Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All

by Christina Thompson

  He was in late middle age when his son was born, the one he named Aperahama. It is a name that signals the shift in political power, the end of one era and the beginning of the next. In one sense, it symbolizes a loss of Maori mana, or strength, and yet, it is a hopeful name, a survivor’s name, one that speaks of endurance against the odds. Of all the Pakeha names, Abraham is the one that best expresses the aspirations of a Maori chief in a pre-Pakeha world—for land, influence, descendants, and spiritual prestige. I imagined Tareha sitting and listening to the missionary’s words: And the Lord brought Abraham out under the night sky and said to him, Look now toward heaven and tell the stars if thou be able to number them. And the Lord said to Abraham, So shall thy seed be. And I will make nations of thee, and kings shall come out of thee. And I will give unto thee, and to thy seed after thee, the land wherein thou art a stranger for an everlasting possession.

  Perhaps later, when his son was born, he looked around and saw that it was all slipping away. The things that they had always known were no longer to be taken for granted and in their place were new things, some of them wonderful—like beaver hats, razors, gunpowder, frocks, and augers—some of them horrible, like the deep, hollow cough and the diarrhea and the sores and rashes that none of the old people had ever known. And so he called him Aperahama in the hope that his sons would be as numerous as the stars and as strong as the Pakehas’ bullocks and that they would be leaders of men and that their enemies would live in fear of the thunder of their guns.

  Of course, in Boston, none of this rang any bells at all. When my parents came that afternoon to see the baby, we all agreed that he was an unusually beautiful child. He was fair-skinned and dark-eyed and he had a wise, elfin expression, wide across the cheekbones and pointed at the chin. They cooed and held his fingers and asked us what name we had chosen.

  “Abraham,” I told them.

  My father looked at me with a quizzical expression.

  “Isn’t that a Jewish name?”

  11

  Nana Miri

  I had Never had much to do with babies and was surprised to find that I found looking after one quite easy. My mother said I reminded her of the French Canadian mother in a film by Margaret Mead about cross-cultural child rearing, the one who tossed her babies about in a confident if somewhat offhand way. I had long admired the way children were raised in New Zealand; the Maoris I knew were warm and affectionate but they never hovered over their kids. Maori men, in my experience, were also more at home with children than most of the men I had known, and it came as no surprise to me to find that Seven was a calm and unself-conscious father. He had grown up surrounded by children—siblings, nieces, nephews, cousins—and although he studiously avoided changing diapers (that, he said, had always been his sisters’ job), he was relaxed and easy with the baby.

  What did surprise me though was Seven’s enthusiasm for New England, and particularly his enthusiasm for snow. It wasn’t the look of it that he liked or the sporting opportunities it presented—though he did eventually take up ice-skating. No, what he liked about snow was driving in it. We were living in a little flat in Cambridge at the time, and whenever there had been a snowfall during the night, he would get up really early and drive around the streets in darkness before the plows were out. Of course, we all thought he was mad.

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “You’ve never even seen snow before. How do you know how to drive in it?”

  “It’s just like driving in sand.”

  And, in fact, the only thing he really missed was the ocean, or not even the ocean so much itself as the kai moana, the seafood. Within months he knew every fish market in a radius of twenty miles. He bought only from certain places and only at certain times. Soon the guys behind the counters knew him. “Hey, Seven!” they’d say, when he stopped in. “How are you, buddy?” They saved him lobster bodies and striper heads and set aside the freshest mussels. The ways we ate seafood in New England—deep-fried or sautéed with butter or cooked in tomatoes with garlic and parsley—never interested him. He liked his seafood fresh and without sauces; often he just ate it raw.

  Boston was an adventure for Seven, and I was glad to be near my family, who helped us out with everything from cutlery to cars. I would remember in the years that followed how much easier it was to raise children with aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents nearby. But I wasn’t quite ready to give up the Pacific and I still pined for the far side of the world.

  One night in the middle of winter, the phone rang. We were all in bed asleep and I came to consciousness just in time to hear the answering machine go on. I knew I should have gotten up to intercept it—at that hour it could only be bad news. But I was tired and I let myself drift back toward sleep. Finally, Seven swung his legs out from under the covers. It was three A.M. and very cold. By the time he got back to bed, I was wide awake.

  “Who was it?”

  “Someone’s died.”

  “Who?”

  “Nana Miri.”

  It was my sister-in-law’s voice on the tape. She was speaking, curiously, to me and not to Seven. She didn’t seem to realize that it was the middle of the night in Boston—for her in New Zealand it was dinnertime—and she seemed to think we were all out.

  “I just wanted to call and tell you that last night Nana Miri passed away. I knew you were specially fond of her and I thought you’d want to know. Well, I hope you’re all fine back there. Bye.”

  There was little point in calling back. It was too cold to sit up and she wasn’t the one I had to talk to anyway. She’d only have known the story third- or fourth-hand. I wanted to talk to Seven’s mother and I knew we wouldn’t be able to reach her until after the weekend. There were so many deaths (or was it so many relations?) that my mother-in-law was at a funeral almost every weekend. All Saturday and Sunday she would be at the marae, talking, singing, sitting with the body, doing the business of death.

  To my mother-in-law, her neighbor for over forty years, she was the Old Girl. My husband and his siblings called her Nana, though she was not really any relation of theirs. Other people of my in-laws’ generation called her Auntie. For years, I called her simply Miri, not realizing how strange, even discourteous, that must have sounded. She forgave me because I didn’t know any better and she never said a word. She called me Tirairaka, the fantail, a quick, curious little bird, always flitting about.

  When I met her, she had been a widow for almost thirty years. Her children were grown and gone away and one of her granddaughters lived with her. Like all the women of her generation, she had had a great many children: ten, of whom five were still living. Of the five who died, she told me about two. One was a baby who died of dysentery while she was in the hospital miscarrying the next. No one told her until she came home, weak and empty-handed. The other was her youngest, a boy. There was a photo of him on the wall in her house, a slender, fuzzy-haired teenager with a shy smile, taken not long before he was killed in a car crash at the age of seventeen.

  Nana Miri and my mother-in-law had known each other most of their lives, and in later years they were next-door neighbors. Their houses sat side by side on the flat, facing out to sea—identical timber boxes with flaking paint and a sheet of corrugated iron for a roof. They each had a living room that doubled as a kitchen, two little bedrooms on one side, and a bathroom tacked on at the back. There was electricity and propane gas for cooking and cold running water in both houses, but there the similarities between them came to an end.

  In Nana Miri’s house there were pictures on the walls and china in the cabinet. The carpet was swept and the dishes were put away. Behind the curtains that separated the bedrooms from the main room, the beds were made and the clothes were folded. The living room had a couch against one wall and a wood stove, a counter, and a kitchen sink opposite. In the middle was a table where she served me tea with milk and sugar and biscuits on a plate. We took our shoes off at the door. It felt to me exactly the way my own grandmother’s house m
ight have felt—though, in fact, I had never known either of my grandmothers, both of whom died before I was born.

  Next door, my mother-in-law’s house looked like it had been hit by a tornado. A large woman with a big voice, she lived surrounded by the wreckage of her energy. The majority of her children, including Seven, inherited from her this total disregard for order. There was not a single clear surface in the place; everything had a pile of something on it: piles of newspapers under the couch, piles of towels on the back of a chair, piles of clothing, piles of shoes, piles of papers. Some of the piles were a mixture: fishing tackle and hairbrushes, hammers and magazines. Part of the problem was that there were too many people in the household and not enough drawers—my mother-in-law had also had ten children, all of whom had survived and most of whom had produced children of their own. But a bigger part was that no one ever threw anything away. Her daughters tidied periodically, mainly by shoving more things under the furniture and pushing everything to the edges of the room. I tried once or twice to help them but it was like trying to discipline entropy itself.

  Whenever I was in Mangonui, I used to escape to Nana Miri’s and sit with her at her table, eating biscuits and drinking tea.

  “I don’t know how they stand it over there,” she would say, shaking her head. “They’re always yelling.”

  “I know. Sometimes I think they’re all mad.”

  We were two of a kind, Nana Miri and I.

  Strictly speaking, Nana Miri had no rights to the land on which she lived. She had been born in Te Hapua, about a hundred miles north, and orphaned at the age of three when both her parents died in the pandemic of 1918. In Te Hapua, as in other isolated Maori communities, influenza spread like fire through dry grass. The people coughed, grew chill, then burning, and complained that their heads were being crushed between two stones. They had sudden nosebleeds, and when they coughed, they brought up a bloody, frothy phlegm. They were overcome with weakness and lay down where they were with parched throats and aching bones, alternately shivering and throwing off the blankets. The ones that went blue died first, a thin, bloody trickle seeping from their nose and mouth. Others lingered, fighting the pneumonia that followed hard on the heels of the mate uruta, the death cold.

  The flu killed both the young and old, but many of its victims were men and women in the prime of life. In Te Hapua, as in other places, it left orphans by the score, and Nana Miri was sent to live with relatives on the other side of Parengarenga Harbour. Parengarenga means “the place where the renga lily grows,” but rengarenga also means crushed, destroyed, beaten, and scattered about, which is how the people of Te Hapua must have felt at the end of 1918.

  When she was seventeen years old, she married and moved with her husband to Waipapakauri, where they worked digging kauri gum. It was hard, backbreaking work and they were up to their knees in the swamp for hours at a time. But Nana Miri thought she must have been meant to live a long time since the flu hadn’t taken her when it took everyone else. Her husband was less lucky. Every year he grew more gaunt, and when he died of tuberculosis at the age of forty-three, he left his wife and ten children in a community to which they had ties neither by marriage nor by birth.

  It is rare, even now, to find someone in Mangonui who does not belong to the iwi, the tribe, who is not, as they say, “of their bones.” The land on which Nana Miri lived belonged to Seven’s father, who gave it to her when she was widowed and said it was hers to keep for as long as she liked. It was part of a parcel of some four hundred acres, all that was left of the thousands to which Ngati Rehia had once laid claim. Of these, the most spectacular fifty—across the peninsula on the open sea—were leased to the Pakeha for ninety-nine years. Another two hundred acres were farmed by the Mangonui Corporation; a hundred or so of cabbage tree, manuka, and gorse remained undeveloped; and the last fifty, on the inlet side of the peninsula, were occupied by the village of Mangonui.

  The arcane rules in Mangonui governing the placement of houses and other property rights, and the ways in which history was recollected differently by different people, gave rise to feuds lasting generations over what belonged to whom. My father-in-law had certain privileges owing to the fact that he was the local minister and to his uncontestable line of descent. He himself was the sole survivor of several children and the son of the son of the son back to Tareha himself. So no one argued with him when he gave Nana Miri the house and said it was hers until she died.

  Nana Miri and her husband had first come to Mangonui in the years before the Second World War, following an apostle of the prophet Ratana, a Maori farmer who, in that terrible year of 1918, had been visited by the Holy Ghost and told to unite the Maori people. Wiremu “Bill” Ratana was forty-five in the year of the pandemic, a temperamental fellow with a taste for football, fast horses, and drink. He caught the flu when it came to Wanganui and recovered, only to find that of the twenty-four members of his generation, just three remained. A week later he was sitting on the veranda of his house when a cloud rose from the surface of the sea and began to move toward him. Out of the cloud a voice spoke, saying, “Fear not, I am the Holy Ghost. Cleanse yourself and your family as white as snow, as sinless as the wood-pigeon. Ratana, I appoint you as the Mouthpiece of God for the multitude of this land.” Later an angel appeared and repeated the message, telling Ratana that he was to turn the people from fear of roosters and owls and belief in ghosts and spirits hidden in sticks and relics of the dead. He was to preach the gospel, heal the sick, and bring the people to Jehovah.

  Out of the ashes rises the bird of hope. There had been others like him in the previous century—men like Te Kooti Rikirangi and Te Whiti o Rongomai—prophets who gathered the people in time of trial. And now, at the end of the Great War, in the wake of the pandemic, the air was full of “thought-storms and semi-heathen superstitions.” The apostles fanned out from Ratana’s home with instructions to gather up the morehu, or survivors, and take them to the places where the Maori had been strong. Nana Miri and her husband were among the thousands drawn to the movement. They knew the past was a time of death and they looked to Ratana for a new beginning, for unity and strength. And that is how they came to Mangonui, an old place, a place with mana from the old days, a place where they could start again.

  “It was beautiful then,” Nana Miri told me, staring out the window over a cup of tea. “Mangonui was just a camp. A mudflat over that way, a marsh over there. The old people came back from Waimate, no one had lived here for years, and we built our houses there where the oyster farm is now.”

  And then, as if she thought she might have given me the wrong impression, she looked at me sternly. “It was hard, you know, not like these days. We didn’t have houses like this. We didn’t have running water. You couldn’t turn your lights on with a switch. We had houses made of raupo, you know, reeds. We got our water from the spring. But we had what we needed. Kai moana, kumara … You see those old trees?” She pointed through the window to a line of ancient peach trees and a scraggly lemon tree at the edge of the bush. “We planted them. We planted fruit trees all over this place—plums, peaches, lemons. Your father-in-law’s mother made the best peaches in Mangonui. Beautiful golden peaches in big glass jars. You ask your husband, he’ll remember.”

  Sometimes when I left Nana Miri’s I’d go for a walk down the beach, past the marae, and back up toward the main road. There was a turnoff to the right that led to the cemetery, a small, weedy plot with a loose wire fence and a creaky metal gate on crooked hinges. I liked to look at the old stones, especially the ones with the Ratana symbols, a five-pointed star balanced in the cup of a crescent moon, the image of the prophet and two whales, the twin square towers of the Ratana church, looking, I thought, vaguely Lutheran.

  I was never sure whether it was OK for me to be there, so I tried to make myself inconspicuous. The family who lived next door to the cemetery had a rottweiler who guarded the place closely. He was chained, mercifully, to a house post, but whenever I came to
look at the graves, he leaped out of the shadows, barking furiously and baring his teeth. No one from the house ever appeared, though I often thought I saw the curtains stir. I imagined them inside, “Nah, it’s just Seven’s missus, you know, the Pakeha, in the cemetery again.”

  Nana Miri’s death came as a surprising blow. It would be wrong to say that I knew her intimately, but I always felt as though there were a bond between us. I was an outsider and she was something of an outsider too. She had taken an interest in me in Magonui, and I had come to think of her as a sort of surrogate grandmother. It was no accident that it was to her, and her alone, that I blurted out the secret of our marriage.

  The last time I’d seen her in Mangonui, winter had been coming on and I had taken her to buy some clothing. She lived on very little money and rarely bought anything for herself, and I wanted to give her something that would be both smart and warm. We went to a store in Kerikeri that sold women’s clothing and picked out a pair of heavy black trousers and a patterned sweater in black and gray.

  “There,” I said. “That should keep you cozy.”

  “Oh, Chris,” she said, giving me a hug.

  She was already old when I first met her, though she was still climbing up and down the embankment at the age of seventy-eight. I knew, of course, she couldn’t live forever, but I hadn’t expected her to die—not yet, and not when I was so far away.