The Bone People (37 page)

"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."

He talks of his two years of religious dedication. "I even started training as a seminarian. It lasted till I met Hana at an interchurch hui. She was Ratana, and I was Catholic, but we were very diplomatic about religion.

We agreed to each go our own way, and let the kids decide for themselves... kids, aue."

He is silent for quite a time then, sipping his whisky as though it burns his tongue.

He says, finally, that he dropped out of teachers' college before he got his diploma -- "Hana wanted me to get

through, but I wanted to get her a house, and I couldn't as a student," -- and he dropped religious observance

when his wife died. "I tasted both vocations enough to know they weren't for me." He laughs bitterly. "I'm a typical hori after all, made to work on the chain, or be a factory hand, not try for high places."

"High places in whose world? And high is as you decide it... I've known roadies who knew theirs was a high

place in the scheme of things, and I've met a cabinet minister who realised he was bottom of the dung heap."

She doesn't explain where she knew any of them. She tells very little about herself, while seeming to say a

lot. After several more whiskies, she steers the conversation adroitly back to Joe's family, specifically the

Tainuis.

"I know you're close to them, e hoa, but I've never quite worked ; out who they are." ;

"Wherahiko is my mother's brother." His voice is becoming slurred. "I like him and Marama helluva lot. Not so keen on their sons though, specially that poisonous bastard Luce. Dunno how Marama could've spawned

him eh. He might be adopted or something, I never heard. I never asked. But he doesn't take after either of the

old people, and he's not like his brothers either. No," he rubs his forehead, "no, he's not adopted, he's just a shit. He was born bad. I keep on thinking things, you know."

I'll bet you do. Like how is Sim going to turn out. Anything like Luce?"

"Ahh man, don't worry... he's a different kettle of fish altogether--Joe is saying,

"Ben's eldest, he's okay. But he's got problems. The farm needs all his time and more money than any of them

have got, and he's worried by the old man's heart flutter. Marama's had a stroke too, but she got over it... Piri

works for Ben now, used to be his own man though. He thinks he runs my life as well as his own, but he's a

neat fella to have round most of the time... except when he's been drinking. He drinks a bit much these days,

and I'm saying it eh? But he doesn't want the separation, and he realises he shouldn't have taken Timote... it

was mainly to pip Lynn anyhow... Marama looks after the kid most of the time. Simon too, a lot more before

than now."

She says cautiously, "Simon doesn't seem to like Piri."

Joe laughs and hiccoughs in the middle of it. "Sheesh... ah, I don't really know why that is. I know one

reason, and that's funny, it truly is. Piri had a fight with me one night because I gave Himi a whacking round

there, and Himi got wild as hell when Piri hit me with a bottle. He didn't forgive him that for a long time.

Poor Piri couldn't understand it... as for now," he shrugs, "maybe Piri knows something about him he doesn't want Piri to know or something... they all know about him, they been in on the act for the last two years..." he stands up wearily. "O, I'm getting old and tired... or is it the whisky?"

"Whisky, and Sim waking you last night eh? You off to bed?"

"Yeah "

"I'll stay up a while and watch the fire die."

She stays up rearranging the picture she had built in her mind of what Joe is, until it is daylight. When the

whisky's finished, and the coal-scuttle is empty of everything including dust, she creeps away to bed.

Very disturbing.

You just get someone neatly arranged in a slot that appears to fit them, and they wriggle on their pins and

spoil it all.

Like Simon the sane and smiling of spirit becoming the screamer.

And Joe, holy mother of us all, you thought him to be a self-pitying childbashing ogre, with yeah, a few good

points--

What would it feel like, to want -to be priest, to want to be teacher, to want to be husband and father of a

family, and be thwarted in them all? How would it feel to have that macabre kind of childhood, blighted by

insanity, beset with illness? And those veiled hints he dropped of violence done to him... no wonder he's

sparse on knowledge of how to deal with children.

She can imagine what it must be like to come home to a cold house, still filled with memories of dead wife

and dead child, after a day of hard hated monotonous work.

She can imagine what it must feel like to be faced again and again with the knowledge that he's failing in

bringing up a chance-given child, an odd, difficult and distressing child, like he feels he's failed with

everything else in his bitter past.

And he still tries, and he still cares.

Mind you, says the snark, you have only his word for his history.

To hell, she thinks, you'd have to be a dramatic genius to put on that pain and Joe is a bad actor at the best of

times... she'd prefer he hadn't started talking, but it's too late now. Thank God for whisky and the sea... the sea

sweeps in and out of the tide of coming sleep.

What is your breakfast?

Whisky, says Kerewin sleepily.

And your dinner?

Whisky.

And for tea?

Drambuie she says, licking her lips.

And your constant companion? (Whisky, doubtless.)