Landings

by Jenny Pattrick

  On board there are now only a small number of people, but all are awed by the sight. For once Bridget McPhee stands silent and open-mouthed. It is so improbable. Since they pulled away from the Jerusalem landing in fading light, they have been thrashing their way upriver with nothing but bush and wilderness on either side, and here, around the bend, is this glowing palace!

  ‘Half ahead,’ calls the captain down to the engineer.

  ‘Half,’ echoes the engineer.

  The pounding pistons slow. The drive-shaft hardly revolves. Now Bridget can hear the plash plash of the paddles as they thrash the water more and more slowly.

  ‘Dead slow.’

  Bridget smiles to see that her brother is now down in the engine-room, holding some lever as the engineer instructs him.

  ‘Dead slow,’ comes the reply from below. Now the chuffing of the smoke-stack, which has pounded like a heartbeat all day long, has at last stopped. In the sudden silence, as the Waimarie drifts in towards the landing, captain Bill Henderson, still awed by the familiar sight, speaks quietly.

  ‘Welcome to Pipiriki House, ladies and gentlemen. Mr Morrow is waiting to transport your valises and other goods up to the House. You may ride too, but I suggest a gentle walk up will be rewarding. In a moment the birds will have recovered from our noisy approach. We are, I hope, not too late for the evening birdsong.’

  The Waimarie sighs its last escaping steam. Peace ripples outwards over river and bush. A last tui farewells the light. Even the little McPhees are quiet as they walk up the road in the sweet-scented dark. Bridget and Douglas run ahead, eager to explore.

  ‘Wait for me, sillies,’ orders Gertie, but they are too quick for their lumbering sister.

  Down at the landing the peace is soon shattered by Angus McPhee’s high-pitched complaints. Bert Morrow and the deckhands are manoeuvring McPhee’s cart from deck to land. Bert, looking to sky and bush, has remarked that it would be wiser to store it under cover, in Hatrick’s shed, for the weather may turn bad in the next few days.

  ‘My good man, I will be away to Raetihi at first light. My cart will not be standing idle any few days.’

  Bert Morrow gives the rude man a straight look. ‘You will not be moving anywhere with that cart. The road up to Raetihi is washed out in two places, and blocked by a mud-slide in the gorge besides. And more rain to come.’

  McPhee explodes. ‘Why wasn’t I told?’ He turns to shout back at the captain, who is coming ashore, his overnight bag slung across a shoulder. ‘You saw my cart! Your loading man never mentioned blocked roads!’

  Captain Bill Henderson shrugs. ‘You will get used to blocked roads and mud if you are to live up this way, Mr McPhee. They are a fact of life. No one at Raetihi will be expecting you tomorrow. Besides, your horses will be several days themselves. Bert here says the river track down to Koriniti is blocked too.’

  ‘God almighty!’ McPhee glares at the dark bush as if sizing up an enemy. ‘Well. We will see in the morning. I expect I will discover a way.’

  Bert and the river captain exchange a smile. McPhee, who has caught the look, turns on Bert. ‘Bring my cart up to the house. And have it ready for tomorrow.’

  ‘I will see to the passengers’ cases,’ says Bert, ‘and my other duties. Later I will see to your cart. If there is still time.’

  He turns his back on the fiery man, slaps his patient horse on the rump, then walks away beside the quiet beast, up to Pipiriki House.

  Maraekowhai: 114 miles upriver

  Wanganui Herald, August 1907

  STELLA O’DOWD WALKS the three miles back home. Today Danny needed the horse for farm work. Dark clouds that have threatened all day have sunk lower to drift through the bush on the hills ahead. It will rain soon. She plods along, humming a tune that one of the deckhands taught them last night. Danny will enjoy it — he loves to hear a new song. She ignores the Ohura Falls, which are such a marvel to visitors, but to locals like Stella only a hindrance to travel. If only they could travel up and down to the landing by canoe, life would be much simpler. Danny and Stella don’t own a cart and must beg the use of a neighbour’s when the wool is ready or (rarely these days) supplies arrive for them.

  Stella grins to herself, remembering the cheeky gentleman on the Houseboat who had offered to take her downriver to Wanganui and marry her there. It’s not the first offer she’s had. Stella laughs at the advances, enjoys the compliment to her good looks and cheerful nature. It’s one piece of news, though, that never reaches Danny. He has trouble enough with her absence three nights out of seven when she stays with the Houseboat captain and his wife — and the rowdy crewmen — to do the tourists’ breakfasts and tidy the cabins after they leave. Stella loves every crowded minute of her work on the Houseboat; loves to watch the ladies in their smart dinner clothes and to listen, as she hands around plates of mutton and vegetables, to the talk of life outside the river. News of the north and south arms of the great railway creeping ever closer to each other — a traveller voiced gloomy predictions that tourists would soon choose rail over dangerous river journeys. Stella laughed at that nonsense. Recently a tour party of men talked excitedly of the fabulous exploits of a New Zealand football team over in England; then of Wanganui’s own Billy Webb, who has won world champion at rowing in Australia. Stella clapped and cheered at that news, earning a black look from Captain White, who likes his staff to be seen not heard. But pretty Stella, born and bred on the river, daughter of Ruvey and Bert Morrow, who also work for Mr Hatrick, finds it hard to keep silent. She must ask a question when there is a puzzle in front of her lively dark eyes, and will always answer back, even to a drunken proposal of marriage.

  The first drops of rain fall, heavy and cold. Stella covers her head with a sack and tramps on. The track beside the river turns to mud before she has gone ten yards. The Ohura, their river, now curves past the old marae, past a deserted farm, the owner gone mad and hanged himself last year, past the abandoned flourmill, which was never finished or operating anyway, and finally past their own farm, where the sheep huddle wetly among stumps and patches of scrub. She turns off the track and walks up through the sad paddocks, which Danny has wrested from the bush, and which the scrub and pig-fern constantly try to claim back. Stella notices a fencepost that has tilted in the soft soil and heaves it upright, chiding it like a naughty child. Stella likes to make fun even of disaster.

  She heaves a cabbage from the claggy soil of the kitchen garden, shaking the dirt and wet from its greenery. At least the cabbages grow here. Under the shelter of the porch she scrapes mud off her bare feet — better not to ruin good shoes in weather like this — and pauses, smiling, to listen. She hears a gust of laughter and then the door is flung open. Danny stands there grinning, his face flushed from the fire, his arms open.

  ‘Here’s my darling!’ he shouts. ‘Wetter than a drowned sailor. Quick, sweetheart, come inside before a month of winter drives in with you!’ He whips the sack away from her head, spraying the water from it like a wet dog, tosses it on the bench and pulls his sodden wife into the warmth of the room, where he gives her a smacking kiss.

  ‘Ah, that’s better,’ he murmurs into her hair, and then, ‘But Lord above, you’re colder than death. Get in by the fire — there’s the billy brewing. Warm up before you’re on to our dinner.’

  Pita is there by the fire. A worry. Stella can smell his liquor, and knows why he has come. But holds her peace for the moment, steaming in front of the open fire, cradling her mug of sweet tea.

  Pita grins at her; raises his mug. ‘Will you take a drop, sister? This wowser husband of yours will have none.’ He is teasing her and they all know it. Danny and Stella do not drink — have never needed it. They are cheerful as drunkards every day of the week.

  ‘Leave off, Pita,’ says Stella, sharply enough. ‘The room stinks like a brewery as it is.’

  Pita laughs and drinks deeply, ostentatiously, replenishing his mug unsteadily from the jar at his feet.

  Danny gently
strokes his wife’s wet hair. Stella knows what he is going to say and wants to delay the moment. Nestling in the deep pocket of her skirt are several surprises. The best she will keep until later. Now she brings out a truly enormous carrot and two parsnips. ‘But look at this!’ she cries. ‘Can you believe these? The size? Charlie Chee gave them.’

  Danny gives her a quick look. ‘In return for what? Charlie Chee gives nothing for free.’

  Stella dares to tease her husband. ‘Oh, well now, a kiss or two behind the Houseboat. He is a lonely man.’

  Danny growls and waits for a truer answer. No one would give Charlie Chee a kiss.

  ‘I tell him English words,’ says Stella, adding with pride, ‘and show him how to write them. He wants to bring a wife from China and needs English words to arrange matters.’

  But the sight of the glowing vegetables has put them all in mind of the evening meal. Stella, warm again, happy to be in her own home, sings the men her new song as she peels potatoes and onions from the garden, slices the cabbage and Charlie Chee’s prize roots, adds strips of smoked mutton and sets the pot of stew on the hook over the fire. Danny, the good man, has already seen that boiling water is waiting on the hob. Stella, knowing she cannot ignore the reason for Pita’s presence much longer, decides against apple pie. Cheese and raisins will have to serve. And now, while the stew bubbles, another strong mug of tea.

  Danny watches her, waiting for the moment.

  STELLA MARY MORROW, named for the stars in the crown of the Blessed Virgin Mary, was just seventeen years old when she met Danny. A crowning joy, she was, to her parents, the Morrows of Pipiriki. An infant daughter and a stillborn son already in their little graves, but this precious one lived. It was no effort at all to put stars and Stella in the same sentence. She won the Star of Achievement every year down at Jerusalem, where the Sisters taught her to read and write and love the Good Lord. She was ‘a little star’ at Pipiriki House too, in her pretty muslin dress a favourite with the guests when she sang to entertain them of an evening. She would sing with the Sisters, even in Latin, her voice rising to the stars they said with little sighs of pleasure. The Sisters hoped Stella would join Mother Aubert’s order, and for a while that seemed likely, as she was a devout child, happy to live with the Sisters and help with the little orphans in the school.

  But as she grew tall and beautiful, less holy aspirations enticed her away from a life as a Bride of Christ. Stella enjoyed the growing attentions of the many single men in the district. In frontier land there is always a shortage of women. Single men arrive to break in a block of bush, but then, when they have time to lift their heads and scan the horizon for a suitable wife, they find they are in a male world. Stella, half Pakeha, speaking good English, was an obvious choice. She learned to flirt, to widen her wonderful dark eyes and toss her long curling hair, which her mother tried to keep tightly plaited but which seemed to break loose at the slightest pretext. Unlike her brother Pita, who looked as Maori as his father, Stella’s skin was light — the colour of well-milked tea — and the bones of her face were fine.

  Her mother was secretly relieved to see Stella spend less time with the Sisters and more laughing with the young men at Pipiriki. Ruvey had only two children still living. The son Pita, wild and unpredictable — who knew where he would end up? What mother didn’t hope for grandchildren, and a daughter nearby to lend a hand when aching joints became a problem? Ruvey hoped that a marriage with a river captain might be arranged, though most of them were married already. Bert would be in favour of a river captain. Or Mr Frampton’s son on that nice block of land downriver near Ranana.

  But when Pita brought laughing Danny O’Dowd home one evening, flirting and fine prospects came to a sudden end. From that moment on Stella had eyes only for the blue-eyed Irishman whose only wealth was an abundance of optimism.

  PATRICK DANNY O’DOWD, known up and down the river as Dannyboy, was born on Great Island, County Cork, his father a steelworker in the shipyards there, his mam a hardworking mother of seven. At fourteen Danny left home on a ship, the Mary Emanuel, whose steel rivets bore the marks of his father’s hammer. According to Danny, his mother wouldn’t have noticed he was gone. Hard to believe that: Danny is definitely noticeable. Pale-skinned but with a thatch of jet-black hair, Danny turned the ladies’ heads in New York and Sydney before he landed up in Wanganui and turned a few there.

  He is slight and wiry, Danny O’Dowd, good-looking and cheeky, but was not one to settle. At sea or on land he skipped from one line of work to another — deckhand, galley-hand, wharf-hand, dray-man, but never a task that required letters or figures, for Danny never learned those skills. For the three years he attended school back in County Cork, Danny fooled the nuns with his charm and quick wit. He could hold a piece of paper in front of his eyes and read off a ‘story’ he said he’d written, while all along his mates would snigger, knowing the page to be blank. Half of those school years were spent at home helping his mam with the little ones — running errands or wiping noses. Danny is embarrassed by his lack of letters now, for his wife loves to read and write, but in the early days he got by comfortably enough. He never stayed more than a few months in the one place. Until he met Stella Mary Morrow.

  After a spell on the wharves at Wanganui, young Danny fancied a foray inland. When he applied to the River Trust for work upriver, clearing channels for the passage of river steamers, Mr Stewart looked doubtful.

  ‘This is tough work, young man. Most of my men would be twice your size.’

  ‘I am stronger than I look, sir,’ said Dannyboy, puffing out his chest, ‘and not afraid of hard work.’ Which was stretching the truth somewhat.

  ‘Do you understand the native tongue? Most of my upriver gangs are Maori.’

  ‘I have a smattering,’ said Danny: a downright lie, but said with a grin that had the stern Mr Stewart grinning back.

  That positive attitude earned him a place on a snagging punt, earning one and a penny ha’penny an hour, working out of Pipiriki, where Danny met Stella and fell in love with her and the river both. It was a fine, roaring kind of life with the river gangs. Danny and Pita Morrow worked together on the snagging winch. Neither of them had the strength or stamina for shifting the river boulders and building stone groins, but they were quick and clever with the winch, snaring the clogging debris of branches and logs that came down after every storm, then swinging them onto the bank, using the long arm of the snagging pole as a fulcrum. Danny was popular with the Maori workers for his easy nature and his joking ways. True enough, he soon picked up a smattering of the language and would sit around the campfire of an evening, happy to join in where he could and to laugh it off when he lacked the understanding.

  That time in the bush – the rich leafy smell of it, the glorious cacophony of birdsong in the mornings, the wild moods of the rapids that they struggled endlessly to tame worked some kind of hook into Danny’s restless soul. And when he met Pita’s beautiful sister, who could sing like the very birds, and loved river life as happily as he did, Danny O’Dowd decided it was time to marry and settle down.

  ‘But have you any idea of farming?’ asked Bert Morrow, suspecting that his daughter’s future with this likeable lad was less than secure.

  ‘Give me the chance and I’ll learn,’ said Danny, confident as ever in his ability, and Bert, charmed by the smile and his daughter’s evident love, gave him a piece of the family land bordering on the Ohura River. A wilderness area, a day’s journey by river steamer above Pipiriki, but beautiful, full of promise, so they thought; a romantic place to settle and bring up a family.

  But Danny found he couldn’t charm the land as easily as he could people. And Stella’s hoped-for crowd of laughing children failed to arrive. In five years no children and little to show for the hard work on the farm. When Captain White finally roped and winched the great Houseboat downriver all the way from Taumarunui to settle at the junction of the Ohura and Whanganui Rivers, it was a godsend to Danny and Stella. Ci
vilisation on the doorstep! Stella earned much-needed money working as housemaid, and Danny suddenly found many reasons to visit the landing. A matter to discuss with the riverboat engineer; a message to send downriver to friends; the possibility that seed might have arrived. Stella could have run all these errands, but Danny went anyway. The farm sank even deeper into debt as Danny sought companionship and laughter down at the Houseboat.

  It was there at the landing one day that he heard news that Angus McPhee, of McPhee and Sons Timber in Wanganui, would pay top prices for prime totara logs floated downriver direct to his yard. Pita and he had hatched the plan, pleaded their case to the elders of the Morrow hapu and won the right to cut three logs and try floating them down. Stella was dead against it.

  SHE LOOKS, NOW, at her brother over the rim of her steaming mug. She knows why he is there and has thought of a way that might prevent their plan. She slips a little packet wrapped in brown paper from her pocket, lays it on the table in front of Danny and waits for him to notice. Frowning, he leans down to riddle the fire again. Won’t look at her.

  ‘Danny!’ says Stella, all grins now. She stills her husband’s hand. ‘Dannyboy, look. I have brought you a heifer and a bull calf!’