Cousins

by Patricia Grace

  Keita and Gloria set up a cooking place and cooked wild pork and vegetables in the big pots for the workers, made paraoa parai in the camp oven and kept the water boiling for tea.

  After much of the clearing, fencing and sowing had been done, sites were levelled for the houses, and when these were ready the builder and the materials arrived.

  I watched the foundations being laid, the framework going up, the weatherboards beginning to cover the frames, and seeing all this was what had me doubting. I wondered how all of this could be for me if I wasn’t the one meant. I had doubts when I looked into my heart.

  But it was when the houses were nearly finished that Mama became ill, and for a time I couldn’t think of anything else but that. Ever since I was a little girl Mama had been my responsibility.

  One afternoon Keita came into work and said that Mama had been taken to hospital. By the look on my grandmother’s face I thought Mama could be dead.

  And when I went into the ward, into the whiteness and the stillness of the room, a question came from me in the language I’d never before spoken — ‘Kua mate a Mama?’ — a question too terrible to be asked in English. ‘Still with us,’ Keita said, not in English. ‘We have to sit and wait and pray.’

  We waited — Dadda, Manny, my grandparents and me — now and again reaching to touch Mama’s colourless face, her black hair spread on the white pillow, the sheet-white hands. And when the nurse asked us to leave at the end of visiting hours, Keita told her that we had to stay and watch. ‘I’m afraid you can’t,’ the nurse said. ‘But if you like, one or two of you can wait in the waiting room?’

  ‘One or two will stay,’ Keita said. ‘The others will wait in the waiting room.’

  ‘I’m sorry but you can’t stay in the wards.’

  Keita didn’t answer, just turned away from the nurse and gave her attention to Mama.

  ‘I’ll get Sister,’ the nurse said and went, her white shoes squealing in the corridor.

  It was before the sister came in that Mama’s lips moved. ‘They come,’ she whispered. Keita leaned towards her. ‘Send them away,’ she said. ‘Tell them to go and not come back. Tell them now.’

  ‘I’m afraid we have our rules and you’ll all have to leave,’ the sister said as she came in.

  ‘We’re staying by our daughter,’ Keita said.

  ‘If one or two would like to wait in the waiting room we’ll be checking Mrs Tatua every hour. We’ll keep you informed.’

  ‘Someone will stay.’

  ‘Rules are rules, I’m afraid.’

  But we turned back to Mama as her lips began to move again. ‘Gone,’ she said.

  ‘Good, Daughter. Good. Don’t let them back.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what,’ Sister said. ‘Hubby can stay a while as long as the rest of you will go. If hubby would like to sit quietly in case Mrs Tatua wakes … as long as there’s no trooping backwards and forwards in the corridors.’

  We left Dadda and I went with Keita to the waiting room while the others went to our relatives’ place to sleep, and after some hours of waiting Keita and I took off our shoes and went along to the ward, where Dadda was sitting in the dark. ‘Shifted her hands,’ I said.

  ‘Shifted her hands, opened her eyes, said nothing,’ Dadda said.

  ‘Never mind, she saw you,’ Keita said. ‘If you weren’t there, if I let those nurses send us all out, Gloria would wake up and think she’s in heaven.’

  Our father’s sorrowful face loosened and he laughed, and in the dark I saw Mama move. Her eyelids flickered but didn’t open and her lips curved into part of a smile. ‘See there,’ Keita said. ‘If we’d all gone out my daughter would have listened in the dark, heard nothing and said to herself, “Huh, this heaven’s a quiet place,” ’ which was enough to make Dadda laugh to wake the dead. Our mother’s smile widened. ‘Shush, Dadda, coming with torches,’ I said.

  ‘I’m afraid no one’s permitted in the wardrooms after lights out,’ one of the nurses said.

  ‘Sister said the husband could stay,’ Keita said. ‘But my son-in-law and my granddaughter are going now. I’ll stay so that my daughter can see somebody when she opens her eyes.’

  ‘Hear that?’ Dadda said as I went with him along the corridor. ‘Son-in-law. First time I’ve heard that from her. Ha ha, my daughter, it must be you that’s bringing your father up in the world. Ha ha, son-in-law.’

  At work next morning I turned on the big taps, beating the soap shaker until the water foamed. Doors were opening and shutting, trays were coming in, dishes were being scraped and stacked, trolleys rattled, cutlery slid on the trays. Hospital sounds, but the smells were different. Voices.

  ‘Where were you?’ Lootie asked.

  ‘Up at the hospital,’ I said. ‘My mother …’

  ‘How bad?’ Lootie swung the stock pot up.

  ‘Collapsed at home, bleeding.’

  ‘Mmm. They took her womb out, I suppose.’ She pulled the skins off the onions with a long knife, leaned back from the fumes squinting. ‘I got a cousin lost her womb. After that she change into a man.’ The skinless onions rolled on the board and she halved them with swift chops, diced them, lifted the board to her shoulder and shunted them into the pot. ‘And they give her blood, I suppose …? You got to watch them with that blood. They can give you a Chinaman blood, a Japanee blood, a white man blood, a black man blood, or any blood all mix up together. After that you don’t know what you going to change into.’

  I plunged my arms in and out of the water, pulling the dishes through, Lootie droning beside me, thinking of Mama. But there was something that Keita had said in the waiting room in the middle of the night that was nothing to do with Mama. ‘When you stood in the house you had no doubt,’ Keita had said, seeing into the corners of me. I hadn’t known how to answer her at first.

  ‘I hardly went to school,’ I said.

  ‘You’re talking about that other one, your cousin. All her going away to school didn’t help us. She ran off and gave us no thought.’

  ‘And I wasn’t the one meant.’

  ‘Huh, meant. If you’re not the one meant your Aunty Anihera and your mother wouldn’t’ve done what they did. If you’re not the one meant your cousin wouldn’t’ve gone away. If you’re not the one meant it wouldn’t have been you standing in the house with the words coming from you without a doubt in your heart. What you have to know and remember is that your marriage is for the people, like mine was. When I married your grandfather we had seen each other just once, but we had been promised since we were children. We were brought together when I was nineteen. Three months later we were married and it was up to the two of us to make a success of it. We did our best because we had to. It was for the people, and if it went wrong it meant the people were wrong. The people had the responsibility of us. At that time I knew nothing about the land, but I had to learn. It had to be me because there was no one else left in our part of the family of my generation. Now you have to learn too. We gave your cousin all the knowledge, gave her everything, but she turned her back on us. You have to know that you and Hamuera can’t be wrong. If it goes wrong, then it’s all the people that are wrong. The people, all of us, have the care of you.’

  So we were like an investment or an insurance policy, I suppose, but I didn’t think of that then. We were being given everything, being cared for in every way and nothing could be different from that. There could be no going back, because it was what they all wanted, what Keita wanted, what Mama wanted.

  It was what I wanted too. I knew I could love. My doubts were no match for that. It is now, on looking back, that I understand these things more fully.

  ‘The girl’s stacked up,’ Lootie said. ‘Got them done and cleaned up. Clean up again today if you want to go. If Bigboy let you.’

  It was a wedding for everybody, and everyone had work to do and decisions to make in preparation for it — except for me. I was told my part would come on the day — to wear the dresses (because there were to be
two wedding gowns, one arranged for by Keita and my own family, the other by Hamuera’s family), to say the words, to sit at the centre table, be the one.

  All I knew was that the dressmakers were busy, bridesmaids and groomsmen were being chosen from all the families, food was being promised from everywhere. The meeting house was being renovated, the grounds levelled and drained and trees and flowers were being planted. Everyone was discussing mattresses, bedding, sleeping spaces for the hundreds of people who would be our guests. And they were talking about water, water, water — and wood, of course. I had my job to go to, letters to write, Mama and the family to look after. None of the arrangements were for me to worry about.

  When the day came I think I managed to be who they all wanted me to be, though some of the memories are indistinct now. I was carried along on words — called words, words spoken, words sung. But what I remember most was the happiness of the old people. After the ceremony the big whariki were brought out from in the house and spread on the ground for everyone to put their gifts on. And the kuia and koroua in their best wedding clothes stepped out of their new shoes and sang the old songs, danced the hula, did the pukana, laughed and played. They were like tekoteko coming dancing off the boards of the house with spread fingers, sharp elbows, their paua eyes coming to life with brand new whites showing and centres glinting, faces stretched and mouths turned down. Making it real.

  After the wedding we were sent away in Hamu’s brother’s car with the middle tiers of both wedding cakes in boxes on the back seat, to visit relatives who had not been able to attend.

  It took three weeks to see everyone, and everywhere we went we were treated like important people because of the ancestors and the land, but I didn’t realise it fully then. Rooms were made comfortable for us, special food was prepared and we were given money and gifts to help us on our way together.

  And when we arrived home again our house was ready for us. Our new cutlery, crockery, pots and pans had been unpacked and put in cupboards. Curtains were up and cupboards were stocked. At the back of the house there was a newly built chook house with six black hens and a bantam in it. Everyone was there when we arrived and we had an all-night singing party in our new house.

  We were given everything and it made the old people happy. It was for all of us, now and forever, they kept saying. They said it was like the old times.

  What we had after our homecoming was hard work. Even though we’d been given so much and there was always help when we needed it, it was hard. We had dry stock at first and there was land to bring in, fences to make, clearing, ploughing and planting to be done. Later we built up a milking herd. It was hard work then and it’s hard work now. But I always knew how to work hard. I liked the way it felt to work hard around my house and on the land. I was ready for that. I was sure.

  But what I became unsure about was the one thing I’d never doubted before, that is, love. I believed in love and was certain I knew what it was. But I suppose it was because of the circumstances of our coming together that I needed assurance that Hamu and I had married for love — my idea of love.

  All the eyes were on Hamu and me. Mama, Keita, the old aunties and uncles all poked and spied, all had their own ways of talking to us, reminding us.

  I don’t know if the eyes found fault with me, but I know all my family loved Hamu. He worked hard for us and had knowledge of what to do on the land.

  But he’s a quiet man and it was hard for me to understand that at first. He didn’t talk much. And in a way I didn’t want him to be so good at things, so solid, so loved by the family. I think I wanted him to be like Dadda instead, silly and singing, and what Mama called ‘useless’. I wanted him to tease me with loving words, the way Dadda teased Mama.

  I could remember the times when I was a little girl when Dadda would wake us in the night with his crying. Mama would have to shake him and hold him. And she’d light a candle and go out into the kitchen for a cloth to wipe his face with. She’d talk to him until he’d calmed down, then he’d say things to her like, ‘Where would I be without you, my Glory, what would I do?’ After a while the two of them would sit up in bed and Mama would roll them a cigarette each. She’d light them from the candle then blow the candle out. There’d be a sweet candle and smoke smell and we’d see the two cigarettes, like two burning eyes, glowing in the dark.

  We knew that Dadda thought Mama was the most beautiful woman in the world. He told her. He told everyone. He had songs for her full of all the love words, even though Mama used to say they were only silly drunk songs and she’d rather have sixpence and a bag of flour.

  Or what is love? There is the love that you both know, where excited feelings make your skins tingle and the black centres of your eyes enlarge, as though you let each other into yourselves through your eyes. Your bodies are together and you have him inside you with your skins riding against each other and you put your mark on each other. Is it love? Apart from each other there were times when you could doubt it. Apart from each other you could be not satisfied with words, or entering or marking. You could want to lay the other open, want to eat the heart, suck the eye sockets. Is it love? I wanted to know that Hamu couldn’t live without me. I wanted words from him that would open him.

  Or is love what others see, what they all watch for in faces, in eyes, what they listen for in the words you use, the things you say, as if they’re watching it all happen on a screen? These were the thoughts and doubts that came from the child in me.

  And the eyes watched for other signs too — watched for little children opening doors to visitors, kids finding eggs or carrying an egg hidden in the hands, babies sucking their toes. They watched me for difference or change and they analysed dreams. But it was nearly two years before I became pregnant with little Gloria, and it was Dadda who had the dream. ‘I saw them. Two,’ he said, ‘wrapped up tight and sleeping.’

  He believed all along that I would have twins. ‘Where’d the other one get to?’ he said when he first saw baby Gloria through the window of the nursery in the hospital where she was born. ‘Looks like a ten-bob note,’ he said, and I thought how silly and funny my father was. Then when I looked at my baby again I began to see that it was true. She looked just like ten shillings. I was glad to have Dadda there to make me laugh.

  The girl that I was had been frightened going in through the big doors in the middle of the night with broken waters and scarcely time to wave to Hamu and Mama before the doors shut behind me. I followed the nurse with the suitcase into a hot room where my particulars were taken down and my clothes were taken away.

  I was unprepared for having to have a standing bath supervised by someone I didn’t know, who was no older than myself, and then to be stretched out on a narrow bench to have her shave me, the razor first of all sweeping round and over my big stomach as though I was being peeled and sliced, then scratching and scraping between my legs until all the hair was gone and I was an egg, ready to crack. I was glad of the pains as they became stronger, that distracted me from all that was happening.

  I was unprepared, when taken to the theatre in the early hours of the morning, to have to lie on my back while strangers pushed my knees up under my chin and a mask was held over my mouth and nose. I pushed the mask away, I pushed my baby down, heard myself scream, unprepared for the sound of it, felt myself breaking in two. Then little Gloria came, my own wet baby, into the hands of strangers, but I don’t mean to say they were unkind. At last she was given to me, but there was no one there to see her except for kind strangers.

  And when baby and I had been attended to we were wheeled away from each other in opposite directions. I wasn’t prepared for that. Back in the ward I couldn’t know if it was my baby or someone else’s that I heard crying every time the door to the nursery opened at the other end of the corridor.

  That night I woke in the dark and thought of the placenta, wondered what had happened to it. Where was the little parcel wrapped by Kui Hinemate, or the basket made by Keita, for t
he whenua to be buried in? I tried to sleep. It was best not to think of such things.

  In the afternoons sometimes Mama and Keita came to visit, or Lootie or Bessie from work. In the evenings Hamuera came. My visitors were allowed to go and see little Gloria through the nursery window, as if window-shopping. They’d give baby’s name, then a nurse would wheel her, in a wire cot that some other baby could have died in, close to the window where they could see her head and part of her face. She was wrapped in every baby’s blanket and there was a note on a pink card, stuck to the bed with sticking plaster, which gave her name, her weight, her date and time of birth.

  Sometimes my visitors would come back into the ward looking uneasy and I would know they had left baby Gloria turning her mouth for food.

  They’d stay until the bell rang, then go tiptoeing out, not wanting their best shoes to put specks on the waxed floors, not wanting sounds to go from themselves along the corridors or for eyes to look at them as they went. Outside my window they’d turn and wave but not speak, as though they didn’t want their words falling into the pansies and forget-me-nots for the birds to find — as though they didn’t trust these birds who made their nests from whatever they found in one place or another.

  There were little pills that were given to us every morning that gave me stomach pains, I found a little hole in one of the bed rails to put them into.

  Samuel was born a year after little Gloria, and Tina a year after that. Each time I went into hospital I tried not to remember too much.

  We’ve been through the good times on the land, and the bad. It’s been hard to afford machinery, which seems to be necessary but it cuts out people. Mostly it’s been a struggle, but we all eat. People are heading back in these hard times and we have to find new ways, as Manny and Michael have done with hydroponics, as Hamuera has done by contracting, while the children and I work the land. Mama Gloria has always helped us — looked after the children when they were little, made a vegetable garden, prepared meals for us.