‘A hundred and fifty pounds.’
‘And what vegetable?’
‘Carrots,’ and tears trickled down the cheeks of the matriarch. ‘He never liked mashed turnips and I made him eat them. I am a stubborn old woman who wants her own way.’ And the young matrons moved closer to her like chicks to an old hen, ‘Oh, no — no — no.’
By late afternoon of the next day, all was ready. The path was cleared. The grave was dug. The wreaths were made. The church was swept and cleaned. The beds in the vicarage were made up with fresh linen. The village was waiting and listening, and it was the children who heard first the canoes coming up the river, and they ran down the main path calling, ‘They come now. They bring him now.’
In his tiny house the teacher heard the running footfalls on the path to the river bank, and he went quickly to the door and could not open it. To join the others was to care, and to care was to live and to suffer.
The tribe waited on the bank, and when the canoes came around the bend in the river, the old people began a chant of sorrow in the ancient language which the young no longer knew. ‘Aie-aie-aie — he has left us — aie - aie-aie’, until even the breeze seemed to whisper it, and the trees to sigh of it.
Then the men of the tribe waded into the icy water to meet the canoes, each man taking his turn carrying the body of the young vicar to the black sands of Kingcome, while the women sang an ancient hymn to a Supreme Being whose existence had been sensed before the white man had ever come to this land. And when the body had been prepared for burial, six men carried the box into the church, the tribe waiting there. They placed it on trestles before the altar, and T. P., the elder, took his place at the lectern which was the golden eagle and spoke the Lord’s Prayer, the tribe joining him:
Kunuh Umpa Laka ike Mayauntla
Hyis Glikum us: gak la hyis gikasa us;
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Au uma gagila gakunuh Laka yaksami.
In the night the only light in the village was that from the lantern which Jim had placed in the little church of Saint George. The village was quiet and at peace.
In her house old Marta lay awake in the dark, and she said softly, ‘Walk straight on, my son. Do not look back. Do not turn your head. You are going to the land of our Lord.’
In the last house of the village, Peter, the carver, lay awake also, and he remembered that in the old days when a great chief died, his soul came straight back to the village in the sleek black body of a raven, and the soul of a lesser man returned in his own body no higher than an inch, or as a ha-moo-moo, a butterfly. Peter did not believe this literally. Yet it seemed likely to him that the soul of the young vicar would return to the village he had loved, as would his own, and surely it would be most inhospitable if no one was awake and waiting. Thus he dressed and sat on the top step of his house in the dark night, and hearing the rustle of some small night creature he, too, spoke softly, ‘It is only old Peter, the carver, who waits here, friend.’
Past the village flowed the river, like time, like life itself, waiting for the swimmer to come again on his way to the climax of his adventurous life, and to the end for which he had been made.
Wa Laum (That is all)
I Heard The Owl Call My Name Page 12
