by Graeme Kent
For a moment she thought the tourist was going to say something of importance to her. Then he shook his head and turned away.
‘One thing I haven’t been is a good Catholic,’ he said.
‘Welcome to the club,’ said Sister Conchita.
‘I remember one or two things though,’ said the man. ‘The letter kills but the spirit gives life, is that right?’
‘The Second Book of Corinthians,’ said the nun. ‘Very well, Mr Blamire, I shall be here at the mission if you would care to talk to me. Good afternoon.’
As she headed for the side door of the church, Blamire had turned back and was standing in front of the altar again, his shoulders slumped. Sister Conchita knelt in the aisle and prayed quickly for the other sisters at the mission, for herself that she might be fit for her new task, and for the tourist at the altar who seemed lost and troubled.
She emerged from the church to an area of the beach roped off from the rest of the mission grounds and hidden from sight of most of the visitors by the church building. A huge pile of coconut husks had been assembled to a height of ten feet above the ground. This was Sister Conchita’s brainchild. She had been preparing it for most of the month since she had arrived at Marakosi, ever since she had learned that it had been a mission tradition dating back to before the war that ships visiting the station would be greeted by a blazing pyre of husks set off by the nuns.
A wooden torch soaked in oil and a box of matches lay on the ground ready for the ceremony. Sister Conchita intended to wait until dusk, just before the open day was due to end, and then ignite the bonfire to bid farewell to the departing guests. She checked that everything was in place and went back round the side of the church to join the crowd.
She noticed with satisfaction that the other attractions she had organized for the day seemed to be drawing plenty of attention. Among the outer fringe of trees, Malaitan labourers from the local logging camp, supervised by a white overseer, were felling a kapok tree with a two-man power saw, while others were stripping the branches from several felled trees with economical blows from their bush knives. On a marked-out course on the sand, islanders were racing one another over a sixty-yard distance carrying heavy bags of copra on their shoulders.
Out in the lagoon, a dozen large canoes provided the incongruous sight of members of a brass band lustily playing ‘Abide With Me’ on their highly polished cornets, trumpets, tubas and trombones. This was the self-styled Silver Band of the Christian Fellowship Church, a recent breakaway denomination from the United Methodist Church of the Solomons. Its members had built a village called Paradise on the nearby island of New Georgia. The leader of the new church, the Holy Mama, who claimed to be the fourth member of the Trinity, was sitting approvingly in one of the canoes of the flotilla, waving his arms decorously in time to the music. He was an elderly islander wearing a long white robe and a shell-decorated turban. Sister Brigid and the other nuns had objected to his presence because he was reputed to have designated a dozen of the most attractive girls from his island as his personal angels. The more pragmatic Sister Conchita had felt, as the moment drew near, that her cherished open day threatened to be so lacking in entertainment that she was willing to overlook any teething troubles experienced by the CFC and the personal peccadilloes of its founder, as long as its instrumentalists could provide a selection of rousing hymns played roughly in tune.
On her way back to the mission house, Sister Conchita could not put the man in the floral shirt out of her mind. Had she ignored a cry for help? Mr Blamire had denied the fact, but perhaps she should have been more sensitive to his needs, whatever they might have been. It seemed to her that the plump man in the church had been very frightened.
By the time she arrived back inside, Sister Johanna had appeared from the recesses of the house. Tall and angular, with a face apparently consisting of little but straight planes, the German nun had a forbidding appearance. Her hands were deeply engrained with dirt and oil, brought about by years of toil as the mission’s mechanical genius. There were several smudges on her face. She greeted Conchita with a chilly nod.
‘So many people,’ she said gutturally. ‘One would almost suppose that your plan had been a success, Sister Conchita.’
Sister Brigid snorted. ‘Nonsense! It’s all an irrelevance. What are we to expect next? Swings and roundabouts? This used to be a working mission.’
‘Not for some years, as I understand it,’ said Conchita, before she could stop herself. She was at once aware from the severe expressions on the faces of the other sisters that she had made yet another error. ‘I believe that you have been more of a contemplative order lately,’ she said in an effort to redress the balance. ‘I have never served in a cloistered mission before.’
‘How long have you been in the Solomon Islands now?’ asked Sister Brigid after a chilly pause.
‘Six months.’
‘You are surely very young to have been appointed to a position of authority,’ said Sister Johanna. ‘Even over us.’
The other nuns laughed. Conchita resolved that they would not trample her underfoot again that afternoon.
‘As it happens, I’m twenty-six,’ she said, ‘but I feel that I’m growing older by the minute, Sister.’
‘Twenty-six,’ said Sister Johanna. ‘I have habits older than that.’
Sister Brigid cackled. It was strange, thought Conchita, how protective the other two nuns seemed of her, and how quick they were to come to the defence of such an apparently graceless and unpleasant woman.
‘You mustn’t tease the child,’ said Sister Jean Francoise vaguely. ‘I’m sure she means well. She’s new, that’s all.’
From out in the grounds there came a sudden crackling noise. This was followed almost at once by a muffled roar, and then by screams of terror from the visitors on the beach.
The sisters looked askance at each other. Conchita was the first to guess what was happening.
‘Someone’s set fire to the bonfire too soon!’ she said.
She turned and led the other nuns out of the house and down past the church to the roped-off area containing her laboriously prepared bonfire. Most of the other visitors were hurrying in the same direction, gathering by the ropes. The heat from the fire was almost unbearable. Thick clouds of smoke obscured the pile of coconut husks. A sudden swirling breeze parted the smoke, revealing the fact that the husks were now blazing.
One of the female tourists screamed and pointed at the side of the pyre. The other visitors took up her cry. Sprawling across the side of the blaze, almost in an upright position, was the body of a white man in a floral shirt. His eyes were open and he was staring sightlessly at the crowd. Two courageous islanders charged forward and dragged the smouldering body free of the husks. They hurled the man to the ground and beat out the flames with several of the empty sacks in which the coconuts had been collected.
Conchita forced herself to go forward. The islanders stood aside, shaking their heads dolefully. The nun knelt at the side of the man. Enough remained of his charred face and body to enable her to recognize that it was the tourist Ed Blamire, and that he was dead.
‘Take him up to the hospital,’ she whispered to the islanders, although she knew that it was too late to do anything for him. The two men took Blamire’s body by the shoulders and legs and carried him through the now silent and awe-struck crowd.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ said Conchita, rising and facing the visitors. ‘There has been a dreadful accident. I’m afraid that the open day must end at once. Will you please leave as quickly as possible?’
The crowd began to disperse in small shocked knots. Conchita saw that the other three nuns were accompanying the body back to the mission house. She hesitated, and entered the church through the side door to say a prayer for the dead tourist. Inside, the place was a shambles. The altar table had been knocked over, the crucifix had been torn from the wall, the shell font had been smashed and several benches had been overturned. Sister Conchita su
rveyed the carnage.
‘Sanctuary!’ she muttered to herself in horror.
Chapter Three
‘BIGFELLA LONG SKY tokk-im long me. Himi say work-im long boat all-same Noah,’ said the old islander with red betelnut-stained teeth, glaring defiantly at the men who had been threatening to kill him.
‘God has spoken to you and told you to build an ark like Noah’s,’ translated Sergeant Ben Kella of the Solomon Islands Police Force, wearily playing for time. He was standing among the gardens on a sloping hillside outside a small salt-water village on the coast of his home island of Malaita. The small plots of earth carved out of a clearing among the trees were given over to the cultivation of sweet potatoes, yams, taro and tapioca. The taro had been watered conscientiously, but the yams grew better in dry conditions and had been left to struggle as best they could through the cracked earth. The fertile ground in which the subsistence crops had been planted had been cut and burnt out of the forest and would be cultivated intensively for several more years before the villagers moved on to begin another patch. Usually the food would be tended by the women of the area, struggling with bush knives every day to keep the alang-alang grass and brambles at bay, but word had gone out that this afternoon there was to be a lethal payback. This was men’s work, especially if a ritual killing should turn out to be involved.
On the other side of the garden area, twenty or thirty young men from the village glowered at the old islander. They were clad only in shorts or loincloths under the blazing sun. Their faces were tattooed with the diamond lozenge marks of the fual alite, the nut of the alite tree. Without such tattoos a Lau man would not be admitted to a place of honour on Momolu, the island of the dead, when the time came for him to begin his long journey into the dark. Kella noticed that ominously some of the young men were carrying heavy sticks, while one elder was carefully assembling a pile of stones to throw at the ark-builder when the fighting began.
Kella sighed. So far this had been just another routine, uneventful one-man police patrol of the coastal villages, no different from dozens of others he had conducted lately. Then the government-appointed headman of this hamlet had sent for him with the disturbing news that Timothy Anilafa, an islander of unblemished reputation, acting completely out of character had spurned tradition and was defying village customs and the white man’s law by trespassing on cultivated land. Normally this would be a matter for the headman, and would not involve a government policeman, but several decades before, while he was still a child, Kella had also been appointed by the Lau Lagoon pagan priests as the aofia, the traditional justice-bringer of Malaita, charged to maintain the traditions of the ancient gods in this part of the remote Solomon Islands in the South Pacific. It was his responsibility to settle any religious disputes on the island while attempting, if possible, to keep news of his involvement from his police superiors in the capital, Honiara.
‘Is there no way that you can move your ark?’ he begged humbly in the Lau dialect. He had to raise his voice to be heard above the thundering of the adjacent waterfall, hidden by the trees and bushes of the undergrowth surrounding the garden area.
Timothy Anilafa shook his head stubbornly. ‘God told me to build it here,’ he said. ‘When the floods come, they will rise to just below the level of the gardens. This is the best place to build it to save the animals when they assemble.’
All eyes swivelled to regard the object of the controversy. The skeleton of Timothy’s vessel lay sprawled across a substantial corner of the village gardens. It was a ramshackle construction consisting of roughly sawn planks bound crudely together asymmetrically with vines and creepers, to form the rough-hewn outline of a boat about sixty feet long. So far only part of the hull had been laid down and the old man had made no effort to establish decks or even to caulk with pitch the lower half of the ark. It was most definitely a work in progress. However, for the toil of one elderly islander it was an impressive enough effort. The drawback was that because of its sprawling growth over the last few months, the vessel now covered much of the fertile land that provided the village with its basic supply of food.
‘The headman and elders say that in the interests of the village you must move your most interesting and well-intentioned ark,’ Kella pointed out.
‘But the Lord told me in a vision that I must build it here,’ Timothy said triumphantly, like a card player laying down a trump. Like most islanders, he practised Christianity in tandem with the old ways of magic, switching with ease from one to the other as the mood and needs of the moment took him. Kella could empathize with the old man. All the same, at the moment, all his tribal instincts told him that Timothy Anilafa had chosen the wrong spot for his shipbuilding project. It was out of balance with the feeling of the area.
As if to confirm this thought, the crowd of men on the other side of the garden started growling. Kella took care to remain where he was, as a token shield between Timothy and the wrath of his putative attackers. It was plain that the villagers were on the verge of destroying the vessel and sweeping the old man away with his project in the process. The problem was that Timothy genuinely believed that he had experienced a vision and would not step aside when his younger kinfolk surged forward. Desperately Kella cast about in his mind for a way of resolving the problem to the satisfaction of both sides, before the elderly villager got hurt. Somehow he had to facilitate the movement of the ark without offending its architect’s jumbled religious beliefs. The persistent drumming of the adjacent waterfall seemed to grow even louder in his ears as he racked his brain for a solution.
Vague memories of his Bible lessons at Ruvabi mission school twenty years earlier, before he had abandoned the white man’s religion, began to stir in Kella’s mind. He remembered Father Pierre prowling up and down the rows of desks in the overcrowded bamboo classroom in his bare feet and ragged cassock. The old man had hoped that Kella would one day enter the priesthood. He must have been severely disappointed when the youth had been summoned away by the custom chiefs, the hata aabu, those whose name must not be spoken, to undergo the calling and cleansing ceremony among the artificial islands of the lagoon. After that, as the aofi, he had been lost to the white man’s church forever.
However, unbidden, one phrase from his dusty mission lessons leapt into Kella’s mind.
‘The springs of the great deep!’ he said loudly. ‘That’s what the Book of Genesis says about the ark.’
Timothy looked at him suspiciously. ‘When the Lord spoke to me—’ he began.
‘I am telling you what the Bible tells us,’ Kella interrupted, gently but firmly. ‘All the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened.’
‘That will assuredly happen again,’ nodded Timothy, regarding the policeman intently.
‘But where?’ asked Kella. The villagers were edging forward, all except the one in charge of the cache of stones, who was now engaged thoughtfully in selecting the sharpest ones. The policeman spoke quickly. ‘The waters of the earth rose first, before the rains came.’
‘And they will once more,’ said Timothy, as if speaking to a child. ‘That is why I must finish my ark soon, to be ready for the overflowing of those waters.’
Actually it looked as if it would take a fair number of years for the old man to complete that particular quixotic project, thought Kella, looking at the ramshackle collection of detritus that made up the vessel’s insecure and uncompleted base. ‘Where will the water rise around here?’ he asked rhetorically, indicating the gardens. ‘There are no springs. The women have to carry water all the way from the pool at the base of the waterfall to feed these plants.’ He paused for effect. ‘You must locate your ark close to the waterfall. Then you will be ready to float away in glory down to the river, and from there to the sea with ease when the rains come.’
Timothy frowned. The villagers stopped advancing. Kella drove home his point. ‘It was an understandable mistake,’ he said. ‘You have chosen the wrong place.’ He pointe
d in the direction of the unseen thundering waterfall. ‘That is where you should have built your ark, next to the cascade. Assuredly that is where the springs will erupt when the Lord decides to send his first flood before the rains come.’
Timothy Anilafa looked thoughtful. For all his zeal, he knew how much present danger he was in at the hands of his disgruntled wantoks. In the interests of self-preservation, he was not averse to a face-saving compromise. The village men, suddenly aware of Kella’s intention, chorused their agreement, their mood lightening. Melanesians delighted in long, hairsplitting arguments to while away the empty hours. Only the solitary man in command of the stones could not conceal his disappointment as he continued to crouch over his carefully selected missiles, like a protective bird on a nest.
‘The waterfall is only a hundred yards away along the track, on common land,’ said Kella. ‘Take the ark there and carry on with your building in peace. No one will bother you again. You will become a big man in the eyes of everyone. The waterfall is a sacred place for the gods. Perhaps they will unite with the Christian Bigfella and join with him to bless your efforts for years to come.’
It was a telling point. Nothing bore more weight in the Lau culture than an activity that obviously had secured the approval of the entire spirit world, pagan and Christian alike. Judiciously Timothy Anifala nodded.
‘There is wisdom in what you say, aofia,’ he conceded. ‘But how will I move my ark? It is large and heavy.’
‘We will all help you,’ said Kella, setting an example by walking forward rapidly to the mangled heap. The rest of the islanders, understanding his purpose, followed him willingly and encircled the ark. They bent and with a series of groans lifted the sagging timbers from the ground, and staggered along the path previously cut and trampled down through the undergrowth. Away from the gardens, the branches of the towering trees in the tropical coastal rainforest intertwined overhead, suddenly almost blocking out the light of the sun. It was like a journey into a fast-falling night. The calophyllum trees with their white bark and shiny leaves grew next to coconut palms and mangroves. Between the trees, the vines of the morning glory and the purple flowers of the bay bean curled above the tussocks of porcupine grass, making their progress difficult.
