The Crime of Huey Dunstan

by James Mcneish

  “You mean you dreamed what Lawrence said the uncle said, ‘It happened to me too’? I don’t find that strange. I’m sure your psyche doesn’t. But now I think about it, it seems a long way to go to Paremoremo to talk to Huey if that’s all we have to go on. It’s a bit flimsy.”

  “I’m glad you said ‘we’. You’ve forgotten your own contribution: what the mother said. It’s not that flimsy. Mind if I get some air?” I slid the sunroof back and opened the passenger window on my side. The noise and smells of the countryside flooded in. The fresh cow dung of the Mangaweka countryside! Delicious. I closed the window again. “Lawrence is a bastard,” I said. “Know what he said to me? He said Uncle Jacob turning up like that was his first real indication that Huey wasn’t lying.”

  “Well. What’s wrong with that?”

  “I was shocked. I said to Lawrence, ‘You mean all this time you’ve been doubting him?’ ‘It helps to be sure,’ Lawrence said. I was genuinely shocked.”

  Lisbeth was laughing to herself. She swerved taking a corner.

  “Steady on,” I said. “What are you giggling about?”

  “Fancy being shocked by that. Darling, he’s a lawyer! Sorry, I’ll slow down. Is that better?” She reached across and squeezed my hand. “Underneath you’re still a romantic.”

  We reached Hamilton in the late afternoon and I went on to Auckland the next morning by bus. I left Lisbeth with friends in Lake Crescent where we spent the night. It was many years since I had been to Paremoremo. Situated in rolling countryside north of Auckland, the prison was one of the first electric-locking cathedrals in Christendom; it had been built to stop Houdinis in their tracks, or tricks, a hymn to the chartists of maximum security. But it struck me rather as “a monument to the vindictiveness of a retarded and over-protective society” (so I wrote in an English journal when the prison first opened). It was not a wise statement for a newly recruited member of the Prisons Department to make, and it nearly cost me my job. Still, in 1968 I was young and gaffe-happy and as a crusading Quaker, as I imagined myself to be, made no secret of my views. I told my boss in Wellington that I had no reason to love those in whom the urge to punish was greater than the love of their fellow Christians, a conceit that I hold to this day. But now, waiting in the visitors’ area for Inmate No. 763 to be brought in, and learning that he was enrolled in a computer-training program on arboriculture, I wondered if some things perhaps were not changing for the better.

  “Bright lad,” said the guard who accompanied me into what appeared a large open space that clanged and echoed and secreted sharp odours. “He’s probably in the gym.” The guard went away. Ten minutes later he returned. “D’you mind waiting a bit longer, sir? We’re a bit busy this morning.”

  I had arrived by appointment, having written ahead and then telephoned before leaving Hamilton. I was trying to identify the smell. I remembered a radio news item Lisbeth had heard: there had been a riot in which the inmates of C Block had holed up their guards and burned all the mattresses. A smell reminiscent of singed flesh clung to the place. I felt uneasy. I stood up and began to pace up and down. I seemed to be the only visitor. I had been uneasy, I realised, ever since learning that Huey had been transferred from Cornford.

  A voice said, “I’m afraid there’s been a mistake, professor. Could you come back next week?” It was a different guard this time.

  “What’s happened?”

  “I think next week, sir, should be all right. If you wouldn’t mind. I’ll see you out.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” I said, “till you tell me what has happened.”

  “Best to give us a bell first, sir. I’ve written the extension down for you.

  “Rules,” he added. He was an older man. I sensed an admonitory finger pressed to his lips and caught a north country accent. He was a Limey, probably Newcastle.

  “Listen, chum. I was manning a quarter-deck when you was just a twinkle in your Da’s eye. Where is he?”

  “I’ve called you a cab, sir.” The guard pressed another piece of paper into my hand. “Give this to the driver.” An hour and a half later I was standing by Huey’s bedside at Middlemore Hospital.

  The bed was screened off. He was in an open ward. I couldn’t speak to him yet, the nurse said. She guided me to a chair at the foot of the bed where there was a policeman on duty. We shook hands. “Do I know you, sir? I believe I do.” The police officer claimed to know me from a previous incarnation, presumably the Prisons Department. He was doing a crossword puzzle. Presently I heard a screen being moved by the bed. A smell like gypsum paste assailed me. A few moments later the screen was moved again. A male voice spoke in my ear and announced itself as belonging to the house surgeon.

  “We’ve had to pin the bone. Surgery was necessary. If you can wait till lunch time, professor, you’ll be able to see him.”

  They brought us lunch on a tray. The policeman ate my spuds and I ate his carrots. By the time we’d finished we were chatting amicably; he had almost completed his crossword and I had worked out roughly what had happened at Paremoremo.

  It seemed that Lawrence had been sending Huey books to read. First books, then a transistor radio. Huey had arrived a rookie, with no idea of what to expect. At first he had been able to insulate himself from the gangs, but before long he was being preyed on—favours for sex, favours for cigarettes, for a pen, a pair of bootlaces, favours to be allowed to queue in order to make a telephone call. He was allowed to keep the books but not the radio. Then a televison set arrived from Lawrence. A couple of days later two hoods accosted Huey in his cell and demanded the TV set. Huey refused to give it up. In the cell was a fixed bed with a concrete plinth running round it. One of them got Huey down with his forearm spread out on the plinth, the other one stamped on it, breaking the arm in two places.

  He was admitted to hospital during the night. The surgeon who operated cut open the arm, intending to plate it on the inside; but in the theatre Huey vomited, unable to tolerate the anaesthetic; he had to be taken out and made to fast and brought back for a second operation. He was woozy still from the anaesthetic, the nurse said.

  It was nearly three in the afternoon when the screens were taken away and we were finally able to talk. “Remember me?” I said.

  “Yeah, sure. They told me. Sorry I can’t shake your paw, prof.”

  As a result of the double break, they had had to pin the bone, Huey said. The right forearm was now fixed on the outside, with a rigid back-slab and pins above and below the breaks. The smell of gypsum was still strong but when I leaned forward to catch what he was saying, the particular odour of him I remembered from our first meeting returned—a faint aroma of vinegar. He talked in his light elfin voice about the operation and said his father and mother might be coming to see him; I asked about the computer course he was taking and when we had done with that there was an awkward silence.

  “By the way, I’m left-handed,” I said. “So we can shake after al.” He took my outstretched hand in his left hand but dropped it quickly. The mistrust and pathological resistance to being touched that I had read into what the mother said, was still there. His palm felt clammy. I had hoped to be able to introduce his Uncle Jacob into the conversation, but it was hopeless. There was bustle and noise. Someone was listening to a race commentary. I had forgotten how public public wards could be. The policeman was sitting there. I heard him say: “Excuse me.”

  “Not now,” I said.

  “Excuse me, sir.”

  Sharper now. It wasn’t the policeman, it was the house surgeon. He brushed past me. I heard him speak to Huey and to someone else. I heard the policeman say, “I’ll let them know, doctor.” Then he went away.

  “They’re keeping me another night,” Huey said to me. There was a risk of infection, I gathered, and a danger of swelling or damage to the nerves.

  I said, “In that case, I’ll see if I can come back in the morning.”

  I stood up, then sat down again. “Huey, do you remember a man
called Sparrow?”

  “He was the prosecutor, wasn’t he? I remember. He gave you a hard time, prof.”

  “Yes, he did. Remember what the judge called him?”

  “Nope.”

  “He called him Starling. He made a mistake.”

  “Oh shit. Did he?”

  “One day I’ll tell you about Starling.” I leaned forward. “Huey, before I go. There’s a chance that your counsel might be able to appeal against your conviction, it’s only a chance you understand. Don’t read anything into it at this stage. But how would you feel about that?”

  “You mean—? Don’t know. I never thought about it.”

  “Well, think now.”

  “I’m with you.”

  “Well,” I said. “Well?”

  “Well great, prof.”

  “You’re not in a church, Huey. You don’t have to whisper. How would you feel about it?”

  “Yeah, great. GREAT. Big time.”

  “OK. Now I’l tel you about Starling. He was a notorious English judge.” And I told him the anecdote about the foreman of the jury refusing to convict William Penn, the Quaker, and Judge Starling saying that if he didn’t, he would cut off his nose.

  “So you can thank your stars, Huey, that you’re not living in the seventeenth century.”

  “You mean even if we lose the appeal, prof, I get to keep my snout?”

  “Yes.” I laughed out loud. Huey laughed. He had a high girlish laugh. We laughed together. On top of the anguish, on top of all the lunacy, there flickered this little sanity between us.

  TWELVE

  THE NEXT MORNING when I came to the ward, they were moving Huey into a private room. I had telephoned Lawrence the night before and explained the situation. Somehow in the interim Lawrence had pulled some strings and arranged the move.

  The policeman was still there with his crossword. I asked him if he would mind going out into the corridor while I talked to Huey. “Before I do,” he said, “what’s ‘confinement’ in six, and it doesn’t begin with ‘P’?” (But I think he made that up.)

  I asked Huey how the arm was.

  He said something non-committal about being fitted with a front-end loader. Apparently he had been taken back for some further cladding. The forearm was now encased in a layer of gauze.

  “Huey,” I said. “I’m going to ask you something personal. Were you brought up in a religious way?” There was no answer and I knew at once that he was on his guard.

  “You said to someone, I think it was one of your cousins, before you gave yourself up to the police—You said, ‘I have committed a sin, the first sin.’”

  “My cousin, yeah. That was my cousin, Nat. He was the first one I told.”

  “Before you rang your father? Yes. And your father took you to the police. I think your actual words were, ‘I have committed the first sin, a mortal sin.’”

  “Yeah. I think so.”

  “It’s just, Huey—just that if I was going to tell one of my friends I’d killed someone, I don’t think I would put it quite like that. That’s why I asked you if you were brought up religious.”

  “Sort of, yeah. Shucks.”

  It was a long time since I had heard such an old-fashioned term as shucks. I smiled.

  “Some question. Yeah, we was all brought up that way. My uncles, my aunties, not my Dad. He was brought up not to speak Maori, he told me. It was forbidden. My old man’s Presbyterian. We followed the Prophet Rua—Rua Kenana. Rua got it from Te Kooti. Ringatu, it’s the Ringatu religion. I was brought up like that. I’m one of the People of the Book, I was told. That’s on my Mum’s side.”

  “But not your father?”

  He paused.

  “My Dad’s from Gissy. He’s Scotch, half-Scotch. My Dad grew up to follow Uncle Ben. Ben’s Gissy too.”

  “Gissy?”

  “Gisborne. No, Wairoa. Ben was from Wairoa. Hey, bro. What’s this about?”

  “I’m interested, Huey.”

  “Are you religious?” he said to me.

  “I’m a Quaker.”

  “What’s that?” he said.

  I was picking up mixed signals. Huey was suspicious of my questions yet at the same time I sensed excitement and curiosity. He wanted to know where I was leading him. He was curious but not, I felt, desperate—or not desperate enough for me to risk bringing up what his Uncle Jacob had said. I calculated that I had about twenty minutes, half an hour at most, before he would be discharged and sent back to Paremoremo. I could not afford to wait and I could not afford a direct question or he might choke altogether. Instead I talked about George Fox, the founding Quaker, and Elizabeth Fry and some other famous Quakers like William Penn of Pennsylvania and David Lean and President Nixon.

  “President Nixon was a Quaker,” I said. “Makes you weep, doesn’t it.” He had never heard of President Nixon or any of them. I asked Huey a question about his sister Amy, but it elicited no response. I was losing him. I wanted to reach out and touch him, to hold his hand and squeeze it and remind him we were on the same side, but hesitated. I moved my chair closer to the bed and leaned forward.

  “What are you doing?” he said.

  I had unwittingly spooked him. My maternal grandfather had a habit of moving his head forward and his ears back which I had seen him do when he took his pocket watch to the pawnshop on Monday mornings, and I had mimicked the habit as a nipper, presumably to help me overcome a natural shyness and also as a way of getting back at my older brother. Over the years I had developed the habit until it became part of my personality. At the university I had sometimes done it to gain attention; it was the only way I could get my adult students to sit up and look at me. Now, leaning forward and wiggling my ears like a golliwog, I had done it to Huey unintentionally, and spooked him. Our heads were almost touching.

  A nurse came in and spoke to him, then went out. I heard Huey pick up a glass and swallow something.

  I said, “Huey, listen. In some ways we are like all people. In some ways we are like some other people. And in some ways we are like no other people. I’m trying to figure out what you are, you and your father, so you have to bear with me. Who’s Ben? Tell me about your uncles.”

  “There’s dozens of uncles on my Mum’s side. That’s how we lost our land, eh. In the Wars. The land was confiscated. My Mum’s people were Tuhoe. Ben’s not. He’s Ngati-Porou. Everyone knows about it, Ben Biddle. You know about Ben Biddle?”

  “Not really.”

  “Uncle Ben—this goes way back, maybe he’s my great, great, great uncle. You ever hear of the Mohaka massacre? 1869. My Aunty Polly told me. She’s the wise one, she’s the kaumatua of the family. She called it Te Kooti’s revenge after they shipped him off to the Chathams, didn’t they, the government, ’cause he was a troublemaker? But Te Kooti escaped and came back and got stuck into them at Mohaka, she said. Ben Biddle was a scout in the government side, one of the friendlies. After the massacre he spied on Te Kooti’s camp and tracked the horses Te Kooti had looted from the government side. One night Uncle Ben loosed a hundred and fifty horses from the corral. The story is that when Te Kooti got to Waikaremoana, he wanted to go horseracing on the beach to celebrate the massacre but all that turned up was three clapped-out old nags. Uncle Ben had loosed all the others. Aunty Polly spits on him, calls him kupapa. She’s dead now. But the old people they remember. My Dad was brought up by his uncle Ben. I was baptised Ringatu after Te Kooti’s way but my Dad wouldn’t have anything to do with it. Ringatu, it means the upraised hand. That’s the faith. I was baptised twice, I think, once in a river. Was that what you wanted to know?”

  Huey fell silent. It had been a long speech, coming from him.

  I said, “And was that why his people left Wairoa and came to Cornford? Your father’s people.”

  “He doesn’t talk about it but I think he got ripped up at school by some of his cousins.”

  “Yes, I understand. Because of kupapa?”

  “Think so. He went the Pakeha way.
”

  Kupapa, collaborator. It explained something to me.

  “And was that why when you were sent away it wasn’t to your aunty Polly or any of the other aunties but this Glen person?

  “You needn’t answer that if you don’t want to,” I said.

  He had fallen silent again.

  I was stuck, my mind in tumult. Talk of uncles. My own Uncle Jack came to mind. My father had lost two brothers, one of them Uncle Jack who died at Ypres in the First World War, the other one was gassed in France but survived only to die after the war in the 1918 flu epidemic. I remember my father telling me Uncle Jack was crouched down waiting for the order to go over the top and he got cramp in the leg. He stood up to stretch his leg, and a sniper got him. I thought of Uncle Jack waiting in the trenches and I pictured Huey in the bed with his arm pinned, waiting in a state of wild surmise.

  Timing, Chesney, I told myself. Don’t rush it.

  But I had to keep the momentum.

  I said: “I had an uncle, Huey, who went to the 1914 war—”

  “Oh sure. Gallipoli. I had two uncles in that. Only one came back. Then Maleme, next war. Crete. Another uncle.”

  Maori Battalion, I thought to myself.

  “Crete. Who was that, Huey?”

  “Wiremu, Uncle Wiremu. Another uncle went to Vietnam, Leo. There’s heaps of war in our family.”

  I waited a moment, then said: “One of your uncles came to see us last week.”

  “Which one?”

  “Hakopa, I think his name is. That’s Jacob, isn’t it?”

  “He’s Leo’s son. He’s also called Leo, but he was baptised Jacob. Leo’s OK. Bit slow. He was at the trial.”

  “Yes. He’s the one I think you said it would be worth talking to, only your counsel forgot. Jacob turned up at his chambers last week.”

  “What for?”

  “He didn’t say much. On the other hand what he said was—well, you tell me. What he said was, ‘It happened to me too.’”

  I waited. There was a slight movement from the bed.