The Shark God

by Charles Montgomery

  After half an hour, Maewo appeared below us like the serrated back of a surfacing crocodile. My seatmate, a gaunt, sincere man, peered over my shoulder. He introduced himself as Alfred, adding that his brother was the Right Reverend Hugh Blessing Boe, the Anglican bishop of Vanuatu. Alfred said he was proud of his famous brother, but he was even prouder of his other brother, whose name was Dudley. Not only did Dudley own a truck—one of four on Maewo—but he was a kleva. When the previous prime minister of the Solomon Islands had heart trouble, it was Dudley who healed him. Dudley could make the ocean spill over the land, said Alfred. He could dump sea snakes into the coconut groves.

  “Do they get along, Dudley and the bishop?”

  “Yes, they do. Why do you ask?”

  “Because of the magic, of course.”

  I had met Bishop Boe in Santo. He was a kind fellow, and smart, too. I had asked him about the persistence of traditional magic in Vanuatu. The bishop told me (and I was sure he meant it as a criticism) that many Melanesians still used religion as a kind of technology. For example, if a man was sick, he would see a medical doctor, but he would also ask a priest to pray for him. If that didn’t work, the man would turn to traditional magic or make a sacrifice to some kind of spirit. Sometimes he would pursue all three methods at the same time. Sometimes, said the bishop with a sigh, Melanesians had trouble separating what was God from what was not God.

  Now, yelling above the drone of the propellers, Alfred told me what Bishop Boe had neglected to mention. It was the bishop himself who had advised the prime minister of the Solomon Islands to see his brother the kleva about his heart trouble.

  “Dudley’s magic is not against the church,” explained Alfred. “It is a gift from God. It’s his work. It’s how he paid for his truck.”

  The pilot banked the Twin Otter into a steep, descending arc. We landed on an airstrip whose grass was as tall and robust as prairie wheat.

  Dudley was waiting for us. He was no withered mystic. In fact, he seemed altogether plain for a witch doctor. He had the capable appearance of a roofing contractor or a mailman. He must have been about forty. He chain-smoked Peter Jacksons under a drooping mustache.

  Alfred and I climbed into the box of Dudley’s Mitsubishi. Dudley drove. We followed a cart track south along Maewo’s leeward coast. The landscape reminded me of the greenhouse at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, only more lush, more surreal: patches of big-leaf taro, flowers, and manioc exploded between great battlements of uplifted coral stone. Green parrots flecked with crimson flapped back and forth between palms and glistening breadfruit trees. White orchids sprang from tree branches. Piglets rooted in pens fenced with heaps of moss-covered rock. Smoke curled from makeshift sheds where men stoked fires in rusty steel drums and tossed bags full of coconut shells on the racks above. It was copra-harvesting time. The air was sweet with the scent of drying coconut.

  Clear water flowed everywhere: it rushed down fissures in the gray rock, bubbled along irrigation channels, cascaded from stalactite-laden cliffs, over the road, down, down to the sea. We forded thirty streams in an hour.

  “Water, water,” said Alfred. “All the people are scared of man-Maewo because of our water magic. This island is full-up poison. But no magic can hurt me, because I bathe in tabu water every day. If you were a jealous man and you tried to kill me with a spell, it would fail. Your poison will bounce back and kill you instead. Would you like protection from evil? A charm? Dudley can make you one.”

  Yes, of course I wanted a charm. I wanted love magic. I wanted to see rain pour from a cloudless sky. I wanted to see Dudley turn himself into an owl. Anything.

  With all this supernatural wherewithal, Maewo should have been the most blessed and peaceful island in the archipelago. It appeared to be idyllic at first, and wealthy, especially compared to Tanna. There were cement-block houses with tin roofs. At first I didn’t notice the fences, the wire mesh that wrapped the yards of Maewo’s most prosperous families. I didn’t make much of the sullen faces or the suspicious glares directed at Dudley’s truck.

  We stopped beside a huge open-air church. Dudley didn’t cut the engine. He barely stopped long enough to say good-bye. This was Betarara, site of the island’s only rest house.

  “The chief,” said Alfred, as a filthy-looking man approached. “Yumi can meet tomorrow after church.”

  I jumped out, and then they were gone. Strange.

  The chief scratched his belly through a rip in his shirt and smiled at me anxiously. I handed him a letter of introduction I had obtained from the National Tourism Office. The letter advised readers that I had come to promote tourism and that they should help me. The chief peered at it, furrowed his thick brows, and studiously ignored the young man who panted and squirmed behind him. The boy rolled his eyes, giggled, leaped in the air with a yelp, then dashed away squealing.

  “My son,” said the chief shyly. I turned away so that someone could turn my letter right-side up without completely embarrassing him.

  The rest house inhabited a corner of the village church hall. It had all the ambiance of a medium-security prison. It was protected by a tall wire-mesh fence, which baffled me, because people in Vanuatu did not steal.

  I cooked myself a dinner of instant noodles and ketchup. I lay awake in the dark, listening to the groans and howls of the chief’s son somewhere in the distance. And closer. The crunch of careful footsteps on gravel, then a sound that made me shiver: a barely perceptible rasping, like tiny fingernails or claws scratching against wire mesh. The sound was faint enough and brief enough to dismiss as an imagining.

  Alfred did not come to meet me the next morning, so I walked south until I reached his village, which was really more of a family compound, several cement-block houses encircling a broad lawn.

  Alfred and Dudley had a sister. Faith Mary was a broad woman with a stern brow and a voice like a diesel engine. She wore an Anglican Mothers’ Union T-shirt and was constantly digging through the dusty leather purse she carried around her neck. When I arrived, she spread banana leaves on the lawn and served baked taro root and coconut crab on it. Alfred, Dudley, and a dozen others gathered around to eat. Faith Mary told me that Maewo was a very modern place. Look at Alfred and Dudley, she said. They cooked and washed the dishes if she told them to. Alfred laughed. Dudley exhaled a plume of cigarette smoke and gazed at the sky. Faith Mary smiled and pushed more food toward me. Then she narrowed her eyes.

  “Now,” she said, “tell me what you want from us.”

  “Well, I know that people everywhere are afraid of Maewo because of the magic here,” I said as soberly as possible. “I want to see that magic. Not crazy stories. Not conjuring tricks. Proof.”

  “You know why the people are afraid of Maewo? For the same reason we are all afraid: death! You make a Maewo man angry, and he will kill you with poison, right now!” she said, slapping the earth. “And Dudley is the strongest magic man of all. Tell him what you can do, Dudley.”

  Dudley was not so enthusiastic. “Mi mekem kastom meresin.”

  “Tell him what kind of medicine, Dudley!”

  “Wanfala drink blong curem cancer.”

  “And…”

  “Wanfala drink blong bringim daon blad presa.”

  “Tell him, Dudley, tell him more.” Faith Mary clearly wore the pants in this family.

  Dudley sighed and made an attempt at English. “Okay, suppose yu garem wan nogud devil living inside you. I take a white cloth blong yu and I sleep on it. Now I travel inside your body to look at that nogud devil, then figure out how to make it leave you. Okay? Now suppose yu ded from a mystery something. I put a stone on the grave blong yu to make you rise up and tell me what killim yu i ded. Okay? Now suppose you knew you were going to die and you wanted to make sure your wife didn’t go marry narafalla, I give you a special drink that would killim hem i ded five days after you.”

  “But Dudley doesn’t do the bad magic, only the good magic,” interrupted Faith Mary.

  �
�So what is your most popular, um, medicine?” I asked.

  “Well, suppose you want some girl to love you, I could make a leaf for you to eat at night. Then you would get up early tumas long morning, and say the name of the girl just as the sun hits you. By and by you will stap inside her dreams. She will come find you.”

  “Ah, sweet mouth,” I said. This was the same medicine Graeme had bragged about on the Brisk. “Why don’t you show me one of these tricks?”

  Dudley looked away. Alfred fidgeted. Faith Mary cleared her throat. It was against the rules for the men to share their kastom with me, she told me. The provincial council had decided that white men couldn’t be trusted.

  “When a white man sees magic, he learns it and he kills it. We know you white people have got savve. For example, a few years ago an Australian came here. He threw a piece of tin can on the ground and it turned into a snake. Then he told us that white man’s magic was stronger than ours.”

  Faith Mary said she liked me. She said I should not be staying in Betarara, because the people there would certainly poison me—that’s just the kind of people they were. I should come and stay in Navenevene, where Dudley could protect me. Dudley showed no particular enthusiasm for the idea, and I had already paid for a week’s stay at the rest house, so I thanked her and left.

  Dudley caught up to me a short way down the road. He rolled down the window of the Mitsubishi and sheepishly offered me a ride.

  “I’ve got legs, I can walk,” I said.

  “Hem i tru. But you might step over wanfala black magic on the road, wanfala leaf that would do terrible things long penis blong yu.”

  The gravel felt suddenly hot beneath my sandals. “My penis?”

  “Now and again people here get cross with each other. They leave poison lying albaot. The worst is the poison that makes your penis shrivel,” he said, holding his thumb and forefinger together, “and swim up inside your body. I cure people of disfala curse all the time.”

  No wonder people on Maewo protected themselves with wire fences. I got in the truck. Church was out, and everyone in every village along the way saw me riding with my good friend the witch doctor. At the time I didn’t think that was such a bad thing. Dudley dropped me off at Betarara and promised to meet me the next day.

  Most communities in Vanuatu have a kastom chief, a man who holds no political power but whose job it is to sustain and promote the old ways. Geoffrey Uli was Maewo’s kastom chief. He lived in a shack near Betarara. I figured his mandate might logically encompass public relations, which meant he should help me.

  Uli managed to evade me for four days. I finally caught him in his yard one afternoon just before kava time. He was an old man. With his shirt off, his skin looked as though it had been shrink-wrapped to his bony frame. His eyes were birdlike, sharp and cunning. They darted back and forth across his garden as though looking for an escape. Eventually they settled on me.

  Uli told me that people on Maewo already had God before the missionaries came. Their kastom stories were the same as the ones in the Bible. Only a few names had been changed. Maewo’s own version of Eve was created not from Adam’s rib, but from his collarbone. There was a great flood, and Tagaro had weathered it in a big canoe, like Noah. As Uli told me these things, his wife, who was sitting in the dirt, howled with laughter.

  “That rubbish woman had me baptized when we got married,” he said. “Now I must pray twice a day. First I do kastom prayers, then I pray to the church God.”

  Uli wouldn’t say exactly to whom his kastom prayers were directed. Not to Tagaro, anyway. But he did make this point: The old gods never had a problem with magic, so why should the new one?

  “But isn’t the Christian God opposed to kastom magic?” I asked.

  “The Anglican missionaries never told us our kastom was rubbish. It was their students, boys from Maewo, who smashed the tabu stones. They went into the nakamal and spoiled the kava grinders and the drinking shells, too. They thought that this would get them into heaven. Now we know better. We have our kava back. And there is plenty of kastom magic left on Maewo.”

  “I don’t believe it. I don’t believe you people still have the power,” I said, hoping to shame him into a demonstration.

  “Sir, you are wrong,” said Uli. “We have rocks that can make rain, wind, and sun.”

  I looked at the sky. There was rain, wind, and sun every day on Maewo. “How about thunder?”

  “The thunder man lives far, far away in the bush. You’ll never find him.”

  “There must be something, some way to prove…”

  Uli’s wife spoke up from the shadows. “Sipos hem wantem looklook long kastom magic, hemi mas findem tufala ston blong etkwek,” she suggested.

  Uli shot her an irritated look. She ignored Uli’s glare and turned to me. She lifted both hands as if shaking an imaginary rock. Then she trembled and fell over on her side. I got it.

  “Yes, yes, earthquake stones. Wonderful,” I said. “When can we go see them?”

  “I cannot help you,” said Uli.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I have no time. Sir, I have been keeping an eye on you. I know you have been on this island for four days already. If you had come to see me first, I could have helped you. But I know what you have been doing. You went off with Dudley, didn’t you? You have not paid me respect. You have spoiled your luck.”

  I tried to explain that he was wrong, that Dudley had been avoiding me for days. But there was no point in arguing. Uli had told me just enough to make it clear to me that he was the real kastom expert on Maewo. He hustled his wife back toward their shack, clucking and poking at her, shaking his head like a bird. How was I to know that Uli and Dudley were bitter rivals? I was left to gaze east toward the serrated crest of the island and ponder the location of the stones that made the ground shake. I wanted to find those stones.

  I met Faith Mary on the coast road.

  “Dudley is avoiding me,” I said.

  “You have chosen the Betarara people and Geoffrey Uli.”

  “No, I haven’t—”

  “You have chosen,” she said again. “We won’t interfere, but we can’t protect you anymore.”

  My fever returned. I spent most of my days in bed. Once they realized that Dudley had spurned me, the citizens of Betarara took me on as their cause. They brought me crackers. They boiled water for tea and instant noodles. They sat and watched me for hours. First, there were the chief and his wife, who mumbled to me soothingly. One night, a handsome young catechist dropped by to read me excerpts from the New Testament. Then came the lady with magic hands. She leaned over me, her immense breasts inflating the expanse of her island dress. She prodded my belly, grunted knowingly, then kneaded my internal organs for an hour, whispering, “God, plis mekem alraet disfala boy.”

  The people at Betarara told me stories, and all their stories were infused with magic and fear. Like the one about the pelicans that had recently appeared on a beach near the airport. Pelicans were not native to the island. Everyone was terrified of them. “They haven’t attacked us yet, but they are huge. We are quite sure that white men brought them,” said one kava-drunk visitor. But there was hope. A boy had brought one of the pelicans down with his slingshot. His family cooked and ate the bird. Now there were only four.

  The villagers were suspicious of foreigners. Once, a white yachtsman came ashore near the village and dug for an hour in the sand. When he sailed away, the village children discovered that he had buried the eggs of man-eating crocodiles. Once, a Russian ship had anchored just off the coast. Villagers insisted that a crew member came ashore and let loose a copra snake. The snake slithered up a tree, and now everyone was afraid to go into the palm groves. Perhaps, the villagers whispered, the sailor had also let a tiger loose on the island. There was so much to fear on Maewo.

  Curses were a constant danger. The strongest kinds of poison on Maewo were not sprinkled on your food or left on the road for you to step on. They were adminis
tered to you after the fact. In other words, a sorcerer could use your footprint or a banana peel you might have discarded to make you sick. The best way to stay healthy on Maewo was to bury your dinner scraps and sweep away your footprints. It was especially important not to make enemies, since many sorcerers kept their talents secret. Never forget to lock your door at night, they said.

  The people of Betarara were scared of things they could see and things they could not see. Some things they did not wish to discuss at all. Like the earthquake stones about which Geoffrey Uli’s wife had pantomimed, and which I very much wanted to see. Very bad, they said. Very dangerous. End of the world.

  Each night, after the villagers went home and I had extinguished my oil lamp, the noises would start again outside my window. Scratching on wire. Rustling. Clucking. Whooshing. I locked my door and did my best to contemplate the rationalist tradition.

  Then a white man arrived at my doorstep. Wes was Texan, barely out of high school. The Peace Corps had sent him to Maewo to teach English. He had the trusting face of a puppy and the glassy eyes of a kava enthusiast. Wes explained to me why the chief of Betarara’s son spent his time howling and barking like a dog. The boy had once been considered quite clever, and had been sent to the Anglican high school over on Santo. That’s when he had fallen in love. The boy’s passion went unrequited, so he turned to kastom for help. He tried using some version of sweet mouth love magic on his beloved, but the prayers and leaves failed to make her crazy with love. The magic boomeranged. The boy had been crazy ever since. No exorcism could save him.

  It was Wes who helped me find the earthquake stones. It was no secret, he said, that the stones resided in Kwatcawol village, which clung to the crest of the forested ridge that ran the length of Maewo. I was still too weak to make the trek on foot, but a track had recently been bulldozed up the mountain from Betarara. Wes’s adopted brother had a truck.