The Shark God (34 page)

“The old, the sick, we just take them there—”

“For example,” interrupted Silas, “one catechist had ten or twelve kids, and they were all dying, all in the space of a few weeks.”

“Malaria?” I asked.

“No. A
kastom
sickness, which came because he had been fighting over land. When the man had only one son left, he took the boy and pushed him underneath the cross. He said, ‘All my
pikinini
are dead, please, bishop, let me keep just this one. If my
boy lives, he will work for God.' That boy was saved! Now he is a catechist in the church.”

The bishop's ghost was being treated much like Melanesians had always treated their ancestor spirits. He was, indeed, becoming stronger in his death. His cross oozed
mana
. Why not? The bishop of Malaita, who had railed against the
mana
-ization of Christian symbols, would not have approved, but it didn't seem like such a bad thing for Patteson's ghost to exert a benevolent influence. Especially if it worked.

Silas moved closer. “You understand it was God's plan for the bishop to die here, not ours.”

“Okay.”

“And you see that we have helped you,” he said. “So now you must help us. We want to find Bishop Patteson's family. His grandsons.”

“Tell them we are Christian,” pleaded the old lady. “Tell them we know the Master now.”

“We want to build a special house for the cross,” said Silas. “And we want to put a computer in it, so we can be on the Internet.”

“For tourists,” added someone else.

“But you would need electricity for a computer,” I said, “and a telephone line…”

Silas was not listening. He leaned in toward me and lowered his voice. “And you should help me, too. The
bêche-de-mer
man has a crate of beer in his canoe. You should buy me some beer.”

Beer was rare on the outer islands. When men got their hands on it, they drank as much as they could as fast as they could. To buy a crate of beer would be to catalyze an evening of chaos and tears. And besides, I didn't like Silas. I didn't like his bulging, suspicious eyes, or the way he took care to stand slightly higher than everyone else, or the way he pushed his face into mine.

I assured the people I would try to help them, and then I retreated to the real chief's house. Silas followed me. I felt his hand on my shoulder just as I was about to duck inside.

“Did you know that sometimes a column of light shoots up into the sky from the bishop's cross?”

“I'd like to see that,” I said, pulling away.

“Of course it takes weeks of prayer to bring the light.” Silas tightened his grip on my shoulder. His breath was heavy with betel.

I waited.

“A storm is coming. You are in danger,” he said. “But I can help you in your journey. I can keep you safe. I am very powerful, because the bishop, the patron saint of Nukapu, gave me his power.”

I did not want to hear this. It was not the end I wanted for my story.

“Bishop Patteson came to me in a dream once. He told me not to be afraid. He told me he would take special care of me. There was light shining from his face. Ever since, I have been able to use his power.”

“Sure,” I said. “You heal people.”

“More than that.” Silas stepped between me and the door of my hut. “Suppose I get in a fight with some man. Maybe he has hurt me or done something bad. I always warn him first: I tell him watch out, now something bad will happen to you. And then in a day or two, he will fall down, or cut himself, or get bitten by a shark. That's the power the bishop gave me.”

“That doesn't sound very Christian to me.”

“Ha! Don't you worry. You have promised to help us. So tomorrow I will pray under the cross for the bishop to protect you. Then, sometime—I can't promise you when—he will come to you in a dream. He will make you safe. He will bring you success.”

“Thank you,” I said, straining to free my shoulder from his grip.

“But remember your promise. You must find the bishop's grandchildren. You must tell them to send money. If you do not do that, something very bad will happen to you.”

He squeezed harder. “Something very, very bad. Maybe you drown.”

The three-quarter moon had climbed to its apex. It cast the village in silver light. Our shadows were sharp and black beneath us. Silas's eyes glistened. I despised him for what he was doing to Patteson's myth. A century after their conversion, the Nukapuans were now converting Christianity: Patteson had not banished the
tindalo
, the powerful ancestor spirits. He had become one. And here was Silas, threatening me with an invocation of the martyr's ghost. Patteson would surely be rolling in his saltwater grave. I crept inside and waited until the sound of Silas's footsteps faded away. One of my friends stirred on the floor.

“Don't worry, Charles,” he whispered. “That man is a liar.”

I knew it. All the night's talk rang false. Nukapu was not what it should have been.

The feast day was searingly hot. I tried to avoid Silas, but he was everywhere. There he was, announcing the Pileni Youth for Christ dance group (they wore grass skirts, waved their arms like the dancers at the Waikiki Hilton, and sang, “We are dancing in the light of God”); there he was, apportioning the feast (parcels of leaf-wrapped pork and sweet potato, baked in an earthen oven, they resembled the remains of Christmas presents after a house fire); there he was ordering people to sit down at their banana-leaf place mats and eat. Silas was always barking at people. And he always seemed to be watching me with one eye. He insisted I make a speech, so I stood up and told the people that Nukapu was “
wan gudfala Christian paradaes
.”

But when I saw the
bêche-de-mer
trader loading his boat, I collected my things and threw them in.

As I said my hurried good-byes, an old lady, who turned out to be Silas's grandmother, pulled me aside. The sun-baked skin on her face and arms was covered in tattoos. There were fish bones and stars, and on one arm, a name: Steven. Her earlobes had been
stretched into long, flabby rings. She pulled the pipe from her mouth and hissed at me in her own language.

“She is telling you to remember that we are not heathens anymore,” said the girl beside her. “There are no heathens left on the island. We are Christians. You must not be scared. We won't kill anymore white men.”

The woman thrust a woven handbag into my arms and peered at me imploringly.

“I'm not scared,” I said. “That's not why I'm leaving.”

The trader pushed his boat free of the sand. I waded into the sea behind him. Silas charged into the water behind me.

“My friend. You won't break your promise, will you?” he said. “Because if you do…Ha! Ha!”

He slapped me on the back. I scowled at him and hopped into the boat.

“
Mi funi nomo!
”—I was only joking!—Silas shouted over the roar of the outboard as we pulled away. But he wasn't smiling.

I turned to the sea and did not look back. I wasn't scared. I was angry, breathless with disappointment, but also on the verge of understanding. I didn't need another word from Silas. I wanted to be alone.

I asked the
bêche-de-mer
trader to drop me on the deserted island I had seen near Pileni. All the boats returning from Nukapu would pass near it when the feasting was over in a day or so. I could just flag down one of those boats, I said, imagining it would be like hailing a cab. It was a foolish idea. The trader agreed to drop me only because he knew the island was not actually deserted.

To my dismay, a fisherman and his family were standing on the beach when we crossed the reef. They had paddled over from Pileni in dugout canoes. They had brought water jugs, cassava, babies, a portable stereo, and a shoe box full of gospel cassettes. They had built huts from sticks, palm leaves, and plastic bags. Now the
music was blaring, the babies were bawling, and the white sand had been transformed into a minefield of buried shit. The men were tired. They had spent ten nights diving in the lagoon for
bêche-de-mer
. The slugs were now shriveling on racks above a fire tended by the fisherman's wife. Their insides oozed out like pus.

The fisherman offered me a shell full of turtle soup. I ate with him in the shade, but then I told him I wanted to be alone. This made him sad, but still he ordered his two sons to carry my backpack away from their camp, through the young palms and oaks to the south end of the island, which he called Makalom.

The island was a temporary place, a perfect teardrop of sand that would surely disappear with the next big cyclone. A strong man could throw a coconut across its widest point. I had brought a tent. I pitched it where I could see the surf breaking on the reef, the smoke curling from Tinakula, and the palms of Pileni trembling like a clump of dandelions on the southern horizon. If I climbed a tree, I could probably see Nukapu, too. But I didn't do that, and I tried not to imagine Silas, who would surely still be licking the pig fat from his fingers and bragging about the special magic he had inherited from the martyred bishop.

I watched the family from my tent as daylight bled from the sky. After dark, the fisherman and his sons pushed their canoes out from the beach and drifted silently across the lagoon. They slid into the water, shattering the reflection of the moon. Their flashlights glinted, glimmered, and faded with each dive, illuminating the surface of the water from below. The surf burned white on the edge of the reef beyond them like a phosphorescent brush fire sweeping back and forth across a dark plain. Thunderheads boiled silver in the distance. Tentacles of vapor were reaching north across the sky. A storm was approaching.

I waited hours for the men to paddle back to their camp. When they did, I listened for their murmurs to cease, for the last gospel song to finish, for the babies to stop crying. Through the
trees, I watched their fire spark and flicker and finally settle into an untended glow. I knew the fisherman and his family said their prayers. They thanked God, and probably their ancestors, too, implored them to bring more slugs and to keep the storms at bay for just another week.

Now, for the first time in four months, I was alone, facing the sea. A breeze sent shivers across the lagoon.

From the moment I had spotted Makalom, I had imagined ending my story there. I had imagined myself alone, knee-deep in the lagoon, understanding the weight and truth about stories and gods and ancestors. But it would not work. The story could not end with Silas's threats still rippling across the water. It was not the concept of the dead bishop's power that troubled me. It was the idea of Silas using Patteson's spirit like a curse-dispensing
kastom
stone, the idea that God could be reversed and reduced to a weapon. No. It wouldn't do.

The central struggle in Melanesia was no longer the fight between Christian and pagan mythology. The Christian God had pretty much won the battle. Paganism was on its last legs. The old spirits survived only in a few last pockets of resistance, like the wounded remnants of an army at the end of a long siege. Even in the Kwaio hills, Christian soldiers were hammering at the battlements of pagan ritual. But the old way of thinking, the way of
mana
, had survived and flourished within the Christian churches. The real fight now was the tug-of-war between
mana
and mysticism; between those who tried to claim and direct supernatural power, like children throwing rocks at their enemies, and those who were certain that the heart of their Christian myth was self-sacrifice and divine love. It was between Old Testament thinking—which was very much in keeping with
kastom
ideas about
mana
and which was increasingly popular among Christian evangelicals—and New Testament thinking, which rejected sorcery and magic in favor of a transcendent kind of vulnerability. The
Church of Melanesia claimed to have oriented itself unambiguously toward the mysticism of the New Testament. It was a profound distinction. The key to this philosophy was not commandment, reward, or punishment. It was not the directing of thunderbolts toward one's enemies. It was not the prophet Fred draining the lake on Tanna Island. It was certainly not Silas invoking the spirit of the bishop to draw favors from me or cast bad luck on his neighbors. It was not magic as technology, nor was it a sorcerer's stone. The key, which you do not have to be Christian to appreciate, was Jesus without his miracles, trudging out of Jerusalem with his cross on his back, toward death and rebirth. It was the shedding of power and worldly wherewithal. It was love. But most of all it was a story whose power came only through faith and its sister, imagination. Silas had gotten it wrong, and so, in my hunger for magic, had I.

I felt the magic draining away from my journey, felt the miracles of the Nonotongere and Langa Langa Lagoon becoming hollow. These were empty miracles, junk-food miracles. They had left me unsated, always hungry for more. What a fool I had been to hunt for magic glitter, more proof of
mana
among the Melanesian Brotherhood. The white
tasiu
's words returned to me like shouts across the lagoon: The measure of a miracle's truth was the quality of the faith it inspired. Proof was the very opposite of faith.

Here, at the end of the world, on the empty edge of things, I felt a sudden and terrible clarity. The miracle for which my great-grandfather waited decades did not contain even a whiff of
mana
. His god did not bring rain or thunder or wealth when it appeared to him so many years after his return from Melanesia. There was only the briefest moment of light in his Irish garden, and a question—“Lovest thou me?”—which most certainly came from inside the bishop's own gut. The light and the voice were not proof of his faith but products of it, and yet they most certainly led him closer to the God of Love.