by Baker Chris
‘There’s a paddock for your horse at the end of the drive,’ he said. ‘Maybe you’ll have a meal with us.’
‘Us’ turned out to be him and Edith. She was older than Frank and where he was rustic in wool and leather she was chic and urbane, flowing silks and her hair in a carelessly executed chignon that looked straight out of Vogue. They were in love like a pair of adolescents. They touched constantly and gave each other meaningful looks. They were comfortable with Sean, as he was with them, and, in a kitchen with an ancient wood range, they sat at a white tablecloth with blue gingham serviettes and heavy silver salt and pepper shakers.
‘You like a wee drop?’ asked Frank, holding up a bottle of what Sean imagined was a local dry white.
‘Sure thing,’ he said. He could smell roast pork.
‘Frank fixed a fence for a leg of pork,’ Edith said. ‘We trade for everything around here — half trade, half friendship. Is that what people are doing in other places?’
‘Some of them. A lot of people are still cleaning up. Where I came from in Whangarei we hadn’t even started.’
‘By "cleaning up" I suppose you mean burying everyone,’ Frank said. ‘Hell of a job. At least we only had a small town. How’re things in Auckland?’
Sean told him about Okahu Bay. Edith listened intently. It turned out she was from the next bay and had been working as a nurse and receptionist with a Hamilton doctor, living alone in an expensive flat, when the Fever struck. She got so sick and afraid of being by herself she almost died too — and probably would have if the power had been working.
She saw Frank passing through on his horse and called to him from her window. He wasted no time at all in whisking her off her feet — quite literally. He found her a horse, taught her to ride, and she joined him on his journey northwards, a journey that stopped three months ago when they arrived in Ngaruawahia.
People had come from all over, they said. Everyone just converged on the place and the community had grown outwards from the marae. Some people had come home from Auckland, some from Hamilton, some from Coromandel and Colville. Others had travelled from places like Tokoroa and Putaruru. Frank had come from Reporoa, where he’d been trying to farm a too-small block and pruning and felling pines to keep the mortgage paid. He was pleased to get away, he said. He’d been alone and so had Edith, and now they had each other, more than either had ever enjoyed in the old times. He saw the question about the pine trees in Sean’s eyes.
‘After dinner,’ he said. He looked faraway, uneasy, shifting on his seat like the memories weren’t pleasant.
Dinner was memorable though. Sean loved the silver cutlery, the juicy slices of pork and roast vegetables with gravy and a wine sauce, followed by a fresh fruit salad, rich with grape and watermelon. When they were sitting back, politely full, Frank took a coffee pot off the stove.
‘Let’s take this through to the lounge,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a bottle of cognac somewhere.’
The kero lamp on the mantelpiece reflected in an ornate mirror, leaves and flowers etched a hundred years ago glinting in the gentle light as they made themselves comfortable.
‘You’re heading south,’ Frank said, and just like Auntie Mihi, ‘Which way are you going?’
‘I’ve been advised to avoid the centre. To travel through Taranaki.’
‘That’s probably good advice,’ Frank said. ‘I’ll tell you what happened to me. That’ll really put you off.’
Sean felt like Frodo Baggins, talking with Gandalf by the fire, except Frank’s story didn’t sound like a fairy tale and he couldn’t just close the book as it unfolded in all its eerie horror.
After the Fever, Frank had carried on farming sheep and cattle next to the pines. Then something had started slaughtering his stock. Dogs, he’d thought, when he began finding the remains of sheep. The packs of dogs, bred from pig dogs lost in the forest, had been notorious and nobody went unarmed anywhere near the trees for fear of being pulled down and eaten. But it wasn’t the dogs. Frank started finding the occasional steer that looked like it had been killed with a fire axe and hacked up with a chainsaw. He’d even found a feather, large, coarse and smelling of decay. He couldn’t imagine what sort of beast he was dealing with.
Frank had decided to set a trap, wanting at least to see what was killing his stock. He’d tethered a sheep near the trees and under a rising moon lay on a nearby hillock with his .308. About midnight he was woken by his dog growling softly and looking towards the trees. Over the tethered sheep he’d seen a shape standing half in the shadows. Claws and a beak caught the moonlight and he’d been straining for more detail when whatever it was had cleared the fence, felled the sheep with a blow of its beak and begun noisily drinking its blood.
‘Edith doesn’t know any of this,’ he said. She was riveted, leaning over from her chair and clutching his arm, eyes wide as Frank’s tale filled the room. Sean was enthralled too, his coffee cold and his cognac undrunk.
Frank had jumped to his feet and fired five shots. He swore they all hit, but the only one that had any effect was a head shot that had flipped the creature over backwards and left it supine for about two minutes. Frank had been walking towards it when it sat up and shook its head. It had fixed him with a gaze that scared him almost witless. It’d made him feel like he was nothing more than food, about to be eaten, weak at the knees and near paralysed. He had managed to turn and run to his horse and, with the ‘Thud! Thud!’ of heavy footsteps behind him, had raced back to his house, abandoning the horse and slamming the newly installed steel front door behind him. There he’d crouched, listening to his horse being devoured. He was still there in the morning, wired, and that’s when he’d decided to leave. No way was he going to live with that thing just over the fence.
So he’d shod one of the stock horses and, chewing on a leg of mutton he’d been smoking in the fireplace, stuck a handful of ammunition in his pocket, slung his rifle across his back, mounted up and rode like hell, six hours to the other side of Tirau. Only then had he started to feel safe from the beak and claws and his half-eaten horse, that he couldn’t get out of his mind, gutted and chewed at his door.
‘It’s probably nocturnal,’ he said. ‘I might have been quite safe. But you’ll understand me not thinking that at the time.’
9
‘THAT WAS KURANGAITUKU,’ Sean said to Frank.
‘Kura who?’ he replied. For a moment his puzzlement overrode the horror of the memory.
‘Kurangaituku,’ Sean repeated. ‘She’s been a part of the local folklore for years. Pity you didn’t learn about her at school.’
Frank was silent. Edith clutched his arm. Then he collected his thoughts and spoke.
‘Forget the folklore. That thing was real. So was my dead horse.’
It was Sean’s turn to be silent. What could he say that wouldn’t make him sound like a fool? The problem was a familiar one and in the end all he could suggest was that in the morning Frank seek out some of the old people, tell them the tale and wait for their reply.
Then Edith spoke, her first words since Frank told his tale. ‘So that’s why you don’t like chooks.’
At the marae next morning, two old men and an old woman were sitting in the morning sun, watching everyone busy around them. One of the men wore overalls, the other had a rust-coloured blanket over a yellowish tracksuit. He looked more Asian than Maori. The woman was dressed in ceremonial black. They all knew who Frank and Edith were. When Sean introduced himself, the man with the blanket nodded and smiled, like he’d been expecting him.
‘I suppose you’ve got a story to tell us,’ the woman said to Frank. ‘We’ve been waiting to hear how you got here.’ Frank and Edith raised their eyebrows at each other. The man in the overalls laughed and patted the form beside him, motioning for Edith and Sean to sit.
‘There’s a chair over there,’ he said to Frank. ‘Take your time.’
To Sean, the old man was saying ‘Get on with it.’ But Frank took his time, moving the ch
air about and shifting around to get comfortable, before dispensing his thoughts about the weather and the progress of the communal veggie gardens. The three old people listened politely and Frank eventually started talking about his Reporoa farm and the events that had sent him fleeing northward. Edith clung to Sean and he didn’t blame her. The tale sounded even more frightening under the mid-morning sun. The old people were impassive. When Frank finished there was a long silence, then the man in the overalls said just one word.
‘Kurangaituku.’ He spoke to Sean then, but the words were meant for Frank. ‘Nothing to stop her now, but she won’t be moving far. We needn’t worry about her up here.’
Then he spoke to Frank directly, and Sean watched his words hit home.
‘You’re lucky to be here. You didn’t know about Kurangaituku, and there are a lot of other things you don’t know about either, but you have learned one important thing — ignorance is no protection.’ He laughed then. ‘Why don’t you get yourself some chooks? Always good to have a few eggs.’ Sean watched Frank. The man didn’t even blink.
‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ he said, ‘but I’m allergic to feathers.’
When the laughter died, the man in the rust-coloured blanket, who’d been sitting next to Sean, turned and spoke in rather strained and correct English.
‘You had better go to meet Kurangaituku. It will be good for your practice.’
Meet Kurangaituku? Good for his practice? Practise of what? Sean felt like he’d been king hit. He looked at the old man, perfectly bald, round eyeglasses, easily in his seventies but poised like an athlete on the hard wooden form. He smiled at Sean and spoke again.
‘Just you be happy,’ is all he said, and with that the three of them rose, thanked Sean, Frank and Edith for the news, and vanished into the building they’d been leaning against. The trio looked at each other in surprise and no small amount of bewilderment
Sean didn’t set out right away. He wanted to help Frank construct a chook run. But Frank insisted on doing it himself.
‘Good for me,’ he said. ‘And that old man’s right about the eggs.’
Edith laughed, but Sean was busy contemplating the blanketed man’s words, delivered with a smile, but carrying all the weight and force of a command. It would be easy enough to disobey, but Sean suspected that ignoring the instruction would bring on a slow and wasting expiry, a withering regret, a sickness of secrets just out of reach and opportunities missed — even worse than being torn apart by Kurangaituku. He felt he didn’t really have any choice.
After lunch he loaded up, thanked Frank and Edith, and once again rode south. He looked at their faces as he left. Did they think he was a little touched? But Frank, at least, seemed unsure. The whole business had got to him and Sean’s departure made a sense he knew he wasn’t far from understanding.
As Sean rode he pondered his predicament. Rationality said one thing, instinct another. Actually, rationality said two things, both conflicting, and so did instinct. By late in the day, just north of Hamilton, he was still some distance from a comfortable solution. He camped by a creek flowing near the old Te Rapa dairy factory, silent and hulking.
He looked in Hamu’s trusting eyes. How could he endanger him and Bojay? What gave him that right? They both depended on Sean and here he was considering a course of action that seemed, the more he thought about it, insanely dangerous, purely suicidal. He decided that night, moths fluttering around the fire and a morepork calling off in the distance, to revert to his original plan, to travel through Taranaki. He might have to live with regrets, but at least he’d live, and so would Hamu and Bojay.
A good night’s sleep firmed his decision and in the morning the three of them headed into Hamilton, ready for the turn-off to Te Awamutu and down to New Plymouth. It was a cowardly step, Sean knew, a soft option, but as he took the road to Taumarunui his confidence grew. He remembered Taumarunui well. He’d lived there for five years, up to his early adolescence. He wouldn’t be travelling that far, though, before turning off near Te Kuiti and coming out on the coast at Mokau, with its black sands and wild west coast surf and, inland, the startling ice-cream peak of Taranaki, rising out of the chequered plains.
Sean’s thoughts wandered off to his childhood in Taumarunui, digging pumice caves with Graeme Carter, attending the local convent school at Rangaroa. He had lived in terror of the school hood, Willy O’Hagen, with his reverse-handlebarred pushbike and his leather jacket with the upturned collar and HELLS ANGLES written on the back in white paint.
Sean used to catch eels in the drain at the bottom of the section, but he’d only brought them home once. His mum had thrown a real wobbly when she’d found a sink full of eels writhing in the chlorinated water. Sean took them back to the drain and let them go. What was wrong with her? Couldn’t she see he was just trying to do his bit? Some years later it dawned on him that the meal of fish fingers they’d had that night constituted some sort of statement, but he wasn’t sure if it meant a genuine acknowledgment of his well-meaning act or simply an assertion of civilised ways. Sean had always been aware that his mother was big on civilised ways, many of which conflicted with his natural leaning towards wild places and the creatures that inhabited them. Eventually he’d realised she was a bit of a wild thing herself, urges sublimated in an effort to accommodate her husband’s public service career, but even so she never was too keen on the eels and wetas, whose company her son so enjoyed.
When Sean was twelve they’d sent him away to boarding school in Auckland, making some arrangement in which he played no part whatsoever, promising him as a Marist brother in return for a good cheap classical education. He’d hated it. He was hungry for two years and caned regularly for very little that he regarded as a good reason. They’d parted company at the end of the fourth form when, overcome by adolescent lust, he’d poured out his feelings and intentions towards Grace Kingi in a letter that was intercepted by Brother Lawrence, known to the boys as ‘Snoop’. Next year Sean had spent a term at Taumarunui High School where he achieved such social pinnacles as helping to talk Brian Newman into peeing on an electric fence — ‘It won’t hurt a bit. It just shorts out.’ — before his family moved yet again, this time to Paeroa.
He had been in the sixth form, employed on weekends as a waiter with Mrs Browning who did catering for weddings and the like. A fellow with the unlikely name of Gladstone Albright was working with Sean one day, both of them slicked down with knife-edged creases in their trousers, natty black bow ties and shoes polished to perfection. Their duties included clearing up and dishwashing, and one of the perks of the job, apart from claiming any leftover food, included drinking any wine left in the bottles they imagined they’d been wielding with such ease and grace. This day there was a lot of wine left following the nuptial festivities of two well-heeled Hauraki Plains farming families, who were no doubt looking forward to the continuation of their dynasties. Gladstone and Sean got thoroughly pissed, so pissed in fact that much of the afternoon became a wine-sodden blur. Several years later, Sean’s sister, Emmy, reminded him of the sight that had confronted her that evening. There he was — black trousers and shoes apparently intact, but his bow tie askew, and in his arms a large cut-glass bowl of fruit salad and trifle — weaving his drunken way home.
‘I’m taking a peace offering home for the olds,’ Sean had apparently told Emmy.
He was just thinking that perhaps he should have spent more time listening to her sane and intelligent commentaries on their circumstances when his thoughts were brought to an abrupt halt by a shout of ‘Oi Oi!’
There in the road, just emerged from a nearby driveway, were four young men, shaved heads, tats, all on foot and all armed. One of them had an assault rifle, three of them had crossbows. Two of then wore ANARCHY RULES tee shirts. Unaware of the irony of both the sentiment and the juxtaposition, they stood next to each other, pointing cocked crossbows at Sean and deploying scowls and grimaces he felt would have been better suited to Sesame Street.
The guy with the rifle called out, ‘Where have you come from?’ The four of them seemed to Sean about as threatening as the Auckland petrolheads.
‘Ngaruawahia,’ he said, his voice instinctively quiet and even. He noticed a sign over their heads showing the distance to Te Awamutu.
‘S’pose you’ve been staying with the niggers,’ the guy said. That’s when Sean’s mouth got away on him.
‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I was staying with a couple of honkies.’
All four of them did a classic double take at that. He would have laughed but for the weapons still trained on him.
‘Get off your horse and kiss the road!’ screamed the fellow with the rifle. He was apoplectic with rage at having his authority so casually dismissed. Sean could see the rifle shaking in his hands. The others, especially the anarchy rules pair, looked nervous. Below them, over the railings and through the trees, he caught a glimpse of the southern motorway.
‘Kiss my arse,’ Sean said to the group and wheeling Bojay he cleared the rails and skidded down the bank towards the motorway. The rifle cracked as they leapt. He felt the shot whistle close to his ear. At the same time, there was a sharp pain in his left arm, in the back of his biceps. They crashed through the trees, but Sean was still mounted on Bojay when they emerged at the bottom. Overhead, he could see his four ambushers peering down at him. A rifle shot spanged off the tar seal and Sean trotted a hundred metres, out of sight, before slowing to take stock.
Only then did he realise that he had a crossbow bolt sticking in his arm, not right through, but the head buried deep in the muscle. It was starting to hurt and without thinking he tried to pull it out. The pain made him black out for a moment. He had to dismount before he fell off, and he sat on the kerb, visions of Matapihi’s panel saw surgery running through his head.
‘Dickhead,’ he said to himself. ‘You should have picked up a medical kit.’
