by Jeff Gulvin
That last night, though, he had been dozing: Mahina had commented on the greyness in his face, the great black hollows beneath his eyes, his skin ravaged by fear. She had cupped his cheek as he gave her morphine and her eyes rolled and the smile played about her lips and she joked about dying more often so she could get high on the drug.
‘You’re not dying,’ he told her.
She touched his cheek and her fingers were thin and fragile and the flesh hung from her arm. And he recalled her in his mind’s eye as she had been only a few precious months before, when they knew nothing of this and she was as vibrant and beautiful as the day he first set eyes on her. He thought then how quickly the disease had taken hold: how frail the body was and yet how strong and utterly indomitable the spirit.
Mahina knew she was dying and she fought it for as long as she could. Then, aware the fight was futile, she calmly told him her time was up. The spirits of her ancestors were whispering across eternity and it was her appointed moment to join them. The wine had dried in his mouth and he stared at the fire with his jaws clamped together, not wanting to show her his fear and not wanting to believe her, but knowing that she was right. One look at her face told him she was right. Gaunt now, she looked, and so pale, the skin of her face thin and seamed like withered parchment suddenly brought into light.
She told him she’d lain in bed feeling strangely weightless under the blanket. The window was open and there was no rain now, just the pattering of possums’ feet on the roof from time to time. As she lay there she heard the cry of the morepork owl in the trees that bordered their garden. The sudden stillness was all-consuming; her senses heightened, she could smell the sweetness of manuka with last night’s rain on the leaves. She could feel the bark dropping from the fuchsia and in her mind she witnessed the saucered ovals of darkness as the possum blinked from its branches. Her breath was light in her chest, almost as if it were not hers. Then she heard the morepork a second time and quietly she waited, fingers gripping the green teardrop stone, the tangi-wai she had picked up from the bay at Anita when her mother was alive and she and Jonah were young. And then she heard the morepork a third and final time and she stared at the ceiling before she eased herself onto one elbow, amazed at her own weightlessness.
‘John-Cody.’
He heard her call him from where he dozed in the chair. She didn’t need to raise her voice or call a second time: he was there, gazing at her through the glow of the firelight in their open bedroom doorway.
He stood on the corner of his street now and peered through the gloom at the darkened walls of the house. Single storey, they had built it like a cabin before Mahina decided to divide it in two so they could offer some self-contained bed and breakfast accommodation to travellers. That was before they began the charter business; he was still a fisherman, supplementing their income with trapped deer for the newly formed venison farms.
Tree and shrub dominated the front aspect of the house and he could make out the flax and the skinny, naked lancewood tree. So many memories, they seeped into his mind like ether: Mahina’s face in laughter, her aged, thoughtful father and Jonah, her wild-eyed Waitaha brother who’d asked if he could crew on the Korimako just to be close to her memory.
The moon moved between the clouds to cast the gravelled road in silver. Soon the dawn would come and Tom would be waiting for him down at Pearl Harbour. Crossing the road, he walked down the drive to the left of the house and came round the back where the dark curtainless window of their bedroom dominated the wall. Before him the garden was a labyrinth of arbour and bush and building, the hut where his guitars were stored, the shed and the broken-down caravan the two of them had travelled the South Island in when they were young.
He had been in New Zealand for twenty-five years now and he had been with Mahina for twenty-two of them. Night after night, day after day, they had only ever been parted when he was at sea. Until last year, when the pains in her back grew to an unbearable level and finally the specialists in Invercargill told them she had lymphatic cancer and her chances of survival were nil. She had lasted only six months, the deterioration savagely sudden, wiping the vitality from her so quickly she cried for release.
John-Cody looked at her through the bedroom doorway and she held out her arms for him and he knew then that it was time. She had always told him she would know and she would be ready. She looked ready now. There was a calm about her features, the lines were flatter in her face and, although she was frail and thin and weak, her beauty was intact.
‘Carry me outside,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t want to die in my bed.’
She showed no fear. He could not show her any: he smiled and as he bent down his hair fell into her face and she caught up the ends in one hand and breathed in his scent.
‘I always loved the way you smelled, John-Cody. I’ll carry that much with me.’
He lifted her easily. Light as a feather, she was so much skin and bone. Outside, the first scratching of dawn unravelled like thread. John-Cody paused by the wooden seat and table where they used to sit at night and talk. Mahina moved against him: arms about his neck so her lips brushed his cheek and her hair was light and fuzzy against his skin. He carried her to the main road and across Waiau Street where Lake Manapouri, the Lake of the Sorrowing Heart, lay black and still in the darkness.
His boots crunched on the gravel as they made their way down to Fraser’s Beach, Sierra running ahead as soon as she could smell the water.
‘It’s so still,’ Mahina whispered.
John-Cody did not say anything: he was not sure of his voice, the lump in his throat already threatening to choke him. He picked his way carefully between the beech trees so that the fingered ends of branches didn’t scratch her. As he set foot on the shingle she was so quiet he thought for a moment he’d lost her. Then she stirred and shifted in his arms and looked towards Pearl Harbour where the gum tree stood tall and white and naked, its branches stiff like petrified limbs against the gorse and scrub and the smaller black-barked manuka.
‘Look at the eucalyptus,’ she breathed. ‘See, there is magnificence in death.’
‘Don’t say that.’ His tears threatened to fall, but she gripped both his cheeks between her palms and squeezed until his mouth puckered.
‘Don’t you go sentimental on me. Not now: not when I’m about to go on the journey of a lifetime.’
‘You’re not going anywhere.’
Still carrying her, John-Cody walked along the shore, the stones damp and sucking at the soles of his boots.
‘You’re right, I’m not,’ Mahina said. ‘Not right away anyway. I want to watch over you, make sure you’re OK.’ Again she gripped his face, deliberately squeezing hard. ‘Not just you but my father and Jonah: take care of Jonah, John-Cody.’
‘You take care of Jonah. He’s your brother.’
They were at her thinking stone, pure white against the shingle but dappled grey in the half-light. The sun was rising but had not yet climbed above the Takitimus to the east, and the lake reflected the night.
‘I won’t be here to take care of him. You’ll have to do it for me.’
John-Cody sat on the stone. This was where she came most days, quietly on her own or with Sierra. She always sat here with the blue gum tree to her left and the lake stretching before her to the Cathedrals and Kepler Mountains.
‘You’ll still be here,’ he said. ‘You’re not going anywhere. You’re not allowed to leave me.’
‘But I am. You know I am. I heard the morepork, John-Cody. I heard him the past two nights and I heard him again just now. Three times he called my name.’
John-Cody stood in the lee of the house, the shadows deepest close to the walls. He stared at the darkened branches of the fuchsia and felt the tightening in his chest. Then he stepped across the short expanse of grass and bent to the hollow bole. Very carefully he lifted the earthenware pot that had rested there for a year and placed it inside the canvas bag he had slung over his shoulder. The walk to
Pearl Harbour took him ten minutes, back the way he had come, past the office to the bend in the road and the quiet inlet where he had fished years ago. It was where Southland Tours kept the boats that they used to ferry people across the lake. He walked quickly, the pack hanging from his shoulder, one hand against the cold stone of the jar to steady it.
‘Don’t forget what you promised me.’ She whispered it to him, her lips close to his ear.
‘I won’t.’ John-Cody stared at the lake as the first slivers of gold began to beat a path across the surface. The sun was rising behind them, the sky clear now: it would be a perfect spring morning.
‘Tell me. Tell me what you’re going to do.’
He looked at her then, his voice breaking as he tried to get the words out. ‘You want to be burned and your ashes placed in the bole of the fuchsia.’
‘For one year only, counting from today, not when you burn me.’ Again she gripped his face and he could feel the urgency in her fingers. ‘I want to watch over you for one year. You’re going to need me. I can see that.’ She paused then, eyes half-closing. Again he thought he was losing her, but her eyelids fluttered and she looked evenly at him once more. ‘But after that you free me, you understand? Free me, John-Cody Gibbs, then forget all about me because I won’t remember you.’ Her words were harsh, features stiff and taut. ‘I’ll be gone for ever, tasting the breath of eternity.’
Mahina rested her head against him; then, loosening her grip round his neck, she took his hand in hers and pressed back the fingers so that his palm was flattened and he felt something cold and smooth against his skin. Glancing down, he saw it was the tangi-wai, the sliver of pounamu greenstone she had kept with her since childhood. She looked across the opaque surface of the lake and smiled. The sun ran in gold streaks on the water and the summits of the Cathedrals were brilliant against the sky.
‘It’s going to be a beautiful day,’ she whispered.
And she was gone. He felt the breath go out of her: her limbs limp against him, head sagging to settle on his chest. Next to him the gum tree was naked and silent. The water lapped at his feet and Sierra, who had been gambolling among the stones, stopped where she was and looked over.
He had carried her body back to the house and then telephoned Jonah and her father, Kobi, who still lived up in Naseby. Kobi had bought what had been the old general store, no more than a warehouse by then, and built himself a single room inside it, roof and fireplace and all. Jonah was working in Omakau and said he would go and collect him. He had been against Mahina’s cremation, which was in keeping with her father’s Eastern European origins rather than the Waitaha traditions of their mother. He had come round, however, when John-Cody told him why she had wished it, and it was afterwards that he had requested to crew on the boat. Jonah had a skipper’s ticket gained when he worked for Ned Pole, driving crayfish boats in and around the sounds. But he’d given up working for Pole when Mahina fell ill.
Tom drove the Z boat standing up and John-Cody sat and listened to the murmur of conversation from the diggers occupying the seats behind him. Halfway across the lake he got up and watched the sun lighting up the valley. Looking back again, he saw that Tom was watching him.
‘How you going, mate?’
John-Cody managed to raise a smile. ‘I’ve had better days.’
‘I reckon.’ Tom looked at the canvas pack. ‘Everything set?’
John-Cody nodded.
‘Are you going to live on the boat after?’
‘I don’t know. I’ll see how I feel.’
‘I hope you’ve got her shipshape. You know how she loved that boat.’
John-Cody smiled then and took tobacco from his pocket. ‘She looks as sweet as, Tom.’
‘Good on you.’ Tom patted his shoulder and turned back to the windscreen where the bow wave lifted spray to smatter the glass.
The crossing took forty-five minutes before they docked at the power station wharf at West Arm. It was still only eight o’clock and John-Cody was glad he had made the early start. The sandflies were not out in force yet and he had left his bottle of repellent back on the boat. The wharf was quiet at this time of day, the first of the parties of tourists not yet in the national park. The green-roofed information centre was dwarfed by the mountains that rose between Lake Manapouri and the sea fiords. Trees clung to their flanks and choked the valleys: silver beech interspersed with red and mountain beech, marbleleaf, wineberry higher up on the pass, and at the shoreline kahikatea and rimu. Mahina had called this place the last garden of Tane, god of the forest and birds.
They disembarked and Tom pointed out the driver of one of the company twin cabs who was going over the hill to the exit site of the second tunnel, where millions of gallons of water were being pumped into Deep Cove. John-Cody was able to hitch a ride. The driver was quiet, sensing his mood. John-Cody had seen him a couple of times during his year living on the boat. Alex, who ran the office, had kept in touch with John-Cody by the ship-to-shore radio and organized the few eco-tours he had undertaken. She had urged him to keep working even though, with Mahina’s death, the boat had been paid off. She told him that Mahina would hate to think of him giving up on everything they had striven to build over the last ten years. There were currently twenty-two charter boats operating in the sounds of south-west New Zealand and theirs was the only one that took no fish from the sea.
The driver dropped him on the road above his wharf. They had had it only a year before Mahina died; the permit was probably the last that would be granted by the Department of Conservation. The Korimako was berthed alongside, brilliant white in the sunlight that beat down on the water. John-Cody could feel the sweat on his back and the sore patch on his shoulder where the strap of his pack was chafing.
He set the pack carefully on the bench seat that surrounded the table in the saloon, then sliding down the for’ard steps he ducked into the engine room and felt for the light switch. He went through his rigid routine of checks before he fired up the auxiliary. Now he had power for the generators and upstairs he could make some coffee. He stood a moment on the bridge, palms moist, before twisting the ignition key. The massive Gardner engine fired into life. He let her idle while he took off the for’ard and stern lines, then finally the spring, which he coiled before depositing it back on the wharf. Instinctively he hit the horn three times, put the gears astern and backed away from the wharf. Moments later he was chugging up Deep Cove with the wheelhouse doors slid open and a cup of coffee at his elbow.
Jonah had driven Mahina’s father down from Naseby after John-Cody phoned them. It took six hours and when they got there John-Cody had already arranged things with the undertaker from Te Anau. He had wanted to come and take her body away immediately, but John-Cody reminded him that Waitaha sensibilities were to be respected and they must wait till Jonah and his father had seen her.
Jonah was a wide-shouldered man who looked entirely Polynesian, though the reality was that the Maori had intermarried with Europeans for generations now. There were no full bloods remaining and few, if any, half bloods. Jonah and Mahina had probably been quarter blood, their mother half-blood Waitaha when she married Kobi, who had landed from Hungary. He was a small stooping man and he looked wizened as he stood at the foot of the bed gazing at the face of his daughter.
‘That’s exactly how her mother looked,’ he said softly. ‘Same thing took her. Almost the same age.’ He shook his head and tears broke at the corners of his liquid blue eyes.
Jonah laid a massive hand on his shoulder. His hair was long and black and untied today; normally he liked to wear it in a ponytail. ‘I still don’t think she should be burnt,’ he said. ‘Waitaha people aren’t burnt.’
‘No, but pakeha sometimes are.’ His father looked stiffly at him. ‘She’s half Hungarian, Jonah. It’s what she wanted.’ He turned to John-Cody. ‘Show me the tree.’
They stepped to the window and John-Cody pointed to the pink-barked fuchsia just the other side of the glass. A hanging bir
d table dangled from one of its lower limbs and a fantail pecked at the apple he had placed there yesterday evening.
‘For a year?’
John-Cody looked back at him and nodded.
‘That’s good.’ Kobi turned back to his daughter once more and brushed her hair with his fingertips. John-Cody moved to the dressing table where a sealed envelope with Kobi’s name on it rested at the base of the mirror. He handed it to the old man.
‘She wanted you to have this.’
Kobi looked at the pale blue envelope, nodded and slipped it into his jacket pocket.
John-Cody put the Korimako on autopilot and went below to turn on the deck hose. He pulled on his wet-weather gear then sprayed the deck down, conscious of the build-up of rust every time he raised the anchor. They had bought the Korimako on a wing and a prayer; the name was the Maori translation for bellbird, which seemed fitting given their garden and the fuchsia and the chorus that greeted them most mornings. She was a buck-eye ketch almost nineteen metres long, her twin masts both the same height with no booms; steel-hulled and steel-decked with no wooden boards to rot, and she weighed seventy tonnes. John-Cody had flown to Australia, bought the best fully commissioned charter boat he could locate and sailed her back with Tom Blanch and Jonah crewing for him. It was Tom who had really taught John-Cody the ways of the sea after he landed in 1974. He had spied the South Island from the deck of a Hawaiian trawler, his third vessel since he had sailed from Bellingham.
He steamed up Deep Cove now, glancing to port and the entrance of Hall’s Arm, which had been one of Mahina’s special places: there they could turn the engines off and listen to nothing but the sounds of the fiord. Ahead was the Malaspina Reach, named in honour of Alessandro Malaspina, an Italian who commanded a Spanish expedition in 1793. John-Cody had learned it all from Mahina and it flooded back now as he took her ashes out to sea, the Korimako cutting a perfect line through the calm dark water. As he approached Espinosa Point a dolphin breached on the port bow and John-Cody smiled: they always came visiting when Mahina was on the boat, as if they knew she was there, as if they could communicate with her in some strange and wonderful way. She always said they were far more intelligent than humans, that long ago they had learned that life on land had a sell-by date and to survive they had to migrate to the sea. Vividly he remembered sitting on the dive platform with her as they paddled their feet in the freezing water while the pod played beneath them. Mahina told him that if God ever wanted to communicate something to man again he wouldn’t use a human being. No-one would believe another human, but they might a whale or a dolphin.
