The Shark God

by Charles Montgomery

  So why would a regular guy like Stanley buy into such an outrageous myth? There was no doubt about his allegiance. Stanley lived in Port Resolution, but he had hiked over the mountain to celebrate tomorrow’s John Frum Sabbath with Chief Wan. But was he really desperate for Spam? And if Sulphur Bay was the epicenter of the Frum movement, why had I found that village empty? There were many questions, but the chief had forced two more shells of kava on us both, and it had simplified us, and perhaps only that one last question actually left my mouth. Anyway, it was the only one Stanley heard.

  “Sulphur Bay is dead because of Fred,” he said. The leper prophet. “Didn’t you see what Fred did over by the volcano? There was once wan bigfala lake on the ash plain. Fred used magic to drain it. He made a flood. It destroyed the river and killed some houses in Sulphur Bay. Fred told everyone that God did this, but we know it was Fred using kastom magic. Isag Wan had to protect the people from Fred. That’s why he moved out of Sulphur Bay to this village, Namakara.”

  “Yes, Fred is a bad man,” I said, now wishing Stanley’s words would match the rhythm of his lips, which seemed to be moving in slow motion. His voice was like mud. Now it was trailing off into an incomprehensible mumble. Stanley was sitting next to me, but the words seemed to issue from far beyond the edge of the clearing, where they mingled with the whirring of thousands of cicadas and the murmuring of the forest. The stars, however, looked close enough to touch. So did the fires that glowed like jewels in the dirt, and the ends of cigarettes that moved like fireflies, and the eyes of the pigs and dogs that flashed in the shadows. Tranquillity settled like a fog on my thoughts. My knee rested against Stanley’s knee, and it was warm and good.

  A boy took my hand and led me through the trees into a hamlet of darkened huts. A warm light shone from one of them. The boy removed a thatch screen, and I stepped inside to find my pack, an oil lamp, and a plate of steaming food. It was the rice and tuna I had given the chief. I ate, then fell into a deep sleep.

  I awoke well after dawn with the gray sponge of kava still hanging in my head and a hint of diarrhea stirring in my gut. Isag Wan was squatting in the dirt outside my hut, agitated. At his heel, two piglets fought over a banana peel. The chief had a watch, which he checked three times before losing patience and calling me out. He led me to a dirt plaza in the middle of the village, and then we stood at attention together. After an uncomfortable minute, the chief consulted his watch again and coughed loudly. It was eight o’clock. Women stopped their sweeping. Pigs ceased rooting. The village fell silent. Even the volcano seemed to stop rumbling for a few solemn moments. Then a whistle sounded, and on a hillock in front of us, the Stars and Stripes was hauled up a bamboo flagpole. The cult of John Frum was alive and well.

  The chief led me to his “office,” a broad hut decked with grass mats and filled with bric-a-brac. There were wooden clubs and woven baskets, an airbrushed poster of frolicking cats and lions, a picture of a white Jesus, and a calendar with scenes from the coast of France. A carved wooden eagle stood on the table. Dominating it all was a crude painting of Yasur, with slogans painted across its slopes in a mix of Bislama and English. I remember one of them:

  MANI HEM GUD LAIF

  BUT MANI I MEKEM MAN I STAP

  RAPEM BROTHA MO SISTA BLONG HEM

  Money is good life, but money makes a man exist to rape his brother and sister. It didn’t quite seem like a plea for cargo. Isag Wan cleared his throat, tossed his cigarette to a lad sitting on the floor, and, with the boy translating, told me his version of Tannese history. It paralleled those I had read in Port Vila, though in Isag Wan’s version, his own grandfather had been the first to champion John Frum’s pro-kastom ideas. The chief was the heir to a spiritual dynasty.

  “So has John Frum returned, or are you still waiting for him to come back from America with his ship full of cargo?” I asked.

  “John Frum speaks to me often.”

  “So he has returned,” I said, remembering my afternoon of ice cream back at the Joy Bible College in Port Vila. The missionaries had insisted that their friend, John Rush, had converted the chief. “John Frum. John Rush. John Frum is John Rush!” I said. “Right?”

  “No! I remember John Rush. He came and told us John Frum was inside of him, but I never believed it. John Rush is only wan man blong church. We don’t need church. We need to stay together and follow John Frum.”

  “So where is John Frum?”

  “Away.”

  “Then how can you talk to him?”

  “He sends others to talk with me. Spirit men. They come through the volcano. There’s a road underneath the fire, it goes all the way to ’Merica.”

  We were speeding into fantastical terrain. I certainly didn’t want to break the momentum by questioning the physics of the chief’s assertions. I encouraged him:

  “Maybe you have been to America…”

  “Yes, I have!”

  “How did you get there? Through the volcano? Did John Frum take you?”

  Isag Wan glared at me, eyes narrowing with irritation. Of course not, he said. A visitor to Tanna had paid for him to fly to America on a plane. How? With his Visa card, of course.

  “I have seen Atlanta, Dallas, and Washington,” said the chief. “I went to the White House and I spoke to President Clinton’s general secretary. He was happy to talk to me because he knew that Tanna has flown the U.S. flag for so many years. But ’Merica made me very sad. Too many trucks, too many poor people. Did you know that some men there have no land at all? I met them on the road. I gave them all the money I had in my pockets.”

  It was too mundane a story to doubt, though I wished the chief would get back to miracle talk.

  “I thought John Frum promised to make you all rich, like Americans.”

  “We will not follow ’Merica. ’Merica should follow us. Look,” said Isag Wan, doodling in the sand with a stick. “’Merica has lost the road. They think money is Jesus. ’Merica must remember the promise of John. Remember the true path.”

  I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. I could feel the dregs of the previous night’s kava pulsing behind my temples. “The true path—”

  “The life way. Don’t follow government. Don’t follow church. Don’t follow money. Follow kastom and peace. That’s what Jesus and John Frum say.”

  “But you don’t have peace here. You’ve abandoned Sulphur Bay. You are fighting your old neighbors. Stanley told me you are fighting with this man—this prophet—Fred.”

  “Fred is not a prophet. He is an evil man. He tells people he has the spirit of John Frum, but it’s a lie. I know where Fred’s power comes from. He is using the power of the black sea snake to trick us all.”

  The whole Fred business had started two years before, said Isag Wan. “Fred made bad talk. He told the old men in Sulphur Bay to kill nineteen pigs and drink nineteen shells of kava in order to wash away their sins, but look what happened instead: he broke the lake and he washed away half the village. Fred promised to turn all the old men in Sulphur Bay into children again. But the old men are still old! Fred promised that if people followed him to the top of the mountain, Jesus would come and take them all to heaven. Jesus didn’t come! He said he would stop the sun from setting, but look at the sky. Night still comes. Fred lies!” The chief paused to swipe at a dog that had poked its head through the door of his shack. Embers flew from the end of his stick. “Worst of all, Fred told people to destroy the last of the kastom stones, and now he is trying to make everyone go back to the church. That’s why we had to leave Sulphur Bay. It belongs to the church again. Namakara is the new home for John Frum.”

  “So Fred lives in Sulphur Bay.”

  “No! He has taken the people to live on the volcano. He told everyone he is the Messiah and he would take them to heaven if they followed him. But they still haven’t gone to heaven. Lies!”

  I spent the afternoon lounging in the bathtub-warm waters of the creek and trying to clear the kava from my head. At dusk a drum
sounded, and I followed it back to the plaza in the middle of the village. The John Frum Sabbath was beginning. Boys poked at a bonfire. The pilgrims from Port Resolution shuffled quietly across the dirt, carrying four guitars, a homemade banjo, and a couple of bongo drums. Stanley was with them, still wearing his tequila T-shirt. The people settled onto palm mats. The women made a circle around the men. Then the band started to play, slowly at first, softly; then the women joined in and sang a song tinged with an autumnal sadness that made me homesick. The night sped on, and Stanley’s band gave way to three others. The rhythm quickened until the chorus rose in great triumphant arcs, suggesting a time of flowers and love and smiles and cumulonimbus clouds touched with sunset gold. “Namakara! Namakara! Namakara!” The people chanted the name of the village over and over again to the stars.

  Now more than a hundred figures had emerged from the shadows: men, women, and children, all swaying in loose formation around the band. The women had glitter paint around their eyes and wore rainbow-painted grass skirts. Some of the men wore skirts, too, over their rolled-up trousers. As the music rose toward a crescendo, those grass-skirted bums began to shake. Boys jumped and writhed. The air filled with whoops, chirps, and rhythmic hissing. Stanley bobbed beside me, smiling broadly and touching my elbow: “Come on! Come on! Sssst! Sssst!”

  I saw Isag Wan in his grass skirt and camouflage T-shirt, cigarette burning in the corner of his mouth, his frail frame shaking, his eyes rolling ecstatically. I was struck by the thought that there was nothing very strange going on in Namakara. Whatever its beginnings, the John Frum movement was no more audacious now than any church. The cult had gone mainstream. Frummers have been elected to Vanuatu’s national parliament, and government ministers have attended the annual Frum marches at Sulphur Bay. Ralph Regenvanu, the director of Vanuatu’s National Cultural Center, told me that John Frum was not a ghost or a foreigner or a crazy man. Frum knew exactly what he was doing, and so did the chiefs who have invoked his name—and changed his story—for sixty years: their promises of cargo are simply window dressing for a sophisticated attempt to halt the spiritual disintegration that they feel Christianity causes.

  If that was so, it was almost beside the point that Isag Wan claimed to receive the occasional dispatch through the fiery gullet of the volcano. The chief didn’t pray for the diversion of the white man’s wealth. He wasn’t asking for anything particularly radical from his people. His cargo was the spiritual riches the world would share when churches and governments stopped fighting each other. Or something like that. This, I thought, is what happens to cults when they mellow over time. They become religion.

  Isag Wan didn’t claim to be a prophet. He wasn’t the chosen one. Not like the mysterious Fred, who, depending on whom you asked, was either in direct communication with God or was working a terrible kind of black magic on all who opposed him.

  Above Namakara’s huts and flagpoles, past the darkened folds of jungle, flecks of magma arced like ocher fireworks through the night sky. The mountainside was illuminated, and for just a moment, I was sure I could make out a hint of campfire smoke rising from a distant ridge.

  4

  The Prophet Raises His Hands to the Sky

  The mountain is awake, with utterance

  Of flame and burning rock and thunderous sound—

  Abode of the ancestral spirits who dance

  In blissful fire! Tremors run through the ground

  And through men’s hearts. The people stand dismayed

  By prophecies as mantic ghosts invade

  With alien voice the soothsayers in their trance.

  —JAMES MCAULEY, Captain Quiros

  The nearest village to Fred’s mountain camp was Port Resolution, on the south side of the volcano. I followed Stanley there and found the village chief on the dirt floor of his hut, holding his stomach. There wasn’t much to him. Flies gathered at the edge of his eyes, which had sunk deeply into his skull. Skin hung from his face like soggy paper. A doctor had told the chief that his liver had simply given up trying to process all that kava, but the chief and everyone else in Port Resolution knew that grog wasn’t the problem.

  “It’s Fred,” Stanley told me as we retreated from the hut. “He has poisoned the chief with his magic.”

  Port Resolution was a perfect teardrop of glowing aquamarine nestled against a long sweep of black sand. Palms hung languidly over the beach. Men threw fishnets from outrigger canoes. Steam curled from vents on the forested ridges that led to Yasur. The bay once served as the base for Tanna’s first Presbyterians, but now its two hundred villagers were served by no less than four churches: Presbyterian, Seventh-day Adventist, Assemblies of God, and an outpost of the Neil Thomas Ministries, an evangelical outfit from Australia. The residents drifted back and forth between faiths like butterflies on flowers. There was a Seventh-day Adventist school, which meant that children born to pagan families learned the Bible early on, then switched back to kastom, pigs, and kava when they hit puberty. Church bells rang each morning, but Stanley’s John Frum string band practiced on the soccer field each afternoon, after which we retired to the nakamal for our kava. If a boy was Adventist he couldn’t drink kava, but he was still expected to chew it for his father’s nightly brew. The chief of Port Resolution was pagan, but his son, Wari, was Adventist. That caused a slight problem, since Wari was responsible for the village’s shark stone, a magic rock that could be used to manipulate the habits of sharks and mackerel. He wouldn’t show me the shark stone, but he told me how it worked.

  “If you want to attract fish,” said Wari, “you get some kastom leaves and rub them on the stone and leave it in a special tabu place.”

  “But you are Adventist. You can’t eat fish without scales. You can’t eat shark.”

  “True, but if I am the keeper of the shark stone, it’s tabu to eat the shark anyway. I must treat it like a god. And besides, the ancestors didn’t use the shark stone for catching fish. They used it to make the sharks eat our enemies.”

  Thus Wari dispatched any ideological conflict.

  The villagers had built a kitchen and a clutch of rough bungalows on a bluff above the bay and erected a sign: Port Resolution Yacht Club. There was no dock, but the yacht club had a commodore who went to great lengths to take care of visiting yachties: for example, if the radio forecast a cyclone, it was his job to put special leaves in the ocean in order to calm the wind and waves.

  Nobody wanted to help me track down Fred. No wonder. People were terrified of him. The prophet had eclipsed John Frum as the source of gossip and myth on Tanna. Everyone had a Fred rumor to pass on. Some accused Fred of cursing people. Others said that Fred was a pervert: according to one story, he enjoyed sitting in a pit above which were placed two thin boards; women were forced to step across those boards so Fred could peer up their skirts. Then of course there was the one about Fred throwing babies into the volcano.

  Those were rumors. What seemed more alarming to me was the effect the prophet was having on human geography. Families from all over Tanna had abandoned their gardens in order to join Fred on the volcano. Farmland was going fallow. Pigs were disappearing. Things were falling apart. While Fred’s followers waited for their ride to heaven, they pilfered the gardens of the villages at the base of their mountain. It was whispered that a handful of old folks and children had already died up at Fred’s camp.

  My chance came on my second night in Port Resolution.

  We were crouched on a log at the nakamal, and well into the kava. I asked Stanley if he had a girlfriend.

  “No,” he said. “I’m waiting for a girl with blond hair, like yours.”

  We stared together into the fire, knees touching again. I saw my window.

  “Please, Stanley, if you are my true friend, you will take me to Fred.”

  He smiled broadly, my favorite smile, and he agreed. At least, I thought he agreed. The next morning we started along the beach toward the mountain, Stanley dawdling all the way, scratching his head
, pulling at his clump of dreadlocks. He wanted to sit by the water and philosophize about John Frum.

  He mused that John Frum’s prophesied return from across the water was something like a metaphor, though he didn’t use that word.

  “John Frum told us he would return on the ocean, in a ship. But you know, for us, the sea is wealth. When someone says solwota, they mean wealth.”

  “It’s a symbol—”

  “Yes! So now when good things happen, when foreigners come with money, we know it is John Frum coming home to us.”

  In other words, the golden age that Frum had promised had already arrived, in the form of foreign tourists and international aid.

  “Look at the solar telephone in our village,” Stanley said. “It came from across the water, just like John Frum promised.”

  This seemed a fairly liberal and reasonable interpretation. I liked it, even if the solar phone happened to be a donation from Australia rather than America. Stanley was a postmodernist! He was also full of contradictions. When we reached the end of the beach and started up a faint trail, he slowed to a shuffle. At the edge of the last coconut grove, he stopped.

  “I can’t go up there,” he said.

  “But why? I’m with you. Nothing will happen.”

  “I want to help you, but I can’t. If I see Fred, if I even look at him, I know I will get sick.”

  So much for metaphors. It was apparently easier to massage contemporary meaning into an old myth than it was to confront the potential horrors of the new. Stanley traced me a map in the dirt, and I continued on alone up a series of braided trails. I passed two abandoned villages. The forest changed. The benevolent jungle of Port Resolution gave way to a ragged and desperate landscape of stumps, cracked coconut palms, and clinging brambles. I heard screams and hoots in the forest. As I climbed away from the bay, I began to encounter people. Children with machetes hacked branches from breadfruit trees. When they saw me they screamed, “Waet man!” They called back and forth in Bislama, which meant they didn’t share a common tongue. Of course: Fred’s followers came from all over Tanna, and there were at least six distinct languages on the island. I saw adults, too, all coming down from the mountain with empty baskets and water jugs. One old man grabbed me by the sleeve and pulled me close. “Go on,” he hissed in my ear. “He is waiting for you.”