She takes the pipe out of her mouth, and squints into the bowl. "I had a good childhood, I suppose." "You were lucky." He stares into the bright ashes. "I wonder,
I've wondered-"
Kerewin is scraping the dottle from the bowl, attentive, but not urging him to continue. Joe goes on:
"I've often thought that maybe what happens to you as a child determines everything about you. What you are and what you do, and somehow, even the things that happen to you." "To a certain extent I think it does."
"I mean, my mother left her home area and married away from her people. So did I. I was given to my grandmother when I was three, and I get to foster Himi when he's about that. Hana died early, I was only married to her for five years, and my pa died when I was four, eh. I was an only child, and it wasn't planned that way, and he is too, although I didn't intend him to be. It all links." "Like he's repeating your childhood?" "In some ways it looks like that… or maybe I'm repeating my mother's life. I don't know." She packs tobacco into the pipe, thumbing wayward strands neatly
down.
"When my mother gave me to my Nana, she was expecting to have plenty more children. But my father died a year later… and I always used to think it was my fault, I'd gone away and left him alone, you know how kids are eh?" He sighs.
"I never knew him… I never saw him buried even. There was some kind of very bad feeling between his mother my Nana, and him, and it wasn't only over me. She used to say things like, "I hated his guts from the day he was born, he was born bad." And, "I'm not having you turn out wrong like him, that's why I've got you." She never went to the tangihanga. I used to go round feeling like some kind of leper for having a father so bad, so rotten, that his own mother wouldn't go to his burying. I can't remember much about him, but he always seemed good, and kind."
She asks guardedly, "He always treated you well, then?"
"I think I know what you're getting at." He laughs. "Maybe I can blame my grandfather for that in me, eh. He was highly respected and that, an elder too, but of the church, not of the people. He avoided the marae… I think he was ashamed, secretly ashamed, of my Nana and her Maoriness. But oowee, was that old lady strongwilled! What she wanted, she got, me or anything else… but the old man, I think he took it out on me for being like her, for being dark, and speaking Maori first, all sorts of things… he always seemed fair about it, at least, he always gave me a reason, but he was hard on me. And my Nana wasn't one for letting kids take it easy. I don't think she ever wanted me for myself, just to show my father who was boss. Maybe to teach him a lesson for marrying a lady she didn't like or something."
He laughs again.
"Sounds a nutty family set-up eh? It was, in more ways than one. My mother spent about six years in the bin after my father died. She was away from her family, and his people didn't like her, it must have been hard… they used to let them out for weekends for good behaviour or something… I never found out why. Anyway she used to come and have this big scene with my Nana, and then go weepy over me. Wail and kiss and carry on, but not because she wanted to comfort or make me feel better. She wanted me to make her feel better… that's what it felt like, eh. O boy, she'd say, e tama, ka aha ra koe? Ka aha ra koe? And I'd cry and carry on, and she'd cry more… and the old people would be sneering away in the background… bad scene. And it was worse when I got older and was going to school, because she'd be just as likely to swoop on me in the street, and there'd be all the kids around that I knew, giggling and nudging each other… shit, it was embarrassing. She got sent down to some South Island hutch eventually, when I was
seven or so. I came down with something like polio pretty soon after."
"Holy oath, really?" she says in extreme surprise.
"Ae, ko te pono tena."
The lamp has finally failed. The fire needs more coal.
She feeds it, lump after lump, waiting for the next revelation.
Heaven and hell, you never knew what people had in their past.
The room lightens. The fire crackles.
Simon stirs in his sleep, swallows hard, turns to his other side.
"E tama, ka aha ra koe?" he says, softly but sarcastically. It seems the sarcasm is directed at himself. "I should know better you'd think, eh?"
"I don't know. I don't know what I would do in your position." She puffs a smokering that sails in the updraught to the ceiling. Then she says,
"You would have come down with polio before the vaccine was out, and before they could treat it properly. How come you aren't mouldering away in an iron lung somewhere? Or does 'something like polio' mean it wasn't?"
''It means the medics weren't quite sure. You see, Nana was a great one for traditional medicine and avoiding Pakeha doctors. Or Maori doctors trained Pakeha fashion, come to that. As far as she was concerned, the old ways and the old treatments were best, even for new diseases, so that's what I got. By the time the fever was all over, the doctors my grandfather had sneaked into the house weren't sure which germ I'd had, except that there I was, flat on my back in bed with legs that might have been rolls of dough for all the use they were in walking… sweet Lord! you should have heard the language my Nana used when she walked in on a dirty Pakeha doctor actually daring to tamper with one of her poultices… yeehair! I learned about a dozen new words for filth and pustular excrescence's in two minutes flat. She was good at languages, the old lady, both languages… I wasn't shifted into any hospital. I wouldn't be, save over her dead body, and I suspect she would have taken a lot of killing, eh. I stayed in my bed and did all my schoolwork from there, and when that got boring, I was given potatoes to peel, wool to card, flax to plait — I can plait and weave as well as any woman, believe you me. Later it was whittling wood… then back to the books. Except, she gave me a dartboard. I don't know why she brought me that… anyway, I used to tie string onto the darts so I could bring them back out of the board. When you've played for a couple of years like that, flat on your back with darts that fly in a lopsided fashion, playing standing up with ordinary darts is a cinch."
"Two years in bed?"
"Well, it was actually closer to four before the old lady got me walking' again. I think she did that by sheer willpower… I want you to walk, and by God you're going to walk, polio or no polio. Walk! And here I am, walking."
"Unholy oath," awe in her voice this time, "nobody would ever pick you'd been crook."
"I've got funny skinny legs as a memento, he iwi kaupeka neir But at least I'm not a cripple like so many of the poor buggers who got the plague when I did."
"Right on, your Nana… except maybe for the darts part.
"Ae…."
He has slid into a private reverie, and doesn't appear to have heard
her.
She gets up quietly and fetches herself another pouch of tobacco from the bach next door. She collects a couple of glasses and the new bottle of whisky, and walks briskly back. Frost glitters in her torchlight, on the beach gravel path, on the dead grasses beside the stream. The stars are bright and close, and the moon shines a cold silver quarter. Back inside, she proposes a toast.
"Here's to the skeletons we all keep in cupboards."
Joe says unsmiling, "Here's to the ones we let out-"
But the whisky unleashes another flow of words. He tells of his grandmother's death in a car accident when he was sixteen, and how he left her home immediately after she'd been buried. He tells of his mother remarrying, "Another loony, but he seemed a good bloke," and shifting to the far North. He says he hasn't seen her since his own marriage, "She regards me as part of the evil past,
better forgotten eh. Besides, she didn't like Hana-" He talks briefly
about his grandfather, increasingly bitter as he talks. "I've never been back to see him since I left Whakatu, and that was after Nana died. I got the money to put me through my training there, working on the chain. The old bastard can go to hell in a handbasket as far as I'm concerned. He might be there already. He'll be pushing eighty if he's still alive."