The old man waves a hand in the air. "From her girlhood, she was curious about this place… her grandfather doted on her, and told her many things from the past. What he told her of the burial of this canoe, and what it contained, fascinated her mind. She sought out the people who had knowledge, and one way or another, obtained all she needed to know. She had the right to this piece of land, through her mother's sister, who never was married. She had to wait years until she got it though, and when she got it, she made sure, pakeha fashion, that it would never pass out of her hands except to someone she was confident would look after what it bore. Me. Now you."
He looks up to the strange well in the gorge-side.
"Remember, it was a time of flux and chaos when she sought her knowledge. No-one can be blamed for giving her information that she maybe should never have known. And she can be praised for having that staunch courage and intelligence to preserve something she believed, as I believe, to be of unusual value. Incalculable value. How do you weigh the value of this country's soul?"
Joe shakes his head. He doesn't want to think of what could be lying there in the cool green and stinging water.
He does say, tentatively, as they're walking slowly away, "If it is, the heart of Aotearoa… why isn't this whole place… flowering? Something as strong as that, would make the very stones flower, ne? And there is nothing at all… no birds… flies, you say, but… flies?"
The kaumatua waits until the halting sentences are finished.
"It despaired of us, remember. It is asleep… maybe its very sleep keeps the living things away, except for flies, who come to the sleeping and the dead alike. Aue! the one thing I regret about dying is that, secretly, in the marrow of my heart, I have always wanted to see what happens when it wakes up." He sighs. "Maybe we have gone too far down other paths for the old alliance to be reformed, and this will remain a land where the spirit has withdrawn. Where the spirit is still with the land, but no longer active. No longer loving the land." He laughs harshly. "I can't imagine it loving the mess the Pakeha have made, can you?"
Joe thought of the forests burned and cut down; the gouges and scars that dams and roadworks and development schemes had made; the peculiar barren paddocks where alien animals, one kind of crop, grazed imported grasses; the erosion, the overfertilisation, the pollution….
"No, it wouldn't like this at all. We might have started some of the havoc, but we would never have carried it so far. I don't think." He adds thoughtfully, after a pause of seconds, "I can't see that," nodding back towards the hidden well, "ever waking now. The whole order of the world would have to change, all of humanity, and I can't see that happening, e pou, not ever."
"Eternity is a long time," says the kaumatua comfortably. "Everything changes, even that which supposes itself to be unalterable. All we can do is look after the precious matters which are our heritage, and wait, and hope."
The lively glint is back in his eyes.
"Well, at least you can do that… this one is going to take things easy from now on!" He rubs his belly. "Though I might wait long enough for tea, Joseph. Yes, I think I'll take you through my garden, and we'll gather food for tea. We'll eat a last good meal together, and you can tell me all about your dead family that was, and your live one which you have lost, and I'll be as polite as you were while I was boring you with tales of my dogs, her?"
Joe grins shamefacedly.
"I wasn't that bored… I hope it's not our last meal. Maybe you won't be called away so fast now they," gesturing with his hand to the pale shining sky, "know how inept and unlearned I am."
"Ah, you'll do, you'll do," says the old man cryptically, and they walk on, limp on, in silence.
In the garden, under that bright sky, the kaumatua clutched at his chest, and fell heavily to the ground. Ahh, he gasps, trying to regain his breath, but with each exhalation there is less left. His body jerks spasmodically. Then slowly, he curls up, withering round his anguish like a burning leaf.
Joe started to run towards the whare, turned and came back. No phone no nothing no doctor what good would a doctor be? He knelt by the man.
His face is suffused and his eyes are screwed tightly shut. One hand scrabbles on the ground.
It is a deliberate motion, Joe realises after a moment. Writing… aie, the will-
"Where is it? The will you want? Where?" he asks urgently, bending over and loosing his voice like an arrow into the old man's ear.
Somehow the thin shaking limbs are drawn together, driven by an inordinate effort of will. He is nearly to his knees.
Joe unstraps his right hand from his belt, and clenching his teeth against the tearing ache, picks him up, cradles him, arm beneath back, head lolling, arm under the long legs. For the strength in my shoulders, praise, going one halt step after the other; for the strength in my shoulders, praise, arm feeling like it is breaking anew; for the strength in my shoulders, praise, a slow torturous ripping apart of bone and muscle fibre; for the strength in my shoulders, praise, staggering, skinning round the doorframe, grating against it, using it as a prop to hold himself up a little longer. He stumbles across the room and lays the old man on his bed.
The sweat rolls into his eyes, stinging them blind.
A whistling croaking voice, pausing after each word, an inhuman voice, says,
"In. The Bible. Pen. On clock."
He wheels round and lurches over, fingers fumbling, words ticking like an inexorable clock, "Bible pen bible pen bible pen."
He shakes the bible and a piece of folded typescript falls out, snatches the pen off the clock knocking over a key a candle butt, and races back to the bed.
"Ahh!" he calls wildly, "something to write on!" picking up the fallen bible and bringing it back. He is dizzy and sick, both with his own pain and the knowledge that the old man, however strenuous and gallant his effort, is too nearly dead to succeed in writing his name, drawing his secret design.
Like a puppet lifted by its strings, the old man rises up. His hand outstretched, he receives the pen. His eyes stare fixedly ahead, looking at the end of his bed.
"Where?" pen poised.
Joe stares at him, cold with horror.
For it is as though the old man has already vacated his body and he — or something else — is directing it from the outside.
"Here," he whispers, through numb lips. Blinking against the tears and sweat of pain, he guides the stiff hand. "My name," he whispers, "here."
In beautiful copperplate, the letters form: mechanically, each letter separate then joined by an eerily serene curve: Joseph Kakaukawa Gillayley, Kati Kahukunu-
"It is done. Where?"
The voice is not the kaumatua's, the eyes still stare blankly ahead.
"Here." Joe is shaking and trembling, his voice chilled to an almost noiseless whimper, fear growing in him like crystals of ice.
The signature flows swiftly, appearing on the paper as if tipped from a strange container. T. M. Mira, a flourish, two dots. The pen falls.
As though someone struck him, the old man winces and jerks. For a second he is present again. Joe seizes the pen and returns it to the cold grasp, ice deep in his heart now as he touches the fingers to close them round the barrel.
As though the fingers have eyes, they take the pen back to Joe's name, and quickly draw a complicated maze of spirals and spreading lines. Too quickly. No calligraphist could have drawn the moko so perfectly in the short time the fingers execute it. With the same horrid fluidity, a second pattern is drawn over the kaumatua's signature.
"Yours… Joseph. My. Blessing."
Joe eases the paper away, avoiding another touch of the living dead hand. The pen falls. As though a string has been cut, the thin body flops bonelessly on the bed, the eyes closing.