HECK HAD A MALLARD DUCK nesting on an old woollen shirt under his bed. During the day, she hung around on the old wooden balcony outside, ignoring the waddle, squawk and shit around her. When she thought she wasn’t being watched, she shot in through the french doors, head down, making straight for her possie. Sometimes Heck would hear her quacking to herself at night as she shifted her feathered bum around on her green eggs which were flecked with brown and blue spots. Then he’d lean over so that his upside-down eye was level with her shiny black beady eye. It looked back at his, and she kept very still and pretended not to be there.
But he couldn’t watch the duck all the time. In the afternoons, Heck was often at a loose end. Sometimes he walked out to where Kau Radovanivich stayed. That was past the tractor shed where the rusting stuff that they didn’t use on the farm any more lay nestled in the hay. The dark red tractor loomed in the shadows, squashed cow shit sticking in the tread of its black wheels.
Kau’s little hut had once been the shepherd’s quarters. It was just the right size for a single man. The inside was wallpapered with old newspapers, yellowing records of what was happening in May 1968. Glass milk bottles on the window sills held faded plastic flowers, white with pink hearts where the sun didn’t touch them. Kau’s brother was the caretaker of a cemetery over in Matamata, and when the wind blew the flowers around, and he didn’t know which grave they had come from, he would take them home. Just like Kau, he didn’t like to see things go to waste.
There was an old coal range in the hut, with a flat black top and milky green enamel doors. Kau had to make sure that it didn’t go out in the winter, because it was hard to relight. Especially if the sturdy mānuka wood was wet. The solid pieces reminded Heck of sinewy muscular limbs, severed cleanly between elbow and wrist.
Sometimes Kau made damper for Heck in the old iron frying pan, or they opened the coal range doors and toasted a loaf of thick white bread, one slice at a time, on the blackened pointy end of the poker. Kau didn’t hold with margarine. The toast was flavoured with woodsmoke and coated with butter. Kau wasn’t scared of heart disease, even though his doctor had told him to cut right back on fat, and to cut out tobacco all together.
Kau was obsessed by the land. ‘This is the whenua of my mother’s people,’ he told Heck on more than one occasion. ‘The stories spun into it are our stories. Down under the peat soil, those are our axes, and our bones. Those holes in the hills are our kūmara pits. Those are our waka out there at the bottom of the lake.’
He was talking about the duck–shooting lake. On a fine day, when the water was as clear as melted ice and the wind was dead, Heck could see down into the depths, where the shadowy black outlines of sunken canoes rested in a place where there wasn’t any sound.
There was a lot of swampy dark–red mud at the lake’s edge. Because of the peat, the water looked dirty, rusty, even oily in the shallows. It was sprinkled with tiny green mānuka leaves, fragrant, and light enough to float on the surface like uncooked rice, thrown for luck at a wedding. Kau knew the lake’s name as Wahapango. Heck only knew it as ‘the lake’.
Kau had books piled up against his walls. Brown and red covers, with glossy black and white photographs at the centre. New Zealand in the Early Nineteen Hundreds. The Māori in Aotearoa. Historical Society Publications. Whakapapa. Piles and piles of paper to prove things. ‘Our people have a saying,’ Kau would say. ‘Ka ngaro te tangata, toitū te whenua. People pass, but the land remains.’
Last year, Kau had stood at the corner stile down by the lake, holding a placard. ‘Give us back our land,’ it said. ‘Us?’ the men laughed. ‘There’s only you here, Kau. You need more than one person for a land march!’ And instead of climbing over the stile, they’d held the fence down and ducked through the barbed wire, where the cows scratched their arses when they were itchy.
Bartie had told Heck to hurry up, but once they got down to the lake, and Bartie had rowed across to his maimai, Heck had doubled back and stood with Kau for a while.
Sometimes Heck and Kau played a game. ‘What I’d miss most if I was dead,’ said Kau, ‘is the sound of the wind muttering round the corners of the hut when I’m under my blankets.’
‘I’d miss the soft feel of a duck’s breast when you stroke it before you pluck it, and the way its shiny green neck sort–of folds to the side,’ said Heck.
‘One of the things I’m going to miss is peeling my eyes for mushrooms, and then spotting this perfect white button in a patch of cow shit, which is going to cook up thick and black and meaty,’ said Kau.
Heck licked the corners of his mouth with his tongue.
‘And I’ll miss the soft feel of a woman,’ said Kau. ‘I miss it already since the missus died.’
‘When I’m dead, I’ll miss having a stone by myself in my room at night,’ said Heck. ‘I’ll miss lying on my back and trying to blow blue smoke rings one inside the other, like Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings.’
Kau would say, ‘Heck, you’re young. You need a woman.’ And he’d read out ads from the personal column of the Sunday newspaper: ‘Māori rose seeking salty sailor. Disco champion seeks dance partner. Here’s one for you, Boy. A woman who likes Holdens looking for a sharemilker or similar. You’re similar.’
Heck couldn’t be bothered with the romance thing. Past girlfriends had always complained that he kept to himself and went off on his own too much.
Sometimes, as he walked back in the soft greying of the dusk, when the light was magical, and the smell of berries and smoke was in the air, Heck imagined mysterious glowing sprites, with wings like cicadas, making their homes in the dark spaces between the abandoned leaves under the hedges. He could feel them there, just as they were in the glossy pictures of the fairy–tale books that used to belong to Bartie when he was a little boy, but which were now stacked in boxes in the back room.
*
Once a year, the entire family descended for the annual duck shooting dinner. All Heck’s sisters brought their husbands and children. Bartie’s nephew came from in town, and brought whatever girlfriend he had at the time. Lynnette invited any of the neighbours that she was still on speaking terms with. This year, she was pretty sweet with most of them. The lino was old and chipped, and Lynette always cleaned it before everybody came by spooning the excess juice from the roasted meat all over the floor. ‘You can’t get cleaner than a floor licked by a cat’s tongue,’ she said.
The ducks were plucked beforehand too, after the men came in from the lake, carrying them in sacks over their shoulders. Night fell early in June, and they couldn’t shoot in the dark. ‘Pluck them before you have a shower,’ insisted Lynette, and they sat around in the warm kitchen, smelling of wet green Swanndris and stoking up the fire while they swapped stories about the day’s shooting.
Lynette said that what Bartie really liked was sitting out in his nice quiet maimai, eating nuts and raisins and listening to Sports Roundup on the radio. ‘Time out for me,’ she said cheerfully. ‘I’m a duck–shooting widow.’
The men watched rugby on TV while Lynette cooked. Bartie shooed the cats off the table, and one or other of them always took refuge on top of the TV, with its back to everyone, purposefully hanging its tail down over the screen and twitching it, so that everyone would know that it was annoyed at having to move.
Lynette loaded the table with mashed potato swimming in butter, and chokos from the vine outside, and duck with crispy skin. Heck chewed carefully, because sometimes there was still some shot hidden in the meat, just waiting to grate against your teeth.
And in the midst of all the talking and laughing and noise, and people racing down the hallway to the billiards room, Heck looked out at the glass panes in the back door. Their shiny surface reflected the warmth and the twinkling brightness of the kitchen straight back at him. The night lay as black and thick as road tar behind them. He wondered what Kau was doing. His hut was only five minutes’ walk away, but it might as well have been part of another world.
Heck’s sister’s kids looked forward to being put to bed, sometimes on the back seats of their parent’s cars, and sometimes in their parent’s old beds, on crispy white pillows, in their old bedrooms. When Heck himself went to bed that night, he walked along a hallway crammed with paintings. There was scarcely space for the ripped, blue wallpaper to hang, let alone for the patches of hessian to show through. Dark, sultry oils by New Zealand artists jostled for room. Acquiring them was Bartie’s passion. His nephew, Heck’s cousin, was an art dealer, and was always finding Bartie something new to spend his money on.
The smell of stale cigar smoke hung in the air where the two of them had stood in the hallway, discussing who it was best to buy, who they liked, and who was overrated. Heck’s tired eyes had trouble focusing in the special mustiness of the darkness that infiltrates the dimness of farmhouse light bulbs. It made the hanging cobwebs near–invisible as well.
The duck was still under Heck’s bed, because he heard her quacking questioningly when the springs creaked as he sat down. He lay down and buried his head in the pillow. It smelt of cat.
*
They got up for duck shooting in the dark. Bartie cooked up wholemeal pancakes with dark brown speckles, and they ate them with golden syrup straight from the can. Heck used his placemat as a plate. It showed an English hunting scene. Men in red jackets on horseback were bordered by a yellowing background with cracking varnish. Bartie counted out his shells while Heck got out an oily rag and rubbed his gun. He liked the silky feeling of the oil between his fingers.
It was still dark when they made their way across the farm, but they knew the path better than they knew the walk down the hallway to the toilet at night, and it didn’t take them long to get to the lake. ‘There’s a funny smell this morning,’ complained one of the men from the next-door farm. ‘Sort of like diesel. Like the fumes that you get when you walk in front of a bus while its motor’s idling.’ Heck nodded to himself. He liked that smell.
Someone just in front of them flicked a lighter and lit up a cigarette behind their cupped hands. It was Kau. ‘Come for a bit of shooting this year?’ asked Bartie. ‘Plenty of room in Heck’s maimai. You can have his old armchair, and he can sit on the beer crate.’
‘Nup,’ said Kau. ‘You fellas couldn’t learn. You won’t give this whenua back, then I’m going to bugger up your duckshooting.’
The men laughed. ‘How are you going to do that?’ said Bartie’s nephew.
‘Like this,’ said Kau. And he chucked his half–smoked hand–rolled cigarette out on to the lake.
It flickered, and then there was a whoomph! A patch of flames clouded the water. The sprite–like things with the cicada wings had come from under the farmhouse hedge to dance on the lake. ‘What the fuck is that?’ said Bartie, but the flames were running here and there across the surface, and some of them were joining hands and forming rings. The fire stretched its fingers towards the far shore.
‘Some sort of petrol,’ said one of the men. ‘He must have been rowing around all night, spreading it.’
Heck was reminded of Christmas, when Lynette lit the rum–soaked fruit pudding, and they all went ‘Ahh’ as the green flames licked its shiny surface. As they watched, the darkness started to thin out, and dawn arrived with its dim blue light. Ducks took flight in alarm, croaking overhead as if the smoke had gotten into their throats. ‘That bloody crazy old man,’ swore the neighbour. ‘Let’s hope the fucking peat doesn’t catch fire.’
‘Ring the fire brigade,’ said Bartie. ‘Who’s got a fucking phone?’
The men were sweating under their Swanndris. The lake was glowing like the warm breath of hell. Sparks flicked up into the dark branches of the mānuka and the small, dry leaves and blackened branches caught and fizzled like clumps of singed hair.
Heck looked around for Kau, awed by the grand, beautiful significance of his gesture. Up above, the morning star still shone, like a hole in the sky where the brightness of God’s eye was up close and looking through at them.
Heck was worried that Bartie would kick Kau out of his hut for setting the lake on fire like that. He needn’t have wasted his worry. Kau’s heart gave out that morning, and he didn’t need a place to stay any more. Maybe it was the strain of rowing all night in the dark, maybe it was the smoking (two pouches a week), maybe it was all that butter, or the lard he fried his bacon in.
They found him slumped over his sheets of whakapapa, all laid out neatly across his kitchen table. He was still wearing the boots Bartie had given him over ten years ago. Kau didn’t like to waste anything, and the soles were still good.
The rain came later that day and dowsed the lake. The bluey–grey clouds were low and thick, heavy with droplets of water. As it lightened a bit, a fine white mist of drizzle settled over the farm, and a misty rainbow rose up through it. Heck could feel the mushrooms stirring, their thick, white skins waiting for the right time to burst up out of the ground, the ground where the bones of Kau’s tīpuna lay.
And as they carried Kau’s body past the house, on an old green stretcher that they found in the shed, in the hay behind the tractor, Heck realised what he’d miss the most when he was dead. And for a long time even before that. It was Kau. Ka ngaro te tangata, toitū te whenua.