by Baker Chris
‘Been a hard winter,’ said one old guy to Sean. He stood on Bastion Point looking out to Rangitoto, protected from the summer rain by a grey blanket over a really sharp seventies suit — wide lapels, maroon with a fine yellow pinstripe — Cuban heels on a pair of zip-up dress boots. ‘We need to keep our strength up.’
They ate well, but very carefully. Frugality came easily to the folk who’d been paying market rents on the bennie. So did the idea of communal gardens, fishing and other food gathering. And especially, so did the idea of work. Sean remembered an old saying, something about giving your guest a spade on the second day.
Matapihi wasn’t a guest, he was family. They all felt like family, like they had at Ngahere and Kaiwaka too. But blood’s thick stuff and Sean certainly caught the fallout from Matapihi’s status as an honoured and respected family member. They both got three days R & R, lying around in the sun, swimming, eating and talking with the old ones. And then they got to work, the most demanding work Sean had ever done.
‘C’mon, you guys!’ shouted Monty standing in the doorway on the fourth morning, when it was just light enough to see. ‘Hands off cocks, feet in socks!’ What did he want? It was warm and comfortable in bed.
‘Fuck off!’ said Perry. Monty heard. He strode to Perry’s mattress, bent down and whipped the blankets off. As Perry lay naked and wide-eyed with shock, Monty promised him a bucket of water next time.
‘We’re not here to fuck spiders,’ he said.
‘Don’t mess with that guy,’ said Vaiga later. ‘He’s had fifteen years in the army.’
They buried everyone around them. The circle grew daily as gangs moved from house to house and street to street. Somebody worked out how to get petrol out of service station tanks and two men in their forties — a pair of real hoods, a Pakeha guy called Stan and Matapihi’s cousin, Jackson — picked up the flashest backhoes they could find, stereos and air-conditioning. They worked with the burial crews, digging a hole in each lawn and filling it in after everyone in the house was laid to rest. Sean gagged and retched for the first three days.
‘Careful you don’t miss anyone,’ Monty said. ‘We have to do this right.’
The old people attended each burial and made sure whatever was left behind wasn’t going to cause trouble for the living. Every relative of everyone there was buried or burned before Sean and Matapihi arrived. Nobody said it out front, but the thought of a landscape peopled by kehua was very alarming, for some of the Pakeha folk too. Every day half a dozen gangs of about six workers each, women and men, went burying everyone who’d died.
Monty had the crews well organised. Sean saw him most nights, when everyone gathered in the spectacularly carved wharenui. Usually he talked with the old folk, making sure people were handling the work. He knew when someone needed a break.
‘Leave Gary in bed,’ he’d say. ‘He needs it.’ Or else he’d pull somebody off a burial detail for a quest to find some obscure tool.
One of the most surprising things about Monty was his immaculately pressed uniform. How did he get those knife-edge creases? Sean pictured him removing his trousers at night and laying them carefully beneath his mattress. They never saw him rumpled, nor without a black beret, a gleaming regimental badge pinned in the front.
Sometimes he’d tell somebody to report to Opetaia for fishing duties. Several times Sean laid longlines from a catamaran, the wind blowing spray in his face and washing off the stench of his work. He went droving too. Once, four of them on horseback brought back twenty cattle from somewhere behind Pukekohe. When they got the cattle home, they started grazing them on the Tamaki Bowling Club greens and ended up letting most of them go in a cul-de-sac, fencing off the lush suburban lawns and overgrown roadsides with barbed wire and standards banged through the tarseal.
The young ones, the ones kept away from any really dirty work, waited on tables, did the dishes and worked in one of the five kitchens that never really slept, cooking food, running wetbacks, and providing endless cups of tea, like Doug had done in Ngahere. Auntie Rose had charge of the provisions. Most nights she talked with Charlie who looked after the gardens.
‘We’re ready for another half acre,’ he’d say. ‘No worries,’ Auntie Rose would tell him. ‘Cattle coming in tomorrow.’ Sean was amazed how much ground twenty cattle could rark up and fertilise in a week. He was surprised, too, at the effect of two dozen pigs on a street-full of suburban gardens. They’d go down over a foot for some bulbs and tubers, evacuating copiously as they went.
Every day there was work to do. ‘Man, that guy just doesn’t let up,’ Perry said to Sean after Monty had told the burial crews to mark their completed streets on a big map on the wall. Monty made sure the crews were followed two or three days later by the kids, harvesting anything worth the effort from the suburban veggie gardens. Some of the kids were wary about the recent burials, but the old ones talked to them.
‘Just say a prayer for each family,’ they said. ‘Say thanks for the kai too.’
The old ones and children lived on the hill overlooking Okahu Bay. Everyone else stayed on the flat, in construction-site smoko huts. Each hut slept about twenty people and was set up with a water tank and a long-drop dunny. A fleet of small trucks kept up a stream of goods. Everyone knew the petrol wouldn’t last forever.
‘We should be stocking up on sawn timber,’ Rawiri said.
‘Medical supplies,’ somebody argued.
‘Both,’ a third person asserted.
The community was shaking down rapidly. ‘Leave that little guy alone,’ Sean heard several times from one or other of Matapihi’s patched-up warrior mates when some unhappy person tried to cause trouble. ‘You want to fight somebody, fight me.’ Sean laughed to himself when he remembered TV ads depicting the placatory, ‘He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother’ approach.
Sickness and death hadn’t stopped either. One fisherman had drowned. A squall had sneaked around an island and driven him onto rocks when he tried to run before it. Some people had been driven crazy by everything that had happened. They were kept especially close, so they didn’t hurt themselves or anyone else either. Matapihi and Sean arrived at the tail end of a sexual frenzy, just like the outburst in Ngahere. The old people had kept the kids occupied while everyone else bonked anything that moved. A group of gardeners complained about copulating couples flattening young corn plants until their own activities saw a bed of tomato plants destroyed.
‘This is a bit much,’ Matapihi said to Sean while they were both taking a breather. ‘I mean, I like to get my rocks off but where does it all end?’
‘Don’t think about it so much,’ advised Sean. ‘It won’t last forever.’
Sean had a mattress next to Stan in their hut. Over their heads were photocopies of astonishingly crude cartoons and useful sayings, like ‘When you’re up to your arse in alligators it’s hard to remember about draining the swamp’, and ‘I’m so happy I could just shit’.
‘I lost a wife and four kids, all teenagers,’ Stan told Sean late one night. He’d made a funeral pyre of his Pt Chevalier home and walked to Okahu Bay. Stan laughed away Sean’s worries about the doom and gloom.
‘What doom and gloom?’ he said. ‘Anyway, shit happens and if it gets on you just wash it off.’
Sean couldn’t argue with that, and he certainly wasn’t inclined to argue with the old man Matapihi took him to one night. He looked about a hundred and twenty and he scared the bejasus out of Sean.
‘This is Uncle Morepork,’ Matapihi said. ‘He knows who you are.’ After they hongi’d the old man came right out with it.
‘You’ve met the Maeroero,’ he said. Sean started to explain about the paintings, but he interrupted with a snort. ‘Don’t get on the wrong side of them. You won’t know another moment’s peace.’
Uncle Morepork told Sean about the Maeroero. They were reject fairies, given life and set free to guard the mauri of the place. They took their duties very seriously, he said, and echoing Auntie Mihi’s
words, told Sean they were now free to act as they saw fit.
‘Nothing to stop them now,’ he said.
‘How do I make peace with them?’
‘All they want is for people to live properly.’
‘How do I manage that?’
‘You know the rules, boy.’ Uncle Morepork scratched his head. His white hair was thick and wiry. ‘You could try a gift. They might like that.’
‘"Might?" What if they don’t?’
The old man gave a chuckle. ‘Then I wouldn’t want to be in your boots.’
After six weeks at Okahu Bay, Sean started moving south again. Matapihi and three of his mates rode out with him, all the way to the Bombay Hills. They were going to bring back some cattle.
‘I’ll be sorry to see Hamu go,’ Matapihi said. ‘He does most of the work when we’re droving.’ He looked serious. ‘We’ll miss you too. Tell you what, though, I won’t miss the curried dog.’
They both laughed, through the tears.
When Matapihi and his friends rode off Sean sat for a long time letting the thoughts and feelings tumble about, and everywhere were contradictions and confusions. He was free again. He was trapped again. He’d lost another home. He was home once more. But he was on the road again. He was moving and all the bets were off.
He wheeled and rode south, into the hills that used to look so neat, groomed and corduroyed. Now they sprouted all sorts of weeds, prickly and leafy. He passed Tipene, St Stephen’s, the college where tension between the two strongest cultures in the country had produced some very high-powered men, in business and politics and all those arenas that meant nothing any more. He started passing roadside stalls. A bank of black and purple thunder clouds rolled in from the north-east and he made it under cover just as raindrops the size of small grapes started splashing in the dust and on the tin roof above him.
Most of the produce in the wooden-floored shed had rotted in the boxes and trays around the walls. Some carrots were still okay and he tossed a handful out the door to Bojay. A few sacks of spuds were still good too, and so were some pumpkins and crates of kumara. Sean filled four small onion bags with vegetables.
He grabbed a bag of pickling onions and some mixed nuts, and found himself a box to sit on by the door while he waited for the rain to stop. It didn’t, so he made himself comfortable under the awning and fried himself some vegetables. Night fell and rain rattled on the roof. He lay awake thinking of what Uncle Morepork had told him about the Maeroero. A gift? What?
He rode the deserted highway in the morning sun, enjoying birdsong from bush that seemed a season away from engulfing everything. At the bottom, he passed Pokeno, the turn-off to the Coromandel and the Hauraki Plains. He remembered two years’ secondary schooling in Paeroa, and hitting what he thought was a peak of educational achievement when Mr Fraser had written on his sixth-form report card that ‘Sean cooperates passively’. He was still reliving adolescent small town scenes buying a dozen at the back of Ernie Bishop’s hotel and rolling the Mk II on the way home from a dance in Thames, when Meremere reared up on his left. The power station didn’t look any different to Sean. Still lurking. Still looming too, with the same haunted quality of primitive and abandoned technology crumbling into ruin.
On his right was what he’d always thought of as the great grey-green greasy Waikato River. On every bend a taniwha. Further up the river was a string of unattended dams, water spilling over or roaring through till turbines corroded and seized. Powerboats, with their spectacular antics, and fit young rowers had used the hydro lakes most weekends. As Sean rode he saw, through gaps between the trees, young men paddling carved waka, sunlight flashing off the water.
The road led south as the river meandered north. He remembered one summer when they’d run out of water in Auckland and had started talking seriously about piping water from the Waikato so people could wash their cars and water their lawns. Folk from both Waikato and Auckland were upset at the mixing of mauri for no good reason that they could see. No wonder the Maeroero had been upset, Sean thought. No wonder Cally had seen them stamping about like Rumpelstiltskin, crying despairingly, ‘That’s enough, that’s enough!’
Uncle Morepork’s warning made more sense. He felt a sudden affection for the gnarled little guys he’d seen in Cally’s paintings. They’d had no show in the old world. Maybe they’d get a better deal this time around.
His attention was suddenly caught by the double stack of the Huntly power station away in the distance. What a very expensive way to boil water. Sean hoped the Maeroero were happy to see the giant machines quiescent and the stacks cold, emitting nothing. As he drew closer, he could see seagulls perched on the rim of each chimney, preening and resting as they journeyed up and down the river.
Sean didn’t feel like adventures in the small town of Huntly. The last time he’d driven south, traffic had been bottlenecked there and everything was covered in a fine black and ochre dust from the coal and bricks that had underpinned the local economy. No doubt things were different now, nonetheless, he stopped at the next creek and rode through trampled and broken fences to a spot about three paddocks away from the road. He unsaddled Bojay, strung his tarp in the willows, boiled the billy and sat back with a cup of tea. He felt relaxed, in command. There was a natural nervousness at being in somebody else’s territory, but the more he let that thought mill around, the more it felt like his turf, and even if he wasn’t from there he was still welcome.
Just before he’d left Okahu Bay one of Matapihi’s cousins had given him an eel net, a hinaki, that he’d made. It had wings and a funnel to admit the eels and Sean had been looking forward to using it. He didn’t miss the curried dog either. He always had liked eel. Good, high-energy food. He waded into the creek, thigh-deep amid the young willows, and set the net. Back on the bank it was potatoes and pumpkin for dinner, boiled then fried quickly in hot oil. Curry powder. Cayenne pepper. Salt. Maybe breakfast would be more exciting. They slept well that night under the trees, no dogs, no people either, just Bojay munching and Hamu occasionally growling at nothing Sean could see.
The sun came up, a clear glow, none of the lurid colours that meant bad weather on the way. Sean checked the net. It was chokka, eels of all sizes. He tipped them out on the bank and selected a couple of two footers, breakfast and dinner. The rest went back in the creek. Sean laughed when he thought of the story about an eel’s brain being in its tail. He crushed their heads and buried his sensibilities as he dragged them writhing through the fire and scraped off their whitened slime with his knife. One he put aside for the evening and the other he cut in half and split like a smoke job, before frying it. Leftover potato and pumpkin mixed well with chopped-up onion. A handful of fresh watercress completed the meal, the best he could remember. Hamu enjoyed it too. He must have eaten close to a half of it, eel bones and all.
They approached Huntly cautiously. Sean remembered the place had always got a bad press. It had figured prominently in some very negative statistics. As he rode in, he could see that somebody had tidied up. Broken glass had been cleaned out of window frames and swept up. There was none of the windblown paper and other rubbish, mostly lolly papers, six months old, that had littered other towns. Koromiko were growing with oleanders in tubs, the blue and purple flowers startling among the pink and white sub-tropical blossoms. A warm rain was falling on the trees, whose tubs had been placed in the road to catch the water. Sean rode dry down the footpath, dodging the shop signs. The place didn’t even stink and, as he started riding past the houses on the south of the town, he could see digger tracks and graves with headstones, where those left behind had been clearing the decks before carrying on.
He didn’t see anyone there. They were probably working, growing vegetables and gathering something useful, and he wasn’t inclined to look for them. The wind felt good, the birds sounded sweet and the solitude was pleasant. So on he rode, past the orchards and vineyards, exotic tree lots, and everywhere weeds springing up and fences flattened. He d
idn’t see anyone till later in the day when he came to Ngaruawahia.
There were dozens of people there: Maori, Pakeha, Asians, people in saris, people in kilts, shorts, swannies. They were coming and going from the houses that still bore in their front yards, as they had in Huntly, digger marks and graves. Mostly they were coming from what looked to Sean like some sort of market at the marae. That marae had been the heart of the King movement. It was as alive as he’d ever seen it, with stalls of produce, clothing and cooked food visible inside the carved gates. He got a few startled stares too. He certainly wasn’t the only person on horseback, but having been a stranger often enough he could feel in himself the subtle differences that set him apart.
People greeted him as he went, a cheerful chorus of ‘Gidday’ and ‘Kia ora’, and even a ‘Konichi wa’ from an Oriental man with half a pig in a wheelbarrow and one of those towelling hats that Sean was sure someone had designed to look good on a watermelon.
He heard a greeting from the porch of one of the houses, just another ‘Gidday’, not particularly loud, not outstanding either. He looked around. Over a well-trimmed hedge and neat flower garden was a man in his forties, white hair cropped short, a black bush singlet, shearers’ pants, heavy work boots that scraped on the porch floor as he stood up. He moved down the path towards Sean and opened the gate. Sean dismounted. The man held out his hand.
‘The name’s Frank,’ he said. ‘Feel like a cuppa?’
Sean introduced himself and gripped Frank’s hand.
‘You look like you’ve travelled a long way,’ Frank said.
‘From Whangarei,’ Sean told him. ‘Stopovers here and there.’ Frank had the relaxed demeanour and unhurried manner that spoke of a lifetime on the land, locked into natural rhythms and flowing easily with the life around him.