The Shark God (7 page)

“You must take many photos,” he said, straightening his tie. “Fred is a very important man. Take many photos and send me copies of them. I want to present them to the Presbyterian Congress on Makira, to show them our work here.”

The man's name was Pastor Maliwan Taruei. He was the grandson of the Presbyterian minister who had battled it out with the John Frummers back in the 1940s. Isag Wan's grandfather had driven Taruei's grandfather out of Sulphur Bay, then torn down his church. Now Maliwan Taruei had rebuilt it. The family feud was still on.

“Isag Wan is destroying this island with his idol worship,” the pastor whispered to me as Fred preached.

“Don't be ridiculous. Isag Wan is a sweet old man,” I said.

“Well, anyway, Fred is much better. Look at him, he is just like Moses. He led four thousand, four hundred sixty-six people up this hill, just like Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt to the promised land. And best of all, Fred invited the Presbyterian Church.”

Wasn't it strange, I asked, for the church to support a man who championed both God and
kastom
magic? It didn't fit with any version of Christianity I had ever heard of. “Aha, you don't understand Tanna, do you? Our
kastom
stories are just like the Bible stories. Don't you know the real name of our volcano? It's not Yasur. It's Yahweh, the Hebrew name for God. The Bible tells us that one day the world will become paradise. But
kastom
tells us that one day Tanna will become a paradise, a new Jerusalem. Tanna people know we have two choices. We pray for both of them.”

“But is your savior Jesus or John Frum?”

“My friend, God will give us the answer, and it will be one of them. Either way, I assure you that the church has returned to Sulphur Bay, and all these people will be there on Sunday.”

Taruei was facing the same dilemma the first missionaries had faced on Tanna: Was winning people's allegiance more important than the shape of faith itself? For Taruei, getting bums into church pews was clearly more important than preserving the purity of Presbyterian doctrine.

The crowd had disappeared. Now they were back, filing onto the dirt plaza by the hundreds. They had changed out of their rags. The men came first, banana leaves tied around their heads and bare chests shining in the sun. Women followed, their faces painted yellow and orange like hornets. They wore feathers in their hair and grass skirts dyed with rainbow checkers. Wreaths of Christmas tinsel dangled from their necks. Their dance was not the dead-eyed shake of Kelsen's
nambas
-clad friends, nor was it the cheery campfire rumba I had joined in in Namakara. It was like a war dance. The men stamped the earth, grunting and exhaling simultaneously in great stormy whooshes. The women gathered around them in loose whorls, wailing and waving tree branches toward the Stars and Stripes. They charged the flag, jumped back again, and raced in circles until the plaza became a maelstrom of dust and leaping bodies. The Presbyterian Congress, I thought, would be mortified.

The pastors shifted nervously on the grass mats where they now sat. The older one adjusted his glasses. He looked like the square kid in a room full of marijuana smoke. Taruei reached for my hand, but I couldn't sit still. Shaking with excitement, I dashed across the clearing, climbed to the roof of a hut, and pulled out my camera. There was Fred, sitting alone on a footstool, watching the dance with one eye and me with the other. He nodded when I pointed my camera at him. Taruei shouted to the dancers, who quickened their pace. I raised the camera to my eye, and the frame
was filled with dust, flashing color, and shining skin. The crowd had spread across the plaza: the frame couldn't contain them all. I stood up, straddling the gable of the hut, raised my arms above my head, motioned like Jesus on the mount. Closer together. Move closer together. The crowd responded.

“Closer!” I shouted when the dance ended. The crowd moved closer still. Adrenaline rushed through my veins.

“Raise your arms to the sky,” I shouted when the dance ended. “Not Fred, just the rest of you!” They did as they were told, sweat-drenched men, dust-caked women, naked children, all four hundred of them; even the Presbyterian pastors stretched their arms in the air. It felt wonderful to see them obey. The dancers all looked up at me, knowing that they had done good work, knowing they were among the first to proclaim a message of peace and unity that would certainly sweep across Tanna and, with my help, around the world.

I gazed down at Fred, standing serenely among his followers. It would be easy to be a messiah here. You have your visions. You make your prophecies. You lead your people to the mountain. You tell them a new story. Then, if you are lucky, you are martyred like Jesus or you disappear like John Frum. If you are unlucky, you just go on living while your aura fades and you become ordinary again. But the key to success is your own faith. It must be rock solid. In other words, you either possess supernatural powers or you are nuts. There is no middle ground.

It was one thing to believe in yourself. But the faith of the people, where did it come from? The Tannese seemed to have the capacity to accept any prophet, any myth. They were more than just tolerant. They had sponges for souls.
Kastom
traditionalists sacrificed to the spirits and waited for John Frum. John Frummers waited for Jesus and John. Christians hedged their bets. Nobody was interested in discussing the contradictions.

I had always traced the impulses of faith to environment. In the
years after I abandoned my family's church, I found that the universe spoke to me most loudly in the fullness of mountains, the endlessness of the sea, the fury of storms, the boom and crack of living physics…that's when the world itself seemed to offer a voice and a breath that felt something like
mana
, and which begged to be given a name and a shape and a myth to explain it all. Tanna was a nexus of such signals. The landscape was as powerful, as crowded, as sharply schizophrenic, as the island's apparent train wreck of faiths. The island was a confluence of primal signals. The vibrating jungle. The dusty stillness of the ash plain. The torrential rains. The fires of Yasur. Yes, the volcano, which had not ceased bellowing since my arrival, declaring its power, demanding attention.

I slid back down the thatch roof, shook two hundred hands, then jogged to Port Resolution. I caught a lift on a Land Cruiser headed for Lenakel but jumped out when we reached the ash plain.

I stood for an hour there at the foot of the volcano. The mountain didn't make a sound. In the last few years, tourists had begun to fly down to Tanna from Port Vila, drawn by the spectacle of Yasur's eruptions like moths to a giant flame. A handful had been struck and killed by flying rocks. Two weeks before my arrival, a woman had ventured onto the mountain and was hit by a rock that melted a hole in her leg. Kelsen had advised me that the bombs only flew north. Or was it east?

Almost without thinking, I started up through the ash, slowly at first, pausing to gaze at the crest of the cinder cone with each tentative step. I sank up to my ankles in the rubble, sliding a step back for every two forward. Sand gathered between my toes. I cursed my sandals. I stumbled over bucket-sized pockmarks and yard-wide craters. They all cradled stones: some were as delicate and light as pumice, others looked like pieces of flesh ripped from a burned corpse. Some were all bubble and froth, the texture of water frozen in midboil. Some were as big as bathtubs. Some had
settled into the earth, as though they had been spit from the volcano decades before. Others were young: the sand around them had been heat-seared into a frosty white ring still undisturbed by rain. But hadn't it rained just that morning?

I was three-quarters of the way up the mountain when it made the most terrifying sound. I could tell you it went
boom
, but that wouldn't be enough. Roared? Not enough. Thundered? Perhaps. It was the kind of sound that assures you that you are a fool, and that if you die, everyone will know you were a fool. A fool, a fool, I thought as the ground trembled and the sand trickled around my feet. I couldn't see past the crest of the cone. I remembered what Kelsen had told me. Don't run away when the mountain explodes. Don't turn your back. Face it, so that you can sidestep the bombs when they come at you. Ridiculous. The mountain shook again, hollering at me to turn back. I did think of turning back. But sometimes a journey takes on a momentum that won't listen to logic.

I carried on, pulling at the sand and ash, my knees grinding into the scree. My feet bled under the straps of my sandals. I didn't decide to beg: the words just seemed to form themselves amid the moans each time I exhaled.
Please don't kill me. If you spare me, I promise not to point my camera into your crater.
It was all I could think of to offer. I know it sounds absurd, begging to a mountain. I knew it at the time. Mountains cannot hear. But if you were there, you would have done the same thing, even as you reminded yourself that the unthinking forces of gravity and physics and geology were never meant to be anthropomorphized.

I reached a cornice of fractured rock and peered over it into the crater, which was the size of a soccer stadium. There were three pits at the bottom. One glowed faintly orange. Another smoked like a bonfire of wet leaves. Occasionally it sucked at the late-afternoon air like a steam engine. The third had no bottom. I gazed into that crater, and I didn't see John Frum's armies or a
fiery spirit or the power of a heavenly God. I knew the rumbling, the explosions, the tremendous heaving power, all of it came from the earth. The mountain did not have feelings. It would not respond to my prayers any more than it would to Fred's commands. I was certain about these things. So why did I leave my camera in its case? Why did I reach instead into my pocket, pull out a five-hundred-vatu note, and slip it under a rock? I did not ask these questions at the time. I didn't allow myself a moment to feel foolish about keeping my promise to the volcano.

The sun was setting. I scrambled along the south edge of the crater until I reached a fence made from bamboo sticks. Someone had built a makeshift lookout on the lip of the precipice. This would be the pristine side of the volcano. I followed a trail that led down from the lookout toward a plateau a few hundred yards away. There was a truck there, and someone waving. As I waved back, the mountain boomed like a cannon, then boomed again behind me. I turned and froze. Magma sprayed into the purpling sky: great gobs of red-and-black-mottled jelly spiraled, spun, broke apart in the heavens before finding their weight, losing momentum, and falling back down toward the earth. The igneous rain exploded across the slope I had just crossed.

I ran-stumbled down toward the truck. It contained four men, volcanologists who had flown down from Vila for a night of fireworks. The men toasted my arrival with tin cups of instant coffee. They said they had been sprinting back and forth to the crater's edge all afternoon. It was the coffee that kept them going, one said, laughing. As if on cue, a bearded fellow with a heavy brow appeared to refill their cups. I should have known. Kelsen. If Yasur was Tanna's real temple, then Kelsen was its money changer. He had lugged a kettle up from his village and lit a little fire at the edge of the plateau. Coffee was one hundred vatu a shot.

“If you come back and stay at my hotel,” Kelsen was saying to them, “I'll tell you the legend behind the volcano.”

It was impossible to say just how Tanna had been transformed into such a psychospiritual Disneyland, such a breeding ground for prophets and wide-eyed, contradictory faith. Perhaps it all went back to the clash between
kastom
and the Old Testament absolutism the Presbyterians brought to the island.

Take the Reverend John G. Paton, the firebrand who landed in Port Resolution with his wife in 1858. Paton had a taste for confrontation, retribution, and high drama. His autobiography reads like the screen treatment for the Melanesia of my boyhood dreams. He describes how he dueled with pagan warriors and sorcerers; how they burned his house to the ground and stole all his possessions; how his wife, his child, and a colleague all died within three
years of their arrival; how he sat for ten days, gun in hand, guarding his dead wife's grave to prevent islanders from getting their hands on her putrefying remains. The heathens, he insisted, were voracious cannibals who “gloried in bloodshedding” and delighted in the taste of human flesh. After one tribal battle, Paton recalled that the bodies of half a dozen men had been stewed in the hot spring near the head of the bay. This presented a unique problem: “At the boiling spring they have cooked and feasted upon the slain,” Paton's cook allegedly reported to him. “They have washed the blood into the stream; they have bathed there till all the waters are red. I cannot get water to make your tea. What shall I do?”

Paton fled on a passing ship in 1862. His story was so captivating, he managed to wring £5,000 from church audiences during a speaking tour of Australia. It was years before anyone realized that Paton had fabricated the juiciest bits of his story. (His claims of widespread cannibalism, for example, were exaggerated. Anthropologists who bothered to ask were told that enemies were eaten not because they tasted good but as a means of capturing
mana
and honoring one's own ancestors. A single corpse might be passed from village to village as a means of solidifying alliances. And cannibalism was restricted by rules of
kastom
and kinship. There were never more than twenty-eight families on Tanna whose members had the right to consume human flesh.) Still, Paton had no problem with violence if it was carried out in the name of his own god. He returned to Port Resolution on the warship HMS
Curaçoa
four years after his departure. The ship shelled the villages along the bay, then its men landed to smash canoes, burn houses, and destroy crops. Paton claimed that the attack, which killed a handful of Tannese, did wonders for the Presbyterian mission. His successors ruled the Tannese as if they were children.

Henry Montgomery shared Paton's sense of mission and some of his sentiments about race. He was confident of Anglo-Saxon superiority. But with greatness came responsibility: “Englishmen
would do well to remember that their wonderful supremacy throughout the world is due in great measure to the existence of races inferior to their own.” The point, which he made often, was that it was England's God-given duty to nurture the lesser races, who were not quite up to the task of leading themselves.

“It would appear that among certain child races independence is for centuries impossible,” he wrote years after his journey. “The power to transmit orders is not lightly to be put into hands that are not fit to wield such privileges.”

Unlike Paton, Montgomery was fond of Melanesians, but preferred to portray them as children rather than savages. Like boys and girls, islanders required education in manners and character as well as religion. He was thrilled to discover that his heroes, Selwyn, Patteson, and Codrington, had not forgotten the lessons of Eton: “The wise founders of this mission saw that the education of their charges lay more directly in their passage from idleness and dirt to cleanliness and diligence and method than by learning to read and write…. Improvement in diligence and orderlinesswent hand in hand with knowledge of the Heavenly Father.”

Everyone agreed that Melanesians needed guidance. Yet there was fierce rivalry among Anglicans, Presbyterians, and Roman Catholics as to just who would do the guiding. When the Presbyterian reverend John Geddie spotted white men wearing the telltale robes of Catholic priests on the shore of Aneityum, near Tanna, in 1848, he despaired: “In this we recognized at once the mark of the beast.”

The Anglicans of Selwyn's Melanesian Mission were as fond of gilded finery and High Church ritual as Roman Catholics—in fact they considered their church to offer a purer, even more traditional version of the Catholic faith—but they disdained the French missionaries who dropped in on their islands uninvited. Henry Montgomery warned that the work of Roman Catholic missionaries was almost always fostered by the French govern
ment, “in order to counteract the influence of England.” A mission conducted for such unworthy motives could hardly have a noble and lasting effect. Therefore the Anglican mission had to do everything in its power to “protect native Christians from unscrupulous and ruthless [Roman Catholic] propagandists.”

The rivalry was just as fierce between English churches. Selwyn, Patteson, and Codrington were graduates of Britain's most prestigious public schools and universities. They were of a different class than the members of grassroots mission societies, and both sides knew it. The Anglicans felt that their protestant competition—lowbrows who, like Paton, were forever waving their Bibles in the air and screaming warnings of eternal damnation—lacked the necessary intellect and temper for the task at hand.

“Well-meaning Englishmen who have been brought up in a somewhat narrow circle of thought and opinion are apt to make non-essentials into essentials, to the grievous hurt of the great cause,” opined my great-grandfather—himself a Harrow and Cambridge man.

The Anglicans thought themselves so different from their Protestant peers that one mission historian dubbed them “God's Gentlemen.” They endeavored to remain polite and unfailingly reasonable in the face of defiant heathenism, but they also adapted a tenuously tolerant stance toward
kastom
. Dancing, smoking, drinking kava, the payment of bride price, none of the traditions the Presbyterians banned on Tanna was seen necessarily as a barrier to Christian salvation. Bishop Patteson told converts they should make up their own minds about them. As long as they pledged allegiance to the One True God, as long as their
kastom
didn't break the Ten Commandments, then islanders weren't necessarily against Christianity, even if they weren't altogether for it just yet. The Anglicans delighted in traditional dances and costumes. Some gained a fondness for kava. They prided themselves on their tolerance, and they pooh-poohed the Presbyterians, who
had a habit of outlawing any practice that reminded them even faintly of paganism.

For decades, the doctrine of “Christianity with civilization” had been an axiom for English missionaries around the world. The gospel was just one part of a curriculum that included aesthetic “improvements” such as the introduction of clothing, homes with separate bedrooms, and encouragement to enter the market economy. But here in the South Seas, the Anglicans were concluding—at least on paper—that some Melanesian social and cultural traditions could provide a cornerstone of a strong church.

R. H. Codrington, who was the first among Anglicans to write down the Melanesians' stories, was the most sympathetic to
kastom
. After years as Patteson's school headmaster, he ventured that
kastom
had already equipped Melanesians with a sense of right and wrong, a belief in life after death, and a concept of something like a human soul. In other words, there was already some light in Melanesia before the missionaries arrived.
Kastom
had in fact provided the heathens with a good foundation for Christian teaching.

By the end of the century, many Anglicans had even dismissed the notion that “civilization” was a necessary companion to Christianity. They encouraged islanders not to adopt heavy clothing and not to become “imitation Europeans.” While the Presbyterians were arresting Tannese dance troupes, the Anglicans were romancing
kastom
.

The Anglicans were determined to avoid the ungentlemanly squabbling that saw mission societies battling over various islands throughout the New Hebrides. As Henry Montgomery put it: “Ours is rather a godly rivalry; not to pull others behind us, but to be first honourably and fairly in the great cause.” So after a few years of haggling, they agreed to leave the Loyalty Islands near New Caledonia to the London Missionary Society, and to let the Presbyterians and Roman Catholics fight over the southern islands of the New Hebrides—including Tanna and Efate. Selwyn
and Patteson promised to concentrate their efforts north of Espiritu Santo, at the top end of the New Hebrides.

After ten days on Tanna I flew back to Port Vila—of course I flew: VanAir offered daily, air-conditioned flights between Tanna and the capital—and I waited for a passage north to Espiritu Santo, the gateway to Anglican Melanesia. The Anglican islands would be different, I thought. The Presbyterians had allowed no middle ground on Tanna, no compromise between
kastom
and Christianity. The collision of the two systems had buried the island's soul in an avalanche of discordant cosmology. If Presbyterian ferocity had produced Tanna's spiritual chaos, then surely Anglicanism would have fostered a more stable, reasonable cosmology. God's Gentlemen would have eased their converts away from ghosts and magic while ever so politely applauding their quaint dances. Part of me hoped to find a pastoral, Victorian paradise. That was the part that was weary. Most of me wanted more sparks, more rumors, more magic. I had touched the edge of a mystery. I wanted to fall into it.

 

I found the MV
Brisk
at sunset, docked—or rather, run up like a World War II troop transport—against a grassy wharf on Vila Bay. She made the
Havanna
look like the
Love Boat
. She was more barge than ship; a shallow tub with all the crude geometry and elegance of a sheep dip. I couldn't imagine her navigating the house-high swells that we would surely hit on our four-day journey north to Espiritu Santo. But I no longer feared the sea. I had acquired a supply of motion-sickness pills.

We set sail after dusk. The two dozen passengers on the open cargo deck had built mounds of pallets and luggage on which they huddled like penguins on bergs. As we left the refuge of the harbor, I saw why. The
Brisk
rolled pleasantly enough in the swell, but waves spilled over her bow anyway. Gradually, the cargo deck
filled with water until it was as deep as a wading pool. I climbed up to a makeshift roof of corrugated iron in front of the wheelhouse. A thin layer of cloud spread across the sky, like a veil thrown up to protect the moon from the sparkle and glare of the sea. A warm breeze ran over me. I dozed off to the murmurs of the crew, the rumbling of the engine, the whoosh of the waves, and the rhythmic click and bang of the wheelhouse door, which opened and shut with each roll of the ship.

My dreams were peaceful at first. But then I drifted away from the
Brisk
and a forest grew up around me, and the knocking became the sound of tree branches jostling in the wind. I peered through the forest, through shadows that shifted across the moonlit earth, and there was the prophet Fred, sitting cross-legged, mumbling indecipherably and cradling a baby wrapped in gauze. A bloodstain appeared on the cloth and spread across it. I knew that Fred was performing another spontaneous circumcision. He raised his head and scowled at me. He had known all along I would betray him. The stain turned black and broke apart into a thousand tiny wings that rose from the cloth, swarming around me, droning in my ears, dancing around my eyes, landing on my neck. The mosquitoes prodded, poked, tested the surface with their invisible probosces, and then, one by one, they injected their poison into me.

Dreams are manifestations of unconscious fears and delusions. That's what Freud taught us. I have always sought to return to this refrain, to see my dreams as the contents of the cluttered attic of my mind, so much bric-a-brac to be considered, yes, but then filed and packed away so that I might see each new day with clear eyes.

But this dream reached past the veil of sleep. It did not evaporate in the light of dawn. My skin began to itch even before I had awoken. Spots rose like tiny red kisses on the soft flesh of my arms and torso.

I dozed on the roof for three days as the
Brisk
bounced from island to island, threading together villages, mission stations, and coconut plantations, running into dozens of sandy shores, dumping cement mixers, rice, and rebar, collecting sack after sack of yam, taro, and sweet potato. We headed north, following the protected lee sides of Efate and low-lying Epi. When we rounded the northern tip of Epi, we were broadsided by the southeast swell. The
Brisk
did not cut through the waves like the
Havanna
. It was lifted by them, carried up over their shivering crests and swept down again into canyonlike troughs. Those waves were unnaturally blue, the color of transmission fluid. They lumbered. They were not violent. But they carried smaller waves that jostled, broke, and exploded over the ship's bow until the cargo deck frothed and churned like a river in flood. We passed a volcanic cone that rose steeply into the clouds. That was Lopevi. We made three stops on a dark fin of black rock and jungle in Lopevi's shadow.

My skin burned. The dream spots on my arm had multiplied, joined, and grew into an angry rash. I wanted to leap into the ocean.

“You cannot swim at this island,” the ship's engineer told me. His name was Edwin. He was a rough man with cunning eyes and sores on his neck. “You will be eaten by the shark.”

“They have sharks here?”

“Just one shark. A
kastom
shark. We call him a
nakaimo
. He is the spirit of a dead man, and he likes white flesh. He ate his first white man fifty years ago. I can swim here, but you can't. Ha!”