by Tamsyn Muir
“Deadly. You come up with a better plan, then. Go on.” When another crofter says that they'll get arrested for this, they'll get the officers in, Simeon laughs mirthlessly. “That's what you're bleating about? The plod getting us for property damage? The Ministry signed them over to us. If it's the inquest you're worried about, by God, just let me take the rap. I've been wanting my day in court for years. None of the rest of you will get blood on your hands, I'll put them down. I'm not watching our stock die and our kids get sick and us bled dry for doctor bills — God, I could kill them all!” he ejaculates. “It's what they wanted all along, they sent us toxic waste!”
He takes off his hat and he scrunches it between his hands. “I'll do it,” he says. “And I'll cop it when the Ministry comes.”
The Mayor says in a voice like grit, “I will call a vote. A show of hands, please, for those in favor.”
A couple of hands shoot up, immediate and grim. Simeon's nodding. Others rise more slowly. The clock ticks the minutes. The final few are unwilling, like a held breath let out. The Mayor's hand is among these stragglers. Laura's the only one who doesn't have her hand up in all the croft, and nobody meets her eye.
She's crying out: “You arsehole, Simeon. You always hated them, admit it.” But Simeon's already putting his hat on his head and heading out the door. Nobody rises to go with him. Nobody shifts from their seat.
They can see it from the window: the wives gathering up behind Simeon when he beckons, collecting them from the shady decks and from the field. They all troop together down the street, the wives placid, their tongues flickering in their mouths, some of them looking through the window back at the silent crofters with their thin eyelids half-down over their dusty eyes. Simeon disappears into his shed and reappears with his shotgun and the wives bob after him, one by one, down to the old abattoir.
At the first crack of gunshot the Mayor sits down at the table and covers her eyes, and she makes a low, guttural sound in the back of her throat. They count one, two, three. A flinching pause between each. At the twentieth it stops. Everyone waits for no reason at all in the silence that follows, a fidgeting, shuffling, throat-clearing quiet.
When she can apparently bear it no longer, the Mayor snaps, “You all go get your tools and dig a pit past the boundary. Tell the vet to burn the goat.” One of the croft asks about the kids. “Say to the children we sent them away. Enough of this, already!”
They wrap the wives in bits of old sacking and put them in a shallow pit past the croft boundary, and they cover them up in sand and gravel and spray the bed with fluorescent paint to mark where they're laid. They burn the goat and keep the others under watch. They work until past the time when the light has all gone, fixing the bunds, taking the temperature in the silo, steaming the winnower in preparation to take it back to the depot. Those who had wives go home to empty houses and Laura doesn't go at all, just cracks open tinnies in the public house and curses anyone who comes near her. Simeon doesn't go home either but hoses out the abattoir.
“Thank God that's over,” he repeats, cold and bluff, to anyone on the street he can collar, which isn't many. “Bring on Christmas. That's what I say.” He sits on his deck and cleans his gun by sickly solar light, and every so often says “Bring it on,” quietly, still somehow audible through closed croft doors and shuttered croft windows, the croft lying awake in their beds.
The onion harvest demands all Franckton's attention. The weather station promises a lot of rain in a month's time and that means hurry, to hoe down the stalks and get the crop ready for dry-curing. After that will be soil prep and nitrogen checkers and sifting and seed negotiation and prices. There's too much to do. There's twenty fewer pairs of hands to do it with. Christmas bears down on them, inevitable and hot, like a sunburn.
The rain starts off Friday as a percussive clap of thunder. The clouds gather in fat, hot, bluish puffs above the croft, and then they open up and the rain roars out. The onions get hauled off in haste to the gas room. The kids are chivvied, screaming, off to the fields to pick up abandoned clippers and pins, jandals slapping noisily on the macadam. The racks groan under the weight of stacked vegetables, frantically checked over for lichen must. One rack shows neck rot but that's par for the course, to be honest, no matter how much they pay for fungal-resistant seed strains or official pesticides it's never a done deal. Simeon says it just goes to show they had a near miss and everyone pretends they haven't heard him.
The whole croft's stuck inside, gloomily playing at cards or smoking. Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, the rain comes down. The sealed road is steamy, liquidy. The warehouse is a blast furnace of dry onion air. The kids all cavil at the rain and the goats get put in the big shed when the ark proves to have a leak. The spraypainted place where the wives were bundled blurs into a watermark.
The thunder comes back and rolls around the plain up and down, booming and growling, startling everyone just when they think it's gone away. There's a lot of joyless boozing in the public house. Nobody has anything to talk about after they've used up the topics of the harvest, the rain. All the water sinks into the dust.
A few days before Christmas the croft wakes up and their wives are back. All over Franckton, the watery sunrise limns wives cooking breakfast, wives sitting patiently in chairs, wives making mash for the goats, wives standing in the corners with their tongues flickering in their mouths and their eyes looking nowhere. Laura doesn't even notice her wife in her kitchen or the egg-frying smells until the plate is put in front of her on the table, and then she screams out loud.
The goats butt from behind the door in the big shed, bawling to be let out. The wives seem distantly astonished by all the fuss: crofters slamming open the peeling dust-screen doors, shouting, hauling on daggy bedrobes and slippers. Inside, Laura reaches out with a jittering hand to push aside the muddy polyppy strands behind her wife's ear: sees the healing weal, powdery, an angry-looking half-closed hole, the dull sheen of a bullet inside the skull being slowly pushed out. Her wife jerks her head away a little, like she's ticklish. Other than the weal she is a nice yellow-green color all over, her freckles a brilliant carmine, her nails as rippled as a riverbed.
The Mayor is panting down the street in her pajamas, an old mackintosh wrapped around her shoulders. She is calling for help.
In Simeon's house, the door has been wrenched from its hinges. There is a fearful amount of broken crockery in the sink. Chairs have been pushed over. Next to the kitchen table lies Simeon, legs and arms akimbo. They can only tell it's Simeon by the clothes, because his skull is a stoved-in mash, fuzzy with the must, sprouting and foliose at the mouth and eye-sockets. Spongy lobes of plant matter rim out down his neck. Gouts of bloody lichen have detonated out his chest, nestled down between brackets of white cracked rib. Long fronds radiate outwards from holes at the stomach: wet with blood, wet with matter, spiraling upwards, drying. He seems titanic in death, enormous and monstrous, half-person, half-explosion.
There are footprints everywhere in the dust, heaps of them. When they go to check on the shed out back there's Simeon's wife, sitting peacefully on her cot. She stares implacably past them, only occasionally reaching up to fret at the hole behind her ear. She yawns with a wet mouth and bright green teeth. When they ask her questions, she gives them a vague smile.
Laura finishes retching behind the goat ark and rejoins the croft, meeting for what feels like the umpteenth time in the pub. All the croft looks old all of a sudden. The Mayor's mackintosh hangs off one shoulder as she sits in a groaning chair.
“Well,” she says, and seems unable to say anything but, “Well.”
“Well, what?” demands Laura. “What the hell are we going to tell the Ministry?”
The whole croft mulls this one over. They'll have to register Simeon's death. There ought to be someone who comes for the remains, but most of the time nobody does, that's a fact. One of the crofters says that anyway it's three days until Christmas, and nobody will come out to them before the
new Ministry calendar year. And someone else says what about the extraction and care team.
“That's not what I bloody meant,” says Laura, “what do we do?”
Franckton's already paid for the foetal care team and all the licensing. They won't notice the damage to the wives, will they? Probably not. They only look munted if you get up close, check them out carefully. Nothing a bath won't fix, either. They've paid for everything. There's the harvest to think about. The Ministry's more trouble than it's worth to talk to. This whole thing's been a muck-up from start to finish.
“They've killed Simeon,” says Laura.
The Mayor has an expression like rock ice. She meets Laura's terrified eyes, and Laura sees the fear reflected in hers, the fishlike darting of the pupil. There's a shuffling outside. A lot of the wives have gathered by the door. The whole croft turns to look at them: twenty dull, dispassionate expressions, mud streaks on flexing fingers. Some of the wives have put on new aprons, but the ones who haven't have big blooming brownish stains on each breadth. They look expectant. They look supremely calm. They look healthy and green and moist.
One of them is at the door and they didn't even see her move.
“Do we look after the goats, Aunty?”
The Mayor stares at her — stares right through her. After a moment she says, “No. There's clearing up today, after the rain. Tell — tell the other girls to go home.”
“Yes, Aunty,” she says, and she's gone with the rest.
There's silence in the pub. An empty, wavering silence, like a heat shimmer. Anticipatory. Laura says faintly, “We need to tell someone… ”
“We've got our bloody pride,” says the Mayor.
The crofters are all picking up their slippers and their mugs and are smoothing back their hair, drifting homewards to re-start the morning. Numbly, Laura does the same, retracing her steps, sliding open the mossie screen on her front door. The eggs on her breakfast plate are cold. Her wife is back and running plates under the dry-cleaner, laboriously picking off bits of dried food, singing tunelessly. Laura notices the bloody splotches on the hem of her dress.
“Welcome home,” says her wife.
Sweat beads at the middles of Laura's palms.
The rest of the croft settles down and plans the pōhiri they'll have to welcome the conception-care team, and a picnic. The Ministry announces that they'll be given five percent off foetal mitochondrial therapy, on account of it being Christmas. Everyone contributing to a baby washes their shirt.
The Woman In The Hill
November 11, 1907
Elm Cottage, Tauranga
Waikopua Creek, New Zealand
Dear Dorothy,
This is the last time I intend ever to write to you. Though you may take this letter as a freak or crank, I ask that you reconsider how likely it is that I would write such madness — that is, unless I knew it were the truth. In my need to convince you I will lay out the events using only fact — what I saw with my own eyes and have subsequently acted upon based on rational belief — and at the last, pray to God you believe me.
I know you heard the gossip and the insinuation surrounding my young friend Elizabeth W— . I will emphasise again her workaday nature and good common sense, not at all given to the morbid or fantastic; the model of a farmer's wife. This concerns last April, when she had been recently married and had moved to the property opposite the old Broomfield slip. Regarding my silence on the scandal that surrounded her afterward, I may only defend myself by saying I thought it none of my business to relate.
It must have been eleven o'clock one summer's night when I was startled from sleep by a fearful knocking. It was such a frenetic scraping and hammering that I would have been up and dressing at that alone, and with Kenneth's gun, even had I not recognised Elizabeth calling for help. Her voice was so slurred that for a moment I thought her drunk, and when I let her in I thought worse. She was shivering and febrile in my kitchen for a long time — so unable to talk and so fearful that I half-convinced myself that the foolish rumours were true, and we were under invasion by the Māori. After a strong cup of tea and some whisky, she told me this:
An old friend of hers had lived on the Peninsula and her sad story was well-known there. The husband worked in transporting wood down to the estuary and was often away and she left alone. This friend, Alice N— , missed a visit to Elizabeth one day, and the postman found the house empty. Everyone thought she had been called away and thought too little of it, but then the husband came back months later and found his wife gone, and being a grim and miserable man, made any number of accusations. It was a sad, short scandal. I did not think it unusual in this country, where English brides come to marry and then regret, but Elizabeth found it uncharacteristic and went herself to the Peninsula cottage. The house was shut up by then. The husband had left for Auckland and no trace of Alice remained. But the whole preyed on Elizabeth's mind, and she found something so unwholesome about the mystery that she determined to investigate.
It being early in the day, she took to the bush behind the house. I acknowledge that this would be foolish for most, but in Elizabeth's defence it was dry weather, no chance of slips. She had enough bush-sense to know when she had to turn back. She was sufficiently suspicious but not so alarmed as to get assistance. She knew there was no danger in Clifton and certainly not from the local tribes. I cannot blame her for it now. She examined the back of the property and past the Waikopua into the hills. There was nothing of Alice — or it seemed so — and here, Elizabeth quit her story and let out a trill of laughter.
It made me jump; Dorothy, it was the awful laughter of a hysteric. She would not be calmed until I locked the door and lit the fire. When she looked at me her eyes were red as though she had been weeping, but there was not a tear-stain on her face. When more composed she told me that, deep in a hot and untidy part of the valley, she had seen a door in the hill — not the remnants of a pā or even an old raupo hut — but a door.
When I questioned her on this she described a portal — a cave-entrance that had been propped with slabs of stone, one atop two others like a mantel, and that the stone had been crudely worked. The carvings did not resemble native carvings, and Elizabeth could not really describe what they did resemble, except that they were ugly and looked as though they had been done in violence: as though someone had taken a chisel and scored cuts to no purpose. I gave her another blanket and I asked if she had gone inside.
Yes, naturally. She had prowled around the outside and found that the earth around did not crumble, and that the doorway was wide and tall and could have easily taken a man twice her breadth and size. I did not chide her for going inside, for I was too appalled and bewildered, and she continued in a mutter and did not look up from her tea.
She had gone inside. She had found the passage quite spacious. She had meant to turn back once reaching the end of this corridor, but that it had made a steep turn and she had seen a light at the end: not torchlight, but the sickly radiance one sees in the Aranui grottoes. And it was not a cavern at all, she said, but made. I questioned her on this. Elizabeth did not answer. There were many corridors leading off from a main chamber and her assumption at this point was that she had found some horrid smuggling cave or tuckaway. There were things in the alcoves but she said she had not touched them and repeated this as though it was important, that she had not touched them.
All this time she had been calling for Alice and not listening, and then she became aware of a sound. It was the incessant lapping of water on stone. She pushed on down until she reached the cathedral-room of this catacomb, very high and square, and here there was a great pool of slow-moving water sloshing up against the rock. Here also there was a stone block she described as being about hip height and an enormous basin. Standing there was Alice, said Elizabeth. And after that she fled.
I was greatly puzzled, Dorothy. When I asked her to explain, Elizabeth began to shake again and would not dri
nk, and she pushed off the blanket as though she were hot. She kept muttering catches of nonsense. She said that Alice was not right. Unwell, I asked, or somehow injured? No; but all the same she was not right. The two had talked, and Alice had claimed — and I confess the word gave me a thrill of strange horror — that she was imprisoned. Elizabeth could not say any more. Now indeed I thought that I had unearthed the source of all her misery — that in an uncharacteristic terror she had fled back out into the bush and the upper air, and left her friend behind. Now she was consumed by guilt and shame. I told her that I would fetch the men from Whitford Hall and we would go to the cave at once.
Dorothy, here Elizabeth screamed. Her voice was the idiot squeal of an animal. No! she said, no! It was too late, Alice had gone now. Elizabeth crawled from her chair and kneeled in front of me and clawed at my floorboards beyond reason until I saw her fingernails split, and she cried out again, and what she said made me afraid in all the ways it should have made me pity her hysteria:
“But I'm here — tell me I'm here, Caroline — for the love of God, keep me here!”
I gave her what comfort I could give a madwoman, put her in the spare bedroom and sent for her husband at first light. Come morning, she was so weary that she was biddable, though also hollow-eyed and stupid, like a dreamer waking in a strange room. Looking back — the madness in me to let her go! — but what choice did I have? It was nonsense. She had experienced a cruel scare for someone else's benefit, or a nightmare of the subconscious, or some other sad and inexplicable reason that would come to light eventually. She needed rest and not pandering. Yet as she was led away, my palms were tight and hot, for there was a look in her eyes that is inane to describe, yet I must describe it: it was the dead terror of a man before the Pit.
Time lulled me into an uneasy security. My evenings never recovered. I had even ventured with Elizabeth one hot day to the Peninsula, in order to lay her fears to final rest, though she startled like a white-eyed colt the whole venture. Naturally, there was no door. We re-traced her steps and found the valley she had come to in her story, and there was nothing but dead trunks of the rough tree fern where a door had been in her memory. I even pushed hard at the earth and scrabbled around at the rocks to show there was nothing beneath, but at this she shuddered and pulled at my sleeves to stop.
