Mr Peacock's Possessions

by Lydia Syson

  ‘Pa? Where exactly? Tell me where you found them.’

  ‘You’ll say nothing to Queenie or Ada? Our secret?’

  That was better.

  ‘Yes. Yes, of course.’

  He settles his tools more comfortably on his shoulder, and strides on, looking straight ahead.

  ‘Not so long after we landed …’

  Lizzie nods. A rare, confiding kind of mood has come upon her father, from out of nowhere. It seems he wants to tell her. He wants to tell someone.

  ‘I was digging, soon after we first arrived. Clearing the taro beds. I’d somehow put aside the tale – Robson’s story, that is. Well, I wanted to forget it. It was over. Finished. Nothing to be done. And there’s been the volcano since, a few cyclones too, I’m sure. I thought everything would be covered up by now. But as I was digging I did hit bones. Pigs’ ribs, I thought at first, no, really I did. I took the first skull for a turtle shell. But when I found others, other kinds of bones, well, that’s when I remembered. Couldn’t forget. And after that I looked out for them, and I cleared and buried decently all I could. Couldn’t have you little ones digging up kanaka bones.’

  A kind of kindness, then, this secret. Nausea begins to take possession of Lizzie. She hangs on harder to her father.

  ‘And I thought you’d never need to know,’ continued Pa, half defensive, half regretful. ‘And then we found the ones in Nightbell Gully. Just a few, mind. One man’s, perhaps. Or two. But how could I tell you the truth? How could I tell you children what they really were?’

  How will she tell Kalala?

  ‘But you knew before we left,’ she said, ‘and still we came?’

  ‘It happened so long ago. I did not see how it could harm us now.’

  ‘Ma knew too?’

  ‘Of course not. Why bother her with old tales? You know what I’ve always said. No looking back. But oh, I tell you, I was a happy man when we moved this side of Monday Island. Sometimes I think that bay was cursed.’

  ‘Monday Island,’ she repeats, sickened. ‘You mean Blackbird Island.’ This place is no more named after a bird than she herself is. Perhaps it will never feel like home again. She thinks of her father, telling no one, secretly removing the bones … those poor stolen men’s bones … and pities him for bearing, all alone and for so long, the burden of that dreadful knowledge. ‘Tell me more, Pa. Tell me everything you know.’

  LONG BEFORE

  No single soul could ever tell this story – not then, not now – but that day, at last, Mr Peacock told his daughter all he could. A piecemeal tale, grown from seeds sown in bar-rooms, on board ships, above deck and below, passed from tongue to tongue. Reports and rumours spread by winds and currents. What he’d heard, and what he’d found, and what he’d come to realise. And here’s the rest.

  *

  Twenty years earlier, from the deck of a fine, fast barque, three-masted, a single eye sized up the atoll that stood alone. Over his vacant socket, this slaver’s Spanish captain rarely wore a patch. An oculist in Barcelona once tried to trade him a glass eye, but he refused. What did he want with a sightless bauble, when the hole left in his face made others see so quick and clear? Low-lidded emptiness, glimpsed off guard – it could make a strong man blench, and spook a kanaka in seconds. It bought time. It bolstered power. No doubt it would help him here, where he intended to fill the spaces left by a particularly troublesome pack of ‘colonists’: Islanders who’d died before they could be sold.

  From the veranda of the Mission House, high on the coral cliff, a spyglass watched the ship. As one-eyed in his way as that Spanish captain, as guileless as the other man was cunning, this missionary’s vision had always been too partial and too innocent. Mr Reverend, they called him there. He was wary that morning. Not six weeks earlier another ship had kidnapped forty men. Snared by empty promises of fish hooks, paddling out with expectation and high hopes, they found no trade, no choice. They were quickly trapped. A few struggled to escape, were hacked and slashed, and ribbons of watery blood marked briefly their downward drift to the ocean floor.

  Lamentation followed, long and loud. Rachel weeping for her children, refusing to be comforted. Meetings were held. The island could not lose more souls to slavers. There could be no more trading in this way. A new law: only one vaka from any settlement could go beyond the reef to greet an unknown ship, and it would carry always letters of warning.

  So when this second Spanish ship appeared, the Reverend wrote to ask where she was bound and what she wanted here, and sent his letter with two teachers by canoe, watching them carefully through his telescope as they paddled out. The men went willingly on board the Rosa y Carmen; their vaka was hoisted after them. When he looked again, his dark and shaking circle framed a new boat being lowered.

  Down to the jetty to meet the seaman in it, a loathsome, bloated sort of man, unshaven and unwashed, besotted and debauched. His English was poor, his mime most feeble, and he could not or would not understand their questions about the missing men. The missionary sent him back as charged with medicine for his captain; a Christian act no man could refuse. The bloody flux killed quickly. He was glad to see him go.

  But the missing failed to return.

  Blood up, neck hung with shark’s teeth white as pearls, their chief pursued them with a fleet of thirty men. Nine of their canoes flanked the returning jolly boat, yet as they drew near the barque, it pulled away and the air exploded into bullets, spray and splintered, shattered wood. These vaka sank. And down came the Spanish crew, to seize the swimmers from the sea.

  *

  The watching missionary set down his glass and wept, inconsolable. Nothing left but to live with guilt, and pray to be forgiven for trusting too much. What a poor shepherd he had proved to his flock. He cursed the mania for emigration, and he blamed himself. How high the price of light. His own presence had made a beacon of this island. And all he could promise was safety in heaven, not on earth.

  *

  Over the water, unseen, the men were bound and kicked under bolted hatches into a placeless place, a floating prison. Pushed into air unbreathable, foul enough to taste, the Islanders gasped and fought for breath. Flesh against bare flesh, shoving muscles tight with terror, jostling and recoiling from unseen strangers, limbs and backs, heads and hair, grass and barkcloth, and above all, the rank stench of the hold. Worse than bilge water. This was where the flux had truly taken hold, and it was spreading fast.

  Voices from other islands. Voices of sorrow, pain, despair. Much later, a musket firing. The Rock fellows gripped each other harder still at the sight of sudden lines of light. Armed with lanterns, and also snarling, choking, pitiless disgust, sailors descended to inspect the sick. Prodding for life with whip ends and musket butts, they hunted down useless ballast and contagion. Sought flickering lids and glassy eyes. Fullest pails withdrawn, washed out – slime and pus and mucus dispersed to particles in salty underwaves – too quickly refilled. Corpses hauled up. Overboard they splashed, slowly tumbling, sinking, sinking, sinking, hair floating behind, descending ever darker, deeper. The vessel held her course regardless.

  Some on board had only just begun to curl round the first dull gripe. Others were doubled up with cramps already, minds and bodies panic-surged, flushing from time to time with the hot-cold sweat which foretold each outpouring. Others, too weak to move, lay matted in foulness, slime-thighed and bloody-buttocked. The Rock fellows cried for mercy and release, and the barque roiled and pitched and heaved through an unseen ocean.

  At last they felt their course shifting. The captain would never return his useless cargo to Easter Island, Rakahanga, Pukapuka, Fakaofo. But he did know a lonely spot where he could strengthen the survivors for some weeks or months, and discard the sick. A thriving little shore station, in the middle of nowhere, where it would be easy to take control and never pay for provisions. Then on to Peru, as planned.

  The surf was high when the Rosa y Carmen approached Clapperton Bay. The settlers came running: th
ree families, stirred first in hope and then in blood. One father’s name was Robson. Bare toes mined the sand in terror. The youngsters quaked.

  Of fifty emaciated bodies tipped into the first launch, only three could stand alone. Three others died before they reached the shore. The settlers watched the captain jump from the landing vessel with a pistol in each hand and a bowie knife in his belt, and shrank from his officers’ bayonets. The sailors dragged men and women from the boat like sacks of rotten produce, revolted by their ruined cargo. Onto the beach and into the foaming tide, they hurled bodies that were barely breathing. Many did not even know they were dying before they were washed away and drowned. Those with power still to crawl were defeated by their fight with the breakers’ pull. Corpses soon scattered the sand.

  For weeks Rosa y Carmen lay at anchor in the bay, no colours at her mast, a strip of tarred canvas concealing her name. Some sailors were left on board to scrub out the foul hold, and float a raft of water barrels to shore for filling. Others set out to seize the settlers’ stocks, while women and children cowered in their huts, and men stood helpless, at bladepoint. The youngest, darkest, and least-valued sailors were ordered to bury the bodies on the beach. Before nightfall, eighty or more lay under grey grit, in the shallowest of graves, a mass of strangers from many far-off islands, who had died deformed with pain, stick-thin, tortured with grief. In came the tide, and out again. Bodies were soon unburied, left to tumble in sea and sun.

  31

  HER TALE ALMOST DONE, LIZZIE TURNS TO LOOK at me directly. We have been walking together on the beach below the bluff, keeping to the cliff, keeping out of sight. Up and down, we pace and talk, scuffing over our own prints, trying to see backwards as best we can, while the cloud hangs so low it cloaks the flats.

  ‘Maybe that’s why … in the Gully … the bones.’ Her voice unsteadies. ‘Could your father be here? Could he have died here, here on this island?’

  Is this enough, I wonder? Dreams and words, instead of bones and bodies. Can these alone convince me? I lack my own eye’s witness. I am faint-hearted. Throttled by fresh doubt, my reply chokes in my throat. No. No, no, no. If we know he is dead, we can no longer hope for his return.

  ‘He has found you again,’ Lizzie says. ‘Can’t you see? He means you to know his story.’

  Perhaps. And perhaps all stories are like this. Some parts can be told. And something else you must make out on your own. We know a beginning now. The end, if there is an end, I have to picture for myself. My tears flow freely as we talk, and Lizzie’s too, yet even this partial understanding brings some easing to my buried sorrow. There seems enough of substance in this veiled tale to lay hold of and follow with our thinking. A truth worth netting, however hard to spear.

  ‘Perhaps the fellows from my island were stronger than the rest of the Stolen Ones,’ I say.

  ‘And so they would have been set to work the sooner here,’ says Lizzie. ‘The captain stole everything from the settlers, Pa told me. They needed labour to shift stores, you see, load boats, cut cane, dig taro, fetch water, wood. All that. And then the settlers’ families began to sicken, and their children began to die.’

  Small bodies die most quickly, when sickness comes with ships.

  ‘Perhaps the crew grew careless with their captives,’ I say. ‘How could they watch them all?’

  ‘The cliffs at Clapperton Bay rise so high. The men so weakened. Escape must have been unimaginable to their captors,’ Lizzie says. ‘And so many dead and dying … how could they have kept count of numbers? The slavers sickening too perhaps?’

  ‘We are quick and agile climbers. We are used to cliffs and chasms,’ I tell her. ‘Rocks hold no fears for us.’

  Lizzie smiles. ‘And I think your father was like you. Clever. Watchful. A resourceful man to have sons like you and Solomona. He must have been. He would surely have found a time to creep away, perhaps with a friend.’

  She is quick with her imaginings. She wants this story to stand for mine. How can I do anything but chase the same desires?

  ‘Yes, not alone,’ I say. ‘I must hope, if my father indeed died here, he did not die alone. And at night,’ I ask Lizzie, ‘when the moon is brightest … before sunrise, could they have reached the top? Even so weak?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Lizzie assures me. ‘Well before sunrise. And then waited in the forest till it was light enough to see and make their way unwatched across the island, as far away as they could get to. Remember, they knew nothing of what lay beyond, on the other side. And in the gully, they’d know they would be safe. Nobody would ever find them there, so hidden away and secret, so peaceful.’

  I remember our earliest days here, searching with Pineki, searching for Albert, and I see the land again through my father’s imagined eyes, searching for a hiding place, somewhere to stow away until the man-stealers quit the island.

  ‘So he escaped,’ I say, ever more convinced by this clear vision, and its familiar echoes. ‘And lived on fern root, and berries, for some days and nights.’

  Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.

  ‘Weeks?’ Lizzie wants to give me hope, but I shake my head. I know how the end comes, and how fast. Sickness not hunger. Needles and then knives turning and twisting your stomach. Your guts stretch and spasm and cold sweat seeps as you burn within. Who to pray to for suffering’s relief? Death took these Stolen Ones in the gully, and there they lay, till Lizzie found their pieces.

  Never closer, never more distant feels my father. I have no proof. I have seen no bones. And what could they tell me if I had? I must wonder, because it is my way. And because this feels something like an ending. One I want to trust, though I cannot see where it might take me yet. We turn again, our shadows lengthening, and walk beneath the cliffs the other way.

  ‘What then?’ I say.

  ‘At last, it seems, a whaler passed the island and saw the state of things,’ Lizzie tells me. ‘Her master grew suspicious when he spied the nameless Spanish vessel at anchor off Monday Island and saw how fast and armed she was. This new ship scared the slaver captain off, Pa thinks. We know the whaler returned to rescue the settlers who’d survived. And by then the captured Islanders, those who lived, now strengthened by their stay, these men had been shipped again. For Peru. Weeks later they were auctioned on the dockside at Callao.’

  *

  My prayers that night are the whirling waters left by a rising paddle. They circle and spin, back to my father. If he is here, if his bones are here, it is here that we must honour his life. I pray for my father’s soul, and for the souls of all the Stolen Ones, wherever they are, and hear in my heart again my island’s weeping. The left-behinds’ long cry of mourning rises to heaven; this agony swells in the wake of every departure of our men and boys for other islands. Forced or willing, partings like deaths. Some say only ghosts can return. Certainly all are changed by leaving. Am I not changed myself? And mothers and grandmothers tear their hair, inconsolable, and stand on the coral cliffs, longing to leap. Some, like poor Vika’s mother, obey that longing.

  Mutterings in my memory lie beneath this keening; the voice of Mr Reverend, mouthing numbers, counting up columns, top to bottom, checking and rechecking, taking ten and carrying over, totting up tithes and contributions and congregations, and sighing at his falling figures, composing sermons on the habits of industry.

  *

  At lesson times, I have begun to notice, Mrs Peacock casts glances at us. Lizzie and I take care not to bend too closely together over our pages, especially when Queenie is elsewhere. I wonder if Mr Peacock has ordered his wife to keep watch.

  We talk again of Albert. We must look everywhere, even the places searched before, she tells me.

  ‘I understand,’ I say, and shift myself apart from her, and the heat that rises beneath her skin. ‘One by one, this is the way. We will look one person by one person, one section by one section.’

  ‘And Solomona?’ she asks me. ‘What will you tell him? About the bo
nes.’

  Words so gentle. She is careful with me, understanding too well how the same blood may flow in different patterns through different bodies.

  ‘Nothing,’ I reply. ‘Not yet. Nor the others. All this is too newly swallowed. I need time to think more deeply, and to listen, and decide what’s best for us.’

  Our search is to be a secret which I must keep, as she keeps mine. For I find I trust her as I once trusted Sidney.

  32

  KNOWING ABOUT ALL THE BONES ON THE ISLAND makes a difference. It shouldn’t, Lizzie tries to persuade herself, for – really – nothing has changed. But somehow it has. It’s not that she feels unsafe. More that something has shifted, and come to rest elsewhere, like a rearrangement of rocks and soil, sticks and stones. If Kalala agrees, she will talk to Pa again, she decides, and find out where he has buried them all. It isn’t right to let human bones lie like that, with nothing to mark them.

  She has a long way to go today – to fetch the grape harvest, and bring back oranges from Clapperton Bay. Her plan is to get there as fast as she can, fill up her bag with as much as she can carry, and return by a different route, covering even more ground, looking for clues and signs all the way there and all the way back. She and Kalala have been searching for many days, using one excuse or another to get away, and it is proving a lonely task. She won’t think about the bones now, she tells herself. The bones. The bones. The bones.

  She won’t even say the words.

  The bones the bones the bones.

  Words or bones, neither can hurt her.

  It’s faster going than it ever used to be: the paths are so much clearer, with so many more people using them. She knows her father has already searched the bay and the cliffs, and the rocks at the bottom too, long and hard. He used to vanish for hours in those early days – to escape from Ma’s silent grief, Ada hinted. But Pa was grieving too, thought Lizzie. Grief has a way of changing everything, she’s found. It can sometimes make it hard to do the easiest things, like find the right place on the fire to balance the kettle. Even months later.