The Shark God (9 page)

Henry attended Miss Baker's Preparatory School in Brighton. Miss Baker was a Christian of the most fervent evangelical principles, who was determined to impart on her pupils the lessons of Revelation. The future bishop of Tasmania later noted: “I was brought up on almost undiluted hell fire. On the whole such diet has done me immense good, for it has left behind in me an awful sense of the Holy Will of God. The thunders of Sinai should not be forgotten by any Christian.”

If the Old Testament taught Henry Montgomery about God's power and the New Testament taught him about God's love, then it was a life lived in the Victorian era that taught him that the English were the new chosen people. God clearly favored the British Empire above all others, granting Queen Victoria dominion over lands, seas, and peoples from Africa to the Americas to Australia. The way to repay the favor was to fight the spiritual battle with the same fervor with which England spread its commerce. “The clergy are officers in an imperial army,” he wrote. “The language, indeed, of all the great men of the Old Testament is the true language of our army.”

When he returned to England from the South Seas in 1901, Henry was named secretary of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. This made him a de facto foreign minister for the archbishop of Canterbury, and thus the most influential Anglican missionary in the world. He fought for years to
formally bond the Empire and its church in one common evangelical mission. He failed—at least in the project of building a Christian theocracy—but his church did extend its reach to every continent. Henry served his god well, and his story would not have been complete without the acknowledgment, the personal visitation, the commendation from God and ancestors, that came to him that Easter morning so many years after he left the South Pacific.

The fan glided to a halt in the dead air of my room. The years converged in the stillness. The climax of my great-grandfather's story returned to me not as text but as an image so clear it should have been my own memory: A crystalline Irish dawn, a garden above the sparkling waters of Lough Foyle, the appearance of a procession of approving ghosts, then a blinding cloud and a voice pressing through the mist like soft thunder, asking Henry, “Lovest thou me?” so that the believer would know that the God of Love and the God of War were the same, and that He would be manifest to those who were ready, and that this gift of sight would be passed on to one's descendants.

This being a story about myth, it would be wrong to continue without explaining what I mean when I use that word. Some people say “myth” when they mean fanciful and false. I do not, because I am learning how hard it can be to discern the frontiers between history, propaganda, dreams, and the terrain of miracles. And besides, the power of a myth always has more to do with its function than historic origin.

Here is my definition.

The definition will not alienate anthropologists, mythologists, or mystics because it omits the question about which men have argued since they first gathered to tell stories around campfires:
Which myths are historically true?

When my great-grandfather was sailing through the South Pacific, his countrymen were digesting Sir James G. Frazer's
Golden Bough
, in which the Cambridge anthropologist reduced magic, myths, and religion to primitive and futile attempts to control the natural world. Charles Darwin's
Origin of Species
had already shaken the foundations of nineteenth-century British Christian thought. Now Frazer was taking the quite radical step of placing Christian texts under the same microscope as “primitive” religion. He assured readers that science and technology would inevitably extinguish the superstition inherent in all this mythology.

Most of the people who have studied and wrote about myth since then have focused on their function and structure, while generally assuming their falsity. Freud gave myths hell. He insisted they were “public dreams”—collective expressions of obsessional neuroses. Psychic baggage.

The first argument against this theory came from Melanesia. Bronislaw Malinowski, the Polish anthropologist who spent the years of World War I in the Trobriand Islands, concluded that for the communities he studied, myths were essential tools for expressing values and safeguarding morality. They may not have contained historical truths, but they were nonetheless vital ingredients of civilization.

This might explain why there is a common underlying structure to myths from various corners of the world. Creation stories
are a good example. In Genesis, Yahweh shaped man from dust. In Banks Island
kastom
stories, the ancestor Qat carved man from a hunk of wood. A serpent in the Garden of Eden convinced Adam and Eve to taste the forbidden fruit. A snake did the same thing to the first man and woman in the legends of the Bassari in West Africa. The great flood is the most universal myth of them all: the Greeks and Romans told of a cataclysmic flood that transformed the world, but so did indigenous people on Canada's west coast. Qat made a deluge, too. It spilled out from the volcano on Santa Maria and carried him away forever.

Carl Jung carried these stories into the realm of social psychology. He argued that myths represented the wisdom the human species had gathered over the millennia. They contained essential truths that the “collective unconscious” had carried for generations and that science should never be allowed to displace. Some of these truths were straightforward: Thou shalt not kill. Honor thy father and thy mother. Marry someone other than your sister. Some were more abstract, and concerned the nature of the soul and its relationship with the universe. The Garden of Eden, according to Jungian sympathizer Joseph Campbell, was not a lush corner of Mesopotamia so much as it was a description of the geography of the human heart. It is the place of innocence that lies within all of us, the place we cannot return to because we have tasted the knowledge of good and evil.

If you subscribe to these theories, then you cannot say the Christian faith in an intervening god is any more or less valid than Melanesians' traditional belief in spirits, stones, and sorcery. If the god-ancestor Qat is a mythical character, then so is Jesus, and so are Bernard the Dane, John Frum, and John Coleridge Patteson, because regardless of their histories, they have been kept alive in stories in order to perform certain mythic functions. They represent ideals. They inspire. They offer their believers clues about the nature of the universe.

But these theories mortally wound myths, because even as they value them, they defang them with deconstruction. A myth without believers is a fairy tale. It is fantasy, fiction, stripped of sacredness. It is mere entertainment. It is a loss, perhaps, of something unfathomable.

Consider this: After decades studying the tribes of southern Sudan, the pioneering social anthropologist Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard returned to Oxford in the 1960s and announced that nonbelievers would never come close to understanding religion and myth as well as believers. Nonbelievers tended to try to explain religion away as illusion, using sociological, psychological, existential, or biological theories. (It's exactly what most anthropologists had been doing for decades, despite the fact that, in the absence of historical evidence, they had absolutely no way of knowing whether the spiritual beings of primitive religions existed or not.) Believers, on the other hand, explained religion in terms of how people conceived and related to reality. Since believers have an inward experience of religion, they understand it better than nonbelievers. According to Evans-Pritchard, even a missionary would make a better anthropologist among pagans than an atheist; while the atheist might find Jungian allegories or codes for living, the believer experiences epiphanies, tendrils of some divine thread.

I was discovering this in Melanesia. As soon as you stand apart from myths, divorce them from faith, pick apart their function and their origins, you become like an anthropologist, like Frazer peering through his ancient texts. You may be fascinated and amused, but you will never see a ghost, or magic, or the hand of God, because you have stepped outside the realm of faith. People say that religious fanatics are blinded by their faith. Evans-Pritchard asserted that there is something just as blinding in rationalism. You must make room for mystery before you can reach for it.

My journey in the Hotel Santo should have ended with that vi
sion of my great-grandfather collapsed beneath the blinding cloud of his god; hearing, knowing, certain. It did not. I had my own memory of that place, and it was too strong to erase. I had flown to Ireland long before I hit the South Pacific. I had driven up the Inishowen Peninsula, along the darkened Lough Foyle past the villages of Muff, Carrowkeel, Drung, and Moville. I had found what remained of Henry Montgomery's garden on a knoll above the lough.

The family manor was boarded up and surrounded on all sides by “heritage-style” vacation homes. The garden was a shambles. The roses were gone. I tromped through the ivy where our ancestors appeared to Henry as ghosts. I forced open the door of the moldering stone church where the god cloud had shone and had asked Henry, “Lovest thou me?” It was cold in there, and empty. I spent an afternoon lingering beneath the granite cross that marked my great-grandfather's grave, challenging the old man to appear, to speak, to offer a sign, anything. I did pray. I did promise to be open to the divine. I waited hours, willing him into being. If there was ever a time for a ghost to make himself known, this was it. All that came was a bitter wind that shook the oaks and ripped the slate tiles from the roof of the church. A storm rolled over the moors. A single patch of sunlight raced across the lough and was gone.

It's reasonable to demand proof if you are going to let miracles flood your dreams and guide your life. Isn't it? Proof. That's what should guide you. But now the certainty, the solidity, of memories were mingling with the fantastical inside the blurred walls of my fever. I rolled and sweated, clear and then unclear, fighting and then not fighting the incandescent visions, the tingle of closeness to something else, the immeasurable longing for the glowing cloud that would descend on me when I reached my myth island, Nukapu, to ask the question and then answer it.

On the fifth morning I awoke to dry sheets, my fever gone.

I found Mary Jane taking coffee on the veranda with her rumpled Australians. She wore a full-length silk gown.

“I need a ship,” I said.

I had awoken clear-headed, and feeling a new vigor for my path, which led north to the Banks and Torres islands—the stronghold
of Anglicanism during my great-grandfather's time—and then beyond to the Solomons. According to my maps, it would only be a few days' sail from the last of the Torres to Nukapu. I wanted to get closer to the old stories. It was time to see the proof behind all the magic talk.

“No ships, my dear,” said Mary Jane.

“No ships,” agreed the ranchers.

What captain would bother sailing to the northern islands? There was no cargo to carry, other than the odd bag of low-grade copra, the kiln-dried coconut flesh that once fueled the South Pacific economy. There was, however, a weekly mail plane that left Santo and zigzagged its way north between a network of grass airstrips.

At Pekoa, the last of Santo's World War II airfields, I climbed inside a scuffed de Havilland Twin Otter along with a dozen other passengers, a clutch of grass mats, and twenty sacks of rice. We bounced off the tarmac, and the plane's shadow danced away between the tidy rows of coconut palms, through a herd of cattle, over a dusty road, and into a powder blue bay. We glided over a coral reef that stretched like a pink stain along the coast, over the rust-red skeletons of wrecked ships and over the open sea, which was rippling and empty and expectant.

My first stop would be Maewo, a thirty-mile-long spine of uplifted coral rock just south of the Banks Islands. I had been assured that Maewo magic was even stronger than Ambrym magic. Maewo didn't have Ambrym's volcanoes, but its mountains squeezed torrential rains from every storm that came Vanuatu's way. Hundreds of fast-running streams tumbled down its flanks, and those streams gave Maewo magicians their power. This was water magic, not fire magic. Everyone knew that water magic could extinguish fire magic. Back in Port Vila I had been assured that if I was ever the victim of an Ambrymese curse, I should go straight to Maewo and seek a cure from a
kleva
, a
kastom
medicine man.

Another thing. My great-grandfather had felt Maewo's
mana
. The mission had established seven schools on the north coast by the time he arrived in 1892. The
Southern Cross
stopped in to fill its water tanks at a cascade on the coast. Henry Montgomery observed that the people, once “wild and cannibal,” had largely been pacified, but supernatural power was being manifested in a new and wondrous manner. “Two women had gone into the church after dark for prayer. There was no lamp there, but over the Lord's Table they saw a bright shining light, which remained there while they prayed and knelt. That same appearance was mentioned as having occurred at another school. There can be no doubt at all events of the simple and real faith of these people.” The light was similar to the one Henry would see in his garden decades later. It was clearly proof of the catalyzing power of faith. I figured there was no better place than Maewo to launch my challenge to those who claimed to control or witness supernatural power.

After half an hour, Maewo appeared below us like the serrated back of a surfacing crocodile. My seatmate, a gaunt, sincere man, peered over my shoulder. He introduced himself as Alfred, adding that his brother was the Right Reverend Hugh Blessing Boe, the Anglican bishop of Vanuatu. Alfred said he was proud of his famous brother, but he was even prouder of his other brother, whose name was Dudley. Not only did Dudley own a truck—one of four on Maewo—but he was a
kleva
. When the previous prime minister of the Solomon Islands had heart trouble, it was Dudley who healed him. Dudley could make the ocean spill over the land, said Alfred. He could dump sea snakes into the coconut groves.

“Do they get along, Dudley and the bishop?”

“Yes, they do. Why do you ask?”

“Because of the magic, of course.”

I had met Bishop Boe in Santo. He was a kind fellow, and smart, too. I had asked him about the persistence of traditional magic in Vanuatu. The bishop told me (and I was sure he meant it
as a criticism) that many Melanesians still used religion as a kind of technology. For example, if a man was sick, he would see a medical doctor, but he would also ask a priest to pray for him. If that didn't work, the man would turn to traditional magic or make a sacrifice to some kind of spirit. Sometimes he would pursue all three methods at the same time. Sometimes, said the bishop with a sigh, Melanesians had trouble separating what was God from what was not God.

Now, yelling above the drone of the propellers, Alfred told me what Bishop Boe had neglected to mention. It was the bishop himself who had advised the prime minister of the Solomon Islands to see his brother the
kleva
about his heart trouble.

“Dudley's magic is not against the church,” explained Alfred. “It is a gift from God. It's his work. It's how he paid for his truck.”

The pilot banked the Twin Otter into a steep, descending arc. We landed on an airstrip whose grass was as tall and robust as prairie wheat.

Dudley was waiting for us. He was no withered mystic. In fact, he seemed altogether plain for a witch doctor. He had the capable appearance of a roofing contractor or a mailman. He must have been about forty. He chain-smoked Peter Jacksons under a drooping mustache.

Alfred and I climbed into the box of Dudley's Mitsubishi. Dudley drove. We followed a cart track south along Maewo's leeward coast. The landscape reminded me of the greenhouse at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, only more lush, more surreal: patches of big-leaf taro, flowers, and manioc exploded between great battlements of uplifted coral stone. Green parrots flecked with crimson flapped back and forth between palms and glistening breadfruit trees. White orchids sprang from tree branches. Piglets rooted in pens fenced with heaps of moss-covered rock. Smoke curled from makeshift sheds where men stoked fires in rusty steel drums and tossed bags full of coconut shells on the
racks above. It was copra-harvesting time. The air was sweet with the scent of drying coconut.

Clear water flowed everywhere: it rushed down fissures in the gray rock, bubbled along irrigation channels, cascaded from stalactite-laden cliffs, over the road, down, down to the sea. We forded thirty streams in an hour.

“Water, water,” said Alfred. “All the people are scared of man-Maewo because of our water magic. This island is full-up poison. But no magic can hurt me, because I bathe in
tabu
water every day. If you were a jealous man and you tried to kill me with a spell, it would fail. Your poison will bounce back and kill you instead. Would you like protection from evil? A charm? Dudley can make you one.”

Yes, of course I wanted a charm. I wanted love magic. I wanted to see rain pour from a cloudless sky. I wanted to see Dudley turn himself into an owl. Anything.

 

With all this supernatural wherewithal, Maewo should have been the most blessed and peaceful island in the archipelago. It appeared to be idyllic at first, and wealthy, especially compared to Tanna. There were cement-block houses with tin roofs. At first I didn't notice the fences, the wire mesh that wrapped the yards of Maewo's most prosperous families. I didn't make much of the sullen faces or the suspicious glares directed at Dudley's truck.

We stopped beside a huge open-air church. Dudley didn't cut the engine. He barely stopped long enough to say good-bye. This was Betarara, site of the island's only rest house.

“The chief,” said Alfred, as a filthy-looking man approached. “
Yumi
can meet tomorrow after church.”

I jumped out, and then they were gone. Strange.

The chief scratched his belly through a rip in his shirt and smiled at me anxiously. I handed him a letter of introduction I had
obtained from the National Tourism Office. The letter advised readers that I had come to promote tourism and that they should help me. The chief peered at it, furrowed his thick brows, and studiously ignored the young man who panted and squirmed behind him. The boy rolled his eyes, giggled, leaped in the air with a yelp, then dashed away squealing.

“My son,” said the chief shyly. I turned away so that someone could turn my letter right-side up without completely embarrassing him.

The rest house inhabited a corner of the village church hall. It had all the ambiance of a medium-security prison. It was protected by a tall wire-mesh fence, which baffled me, because people in Vanuatu did not steal.

I cooked myself a dinner of instant noodles and ketchup. I lay awake in the dark, listening to the groans and howls of the chief's son somewhere in the distance. And closer. The crunch of careful footsteps on gravel, then a sound that made me shiver: a barely perceptible rasping, like tiny fingernails or claws scratching against wire mesh. The sound was faint enough and brief enough to dismiss as an imagining.

Alfred did not come to meet me the next morning, so I walked south until I reached his village, which was really more of a family compound, several cement-block houses encircling a broad lawn.

Alfred and Dudley had a sister. Faith Mary was a broad woman with a stern brow and a voice like a diesel engine. She wore an Anglican Mothers' Union T-shirt and was constantly digging through the dusty leather purse she carried around her neck. When I arrived, she spread banana leaves on the lawn and served baked taro root and coconut crab on it. Alfred, Dudley, and a dozen others gathered around to eat. Faith Mary told me that Maewo was a very modern place. Look at Alfred and Dudley, she said. They cooked and washed the dishes if she told them to. Alfred laughed. Dudley exhaled a plume of cigarette smoke and
gazed at the sky. Faith Mary smiled and pushed more food toward me. Then she narrowed her eyes.

“Now,” she said, “tell me what you want from us.”

“Well, I know that people everywhere are afraid of Maewo because of the magic here,” I said as soberly as possible. “I want to see that magic. Not crazy stories. Not conjuring tricks. Proof.”

“You know why the people are afraid of Maewo? For the same reason we are all afraid: death! You make a Maewo man angry, and he will kill you with poison, right now!” she said, slapping the earth. “And Dudley is the strongest magic man of all. Tell him what you can do, Dudley.”

Dudley was not so enthusiastic. “
Mi mekem kastom meresin
.”

“Tell him what kind of medicine, Dudley!”

“
Wanfala drink blong curem cancer.
”

“And…”

“
Wanfala drink blong bringim daon blad presa.
”

“Tell him, Dudley, tell him more.” Faith Mary clearly wore the pants in this family.

Dudley sighed and made an attempt at English. “Okay, suppose
yu garem wan nogud
devil living inside you. I take a white cloth
blong yu
and I sleep on it. Now I travel inside your body to look at that
nogud
devil, then figure out how to make it leave you. Okay? Now suppose
yu ded
from a mystery something. I put a stone on the grave
blong yu
to make you rise up and tell me what
killim yu i ded
. Okay? Now suppose you knew you were going to die and you wanted to make sure your wife didn't go marry
narafalla
, I give you a special drink that would
killim hem i ded
five days after you.”

“But Dudley doesn't do the bad magic, only the good magic,” interrupted Faith Mary.

“So what is your most popular, um, medicine?” I asked.

“Well, suppose you want some girl to love you, I could make a leaf for you to eat at night. Then you would get up early
tumas long
morning
, and say the name of the girl just as the sun hits you. By and by you will
stap
inside her dreams. She will come find you.”

“Ah, sweet mouth,” I said. This was the same medicine Graeme had bragged about on the
Brisk
. “Why don't you show me one of these tricks?”

Dudley looked away. Alfred fidgeted. Faith Mary cleared her throat. It was against the rules for the men to share their
kastom
with me, she told me. The provincial council had decided that white men couldn't be trusted.

“When a white man sees magic, he learns it and he kills it. We know you white people have got
savve
. For example, a few years ago an Australian came here. He threw a piece of tin can on the ground and it turned into a snake. Then he told us that white man's magic was stronger than ours.”

Faith Mary said she liked me. She said I should not be staying in Betarara, because the people there would certainly poison me—that's just the kind of people they were. I should come and stay in Navenevene, where Dudley could protect me. Dudley showed no particular enthusiasm for the idea, and I had already paid for a week's stay at the rest house, so I thanked her and left.

Dudley caught up to me a short way down the road. He rolled down the window of the Mitsubishi and sheepishly offered me a ride.

“I've got legs, I can walk,” I said.

“
Hem i tru
. But you might step over
wanfala
black magic on the road,
wanfala
leaf that would do terrible things
long penis blong yu
.”

The gravel felt suddenly hot beneath my sandals. “My penis?”

“Now and again people here get cross with each other. They leave poison lying
albaot
. The worst is the poison that makes your penis shrivel,” he said, holding his thumb and forefinger together, “and swim up inside your body. I cure people of
disfala
curse all the time.”

No wonder people on Maewo protected themselves with wire
fences. I got in the truck. Church was out, and everyone in every village along the way saw me riding with my good friend the witch doctor. At the time I didn't think that was such a bad thing. Dudley dropped me off at Betarara and promised to meet me the next day.