Potiki

by Patricia Grace

  The man with the camera went then, and stood for a while by the roadside, but he was not dressed for water and mud. He made his way along to the road where his car was parked. I went to phone the priest.

  It was about two hours later that one of the children who had been up the hill looking out came back and said the people were returning. The water had gone down a lot by then, so we, with Hoani, prepared to go out towards the urupa to meet them.

  ‘I’ll walk,’ I said.

  ‘It’s a long way.’ For me.

  ‘And too muddy for the chair.’

  But my brother was already helping me remove the heavy shoes. ‘Leave your sticks, leave your shoes,’ he said. ‘Too hoha, come on, Puti.’

  He and our cousin shouldered in under my armpits and linked hands behind me, as I draped my arms about their necks.

  ‘Go on ahead, we’ll catch you shortly,’ our Aunty said. ‘What about you, Kui? We need you there with Hoani.’

  ‘All of us,’ said Granny Tamihana. ‘All the kids, babies, all the whanau, everyone.’

  There were people about, some writing in notebooks, others taking photos. Some had come to look, and others to help. Some were friends – those who had tried to stop the road from being made and who had been angry at the cutting of the hills, the destruction of trees, the disturbance of rocks of the hills and shore.

  ‘It’s because of that,’ they said.

  ‘It could be more than that,’ Aunty Rina said.

  ‘We’ve come to help, maybe clean up. Whatever.’

  ‘Come with us,’ our Aunty said. ‘We’re going to have karakia, a service, up at the urupa … our cemetery. Started to wash away, you see. We don’t know what we’ll find, what needs doing, but … we need help, with the old lady, the kids.’

  She turned to speak to her daughter.

  ‘Get some gumboots for Granny, Babe, and a warm jacket for her, and for you too. You too Mary, you get your boots and coat. Come on kids, boots on, do your jackets up.’

  So the people who had become our friends came with us through the mud carrying the children. They stood with us as we met up with the others and as we began to tangi for all that had happened, and for family long gone and recently gone, but who were amongst us still. We all stood close together about the urupa as we chanted the karakia and sang the waiata tangi. It was our urupa, where as younger children we had listened and played, where we had told our stories and said our dreams into the ground.

  18

  The urupa

  Granny Tamihana always gave them the first flowers of each season to take up to the graves. In one season there were red and gold gladioli, scarlet geraniums, and hydrangeas that were rust and mauve. In another there were dahlias and snapdragons that were white and purple and wine, and there were leafy branches of kotukutuku with dark hanging bells. In another there were rust and amber wallflowers and heavy brown chrysanthemums. Then there were the snowdrops, freesias, jonquils, daffodils, and handfuls of green.

  She would give them the special water containers that she kept under the shed and instructions on what was allowed and what was not allowed, and instructions on what needed to be done.

  The children always filled the containers at the creek before starting up the small hill to the urupa. On the way up there was a large manuka that stood by itself, that they should not touch, so they did not touch it. They would move on to the narrow path that led to the gate, helping each other, helping Toko so that he would not lose balance and fall.

  Once inside the fence they would sit down to rest, then after a while begin to walk about, keeping to the narrow paths, being careful not to step on the places. They would read the stones and discuss the dead, retelling the stories they’d heard and told over and over again.

  Manu said that Uncle Pere Thompson had been as big as a mountain, and that when he died people had had to take the roof off his house to get him out. It was worse than a horse dying inside, he said. But James didn’t think there had been anything about a mountain. He reckoned that their uncle was just a fat man with a coffin the size of a kitchen that it took forty men to carry. The men had straps over their shoulders, the same straps that you have when you lift a piano, or maybe they used a crane, he said.

  Then Tangimoana remembered that there really was something about a mountain because the diggers had taken hours and hours to dig the hole. The men had started digging early in the morning and the sun was hard on them before they finished, and it was nearly time for the burial. One of the digging men had collapsed and they thought he had died too, but it was because he had not had food or drink, and because they had all hurried to get the digging finished before burying time.

  But the earth dug out from the deep hole had made a big pile, like a mountain, and when all the people had come to the burial they’d had to stand on the slopes of the mountain so that they could watch Uncle Pere go down.

  Manu said that he knew Pere Thompson had been as big as a mountain, and Toko said but not always. Because when Uncle was young he had been as skinny as a handle, but when he was old he was very enormous. He used to make toffee for kids Toko said, but that was when Dad and Uncle Stan and mother Mary were kids. And he twisted the toffee into curly sticks. Nobody else could. His legs were like the pyramids of Egypt, he said.

  Well Aunty Emma was married to a German spy. She pushed him off his bike one day when he was riding along spying. The handlebars of the bike were full of rolled-up maps and messages. After that she married him with a good hiding from her father. She was bossy and gave him no chance.

  Grandfather and Grandmother had big gardens at the back. Everybody helped there. Grandfather was tall and thin and a bit bent over from digging and weeding. But when he was young he was tall and straight and smiling in a soldier’s uniform. He went to the second war and had his thumb blown away. His thumb got lost there, somewhere in a trench.

  When Grandmother died that was when Mum came and married Dad. Mum saw Grandmother dressed up nice. Grandmother had the cloak and the pounamu. And she wore a little locket with tiny tiny photos of children. The children were Miria and Tame.

  Well Dad remembered when he used to hikihiki Miria on his back, and he remembered Miria and Tame playing on the verandah and by the gardens. But Miria died of a disease in her back and Tame died of pneumonia when he had just learned to crawl.

  And there were other babies of the whanau there too. Babies with real names but who had died before they got to be born. So it was as if they hadn’t been born yet and would come out and cry soon and want their kai. Or it was as if they were sleeping and waiting to be big enough to know you, and to come out and play, or to catch little fish with their quick hands, or to throw stones in the sea.

  The children would weed the places and fill the jars with water, putting the same number of flowers in each jar to be fair. Then they would go from grave to grave squatting and putting an ear to each place. They would listen carefully but would hear nothing. No one called to them, no baby cried, no one whispered to them the secrets of under the ground.

  ‘What colour are their kitchens?’

  They stopped listening for the secrets of under the ground and sat up, looking at Manu. No one spoke for a long time.

  ‘What colour are their kitchens?’

  So Tangimoana said, ‘Yellow. Their kitchens are yellow. And there aren’t any windows. You can’t see out or in. They sit all day and night in their kitchens, wrapped in blankets, and they mumble and stare. But there’s really no day and night. And anyway they don’t stay there all the time. Sometimes they crawl down skinny passages and bump their heads. They crawl and crawl, and sometimes they come to a free place where they sing and dance throwing their blankets down. They can step into water if they want to and swim down to a big whare whakairo with no need of breathing, where they talk all day long, but there’s no real day. And Uncle Will has crawled back to Germany by now, but it’s an underground Germany. He has maps and signs, and he meets grey people in the tunnels
who sing in their throats. He never comes back to the yellow kitchen.’

  ‘The babies.’

  ‘The babies. Well the babies are not real yet. They are only wood without eyes and haven’t had a chance. Not yet. But they’re waiting … for something … their eyes to get put. And then … they’ll pop up. Out of the ground. Or, out of the sea … yes, out of the sea. The sea will be red then … the sea was … red … that’s all. Because we have to go home soon.’

  ‘Soon, but we haven’t told them things yet. We haven’t said our things.’

  ‘All right we’ll have turns. James can go first and we can pick whoever we like.’

  ‘All right, I pick my grandfather. “Tena koe e Koro. We never saw you because you dropped down dead in the garden and we weren’t born then. But we’ve seen your photo at Granny Tamihana’s. You were a soldier then in that photo but you still had your thumb. It was before you went. Your brothers and sisters, and you and Granny Tamihana’s husband all used to work in the big gardens. Everyone worked there. And you all used to sell vegies by horse and cart, but mostly people couldn’t pay. We all live in your house now, and we have other photos of you too. All the old things are still in the shed, and a bit rusty. Ko James ahau, tou mokopuna. Kia ora koe, e pa.”’

  ‘And I choose Miria and Tame. “Well Miria and Tame, I like it when we all crawl along the tunnels. Then we come out and throw our blankets down on the grass in the free place and dance and sing. Then we have a big swim and dive down to the big undersea houses and tutu round day and night, but there’s no dark time and no shadows. You don’t get lost. There’s no eaters or snatchers, or doors that stay open half way. No bones to make rattle sounds by your windows, or by your eyes. We have a party sometimes, Miria and Tame, with Tangi, James and Toko and all our cousins. When I had my ear down I think I heard.”’

  ‘“Tena koe, Granny’s brother. She said I could have your name. Eight people died in one month when you got born. Eight of our own whanau, because there was a bad sickness where we live. But you yourself, you did not die of a sickness, you died of a kehua. Granny was angry. She was a little girl then. But Granny gave me your name to help me, but it is not my only name. And she gave me a taonga from her ear to help me too. It is a taonga to help me in every way, but it is not the only taonga that I have. Ko Tokowaru-i-te-Marama koe, ko Tokowaru-i-te-Marama au. Kua mutu.”’

  ‘“Grandmother, I sleep in your room but it’s all done out different now. I’ve got photos and books and a radio. There are yellow and red curtains and a blanket made of forty-seven different colours of wool that our Aunty Rina made for me. My mother and father were angry with me for cutting my name into the window-sill with a little knife – Tangimoana Kararaina Mary Tamihana. I do wrong things, not always. I get mad at Aunty Mary. I call her names, not always. Some teachers don’t like me but some do. We have to go home soon and here is a song for you. It’s about Granny’s place. She’s an older granny than you but you died before she did.

  “Seagulls walk on Granny’s garden

  But one has a broken wing

  Seagulls walk with white white fronts

  But one is splashed with colour

  Seagulls walk close together

  But one looks at the sky

  Seagulls walk with flamy eyes

  But one steps in the fire.”’

  The children would pick up the containers while Manu held Toko’s arm, then make their way slowly down the side of the hill without speaking. At the base of the hill they would always take the path to the sea that did not lead through the gardens or by the houses, instead they pushed their way through the lupins to the water.

  They would wash the containers and then their hands and feet. They would clean the underneath of Toko’s boots and flick water on each other. Then they would return to Granny’s place and put the containers back under the shed.

  Did you do this. Did you …? Yes Granny. Have you, have you? Yes. But Granny was not really angry.

  ‘Haere mai mokopuna ma, ki te kai paraoa, ki te inu ti. Tomo mai ki roto. Kei te matemoe koutou? Kei te matekai koutou? Tomo mai ki roto.’

  They would go into Granny’s kitchen where the fire was always going and where the table would be set with best cups, and glass dishes of butter and jam. The big new round of bread would be on the board wrapped in a cloth.

  ‘Tino pai o koutou mahi whakapaipai te urupa o te whanau. Tino pai hoki te whakarongo ki nga tono o to koutou kuia. E kai koutou, e kai. E inu hoki …’

  19

  Roimata

  The seagulls cried above the land. They dipped and climbed and called, but there was no other sound as we set out with the boats.

  Some went in the dinghies with the gear, and there was enough depth in the flood water to enable them to row, sometimes pole the boats along. Others of us made our way on higher ground round the side of the hills. We moved slowly because the way was slippery and steep. It was one of the young men walking ahead who turned and called that the creek was full of junk, but we didn’t understand what he meant until we caught up with him and saw the heap of stone and concrete and bitumen showing above the flood water.

  It is a small creek, and in places runs narrowly between sharp banks. Where it widens into pools there is not much banking at all. It was in a place where water from a shallow, bankless pool dropped into a narrow neck and flowed between steeply cut banks, that the dam had been made. But we did not realise at first that this damming had been deliberately done. Our first reaction was one of anger towards what we thought was the thoughtlessness, the lack of care, of those who made the roads.

  Our next thought was to clear the blockage away quickly, to get the water moving again, because above all immediate thought was the knowledge that the banks of the urupa had begun to slip, and that our gardens were gone. These were the things that were heavy on us as we began to move the rubble away, piece by piece.

  We were soon wet through and covered in mud as we levered rock and shovelled mud, as we dragged and lifted debris away from the channel. As we worked the thought came to me that this had been deliberately done.

  Gradually we were able to make a narrow clearing so that the water began to flow again, slowly at first, and then more rapidly as we pulled away more and more of the rubble.

  ‘They did this,’ Stan said.

  No one had spoken until then. There had only been the creening of the gulls.

  ‘But why?’

  We had all had the same thoughts.

  ‘Getting back at us I suppose, or warning us to back off.’

  I remembered the amount of money we’d been offered. I remembered the letter and its desperation, and knew that what Stan said was right.

  ‘The urupa and the gardens,’ someone said. ‘They’re trying to kill us.’

  But we didn’t speak of it any more just then. We continued with the work, shovelling mud and debris, passing rock and rubbish from hand to hand.

  It was some time later that we saw a group of people making their way towards us. It turned out to be Matiu and Timoti and their three workmates, followed by Tangimoana and Tania. They had brought hot drink and food.

  We set the kai down in one of the dinghies and stood about to drink the tea and eat the food that Matiu and the others had brought. We were too tired to speak of what had happened and why. Then Matiu said, ‘There’s been a channel made, down the side of the hill,’ but that was all he said.

  Tangimoana was quiet, which was not usual. There was something to be told, but not by her.

  ‘Korero, Son,’ Hemi said.

  ‘It’s a channel. Been made to take the water down. To the urupa. Into it, where the soil has slipped.’

  ‘Korero,’ Hemi said again.

  ‘Looking down from the road. You can see. Half hidden, but you can see. Put there, by … someone, to take the water down and do … harm. Someone from the job.’

  ‘And all this too,’ Hemi said. ‘It took a man and a machine to do all this.’

 
‘And. That’s the finish for us,’ Matiu said. ‘We quit. There’s a lot’ll walk off once they know.’

  He and Timoti and the other three men, as well as Tangimoana and Tania, took over the work that we’d been doing.

  No one spoke then. We stood in silence about the dinghy, our feet being pulled further and further into the mud of our own turangawaewae, our own standing place. It was a world of silence, an unfamiliar world, a world of other, a world of almost drowning. We stood, not speaking, only trying to search and sort the other, the almost drowning, to find a pattern and a sense, to work through piece by piece to get us home.

  By the time we had finished eating, the others had finished clearing the creek. We picked up the gear, leaving the dinghies where they were, and as we began making our way back someone said, ‘The ground is still the same ground.’

  ‘The dead are still dead,’ someone else said. ‘And the living are still on two feet.’

  Much of the water was gone by then. There were people about, and our family that had stayed behind was coming in a slow procession to meet us at the urupa.

  Above us the gulls were turning, eyeing the ground to which they would occasionally drop in wauling groups before lifting and circling again. The sky was clouded still, but it was high white cloud, and the light showing through it caught the undersides of the rising birds, and outlined the angled wing shapes as they rose and wheeled, glinting and haloed above the land.

  ‘They’ve got Hoani with them,’ Tangimoana said. ‘And there’s those Pakehas who sat up on the road, well some of them, helping to backy the kids through the mud.’

  ‘And Granny, they’re bringing her.’

  ‘James. They rang James.’

  We moved forward to greet them, to hold our most precious ones to us – the little ones, and also those who were not strong along with those who looked after them. And there was James who had been away, and Hoani our minister who came whenever we needed him.