Around her suddenly, the warm familiar smell of the man she’d later come to know as her father, and, as usual, she moved into it, letting it envelop her like a second skin. Down-pressing round coldness on her right cheek, radiating out across her face and down through her body to her tingling toes. She jerked away from it, hands clasped to the wet spot on her cheek. In her father’s hand, at the centre of her seeing, was a round green-orange object. (A mango, she’d learn later.) From the object to his hand, to his face, she looked, recognising he was smiling. She moved closer to him, her hand taking the object, the fruit, which assumed the shape of her grip: solid, fitting, apt, balanced. Her father nuzzled his forehead against hers.
During the final moments of her dying, years later, that was how Peleiupu (or Pele, as everyone came to call her) was to recall, in slow vivid detail, that incredible dawn when her father, Mautu Tuifolau, pressed the dew-covered mango against her right cheek. At that startled moment, she was conscious for the first time she was an entity (I, me), separate from everything and everyone else — including her father, who was encouraging her, with repeated nods, to raise the fruit to her mouth and bite it. She would try, in her dying, to remember whether she’d taken that bite or what the mango had tasted like, and not be able to.
It was 1882 and she was about two (her father would tell her later), her parents’ first child, and they were living in Satoa, Savai’i, where Mautu was the pastor of the Lotu Ta’iti, the only church in the village. Satoa then was an orderly collection of about thirty aiga in fale spread along the shore under palms; a trading store owned by the Englishman Barker and his Satoan wife, Poto; and a modest church constructed of bush-cut timber and sugarcane thatching with a sand floor anchored to the earth by centuries of settlement and genealogical trees rooted in the atua, and a prophecy that Satoa would one day produce an aiga of prodigies who would lead the country.
A year after the mango fruit’s kiss, Peleiupu’s brother Arona was born, a year later Ruta, then another sister, Naomi, and finally Iakopo, another brother.
For a surprised while Peleiupu couldn’t believe she’d heard her mother, Lalaga, whispering to her father in their mosquito net: ‘Iakopo is very sick!’ Pretending to be asleep, Peleiupu held her breath.
‘Sick from what?’ he asked.
Peleiupu caught it in her mother’s ragged breathing even before she released it: ‘It may be …’ She couldn’t say it.
‘May be what?’ he whispered.
‘It may be the Disease,’ she admitted, finally.
There was a long pause as Mautu gathered his sleeping sheet around his shoulders. The dim light of the lamp outlined and isolated his face in the dark as he gazed at Iakopo, who was asleep in the next mosquito net. ‘Are you sure?’ he asked.
‘It could be.’
‘But he’s only three!’ he protested. Peleiupu turned over and, snuggling around her mother’s legs, held on to them. Lalaga started caressing her face.
Mautu’s predecessor had died the previous year from what everyone called the Satoan Disease which, in a matter of days, had transformed him — as it had done to its previous victims — from a handsomely robust man of exceptional physical strength into a delirious, suicidal bundle of excruciating pain, skin and bone. Some Satoans believed their Disease had been introduced into their genealogy and lives by a papalagi sailor who’d deserted his ship when it had called in to Satoa for water and fresh provisions. Others believed that a pre-Christian atua had infected a Satoan woman with it.
‘I’ve tried everything I learned at Vaiuta,’ Lalaga told Mautu. When he remained silent she added, ‘I’ll get the fofo in the morning.’ She pulled up the side of their net, crawled into the next net, returned with Iakopo in her arms and laid him beside Peleiupu, who reached out and held his burning hand.
Peleiupu would wake periodically during the night and see her parents, sheets wrapped securely around their bodies, watching over Iakopo.
Even before the fat sun could sit safely on the sharp eastern rim of mountains, Lalaga disappeared into the village and returned a short time after with Filivai, the most skilled fofo in Satoa. There were more skilled fofo elsewhere but they didn’t understand the Satoan Disease.
Peleiupu and her brother and sisters wanted to watch Filivai treating their brother, but Lalaga got one of the older women to take them to the kitchen fale to prepare their morning meal.
‘What’s wrong with Iakopo?’ Arona asked their minder.
‘Yes, what’s wrong with him?’ Ruta echoed.
‘He’s sick, isn’t he?’ Naomi tugged at their minder’s ie lavalava.
As she followed them towards the kitchen fale Peleiupu noticed that the others were leaving clear white footprints in the layer of dew. ‘Iakopo is going to be all right,’ she heard their minder reassuring the others. Peleiupu started placing her feet in their minder’s footprints; she had to take longer strides to do so. One day she’d have feet as large. When she looked back at the main fale Filivai was massaging Iakopo’s body, while Mautu and Lalaga watched.
At the kitchen fale Arona ran off and joined the boys who were collecting the fallen leaves and other rubbish around the compound. The women frying pancakes and corned beef over the open fire called over Naomi and Ruta, and soon their endless chatter added body to the sizzling sound of the frying. As Peleiupu helped their minder boil the large pot of water for Iakopo’s bath they sang a well-known song:
| The moon of the morning tide is rising | Ua oso mai le masina o le tai taeao |
| The year is ending | Ua i’u le tausaga |
| I wait for my beloved hoping he’ll return. | Mo’omo’oga ia toe fo’i mai la’u pele. |
When the meal was ready their minder asked five of the men and women to serve it. They took the pots and baskets of food to the main fale. The children ate, with the other young people, in the faleo’o.
Immediately after Filivai left, the minder filled the tub with warm water and got a clean towel and a piece of soap. Peleiupu and her sisters followed her to the main fale. The children sat around the tub and watched. The pain was obvious in Iakopo’s face and body over which the tiny red sores that were symptomatic of the Disease were spreading rapidly, but he didn’t cry as Lalaga lowered him into the bath and started soaping him. Peleiupu glanced up and saw the other women preparing a mosquito net and a bed of mats for Iakopo at the far end of the fale.
Lalaga laid Iakopo in her lap and dried him with the towel. She beckoned to Peleiupu, who uncorked the bottle of coconut oil and, pouring the smooth liquid into her hands, rubbed it over her brother’s body. Long firm stroke after stroke after stroke relaxed Iakopo’s pain eventually and he started to fall asleep.
‘Can we do it next time?’ Ruta asked Lalaga, who nodded.
Gingerly so as not to wake him, Naomi put on Iakopo’s singlet, Ruta combed his hair, Peleiupu wrapped him in a clean sleeping sheet, and Lalaga carried him around the tapa-cloth curtain that now hung across the fale to his bed. Peleiupu and her sisters lowered the net around him, anchored it to the floor with the large smooth stones they used for the purpose, and sat with Lalaga around the net. Through the white mesh of netting their brother looked as if he were cocooned in a fine mist. Mosquitoes zinged at the edge of their attention.
By evening everyone in Satoa knew about Iakopo, and in their evening lotu pleaded with God to save their pastor’s son from the Disease.
To many Satoan elders, everything about their pastor was heavy: his appearance, mannerisms, speech, and the reassuring but pompous aura of impregnable confidence that he exuded. It was as if Mautu had been born an adult; had missed out on his childhood. They had heard that their pastor had succeeded at theological college because he had been utterly trustworthy and solid in everything, the epitome of Christian respectability, who would maintain and strengthen tradition. The Satoan elders admired him for that, and for his down-to-earth sermons, which echoed the values of his missionary teachers: hard work, cleanliness, thrift, honesty and the determination to conquer the Devil, who lived in the pagan darkness that still covered much of Samoa and the Pacific.
So they viewed Iakopo’s illness as the first real attack on their pastor’s solidity. The Disease had selected their pastor’s son, and they watched how Mautu would survive it. Some were even willing to wager that he wouldn’t.
During their lotu, Lalaga assured Mautu and their household that Iakopo was going to recover. But before the lotu was over, Iakopo was screaming with pain. Mautu sent two youths to fetch Filivai.
While they waited, Lalaga clasped her son to her body. ‘Shhh, you’ll be all right!’ she crooned into his hair as she rocked back and forth. Mautu dabbed at Iakopo’s burning forehead with a wet cloth.
Filivai scrambled through the curtain and Lalaga handed Iakopo to her. When Naomi and Ruta started whimpering, Peleiupu took them out to the paepae where they sat and watched the stars, which looked like luminous pebbles breaking up out of the dark lake of sky.
‘Is Iakopo going to die?’ Arona asked Peleiupu.
‘Is he?’ chorused Ruta and Naomi.
‘God will save him,’ Peleiupu tried to comfort them. She then wound her arms around her sisters and pulled them in to her sides. The stars looked so far away, lost in the dark emptiness, but they were hanging on to their meagre light. Hanging on.
For almost two weeks the female elders took turns, in groups, helping Lalaga and Filivai care for Iakopo. They watched over him at night while Lalaga and Mautu tried to rest. Each aiga sent people to help in the cooking and caring for the elders and visitors. Because Lalaga was busy with Iakopo, Mautu ran their school on his own. His lessons were punctuated with lengthening stretches of unexpected silence and desperate attempts to remember what he’d just said. Sometimes his voice broke, and his students heard him swallowing back the pain. They behaved around him as if he were as fragile as eggshell. The care of Mautu’s and Lalaga’s children was left to the other women in their household.
With almost clinical detachment the Satoans watched their pastor shedding his solidity as the Disease sucked in Iakopo’s beauty, and the fofo and Mautu’s prayers failed to arrest the inward contraction, until, on Sunday in the pulpit in his now ill-fitting white suit, he looked like a butterfly cocoon collapsing in on itself.
‘This morning I stand before you not understanding our God’s sense of justice,’ Mautu started his sermon. ‘I have not chosen a text or prepared a sermon.’ There was a tense pause as he tried to gather his strength and control his trembling. ‘Though many of you have told me I shouldn’t be afraid for my son because his illness is God’s way of testing my faith, I am mortally afraid. My fear, born out of love for my son …’ His voice breaking, he swallowed again. ‘My fear is more real to me than anything else in my life …’
As Mautu spoke, Sao and some of the other elders observed that the righteous certainty was gone. Mautu was adrift in the sea of complicated greys, complex choices and unanswerable questions and contradictions; of blurred boundaries between good and evil, right and wrong; of God being not only a beneficent Creator but also an unforgiving Destroyer. And their alofa and admiration for him grew.
‘What do you think?’ Sao asked some of the elders as they left the church that morning.
‘He will endure,’ Vaomatua, his wife, replied.
‘He’s getting there,’ a cataract-eyed sage said.
‘He’ll do!’ someone else concluded.
Only the dumb roar of the surf breaking on the reef and the breeze clattering through the palms framed the silence that rang in Peleiupu’s hearing when she woke. She sat up and looked around. In the shifting light from the lamp beside Iakopo’s mosquito net she observed that everyone, including the two women who were supposed to be caring for Iakopo, was asleep. She raised the side of her net, hesitated and looked down at Lalaga, who was snoring almost inaudibly beside her, reached down and caressed her mother’s forehead, and then slid noiselessly out of the net and crawled across the mats into Iakopo’s net.
The previous night, as she had lain in bed trying not to listen to the fofo treating Iakopo’s pain, she had decided finally, and had been surprised she wasn’t afraid of her decision. It had nothing to do with what was right and wrong. ‘Why is God not ending my brother’s pain?’ she’d asked Lalaga, who’d reached across and brushed her hair from her face.
‘God’s justice is beyond our understanding,’ her mother had said.
‘You’re just repeating what Mautu says!’
The light and the whiteness of the pillows accentuated the emaciated condition of Iakopo’s face. Only the skin was preventing the skull from erupting into the open; his eyes had retreated deeply into their sockets; almost all his hair was gone. He looked like the eighty-six-year-old deacon who’d died the year before. She could barely hear Iakopo’s breathing, but at least he was momentarily free of the pain. Was that ripe mango she could smell?
She reached out and, with her fingers, delicately traced and read the contours of his face and the pulse beating irregularly at the side of his neck, while the night watched and waited. Then she pinched his nostrils shut and held her grip, fearlessly. The pulse in his neck eased away as she held and held …
My brother, my beloved brother.
At dawn, when Lalaga’s muted wailing fished them out of their dark sleep, Peleiupu was prepared for it. For a while she lay still and watched. Their household operated to routines and practices laid down by Lalaga and tradition. Mautu was embracing Lalaga, trying to ease her grief. Filivai and two other women untied Iakopo’s net and started washing his body. The rest of the people untied their nets, rolled up the sleeping mats and stored them on the rafters. Then the males hurried off to prepare the food for the mourners; some of them would go off to dig Iakopo’s grave. Some of the women were cleaning the fale, ringing the posts with good mats and preparing the thick bed of fine mats for Iakopo’s body. Peleiupu rolled out of the net, got up and untied it from the rafters. Then she woke the other children and untied their net. ‘What’s happening?’ Arona asked, alarmed.
‘Our brother has gone to God,’ she told him, imitating their father.
She stood alone while the other children rushed into Lalaga’s arms. When Filivai reached out to her, Peleiupu edged away and to her father who, though only two paces away, was alone, gazing up into the eastern sky as the sun singed it with a golden fire. When Peleiupu placed her hands on his shoulders, his right arm swept her in to his side. Together they watched the sun rising. Rising. And in its light Peleiupu saw her healing fingers exploring and reading Iakopo’s face and the final horizon of his short life.
A short while later when the deacons, led by Sao, the tuua, arrived and they discussed Iakopo’s funeral, they were surprised when Mautu ignored the church requirement that pastors should not conduct the funeral services of their own kin and insisted that he was going to do it.
‘It is as if he’s not the father!’ a young deacon protested as they left the pastor’s house.
‘He is,’ Sao remarked. ‘He’s just trying to hide his grief. We all do it at times like this.’
When the deacon continued his accusation, Sao silenced him with one wave of his hand.
The sun climbed into the white sky and a fierce heat started gripping Satoa. No one minded, though, because there’d be no work that day. They were all getting ready for Iakopo’s funeral.
After she helped her sisters dress, Peleiupu went to her father. She got him his shaving gear and a basin of water. After he had shaved, slowly, cutting himself several times, she got him his clothes, fan, hymn book and Bible, and, when he was dressed, took him to sit beside Iakopo’s body.
Dressed in his Sunday clothes, Iakopo was covered up to his neck in ie toga. ‘Are you all right?’ Peleiupu asked Lalaga, who nodded once. She led her mother to sit beside Iakopo’s head, with Arona, Ruta and Naomi. Peleiupu sat down beside her father.
They were ready.
The deacons and other elders arrived first and occupied the main posts; the church choir came as a group and sat in rows across the centre of the fale; the rest of Satoa took up the remainder of the space and spilled out over the paepae to the shade of the breadfruit and mango trees outside.
There was no ornate, poetic or lengthy welcome from Mautu. ‘We are gathered here today to farewell Iakopo,’ was all he said. ‘He has gone to be with our Maker.’ He paused, no sign of grief. ‘Let us pray. Our Heavenly Father, thank you for this glorious morning. It is an apt day for Iakopo’s journey towards you, to be with you, forever.’ He paused again. ‘Thank you for ending his pain, his suffering. Amen.’
Most people were left suspended, having expected a longer, more anguished prayer. Many kept their heads lowered, their eyes closed. A few of the elders looked at one another. Peleiupu handed Mautu the hymn book and he flipped through it quickly. Stopped. Everyone was now with him. ‘Let us sing hymn number 134.’
The choirmaster stood up, raised his arms, sang the first line of the hymn — Let us praise the Lord for His Love — and then the choir and mourners joined him.
… for this life is one of sorrow and pain
This earth a place of sin we need to be freed from.
Lord, give us the courage and the strength …
They were further surprised when Mautu said, ‘There will be no sermon, for Iakopo was only a child. Suffice to say, in witness, that he was a happy and honest boy.’ He swallowed and straightened up again. ‘Yes, he is fortunate to be with God.’ He bent forward, kissed his son on the forehead, and then backed away. Lalaga and their children followed. Peleiupu would never forget the cold sweaty feel of her brother’s forehead when she kissed it. That memory would almost choke her every time she attended a funeral and kissed the corpse farewell. The choir started singing another hymn. The rest of the congregation began coming forward to farewell Iakopo.
Only when Filivai and two other women started wrapping the body in mats did Lalaga weep openly. Arona, Ruta, Naomi and many of their household joined her. When the wrapping was finished and tied with sinnet, Sao encouraged the weeping to end. ‘It is enough: there is no need to be sorrowful. Iakopo is lucky to be free of this life. He is with God.’
Two young men carried the body as they moved towards the grave site behind the church, with Mautu and Sao leading the procession. A generous breeze, heavy with the tang of the sea, cooled them in the noonday heat. Peleiupu walked in her father’s shadow, holding Lalaga’s hand. A kingfisher shot from the heads of the mango trees and across the church. A good omen, Peleiupu thought, remembering that Mautu had once told them that the kingfisher had been an atua in pre-Christian times. Casually she noted that the mango trees were bare of fruit.
The air smelled of newly turned earth drying in the sun. Mautu and Lalaga stood at the head of the open grave. The congregation ringed the grave or sat on nearby graves; many of the children perched on the frangipani trees. Using ropes, the pallbearers slowly lowered the body into the earth. With the sun caught in the large beads of sweat on his brow, Mautu uttered the shortest and most surprising prayer any of them would ever hear: ‘Thank you, God. Amen.’ Sao and a few of the elders interpreted it as a statement of defiance and were shocked. The rest believed Mautu was too grief-stricken to say any more.
Picking up a handful of earth, Mautu sprinkled it over the body. Lalaga and her children did the same. Many of the mourners threw flowers taken from the wreaths or from nearby trees and plants, and called, ‘Farewell, Iakopo. May your journey end well.’
The men who’d dug the grave moved forward to fill it. Mautu waved them away, took a spade from one of them, and, scooping up earth, hurled it into the grave.
His family and the other Satoans watched him bury his son, one spadeful after another, with silent tears washing down his face. His tears mixed with the earth that was staining his white suit until he stood, arms crossed over the wet handle of the spade, which he had stabbed into the head of the remaining mound of earth, head bowed, alone and apart from them. Nobody knew what to do.
Peleiupu broke from the group and went to him. She held his hand and started leading him home.
‘Mautu has buried his former self with his son,’ Sao would say later.
‘He and his family are now of us, of Satoa, of our eleele. Our Disease has made sure of that,’ another matai would say.
‘Yes, they have paid at last to be of us,’ the elders agreed.
It was l889.