Kerewin picked up her cases, and walked away into the night.
IV. Feldapart Sinews, Breaken Bones
10. The Kaumatua And The Broken Man
"HERE?" says the bus driver incredulously. "Here?"
"Here," says Joe.
"But it's in the middle of bloody nowhere!"
"That doesn't matter. I can walk to where I'm going."
The bus pulled away in a rising whine of gears. The late afternoon sun glinted on the back window until it turned a corner. The noise faded.
It began to rain, a thick drizzle that clung to his clothes without really wetting them. He shifted off the road and started walking through the scrub towards the sea. It wasn't hard going: there was little gorse and less blackberry, mainly acre upon acre of manuka, stands of bracken, the occasional coprosma, no tall trees. But the scrub was high enough to prevent him seeing where he was going.
The bus driver had said,
"Well, you might meet old Jack in there. He comes out to the turnoff sometimes to collect his sack of flour and tea and tobacco. They call him the last of the cannibals, but I don't think he really is," and he'd laughed.
The sentence joggled in his mind.
"I don't think he's really the last of the cannibals," or "I don't think he's really a cannibal, but you never know-"
He could never imagine his great-grandfather, who had taken part in several feasts of people, as a cannibal. He remembered the old man only as a picture of a silver-haired fiercely dignified chief. He'd always imagined cannibals to be little wizened people, with pointy teeth.
"We're meat, same as anything else," his grandmother had said.
He shivered.
The manukas were blackened with blight and there was a pervading stink of swampwater throughout the bush. Even the concrete rooms and corridoring with their discreet bars and locks seemed more pleasant now.
He shoved his way onward, his pack catching and smashing branches, and all at once stopped.
He was on the edge of a bluff: below him, a scoured stone beach, with driftwood in tangled piles along the tideline. It was thirty shadowed feet to the bottom.
The kaumatua:
I have watched the river and the sea for a lifetime. I have seen rivers rob soil from the roots of trees until the giants came foundering down. I have watched shores slip and perish, the channels silt and change; what was beach become a swamp and a headland tumble into the sea. An island has eroded in silent pain since my boyhood, and reefs have become islands. Yet the old people used to say, People pass away, but not the land. It remains forever.
Maybe that is so. The land changes. The land continues. The sea changes. The sea remains.
Since I came here, I have left this land only twice. I walked the streets of towns the first time, and was ignored. The second time, people laughed behind their hands at my stilted speech, and stared at my face. "Keerist, what an antique," said one. So I quickly learnt the results of my desertion. I am tied irrevocably to this land.
And so. For this past life, I have kept watch, from dawn till star-pierced night. For this past life, I have waited, from the sun's dying until the bright midday. Watching over, watching for awakening: waiting for the sign. There is not long left for me to watch or wait, and still the stranger does not come. The digger has not delved. The broken man has not been found and healed.
Yet those were the ones you instructed me to watch and wait for.
Was it all illusion? Were your eyes blinded in the moments before your death? Have I cast aside the pleasures of life to endure only this pointless watch?
He stood sweating, looking down at the beach for a long time. A shag flew past in the twilight, and gulls wheeled and keened above his head. It could be Moerangi, four hundred miles south; it could be Moerangi, and nothing has happened, and along the beach in a firelit bach, they wait for him-
He shook his head, and stumbled back.
As though in a dream, he began to run. Somewhere near, he could hear a river that he hadn't heard before. You learned not to hear too much in prison. The manukas slashed at him as he blundered through, ears full of the river. The packstraps ate into his shoulders. You grew flabby and soft in prison, playing at working, ignoring the talk, enduring the time.
He stopped, breathing heavily, and shrugged the pack off. He listened carefully. The bush is filled with the sound of the river but he can't tell which way it is. Something moves and grunts nearby, and he turns sharply, his fists clenched.
The grunts stop. His heart settles again.
It grows very dark as he stands there. At last, he sighs and sits down beside the pack. He doesn't feel like eating, wanting only deep, dreamless sleep. He fumbles through the pack, sorting out the bivsac, and sets it up. The pencil torch is blindingly useless. It is better to work in the dark, even though he bangs into stones and bushes. He grows more and more tired.
Prop the pack against a stunted manuka: turn the boots upside down beside it: wriggle into sleeping bag, and again into the bivsac, and wait for sleep.
The ground is surprisingly springy except for a branch buried under his shoulders. And an evil little breeze drives straight into his face. It is bitingly cold, and the drizzle slides in with it. He puts his head inside his sleeping bag, and moisture from his breath builds up and wets the area by his face. His feet are numb.
He cannot recall falling asleep, but the wetness and the cold wake him. There's a thin whining of insects. In the chill gloom, all else is silent. Slatebodied midges begin crawling in every gap, hordes of them, slow but thorough biters, driving him to get up.
In the grey half-light, he discovers he has gone to sleep in a bog. A small bog, crawling with every kind of biting life. Midges and daylight mosquitos of all varieties. They whine joyfully.
He stands, incomparably miserable, the soles of his socks wet and growing wetter, letting the creatures bite their fill.
Ngakau, wake up. Look, the sky is lightening. Make a tea. Dry out your gear. Pull yourself together, man.
Two kinds of manuka, he thinks, consciously observing as he spreads the bivsac and sleepingbag. One with white flowers and fat leaf lobes, and that one has smaller diamond leaves and pinkish flowers. Wonder which one she made the sedative from? Or was it both? He notices sundews, some vivid red, some tall with a dozen green sticky heads per stem. Kerewin would love 'em, eh, she had a mind for the macabre. Probably spend hours watching until some poor bastard of a fly got snared. Fern curls, bracken, pollen-like dust round the rims of puddles. Cracked white rocks edging out of the soil. An odd bleak place, but better than the concrete desert.
As he lit the spirit-cooker, a seagull flew overhead and made a raucous noise. He was reminded of the boy imitating the mollymawk, and the minding made him smile. You learnt to remember the sweet things and squash down the bad ones. It works until sleep comes.
The sun is out: the bivsac is drying, and the wet patches at the mouth of the sleepingbag have dried. His sad fey mood begins to pass.
Midges in the tea… he scoops them out, frowning… what was that childhood horror? Ah yes, Kohua-ora, meaning "Cooked alive
in an earthoven." Refers, the book has said, to an ancient event near Papatoetoe. He had stumbled across the reference in one of the useful books his grandmother gave him, and it brought him nightmares for months.
You have plenty of time to think when you're sick and helpless, when you're cooped up and made to feel useless.
Had it been deliberate, the slow cooking of a hated rival? Or someone laid in the hole, who though thought dead, was still alive and showed it? She told him what a noble fighter the old Maori was, and the school texts repeated it whenever they mentioned the Maori at all… God, what lies we get taught. Exemplify the honourable incidents, and conceal the children who got the chop, the women and old men stampeded over cliffs, the bloody endless feuding… yet the gallantry according to the code was there, the wit in the face of inevitable death… besides, he grins to himself, as a race, we like fighting. We're not too far from the old people, Kerewin and me… but Kohua-ora? Thinking about old horrors somehow lessens the impact of the new ones.