Days of the Python (Python Trilogy Book 1)

by David Jurk

  “I just have trouble imagining you being amenable to an arranged marriage.”

  “Well, right – you’d have to know what it was like on Niue.” She paused. “You’d have to know what I was like. So, well, it’s… complicated.”

  “OK,” I said. “Tell me then.” And as the night slipped by around us, she did.

  Her mother had died giving birth to her, her father a few years later, killed in a car, driving drunk. She’d been raised by her maternal grandmother – her Nana – something of a real maverick, apparently, on Niue. With its patriarchal order, and intense, nearly universal Catholicism, Aulani had been taught to scorn both the notion of men running the world and a deity above it. Nana was a spiritualist; she held a literal belief in the ancient Samoan spirit women – the Teine Sa. These teachings dominated her early life, but there’d been a price to pay; casting aside Catholicism had ostracized her from virtually the entire community. They saw her and Nana as pariahs, apostates of the worst kind. Shunned, she had led her life on Niue less with people than nature. Out among the trees and cliffs and waves, Nana had taught her the ways of the Teine Sa, a recognition of the spirituality contained within all things of the earth and sea, and especially the central role of women.

  “It is as Nana told me,” she said, “we say mother earth and mother sea for a reason. It is their fertility that gives all of us life.”

  “That’s fine,” I replied. “I agree there’s a natural femaleness to many things in the world, and who am I to say there’s not some actual spiritual presence – such as the Teine Sa – in the islands. Still there’s something here that just seems contradictory to me. If Nana taught you freedom from the domination of the Catholic church and espoused not just the strength of women, but the need for them to lead, why on earth would she then arrange a marriage?”

  “So that I would have a child,” she replied, her voice flat. “Nana told me the Teine Sa came to her in a dream and told her my future was ordained.” She paused. “She said I…” She let the sentence die.

  “She said you what?”

  Her voice was muffled as she pressed her face into my neck, pulled herself tighter against me. “She said I was going to give birth to a special child.”

  I waited, but there was nothing more.

  “Special, how?” I persisted.

  “I don’t know, Owen. Honestly, it was… just a dream of hers, an illusion.” I felt her take a deep breath, felt her breath flow out warm against my neck. “She was wrong; it never happened.”

  When she spoke again her voice was distant and tired.

  “But she truly believed it. And… well, I wasn’t very likely to find a man on my own, so she found one for me. He was older, a Maori from New Zealand, working on Niue on some NZ construction project.”

  She paused.

  “What he wanted…what he wanted was a woman. That’s all. A woman. For himself, for what you would imagine. And for his small son, he wanted a mother.”

  His small son, I thought, not hers.

  “So, what then?” I asked. “Did you go to New Zealand?”

  “No. The arrangement Nana made was that he…got me, and in return had to agree to live on Niue. She said that the Teine Sa spirits were centered there, that I needed a connection to them.”

  “So, did he…?”

  “Did he believe all that? No, he thought it was funny. And at first, he didn’t seem to care about me staying on Niue; most of his work was off-island anyway. He’d be home for a few days, then off for a month or two.” She paused.

  “He wasn’t a bad person.” Another pause. “I tried to be a good wife. I tried to be a good mother to his son.”

  She sighed.

  “In time though,” she whispered, “he came to hate coming home to me. He considered Niue boring and remote, thought Niueans were hicks. He wanted to be back living in Auckland; he missed the social life there, all his mates, the pubs. And… just having a young woman waiting when he came home, after a while, it wasn’t enough.”

  I tried to think of something comforting to say and couldn’t find it.

  “He never hurt me,” she added suddenly, “never got angry with me. I think in the end, he just regretted everything. And when the NZ takeover happened, well, in his mind that took care of his end of the deal. He thought we’d leave Niue, go to Auckland like everyone else. It… he couldn’t understand why I refused to go. It was the only thing we ever fought about.” Her voice trailed off again and I waited for her to finish. “In the end,” she finally said, “I just couldn’t.”

  “And the boy?” I asked.

  “Truly,” she replied softly, “I came to love him. He was four when he came to me, and six when Mani took him back to New Zealand. For him, I was the only mother he’d ever known; for me, caring for him made the two years worthwhile.”

  “So, then” I asked slowly. “What about the special child the spirits had revealed to your grandmother in the dream? Did… didn’t you get pregnant?”

  Something approaching bitterness crept into her voice.

  “No,” she said, “I didn’t.”

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered. It was all I could think of to say.

  She pulled closer to me, touched her lips to my neck.

  “Don’t be,” she whispered back. “The only sorrow was the boy, who lost his mother twice.”

  “But you,” I said after a while. “You lost the chance for a family.”

  I waited for a long time, long enough that I thought she’d fallen asleep. But she finally answered in a voice small and distant.

  “I never had a chance,” she said. “It just wasn’t meant to be.”

  “How can you say that?”

  “How can I not? It couldn’t have been him – he’d fathered a child. The failure was mine.” She sighed deeply, and I stroked her hair.

  “I had been an outcast for a long time, Owen. As I think about it now, it just all seems to have a certain karma to it. When Niue was for Niueans, I rejected them. When Nana dreamed I’d have a child, I couldn’t. And when everyone left, I stayed. So, living my life alone, finally hiding in a cave – well, it seemed right.”

  “You belong in sunshine, not a cave,” I said.

  She laughed quietly into my chest.

  “Perhaps,” she whispered.

  For a few minutes then, we lay quietly. I suppose, at that point, I should’ve known it was coming, should have expected it, but when she asked, I was quite unprepared.

  “And you,” she said. “Now you have to tell me about your Rachel.”

  How, I wondered in the silence that followed, will I ever do that?

  “Is it all right? She asked, after a moment.

  “Yes, of course,” I replied quickly. “I just…I’m not very good at even thinking about it, much less trying to talk about it.”

  She hugged me.

  “Then this will be good for you.”

  Right.

  “I met Rachel in college, in Ann Arbor. How she…why she bothered with me I don’t think I’ll ever completely understand. I wasn’t someone that…I wasn’t a very social person.” I paused to consider my words. “Actually, I wasn’t very friendly to people at all. I really don’t think I cared about other people.”

  She raised up slightly, trying to see my face in the darkness.

  “But why, Owen?”

  I took a few moments to marshal my thoughts. How do you explain your own nature? How can you possibly see yourself with any objectivity? But still, I tried.

  “I just never, even as a child, felt entirely comfortable around other people. I don’t exactly know how to describe it – I felt remote from them, different. I was amazed that people seemed to want to be with each other, seemed so wrapped up in what other people thought. I couldn’t have cared less. And, well, it was a little more than that. I…I hated being told what to do. When I was little, in grade school, I can’t tell you the trouble it caused; it was painful for everyone, especially my parents.”

&
nbsp; She laid her head back on my chest, listening.

  “I was kicked out of grade school – suspended – five times before I reached the fifth grade. They sent me for counseling; I refused to talk to the therapist. The whole thing, my whole childhood – it was just a mess.”

  I let the memories come, waiting for words to form.

  “It got worse as I got older and finally, they just kicked me out of the school system entirely when I was sixteen. They’d just had enough, I suppose. My parents were horrified but I was very relieved. I found a job, got fired. Found another, fired again. It kind of went that way for a while, and when I was old enough, I took a high school equivalency test, so I could get a diploma and apply to college, thinking… well, that it might be different. I did very well on the test and got into a good university. I went there fearing the worst, and it turned out to be much better than I’d ever imagined. I was free, really. If I wanted to be left alone, I was – no one gave a shit.”

  She stroked the side of my face with her soft hand.

  “It was good,” I reassured her. “The work - there were some amazing minds in Ann Arbor, some very, very bright people and it was…it opened up a new world to me. But I was still the same person inside, and very ready – always - to turn away, to reject people. And… after a while, I didn’t need to. I wasn’t someone people wanted to be around.”

  I paused. “And that was fine with me.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  I thought about it.

  “I suppose it’s not entirely true,” I admitted. “Because if it were, when I met Rachel, when she insisted on getting close to me, I wouldn’t have let her.”

  “And you did let her.” A statement, not a question.

  “Yes,” I agreed, “I did. I saw her the first time in the library. She had some huge reference book and dropped it, literally at my feet, and more in irritation than anything else I picked it up and shoved it back in her arms.”

  I laughed at the memory.

  “The look on her face when I scowled at her – I think if I’d done anything else, anything normal at all, that would’ve been that. But – you’d have to know her – she saw this angry, defensive, maniac of a person as a personal challenge and…well, she was persistent. And very, very smart. And…she didn’t seem like the others. There never seemed to be an agenda with her, never any reason to believe she meant anything other than what she said. She was the only person I’d ever met who didn’t seem to care what people thought. She was very true to herself. That’s how I saw her.”

  I paused, remembering.

  “And she was beautiful and so very kind,” I added in a whisper.

  “And she overcame your defenses and you loved her and married her.”

  I nodded very slowly. “Yes, that’s how it was.”

  I thought about those days, so long ago now. How happy my parents had been; their unimaginably anti-social, half-crazed son had met someone, was actually getting married. My mother wept, literally wept tears of relief and joy, every time she saw us together.

  “And the boat, Owen? How did Windswept come about?”

  “Well,” I replied, “marrying Rachel changed my life, but didn’t really change me, if you catch my meaning. I came upon the idea of building a boat because I wanted to take her and escape – to cruise the ocean endlessly, a society of two. And we couldn’t buy a boat of course, because no boat was exactly right. I needed to make my own.”

  Aulani laughed. “And she was willing? She agreed?”

  “She wanted me to be happy,” I replied slowly. “Though she never said so, I think she went along with it largely because I wanted it so much. But,” I added quickly, “you had to know Rachel; once she said she’d do something, she did it completely, did it as though she were redefining it.”

  I had to laugh, thinking of all the stuff she bought, all the classes she signed us up for and made me attend.

  “She went after plans and boat types and cruising routes as if we were embarking on a scientific mission. I think by the time we finally found a design we liked, she had pissed off half the naval architects in the States and Australia combined. She detested pretentiousness, and as a group they’re a pretty smug lot.”

  “I think I would’ve like her,” she said quietly.

  “I think so, too.”

  “And then she got sick?”

  “Later, yes - she got sick. A lump in her breast. She laughed it off, teased me for worrying. But it was cancer. Still, she laughed – big deal, she said. One breast instead of two – that’s why they made them in pairs.”

  The memories streamed past in the dark room.

  “We thought everything had been…taken care of. But she got sick again, began having headaches and we went back, and they told us it was in her brain. She got sicker and sicker, very quickly. One day we were still planning for when she got better, got well, and then suddenly it became a question whether today would be the last day, whether that night would be the end of it.” I stopped, needed to push back the sob that rose in my throat.

  “One afternoon, as weak as she was, she began asking me to promise her that I’d finish the boat; she wanted me to complete it, get it out of the barn and take it to sea just as we’d planned. And of course, I said I couldn’t possibly do that – how could I go without her? But she summoned some force from somewhere and she wouldn’t let it go; she kept saying Promise me, Owen, promise me you will. All that afternoon, as ill and exhausted as she was, she asked me and asked me. And I begged her, I said Rachel, please… but no.”

  I waited a long time to find my voice again.

  “So, I had no choice. I said it. I promised to finish the boat, promised to take it to the sea. Promised to go sailing.”

  “Of course,” Aulani said softly.

  “When she died, the moment she died, it was like a dream; it just wasn’t possible that it was real. I knew she was very sick, and she’d been very open, very frank as always, talking about death. The doctor talked about death. But I didn’t; to me, it was just a word.”

  Another pause. Then the words rushed from me.

  “She loved tea. The afternoon, that afternoon, I made her a cup and brought it to her. I sat it down next to her very carefully and I could see the steam rising from it. Nothing was different, you know? It was the same thing as the day before and the day before that – there was nothing any different about that day.”

  “Owen, I…”

  “And the cup just sat there, and I was looking at her, and the steam…the steam stopped rising from the cup and I saw in her face that she wasn’t there anymore. She was looking at me and then she just left. And…the windows were all closed, I know they were because I checked. There wasn’t a breath of air and the curtains behind her moved, they moved when she died, moved as if something had passed through them, and I felt it somehow. I could see it.”

  I thought about it all over again; arriving where I always arrived.

  “So, I think it was her. I think it was her going from this world.”

  And then, it was all just too much, all these words. They ripped me, left me in anguish, burned the night air. And something burst inside me, some dammed up thing ruptured and broke, and I raised my hands to my face and wept and wept as if tears were free. And in a while, I wept as much with rage as sorrow, angry with myself, watching remotely from some high, far place as this poor fool cried. Always, always this. It never ended.

  But in time it gave way. Aulani lay quietly beside me, holding me. She caressed me, stroked my face, kissed my tears. I heard her whisper to me in foreign words soft in the darkness, words that soothed me; unintelligible words that I understood nonetheless. And I learned that pain shared is just as sharp as pain suffered alone, but that pain shared is grey, not black. And it was enough.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  WE WERE AT the pier the next morning, working together to reload all the provisions into Windswept according to the plan Aulani had worked out, when Charlie a
ppeared above us at the head of the cliff trail, waving cheerily, pipe billowing smoke.

  “Awright there, ye tae, climb up ‘ere and len a haun, hey?” he shouted down, thrusting the pipe stem at us with each word. “Ah cannae gie aw thes myself!”

  We looked at each other.

  “Was there more you had at the house?” I asked her. She shook her head, evidently as confused as I was.

  “Everything’s down here already.”

  “Well, then what stuff is he talking about?”

  “Don’t know,” she answered, and came up onto the pier. “But I think we’d better go find out.”

  When we reached the top of the trail, he stood leaning against a wheelbarrow – a huge thing with high plywood sides – overloaded with provisions of all sorts. Canned meats, vegetables, soup, fruit juice, packets of freeze-dried meals, powdered milk, pasta, bags of rice – it was as though he’d raided the local Costco.

  We just stood and stared, Aulani getting the obvious question out before I could.

  “Charlie, what is all this?”

  “Weel, this...” and he jabbed his pipe vigorously at the wheelbarrow two or three times, “is a wee bit ‘o fairn for ye. I’ll not have the tae of ye starvin’ on mah watch, hey?”

  “Charlie, we can’ take that,” she replied. “There’ll be no more supply boats for you.”

  He scowled at this.

  “Guid christ, lass,” he grumbled. “Ah’ve got enaw scran tae bide tae a hundert!”

  She crossed her arms. He tried another tack.

  “Lani,” he insisted, “Ah cannae hae ye aff tae sea knowing ye'r likely hungert.”

  “Charlie,” I said, “we can always find another grocery store somewhere. And we can fish! But we’ve already eaten your food for nearly three weeks.”

  He pulled the old watch cap from his head and waved it at us madly. “Ah hae mair than I cuid use in a hundert years, I teel ye!“

  He brought the cap to rest, pointing it at Aulani, his face contorted. “Ye cannae feed this bonnie lassie hee haw but fish!”