The train came into view. Smoke was pouring from the engine. Fathers, mothers, wives and children waved patriotic flags. The town band played ‘God Defend New Zealand’. There wasn’t a dry eye in sight. Finally the train was there, and steam hissed from beneath the couplings. The soldiers began to disembark. Still under command, they formed a line along the station platform, waiting for the colonel to dismiss them. The suspense was awful.
Then it was done. The Hukareka people launched into their great haka for Rupeni Poata. His mother and sisters ran weeping towards him and flung themselves into his arms. Maata was brought forward. She knelt before him. He smiled down at her.
Then out of the corner of his eye he saw Ramona. His face crumpled with grief. Then he saw Tamihana. He saw their children.
Maata tried to act as the go-between in healing the rift between Rupeni and my grandparents. Rupeni pushed her to the ground. He still had his bayonet and he drew it. People screamed. But Rupeni’s anger was unchanged. Raising his bayonet, he slid it between his lips so that his mouth filled with the blood.
‘With these, my blood words,’ he said, ‘I vow undying vengeance on you and all who spring from your loins. Let there always be enmity between you and yours’, he pointed to Tamihana and the children, ‘and me and mine.’
Chapter 21
Sometimes when I think of Grandmother Ramona I remember a moment in summer when I watched her unobserved. The day was hot. I had come into the kitchen for a glass of water and to escape the heat. I thought I was alone in the homestead and pondered sneaking into the drawing room to turn on the wireless and listen to ‘Dossier on Demetrius’.
I heard a sound. I went through into the drawing room. The door to Grandfather and Grandmother’s bedroom was open. Grandmother Ramona had just come back from her hives. She was removing her beekeeping veils.
Although Grandfather Tamihana had no land left in Waituhi — or so he said — Grandmother Ramona had five acres of the richest meadow down beside the Waipaoa River. Annual flooding had not leached that land where the river looped, and instead had layered the meadow with dark earth from further inland. Grandmother Ramona grew her fruit trees — quince, fig, apple, orange, feijoa and nectarine — and cultivated her strawberries and raspberries on that land. The primary glory, however, was the meadow itself, wave upon wave of green grass speckled with wildflowers. There, Grandmother Ramona kept her hives.
Grandfather Tamihana hated bees, and although he would have loved to have taken Grandmother Ramona’s land, stayed well clear of it. He said in jest that he would not risk being pursued by every bee in Christendom.
‘I think your grandmother goes down there,’ Nani Mini Tupara once told me, ‘because she knows Grandfather won’t set his foot in the place! She can be by herself there and do what she wants.’
With the exception of Mum and Dad, everybody else in the Mahana clan hated ‘Mum’s bees’ too. In the beginning, I had an aversion to them as well. I marvelled at Grandmother Ramona’s courage as she went down to take honey from the hives. I sometimes went with her as far as the edge of the field, but watched from afar as, dressed in her long beekeeping veils, she went about her work. The bees were like the Furies, buzzing and circling angrily over her.
‘They’re all noise,’ she told me. ‘They really love me, see? Titiro!’ To prove it, she took off a glove and allowed the bees to swarm on her hand. ‘Do you know why they love me? They know that as long as I am alive this meadow is theirs.’ When she eventually peeled the bees off, like a gold and black crust, she had not been stung at all.
As I grew older I began to lose my fear of being stung and went into the meadow with Grandmother Ramona. There I would join Mum and Dad picking fruit or helping Grandmother with the bees. My mother always had stars in her eyes when she was down on Grandmother’s land. The meadow was a place to dream.
‘One day,’ Dad told her, ‘we’ll have a place like this. One day —’
Grandmother Ramona harvested the honey for family eating, but its golden colour and rich taste were renowned throughout the district. To some she was known as ‘Te Hanene’, the Honey Gatherer, and people would often come to the homestead to ask for her honey.
‘E kui,’ they would say, ‘homai enei hani mo taku mokopuna me taku koroua.’ Grandmother’s honey was regarded as having healing properties, especially for young babies or old men and women.
The windows in the bedroom were wide open. The wind was billowing the curtains like dreams. A thunderstorm was approaching. Dark clouds were boiling across the hills, pushing the hot air in front of them. Grandmother Ramona was rubbing the sweat from her neck with a small towel. A tender look came over her face. She approached her memory box at the foot of the brass bedstead and knelt beside it. She opened the lid and unfolded a dress from layers of tissue, carefully, slowly, the paper falling like doves’ wings.
I glanced up at the oval photograph of Grandmother. The dress looked similar — long, white, high-collared with puffed sleeves. But I wasn’t sure. When I looked back, it was too late to check. Grandmother was standing with her back to me, the dress enfolded tightly in her arms. She was staring out the windows, watching the dark clouds coming. All of a sudden there was a rush of wind through the windows. The curtains flapped like white veils. Tissue paper swirled like white birds.
Summer lightning jagged the sky.
Chapter 22
‘Hey, sheepo!’ Mick the shepherd yelled. ‘Tell them to slow down inside, eh?’
He and Phil were grinning in a harassed way. Outside, the yards were bedlam. We were on to the last of the rams, and now ewes were being brought into the shed. Mick and Phil were pushing them through the race, but the ewes were baulking at the entrance to the shed. On the way through the race they’d been divided from their lambs and wanted to get back.
‘Can’t keep up, eh?’ I yelled.
The pace was fast enough inside. I was lucky to have Peewee and Mackie’s help. Getting sheep to go through gates was worse than making a donkey trot; unlike donkeys, you can’t entice sheep with carrots.
‘You bloody bitches!’ Peewee was scolding. Peewee and Mackie’s swearing had escalated as the shearing progressed.
Now another of the ewes had baulked, afraid of crossing from sunlight into darkness. The ewe had turned the rest away from the entrance. Alerted, Mick whistled his cross-Collie — ‘Hup, Skip!’ Skip came hurtling over the backs of the sheep to the ones in front. She let off a roulade of barks, startling the sheep to return our way again — and in.
‘Thanks, Mick,’ Peewee called.
The large holding pen at the inside back of the shed was almost full. Just one more sheep — and Peewee was pushing the gate across, flicking the toggle shut. Mick waved good-humouredly. He took his hat off and wiped the sweat from his brow. Already more ewes were being brought down from the back paddocks. Shepherds on horseback whistled their dogs to weave back and forth across the hillsides, driving the sheep relentlessly down the slope toward the shed. No time to talk. Mick put his hat back on. He strode through the dust and the melee to bring in the sheep.
‘Get in behind, Skip!’
By midday the shed was an oven at its highest heat. Outside, you could fry an egg on the inverted V of the corrugated red roof. Inside, the heat radiated mercilessly, amplifying the stench of grease, wool and sheep droppings.