Bed of Nails (28 page)

“Who’s she?” Pigeon asked.

“The first white woman eaten in the Cooks.”

“Thank you, Brother Bret, for that clarification,” said Wes. “As I recall, you had the floor yesterday at the
tumunu,
until your deadly brew sent half of us to hospital. Now it’s time for someone else to have a say. But I do appreciate your giving us a good example of why Cook Islanders ate their neighbors.”

“Get to the point,” said Bret.

“
Mana,
folks.
Mana.
Focus on that word.
Mana
is the Polynesian concept of spiritual power or influence. Everyone has
mana
to a certain degree. But because the ancient islanders believed that the
ariki
—their high chief—was chosen by the gods, he wielded
mana ariki
through control of
tapu.
When Captain Cook first heard that word, he wrote it down as ‘taboo.’”

“Same meaning?” Yeager asked.

“Yes and no,” said Grimmer. “We use ‘taboo’ to mean that which is prohibited or banned. That which is bad. In the cannibal Cooks, it meant that which for supernatural reasons was sacred and forbidden for general use. Since the
ariki
—as the gods incarnate on earth—could determine on a day-to-day basis what was or wasn’t
tapu,
that—in combination with his inherent
mana
—gave him control over his people even though he lacked the physical means to enforce his will.”

“Get to the point,” Bret goaded.

“The point is that cannibalism may be the last taboo for those who control us in modern times, but to Cook Islanders back then, cannibalism was never
tapu.
Why? Because in the islands, unlike other parts of the world, humans weren’t eaten as a protein supplement. By consuming the flesh of an enemy killed in battle, not only did you add his
mana
to your own by supernatural acquisition, thereby increasing your power in this world, but you also exacted delicious revenge. What greater insult could there be than to devour him down to the bones and defecate him out as a pile of shit? Revenge was the fuel that fired vendetta raids for generations. Every insult had to be avenged by pillaging the
mana
of your enemy. If satisfaction couldn’t be attained right away, a tattoo mark was recorded on your throat. If a father died unavenged, the tattoo mark was transferred to his son. Such marks could descend for generations, as nothing would obliterate the original injury but the killing of someone in the family of the original insulter. Some Cook Islanders had two or three marks, and some had so many that their throats were entirely covered. Is it hard to imagine the level of carnage that might result from that sort of revenge?”

The muse bit Yeager. He began scribbling notes.

“That’s why Rongomatane was a voracious cannibal chief. Power and revenge required constant man-eating. Atiuan raids to supply the orgies of gluttony that Rongomatane offered his people on the island of Tangaroa all but wiped out the populace on the neighboring islands of Mauke and Mitiaro.”

“What’s there now?” asked Zinc.

“We’ll all see soon enough. But if
mana
could be gained, it could also be lost. In the same way that Bret set himself up as the
mana ariki
of this Odyssey”—Grimmer formed a fist, palm up, and pumped his arm once in the machismo way—“but then came crashing down by feeding his people bad beer, so Rongomatane lost his power by making a stupid mistake.”

Wes waited.

And waited.

And waited.

Until someone blinked.

Ever the lawyer, thought Zinc.

“What mistake?” Yeager finally asked.

“He
didn’t
feed someone poisoned sugarcane.”

“Who?”

“The Reverend John Williams,” Petra said.

Mano a mano, mana a mana
—it must have been quite a battle. Fought not with weapons in the classic sense, but with the power of God or the gods behind each man.

A clash of the titans.

With Atiu up for grabs.

As the rebellious daughter of a preacher with a church in the Bible Belt of British Columbia, Petra was the Odyssey expert on missionaries in the Cooks. That was evident from the way she described the arrival of the Reverend John Williams of the London Missionary Society off the coast of Atiu on July 19, 1823. Zinc had to give Wes and Petra credit for their preparation. Working in tandem, they painted a vivid picture in words of the fiction potential surrounding the wannabe writers. It was like having a time machine to travel back to the era of cannibals and converts. As he listened to Petra describing that collision of cultures out on the sea, Zinc could picture it clearly in his imagination, and that made even him contemplate taking a stab at writing a story.

Ladies and gentlemen, in this corner, weighing in at who knows how many pounds of ingested human fat, wearing the
maro kura
—the sacred scarlet loincloth of
ariki
chiefs—and the
pare kura
—the grand conical headdress of his rank, woven from sennit fibers and adorned with the red tail feathers of the tropic bird (that color being the color of the gods)—sat Rongomatane, the human shrine of the invisible and immortal gods on earth. His corner was actually the elevated seat on the royal canoe, which paddled out to meet the ship that waited off the coast. Accompanying him were eighty canoes of cannibal warriors. Eight or nine months earlier, an Atiuan prophet named Uia had foretold the arrival of a huge canoe with no outrigger, manned by people with their heads, bodies, and feet covered. Theirs would be a mighty god, and the gods of Atiu would burn with fire. So out came Rongomatane to show them who was boss.

In the other corner, wearing black from head to foot, the Reverend John Williams stood waiting. Two years before, the zealous crusader had brought the word of God to nearby island Aitutaki, where, thanks to the Good Book he raised aloft in his hand, the missionary had triumphed over cannibalism, infanticide, idolatry, debauchery, and polygamy. So when Rongomatane climbed aboard to size up his next feast, he was surprised to find none other than his neighboring counterpart, the cannibal
ariki
of Aitutaki, under Williams’s control. That
ariki
took him down to see his
marae
idols stored in the ship’s hold, and he told him how Williams had burned other idols to build a big white house of burnt rock in which the islanders now worshipped the new God.

A church, he called it.

The new
marae.

“Williams preached a special sermon for the
ariki
of Atiu,” Petra said. “He read from the Bible, the Book of Isaiah 44:9: ‘They that make graven images are all of them vanity; and their delectable things shall not profit; and they are their own witnesses; they see not, nor know, that they may be ashamed.’”

“What in hell does that mean?” Pigeon asked.

Wes responded, “Those who fashion and worship idols will be put to shame.”

“Williams told Rongomatane that his idols had no power because they were made out of wood, which has no life in it. Then he showed the cannibal the face of God,” said Petra.

“You mean like Moses and the burning bush?” asked Yeager.

“Exactly. Want to see?”

“God?”

“Uh-huh.”

“God hangs with you?”

“Got him in my bag.”

“A dollar says you don’t.”

Petra put down her pad and got up from the bench. Rummaging in her black bag for the second time, she withdrew one of those old Bibles with the gilt-edged pages. The cover was new, Zinc assumed, because the cross embossed on it was upside down.

Turning her back on the group, she walked outside into the glaring sun that beat down on the dusty road. With the Bible held at arm’s length from her body, she swiveled 180 degrees to face the others in the terminal, then ran her thumb across the pages so their gilt edges fluttered and flashed in the dazzling light.

“There’s your burning bush,” the Mountie said to Yeager.

“Blinded by the light,” Grimmer added.

“It’s worth a buck,” the lawyer said. “I’m born again.”

Returning to the shed, the goth queen collected her dollar. Both it and the Bible went into her black bag. “The cannibal chief was told that God himself was jumping around on the pages. The Cook Islands were still in the Stone Age. Both metal and books were unknown. Rongomatane was impressed, but he was also shrewd, so he challenged Reverend Williams to a test of his own. He dared the missionary to follow him to his
marae
and eat sugarcane from its
tapu
grove.”

“Like the banana,” said Zinc.

“You know about that?”

“Yvette told me on Rarotonga.”

“Actually, the incidents are linked. The same missionary, Papeiha, was involved in both. Williams was hunting for Rarotonga when his boat stopped at Atiu. Off they went to the chief’s
marae
to eat the sugarcane. ‘If you do not die,’ Rongomatane told Williams, ‘I will believe in your God and burn my idols. But if you die, that will be the end of both you and your God.’ Papeiha, Williams’s right-hand man, knew sugarcane from Tahiti, so he gobbled it up with relish, and that was that.”

“It wasn’t poisoned?” said Pigeon.

“No need. It was
tapu.
”

“It would have been poisoned if Bret had been the
ariki
of Atiu,” joked Wes.

“What a blaze it must have been,” Petra continued. “Rongomatane decreed that all the idols on this island be gathered together for burning. As Papeiha preached the gospel, questions were asked and answered. ‘Is the fire of the god of darkness below like this?’ ‘Tomorrow, this fire will die, but that one burns forever.’ ‘What kind of firewood burns forever?’ ‘Those who refuse to believe in Jesus are the firewood.’ ‘But what is the fire?’ ‘It’s the anger of God.’ ‘Will the fire never die?’ ‘When all of you believe in Jesus, then the fire will die.’”

“Amen,” punctuated Wes.

“Having converted Atiu, Williams set sail for Mauke and Mitiaro with Rongomatane in tow. The last time the cannibal chief had landed on their shores, here’s how those inhabitants ended up. This passage is from William Wyatt Gill, one of the early missionaries in the Cooks. I call it the shitty end of the stick.”

A third rummage in her black bag produced a clip of photocopies. Handed one, Zinc read:

It was customary to prepare the body in this wise: The long spear, inserted at the [anus], ran through the body, appearing again at the neck. As on a spit, the body was slowly singed over a fire, in order that the entire cuticle and all the hair might be removed. The intestines were next taken out, washed in sea-water, wrapped up in singed banana leaves (a singed banana-leaf, like oil-silk, retains liquid), cooked and eaten, this being the invariable perquisite of those who prepared the feast. The body was cooked, as pigs are now, in an oven specially set apart, red-hot basaltic stones, wrapped in leaves, being placed inside to ensure its being equally done. The best joint was the thigh. In native phraseology, “nothing would be left but the nails and the bones.”

 

“Given the choice between that and Christianity,” said Petra, “how eager do you think the cannibalized residents of Mauke and Mitiaro were to convert?”

“That fast,” Yeager said, snapping his fingers.

“With those three islands converted, Williams was ready for more. Rongomatane had attacked Rarotonga several times, so he had Williams sail his ship around to the same beach on which Cook’s crew had landed almost fifty years before, to line up the stern with the rock that’s still in the lagoon. Off they sailed in a beeline—”

“To Black Rock,” completed Zinc, “where Papeiha waded ashore with the Bible held over his head and cooked that banana on the burning idol of the
ariki
of Rarotonga.”

“Banzai!”
said Pigeon, the cry of the kamikaze. “There was no stopping the guy.”

“Sure there was,” Petra replied, rotating her hand as if barbecuing a roast on a spit. “Eventually, everyone’s luck runs out. The pagan gods got their revenge in 1839, when Williams was killed and cannibalized on the Vanuatu island of Erromanga.”

“Or what about Charles Darwin?” Grimmer said. “He sailed through the Cooks on that famous voyage of the
Beagle
in … in … When was it that he was here, Petra?”

“It was 1835, I believe.”

“
The Origin of Species. The Descent of Man.
Earthshaking books came out of that trip. The law of the jungle. Survival of the fittest. What if Darwin went ashore to explore the flora and the fauna of these islands, and what if the island he selected was one of the stragglers yet to be converted? Is that what inspired his theories? Did he write another book about his adventures, a book he had yet to publish at the time he died, a book that was suppressed for some mysterious reason, and only now has come to light because
you
found it?”

“I like that,” Zinc said.

“If you want it, it’s yours,” offered Wes.

“Put that in writing?”

“You bet.”

“If I was a writer,” Petra said, “the tale I would tell is about a cult that challenges the blue laws. No sooner did they convert the cannibals in the Cooks than those London missionaries imposed a Christian police state. The people on Rarotonga lived inland, so the zealots uprooted their villages and moved them to the coast, where each could be controlled by the ring of churches we saw. Here on Atiu, the local villagers lived near the coast, so they were hauled inland around a central church, and that’s why they all dwell on five landlocked streets today. A street for each village. Like a five-armed octopus.”

Wes held up the map again and jabbed the center of Atiu with his finger as Petra elaborated.

“Christianity always comes with a price. That’s why they pass the collection plate around. Along with the gospel came smallpox, whooping cough, dysentery, measles, and flu. The population shrank by two-thirds. Cook Islands’ mourning was something to behold. Death was referred to as ‘going into the night.’ When someone ill died, relatives went berserk. They gashed their flesh with sharks’ teeth until blood gushed down their bodies. They blackened their faces and cut off their hair. They knocked out some of their front teeth as a token of sorrow. They shrieked a death wail until they lost their voices. And they shuffled about in grave clothes dyed red with candlenut sap and dipped in the black mud of a taro patch to give them a reeking stench that was symbolic of the putrescent state of the dead.

“The missionaries, of course, knew a good thing when they saw it. So there they stood, in the midst of all that suffering, with Bibles held high as they beseeched the islanders to cast out sin and join the church to drive away the plagues.”

“Praise the Lord!” Wes intoned, mocking an evangelist at a revival meeting.

“And what about the blue laws?” Petra said. “What was it like to live in a Christian heaven on earth? Sunday—the Sabbath—was strictly observed. A curfew was levied at seven in the evening to force people to pray at the church. Since Sunday was a time for worship and nothing else, children were banned from playing and making noise of any kind. Instead, they were corralled in Bible schools and had to learn the Old and New Testaments by heart. Sunday observance was so strict that it was illegal to walk from one village to another, and food for the Sabbath was cooked on Saturday so smoke wouldn’t desecrate the air.”

“Praise the Lord!” Wes repeated, banging the map as if it were a Salvation Army drum.

“Dancing was prohibited. Tattooing was outlawed. And as for sex, that became
tapu.
It was illegal for an unmarried woman to be pregnant. An unmarried couple who slept together were paraded up the main street to the beat of a gong, in front of a missionary who denounced their offense. A man who strolled with his arm around a woman after dark was forced to carry a torch in his other hand. The blue laws were enforced by a system of paid snitches. Fines imposed on sinners were split between police and judges. Policing became such lucrative work that one of every six people was a cop on the take.”

“Praise the Lord!” extolled Wes.

“Christ!” said Petra, flashing with anger. “Have you any idea what it’s like to live under a jackboot like that? My dad was a holy-roller, so I know only too well. It makes you want to lash out at whoever grinds you down. The missionaries had free rein in the Cooks, until the British took formal control in 1888.”

The year of Jack the Ripper, Zinc thought.

“As soon as word got out that there were souls to save down here, they all came stampeding in to lasso their share. The London Missionary Society became the CICC, the Cook Islands Christian Church, still by far the largest denomination. Others include Roman Catholics, Seventh-Day Adventists, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Assembly of God, Baha’is, and Apostolic Revival Fellowship.”