Kokopu Dreams

by Baker Chris

  One day, at the height of summer, Sean and Tao were returning home from the inlet foreshore. They’d been checking on the ducks and Sean had been picking over the driftwood left at high tide, looking for good pieces to carve. A movement on the hill, away in the distance where he’d gained his first view of Kokopu Waters, caught his eye. Two tiny figures on horseback had come through the cutting, gazing down as he, Alex and Lydia had, all those years before. Who were they? The sight made his hair stand on end and he legged it home, stoked up the stove, and put the water on to boil. A cup of tea. The familiar chore calmed his nerves.

  With the water heating, he stood waiting, leaning against an oak tree in full leaf. Before long two people rounded the corner at the end of the street and rode towards him. Tall, on a large brown standard-bred like Bojay, was a Maori man in his late twenties, dressed all in black — a silver-disc band on his flat-brimmed, black hat and a black wool poncho that left his arms free like an old western movie gunfighter. Beside him was a Pakeha woman, a few years younger, with long dark hair hanging loose under a peaked cap advertising an Old Time beer.

  Both were travel-stained and weather-worn. They sat on their horses with the ease earned after many hours in the saddle. The man spoke first.

  ‘The eyepatch suits you.’ He was clearly enjoying some private joke, grinning all over his face. The woman burst out laughing.

  ‘Cally!’ Sean shouted. ‘Hemi!’

  Hemi swung off his horse and helped Cally dismount. They all fell in each other’s arms laughing and weeping.

  ‘I said we’d come.’ Cally rested her hand on his arm. ‘I wasn’t kidding.’

  Sean looked at them. His friends. People from his past, people he loved. He was just about to offer food and drink and his open home when Cally spoke again.

  ‘I’m pregnant,’ she said. Hemi looked protective. Sean’s jaw dropped.

  She was too. Between three and four months, Frangipani said, suggesting that she keep off horses for a while.

  ‘You’re here to stay, girl,’ she said. ‘Hope you like the place.’

  Maybe she did, maybe she didn’t. She and Hemi could have been anywhere. Every evening was filled with stories. They couldn’t believe Kevin’s adventures and, even though he’d shared many of them, hearing them retold shocked even Sean. He and Kevin caught up on all the news from Ngahere, only a year out of date. Hemi and Cally took them over every inch of their journey. Sean had never been so interested in anything and Hemi turned out to be a gifted storyteller, leaping, dancing and gesticulating, as he acted out incidents from their travels.

  Edgar had died eight years before, Hemi told Sean, remembering his affection for the old man. Sean could still see Edgar sitting in his deckchair waiting for the dogs. Edgar had taken advantage of the occasion of his death for a final practical joke.

  As people gathered round his bed, solemn and tearful, he’d feebly lifted a hand for silence.

  ‘I suppose you’re wondering why I’ve gathered you all here,’ he said, and promptly expired.

  ‘I didn’t think it was all that funny,’ Cally said, when Sean’s outburst of raucous laughter had finally petered out and he’d dried the worst of the tears. She turned to Kevin who wasn’t laughing either, and tapped her temple with a forefinger.

  ‘Things must have got to him,’ she said.

  The Kaiwaka folk had arrived in the same year, sailing a yacht on the short trip across Bream Bay from Mangawhai Heads to Whangarei Harbour. Sean wished he could have been there. Merenia said gidday to Jim and inside a week they were an item — daily practising the arts of crockery-hurling, invective and riding off in a huff for solitary sojourns deep in the bush.

  ‘They really love each other,’ said Cally. ‘Nothing could separate them.’

  Marie and Doug had watched over Cally and Hemi as they’d grown. Sean could see they’d done a job they must have been proud of. It would have been very hard for both of them, he was sure, waving goodbye to the two young ones, knowing they’d never get a letter or a phone call and they’d probably never see either of them again. They wouldn’t even learn about Cally’s pregnancy, though when Marie had asked one day Cally had apparently smiled mysteriously saying that anything was possible.

  ‘Did you know what was going to happen?’ Sean asked.

  ‘Tinirau told me. It must have happened about Wellington.’

  Hemi laughed at almost everything, but he didn’t laugh at that and he didn’t laugh when Sean asked him about Brian. He just looked at Cally and Sean had his answer.

  ‘It was the flu,’ Cally said. ‘It killed Cathy. Brian died a year later. He couldn’t sleep, he wouldn’t eat properly. It was a broken heart really.’ She snuffled and next thing they were all weeping, their painful memories reawakened, their heartbreaks still close to the surface.

  ‘What about Matapihi?’ Sean asked Hemi the next day. ‘Did you meet my mate?’

  ‘Sure did,’ said Hemi. ‘That’s some moko. He’s the big kamokamo at Okahu Bay now. He wanted to ride south with us, but he reckoned he’s too busy looking after a thousand people.’ Hemi reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a small packet. ‘He sent you this though.’

  Sean opened the packet and sniffed the yellowish spice. It was a strong curry and it made a delicious possum stew. Sean was delighted when Fairgo added whisky, distilled by the wild men of the Hokonui Hills according to an ancient recipe.

  ‘I often wanted to do this when I was eating dog,’ he said.

  Cally and Hemi had stopped in Ngaruawahia and were told by an ancient Oriental man in a rust-red blanket sitting in the sun with an elderly Pakeha couple that Sean had arrived safely in the south.

  ‘But you know that already,’ he’d told Cally.

  They’d ridden right through the centre of Maui’s Fish, camping among the pines.

  ‘Bad buzz,’ said Hemi. Cally laughed.

  ‘I told you we’d be safe,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t care. That was the scariest thing I ever saw. Worse even than Auntie Thelma telling me off when I was little.’ They’d seen Kurangaituku in the moonlight, her beak and claws terrifying. Cally called out a greeting. Hemi cocked his sawn-off. Kurangaituku hadn’t moved.

  The folk at Tokaanu remembered Sean and Kevin well. Along with Kurangaituku, they were now a local legend.

  ‘In our own lunchtime,’ Sean laughed, remembering Roha’s kindness. Uncle Ruka was still alive. He sent a letter for Sean, painstakingly written on good notepaper, stamped and addressed C/- the Kokopu Waters Post Office.

  ‘Pai tou mahi,’ Uncle Ruka said.

  ‘How did you guys get across Cook Strait?’ Sean asked. Hemi looked him straight in the eye and spoke without a flicker of a smile.

  ‘We didn’t go that way,’ he said. Actually they’d crossed the strait with Geoff and had heard a lurid tale of Sean and Kevin’s storm-tossed voyage years before. They’d also stayed with Zed and Fiona and had heard an even more fanciful story about how they’d crossed the renamed Ngerunui Plains, fighting off lions and packs of wild dogs.

  They helped Hemi clean up a house for him and Cally, and the pair of them fitted into the community as if they’d been there all along — and in a way they had. That was one of the things Sean learned over the years, that people kept their past with them, the important thing being how easy it was to live with. Sean had no trouble living with his, but he was very wary about spending too much time wandering around in it. If he wasn’t suddenly blasted with a noise like a train wreck, he’d be bumping into some long-dead auntie or uncle.

  ‘C’mon, boy,’ Sean would hear. ‘Watch what you’re doing.’

  One day he saw Cally down at the foreshore. She was getting large and so were the others. Cally was gazing intently at a spot a few metres out in the water where huge bubbles were rising. She was having a boy, she told Alex and Sean, and they were going to call him Tinirau.

  ‘Do you want to have a baby?’ Sean asked Alex that night. She gave him a look.
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br />   ‘Doubt it,’ she said. ‘Been there, done that. I’ve even got the tee shirt somewhere. What about you?’

  Sean thought for a moment. ‘No thanks. The dreams are enough.’

  But were they? Were they really? He reached for the bowl on the bedside table.

  ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Try one of these apples.’

  CHRIS BAKER grew up in small towns all over the North Island. He worked in New Zealand and Australia as a journalist and editor and left the profession for fencing, bush and farm work, driving, construction work and concrete finishing. An environmental campaigner in the 1970s, in the 1980s he was a Labourer’s Union job delegate at the Marsden Point refinery expansion before moving to Brighton, south of Dunedin, where he now lives.

  ‘I’m currently confined to a wheelchair (multiple sclerosis) and am writing full-time. My ancestry is Polynesian (Samoan), Celtic and Anglo-Saxon. I regard myself as a Pacific person, and my thanks to Ngapuhi Nui Tonu and particularly Ngati Hau and Ngati Korora for taking me in and allowing me to feel like I belonged somewhere.’