White Lies

by Witi Ihimaera

  She would have journeyed with her travelling garden throughout the lands of Te Whanau a Kai, Te Aitanga a Mahaki, Tai Manuhiri and Rongowhakaata. Wherever the Ringatu festivals took place, wherever the faithful gathered to sing, pray and praise God, there she would be: Waihirere, Puha, Mangatu, Rangatira, Waioeka, Awapuni, Muriwai … Still avoiding te rori Pakeha, the Pakeha road, she would instead have ridden the old trails along the foothills or rivers, the unseen pathways that criss-cross the plains like a spider’s web.

  Instead, for twelve days, Paraiti remains in Waituhi, venturing every second day to Gisborne. When she returns to the village, she goes into Rongopai to pray until dawn. The interior of the meeting house is like a beautiful garden: sometimes, Paraiti has fancifully imagined it as the garden of the Queen of Sheba, where hoopoes sing; at other times it becomes a garden in fabled Babylon, one of many hanging in the palace of Nebuchadnezzar. In this time of agitation and fear, however, Rongopai is like unto the garden of the New Testament at the place called Gethsemane, where a bright, broken Christ was laid to his death and resurrection.

  The change in Paraiti’s routine worries her neighbours. They look through the doorway of Rongopai at her. She is kneeling before a painting of the tree of life with its healing blossoms. ‘Aue, te mamae,’ she cries.

  ‘Are you all right, takuta?’

  Then others from villages beyond Waituhi come seeking her. ‘What is the matter, Blightface?’ they ask. ‘Are you ill? We need you. What will happen to us?’

  Paraiti is patient with them. ‘I am only delayed. I will come again soon.’

  The concern and enquiries force Paraiti to make an appearance at a Ringatu hui at Takipu, the large meeting house at Te Karaka, so that the people will see she’s still alive and kicking. Takipu is so beautiful that Paraiti cannot help but be grateful that her whakapapa connects her to such a glorious Ringatu world.

  The hui incorporates a kohatu ceremony, an unveiling of the headstone of a brother Ringatu healer, Paora, who died a year ago. The obelisk, the final token of aroha, is polished granite, gleaming in the sun. It is a sign of the love for a rangatira. As Paraiti joins the local iwi, weeping, around the obelisk, she reflects on the fragility of life. ‘Not many of us morehu left,’ she thinks to herself. Afterwards, she spends some time talking to Paora’s widow, Maioha: ‘It was a beautiful unveiling for a man who always served God and the people.’

  ‘Ae,’ Maioha says. ‘However, we must go on, eh? The men may be the leaders, but when they die, it is the women who become the guardians of the land and the future.’

  On the way back to Waituhi, Paraiti cannot shake off Maioha’s words. Her mood deepens as she thinks of all the changes she has observed in her travels. Since she and her father saw the ngangara those many years ago — the train steaming across the countryside — the marks of the new civilisation have proliferated across the land. New railway tracks, highways and roads. More bush felled to make way for sheep and cattle farms. Where once there was a swing bridge there is now a two-lane bridge across the river. And although the old Maori tracks are still there, many of them have barbed-wire fences across them, necessitating a detour until a gate is found. On the gate is always a padlock and a sign that says: ‘Private Land. Trespassers will be prosecuted. Keep out.’

  The changes are always noted by the travellers of the tracks and passed on to other travellers — ‘Kia tupato, beware’ — because, sometimes, horses or children can be ensnared in the coils of barbed wire discarded in the bush after the fences have been built. Paraiti has sewn up many wounds inflicted by the wire as pig hunters and foresters have rushed after prey in the half-light of dusk.

  But of all the changes wreaked by civilisation, it is the spiritual changes that really matter. The ngangara is not only physical; it also infiltrates and invades the moral world that Paraiti has always tried to protect.

  You wear your scar where people can see it, I wear mine where they can’t.

  Perhaps the marks that really matter are, indeed, the ones that can’t be seen.

  The twilight is falling as Paraiti returns to Waituhi from Te Karaka.

  Tiaki pricks up his ears and sniffs ahead. He begins to growl.

  ‘He aha?’ Paraiti enquires. ‘What is it?’

  She sees that smoke is coming out of the chimney of her two-roomed kauta. When she gets to the gate, a horse is grazing in the front paddock. She reaches into her saddlebag for her rifle and commands Tiaki to be alert. Then she hears someone chopping wood at the back of the house.

  ‘That’s not the sound of danger,’ she says to herself.

  A man, stripped to the waist, his trousers held up by braces, is balancing on crutches, chopping wood. The falling light limns him with gold. Who can it be?

  Paraiti realises it is the logger from Te Kuiti whose leg had been broken. At the sight of him Tiaki begins to growl: he is jealous and doesn’t like any other male company around his mistress.

  ‘Turituri,’ Paraiti scolds him. She watches Ihaka, amused. ‘So what’s a man on crutches doing chopping wood in my back yard?’ she asks.

  He puts the axe down and grins at her. ‘Paying my debt to you,’ he answers. ‘I have heated water for a bath and the fire is on in the kauta to make it warm.’

  A bath? Paraiti’s eyes light up. ‘You didn’t have to do that.’

  ‘I won’t take long filling the tub,’ Ihaka responds and then — oh, he’s a cheeky one — ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to look as you get into it.’

  It’s dark by the time Paraiti gets out of the bath. When she enters the big room of the kauta, Ihaka has washed and put on a clean shirt.

  And he has set the wooden table with a plate of damper bread and pots of puwha, potatoes and bacon bones. ‘I brought these with me,’ he says. ‘They won’t last, so we may as well eat them. Would you like me to say a karakia for our food?’

  Paraiti nods her head, perplexed. What is happening?

  After grace, Ihaka dishes out the food. He is courteous and polite, attentive to her every need. ‘Would you like more bacon bones? I picked the puwha from your own vegetable garden. I hope you don’t mind — I’ll replace the plants if you do. Let me get you some more damper bread. Would you like some water to wash the meal down?’

  The meal completed, Paraiti thanks Ihaka. ‘You are a good cook, and I have not had anybody make kai for me for a long time.’

  The room is warm from the fire, and the oil lamp casts a golden glow through the interior. Paraiti’s heart is beating fast. Tiaki does not like the situation at all; his ears are flattened on his head and he keeps showing his teeth.

  And then Ihaka coughs, gets up, eases Paraiti from her chair and gently pulls her into a hongi, a pressing of noses. She tries to break away from him but he is so strong, his breath so sweet. To soothe her, he begins to kiss her scar.

  ‘No.’ Paraiti pushes him away.

  ‘I have a debt to pay,’ he answers. ‘I am a man of honour. Let me repay it.’

  How? Not like this. ‘You are much younger than I am, and you have a wife and children.’

  ‘A woman must have a good man at least once in her life,’ Ihaka says.

  Paraiti has always been alone with her animals, unloved by any man except her father. She can’t help it: tears flood from her eyes. ‘Yes,’ she nods, ‘and I know you are a good man.’

  It takes quite a while for Paraiti to recover. Only when Tiaki noses himself into her does she stop weeping. ‘Thank you, Ihaka,’ she says, blowing her nose, ‘but …’ — she gestures at Tiaki — ‘… as you can see, you have a rival.’ She takes a deep breath and, in releasing it, lets Ihaka go. ‘Nor would Tane, God of the Forest, like it if I did not offer the first fruit — you — back to him.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I am sure,’ she smiles, pressing his hands with hers. ‘Go back to your wife. And you don’t have to look so relieved!’

  ‘She knows I am here. Because of you I am still a good provider, and my wife … she k
nows I am pleasing to look at. She told me, “Let your beauty be our gift to the takuta.”’

  ‘Your wife said that? Thank her for her generosity.’

  Quickly, before she changes her mind, Paraiti shows Ihaka to the door.

  ‘Goodnight, takuta,’ he says.

  For a long time afterwards Paraiti wanders around the kauta. Ihaka’s scent is everywhere. Tiaki doesn’t like it, endeavouring to urinate in a corner.

  Paraiti starts to giggle. ‘Don’t do that,’ she scolds.

  Then she opens all the windows and doors.

  Breathes in deeply.

  Turns her thoughts to tomorrow.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The star cluster of Matariki has burst into its fullness in the night sky.

  How Paraiti manages to get through the second week, she will never know. She prays constantly, morning, noon and night, her karakia unceasing and seamless. All that sustains her as she hastens to Waterside Drive every second day is her immense faith, and the words of her father: ‘You know what you have to do.’

  But every time Maraea meets her at the side door, saying ‘Come in, quickly, before you are seen’, Paraiti feels sick to her stomach that all her efforts might be for nought — that, instead of saving the baby, she will be complicit in its death. Indeed, as she steps through the doorway she finds comfort in knowing that the Ringatu gardener is watching — somewhere he is out there, going about his work, pretending not to know what is happening inside.

  It doesn’t matter if he sees, for he is only a worker; but it does matter if others do, the high-class neighbours, the leaders of Gisborne society, for they are the ones who hold the power.

  And so Paraiti continues the regime. First, the administering of the lethal compound designed to shrivel the birth cord and expel the baby from the womb. Second, the deep, forceful, disturbing massage: out, out, come out. She brings Rebecca Vickers from groaning to screaming point, and then those rapid hand manipulations followed by the pressure exerted on the womb.

  Paraiti realises, however, her anxiety must be as nothing when compared with that of the baby in the womb. What must it be like to be in the house of birth, a whare meant to nurture and sustain, as its walls and roof are caving in, as the stitched tukutuku are ripping apart, the kowhaiwhai panels are cracking? Where can the baby go when the poutokomanawa begins to collapse and the poisons begin to flood through the placenta that feeds it? Even when it is fighting back, how can it know that even this is anticipated and is part of its brutal eviction?

  As she pummels, she imagines the child trying to retreat into the recess of the womb looking out, as if through a doorway to a world collapsing all around it, facing the terror of the unknowable, its little heart beating hard against translucent skin. What is happening? Help me.

  ‘Forgive me, child, oh forgive me,’ she whispers.

  Ironically, Rebecca Vickers’ own strength is working in the baby’s favour for, whether she likes it or not, her baby has inherited her stamina.

  And so child fights mother: I will not let you do this. Indeed, for Paraiti, the long moments after each savage treatment are always frightening. Will the baby rally? Will her heartbeat come back?

  Child, fight. Fight.

  Meanwhile, Mrs Vickers has bought herself the last two days. Her vanity has persuaded her that after the premature birth she would like time to recover and present herself to her husband as immaculately as she can. She has sent him a telegram on board his ship, to say that she will be unable to meet him in Auckland. A reply has come: although he is disappointed, he will spend the evening in the city before travelling on to Gisborne.

  Thus, on the twelfth day, when Mrs Vickers groans, ‘Now, Scarface, do your work and rid me of this child’, Paraiti takes the advantage presented to her.

  ‘The door of the whare tangata is not wide enough to enable the baby’s delivery.’

  Turning a deaf ear to Mrs Vickers’ torrent of curses, Paraiti tells her, ‘I will do it on the morning of the fourteenth day, before sunrise.’ Every hour will improve the baby’s chance of survival.

  ‘Mr Vickers will be home that evening,’ Mrs Vickers cries.

  ‘Lock your door. Tell him you are still indisposed.’

  Mrs Vickers’ rage pursues Paraiti into the street, but the medicine woman is beyond caring about her. Her thoughts are only with the child. ‘Kororia ki to ingoa tapu,’ she prays to the evening sky and all throughout the next day. Her animals, sensing her anxiety, honour her fervency with barks, whinnies and brays of their own; otherwise, they stand and wait in silence and on good behaviour.

  Now has come the fourteenth day, before sunrise.

  Paraiti arrives at the side door, where she is admitted by Maraea. Rebecca Vickers waits in her bedroom. ‘You think you have trumped me,’ she snarls. ‘Well, two can play at that game, Scarface.’

  The final treatment has forced her waters to break. The birth has begun. The contractions are coming strongly — and the baby has slipped from the whare tangata into the birth canal.

  Paraiti ignores the threat. ‘Your trial will soon be over,’ she answers, ‘and it will be advisable for you to focus on the difficulties ahead. A normal birth is difficult enough. One that has been induced as forcefully as this is more so.’

  Yes, Rebecca Vickers has stamina all right but, even so, she is being truly tested. She is dressed in a white slip, the cloth already stained at her thighs. Her skin shines with a film of sweat.

  ‘You wish to be delivered of the baby here?’ Paraiti asks.

  ‘Here, fool?’ Mrs Vickers asks. ‘In my matrimonial bed where I would be reminded of the birth of an illegitimate child every time I sleep in this room?’ She motions to Maraea to help her up.

  ‘How do you wish to give birth, Mrs Vickers?’ Paraiti asks. ‘The Maori way or the Pakeha way?’ She knows the question has a hint of insolence about it, but, after all, Mrs Vickers has Maori ancestry and it needs to be asked. The Pakeha position is prone, unnatural; even so, Paraiti assumes that this is the way Mrs Vickers would wish the baby to be delivered.

  Her answer, however, surprises Paraiti. ‘My mother has prepared a place so that I can deliver the Maori way,’ she says. ‘What does it matter? The child will be born dead anyway.’

  It is a slip of the tongue, accidental. However, her next words are not.

  ‘If it was good enough for my mother’s child,’ she says, looking at Maraea, ‘it is good enough for mine.’

  Maraea? Mrs Vickers’ mother?

  ‘You stupid girl,’ Maraea says, looking at Paraiti.

  ‘Oh, what does it matter if Scarface knows,’ Mrs Vickers answers. ‘She is of no consequence.’

  Who holds the upper hand here? All this time Paraiti had thought that Mrs Vickers was the dominant one. ‘Ko koe te mama?’ she asks Maraea, and she looks at the older woman to affirm the relationship.

  Maraea holds her gaze. She nods briefly. ‘Yes, I am Ripeka’s mother. And it would be best if you held this knowledge to yourself …’

  ‘Or what?’ Within the words is an implied threat.

  Maraea retreats, puts on the garb of subservience. ‘I never thought the pathway would lead to this, Scarface, believe me.’ There is no resemblance at all. One is old, dark, seemingly indecisive; the other young, fair, purposeful. Or is the old one as passive as she would lead you to believe? What kind of unholy relationship, what kind of charade, is this between daughter and mother?

  Paraiti refuses to let Maraea get away that easily. ‘You call yourself a Maori. You are nothing.’

  Maraea rears at her. ‘Don’t you judge me, Scarface. You live safely among your own; you try to survive in a world that is not your own. I have done what every mother, Maori or not, would do: give my daughter every chance at success. Her success is my success.’

  Clearly, the painting on the landing is a lie. It is not Rebecca’s mother at all, but simply a ruse to put people off the scent.

  Rebecca Vickers gives a guttural moan. ‘Take me
to the birthing place. Quickly.’

  Leading the way, and supporting her daughter as she goes, Maraea beckons Paraiti down the stairs to the ground floor of the house. Through the kitchen they go to a set of doors leading to an underground basement. There’s a circular staircase and then a further set of steps to a small cellar.

  ‘This is the place,’ Maraea says, switching on a light. The cellar is a large hole cut out of the dark, wet clay, barely high enough to stand up in. It is where Mr Vickers stores his vintage wine.

  Paraiti sees that Maraea has done her work well. Two hand posts have been dug into the clay, and beneath the place where Mrs Vickers will squat are clean cotton blankets and a large sheet to wrap the baby in.

  With a cry of relief, Rebecca Vickers shrugs off her slip and, naked, takes her place between the posts in a squatting position, thighs apart. Her pendulous breasts are already leaking milk. ‘No, I won’t need those,’ she says to Maraea, refusing the thongs that her mother wants to bind her hands with. ‘Do your work, Scarface,’ she pants, ‘and make it quick.’

  Maraea has already taken a position behind her, supporting her.

  ‘Massage your daughter,’ Paraiti commands. ‘Press hard on her lower abdomen and whare tangata so that the baby is prompted to move further downward.’

  The whare tangata is collapsing. But there is a heartbeat — faint, but a sign that the baby has survived the rigours of the internal punishment.

  ‘I am here, child,’ Paraiti whispers. ‘Kia tere, come quickly now.’ She takes her own position, facing Rebecca Vickers, and presses her knees against her chest. In this supreme moment of childbirth, the young woman is truly transformed: Mother Incarnate, her red hair is plastered to her skull, sweat is beading her forehead and her entire body streams with body fluids. She is magnificent.

  ‘You will pay for this,’ she says. Suddenly her face is in rictus. She takes a deep breath, her mouth opens in surprise and her groan seems to echo down to the very moment of the creation of the world. She is one mother, but she is all mothers.