the bridge; kids had to vacate if he turned up and he grumbled at the wet of someone's swim shorts on his seat. Sat there like a real-life warrior figure guarding our entrance. We had carved warrior figures in fence-post form, tekoteko, flanking the road down to the meeting house as symbols of guarding.
Hello, Barney. 'Ello, Lena. He'd give groaning greeting and squirm as if uncomfortable at my close presence, shift position, reach for notebook and pencil. We'd learned to talk without his needing to write it down. I'd come to understand his broken sentences, found the code therein.
After posting my reply to Jess's latest letter I sat with Barney. Below us the sounds of kids in the river, straight after school. Told of Jess's letter: how after several years of correspondence he feared he was falling in love with me again.
Barney pointed at himself to mean he and I might have been an item if he'd been quicker off the mark than Henry. As for the American — forget him. A hint of jealousy in Barney's wicked grin. But a different jealousy to Henry's.
Then he frowned and got out something about Henry being quick off the mark in other ways. But looked away when I pressed him on it. Second cousins on their mothers' side, Henry a year younger but close to Barney's brother Harold (the one killed in the war). A rugby star, representing the province at senior level aged only eighteen, Barney found his own war injury cut short a most promising sporting career.