The Shark God

by Charles Montgomery

  My faux-savages led me to a bench. The tasiu stood with his novices in a line near the altar, and he led them in song, much as a schoolteacher might lead children in a variety show number.

  “You have traveled far from home across the sea. Welcome, welcome, we welcome you,” the boys sang in English while flakes of crusted mud fell from their cheeks. It was sweet and heartbreakingly sincere.

  Over coconut milk and cream cookies, the tasiu explained to me that the ambush was a traditional welcome for European visitors, so that we would know what captured laborers felt during the days of the blackbirders.

  “Thank you, I think,” I said. I was their first foreign visitor in months.

  The tasiu told me his name was Ken Brown. He was twenty-nine years old. When he was half that age, emissaries of the Melanesian Brotherhood had come to his village near Vureas Bay. Ken was captivated by the stories the brothers told him about their adventures in heathen places. He followed them back to their base on the island of Ambae, where he trained, prayed, and emerged after three years as a full-fledged member of the Melanesian Brotherhood.

  “But what do you do here in Vureas Bay?” I asked. His English was sparse, so we spoke in Bislama. Ben helped with translation.

  “Many things. We negotiate to stop land disputes. We help married couples work out their problems. We make rebaptisms for backsliders…”

  “Magic?”

  “Oh, yes, we take care of that. We also organize a youth choir…”

  And I felt the sense of urgency returning, and though I had intended to play ethnographer, I knew I did not care about youth choirs or rebaptisms, and I could not stop myself from interrupting him: “But the magic,” I said. “What do you do about it?”

  “Well, if there is a rubbish spirit hurting people, we stop it. For example, did you see the black stone down on the beach at Vureas Bay? That devil stone was making people sick, so we took some holy oil and made a small service, and we banged that stone with our sticks to drive the devil out of it, in the name of the Big Man.”

  “I’m sorry, who?”

  “The Big Man, our Lord in Heaven.”

  Ben interrupted. Tasiu Ken was like the policeman of Vureas Bay, he said. If you stole something and hid it, he could find it just by praying. And if you were a bad man, if you worked black magic on someone, he could curse you.

  “Yu mas look-look woking stik blong mi,” said Ken. He left for a moment and returned with his walking stick. It was black. A carved snake wound its way up the shaft, the snake’s eyes shining with inlaid abalone. Exodus: God turned Moses’ staff into a serpent to prove his power to the Egyptians. Ken had carved this stick himself. It had been blessed by the bishop of Banks and Torres. It was the first of dozens of snake staffs I would see before my journey was done.

  “I heard that people are scared of your walking stick,” I said.

  “He is one powerful something,” said Ken, running a muscular hand over the carved wood. “For example, suppose I go to a heathen village and want to show people the power of God. I always bring my staff. I throw it up high and it hangs in the air. After the people see that, they know they must follow the Big Man.”

  “I can’t even imagine it.”

  “Hem ia nao! It does take a big, long prayer to make the stick fly. We pray and fast for two weeks before visiting the heathens. That helps us work closely with the Big Man.”

  I wanted to ask him about the man he had cursed, but it seemed a rude question after all his hospitality, all those cream cookies. I didn’t quite know how to bring it up. In the end, I didn’t need to.

  “You killed a man who defied you, didn’t you, tasiu?” said Ben. “Tell him about Jim Bribol.”

  Ken lowered his head and spoke quietly. The trouble had started back in 1997, during a time of denominational turmoil. While he was away visiting the island of Ambae, the Seventh-day Adventists had gained a foothold down in Vetuboso. Even Eli Field’s brother had joined the new church. But the Adventists weren’t content with stealing Anglican sheep; they accused the tasiu of being a false prophet.

  The tasiu challenged the entire Adventist congregation to meet him in their church. The Adventist pastor was the only one brave enough to show up. Ken put his staff down and challenged the pastor to an unusual duel. He suggested they point their Bibles at each other and see which one of them was still standing after three days. The pastor refused to face him.

  Ken had been due to return to Ambae after winning the standoff, but things got ugly before he left. His own cousin, Jim Bribol, switched churches. One day, Jim decided that his wife’s King James Bible was a symbol of Anglican hegemony, so he burned it. That was his first mistake. He would have survived if that was all he had done. But then Jim Bribol announced to the village that he was going to march up the mountain and break the tasiu’s walking stick in half. Ken’s response was swift and unequivocal. He sent his cousin a message: I will leave Vanua Lava, and then you will die.

  A few days after the tasiu’s departure for Ambae, Jim Bribol went wading in the sea. A strange fish—a swordfish, perhaps—swam up through the shallows and cut his shin. The wound became infected. Bribol fell desperately ill. His family rushed him to the hospital in Santo. The doctors couldn’t temper his fever, nor could they stop his flesh from rotting. They called in a kleva, a kastom medicine man, who told the family that no medicine could save Bribol because he had been cursed. Bribol’s family sent a message to Ambae by teleradio, begging for Tasiu Ken’s forgiveness.

  “And you didn’t help him?” I said.

  “No,” said Ken, solemnly.

  “You just let him die. How could you?”

  “Listen: we have our kastom, and we must stick to it. We have one Church and one God. We were all born Anglican, and we must stay that way. If Jim Bribol lived, people would forget the power of the true God.”

  Either the tasiu had capitalized on a coincidental death to reinforce his own mythical status, or he was guilty of some admittedly awesome, but extremely un-Christlike, behavior. It didn’t seem polite to point this out at the time. Ben and I retreated from the mountain in silence. The oaks had ceased their creaking. Mist drifted up from the sea. Drizzle fell like sadness.

  The southeastern trade winds had eased for the first time in weeks, but the rain continued to fall through the night. The trails around Vetuboso were as gummy as laplap. My sandals were useless. I left for Sola in bare feet, letting the puree of mud, cow shit, and rotten mango squeeze through my toes. In lieu of a sun-producing miracle, Eli sent his son, Cali, to help me across the big water. The river had swollen. The water was waist-deep and flowing swiftly. Cali held my hand tightly as we crossed. I felt like a grandmother.

  I carried on alone through the warm drizzle. I was surprised at midday by Ken Brown himself, who emerged from a trailside shack halfway to Sola, rubbing his eyes. He was now more Ken than tasiu. He wore his civvies: baggy surf shorts and a tank top that gave him the aura of a Santa Monica surf bum. He had crossed the river the night before, hoping to intercept me. He wanted to carry my pack to Sola. There was no dissuading him.

  We walked through the afternoon. The rain ceased, steam rose from the grass, and the overcast sky radiated white heat. Ken was silent.

  The path became a road again. We crossed the plain of palms and climbed the hill above Sola. Ken stopped on the crest of it and set my pack on the ground. This was as far as he would go. He said he couldn’t walk into Sola without his uniform; the bishop might see him. I wasn’t ready to part. I hadn’t been able to shake the image of Jim Bribol, rotting to death in some dreary hut.

  “Are you still glad you cursed that man?” I asked. “Did you do the right thing?”

  A thousand tiny beads of sweat had broken out on Ken’s forehead. He looked to the sky, kicked the gravel on the road. Here, without his local audience, he was less keen to take credit for Bribol’s misfortune. “Maybe I made the curse,” he said slowly, “but I didn’t kill Jim Bribol. No, I asked the Big Man
to decide on his fate. I made prayer for hours. I said, ‘God, it is for you to choose. You make Jim live or you killim hem i ded.’ So it was truly the Big Man who ended the life of Jim Bribol.”

  “So your God is an angry God.”

  “He is a god blong love. But yes, He is also a god blong vengeance. The unrepentant will be punished.”

  Of course. This was the same conflicted god my great-grandfather had worshipped, a spirit vacillating between love and anger, war and power. It was a god who behaved very much like the ancestor spirits of old Melanesia. Later I would learn that the bishop of Banks and Torres had given Ken a firm talking-to about the whole Jim Bribol episode. Apparently the punitive direction of divine power wasn’t the kind of work a member of the Melanesian Brotherhood should be doing. I did not approve of cursing. But I was enthralled to have brushed against the bounds of a mystery so foreign and yet so familiar. I resolved to seek out more members of this strange order as I moved north.

  14

  Guadalcanal, the Unhappy Isle

  In the last days perilous times shall come. For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, Without natural affection, truce-breakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good.

  —2 Timothy 3:1–3

  I met the deputy mayor of Honiara, the capital of the Solomon Islands, somewhere in the stratosphere between Fiji and Guadalcanal. I had the window seat. He leaned into my shoulder, peered out into the blue, and exhaled into my face. Rotting carrots. Grass mulch. Compost. The deputy mayor did not wish me a pleasant stay in the Solomon Islands, nor did he recommend a favorite restaurant. But he did roll up his pant leg to show me the bullet wound in his calf. The scar was the size of his thumb and the texture of tire rubber. “I am going to kill the man who did this,” he said. “Fucking kill him.” I didn’t reply. I just stared into the deputy mayor’s mouth, which was like nothing I had ever seen. His teeth were the color of rotten cedar, and his tongue lolled beneath a worrying gob of pinkish fiber. A drop of red juice had dried at the corner of his mouth, like something from a Transylvanian nightmare. It was the mouth of a betel nut addict.

  I did not want to be breathing recycled air with the deputy mayor. I wanted to be crashing north toward Nukapu aboard a cargo vessel, a mission ship, a yacht, a canoe, crossing the ocean that Henry Montgomery had once crossed, whipped by salt spray and nautical hardship. It should have been easy to arrange a passage to the Solomons from Vanua Lava: Sola is the last jumping-off point for boats traveling north from Vanuatu. In theory, the two nations are just a day’s sail apart. Barely ninety-three miles separate Hiu, the most northerly of Vanuatu’s Banks and Torres islands, from Vanikoro, the most southerly of the Santa Cruz Group, of which Nukapu is an outlier.

  But each time I shook awake the customs officer in Sola—which I did every afternoon for nearly two weeks—he assured me there were no cargo ships bound for the Solomons. Finally, he lost his patience. Why would there be a northbound cargo ship? What in God’s name would it carry? Didn’t I understand that Solomon Islanders had no money left to buy cargo?

  There were yachts, though: a sail grew out of the horizon every day or so. Vanua Lava sits smack in the middle of the trade-wind route that carries yachties from New Zealand and Polynesia to their storm-season havens in the Gulf of Thailand. The Solomon Islands offer the next batch of good harbors on the route. With each new arrival, I would wait for the sails to come down, the anchors to fall, and the dinghies to bob toward shore. I would shave and put on a clean shirt, and then I would catch the sun-ravaged yachties on the beach and tell them my story about Bishop Patteson and my mystery island, Nukapu. We could be there in four days, I would tell them. They could drop me off on the reef and carry on toward Torres Strait or Papua New Guinea. The yachties were universally horrified by my proposal. Hadn’t I heard about the guns? The blood feuding? The pirates? The awful Chinese food? “We’re not bloody idiots, mate. The Solomons are no place for children,” one yacht dad told me sternly.

  It was September. I was two months into my journey, halfway through my savings, and facing the advent of the storm season. One by one, the yachties all turned west for Cairns. As I watched the last sail disappear, I realized that Sola was a dead end. My only hope of getting to the Solomons was to backtrack: hop the mail flight south through Santa Maria, Espiritu Santo, and Malekula to Port Vila, catch the weekly shuttle east to Fiji, then loop northwest again, three hours by 737 from Fiji to Honiara, on Guadalcanal. After that 2,200-mile detour, after trading the rolling uncertainty of the open ocean for the crystalline detachment of the stratosphere, I would try to reach Nukapu from the north.

  Which is how I met the deputy mayor of Honiara, whose first act upon reaching his homeland was to spit a stream of crimson mucus onto the tarmac of Henderson Field, the Solomon Islands’ international airport. Betel nut juice is apparently tremendous fun to spit, which is why the most striking thing about the airport was that everything was spattered blood red. The arrivals hall looked like the scene of a mass murder. The rest of the city was the same.

  I was met at the airport by Morris Namoga, the manager of the national tourism bureau. Morris was a jovial man with a Rhett Butler mustache and a rugby player’s physique. I had faxed him from Port Vila, promising to write happy stories about the Solomons if he helped me. I felt a pang of guilt as soon as I saw his generous grin.

  Morris drummed the steering wheel and hummed the Canadian national anthem as we drove into town, trying to distract me from the storm of dust and refuse, the plastic bags that rolled like tumbleweeds across the road, the heaps of garbage that smoldered like castles after a siege. And this, spray-painted across an abandoned building: Welcome to Hell.

  “Haw! haw! Sorry about the mess,” Morris said in English. “The municipality doesn’t quite have the means, haw haw, to clean up anymore.”

  Honiara was perfectly safe, said Morris, before I had a chance to ask.

  “And in case you are wondering, it’s not true what they are saying about the deputy high commissioner of New Zealand. She was not stabbed to death. She fell on her kitchen knife.”

  The heat was unbearable. Morris didn’t seem to be in a hurry, so I suggested we drive out of town and go for a swim.

  “Haw haw! I don’t think so. No, I don’t think so. Well, of course you can go, but it would not be a good idea for me to come with you. Oh, no. Guadalcanal people are still being, shall I say, assertive.”

  Morris was from the island of Malaita. Malaitans controlled Honiara, he said, but they tended to get shot at if they left the city.

  We passed an open-air cathedral. I could see hundreds of people inside.

  “Funeral!” said Morris. “For the national minister of sport. Tsk, tsk. Very sad. Murdered two weeks ago. Father Geve—yes, he was also a Catholic priest—he went back to his constituency to talk to Harold. Not a good idea. You know about Harold Keke, of course.”

  I had been hearing Harold Keke’s name for weeks. Harold the militant leader. Harold the Guadalcanal nationalist, Harold the warlord, Harold the madman. Keke was all these things. He had been hiding out on Guadalcanal’s storm-battered southerly Weather Coast ever since refusing to sign a peace agreement in 2000. Someone had recently convinced a gang of eleven lads from Malaita to go looking for Keke. The boys were given guns and a boat, and they buzzed around the Weather Coast until they found Keke. Or rather, until Keke found them. He killed them all. That was three months before my arrival. People were starting to think Harold had cooled off, but then he went and put a bullet in Father Geve’s head.

  “Harold thinks the war is still on, which it certainly is not,” said Morris, wiping the perspiration from his neck. “None of this is good for tourism. Haw! Sorry about the mess.”

  Morris left me at the Quality Motel, a fortress of steel mesh and barbed wire overlooking the port. That night I sat with the motel’s guards—there were five of them,
earnest young men with broad chests and billy clubs. We watched a gang fight in the orange glow of the streetlights below us, and we listened to the radio. The news was read both in English, the official national language, and Solomon Islands pidgin, which floated in a linguistic swamp between Bislama and English. On the news: Harold Keke had sent a communiqué from the Weather Coast, saying Father Geve had died from “lead poisoning.” Lead poisoning! Everyone got a chuckle out of that. Other news: four people were dead and six wounded in a shootout on an oil palm plantation east of the airport. Police suspected the combatants were neighbors. (But how would they know? The Royal Solomon Islands Police had been too scared to drive beyond the city limits for months.) Last item: the police had made a formal request for citizens to please stop stealing government trucks and vans.

  The brawl on the street below us ended abruptly when the power failed. Honiara was left in darkness punctuated only by garbage fires and the sparks that rose out of them like fireflies. I heard one disembodied voice howling and bawling late into the night. “Go home,” it cried. “Go home, oh please go home.”

  People in Honiara did not like to call the darkness a civil war. They did not like to call it chaos, or even conflict. The preferred phrase was “ethnic tension,” as though the past four years had come like a migraine, a condition of suffering over which no one had any power or responsibility. But it looked like war to me.

  The trouble had begun with hatred, guns, and money. Sometime during the 1990s, men on Guadalcanal became irritated with the settlers from other islands who populated Honiara and the rich plains around the capital. The Guadalcanalese were particularly bothered with the thousands of Malaitans who had arrived and prospered in the years following the nation’s 1978 independence from England. Malaitans treated Honiara as if they owned it. They ran the businesses, took the government jobs, built proper houses with tin roofs and TV antennas, and they let their young men run wild at night. The locals blamed Malaitans for a string of murders, including one machete massacre on the outskirts of the capital. Malaitans were greedy, crude, and aggressive, they insisted. Malaitan kastom was not good kastom.