The Shark God (31 page)

“I'm coming with you,” I said.

“Yes, you are coming!” said Brother Clement, as though he had planned it all along.

We stopped at the Sweetie Kwan store, where I bought bread, peanut butter, and sticks of tobacco for everyone. Then we were off: stereo blasting, cigarette smoke pouring from the windows, betel spit flying.

The driver, who would not tell me his name, threw on a New Caledonian reggae cassette.

“We will call him Driver X!” said Clement, who sat in the front seat, chewing and toying with his medallion. The necklace was strung with hundreds of tiny dolphin's teeth. I sat in the backseat, flanked by Brothers Floyd and Nicolas, who sang and giggled and
tickled me until I had to slap them. Another brother huddled in the truck's box. I recognized him as Francis, the white
tasiu
's best friend. Francis had soft skin and straight hair, marks of Polynesian, rather than Melanesian, ancestry. He was born in faraway Tikopia. I couldn't see his eyes through his wraparound sunglasses. He was very quiet. I concluded that he was not so important.

I wish that I had known then about the fate Brother Francis would meet on the Weather Coast. I wish I had known then that he was the beginning of a new story and the end of my own.

Driver X threw on a Bob Marley cassette and cranked up the volume. We rocked out of town, past the rusting remains of World War II Quonset huts, past the garbage mountains and the hundreds of betel nut stands, past Jimmy Rasta's bottle shop and the airport. We crossed the Alligator Creek Bridge, which seemed to have forgotten the battle that had been fought across its span. Grass was beginning to sprout through the concrete.

We howled like teenagers. We sang along with the music:
Let's get together and feel alright.
There was trouble ahead, but we were blameless. It was a road trip. I felt as though we should have been drinking Slurpees spiked with vodka and throwing beer cans at street signs. None of the
tasiu
was over thirty.

There was no traffic after Alligator Creek, but sometimes we saw people on the road, hiking with gas jugs or plastic baskets on their heads. Driver X slowed to pick them up, but Brother Clement stopped him.

“No! Official business! Very important! Very dangerous!” bellowed Clement.

“Commando unit! Strike force! Bruce Willis!” shouted Floyd.

“Army! Army!” chanted Nicolas, poking me beneath the ribs and saluting. “
Yumi stap insaed long army!
”—We're in the army.

Brother Francis just smiled and waved at the foot travelers. We didn't stop for anyone.

Soon the countryside changed. There was nobody left on the
road—which had once been a paved highway but was now disintegrating, clawed by great forests of grass and fern and woody shrubs pushing in from both sides. We passed the bullet-riddled shell of a gas station and later a health clinic, also abandoned. The journey began to feel less festive.

The next bridge required four-wheel drive. It had been bombed to stop the Malaita Eagles from getting too far out of Honiara, but the bombing had been halfhearted. The bridge had not been destroyed but had simply sagged into the riverbed. The midday air thickened. It dripped with bad memories and a hazy, shapeless malevolence. The brothers stopped singing.

We approached what looked like a lemonade stand. Its occupant, who wore a camouflage sun hat, stood up, rubbed his eyes, and motioned for us to stop. Clement spoke to him in mumbles, and the man waved us on.

“Which side is he on?” I asked.

“This week, he is Gold Ridge,” said Clement.

A junction in the road and another guard hut. Men leaned against what looked like a giant outhouse, erected in the middle of a side track. Its walls were solid and windowless except for a horizontal slit in one wall, from which a gun barrel pointed. The shack gave off a puff of smoke, and then it lurched forward. The shack was not an outhouse. It was a homemade tank. Its gun barrel shifted and remained trained on our truck as we rolled away again.

The situation on the plantations was not simple, Clement said. Sometimes the plantation villages fought with each other. Sometimes they fought with a faction based at Gold Ridge, in the hills near the abandoned mine. The previous day, a boy from Matepona, a village just past CDC-1, had been kidnapped by the Gold Ridge militants. The police were still too afraid to cross Alligator Creek, so it was up to the
tasiu
to perform the rescue.

We stopped at a clutch of tin-roofed bungalows hopping with children and clucking chickens in order to pick up the boy's father.
He was a weak-looking man with gray hair and glassy eyes. His name was Johnson.

“Where is Junior? Where is my boy?” he said somewhat rhetorically, since by this point we had established that the Gold Ridge boys had kicked the shit out of Johnson Junior, then taken him back to their base. Why had they kidnapped him? Johnson had no idea. His was a good Christian family. Clement tapped his feet impatiently.

Johnson, his wife, and his brother hopped in the back of the truck with Brother Francis, who smiled at them but remained silent. We headed east, past another roadblock, past rows and rows of neglected oil palms, their shaggy tops casting mottled shadows on the jungle that had begun to rise, unchecked, beneath them. Bushy vines climbed up the palm trunks, arcing into the sky above the fronds. I once heard someone describe the Solomons as a green desert. Now I understood. Like the shifting sands, the jungle was always creeping closer, seizing on weakness, threatening to bury human industry in suffocating mounds, in an impenetrable, seething desolation of electric green.

We pulled into a clearing. There was a sign: Tetere Police Post. But there were no police. The lawn was overgrown. A crowd of men waited in the shade of an oak tree.

“The Gold Ridge boys,” said Brother Clement.

Our arrival was not a surprise. That was obvious, because the Gold Ridge militants had hidden their guns. (People were careful around the brotherhood. If a
tasiu
saw your gun, he would insist that you hand it over.)

The militants shifted nervously, glaring at Johnson like wolves assessing a wounded buck. Their leader was a fat man with silver aviator glasses.

“Now we will straighten things out,” Clement whispered to me.

“Welcome,
tasiu
, welcome,” said the leader. “This is just a family problem. We are sorry to bother you.”

“Yes, said Johnson, who was slouching deferentially behind Clement. “Just a small problem. I just want my Junior back.”

“And we want our machine gun back,” snarled the leader.

“And no more bombing,” said a sinewy young man behind the leader, pausing to spit a great hork of betel into the grass no-man's-land between us.

Machine gun? Bombing?

It was difficult to understand the exchange that followed. The militants were furious, and Johnson was vague. But gradually it became clear that Johnson and his boy were not as meek as they seemed.

Apparently, a gang from CDC-1 had blocked the road between Gold Ridge and Honiara—roadblocks were a convenient way of extorting cigarettes and petrol from travelers. That was a month ago. The Gold Ridge gang was upset about this, even though they had blocked plenty of roads themselves. They made a retaliatory sweep through the plantations, beating the odd settler and stealing the odd pig. But when they hit Johnson's compound, Johnson and his Junior fought back mightily, wrestling an SR-88 assault rifle from one of the attackers and sending the Gold Ridge gang running. Then Johnson Junior acquired some explosives and bombed a bridge on the Gold Ridge road. That's why the Gold Ridge boys had hunted him down, and why he was now bleeding in a shack behind the police station.

Nobody shouted. Johnson whimpered. At first the militants spoke in hushed, pleading voices. Clement tried to negotiate, but even as the militants deferred (“Thank you,
tasiu
, yes,
tasiu
, we are sorry,
tasiu
”), they grew more agitated and shuffled forward. They hissed like snakes and quivered with quiet outrage. The militants stopped chewing their betel. Clement chewed faster. A drop of red foam boiled at the corner of his mouth. Perspiration beaded on all our faces. The tension was nauseating. I wished I had not come.

And then Brother Francis stepped forward. He wore a shy
half-smile. He pulled off his wraparound sunglasses to reveal the eyes of a daydreamer. He did not look at Johnson or at the militants. He gazed at the trampled earth as though looking right through it, then toward the deep green folds of the highlands, then up at the sky, and then he bowed his head. The militants seemed transfixed by his movements, like charmed snakes. The bickering trailed off. Brother Francis spoke softly, and his voice was like a breeze blowing through the yard, rustling through the dry grass, easing the weight of the humid afternoon. I could barely hear him. At first I thought he was reasoning with the militants. But his murmurs were too melodic for that. I realized he was praying when I noticed two dozen other bowed heads. The militants unclenched their fists. The leader removed his aviator glasses. An immense calm fell on us all.

And that was it. Within minutes, the problem was settled.

We drove back to Johnson's house, where his wife and his sister served us great lumps of taro in coconut milk. Johnson beamed. “You know, my boy didn't blow up the bridge,” he said cheerily. “He just made a little explosion to scare those Gold Ridge boys away.”

“
Hem stret brotha
,” said Clement. “But we need the gun.”

“The gun?” said Johnson, smiling weakly.

“The gun,” said Clement, rolling a fresh wad of betel around his gums.

Johnson hummed and hawed. So did his brother and his wife. But they knew the game was up. Finally, someone produced a battered SR-88 assault rifle from inside the house. There was no ammunition. We took the gun with us. The agreement back at the Tetere police post had been for everyone to return the following day. The
tasiu
would bring Johnson's gun. The Gold Ridge gang would bring Johnson Junior—alive. There would be an even trade, and then they would all make a picnic together. In fact, when the brothers returned the following day, they picked up
Johnson Junior but informed the Gold Ridge boys that they were keeping the SR-88 so they could dispose of it in God's name. Who could argue with that? The militants didn't.

We sang all the way home, and we stopped at the middle of the Alligator Creek Bridge so I could take a photo of the brothers. I wanted them to hold the gun above their heads. They refused, but they did pull out their walking sticks. I keep that photo on my wall. There is Driver X, running along the bridge railing. There is Brother Nicolas, beaming, and Brother Floyd, barefoot. There is Brother Clement, with his walking stick and his white sneakers. And behind them, squinting into the light, his lips pursed into that shy half-smile, is Brother Francis, whose face and name have now been seared into my memory.

How could I have known that it was my job to remember more than I remember of Brother Francis?

How could I have known that he would go off to challenge the greatest darkness his country had ever seen? Would I have warned him? And if I had warned him, would he have sailed to the Weather Coast anyway?

I didn't yet know the significance of the moment. I didn't yet know that after all the talk of miracles and magic, it was Brother Francis who would offer an answer that obscured all the rest. I didn't yet know Brother Francis's place in the story, or my own. That knowledge would take months to come, and by that time Brother Francis would be dead.

The last time I saw Brother Francis, he wrote in my notebook:

Believe.

The story on which Brother Francis would base his life and his death was the one that had guided Melanesians for more than a century. It brought my great-grandfather to the archipelago, and it had drawn me, too, from the moment I discovered that packet of sand back in Oxford. I had found a dozen different accounts in libraries in Oxford, London, Sydney, and Canberra. Some were the scribbled testimonies of sailors. Some were written years after the fact by amateur evangelical historians. Some were fanciful reconstructions. The story captivated me, but it also bothered me, because the earliest versions of it were constructed and put to
work even before Bishop John Coleridge Patteson's followers had figured out just how and why the first bishop of Melanesia was murdered on Nukapu. But the story of Patteson's martyrdom did not require facts to survive. It lived independently of them. It was bigger than facts. That is why I call it a myth.

My great-grandfather gave his version in
The Light of Melanesia
. The things Henry Montgomery wanted remembered were these:

Patteson had always followed his god. As a boy, young Coley longed to say the Absolution in church, because he saw how happy it made people.

Patteson was royally blessed. As a student at Eton, Coley was nearly crushed when he stumbled in front of the oncoming wheel of the royal carriage, but he was saved by the outstretched hand of young Queen Victoria—“How much depended upon that happy moment!”

Patteson was the rightful successor to Selwyn, founder of the Melanesian Mission. He showed uncommon bravery, but also gentleness, in his South Pacific adventures. More than once, wrote my great-grandfather, Patteson was confronted by a native with arrow on the string and bow drawn tight. “Shoot away!” Patteson would shout. “It is all right,” and his pluck and his smile would disarm his opponent.

Other accounts indicate that while Patteson escaped certain death many times, he could not always save his disciples. In 1864, Patteson was chased from the shores of Santa Cruz by a crowd of three hundred agitated villagers. He reached his whaleboat and used the wooden rudder to shield his crew from the hail of arrows. But the oarsmen were pierced like pincushions. One took a bone-tipped arrow in the chest, another through a cheek. Fisher Young and Edwin Nobbs, lads who had sailed north with the bishop from their home on Norfolk Island, were both struck, but they kept rowing until they returned their master safely to the
Southern Cross
. Patteson nursed the boys' wounds, but he knew tetanus
would take them both. Patteson later wrote to a cousin: “On the fourth day that dear lad Fisher said to me, ‘I can't think what makes my jaw so stiff.' Then I knew that all hope was gone of his being spared.” Young was buried on Vanua Lava. Nobbs was consigned to the deep.

People said the bishop, who thought of the boys as sons, was never the same after that. It was as though he knew of the fate that awaited him on Nukapu.

Friends urged him to return to England, but he was determined to crack the pagan shell of the Santa Cruz Group. For nine years he tried to land there, and for nine years he was repelled. His work was made increasingly dangerous by the presence of labor recruiters among the islands. The natives found it hard to distinguish between the
Southern Cross
, which carried their children away to mission school, and the blackbirding vessels, which carried strong young men off to work on plantations.

“The exasperation of the Natives is very great,” wrote Patteson. “Kidnapping is going on fast. Many quarrels have arisen; Natives are retaliating; And they can't always discriminate, you know, between a friendly and an unfriendly white man.”

The bishop sailed toward Santa Cruz in 1871 in an atmosphere of foreboding. The
Southern Cross
had just completed a loop north through the Solomons to collect the evangelists it had deposited two months previously. The missionaries' reports were alarming. Natives had killed all the crew on at least two labor-recruiting vessels. At San Cristobal (now Makira), the captain of the Fiji-based labor-recruiting ship
Emma Bell
bragged to missionary Joseph Atkin that Santa Cruz would be his next hunting ground.

All this bad news weighed heavily on Patteson, who expected to die on the islands but did not wish more of his followers to die along with him. The
Southern Cross
sped toward Santa Cruz but was becalmed near the volcanic sentinel Tinakula, whose peak
smoked and glowed like the fires of Sinai. The bishop fell into deep meditation. The crew mused that he was praying for the poor souls who still remained in ignorance and darkness. My great-grandfather recounted Patteson's diary entry for that night: “On Monday we go to Nukapu. I am fully alive to the probability that some outrage has been committed here. The master of the vessel whom Atkin saw, did not deny his intention of taking away from these or from any other island any men or boys he could induce to come on board. I am quite aware we may be exposed to considerable risk on this account. I trust that all may be well, and that if it be His will that any trouble should come upon us, dear Joseph Atkin, his father's and mother's only son, may be spared.”

The bishop would be denied that last wish.

The wind picked up, and at midday on September 20, the
Southern Cross
hove to outside Nukapu's barrier reef. No canoes ventured out to greet the ship, so Patteson, despite his trepidation, decided to go ashore. The crew lowered a whaleboat, and Patteson set off with four rowers: Joseph Atkin, Stephen Taroaniara from Baura, and two youths from Mota. They paddled to the reef, where they were intercepted by several canoes from the island. The Nukapuans were friendly, but the low tide made it impossible for the whaleboat to cross the reef, so the bishop accepted a ride to shore in one of the canoes. The rest of the canoes remained with the whaleboat and its rowers.

The strangers chatted across the water. The missionaries and the Nukapuans watched the bishop land on the island and disappear into a hut. Then one of the Nukapuans stood up in his canoe and raised his bow.

“Have you got anything like this?” he asked.

What a strange question. Of course the missionaries did not carry weapons.

Then he shot the first arrow.

“This one is for New Zealand!” shouted another warrior.

“This one is for Mota!” shouted another.

“This is for Baura,” shouted another.

And so on, until the air was full of arrows.

The missionaries beat a frantic retreat, but not before Atkin had been struck by an arrow in the left shoulder and one of the Mota boys had taken one in his right, and someone else had an arrow through his straw hat. The arrows were each a yard long, heavy and tipped with shards of human bone, designed to break in the wound and fester. Taroaniara was hit six times: one arrow broke his jaw; another pierced his chest. The Nukapuans yelled and laughed at the fleeing missionaries, but they did not give chase.

When the whaleboat reached the
Southern Cross
, five arrowheads were pulled from Taroaniara's body, but the sixth had lodged too deeply in his chest to be extracted.

As soon as his own wound was cleaned, Atkin climbed back into the whaleboat with four men and went to look for the bishop. When the tide rose, they crossed the reef and scanned the shore with a telescope. They saw a pair of canoes put out from Nukapu. Near the middle of the lagoon, one paddler dropped a rock anchor. The men retreated to shore, leaving the anchored canoe behind. Atkin and his fellows rowed toward it cautiously and peered inside. There was a large parcel wrapped in a fine woven mat. Poking out from one end of the parcel was a pair of feet in striped socks. They unrolled the mat to find the bishop otherwise naked. The right side of his head had been shattered. There were more light cuts here and there on the body, but it was clearly the blow to the head that had killed him.

And this: the Nukapuans had attached a palm frond to the mat, over the bishop's breast. Five of the frond's leaves had been knotted. Five wounds. Five knots. It must have been a message.

And this: the dead bishop was said to have been wearing a placid smile, which was also widely interpreted as a message.

As soon as Patteson's body had been lifted into the whaleboat, a hundred islanders poured onto the beach and let out a collective scream. The missionaries retreated to the
Southern Cross
and put her sail to the wind.

The next morning, Bishop Patteson's body was consigned to the deep within sight of Nukapu. It took six days for tetanus to take hold of Joseph Atkin's nervous system. Taroaniara died two days later. The two were buried at sea before the ship reached Mota.

Codrington, who was now the mission's de facto leader, begged the government not to retaliate, but the HMS
Rosario
was immediately dispatched to Nukapu to bomb the island and burn its village. The ship's commanding officer reported that the foray incurred “severe loss of life.”

Anglicans around the world mourned, but they also rejoiced. The church finally had its first episcopal missionary-martyr, a shining archetype of Anglo-Catholic sacrifice. Patteson's story was represented on stained-glass windows, carved into the stone of Exeter Cathedral, and writ into Victorian children's books, place names, and Sunday sermons.

Years passed before the missionaries returned to the island and learned the details of Patteson's death, but that did not stop them from wrapping the tragedy in symbolism and political intent within weeks. The attack had not been an act of spontaneous passion. The Nukapuans, they noted, did not decapitate the bishop, nor did they eat him, as islanders had done to the Reverends Williams and Gordon on Erromanga. The Nukapuans knew the bishop was a big man among Europeans. They treated his body with respect, right down to its presentation in that woven mat. So why had they killed him? The murder was a message, and that message was crystal clear, at least to the missionaries. Five knotted palm leaves. Five wounds. Five islanders must recently have been killed or kidnapped by labor recruiters. This was more than revenge: it was a demand for white men to stop the kidnapping.

“There is very little doubt but that the slave trade which is desolating these islands was the cause of this attack,” announced Codrington. “Bishop Patteson was known throughout the islands as a friend, and now even he is killed to revenge the outrages of his countrymen. The guilt surely does not lie upon the savages who executed, but on the traders who provoked the deed.”

The missionaries, who had long fought with labor recruiters for the islanders' attention, now lobbied in England and Australia to restrict the blackbirders. Churches and newspapers across the empire joined the outcry. Queen Victoria expressed her disapproval, and early in 1872, the British Parliament finally passed a law to regulate the trade—all this before anyone knew exactly what had happened on Nukapu.

When the
Southern Cross
returned thirteen years later, some Nukapuans told the missionaries what they wanted to hear.

“Let us follow the bishop ashore,” my great-grandfather's version went. “We saw him last in the chief's canoe crossing the reef, and at length landing on the beach. It seems that he went into the house of which I have spoken, and laid himself down flat on his back, with his head on a Santa Cruz pillow, and closed his eyes. The place was full of people. Behind him there sat a man who had in his hand a wooden mallet. With this he struck the bishop on the top of his head. Death was instantaneous. It is said that he did not even open his eyes.”

That much, all the Patteson stories had in common. But there are many stories and many more details.

The truth is, nobody ever said conclusively why and how the bishop was killed. The mission's accepted version is that the murderer was a relative of one of five men who had been kidnapped and taken to Fiji on a labor vessel. The murderer was banished from Nukapu for his outrage. He drifted from island to island like Cain, until he was finally shot by a chief on Santa Cruz. And those kidnapped men? One died on Fiji, but the other four stole a boat and
followed the stars west, back to Nukapu. Of course, these details were related to the missionaries through interpreters, and the shell-shocked islanders were unlikely to contradict a tale that had already gained popularity among white men. This mission-friendly story also happened to give everyone a convenient scapegoat for the crime. But as Australian historian David Hilliard noted more than a century later, it did not explain the obviously premeditated attack on the crew in the
Southern Cross
's whaleboat. And in fact, it was contradicted by the first missionary to actually live on Nukapu and become fluent in the local language. Actaeon E. C. Forrest was told that Patteson was killed over nothing more than a breach of etiquette. He had given a present to the wrong chief at the wrong time. This version did not carry the symbolism and power of the earlier myth. Perhaps that is why it was not included in the official version of the Patteson story. Regardless, it made Nukapu shine even more mysteriously for me.

I couldn't shake the sense that the island was the place where myth and history intersected. If I could just cross that reef and wade to its shore, if I could feel the island's certainty, I might be able to divine the space between all the old stories, and in that space find some truth about the god that my ancestors had carried around the world. I wanted an answer that felt as real and as powerful as the
kastom
miracles of the Nono and Langa Langa Lagoons had felt for me.

My maps insisted that Nukapu was a real place. There it was, a tiny speck on the northern fringe of the Santa Cruz Group, caught in the cartographer's grid, 166 degrees east of Greenwich, 10 degrees south of the equator, 430 miles east of Honiara, beyond a blankness of sea and the deep blue canyon of the Torres Trench. People in Melanesia all knew of Nukapu for the act of violence that marked the frontier between the age of the ancestors and the age of the new god. They knew it as the epicenter of the myth that bound them to their church. But nobody seemed to have been
there. The island had begun to feel like more of an idea than a real place. Weeks had passed since the captains of the
Eastern Trader
and the MV
Temotu
had first promised a quick departure for the Santa Cruz Group. So it was with no great expectations that, on the morning after my adventure in CDC-1, I packed my air mattress, stocked up on cookies at the Sweetie Kwan store, and sauntered down to the port, as I had done a dozen times before. I didn't get my hopes up, even when I saw diesel smoke curling above my two ships and the pier between them seething with bodies.