The Shark God

by Charles Montgomery

  We left at sunset, following the red scar of the new road up through the jungle. The evening’s first fireflies twittered like green sparks. Flying foxes dropped out of the banyan trees to chase them up and down the road.

  We pulled into a field in the middle of the village. A crowd formed around the truck. I stood up in the box and explained my mission. There was a whispered debate. Wes interpreted. He told me my timing was perfect. The custodian of the earthquake stones had never permitted outsiders to see them. But the old man had died a year before my arrival, and his seven sons, all Christians, were not quite sure how they should handle their pagan legacy. Voices were raised. Heads were shaken. Finally, one man’s eyes lit up: perhaps the visitor could offer a gift. Ah yes, a gift. It was not so much a bribe or an admission fee as a tribute to Melanesian kastom. Traditional relationships in Melanesia were always based on symbolic exchange. A murderer could be let off the hook with the right exchange of pigs.

  I handed over a bag of rice and a can of corned beef, and we all filed somberly toward the sturdiest hut in the village. It had been built in the traditional style: one great room under beams of black tree fern trunks, with palm leaves hanging so low to the ground they were spattered with mud. The roof beams were reinforced every few inches with smaller poles. This was the Melanesian version of the earthquake-proof bunker.

  Inside, it was dark, crowded, and confused. Then someone lit an oil lamp, revealing what looked like two bundles of garbage hanging on the wall at the back of the hut. The earthquake stones. I moved closer. Hands reached out from the shadows toward me, not touching me, but straining and ready.

  The stones may have been the size of potatoes, or they may have been bigger. I couldn’t actually see them. They had each been wrapped in strips of dirty canvas, then bound in chicken wire and suspended from a crossbeam by lengths of hemp rope. It hardly seemed dignified.

  The new guardians of the stones appeared to be a husband-and-wife team: he was bare-chested, tattooed, and scowling suspiciously; she was plump and beaming warmly in the glow of her oil lamp. At first nobody said anything. Then an old man stepped out of the shadows. He wore a towel wrapped around his head like a turban. His pupils were opaque. He pushed his face into mine. I will translate his monologue into English:

  “Ages ago, in the time of the ancestors, the people found three stones in the forest,” he said—or rather, shouted through the silence. He cupped his leathery hands together as though he were holding a great weight. “The stones were all hanging in midair, and they were shaking. One man touched them, and they stopped moving. He played with those stones. He put one of them on the ground—that caused the ground to shake in another village. Oh, yes, that man saw how powerful the stones were. He played so much and caused so many tremors that one of the stones rolled into the ocean and was lost forever. Since then we have been very careful with the other stones.”

  “Can I touch them?”

  The old man made a gurgling sound, as though he were choking. The guardian exhaled through his nostrils like a bull, but his wife steadied him with a glance, then nodded her head at me encouragingly. I reached for the bigger of the two bundles, lifted it, turned it in my hand, peered through the chicken wire. It was an industrial-strength cocoon.

  I felt a hand on my elbow. Foreigners could not be trusted. It was true. I was desperate to test the stones’ magic.

  “Can I untie it? Just touch it to the ground to see if the stone still works?”

  “No! Of course not,” croaked the old man, now breathing hoarsely. “If you did that, you would cause a terrible earthquake.”

  “But if we did it quickly, you know, a quick touch to the floor, perhaps we could make the ground shake for only a few seconds. Wouldn’t that be fun to see?”

  It was rude to push, I knew it. But the stones did not radiate power or history or the slightest whiff of danger. They looked like cobblestones. I wanted to give them a chance to be something more or nothing at all.

  “Yu no savve! The last person to try anything like that was this boy’s grandfather,” said the old man, pointing at the bare-chested guardian. “He made Maewo shake for eight days. Eight days! It was one awful something. But at least the olfala knew how to make the tremors stop, he had a special leaf. But he never passed on his secrets. The knowledge is dead in the ground. That’s why we have to take such great care of these stones. They are very sensitive. When a big wind comes, someone has to stay here to hold the stones tight, even if the house collapses around him. And if a rat or a pig was to find its way inside this house, watch out! The ground would shake, because the stones don’t like those animals. We have to be careful!”

  The story wasn’t good enough. Proof. Part of me yearned to pull out my knife, cut the hemp, pound that rock on the bare earth even as the people screamed and leapt on me and beat me senseless, because in those moments we would all know. I could feel my muscles twitching. The bare-chested guardian took a deep breath and said in a commanding baritone, “Yumi go long drink kava nao.”

  “Um,” I said.

  “Nao ia,” he said, and he stepped toward me like a bull. “Yumi go raet nao.”

  I looked to Wes for support. But he had already turned for the door.

  “Kava,” Wes was murmuring to the men who clung to him like a teddy bear. “Mi likem kava.”

  Late that night, after three shells of muddy kava and a dizzy ride home, I lay awake in bed listening, for the last time, to the distant cries of the chief’s son and the rain on my tin roof, drumming and dripping me toward sleep. And then I heard the rasping, the same staccato click and metallic hum I had heard every night on Maewo, and I knew that something was tapping at the wire-mesh fence outside my room. I rolled quietly out of bed and crept to the window, holding my breath. The rain had stopped. The yard was empty. The sky was starless and muddy. A shadow teetered on the curled edge of the mesh fence. Before I could focus, there was a sudden, explosive beating of wings, and the creature flapped through space and landed on my porch. I could just make out a great plume of tail feathers and the glint of tiny eyes. A rooster. I exhaled. I suppose I should have felt relief. I didn’t.

  “Out!” I shrieked.

  The rooster didn’t take flight. It simply cocked its head and glared at me with cunning, familiar eyes. I hung a towel over my window and locked my door. When I did fall asleep, I dreamed of the kastom chief, Geoffrey Uli. I saw him in a clearing in the forest, standing with a knife in one hand and a stone cup in the other. There were black feathers tied to his arms. At his feet lay a pig with its legs bound together. I saw Uli bend down. I saw his knife slice through the beast’s throat, saw the blood run in bright red streams into the stone cup, overflow, and trickle over Uli’s talonlike hands. I saw his eyes narrow with pleasure and secret knowledge, and I recalled what he had told me: I have been watching you.

  It may be true that people all over Vanuatu were scared of men from Maewo. But here on the island of water magic, people were fearful of absolutely everything. They trembled at the thought of unseen curses and charms, at the terrible power of two small cobblestones. They suspected treachery from visitors, from their neighbors, and from the natural world. All that magic made them vulnerable. It always had. My great-grandfather described an encounter between a white missionary and a murderer on nearby Ambae. The missionary only had to fix a disapproving gaze sternly on the man to send him scurrying for safety. The murderer returned to his home village, declared, “The man looked at me!” and promptly collapsed. He died, I suppose, of shock, or fear, or some life-sucking disorder he felt the white man had directed at him. My great-grandfather was intrigued, not so much by Melanesian magic as by Melanesian fragility. “Like peaches ripened in the hot sun, the slightest shock seems to upset their balance and cause death,” he wrote.

  Bad intent, hostility alone, could be lethal. I felt the truth of this on Maewo. I couldn’t shake the idea that the rooster that had been prowling my yard each night for a week had something to do wit
h my recurring fever, and with Geoffrey Uli. Yes, this would be a silly hypothesis if proposed from an easy chair in an apartment in London or Toronto or Los Angeles. But when you are breathing the air of sorcery and fear, it is difficult not to absorb the local wisdom about these things. If myth is the form we give to our idea of the universe, of God, then it must also occasionally be the vessel into which we pour our fears. I flew away empty-handed, without proof of anything, and yet carrying an acute sense that the farther I got from Maewo, the safer I would be.

  9

  The Curse of Gaua

  One day, long ago, a man was fishing on a reef, and he saw something out in the sea. It appeared to be an island, but it moved. He ran to the beach shouting,

  “An island is coming here,” and quickly the people gathered on the beach to watch a sailing ship approach and anchor on the reef. The inhabitants of the island came ashore, and our island world ceased to be.

  —CASPAR LUANA, Buka! A Retrospective

  When the Southern Cross first appeared in the Banks Islands, islanders assumed the ship could not be of the world, because nobody in the world could make such a big canoe. They assumed the creatures aboard the vessel were not human: after all, humans were black, not white. So there was much debate wherever Bishop Patteson stepped ashore. Some elders thought he might be the ghost of a dead man. But it was the general consensus that Patteson was not a ghost at all but Qat, the mythical hero of all the Banks Islands, returning after thousands of years away.

  Qat was born on Vanua Lava. His mother was not a woman but a stone that had cracked apart to bring him into the world. Like Jesus, he had no earthly father, but Qat was not a god, or even the son of a god. He was a vui, a spirit. He was not the world’s creator. But he did make men, pigs, rocks, and trees to amuse himself. He did not make day, but he did paddle to the edge of the world and return with a piece of darkness so that his brothers could have night to sleep in.

  I wanted to know more about Qat. I imagined sitting by a cooking fire and listening to some olfala ramble on through the night about the wonders of the cunning ancestor. There should have been no better place to do so than Santa Maria, southernmost of the Banks Group. Qat’s story was written into the remarkable geography of the island. I could see it all through the porthole of the mail plane. Santa Maria looked like a green doughnut floating in the bubbling fat of the sea. The island had clearly once been a volcanic cone even grander than Lopevi, but at some point that cone must have exploded or imploded, leaving a four-mile-wide hole in its center. The doughnut hole was occupied by a lake. Steam billowed from a small cone of ash and orange muck at the lake’s edge.

  The island looked strange and mysterious and just as it should have, and it was all explained by the Qat stories that Codrington had recorded in The Melanesians.

  In ancient times the caldera had been quite dry. It was Qat’s playground. He spent his last earthly years frolicking there with his companion, Marawa the Spider. This is how the lake came to be: When Qat grew tired of the world, he carved himself a huge canoe from a tree he found in the caldera. He loaded his wife, his eleven brothers, and every living thing, even the smallest ants, into the canoe, and built a roof over them. Then came a rainstorm of biblical proportions. Water filled the caldera and flowed over its rim. Qat steered his canoe over the edge, ripping a channel through the crest and tearing a ditch all the way to the sea. Then he floated away beyond the horizon, never to return.

  Flying above Santa Maria was like drifting above Oz. There was the mythical lake. There was the gaping wound in the side of the caldera, and a cascade, and a river marking the path of Qat’s escape. I saw all these things as the Twin Otter drifted out of the clouds toward a patch of grass at Gaua, the name given to Santa Maria’s east coast.

  Once the plane had bounced away and its drone had subsided, I went looking for signs of Qat. A family had built a bungalow for tourists by the airstrip. They fed me. I was their second guest in five months. I asked the man of the house for the old stories. He didn’t want to talk about Qat. I wandered the cart track that served as the island’s only road. I sat with people in the dirt. Nobody cared much about Qat.

  You would think islanders would never forget Qat. You would think that with his stories imprinted on the landscape, thoughts of the vui would occupy their days. But this is not the history about which Santa Marians now concern themselves. Finally, Paul Wudgor, the paramount chief of Gaua, a thoughtful, shoeless man of about thirty, took me for a walk through the forest beyond the coast road, and showed me why.

  The coastal lowlands were covered with ruins: hundreds and hundreds of stone platforms, broken walls, chest-high foundations, all built from stones fitted tightly without mortar in a style reminiscent of Peru’s Inca palaces, though more modest in proportion. The ruins appeared in gardens, under mounds of grass among the coconut groves, and in the darkest glades, bound by knots of banyan root. They collected moss in the shadows on the mountainsides, and they whispered that once, long ago, there had been something of a metropolis on the Gaua coast.

  That was certainly the impression gained by the island’s first European visitor. The Portuguese navigator Pedro Fernandez de Quirós—who journeyed on behalf of the king of Spain, and who gave Santa Maria its name—noted in 1606 that the island was populated by “innumerable natives” of three different colors: yellow, black, and off-white. Other early visitors estimated the island’s population at twenty or thirty thousand.

  But now there were few people on the Gaua coast. They lived in a scattering of small hamlets, their houses rustic pole-and-thatch affairs with no tin roofs or stonework or milled timber to speak of. I never saw a car or truck on the coast road, and I rarely saw people. What had become of the metropolis and all its citizens?

  Codrington blamed a turn-of-the-century population decline on the labor trade. Tens of thousands of Melanesians had been taken to work on the sugar plantations of Queensland and Fiji in the nineteenth century. But most of the laborers completed their “contracts” and returned home after a few years. That explanation wouldn’t do.

  Henry Montgomery, who was carried to shore by a young man in 1892, blamed the islanders’ own bloodlust. War, he wrote, was as regular and systematic on Santa Maria as cricket tournaments, with marked battlegrounds and strict start times: “Still more curious, is that when such a battle is announced the young men of a neighbouring village, who have nothing to do with the quarrel, will take their bows and arrows and start off to take part in the conflict. Strangest of all, is the fact that such a party, who go from sheer love of fighting, usually divide into two parties and choose to oppose each other.”

  The sport resulted in a cycle of murder and vengeance that my great-grandfather insisted only got worse when laborers returned from Queensland with rifles.

  But this explanation won’t do, either. Such blood sport rarely ended with more than a single death and could not account for the almost complete decimation of Santa Maria and almost every other island in Melanesia. Each year, fewer and fewer canoes came out to meet traders and missionaries. A resident missionary at Wango in the Solomon Islands was shown the sites of forty-six once-prosperous villages, of which only three remained. In the nineteenth century, the population of Erromango, north of Tanna, fell from more than three thousand to less than four hundred. Some historians estimated that the population of the New Hebrides was reduced by 90 percent in the late nineteenth century. What was killing people?

  My new friend Chief Paul had a theory about that. I should have seen it coming. He said it was kastom magic that had decimated the island, and it was God who eventually came to the rescue. Santa Maria was once like Maewo: a place held hostage by sorcerers so treacherous and lethal that those who weren’t poisoned or murdered finally just got in their canoes and fled.

  “Once we had twenty thousand people on this island,” the paramount chief told me as we gnawed boiled fish in his hut. “But then came a time of terrible magic. Sorcerers cursed people using their g
arbage, their poo-poo, whatever they could find. People had to throw their dinner scraps into the sea to make sure sorcerers didn’t use them to cast evil spells on them. Bad men used secret leaves to kill our pikinini even before they were born. They used smoke from fires to curse people. Hundreds and hundreds of people died this way.”

  By the 1960s, said the chief, there were only seven women left on the Gaua side of the island. Finally the church took action. Esuva Din, an Anglican district priest from Vanua Lava, sailed south to confront the evil with an act of boldness and Old Testament audacity. He harnessed the Holy Spirit to create a boomerang curse: all black magic would now bounce back and kill anyone who tried to use it. Within days, dozens of known sorcerers had dropped dead. One sorcerer confronted the district priest and said, “I don’t believe it’s true; I don’t believe you really have the power to curse anyone who uses black magic.” Esuva Din did not like to be challenged. He said, “Rubbish man, just you wait and see.” The sorcerer keeled over and died the next day.

  The chief’s version of the crisis and its resolution seemed good enough for almost everyone I met on Santa Maria. I suppose you remember things in the manner that most suits you. But the truth is, the church was the cause, not the solution, of the death plague that landed on the islands. You can see the signs in the early mission writings. You can see the truth dawning, too late, on the Anglican brotherhood.

  After a visit to a village on Vanua Lava in 1861, Bishop Patteson complained that local men were avoiding him and that some had remarked quite rudely about the “unusual sickness” connected with his new teaching. Patteson found Mota in good health in August 1863; two weeks later, he returned to find the island in the grip of a terrible scourge of dysentery and influenza. Fifty people had already died from it. Four of every ten baptized Melanesians died in the decade straddling the turn of the century. It would take the missionaries decades to realize—or admit—the part they played in the Melanesian apocalypse. The Reverend W.J. Durrad was horrified to realize it was his own arrival on isolated Tikopia that sparked an epidemic of pneumonia that killed dozens. The incident convinced Durrad, finally, that the Southern Cross, oozing with New Zealand–bred germs, was the chief agent of disease. The ship’s legacy of death lasted well into the twentieth century. “A fortnight after its visit everyone is ill,” he wrote in 1917. As late as 1931, a stopover on Malaita unleashed an epidemic that killed eleven hundred islanders.