Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All

by Christina Thompson

  I often tried to encourage him to speak Maori to the children and to teach them some of the things he knew. Once, I suggested he show Aperahama how to fish with a hand line like the one I’d seen him use in Mangonui. It was just a circle of plastic on which a fishing line was wound, but the way he could throw it out was marvelous. “Oh,” he said, “I don’t even know where to get one of those. And, anyway, it’s easier to fish with a rod.” I think the idea of trying to re-create the world he’d grown up in struck him as silly. He was never one to fetishize his own culture, not when, as he pointed out, there was a perfectly good alternative to hand. I think he agreed with Sir Paul Reeves, the former governor-general of New Zealand, who once said, “There are as many ways of growing up Maori as there are Maori themselves”—and one of them is not to grow up Maori at all.

  But there was something else I hadn’t anticipated, which had to do with the way that I had been raised. One has no idea, in advance, how much one is going to draw upon one’s own experience of childhood in order to raise children. And yet, I too was “out of culture.” The Australian school system, for example, was foreign to me and, although I could make sense of it from year to year as my children progressed through the grades, I had no memory of how it went, no overview, no sense of where it was going, no model for what was coming up. Nor did I really understand the other mothers, who had, for the most part, grown up right there, sometimes in that very suburb. I didn’t know what to make for children’s birthday parties or what to bring for the school potluck. I didn’t have any loyalty to the local football club. I didn’t belong to any neighborhood organizations. I didn’t even go to church.

  Some of this awkwardness might have had to do with the particular neighborhood in which we were living. There were places in Melbourne where I might have felt more at home—where the mothers might have been more like me, though the fathers would, of course, have been even less like Seven—but we couldn’t afford to live in any of them. The curious thing was that, in the past, I had never minded this sense of dislocation. On the contrary, I’d always been happiest swimming in some strange sea. But once I became responsible for my own children, I no longer enjoyed the feeling of being out of my depth. How was I supposed to know what to do with them if I couldn’t follow the only templates that I had?

  It was a classic immigrant’s problem and, of course, it could have been very much worse. Melbourne wasn’t that different from what I was used to—everyone spoke English, after all—but it was different enough to be disorienting. And that, combined with my growing sense of insecurity about finding anywhere to live, made me feel that, although we had come back to a place where we’d been happy, we had not necessarily come back to a place we could call home.

  And then an arrow dropped in front of us, just as Seven always said. It came in the form of a telephone call from my mother. My father was in the hospital again; it was serious though not immediately life-threatening. But he was nearing eighty and I had to ask myself: did I want to do what Seven had done and go back for the funeral, or was it, maybe, time to go back home?

  15

  Matariki

  I remember waking in the middle of the night on my very first flight across the equator and looking out the window of the plane. There, low on the horizon and much smaller than I’d imagined, was the Southern Cross. This constellation is to the southern hemisphere what the Big Dipper is to the north, a bright, familiar figure in the night sky that any child can point to. It is made up of four bright stars with a fifth, smaller star floating in the lower right-hand quadrant. To the lower left is an area of darkness long thought to be “an opening into the awful solitude of unoccupied space.” In fact, it is a dark cloud of hydrogen gas nearly five hundred light-years away.

  A circumpolar constellation, the Cross rotates through the southern sky with its long axis always pointing to the pole, and it is as useful to the navigator in the southern hemisphere as Polaris, the North Star, is to the sailor in the north. While, technically, I might still have been north of the equator at that moment—for the Cross is just visible within the Tropic of Cancer and can be seen low on the horizon from Hawaii and the Florida Keys—for me, the presence of that little cluster of stars was not merely an indication that I had crossed over the line. It was a sign, the sign, that the world of things I knew was dipping out of sight behind me, while before me rose a world of things I’d never seen.

  When I made my final journey a decade and a half later, it was along this same pathway in reverse. I had Seven, Aperahama, and Matiu to keep me company, and a third child on the way. We allowed ourselves five weeks to enjoy what we knew would likely be our last big trip, at least for sometime to come. There are many things you can do with one child that are difficult, if not impossible, with three, and moving back and forth across the world is certainly one of them.

  We stopped off in New Zealand to say good-bye, making the rounds of Seven’s siblings in Auckland and Kaitaia and Whangarei. We slept on people’s couches and in their guest rooms and once we pitched a tent in someone’s yard. But after ten days or so of constant moving (the tent was rather damp), we decided to rent a house for a week on a beachfront not far from Mangonui. It was a tiny place, extremely rustic, but it looked out on the most spectacular bay. It was autumn, the offseason, and the weather was unsettled: one day of brilliant sunshine followed by two of scudding clouds.

  The beach was on the ocean side of a long branching peninsula that reached out into the sea. It was remote and extremely quiet, just a little cluster of houses, several of which were shuttered up. A stream ran into the ocean at one end of the beach, and each tide brought new pools and eddies for the children to play in. At the back of the cove there was a steep hillside that led up to the crest of the ridge, and once or twice I clambered up to the top with a cell phone to ring my mother. To our mutual amazement the connection was perfectly clear, and I felt as though I were describing a parallel universe when I tried to explain to her where I was.

  “Well,” I said, “I’m sitting on a rock in a paddock. There’s a fence behind me and a couple of cows and a lot of prickly-looking gorse. But looking out the other way it’s quite incredible. I’m up on a bluff overlooking the Pacific, and from where I’m sitting I can actually see the curvature of the earth. I think if you set off from here and sailed in a straight line, you wouldn’t hit land again until you came to Valparaiso.” There was a strong swell coming in from the east and the breakers down on the beach shone brilliantly whenever the sun broke through. “The color of the sea? Hmmm. I think maybe I’d call it Prussian blue.”

  The other important stop on our farewell journey was, of course, Hawaii. It had been years since we lived in Honolulu, but we had never gotten over our fondness for the place and Seven often talked about returning. We stayed in a little flat on the university campus and took the boys to Ala Moana to show them the break where Seven liked to surf. We went up over the mist-shrouded Pali and down to the beach at Sans Souci. We showed them the basketwork gods in the Bishop Museum and walked them round the portraits of the Hawaiian monarchs whose resemblance to their Maori aunties and uncles was so plain to see. And, as a sort of coup de grâce, we took them to visit Henry.

  Henry, who was the same age as my father, was having some trouble getting back and forth, and he told us we were lucky to find him there; it was probably the last time he’d be able to make the trip from California. I had brought him a book by Ben Finney on the off chance that he didn’t already have it. It was the story of the journey of the Hokule’a—a reconstructed double-hulled voyaging canoe—from Hawaii to New Zealand and back again, a journey, including side trips, of some twelve thousand nautical miles. Henry knew a good deal about experimental voyaging—journeys undertaken in traditional vessels using only traditional knowledge and tools—and had followed the fortunes of the Hokule’a since her maiden voyage to Tahiti in 1976. Although he was mildly allergic to the idea of reinvented tradition, and disliked the hordes of New Age tourists who c
ame to pray to the goddess Pele, he was intrigued by these efforts to rediscover the ancient navigational techniques.

  “Hokule’a,” he said, “is the Hawaiian name for Arcturus, Hawaii’s zenith star. Arcturus is a bright star. The brightest, I believe, in the northern hemisphere and its line of declination happens to be precisely the same as the latitude of the Big Island. Some people think the old Polynesians deduced the existence of an island beneath it on the principle that every bright star ought to mark something important. Sirius, the brightest star in the heavens, passes directly over Tahiti. But you know, if you were hunting for Hawaii, you might also find the Pleiades useful. Makali’i, the ‘little eyes’—or by some accounts the ‘eyes of god,’ though I think that may be a late interpretation—travels over us as well.”

  Henry leaned back in his chair and looked out the great glass windows at the sky.

  “I know that one,” said Seven. “We call it Matariki. We sometimes used to use it to find north. But I never knew it was over Hawaii.”

  When our third son was born about six months later—on Columbus Day, as it happened—my mother jokingly asked if we were going to call him Cristobal.

  “Ha ha,” I said. “No. We’re going to call him Dani. Nice and simple, don’t you think? But his real name is Dani Matariki. A pointer to the northern hemisphere. A north star for the south.”

  Each time we moved it was logistically more difficult and each time the stakes were higher. We had, in spite of all our problems, begun to put down roots in Australia. My entire professional career had been spent in the Pacific; everyone I knew or had ever worked with was there. Seven, who’d gone back to the messenger business, had a network of very close friends. Our children spoke with Australian accents. I had gone so far as to become naturalized and carried two passports: one with an American eagle and one with an emu and a kangaroo.

  And, yet, when the call came about my father, we barely hesitated. He was ill and old and there was too much for him to look after, too many leaves, too much grass, too much snow. We, for our part, had too little money. No matter how hard we worked, it seemed it was always one step forward and two steps back. Maybe, I thought, in America, we could pool our resources: my mother could cook, I could clean, my father could pay the bills, Seven could do the heavy lifting. From each according to his ability, I joked, to each according to his need.

  We shipped three trunks of clothes and bedding, two trunks of toys, a titanium bike, a case of tools, and forty boxes of books and papers. It was the most we’d ever amassed in the way of belongings, but it was still not much for a family of almost five. We had no furniture at all and no kitchen equipment to speak of. I did own one good knife, which I wrapped in a towel and packed in my suitcase, and there was a frying pan I was fond of that had been given to me by a friend, but I left it behind with Seven’s sister, along with everything else, including the car. We promised our friends we’d be back in a few years but they just looked at each other and said, “Well, we’ll wait and see.”

  We had, typically, given almost no thought to the question of where we were going to live. Our first thought had been to stay with my parents until we sorted ourselves out. But we soon found that Boston was even dearer than Melbourne. Jobs were hard to come by; salaries were low; health insurance and child care were astronomical; and house prices and rents were, as usual, completely out of reach. But we did have one thing we hadn’t had in Australia, and that was help.

  The advantages of living in a multigenerational household are apparent to vast numbers of people around the world, but in America, affluence has enabled a culture of isolation and the idea of living with one’s extended family strikes most people as quite mad. How can you stand living with your parents? my friends asked me, while my parents’ friends asked them, How can you stand living with your kids? Actually, it was quite easy. There were many more people to do all the things that needed doing—shoveling, cooking, babysitting, putting on and taking off storm windows and screens—and while we brought a certain degree of mess and chaos, we also brought life and energy to a house that was growing quieter with every passing year.

  It wouldn’t have worked for everybody, but it worked for us. Everyone sacrificed something—privacy, control—but everyone benefited. Seven and I were able to raise our children in a place much nicer than anything we could afford. My parents had company and help with the arduous task of looking after a house in New England on three acres of land. And, as for the children, it was entirely win-win: an array of devoted adults to look after them, a safe and beautiful environment, a nice little public school.

  Which is not to say that there weren’t problems. My parents objected to Seven’s truck, a hulking red Ford with a rusting snowplow that he thought he might someday learn to use, and complained about the quantities of junk that he brought home from the dump—broken snowblowers and television sets, bent ski poles and baby strollers, lamps, radios, bicycles, any kind of remote-control car. It was symptomatic of their differences: his inventiveness versus their refinement. And reminded me of the anthropologist Nicholas Thomas’s argument that the close proximity of two cultures—on, for instance, a colonial frontier—does not necessarily result in cultural synthesis. On the contrary, he writes, “closely connected things can remain utterly different.”

  Seven and my parents could agree to disagree and, so long as they respected each other’s boundaries, everything was fine. For me, the problem was different; it was the feeling of having been displaced in time. Everywhere I went there were echoes of my own history: there was the field where I used to go riding; there was the gym where I’d broken my arm; there was the house where my brother was married. I had grown up in this very place with these very people and I knew it all like the back of my own hand. But it was a life I associated with childhood, and there were times when I felt like a subject in a psychology experiment in the erasure of adult memory. My parents were still in their room; my children were in the room I’d occupied as a child; Seven and I were in the guest room. It was like not knowing where in your life you were.

  But, then, wasn’t this sense of disorientation precisely what I’d always sought? I told myself that I had simply embarked on a new adventure, filled with minivans and soccer fields and bank overdrafts, which to the prejudiced observer might have seemed like the antithesis of a voyage of discovery, a kind of antiexpedition, an unadventure, but which—looked at from the right angle—was as challenging and peculiar as anything I’d known.

  There was one person for whom it really was an adventure, however. Seven was no longer the innocent he’d been when he first came to America, but he had never lived anywhere quite like the place to which we had now moved.

  The town in which my parents lived was one of those New England villages with a flower pot, a white church, and a common in the center, and a small, grudging concession to commerce in the form of a bank, a post office, a supermarket, and a gift shop about a mile away. Although it was only about fifteen miles from Boston, it had retained much of its original character, thanks to the implementation of a radical two-acre zoning policy in the late 1950s. Thus, while all the towns around it had grown denser and more suburban, my parents’ town had remained remarkably pristine.

  There had been demographic changes, however. The people who had moved out from Boston in the late 1950s and early 1960s—my parents among them—were attracted to the area by the prospect of cheap land. They were mostly middle-class people, professionals and businessmen, but also a number of academics like my father. As the value of the land went up, however, the professions of the inhabitants changed. Professors could no longer afford to live there, and by the time Seven and I arrived, the town was filled with venture capitalists and financiers.

  In this small and affluent community, Seven was difficult to miss. Everything about him was different: the way he looked, the car he drove, his accent, the things he wore. Soon it seemed that everybody knew him. Although I had the advantage of having already lived ther
e, within a matter of months more people knew Seven than knew me.

  One day I went to the local library to get some books for a talk about New Zealand that I’d been asked to give at the preschool. When I got there, I found that some other group was doing a project on the antipodes and all the books on New Zealand were already out. I explained the situation to the librarian.

  “You know,” she said, leaning across the counter confidentially, “there is a Maori in town that you could talk to.”

  “I know,” I said, trying not to smile. “I’m married to him.”

  As the years went by and we showed no sign of returning to the Pacific, people began to ask me if Seven was happy in the States and whether he ever wanted to go home.

  “Don’t you want to go back to New Zealand?” I would ask him.

  “Not really,” he always said.

  For some reason, everyone, including me, expected him to be homesick. But when I thought back on my own decade and a half away, it struck me that I had rarely been homesick in all those years. I had enjoyed the freedom that came with being far away and had liked being the only one of my kind wherever I lived. Now that I was back in Boston, I could appreciate the ways in which belonging was useful. I understood the landscape and the weather; I got a higher percentage of the jokes. But I still sometimes found it claustrophobic and I imagined that Seven was probably enjoying the freedom to reinvent himself that I, by coming home, had given up.

  One of the things he did was to take up tennis, a sport no Maori where he came from played. He was athletic and picked up sports easily but, until he learned to control the ball, his strength was something of a liability.