The Crime of Huey Dunstan

by James Mcneish

  “What’s he been up to?” the man said. And then, softening: “Has John hurt himself?” He wasn’t slow, the father.

  “He’s a good lad,” I said. We talked in the car, driving back. I discovered that the father whose name was Fred (but baptised Isaac) had been brought up by his grandparents. His son, John, had also been farmed out to a grandparent at the age of three. I told him I too had been brought up by my grandparents when I was small.

  “What do you like to be called?” I said to him. “Isaac or Fred?”

  “Go-Go. My mates call me Go-Go.”

  “I’ll stick with Isaac,” I said.

  After some fiddling on my part, the business with the son turned out well. I was able to get him off the charge of assault and sent home on bail with a form of community service. Isaac’s gratitude almost broke one of my ribs when he embraced me.

  “Sir, you have given me hope,” he said.

  “In what, Isaac?”

  “I don’t know, my friend. But you have given me back my son. May your blood be bottled and preserved for ever.”

  Isaac’s thanks did not end there. Unsolicited items liked smoked trout and parcels of meat began appearing on the doorstep of the house where I had digs. One night three men came to the door. They wore balaclavas and heavy boots. They had knives strapped to their waists. Two carried guns. It was a moment before I recognised the third man. Isaac’s face was split in a grin, his black curls clustered at the neck partly hidden by a white bandanna.

  The roar was on, he said. He and his cousins were leaving at first light to go deer-shooting. “Coming?” he said.

  “But I don’t shoot,” I said.

  One of the cousins returned a few hours later and collected me in a small truck. We went by a roundabout route to the end of a valley two hours away where horses were waiting and I confessed to Isaac that I didn’t know how to ride. “You don’t shoot and you don’t ride. What do you do, bro?” I told him that in the navy I had learned to navigate. He sent his cousins on ahead with the horses and for four days I was in his company in the open air unimpeded. Isaac had brought food, warm clothing, oilskins to lie on. We slept out. On the second day he showed me the shack where he had lived with his grandfather until the age of fourteen.

  “My grandfather said the hardest thing in life is to survive,” Isaac quoted to me. “To survive,” he told me, “you need four things: Karakia. Land. Fire. And discipline.”

  Isaac had many sayings like this.

  I remember his laugh. Isaac laughed so much that the woodsmoke from the fire at night brought on an attack of asthma. He had a high tinkling laugh, as when he said kutikuti (scissors). He couldn’t say scissors in English, he said kutikuti, and laughed. When he laughed he shut his eyes; tears rolled down his cheeks and saliva glistened at the corners of his mouth, his cheeks puffed out and the wrinkles in his face turned to valleys and drains. He made a constant whistling sound as he walked.

  We followed a rough track through trees, descending every so often to the river to fish and swim in the pools. The river bisected the valley. Cattle grazed in bush clearings and small herds of horses. The hills on either side became vertiginous. On the evening of the first day I stumbled twice in the fading light—one of the first occasions I can point to as a sign I was starting to lose my peripheral vision. After that Isaac began to carry my load. He mothered me. On one occasion I lost my footing crossing the river. He bent down and piggybacked me across, spread-eagled on his back like a child. Nearly fifty years on I can conjure up those days—cry of the oystercatchers on the river, smell of tawa berries crushed underfoot, silhouettes of twisted tree trunks standing up in the morning mist like human torsos, silver, naked, spectral.

  There were no houses in the valley. On the last day we clambered up to a tumbledown building in a clearing. It was desolate. Evidently it had been a marae, a tribal centre. Isaac led me past a collection of crumbling outhouses to a building with carved posts and an iron roof. Warning me to stay back, he prostrated himself on the ground, then after uttering what I took to be a prayer or karakia he removed his boots and approached the house carrying his boots in his hand and sat on the porch in silence. Presently he began to wail.

  Isaac despite a high-pitched laugh had a deep cavernous voice and the wailing that came from his throat was unearthly. The rhythm was broken, now drawn-out, now interrupted by a patter of small intimate sounds as if he were conversing with someone. I thought of an ancient Chinese lyric I knew:

  It was our fathers’ sacrifice,

  It may be they were eased.

  We know no harm to come of it;

  It may be God is pleased.

  I don’t know how long Isaac wailed, but it was almost dark when he stopped and called out to me to approach. Nor did he explain anything, although we sat out on the porch until late, after we had eaten, talking by candlelight. In the morning when I awoke he wasn’t there. He reappeared after about an hour with a trout in one hand, freshly caught, and an eel in the other.

  He said, “We had a visitor in the night.” He showed me where a morepork had alighted on one of the poles and inspected us in the small hours as we slept, then swept down grazing his brow as it flew off. “It was a messenger,” he said.

  “What did it mean?” I said. He didn’t explain that either.

  Isaac was not an educated man. He was twenty-one he told me before he learned to speak English. His first English sentence was, “I must not speak Maori.” At fourteen he was apprenticed to a timber mill; since then he had gone from one job to another, hence the nickname Go-Go. Even though he had lived as a young man only a short ride from town, he had not seen the inside of a shop or of a white man’s house until he was married. His, like mine, was a talking culture and it was only later, thinking about some hints and taunts he let drop that I understood his wailing as a lament for the dispossession of his people. Much of the land we walked over and slept on, linked to his birthright, had been alienated by successive Acts of Parliament; still more land in other valleys had been stolen through sales enforced by government men, using the tactics of intimidation which would later be perfected on the African continent by a man called Robert Mugabe. Walking out of the valley, Isaac dropped a few hints. That was all. He was without guile or self pity. He knew I would piece things together later in my own way.

  What remains for me is less a sense of grievance on Isaac’s part than a sense of the strangeness of it all. Sitting out with him on the porch that last night, our faces etched in a pool of yellow candlelight, I remember thinking to myself: I am being initiated into a mystery that will remain for me a mystery. It is said that one sees most by candlelight, because one sees little. But there is a magic circle. In it all things shine. Although I failed to penetrate the circle and came away that night understanding very little, afterwards whenever I came in contact with Isaac’s people, in schools and factories and on farms or in their small houses painted in bright colours, I found myself regarding them differently. I no longer saw them as belonging to a white man’s world. Perhaps that was when I first began to think of myself as someone like them, as an alien. I think Isaac’s grandfather was wrong when he said the hardest thing in life is to survive. I think the hardest thing may be to stay alive and feel like a stranger in your own land.

  Isaac, you may think, is a digression. But even psychologists must be allowed their foibles. We cannot be expected always to stick to the point. Isaac said to me once, “I can never leave this place. Even if I was on the moon, I would still be living here.” Which brings me back to Huey and his father. Isaac would have despised Huey’s father.

  FOUR

  I SPENT TWO very happy years in Cornford. I only got there because of a man I met in the Navy, Lieutenant-Commander Fox. Hubert Fox taught me to navigate. But more important than that he introduced me to books. He used to do book reviews for a London journal on the long voyages at sea. I didn’t know what a book review was. There were no books in my mother’s house, no room for books.
We lived in a two-up, two-down, by the London docks, with a little scullery attached. My father was an unemployed dock labourer. My mother could read. My father couldn’t. My maternal grandparents couldn’t read either. I don’t know when I began to covet books and admire literary people. My parents brought home a book from the market once for my birthday, Walpole’s Castle of Otranto. It was miles over my head. As I say, I didn’t know what a book review was until I joined the Navy. Hubert Fox introduced me to Alexander Dumas—The Count of Monte Christo—and Charles Dickens, Joseph Conrad and many other authors I had never heard about, like Darwin and Galsworthy and Karl Marx. I read short-story writers—John Masefield and Chekhov and Katherine Mansfield. And some poetry. But I found poetry difficult, and still do. Hubert Fox was my mentor, an inspiration really. He it was (was it? or was it the chief petty officer?) who gave me the cardinal advice—“Never volunteer, never get separated from your gear, and always do a piddle when you can.” Certainly it was Hubert Fox who at the end of the war when I was demobbed urged me to enrol at university. “There’s a bursary waiting for chaps like you,” he said. “Take it.” But I questioned this. I couldn’t imagine being entitled to a grant as of right. I insisted on going before a selection board in order to qualify. Even so, I nearly didn’t make it. I was working in the Juvenile Court at Stratford-atte-Bow in the east end of London as an office boy, and my section head objected. He said to me, “Who will sweep the streets if you go to university?” He thought I was being a clever shins. But I come from a background where nothing is achieved without overcoming some difficulty. Obstacles were built in. It was like my youth-entry training on the path to becoming an officer. I didn’t fit the pattern. One of the examiners whose arms were tired from all the gold braid he had to wear said to me, “What would they say if you appeared walking down your street looking like one of us?” I replied, “They would say, sir, with respect, ‘Bloody good luck to you!’”

  Anyway I ignored my section head and enrolled in the London School of Economics as a mature ex-Services student, and got a certificate, and as a result I fetched up in Cornford New Zealand.

  You must forgive me talking about myself. I don’t often get the chance, but it so happens the Year of the Monkey is here. I was born in the Year of the Monkey, or so I was told by one of my aunts. Surely a chap can talk about himself in his own year?

  To amplify my aunt’s statement, which I don’t fully understand: when my parents died, my brother and I divided up the inheritance. There was the furniture and there was a miniature in brass of three monkeys that had belonged to my mother—“Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil”. My brother Tom said to me, “You don’t want the furniture, do you?” Tom wanted to give it to someone he knew in need. “Of course not,” I said. So I got the monkeys. It was my sole inheritance.

  I have always had trouble with language. At university I had to listen to lectures that seemed to go on for hours, interminably, and then try to convert my thoughts into the written word for the weekly essay. I couldn’t do it. I sweated. I agonised. Then I remembered my mentor in the Navy, Hubert Fox, telling me it had taken him three weeks to write his first book review. He talked about his “intolerable wrestle with words and language” (I think it was a quote from T.S.Eliot). So I persisted. It used to take me six and a half hours to write a single page of foolscap. I still don’t write easily, my thoughts get in the way. Hubert Fox was one of the fighting Foxes in the Quaker tradition. He was a Quaker from Devon.

  After I qualified from the LSE with a certificate in Social Sciences I became a probation officer in London. But the pay was so poor I couldn’t afford to buy books. By now I was reading so much in the literature of novels and poetry, I needed books even more than I needed fresh air. I had discovered that even the literature of fiction and fantasy, for all its polly-wolly-steeplejack words that needed a ladder to be negotiated, could be a source of conjecture and enlightenment about human behaviour. I sent off applications for positions in Canada, Hong Kong, South Africa, India, Australia, and accidentally landed an interview in London which led to a job in New Zealand instead. In Cornford New Zealand, on my probation officer’s salary at the age of twenty-seven, I could afford to buy books for the first time in my adult life.

  After Cornford I came to Wellington and enrolled at university part-time while I worked in the Prisons Department. I started my degree in education and switched to psychology. Later I got an honours bursary and worked as a prison psychologist. Later still I became a lecturer in abnormal psychology at the university, and then professor. And so on. Incidentally the chap in New Zealand who influenced me to go back to university was a social scientist, Ralph Travis. Lovely man (he introduced me to Joyce Carey and Robert Tressell’s Ragged Trousered Philanthropists). Ralph was another Quaker. He’s the one who told me the Chinese lyric.

  During the long bus ride back to Wellington on Saturday, after dining with Andrew who must be over a hundred now if he is reading this, I tried not to speculate on the outcome of the trial. But Andrew’s prognosis bothered me. I knew a little about juries, how flighty and irrational they could be, yet I could well believe that if one juror had fainted on being shown a photograph of Huey’s victim, the rest of the jury had probably made up its mind already. The man’s head according to the police surgeon had all but disappeared, and according to a scientist called in to attest to the ferocity of the attack the blood was spattered halfway up the chimney piece. Lawrence had tried to stop the photographs going up, he told me, but the judge overruled him. Had Andrew been on the case, I might have felt differently. He had fought alongside the Maori Battalion in the Second World War; he understood concepts of Maori custom and tangatawhenua that were quite foreign to other judges. He not only understood an act committed with animus furandi, the state of mind which converts mere “removal” of an object into “theft”, but he could conceive of a lack of animus furandi, which was why he had been able to acquit with a clear conscience the young man who came before him charged with stealing a war medal. Andrew had instinctively understood that when the accused began to remove the medal from its glass case, he was powerless to stop himself because he had been overcome by a feeling he had never experienced in his life. I suppose the reason the incident came back to me with such force was that the young Maori who committed the crime had been born Pakeha but then adopted out at the age of three months, Maori style, to an uncle in one of the Taranaki tribes. In a perverse way, he reminded me of Huey.

  My use of the word “sadistic” still bothered me. As an old pro, I prided myself on being able to convert the most foul language into proper testimony for the benefit of the bench. I once had to introduce a client described as “a f------git” and “a belly-aching bastard” to the magistrate. I presented the man, a ship’s waiter accused of pilfering, as “a somewhat colourful individual” who “exhibited a tendency to complain too much”. Easy, when you know how. So why had I abandoned the training of a lifetime and let myself go so irresponsibly? I wasn’t ancient. I was sixty-six. (I’m eighty-two now.) Was I losing it?

  Next thing, I told myself, I shall be spouting obscenities in public like Andrew.

  Lawrence, being Lawrence, made light of it. “A peccadillo, Ches.” Lawrence had pronounced himself delighted with my evidence-in-chief. But I was aware that, having asked me for a diagnosis, he was generous enough not to remind me that I had failed to provide one.

  On the bus I fell into a half-dream. I may have slept. Waking, I saw the courtroom in uproar and Huey in the dock struggling with two guards. He was trying to vault the railing. The guards overpowered him and he was taken down below. Then Lawrence appeared and said to me, “Huey says you don’t believe him any more. Is it true?”

  I woke sweating, holding my cane collapsed in half across my knees (I must have seized it in my sleep without realising). Was it true? Or was it that doubting Huey, I had come to doubt myself?

  Lisbeth was at the bus station to meet me. She drove me home. We ate a late lunch (Gree
k salad and homemade bread with cumin seeds) and afterwards I went with her to the supermarket in Courtenay Place. I’m not much use at shopping but I can choose the wines by asking around—I usually know the variety I want—and can lift heavy bags for her. Lisbeth has a bad knee. Her feet suffered from wearing the wrong shoes during the war and she’s inclined to trip and lose her balance. If we’re out walking, she has to take my arm for support. People think she is steadying me, whereas in fact it is the reverse. Funny that. At home she looks after the money and the accounts and I do my share of the cooking.

  Later when we were having a drink before dinner, the phone rang. It was her cousin Bubi ringing from Melbourne. They had a spirited conversation in German. Lisbeth put the phone down and said, “What’s ‘hurried to find concealment’ in four letters?”

  “I thought you’d finished the crossword.”

  “I have, except for this clue. I thought it was hide, but it doesn’t fit.”

  “How have you spelled it?”

  “Ah! Clever Charlie. H-i-e-d. Of course.”

  A few minutes later she said to me, “What’s he like?”

  “Who? Huey Dunstan?”

  “The boy. Yes.”

  “Funny you say that. Lawrence calls him ‘the boy’ too. He’s twenty-two. Bit of a loner, I’d say. I got the impression that he’d been properly brought up. Poor family, but decent people. Father a disciplinarian but seems to care for his kids. Apparently, after he moved the family away from town, he let the children go to the schools of their choice. So why throw little Huey out at the age of seven?”