It was a light, persistent rain, which first swirled in from the sea in pursuit of a flock of matu’u, and stopped to wash the children who rushed out of their homes and splashed and laughed and danced in its silver coolness. When the children lost interest, it stayed over Satoa and extended up to the top of the inland range, making everything smell of fresh seaweed and coral. As mould mushroomed in the fale — in the damp places, in the rubbish heaps, and even under the Satoans’ toenails — the rain acquired, over a month of persistence, the inescapable odour of decay.
During its life, most Satoans forgot what sunlight was like. The grey blanket of cloud blocked out the sun and affected their sense of colour: the world became a swimming, shadowy place of greys, dark blues, dull wet greens and browns, with flashing shades of running water. A dank dampness and fermenting mould everywhere. In the humid heat seeds germinated and grew lushly. Some people believed that their hair was lengthening at a phenomenal rate.
The rain wasn’t heavy enough to disrupt the usual pattern of life: the children went to school, the men tended their plantations and fished, the women did their usual chores. However, the rain’s incessant, relentless drone, its hypnotic, throbbing rhythm, surreptitiously became the heartbeat of Satoa. The beat muffled other sounds. People talked less, listened more, and withdrew more often into their thoughts and dreams.
During its first week of occupation, the rain washed the dust and dirt off everything, gathered it on the ground in rivulets and eager, snaking streams and drove it with other rubbish down the slopes into the pool and the river and the sea. It was a cleansing of the whole village as though in preparation for an important visitor or event.
In the time of the rain, Mautu and Barker didn’t visit each other. Rumour had it that Barker was confining himself to the back room of his store where, in the light of candles, he was writing a manuscript that grew fatter with every rainy day. It was as if he had been seized by a demon that was not going to free him until he had finished writing down whatever terrible confession it wanted him to make. With every unwashed day his flying-fox smell germinated and fermented and expanded, like a drowned corpse, in the room. Even Poto and their children couldn’t bear the stench, not that they dared disturb him. And, as his confession fattened, Barker himself thinned, became gaunt and hollow-eyed.
Without explanation, just before church service on Sunday morning, the rain stopped and left the air to the usual acrid smoke of umu, and a booming silence.
Barker, so Poto would later describe, shuffled out of his room, his dirt-caked clothes around him like a ragged second skin, his stench weaving out into the bright light, and stood on the store veranda, manuscript under his right arm. As he surveyed the village, he laughed softly. Then for a long, long time he gazed up into the deep sky, as if he were searching for an end to infinity. ‘He’s old, old!’ Poto would tell others. ‘His month-long fight with that demon has left him very old, empty of his usual fury.’
‘It’s very beautiful!’ Peleiupu said when her father handed her the small wooden box.
‘Yes. It was sent by Barker,’ he said. Afternoon classes were over and they were alone in their fale.
Carved into the wooden lid were Chinese mandarins holding umbrellas and standing before a gathering of students. ‘Is it very old?’ she asked.
He nodded. ‘Barker must have got it from China on one of his trips.’
‘What’s in it?’ The small bronze lock was open.
‘Papers that Barker has written. It is not to be opened and read until after he has … until after he has passed away.’ On Mautu’s desk was a letter. He picked it up. ‘And when the box is opened I am the only one allowed to read what is in it.’ He gave her the letter. ‘And after I die, the box and its valuable contents are to be yours. No one else is to read it.’
‘Not even Lalaga?’ she asked.
‘Not even your mother.’
‘And after me?’
‘His letter doesn’t say. Perhaps it’s meant for the eldest child of every generation in our aiga.’
He watched her as she read Barker’s letter.
‘What are you going to tell Lalaga and our aiga?’ she asked as she returned the letter to him.
‘She will be dissatisfied that the box and Barker’s papers are meant for us only. But she will respect his wishes. So will your brother and sisters.’
For a while she was thoughtful. Then she asked, ‘What do you think he has written?’
‘I don’t know,’ he murmured. ‘But it must be important. Perhaps it is all the knowledge he acquired on his voyages.’
‘And stories about all those creatures he has seen!’
Later as she returned to the kitchen fale, the concluding sentences of Barker’s letter wound around her and she couldn’t escape their pain:
I do not need to remind you, my friend, that curiosity killed the cat. If out of curiosity you open the box before the prescribed time, I will be the cat and become maggot-meat before I am ready for it … By the way, when I die please bury my carcass up in the hills in the village of the People. I will find peace with them. There is to be no church service for me.
That night, after their English lesson, when everyone else had gone to bed, Mautu told Lalaga and his children about the box, its contents and Barker’s wishes.
‘No one, absolutely no one, is to touch or open the box!’ he emphasised. ‘It will be locked in my trunk until it is time. And if anything happens to me before then, only Pele may open it and read its contents. That is Barker’s wish.’
‘But why should it only be her?’ insisted Naomi. He looked at her. She fell silent.
They watched as he wrapped the box in a piece of new calico and placed it under his clothes in his trunk, and locked the trunk.
Barker’s book was perhaps the magic key to unlock their past and future: the prophecies that would give meaning to the generations of her aiga, Peleiupu thought.
After the children went to their mosquito nets, Mautu turned down the lamps.
‘Is he dying?’ Lalaga asked.
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Then why has he made his will?’
‘I want to sleep.’ He lay down. She spread his sleeping sheet over him.
‘Why?’ she whispered.
‘It is a papalagi custom to make your will well ahead of your death.’
They lay in silence for a while. The night pressed down on them. ‘I’m afraid,’ she said.
‘Of what?’
‘Of the box and its contents.’
‘You’ve never liked him, have you?’
‘I never said that!’
‘But it’s true?’
‘Yes,’ she admitted. ‘He doesn’t believe in God, and he has no respect for God’s Church.’
‘What has that got to do with his written legacy?’
‘I am just afraid,’ she tried to explain. ‘Afraid for you and Peleiupu.’
‘Because we will be the only people to know what he has written?’
‘Yes,’ she whispered.
‘I’m afraid too,’ he admitted. ‘Fascinated by what I may find, but afraid of it as well.’
He remembered that it wasn’t raining any more. In Barker’s ancient Chinese box was locked the source of the rain, Mautu speculated.