The Bone People (61 page)

"... though you say it yourself," says the sergeant grinning. Joe grins too.

Then he sighs,

"Well, that's one more mystery wrapped up... it's a pity I can't tell Tiaki. I was curious myself, too."

"Understandably," says the sergeant. "That old man had a lot of secrets you could be curious about... know what they call him here? The last of the cannibals. They reckoned he ate his grandmother in the old days. All

I've heard of is that the old lady just disappeared and--"

Joe grins again.

"Well, he was nice enough to me, and that's all I worried about. And he had plenty of chances to make me kai

if he wanted."

The police laugh.

Forgive me, Tiaki. But if we keep talking this way, they might get curious about some of your other secrets.

Kill it with a foolish joke--

Outside the station, he looks at the photograph again. It had been a slim chance, going on no more than the

young man's colouring, and the pointed chin, and something about the eyes, an impossible chance... Ahh,

forget it, Ngakau. What does it matter now?

He hired a truck to carry his gear to the track turnoff, but he carted the gear in on his back. It took three trips.

The new mattress was worst. It kept slipping away from his one-handed grasp. By the time all the stuff was

packed away, he was exhausted.

He sat on the doorstep, propped against the frame, and watched the stars come out, one by one by three by a

hundred. The air was still.

I'll stay here, he thought, until things make sense again. Until I'm healed anyway. Until I know more about

the pool, the mauri. Until the title's mine, and I've set up some proper boundary markers. Until, God help me!

I know what to do.

The cry that came out of him was not intended to happen. It burst out, while his mind listened amazed. And

then he was caught UP in the streaming sound. It was full of grief, a lamentation without words.

When it stopped, there was silence.

Then the treefrogs begin their chirruping again: a cricket zitzitt, close by: down by the river, a morepork

calls.

Life goes on, Ngakau.

The weeping doesn't last forever.

Nor does the waiting.

You'll heal, man, back together again.

In the deep south, a shooting star blazes brightly, and is extinguished by the night.

»«

The earthquake hit on Saturday morning, just before dawn.

He wakes a second before the first shock strikes, the air full of cavernous rumbling, and slides off the bed

before the shaking starts. It grows in intensity, becoming violent.

"Be still, o God be still," while the earth groans,

Jesus the ground's gonna open right under here in a' dirty great crack what are my rahui doing that noise is

murder the mauri'll die

"stopit stopit STOPIT!!"

bellowing furiously, and over the earth moaning and the skriek of

iron grating all round him, surprises himself by laughing loudly.

Jesus, Ngakau! This'll take heed of you!?

The tumult suddenly ceases. His heart pounds on in the preternatural quiet.

If this keeps going I'm not going to make it to any Christmas party...

Face on the hard dirt floor, waiting uneasily.

If this is an all over one, she won't either. If she's still alive--

The earth shudders again.

The window behind him splits with a ringing crack!--

Stillness.

Ready for it, sphincters clenched in all directions. Nothing happens.

You might as well get back to bed, man. Damn cold here.

For all that, sweat is trickling down his face. He stands up, his feet meeting the ground unsteadily, still

expecting it to jolt.

Might as well stay up... it's getting light anyway.

But Haimona honey, where are you? Kerewin, Kerewin, where

are you?

He rakes away the soft ash and lays wads of fuchsia bark on

the still-glowing coals. It smokes immediately. Twigs, larger pieces of driftwood, hunks of heartwood to top

it off--

It's not that I haven't been thinking of you both... but it's been rearranging it. Not falsifying, but trying to see the whole thing as an outsider would.

His thought is as calm as his face. He fills the kettle, and dresses in front of the range.

But I've done as much as I can with the past. I know my child was a gift, and that I loved him too hard, hated

him too,much. That I was ashamed of him. I wanted him as ordinarily complex and normally simple as one

of Piri's rowdies. I resented his difference, and therefore, I tried to make him as tame and malleable as

possible, so I could show myself, "You've made him what he is, even if you didn't breed him." And I loved

and hated him for the way he remained himself, and still loved me despite it all.

Now, the gift has been taken back, and I have only myself to blame. As I have only the memory left, of his

love and his pain, his joy and badness and sadness, of four years, almost, of growing. That is that.

Another tremor.

He glances at the roof, the cracked window. The whare is creaking and shivering all round, but shows no

signs of falling down yet.

Soon as it's light, I'd better go and check what's happened up the gorge.

The kettle has started to sing.

He lays out a cup, and the ready made skim milk, and puts half a handful of tea leaves in the pot. There's a

bread left and butter still in the safe. While eating:

Kerewin... I was trying to make her fit my idea of what a friend, a partner was. I could see only the one way...

whatever she thought she was, bend her to the idea that lovers are, marriage is, the only sanity. Don't accept

merely what she can offer, make her give and take more... now I can see other possibilities, other ways, and

there is still a hope--

The birds are starting to make a noise, but it isn't the gradual growing chorus that normally wakes him.

They're calling, Alarum! Alarum!

All shook up with nests in the roots of trees he thinks, and giggles. But he loses the gaiety quickly.

The hope is still a hope while Kerewin lives, but if she has died, as her note gloomily foretold, he has decided

to stay here. Hermit

and recluse number three, the unsung guardian of a madwoman's dream.

Aie, Ngakau, little did the old lady know what she was bringing you up for! But I can pray and play and

carve again... I've got the garden to take care of -- if this hasn't shaken it to bits -- and my food to catch.

Strange old cold trails to follow.

He has begun a correspondence with several North Island elders and two libraries, trying to find out, without

giving too much information away, what one of the founding canoes could be buried here. Whether there was

any ancient lore concerning a pact with such a nebulous entity as the mauri of Aotearoa and any tribe of the

old people. He goes into town each fortnight, staying overnight with the solicitor and his wife. He buys food,

checks his mail and writes replies, says Hello to the pub at the edge of the town, and leaves it quickly after a

single beer each time. Somehow, it has got round who he is and what he's done, and the incident is still fresh

in people's minds. It is a relief to return to eyeless tongueless bush.

He sips his tea thoughtfully.

Next week is Christmas week, and he has still some final arrangements to make for a sneaky happening he

has set going. If Kerewin doesn't turn up, he will look all kinds of fool, but if she does... that might be a new

beginning.

If the lady lives... look in the tea leaves, Ngakau, some people say they tell you things. She used to play with

oracles... and the kaumatua had some tame demons or something. Old karakia he mentioned to make stones

float, and find halfdead people cluttering up his beaches. My beaches, now. Well, I don't have second sights

or insights or even the uncanny sense Himi had music hutches and lights around people:

shaking his head,

e tama, you were a strange one. He stands abruptly. The day is growing bright. Time to go round and check

the damage.

He fills the thermos and takes an extra packet of cigarettes, and the last of the bread filled with cheese. It will

take most of the day to go round his rahui.

I'll leave the gorge to last. If one of these neat little wriggles go off while I'm there... aue! a nice career as a hermit ended by a few ton of stone.

There's still enough hope for that to have no appeal at all.

The land shows little damage. Some of the seaward bluffs have crumbled further, and there are several deep

rifts by the river, too narrow for anyone to slip down them. All the rahui except one are standing.

When he carved them, he had thought of a person and put all that he felt about them into the work. He had

erected them in places that reflected an aspect of each person. The kaumatua stood nearest the gorge.

Wherahiko and Marama were close to one another, on the northern track. Luce was planted in the swamp,

and other Tainuis bordered the road. Hana and Timote and Simon stand close to the whare, on the southern

boundary. And at the western sea border, planted by herself in a place he loved to sit and watch the sea from,

Kerewin had stood.

That rahui is angled drunkenly, nearly on the ground.

His heart pounds: "Aieee," flinging down the kete, and racing to prop it up.

You superstitious nga bush, that'll teach you to go thinking a person into a piece of wood, it doesn't mean

anything, it doesn't mean anything,

gibbering and praying it didn't.

And all the while, the odd phrases of Kerewin's note pass through his mind:

E Joe Ngakau, I'm in the lost country. And would you believe the crab has me in thrall? A deft pincer caused

that alarm at Moerangi, remember the pale and gasping state? Medics chorus dividedly, but a friend in my

soul whispers Death sweet Death, and that will probably be the way of it. But if I exist this coming Christ

Mass, rejoin meat the Tower eh? O the groaning table of cheer... speaking of tables, does commensalism

appeal to you as an upright vertebrate? Common quarters wherein we circulate like corpuscles in one blood

stream, joining (I won't say like clots) for food and drink and discussion and whatever else we feel like... a

way to keep unjoy at bay, like those last few weeks before they haled your corpus away. With no obligation

on your part, I could provide a suitable shell. If, if... I drivel. If you turn up for Christmas, maybe I do too.

Then we see, right? In the mean mean time, thus think and drink tobacco. Piri says he'll pass on this to you.

I'm stoned the noo. Kia koa koe.

No address, no date, no signature, the small box of cigars as an envelope, and nothing heard from her since.

A tumbled rahui means nothing, it was a random chance, an accident of the earthquake... Sweet Lord,he

thinks, why couldn't it have been Luce in the bog where the ground is naturally shaky?

Going flat on his face in the slime, I couldn't give a damn for him, the two-faced stirrer, going to the police

behind everyone's back--

He stamps the earth down hard round the re-erected pole.

The free-flowing spirals face the sea once more. He lays his hand on it a moment, and then sets off for the

gorge.

The great overhang has gone.

There is a pale gash on the freshly exposed rock above the pool. And the pool, the living green pool, is buried

under a thousand tons of rubble. He stands on the track, stunned.

This is not real. It is nightmare country. It can't have happened.

He stumbles up the rock-strewn slope.

"No it isn't, no, not all dead, no please, please no please no," begging like a child in the end.

His arms outstretched, standing on the edge of ruin, Why?

And one part of his mind says sagely, It was all an old man's dreams and fancies, and there were explanations

for what you saw and felt that have nothing to do with mysteries, and another part says Listen, and the sage

bit goes on, It's just some rocks that have fallen in a rainwater well, and the other says Listen, and the wise bit

over-rides it saying, You are a young man yet with plenty of things to do, you're whole and healed and

flourishing, and you're released from any promise you gave; you've a future now, not an immurement in dank

swamp country, and the other side says LISTEN!

"Just crickets and treefrogs," he says dully. "Just beetles and mothwings thrumming."

Here?

He's been here at night and in the day and there have been flies. Some flies. A few flies.

A morepork calls close by, and its mate answers from further up the gorge.

The early evening air is alive with noise.

His breath held until it's painful, he searches round the buried pool.

It's a hump in the dusk, a round, a disk, a thing the size he could hold in his two spread palms. Settled on a

broken-backed rock, balanced on the crack as though it had grown there. It looks very black or very green,

and from the piercing, the hole in the centre, light like a glow-worm, aboriginal light.

"You're cheerful, mate." "Yep. Nice day and all eh?"

"Too right... pack go in the back?"

"You mind if I keep it in the cab? It can stay on my lap?"

The driver shrugs.

"Suit yourself, mate. There's room down by your feet. Shove her

there." "Right." Whistling merrily, propping his feet on the pack.

He had been afraid to touch it, but the drawing power of it

was immense.

He had walked to it, sat by it, hands over it, hands on it.

It felt like stone, it was stone, fine-grained cold stone... no

tingling or warmth, nothing out of the ordinary, Ngakau.