Potiki

by Patricia Grace

  Soon the light went off the water and then the sea was only a sound – a soft sucking sound and a fish splash sound. When the dark came so did the cold, and I’ve been told Hemi put a jersey on me. I do not remember the cold but I know it is true that Hemi would have taken a jersey for me, and that he would have put it on me when the sun went down. After dark the sky was white with stars. Tangimoana has told me that. I don’t remember the sky of stars, or the whiteness of the stars, my thoughts were in the water. The sky was like a sea full of herrings Tangimoana has told me, but I have no memory of that. My thoughts were not in the sky.

  James wanted me to have his line for a little while because he cannot enjoy without sharing. But I waited strongly holding my strong line with its big old hook that had been fixed for deep water, and its heavy sinker bigger than my fist. I don’t remember the stars or the cold, or my brother James wanting to share his line with me, or the sinker bigger than my fist, though I’ve been told. But I remember waiting, and the light going, and the soft splash sounds of the water with all the colour gone.

  I remember when the pull came. James, who was sitting by me, grabbed and held onto me so that I wouldn’t go over the side. I held on hard to my line. I remember that for a moment there was nothing else, only holding – me holding the line, James holding me. Hemi took the other end of my line, unrolled some of it and tied it to the seat.

  ‘Hold him, Son,’ he said to James. Then he said to me, ‘Let go now, Boyboy. It’s tied.’

  I didn’t hear him, and I don’t remember. I was holding and pulling, and James was holding me. ‘My fish, my big fish,’ I remember calling.

  And then I remember my father Hemi taking my hands and saying, ‘Hold it lightly now, Boyboy. The line is tied.’ He made me look to where he had tied the line to the seat. ‘You’ll cut your hands,’ he said, ‘if you hold the line too tightly.’ He stopped me from pulling. ‘You’ll have us all in the sea. Stop pulling now, let go now and we’ll row your big fish into shore.’

  I remember that Tangimoana was calling out to my mother Roimata and my mother Mary and my brother Manu and some others who had gathered, and who were sitting on the beach round a little fire they had lit there. ‘He got it,’ she called. ‘Boyboy got it. Toko caught his big fish.’

  ‘Stay there with your line,’ Hemi told me when he ran the dinghy up on to the beach. He and Tangi and James got out. My uncles and my cousins helped them to get the dinghy with me in it, onto dry shore. Hemi lifted me out and we could hear my big fish knocking and splashing not far from the edge of the water.

  Hemi and I began pulling my big fish in. It was a strong fish, swimming backwards in the shallow water.

  ‘He’s swimming backwards!’ That’s what I remember that Hemi said. Then whoa, we couldn’t pull anymore. ‘He’s found a rock,’ said Hemi, ‘and he’s hanging on by his tail. Hold,’ he said. ‘But don’t pull any more. Go and get us a gaff and a torch,’ he said to James.

  Hemi and I held on while James ran home for a gaff-hook and a torch.

  ‘If we keep on pulling we could break our line, or break the mouth of your big fish and then we’d never land him.’ That’s what Hemi said.

  James was only a little circle of light and a sound of stones sliding as he came running. He gave the torch and gaff to Hemi, then held the line with me.

  My father Hemi walked out just a little way into the water with my sister Tangimoana splashing along behind him. He put the little circle of torch light close to the surface of the sea and gaffed my big fish under its head. He swung his arm round and pulled the big fish free of the rock that it had lashed its tail to.

  We hauled it out onto dry shore while it barked and barked and smacked at the stones with its long heavy tail. It is in my memory that the big fish was much much bigger than me, and longer than the little dinghy sitting on the shore.

  ‘We got it, we got it,’ Tangimoana was shouting, and there was talking and noise from everyone.

  ‘It’s a conger Dad,’ James said. ‘A big conger.’

  ‘It’s bigger than he is,’ said Hemi. ‘Boyboy it’s bigger than you.’

  We dragged the big eel up further onto the beach and my father Hemi found a heavy piece of wood and whacked my big fish on the head with it. I do remember the sound. My brother Manu was hiding away with Mary’s arms round him, and she was saying, ‘Never you matter Boy. Mary look after Boy.’

  My father Hemi lifted the big eel from under its gills and half-slid half-carried it to the verandah where we could see it in the light. It was half the length of the verandah, or that’s what I remember. It was shiny and black, and shiny silver underneath. Its eyes were little dark pips, and you could tell nothing from its eyes – nothing about its life or its death. Its head was the size of my head, or that’s what I remember. And I remember that I was both sorry for my fish and glad about it. Also I remember that I was not afraid of it even though you could tell nothing from its eyes.

  We pulled out the stomach of my big fish, and the cockabullies and crabs that it had been feeding on. Then Hemi cut off its head that was as big as my own head, or that’s how I remember it. He made a long cut down the middle of it, from its head to its tail, then took the long bone out and opened the fish out flat. The whiteness of the inside was a surprise to me.

  Hemi sent Tangi for the salt and James for the tub. I helped James to hose out the tub, then we poured the salt into it. The pile of salt was like a little snow mountain and when we put the water in, the little snow mountain melted right away. Hemi and Roimata cut the eel into strips and put the strips into the brine we had made. Hemi scrubbed a heavy board to cover the tub with so that the fish would stay clean, and so that cats would not come and try to take the fish away.

  Well we were up late that night helping with my big fish, that’s what I remember, and we hadn’t even had our baths by then. We had to hurry and not play in the bath, and not be a big eel swimming and splashing.

  Manu got into my bed so that he wouldn’t call out and cry in the night. We went right under the blankets and we were big conger eels living under the water at the base of the snow mountain. We had little eyes like pips and long fins from head to tail. We had sharp close-together teeth and crabs in our bellies, and we swam and dived and fought and bit and flopped our tails until all the blankets were on the floor.

  Then our mother Roimata came in to speak to us and to tidy us, but still we did not go to sleep for a long time after that. I don’t remember if Manu cried in the night, and called and kicked and struggled in the dark. I don’t remember if that was one of the nights that I woke with his fingers pinching hard into my arm.

  There is a lot to remember about that night, and some of it is my own remembering, and some of it is from what I have been told since. But what I remember most of all about then, what I remember truly and really was that I knew. I knew that there was a big fish for me. I knew when Hemi said that he was going to get herrings, when I went to the shed for the line, when I was lifted into the dinghy, when the water was soft, orange and bangled, when I let the big, heavy line down, when the night came, and the cold came – but I do not really remember the cold – I knew as I listened to the soft sea sounds, and before the pull came, that there was a big fish for me. And what I have known ever since then is that my knowing, my own knowingness, is different. It is a before, and a now, and an after knowing, and not like the knowing that other people have. It is a now knowing as if everything is now. My mother Roimata knows about me. On that night she said to me, ‘You knew didn’t you, Toko? You knew.’

  We were up early the next day and my father and my uncles did not go out fishing early as they had planned. First of all they buried the head of the fish and the insides of the fish at the roots of the passionfruit vine. Then we all went up back into the bush to get green manuka brush for the smoke fire. Hemi started the sweet-smell fire in the smoke drum and we took the eel pieces out of the brine and dabbed the wetness away from them with a cloth. Then Hemi and Uncle
Stan hung the pieces in the drum with all the smoke coming up, and they showed James and all of us how to keep the smoke fire going with the manuka without letting any flames happen.

  So then we had work for the rest of the day looking after the smoke. I don’t remember, but I know, that it would have been our brother James who did everything and understood it all and knew what to do. He could always do grown-up things. He could always be careful and patient and tidy, like Hemi, that’s what our mother Roimata said.

  When Hemi and our uncles came home they were pleased with James and all of us, and they took the strips of eel from the drum.

  The eel flesh was goldy and smelled of the sea and the trees. We wanted to eat some of it right then but Hemi was a little angry with us and told us you didn’t eat food until it had been shared, especially if it was from the sea. Ours is a big family he said, which was something to always remember.

  9

  Toko

  There is more to the story of when I was five, and it is about when I went to give Granny Tamihana her pieces of fish.

  Granny heard me walking on her path. She knew it was me by the special sound of my walking, and she called out, ‘Haeremai Tokowaru-i-te-Marama.’ I sat down on her doorstep to take my boots off, although that is not a rule for me. I am allowed in houses wearing my special boots as long as I wipe them carefully. But I was pleased to get the big boots off and go into Granny’s kitchen. Granny wasn’t in the kitchen but I knew where she would be. I went through to the little porch of windows where she was seated on her sheepskin rug preparing strips of flax for her baskets.

  I held up the bag of fish for her to see and she said that I was very good and strong. That’s what I remember. She said I was a good fisherman and a good little father to her, and a good little father to all my family, and that my fish was myself to give. And she said that she was the one that was going to cook the fish in milk for me, and that she and I were going to eat the fish together, soon, at her own table. Soon when her basket was made.

  I put the fish into her fridge so that the little cat would not steal. Then the cat and I watched Granny scraping the flax strips and making the muka at the ends. Then she plaited the muka ends together until her work looked like the long bone that Hemi had taken out of my fish.

  While she worked she was telling me and showing me which to lift and which to pull but it was too much to remember. It was just as if she was waving her hands – as if she held the flax strips and did a little green dance with her hands, and then after a while there was a new basket for me.

  ‘I make myself,’ she said. ‘And give it.’

  The sun was coming into the little room of windows. I remember feeling warm and happy on one of Granny’s rugs with the garden smell of flax and the sea-sound of her voice, and the shifting sounds of her body and her liney hands.

  ‘Here’s your basket nearly finish,’ she said. ‘Make some handles for your basket when we had our kai.’

  Perhaps I went to sleep then, or maybe I followed Granny to the kitchen and watched her heating the fish in a pot of milk, and mixing the dough for the paraoa parai and floating the dough pieces in a pan of fat. I remember the two of us sitting at her table with the fish steaming on our plates and syrup melting and running down the sides of our warm bread. I think I remember Granny putting the very tip of her finger on the knob of her teapot lid as she poured tea for us, or else I know it because it’s what she always does. I remember that she talked and talked advising me about everything to do with my whole life. Some of the things she told me were not right out of my understanding, but only sitting on the edge of it. Even so my understanding was more than ordinary for a person who was five. Well that’s what I’ve been told. Given in place of a straight body, and to make up for almost drowning – nobody has told me that but I think it might be so.

  And I remember Granny getting up from the table and taking the fire poker from where it was hanging on the wall and swinging the fire door of the wood range down. She stooped, and rattled the burning wood so that the sparks danced, and then she poked more wood in. Fire caught the new wood, and the dry manuka bark lifted and curled and flamed. There was rumbling in the chimney like a storm coming.

  Then Granny stood, and I thought that she could have come out of the fire, like a magic fire woman. She stood, in her dark dress, with her old, old face and smoke hair. Her eyes had two dark centres but the whites were lined with red like little fiery pathways. And I tried to walk the fiery pathways but found that they led to places where it was difficult to follow. The way along the pathways was too far, and too magic, too secret and too locked away to follow, or that’s what I think now.

  We washed and dried our dishes and put them away. I shook the tablecloth outside where the seagulls come, then I followed Granny through to the sitting room with its big brown chairs and flowery cushions and photographs in big wooden frames. The photographs were of long-ago people in best clothes. One was of Granny when she was a girl, standing by her brother who had been dead for seventy years. That’s what Granny said. ‘That’s Tokowaru-i-te-Marama, your great-granduncle, and he’s been dead for seventy years. Only me and him, you know,’ she said, ‘the two of us. And after that, only me.’

  Back in the little window room I watched Granny make muka and plait the handles for my basket.

  ‘Riding our horses,’ she said. ‘Only a little time after that photo there, and the tide down low. Galloping, galloping on our horses on the low-tide sand. Well there is a kehua there that day, on that little rock, and that kehua give my brother’s horse a very big fright. Yes, the horse see a very big kehua there on the little rock sticking up in the low water just in front of here. Well. The horse get very wild you see, very wild. The horse get a very big fright. My brother fly out in the air you see, because of the big kehua make his horse very wild. And down, down, and splash in the small water. And bang. His head break on that rock there with a big kehua on it. My poor brother, ka pakaru te upoko.

  ‘Those days I cry and cry for my brother. And smack him too. They make my brother all ready for the people to come, and dress him up nice and put him in our wharenui there. And I look at him, and you know I smack him hard. I throw my flowers down hard, and I kick that pretty box with my brother in very, very hard.

  ‘Well my daddy and my aunties growl at me and hold tight on to me, and I can’t smack and kick. I have to be a good girl after that. I have to be good, and all the people from all everywhere come and see my poor brother. I have to be a good girl.

  ‘No more fishing for a long time after,’ Granny said. ‘No more fishing and no more going in the sea. Just like when you are born, Little Father. All the people have to wait and wait for the water be right again. Just like for you, Little Father.’

  She gave me the finished basket which was cool and green-smelling, then she led me back to the photos.

  ‘The time your great-granduncle is born, that’s the time all those people die of a bad sickness, tokowaru i te marama. Eight people die in one month here, and eight tupapaku on our marae. Eight in one month. But it’s a good name for you Little Father, your great-granduncle’s name. And it’s your own name now.’

  I thought of the other Tokowaru-i-te-Marama galloping along the sand, being thrown from his horse and falling to hit his head on the rock. The dull, hard sound of when my father Hemi whacked my big fish with the heavy stick came back to my mind. And the life of the long-ago Toko and the life of my big fish seemed somehow to come together. There was a big kehua there.

  I put on my boots and went home along the beach shouldering the gifts I had been given.

  There is something else to do with my five-year-old story and the story of my big fish. It is to do with the passionfruit vine. ‘Vine’ and ‘brine’ were both new words to me then, and these words quickly recall that time for me whenever I hear them.

  My mother Roimata had taken a passionfruit cutting from Granny Tamihana’s vine. At the time when I caught my big fish the cutting was dr
y and without life, that’s what I’ve been told. But after we buried the fish head and fish guts there the plant began to grow and grow. The branches began to swim everywhere like a multiplication of eels. It was as if the big eel head with its little seed-eyes was birthing out trail after trail of its young. All the little eels swarmed the shed walls and the trees, whipping their tails and latching them to the walls and branches, still growing and multiplying all the time. And the eel-vines had a thousand hidden eyes, a thousand tails and a thousand hidden hearts.

  The hearts are dark and warm and fit in the cup of your hand. You can pull out the hearts without pain, and when you open them you find the thousand dark seed-eyes. The seeds are a new beginning, but started from a death. Well everything is like that – that’s what my mother Roimata says. End is always beginning. Death is life.

  The goldy seeded fruit is sharp-tasting and stinging, and leaves you with red stained fingers and a smarting, blooded mouth.

  And the endless vine going everywhere is like a remembrance of the time, which is really a now-time, of when I was five, and of the big barking fish that I knew was waiting for me on the white sky night in the orange lagoon.

  10

  Hemi

  The day the works closed down for good he walked home along the beach leading a horse. It was a good horse, quiet and strong, even if a little old for what he needed.

  It had been a very difficult year for a lot of people, with fewer and fewer jobs and so many people out of work. It had been a time of stoppages and strikes, and so much unrest, and now he was out of work too. Well, he was glad. He was sorry about the general hardships that people were facing, but for himself, for the whanau, he was glad. He had important things to do, things that had been on his mind for years now, and he’d done nothing but talk about it. A bit old for it now, he wondered? Well he was always a little slow getting onto things, inclined always to wait for things to happen. Should have been on with it before now, for the sake of the ones without work wanting to return home. But anyway now was the time.