Inheritance (19 page)

We took Jeanie to Piula ‘to cheer her up’ Teo said, but he had a different reason. He knew it would be the last time he was able to behave in this free manner. Piula pool is famous for its clarity and beauty. Being brought up Catholics, of course we averted our eyes as we walked past the Methodist seminary rising above the sea on the promontory, an impressive concrete building, you have to admit, competitively large as are all buildings to do with religion in Samoa, but not as large and beautiful as our old Catholic seminary. We led Jeanie down the steep and winding path to the sea. A warm afternoon, it was, with a light breeze coming off the sea. Teo was excited, chatting wildly of this and that. I think he was apprehensive about the wedding. It would be a big event, as Ma‘atoe was high-born and the taupou of her village.

We hadn’t told Jeanie about Piula. It’s such a lovely surprise. She thought we were just going for a swim. The lagoon here is clean. No falela‘iti‘iti‘i to deposit their faeces at low tide.

‘Look!’ cried Teo, gesturing with pride as if he himself had made the pool.

Jeanie grinned at his excitement and was suitably impressed. It is beautiful. A perfectly formed little cave in the cliff disgorges a clear icy stream into the sea. Perhaps the young would-be pastors, or perhaps our ancestors long ago, have built a semicircular wall of black volcanic rocks to enclose the stream so that it becomes a cold pool deep enough to swim in. Even I enjoy this pool. It was a good thought of Teo’s. Jeanie always loved the water. She swam with him up into the cave, disappearing into the darkness and then floating down with the current, shouting with the chill. Over the rocks they climbed to wallow in the warm water of the lagoon. Then back into Piula’s cold freshness. I like to think of it as Samoa’s version of the Scandinavian sauna and snow routine. Much gentler of course. Our way of life is much gentler. They swam for a while, disappearing up into the darkness, their laughter echoing off the stone and pouring out to me in triplicate. It made me happy to hear them, that day. Sometimes Teo’s antics – his flirting and his sudden anti-palagi bursts of anger irritated me, but Piula is too peaceful for anxiety. I dipped myself then lay under a tree and watched them. Finally they came over and we ate our picnic. Teo told her then that he was to be married in a few weeks’ time and that he would have to behave himself after that. He said it lightly, making a joke, but I heard pain, too, behind his words. He stroked her wet arm
lightly as he spoke, then rolled over on his stomach to look at her. She held his gaze; let his hand lie on her arm, near to her breast. I believe if I had not been there they may have made love. Perhaps that was why I was there – to make sure it didn’t happen.

‘Yes,’ she said, quite calmly. In those weeks after her father’s death Jeanie often seemed removed, as if mourning in some internal, hidden way, his loss. We had known him only briefly: he was there, then gone. His loss caused hardly a ripple in our lives. But Jeanie had been brought up by him. And now she was an orphan in a strange land. I think that awful husband could not begin to fill the void.

She picked up Teo’s hand where it lay on her, kissed the fingers and laid them back on his own thigh. It was a gesture of great gentleness, I thought, familiar, as if it had been performed often. I don’t imagine it had – where was the opportunity? – but a feeling of natural intimacy existed between them. They could have been lovers in another country. But neither was free.

‘They say the palolo will rise one week, maybe two before the wedding,’ said Teo. ‘Will you come? You must see it.’

This was more problematic. Everyone would be at the lagoon to watch the rise. Teo would have to watch his step.

I suggested – reluctantly I admit, but the older sister must sometimes keep the peace – that Stuart should come to see the rise too. The others shrugged and nodded. There was something dreamy about the two of them that day. It worried me rather. Perhaps it was simply Piula. There is something magic about the place. Surely it is
older than the Methodists!

It occurs to me now that Francesca may have been conceived there at Piula. Did they swim up into the cave to lie together on the little sandy beach there, while I dozed in the shade outside? To have sprung into life at Piula – how perfect!

The palolo did indeed rise a week before Teo was married. A night as tumultuous (and eventually shocking) as the day at Piula was peaceful. My mother wanted the excitement of the rise well over before the wedding. There was no way she wanted her big day (she saw it as hers) upstaged by the sexual antics of those reef worms! Tiresa always predicted the day by the flowering of the moso‘oi tree and the smell of the reef. I simply watched the moon and the weather. Our patele prayed to God, so he said, and God told him, but I heard that his prediction was actually based on the excitement of the coconut crabs: if they clattered around more than usual in the night, and fought among themselves with extra vigour, the palolo were about to rise. We all had our theories, but amazingly, we all predicted the same day! How was that?

There is a beach between our village and the next, where it is easiest to wade, and the palolo rise in great quantities. The two villages usually join forces there for the tapalolo, though the spoils are not shared – every man woman and child for himself! An hour or two before dawn – that year it was late in October, the moon in its first quarter – we gathered at the beach in
front of our village. Jeanie and Stuart arrived in their little car with their torches and reef shoes. I met them and handed them a net each and a bucket. Jeanie was full of it all, asking questions as fast as I could answer them.

Stuart drifted away for a while. In the dark I could just see him talking in a rather familiar fashion to Soloia, a young cousin who worked on the plantation. I resolved to keep an eye on him. By the smell of his breath he’d been drinking. But he came back to hook an arm rather possessively through Jeanie’s. Or was he intimidated by the press of people and the excitement? Since John’s death he seemed to hang around her in a rather pathetic way. He relied on Jeanie. Something unhealthy about his neediness.

Teo’s fiancée, Ma‘atoe, was there too with her entourage – she was village taupou, and insisted on having an attendant group of unmarried girls – a custom not always followed by those times, but Ma‘atoe and her family were old fashioned. Still are.

I love the sight on the beach and lagoon at tapalolo. It’s as if a small lighted city has suddenly sprung up, reflected in the water. Some carry electric torches, others kerosene lamps. Back then, several still favoured live flames made with rags, dipped in kerosene or pitch and tied to the end of sticks.

The air is always still. People are quiet at first, wading and peering, then netting the palolo in great sweeping scoops. The delicacy is actually the sexual organ of male and female reef worms. On this particular night, in a synchronised action, they release this part of their anatomy into the lagoon. The little gelatinous wriggling
part, headed by one light-sensitive eye, makes for the surface – I suppose they think our torches are the dawn (if they have thoughts) and we scoop them up. It has to be at this particular pre-dawn time. With daylight, the hundreds of thousands of palolo release the eggs or sperm to get on with it, and then dissolve. But we get to them before that happens. To be honest I scoop them straight into my mouth. They are best totally fresh, eaten in the dark, though some prefer them fried with onion on toast, a barbaric practice in my opinion.

Jeanie was interested in the flavour – or was she pretending delight when I slipped a handful into her mouth? Stuart spat his back into the sea. They worked beside me for a while then we drifted in our own directions. The hunt becomes competitive, of course, and I am not immune when it comes to palolo!

It was a good harvest as I remember. When dawn came the sand was lined with buckets and bowls brimming with palolo. Some would go to the markets; most would be gorged on that day. No doubt Tiresa was intent on keeping some fresh enough to serve at the wedding feast. Did she freeze some? I’m trying to remember whether her fridge-freezer from New Zealand had arrived by then.

I watched the sun rise out of the sea, a beautiful fresh morning. What a pleasure it is that moment, after tapalolo, when the new sun warms a belly full of seafood! I hoped Jeanie was feeling the same. There she was, sitting on a fallen coconut tree, lost in thought. My dreamy Jeanie! I shouted to her, still full of pleasure, not guessing what was to come. She looked up briefly and raised a limp hand. I began to feel uneasy. Something was not right
in the way she sat so still on such a morning. My mother was calling me to help carry the buckets back to our fale, but from further down the beach there were other shouts. Jeanie jumped up as if shot and stared towards the shouts, but they were calling for me. A doctor.

At that part of the beach, the coconut palms lean down right over the water, and low scrub is left to grow underneath them so that canoes may be tied there in rough weather. Two young men emerged from these bushes, half carrying, half dragging Stuart. Teo walked behind. ‘Elena!’ he shouted, ‘Elena!’

Stuart was bleeding badly. One hand flapped frightfully from the wrist as the men ran. It was attached by skin and flesh only, the joint severed. His face was a sheet of blood, the features drowned. I couldn’t tell at first if he was conscious or not. The men shouted that Stuart had stumbled into some traps, set to catch coconut crabs. Then, as he thrashed, had set off another which caught his ear. One of the fellows held up the severed ear with a sheepish grin. Good Lord, those traps should be banned. I would see to it that they were.

I did what I could to stop the bleed. Jeanie did not rush over immediately, which I thought was strange. She had sat again on the log as if in some dream. Or nightmare. It was only later, as I was attempting to move him, that she came to help. The ear wound was superficial; already the blood was clotting, but the hand was another matter. Stuart moaned and writhed as I tore strips of lavalava, applied a tourniquet, and tied the hand back in place as best I could. I couldn’t tell how much blood he had lost. I asked how long ago the accident had happened. The men shrugged and pointed
over to Teo. Teo had found him they said.

My brother was sitting on the log beside Jeanie, his head hanging. The shock had got to him, I think. He was shaking violently, bright-eyed as if with a fever. Teo was never one to handle blood well, for all his bravura. I had known him faint at the sight of a bad slash from a bush knife.

Well, there was no time to see to Teo. We bundled Stuart into the back of his own car. Jeanie drove while I sat with him on my lap, hoping that we would meet the ambulance soon. Stuart was by now white as a ghost and shaking. He was incapable of answering any questions. Fortunately Jeanie knew his blood group – a common one as I remember. We didn’t carry large stocks in Apia in those days. (And I doubt anything is different today – another reason for me to take up that job.) Blood seeped through the cloth of the bandages. I tightened the tourniquet and prayed for the ambulance.

We met it as we drove into the hospital grounds. Palolo night was a busy one, evidently, for the hospital, cuts from the coral being the most common, severe indigestion from over-indulgence the second.

We saved Stuart. He lay for days like one dead, but he lived. Tim Stokes sewed ear and hand back on but neither took. Both wounds became infected and, in the end, even the hand had to be removed. Stuart took it all rather stoically, I thought. Given his argumentative manner and fierce temper, I expected a torrent of accusations, but he was too sick, perhaps, to press charges. When the police came questioning, he simply muttered that it was an accident and he didn’t remember which canoe or which trap.

I wonder? He was drunk, which would affect his memory, certainly. The man often carried a flask, so they said. But I suspect something happened between Stuart and Jeanie that night. Did they fight? Did she push him into the traps? Perhaps Teo was involved? From then on she was open in her dislike of her husband. She called infrequently at the hospital, and showed little interest in his progress – or lack of it. When Tim said Stuart must go back to New Zealand for treatment, Jeanie stayed in Samoa. The plantation was her excuse, but Jeanie had showed little interest in the business up to that time.