The Alia

‘He’s — he’s caught our Disease,’ Arona said. They were alone in the school fale; their students were cleaning the grounds.

‘Who?’ asked Peleiupu, continuing to write on the blackboard. For almost a year Arona had been teaching a junior class. He was about fifteen.

‘Barker.’ The name slipped like a startled fish into Peleiupu’s hearing and, for a moment, she didn’t want to know it was there. She glanced at him; he was refusing to look at her. ‘He’s got the Disease of Satoa!’ he whispered.

‘How do you know?’ She was breathing in the sweet scent of frangipani. She noticed the sun was caught in the embrace of luminous clouds.

‘Tavita and I have been with him most afternoons. He’s been teaching us about ships.’ He waited for her.

‘Does Mautu know?’ she asked. The smell was insinuating itself, like the roots of weeds, down her throat.

‘No, Barker has told no one else.’

‘What about Tavita, does he know?’

‘No. I’ve told no one but you.’

‘Mautu will know what to do,’ she offered.

‘I promised Barker I would not tell anyone. He’s taught me many wonderful things,’ he said. She didn’t want to hear him. ‘Many things about the sea and the stars and ships.’

‘They’re returning to class,’ she said. He got up. ‘He’s been very good to us, Pele.’ He walked off.

The students were entering the fale. ‘Be quiet!’ she ordered.

They stopped talking at once.

That evening after lotu, while they were having their meal, Lalaga asked Mautu why he hadn’t been seeing Barker lately. Mautu told everyone that Barker was too busy designing a large alia he was going to build.

‘Arona’s been helping him,’ Lalaga said.

‘Is he teaching you how to design ships?’ Mautu asked Arona, who was sitting with the other young people at the back posts. Arona nodded.

‘Tell us what Barker has been teaching you,’ Mautu asked Arona.

So while the elders ate, Arona detailed, in his ponderous, thorough manner, how he and Tavita were learning how to use a compass, a sextant and the stars to steer by. He gave the English and Samoan names of the stars. His eyes glowed as he described Barker’s alia, giving the exact measurements, the revolutionary changes Barker was introducing to the traditional design, the timber to be used, and the other qualities needed for the alia to come alive. Not once did he lose his way, or the attention of his audience. Peleiupu found herself flowing with his tale, and forgetting that Barker was dying.

‘And when the alia is built has Barker asked you to sail with him?’ Lalaga asked. Peleiupu felt Arona looking at her. She daren’t look at him.

‘Has he?’ Mautu asked. ‘Just think, you could sail around the world!’

‘Yes, he has asked me,’ Arona replied.

‘Good, good!’ exclaimed Mautu. ‘If only I was younger.’ Peleiupu caught Lalaga gazing at Arona and knew that Lalaga wasn’t going to allow Arona to sail away from being the pastor she wanted him to be.

That Sunday after to’ona’i, while everyone rested in the fale, Mautu reminded Peleiupu about reading aloud to him. He got her to bring his favourite collection of stories, The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling.

So while he lay, covered with his sleeping sheet, his eyes shut, his head resting on his bamboo ali, she read to him.

‘Are you not well?’ he asked.

‘I’m all right.’

‘Then concentrate and read properly! You’re ruining a very exciting story!’

She tried. She had read it many times to him, but he was like a child: he wanted his favourite stories repeated over and over again. She was fed up with Babu and his jungle friends and their ridiculous adventures, but she didn’t dare tell her father, so she persevered.

Straight after the second story she said, ‘Arona told me to tell you that Barker wants to see you tomorrow.’ The lie was so easy.

‘Remind me tomorrow morning,’ he murmured. ‘I want to see his designs for the alia.’

‘He should have asked you earlier,’ she tested him.

‘Yes’ he said. And she knew then that he was hurt that Barker had left him out of his alia project. She pretended to be looking through the book for another story to read, then, pausing dramatically, asked, ‘Since you became pastor here, how many people have died from the Disease?’

‘What disease?’ He sounded as if he were falling asleep.

‘The Disease of Satoa.’

‘Can’t remember.’

‘What causes it?’

‘Why do you want to know?’

‘Some of my students asked me about it. I have got to give them an answer tomorrow.’ Again it wasn’t difficult to lie.

‘I’ve tried to find the answer in the papalagi medical books but I haven’t been able to: my English isn’t good enough, and my understanding of the sciences is very inadequate.’ He paused. ‘Perhaps you should read the books yourself, your English is now better than mine. Or, why don’t you ask Barker. He’s seen people dying from the Disease. Come with me tomorrow and ask him.’ Her lies had led her back to Barker. ‘Now let me sleep,’ he sighed.

Next morning Mautu didn’t need to be reminded about going to see Barker. He hurried through his morning meal and told Lalaga where he was going. That afternoon, before Lalaga could ask her to do something else, Peleiupu dismissed her classes, told Ruta and Naomi that Mautu wanted to see her at Barker’s, and left. She hadn’t seen Barker for a few weeks so she dreaded what she might find.

Poto and another woman were weaving mats at the far side of Barker’s fale. Seated at the desk at the centre of the fale, Barker and Mautu were discussing the drawings of the alia, which were spread out over the desk. It was clear to Peleiupu, as she approached, that the two women were pretending not to be listening to what the men were saying, and she remembered, regretfully, that because she was now a young woman it was not proper for her to be a confidante of her father and Barker. People accepted that Mautu and Barker treated her as a son and, at times, as an equal, but that was no comfort because she knew — and Lalaga reminded her often — that now she had to keep her distance. Only papalagi daughters treated their fathers in that over-familiar way, discussing everything with them openly, publicly.

Arona and Tavita were in the new shelter, which extended from the right side of the fale, sawing through a hefty log. When they saw her, Tavita smiled. It was so restrictive, she thought. She could not now even talk freely with her brother or any of the boys she had grown up with.

‘Come and see these,’ Barker called as soon as he saw her. She nodded but veered off to the back of the fale. ‘No, come through the front!’ Barker instructed. She wished he wouldn’t treat her so equally, not in front of other people. She insisted on doing the proper thing, entering the fale through the back. ‘Here, come to the table,’ Barker said. But she sat down beside Poto.

‘It’s all right here,’ she said. ‘I came to see Poto.’

‘It going to be a magnificent alia,’ Mautu said.

Soon the two men were again immersed in their discussion.

Peleiupu asked Poto where her children were. Next door, she told her. Peleiupu had never felt close to Poto. She had tried to but Poto just didn’t interest her: what she talked about, what she did bored Peleiupu. That was how she felt about most of the women. Their being women, in Satoan terms, was too narrow, and she didn’t want to be like that, but she had to disguise her dissatisfaction. For instance, right then, while she pretended she was interested in what Poto was saying, her attention was on Barker and Mautu and the alia. She wanted to be part of the alia, the building of it, but the way of Satoa denied her that: she was a young woman, a child still, who had to stay away from what was male and adult. It was so unfair. Barker and Mautu had taken her out into the boundless adventure that was the world, but the Satoan way wasn’t allowing her the full dimensions and richness of that adventure.

Once, when she’d explained how she felt to Lalaga, her mother had told her to be satisfied she was a very intelligent girl who would one day marry a man of God and help spread God’s message in the pagan Pacific.

‘… And how are my children doing at school?’ Poto broke into her thoughts.

‘Doing well,’ Peleiupu replied.

‘I hope they’re not too naughty!’

‘No, they’re well behaved.’

Poto continued talking about her children while Peleiupu observed Barker surreptitiously. Only the sun-bleached tips of his hair and his blue-green eyes showed he wasn’t Samoan. And you had to listen carefully to his Samoan to know he had an accent. He had succeeded in ‘going native’, he was fond of telling visitors; and Mautu kept telling him he now belonged to Satoa.

There was no new blemish on his skin, no change in his mannerisms and speech; in fact he appeared healthier, happier, and openly enthusiastic about what he was describing to Mautu as ‘our new project: a ship to outspeed any thing, even death’.

‘You know what an alia is?’ Mautu saved her. She nodded. ‘We’re going to build a modern one: lighter, faster and stronger than any built before.’ In his voice Peleiupu once again detected that limitless delight which, years before, had driven their search for gold.

 

Peleiupu couldn’t sleep that night. It started raining at midnight, and the incessant drone strengthened the grip of the darkness around her. Over and over, she examined Barker at his desk with Mautu, looking for the sign he had the Disease. But where? Where?

At dawn, in a dream, she was in a warm, slow-circling current. The alia, white as bone, black mast veined with fissures, and winged with a white sail fat with the wind pushing the craft forward, sailed into the centre of her head and circled and circled with the current that was now her completely. No one on board, just the silent circling vessel tracing the veins in the water, in her, lifting her up, up, up, the sail shimmering and shivering in the invisible breeze. And she was the sail, her body stretched out in one taut skin with the wind singing through her pores.

Suddenly (and she didn’t want to see it) she was kneeling on the deck that joined the two hulls, beside a corpse that was covered up to its neck with ie toga. She leaned forward but a blinding light burst up out of the mound of mats, and, as her mouth started swallowing the light, it turned into a solid, choking liquid that tasted like blood …

The memory of the dream gripped her all day while she taught her classes.

When she remembered that Hawaiians buried their chiefs at sea by placing them on canoes and sailing them out into the horizon, she hurried out of her classroom and, hiding among the bookshelves in the main fale, she prayed.

When she got up to return to her class she glanced back at where she’d been sitting. On the mat were three large drops of blood. She clamped her hands over her mouth. She looked down at her dress. A thin red stain extended from below her belly to the hem.

She waited under the breadfruit tree until Filivai was alone in her fale, then she entered. Since their meeting years before, when Filivai had warned her about her special gift, Peleiupu had not visited her. They met often around the village but never referred to that meeting.

Filivai greeted her formally and then said, ‘It’s been a long time, eh?’ Pele nodded. ‘Are your parents well?’ Pele nodded again and waited for Filivai to continue talking, but she didn’t, so she looked up at her. ‘Are you well?’ Filivai asked. Peleiupu looked at the mat. ‘Something is wrong?’

 ‘Is there a cure for our Disease?’ Peleiupu couldn’t stop the question.

‘I don’t understand your question,’ Filivai replied. ‘Are you referring to your gift?’

Peleiupu shook her head. ‘I’m asking about the Satoan Disease.’

‘I know of no cure for that. Why do you ask?’

‘Have you — or anyone else — tried to find a cure?’

‘I haven’t, but some others have tried.’

‘Why haven’t you?’

Filivai used the end of her ie lavalava to wipe the dried sleep out of the corners of her eyes. ‘Because there is no cure. During my life I’ve seen thirteen people die from it, and I’ve made certain observations about it.’

When she didn’t continue, Peleiupu asked, ‘Will you tell me?’

‘First, you must tell me why you want to find a cure. Is someone you know ill with it?’

Peleiupu nodded. ‘It is not my parents.’

‘You see clearly, always. So I won’t lie to you. Let’s go for a walk,’ Filivai instructed her. ‘And pick the leaves I need for my medicines.’

Peleiupu helped her up to her unsteady feet and handed her her siapo tiputa, which she put on. ‘Come, I need you to lean on. My old body weighs on me like a sick animal.’ She wound her left arm over Peleiupu’s shoulders and, putting some of her weight on Pele, asked, ‘I’m not too heavy, eh?’ Peleiupu smiled.

As they picked a path through the shrubs and undergrowth Filivai described to her the various medical concoctions she made and the ailments they cured. She stopped periodically and asked Peleiupu to pick the leaves of one plant or another. Whenever they disturbed some insects and birds and the creatures escaped into the greenery, Filivai identified each one for Peleiupu.

‘Are you feeling better now?’ Filivai asked. Peleiupu nodded. Filivai then told her what she’d observed about their Disease.

Of the thirteen victims she had seen, two had been young children, five had been in their twenties, and the rest had been old. Eight, she recalled, had been male. ‘So you see, it can claim anyone of any age or sex.’ She pondered for a moment and then said, ‘Yes, not all of them were direct descendants of our people either. Three, I remember, came here from somewhere else. However, they lived here for over fifteen years. You could say that all thirteen belonged to Satoa, or had decided Satoa was their home, the place in which they wanted to die. No stranger ever contracts our Disease.’

The walking was tiring the old woman so she got Peleiupu to sit her down on a boulder in the shade of some cacao trees. She gathered her breath and continued. ‘Of the four I knew well and helped nurse through their dreadful ordeal, all wanted to die.’ Peleiupu looked at her. ‘Yes, Pele, they wanted to die. One of them admitted it to me: the other three didn’t know they suffered the wish to die…’

‘But how did you know?’

Filivai gazed up at her. ‘How do you know?’ Peleiupu looked away. ‘Yes, Pele, all the victims of our Disease want to die and be buried here in Satoa.’ Peleiupu refused to believe it of Barker and was going to say so, but Filivai said, ‘I don’t want to know who it is, Pele. Not yet.’ Reaching up, she grasped Peleiupu’s arms and pulled herself to her feet. ‘I’m old, Pele, and it’s not easy carrying the pain of my own carcass, let alone sharing someone else’s pain. You understand?’ Peleiupu nodded. ‘Let’s continue to pick leaves to cure simpler maladies!’ she chuckled. They moved deeper into the cool vegetation.

‘When I was convinced all the victims wanted to die, I thought I’d discovered the cure: restore the person’s will to live and the Disease would leave his body…’

‘And?’ Peleiupu urged.

‘I tried it with the first two victims. With their loved ones, I tried to make them see their death-wish, to see it clearly and want to live. But it didn’t work. Don’t ask me why. We thought we’d succeeded bu …’ She scrutinised Peleiupu’s face and said, ‘You’re telling yourself: where Filivai failed, I’m going to succeed, I’m going to get the victim to believe she doesn’t belong to Satoa and that she is suffering from the wish to die. Am I correct, eh?’ Peleiupu nodded. ‘And once that is done, our Disease will leave her alone?’ Peleiupu nodded again. ‘But there is another question which, if you haven’t arrived at it already, you’ll eventually face after suffering hours, days, months watching the victim dying. It’s this: Perhaps our Disease is a blessing, a reward for a life of virtue and goodness? Remember, God is a god of love not cruelty.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Peleiupu.

‘Think of this, Pele: if God is a god of love, would He inflict our Disease on someone as punishment or as a reward?’ She paused and added, ‘All thirteen victims I knew led exemplary Christian lives.’ Before Peleiupu could say it, Filivai held up her hand and said, ‘No, don’t tell me who it is or that she has not led a virtuous life. I don’t want to know just yet.’

After they stored the leaves in a basket under the bed in the fale, Filivai said, ‘Pele, I try to cure what is within my power to cure. Many years ago I learned, after much suffering caused by too much hope, to accept the limitations of my ability, my gift, call it what you like. I learned, with great bitterness but with wisdom, that I couldn’t heal the world or be greater, more powerful, than I was or am.’ She reached over and brushed back Peleiupu’s hair, then added, ‘Your gift is much greater than mine but it also has limitations. You continue to hope. You believe you can heal the world. For your sake — and the sake of anyone you love or will love — learn quickly your limitations, then hope within them. Do you understand?’

‘Yes,’ murmured Peleiupu, but she was convinced she could save Barker.

‘You’re going to try, eh?’ Filivai laughed. ‘Go now. God may help you win!’

For nearly a month Peleiupu struggled with the science and medical books in their library. She realised, not long after she started, that she didn’t have the basic scientific knowledge to understand the books, but she persevered, using dictionaries and encyclopaedias to decipher unfamiliar terms and formulae. The less she understood the more tenacious she became. Even when she was doing other chores, her mind battled with the maze of terminology. She could recall, word by word, sentence by sentence, formula by formula, whole areas of what she had read but she understood little of it. She decided she needed a teacher. When she told her father she was trying to teach their students some science and needed someone to explain the books to her, he suggested Barker. All her attempts to save Barker seemed always to return to him.

Next morning, with an armful of books, she accompanied Mautu to Barker’s home.

‘Now, what is it you want to know?’ Barker asked. ‘I hope you don’t expect me to read all those books!’

Peleiupu shook her head and said, ‘I need to know about diseases, so I can teach our students better hygiene and health.’

‘All right, fire ahead. I probably won’t be able to answer most of them.’

‘What causes human illness?’ she began.

‘Many things. But germs cause most of them.’

‘And germs?’

He explained in detail what they were and how they could be destroyed. She knew this already but she wanted him to lead her, step by step, from what she knew into the jungle she needed to see, tree by tree, vine by vine, and far away from any awareness of why she wanted that information.

She got him, later, to discuss epidemic diseases, such as measles, smallpox, influenza and mumps, which, Barker pointed out, the papalagi had introduced into the Pacific and which were killing hundreds of islanders who were not immune to them. She asked him about immunity, and he explained.

‘Most medicines merely help strengthen the body’s natural defences,’ he said.

‘But why are there diseases we can’t cure?’ she couldn’t help herself.

‘Because we haven’t discovered what causes them. Or what those diseases are …’

‘I need help,’ Mautu called to him. Mautu was working on the drawings.

‘Coming,’ Barker replied. ‘Let’s continue later,’ he told Peleiupu. He stood up. ‘By the way, young lady, not all diseases have physical causes. And I’m not referring to aitu. Sometimes your spirit, your soul is ill. This shows itself in the body. And your books won’t tell you much about those illnesses.’

While she waited for him to return she skimmed through the books, and sometimes observed the craftsmen working on the alia in the alia shelter. Arona and Tavita were among them. Tavita smiled at her every time she looked over.

An hour or so later, when she knew Barker was too absorbed in the alia, she headed home. As she went past the shelter Tavita waved to her. She smiled back.

Their meals were now tuned to Mautu’s excited narratives about the alia: its history, the various types and their uses. He concentrated on describing how fleets of alia were used in warfare and how certain warrior matai in the past had conquered Samoa by using swifter alia fleets and better naval tactics than their enemies. He went on to describe many of the great British naval victories he had read about. From there he descended into the mythology of the Odyssey and, later, Sinbad’s adventures. Whenever he taught his classes, which was rarely now since he spent most of his day building the alia, he took his students adventuring with Christopher Columbus, Captain Cook, Abel Tasman, Vasco da Gama, and their heroic Polynesian ancestors who, using mighty alia, had discovered and settled the Pacific Islands scattered over millions of square miles of ocean.

Into the pulpit on Sundays he took these tales, this mythology, and wove them, sometimes for two hours, around the hearts of his spellbound congregation. He even transformed Noah’s Ark into an epic tale of exploration, combating evil and saving humankind.

At home, after Sunday to’ona’i, he insisted that his children read him books about ships. Peleiupu was conveniently absent whenever he was choosing a reader, and the burden fell mainly on Ruta or Naomi.

One Sunday, while Naomi was struggling to read to him a manual about British naval ships, and doing a tortuous job of it, he called, ‘Pele, you come and read to me.’

So for what seemed to Peleiupu like an eternity she read to him, in naval fashion, about the various British warships. She almost slammed the book shut when she finished one chapter, indicating she didn’t want to read any more. ‘Mautu, can someone have our Disease and not know he has it?’ She knew that whenever she showed she was annoyed with him, he became defensively obliging. She didn’t exploit this often, though.

‘He may not know at first, but he’ll soon know when it starts erupting from his body.’

‘Is it true all the victims get the Disease because they wish to die?’

‘Who told you that?’

‘I heard it somewhere. I also heard that if you can make the person realise that’s why he’s got the Disease, and make him want to live, the Disease will go away.’

‘That’s not true.’

‘If it is true, though, then there is a cure for our Disease.’ She watched him. He pondered, his eyes shut. ‘Think of all the victims you knew,’ she encouraged him. He sat up and, pushing his sleeping sheet down to his waist, gazed out into the village burning with sun.

‘It’s not true!’ Lalaga shattered the limits Peleiupu had trapped her father in. ‘It’s just superstitious talk. I knew many of the victims — they certainly didn’t want to die.’

‘But Pele may have a point,’ Mautu interjected. ‘A point I’ve never considered before.’

‘Barker told me that some diseases do not have natural causes,’ Peleiupu encouraged him.

‘Are you talking about ma’i aitu?’ Lalaga cautioned her. Peleiupu glanced at her father. ‘There are no such diseases!’

‘Pele is not referring to ma’i aitu, which I don’t believe in. I too have read in scientific books of maladies caused by not having the will to continue living,’ Mautu countered Lalaga.

‘God punishes sinners by sometimes inflicting illnesses on them,’ Lalaga reminded him.

‘God works through love, not hate,’ he said.

‘But he punishes also!’

‘Then you believe our Disease is God-inflicted?’ he pursued. Peleiupu avoided looking at her mother.

‘Perhaps it is,’ Lalaga replied.

‘You’ve seen the terrible way it destroys people? You still believe it is sent by God?’

‘Perhaps …’ Peleiupu tried to rescue Lalaga.

‘I want your mother to answer.’ Though he said it quietly, it was like a blade.

‘Why are you angry?’ Lalaga countered.

‘Answer my question.’

Gazing at the floor, Lalaga admitted, ‘Our God is not a cruel god.’

Peleiupu wanted to get out of the way so she got up.

‘Why did you bring up our Disease?’ Mautu demanded.

Peleiupu shrugged her shoulders and started walking away.

‘Sit down. Your father wants an answer to his question!’ Lalaga insisted.

Peleiupu sat down again. ‘As you know, Barker’s been helping me understand those medical books so I can teach better hygiene to our students.’

‘What’s that got to do with our Disease?’ Lalaga continued her attack.

‘You know what she’s like,’ Mautu said. ‘She’s curious about everything, and she has to teach our children better health.’ Peleiupu didn’t look at Lalaga.

‘Go and sleep. It’s nearly time for church,’ Lalaga ordered her. ‘I’m going to sleep too.’ And, before Mautu could say anything else, Lalaga turned onto her side and pulled up her sleeping sheet.

 

When Peleiupu heard that Barker was taking Arona to Apia to buy materials they needed for the alia, she instructed Arona to see two of the missionary doctors Mautu knew, and give them a list of questions she had drawn up about the Disease.

They were away for just over a week. In that time Peleiupu distracted herself by helping Mautu draw the last designs for the alia, and at night by studying the medical books. Whenever she hunted for Barker’s reasons for not wanting to live, Stenson entered her thoughts. Stenson had searched for a place to die, and had found Samoa. Perhaps Barker had chosen Satoa, and by belonging to Satoa now qualified for their Disease. But as long as Arona was in Apia consulting those doctors, her hope was boundless.

‘The doctor I saw couldn’t offer any cures: he has to examine Barker,’ Arona informed her. ‘From your list and your descriptions of the Disease he said it may be a form of leprosy. But he couldn’t be sure.’

She turned away from him. ‘I’ll get Mautu and Lalaga and Poto to persuade him to live.’

That night she asked Mautu if their aiga should help feed the craftsmen, and in the morning Mautu told Lalaga to provide food for them every Friday. In turn, Lalaga asked Peleiupu to organise it. When the other aiga heard their pastor was feeding the craftsmen, they too took a day each, and also sent their skilled craftsmen to help. By Saturday, fifty men were helping Barker and Mautu, and all the old men were coming to watch, offer advice, and plait sinnet for the alia. Whenever the boys were free of their family chores, they came to learn and help too. At first the skilled alia and fautasi builders were sceptical of Barker’s innovations and designs, but, as he deciphered the drawings for them and showed them how to fashion the various parts, they came to respect him.

During Sunday to’ona’i Mautu and the matai talked enthusiastically of their alia. Had he and Barker decided on a name for it yet? someone asked Mautu. When he told them no, they made various suggestions. Peleiupu listened to their discussion, and was convinced the elders now accepted Barker as one of them. Some of them still referred to him as ‘our palagi’, but it was in jestful admiration. How were they going to react to his contracting their Disease? Would they see it as proof of his sinfulness? Or as a reward from God? She had to tell her parents, and they, in turn, would prepare Satoa for Barker’s illness. But she dreaded telling them — Mautu particularly.

‘Aren’t you feeling well?’ Lalaga asked her as they prepared for classes. Peleiupu shook her head. It was going to be a still day, muggy with heat. They started walking to the classrooms. ‘What’s the matter?’ Lalaga asked again.

Still looking away from Lalaga, Peleiupu said, and she had to say it all at once, ‘Barker is ill, he is ill with our Disease.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes. And Mautu doesn’t know yet,’ Peleiupu anticipated her. ‘Arona’s the only other person who knows: Barker told him.’

‘What are we going to do?’ Lalaga murmured, more to herself than to Peleiupu. ‘So that’s why you’ve been asking all those questions about the Disease?’ Peleiupu nodded. ‘We’ll ask our Heavenly Father to save him, that’s the only way. We’ll all pray; we’ll get everyone in Satoa to pray for him: he’s one of us now.’

‘God didn’t save the others,’ Peleiupu reminded her.

‘God always makes exceptions. First we’ll tell Mautu.’ She paused. ‘Yes, we have to tell him.’ Peleiupu reached over and clasped Lalaga’s trembling hands. ‘Our aiga, all of us, will help him. Should we tell your father?’

Peleiupu nodded.

 

The night was cool and a slow inquisitive wind was exploring the village. Mautu was reading beside the lamp while Lalaga and Peleiupu were playing cards. Everyone else was asleep.

‘How is the work on the alia coming along?’ Lalaga asked.

‘Very well,’ he replied.

Peleiupu watched Lalaga’s fingers picking bits off the ragged corner of the mat she was sitting on. ‘We have something important to tell you,’ she heard her mother saying.

‘Well, tell me quickly, I’m falling asleep waiting!’ he joked.

Lalaga looked across at Peleiupu, who nodded. ‘Barker …’ Lalaga began.

‘Yes?’ Mautu encouraged her.

‘Barker-has-our-Disease!’ Lalaga blurted out. Lalaga looked to Peleiupu for help again, but Peleiupu was looking away from her.

‘Say it slowly,’ Mautu said.

‘Barker has our Disease,’ she said, gazing up into his face.

‘He looks perfectly healthy to me,’ he said. They continued to look at him. ‘You must be wrong.’ They maintained their silent gaze. ‘How do you know?’ He looked from Lalaga to Peleiupu. ‘It can’t be true!’

‘It is true,’ Peleiupu said.

Mautu shook his head slowly. Then, as they watched him, his body seemed to be filling, starting from his feet, with a dark vapour. As the vapour rose higher, he started stretching his body upwards as if he didn’t want the vapour to reach his throat. Before they could stop him, his protesting head had pulled his body up to a standing position, and was dragging it backwards out of the fale into the night, on running feet. Away.

Peleiupu woke when Mautu’s footsteps crackled across the pebbles of the paepae. It was dawn; a faint glow was emanating from everything outside. She sat up and, with Lalaga, watched him get a dry ie lavalava out of the trunk. Stripping off the dew-wet one he wore, he put the dry one on. He sat down, a few paces away, with his back to them, and gazed out through the dark palms at the sea, at the horizon that was now streaked with the dawn light. They waited. They could hear the cries of roosters and pigs. The breeze was huddled in their fale, listening.

‘I have decided,’ Mautu spoke out at the dawn and the waking world, ‘that what I’m going to say will be the last word I will say about this … this matter. Who else knows?’

‘Arona, only Arona,’ replied Lalaga.

‘You, Pele and Arona will not tell anyone else. We will all continue to live as if he were well. Only if he chooses to tell us will we then work out another way of dealing with it …’

‘But shouldn’t we try to help him?’ Lalaga asked.

‘No! It is clear he has decided to live — yes, live — through and with the Disease, alone. We must respect that. We must not even ask God to save him.’

‘You will let him die?’ Peleiupu was surprised at how calm she was.

‘Yes, if that is what he wants. You will respect my decision. Tell Arona. All we will pray for is that he admits to us that he has our Disease.’

‘He is your friend,’ Lalaga tried again.

‘Yes, he is my dearest friend. I don’t want him to die. But I respect him too well to interfere with his decision.’ She tried to speak again but he raised his hand. ‘Don’t you realise? He may be welcoming the Disease as proof that he belongs to us, to Satoa, to this little bit of earth. Don’t you see?’

‘But why did he tell Arona?’ Peleiupu asked.

‘In a moment of fear. The thought of being attacked by our Disease can frighten anyone, even someone as brave as Barker.’

 ‘And when it appears on his body and people see it?’ Lalaga asked.

‘They must continue not to see it,’ he said. ‘Only if he admits it to us will we then see it!’ The wind had uncurled and was weaving lazily around the figures sleeping in the fale. The dawn light was now burning fiercely on Mautu’s face and shoulders. ‘We will build the alia,’ he added. Peleiupu sprang up. ‘You will obey me.’ Mautu looked back at her for the first time that morning. ‘It is not easy for me either!’ he pleaded with her.

Quickly, Peleiupu walked out of the fale. ‘Pele!’ Lalaga tried to stop her.

‘Leave her,’ Mautu said. They watched the tangled mass of banana trees behind the fale, swallowing up their daughter.

‘Next year she’ll be going to Vaiuta School,’ Lalaga said. ‘The papalagi missionaries will teach her discipline.’

Everything was armoured with dew, and the rising sun was caught in the droplets of water. As far as Peleiupu could see, the vegetation was aglitter. She didn’t notice her blouse and sleeping sheet getting soaked as she waded through the undergrowth. The cold air licked at her wetness.

Her tree. She gazed up at it, at the fluttering body of leaves and branches humming in the breeze, opening their arms to her. She hadn’t visited it for two years. It looked smaller but harder to climb. She gripped the lowest branch and tried to swing up. She was bigger, heavier, and now too grown-up to be climbing trees. She tried again and got up to stand on the branch. Hitching up her wet sleeping sheet, she started climbing.

She was wet through when she reached the platform. Water was even streaming out of her hair. She squatted, peeled off her blouse, squeezed most of the water out of it, then spread it out on the platform. After squeezing her sleeping sheet, she dried herself with it, then squeezed it again and spread it out to dry.

She wrapped her arms around her torso and sat back against the trunk, her skin already goose-pimpled with the cold. She shut her eyes.

As the wetness dried on her, the cold of it fingered through her body. She concentrated on welcoming the cold, and the discomfort of it distracted her from Barker and the world, which was threatening to disintegrate.

Soon she was floating in the heady aromatic odour of damp moss and the slow rocking of her tree. She opened to the current and became part of it.

 

It was Friday morning and they were cooking food for the craftsmen. The smoke of the umu was surging up into the dome of the kitchen fale. Caught there, it started finding holes in the thatching and escaping through them like white eels.

Arona and the boys who’d helped him light the umu were at the valusaga scraping the skins off the taro, while Peleiupu was supervising the girls in the shade of a breadfruit tree beside the kitchen fale. ‘Peel the bananas,’ Peleiupu instructed Ruta and Naomi, who’d just plucked and gutted the chickens. Peleiupu continued wrapping the small reef fish in breadfruit leaves.

‘You do it!’ Ruta objected.

‘Why don’t you stop ordering us around?’ demanded Naomi.

Peleiupu couldn’t believe it: they’d never challenged her before. ‘Watch out, eh, or some little girls’ll get slapped!’ she warned them, in the style of their mother.

‘Go ahead!’ Ruta challenged, standing up. The others were now watching.

‘Hey!’ Arona called. ‘You just do what Pele tells you!’

Peleiupu picked up the fofo’e and started peeling the green bananas. The others resumed their work.

Ruta stamped her foot and, squatting, muttered, ‘He always sides with you!’ She grabbed a banana and started peeling it.

‘So do Mautu and Lalaga!’ Naomi said.

‘The only thing you do well is complain!’ Peleiupu said, but she was regretting Arona’s interference — she would’ve regained control without his help.

For the rest of the morning, while they cooked the food, Peleiupu observed her sisters and concluded that Mautu and Barker, by pulling her into their adult and male world, against usual practice, had taken her away from her sisters. Her closest friends were adults — and elderly adults at that. When she noticed the boys vying — but trying to disguise it — for Ruta’s and Naomi’s attention, she envied her sisters’ beauty. She was lauded as the exemplary model of how a daughter should be, but no boy was interested in her the way they were captivated by her sisters.

When the umu was cooked, they took the baskets and pots of food to Barker’s fale, entered through the back and started serving the food onto the foodmats. Poto and the women of her aiga helped. ‘Remember to thank your mother for all this food,’ Poto whispered to her.

After Mautu said grace, the craftsmen ate hungrily, with the loquacious Barker praising the quality of the cooking. When the flies became annoyingly numerous the girls got fans and, sitting down in front of each elder, fanned the flies away.

‘How’s your English?’ Barker asked Ruta.

‘Good, thank you,’ Ruta replied in English.

‘Why do you want our children to learn your barbaric language?’ one of the old men joked.

‘So I’ll have people to talk to!’ laughed Barker.

‘But you speak our language well!’ someone remarked.

‘Only just well!’ Mautu laughed.

As their lighthearted banter continued, Peleiupu noticed nothing unusual in Barker’s appearance. There was nothing unusual in Mautu’s behaviour either.

After they had eaten and washed their hands and mouths, the craftsmen lay down and rested. The young people cleared away the food and served Poto and the other women in the back fale.

Soon Barker was snoring.

‘Our palagi can really snore!’ someone said. The others laughed.

‘Just like a real Samoan!’ someone else quipped.

Peleiupu and the other girls picked up the baskets of food and headed for home. They reached the alia shelter, put down their loads and went in and inspected the craft. Laid out on large logs the hulls were higher than their heads and looked like white sharks that had turned into white stone.

‘Big, eh?’ sighed Naomi.

‘It’ll be able to sail anywhere,’ said Ruta.

‘Even to Barker’s home in England?’ someone asked.

‘Yes, even to England,’ Peleiupu replied. The wooden hulls, as she ran her fingers over them, felt like oiled paepae stone, like an imagery of light caught and crushed into unbreakable rock and then oiled to preserve it.

She realised, as she walked out of the shelter, that her feet were crunching over a thick layer of wood shavings, chips and sawdust. She glanced down: the floor was a white sea being ruffled by a strong wind. She looked back at the alia propped up by an intricate network of scaffolding. It appeared to be rocking in the white sea of wood waste. Rocking, moving almost imperceptibly.

In her dreams that night the mastless alia glowed bone-white as it rose, dipped and slid through an icy sea towards a lava-black castle whose battlements and towers were choked with mist. (She knew it was England without being told.) On the central tower stood a man dressed in glistening white robes that shimmered silkily like diaphanous membranes. The man beckoned to the alia with his long sinewy arm. Then Peleiupu was suddenly gazing into Stenson’s face: into those deep blue eyes. Stenson was trying to tell her something but no sound was coming out of his mouth. She moved closer to him. All around, the air hummed with the beating of wings, and she was struggling against the singing emptiness, which was pulling her down towards the alia and the swirling sea. Nothing to hold on to! Nothing! She was choking, no air to save her. Barker! she heard herself calling.

It took another two months to complete the alia, which, during the elders’ to’ona’i one Sunday at Mautu’s, was named, at elder Sao’s suggestion, Le Sa-o-le-Sauali’i-Pa’epa’e, the Ship of the White Phantom. Within a week every Satoan was referring to it affectionately by that name, as they prepared for its launching.

Because Mautu and Arona were busy with the alia, and Lalaga had to organise their contribution of fine mats, money and food to the launching, Peleiupu had to run the school. Ruta and Naomi helped her, and sensed that Peleiupu was deeply worried about something to do with the alia, Arona, their father and perhaps Barker: Peleiupu kept reading books about ships and sailing and exploration and tropical diseases. In her lucid lessons, she conveyed the information to her students and, for puzzling reasons, related it to the alia’s construction. Peleiupu even described, to them, one night before they went to sleep, her frightening dream of the alia sailing to England, to Stenson and his dark castle, like a death canoe, and asked them to interpret those omens. They told her dreams were just dreams, not omens or prophecies, but Peleiupu insisted that in pre-papalagi times dreams were believed to be part of what was real — the future — and that the atua spoke to humans through their dreams. During the dreaming, she said, the dreamer sometimes left her body and travelled into other people’s dreaming. When Ruta asked her if she believed that, Peleiupu half shook her head and said, ‘Christians shouldn’t believe that.’ Then she considered further and added, ‘Strange that our aiga were once the taulaaitu of the Atua Fatutapu; now we’re priests for the Christian atua. And in our ancient religion, dreams were a vital script to guide us in our living …’

‘Who told you that?’ Naomi asked.

‘Mautu,’ she replied.

‘It’s bad to learn more about our Atua Fatutapu, but Mautu should tell us more about it,’ Naomi sighed.

‘It was in the Days of Darkness,’ Ruta cautioned, but she too was interested in learning more.

 

Peleiupu pushed up the side of the mosquito net and sat up. It was not yet time to wake the others. She started combing her hair, untangling the knots. The mango trees behind the kitchen fale drew her attention, up to the highest one. A shadow? No, a dried branch, broken and hanging down. She continued combing; the comb snagged in a knot and she had to undo the comb carefully. The mango trees again. The highest one. No — not a broken branch, just a shadow. She hummed as the comb swept through her long hair and she remembered that the alia, now floating behind Barker’s home, was to be launched the next day. The alia sang as it sailed swiftly in her imagination when she recalled Barker’s confession that he’d been wrong in thinking he’d contracted the Disease. No sign of it, he’d admitted, two days before. Her heart was the sail of the alia, fully stretched with the wind’s song of freedom. Perhaps Barker would teach her how to sail too, she thought. But girls couldn’t be sailors.

The shadow again, in the mango tree. It was darker now, in the shape of a sack bloated with fruit, dangling from a short rope. Strange that there were no other shadows in the trees. Well, none as distinct.

Then it gripped her: her breath was a hand around her throat and pulling her up to her unsteady feet. She stepped out of the fale onto the paepae. Sucked in air. Her gullet unclogged but somehow a small ball, which felt like a green mango, remained. She swallowed again. The ball expanded and started pulling her across the paepae, as if it were attached to a line someone was pulling. Towards the mango trees. Cold dew on the grass under her feet. Breathe!

The shadow, the presence, wasn’t in the mango trees. The ball tugged, pulled, and she moved with it. The shadow was now in the breadfruit trees down by the beach. The ball hurried her. It was not a sack — just mere outline cut out of black paper or black vapour, taunting her, pulling on the invisible line attached to the ball in her throat.

Bare earth under the breadfruit. She stumbled and her right knee stumped into the ground, the pain jabbing up into her thigh. No time to rub the hurt away or examine the cut on her knee — the line was pulling her head up. No shadow up there. It had retreated towards the sea, into the kapok tree, chuckling, pulling on the line. Fish caught. Her, the fish. The air whimpered in her head; her throat was being dragged out of her, so she moved with the line towards the kapok. Stumbled again. No time to clean the bleeding on her knees. Up, the line pulled her head. Nothing in the kapok, just dawn light as sharp as a bushknife blade.

The shadow, the presence, the creature of vapour was scurrying along the shore from tree to tree, dragging her behind it, along the beach, the sky, the world reeling in her head and eyes.

No one in sight. No one to save her. The sharp coral, rocks and shells cutting into her feet. The ball unforgiving in its insistence for her to follow. Fish hooked.

She didn’t want to know. Forced her body to stop, dead still, hands clasped to her eyes, refusing to look at the shadow. She couldn’t breathe. Falling forward, the sand rushing up to hit her. Rolling over. Gagging, and away again into the shallow water. The line was pulling her through the shallows, towards the shadow sitting in the green coolness, still taunting her — a mocking creature, the shape, feel, sound, the movement of a creature she’d always feared but had never put a name or identity to. Fear itself? Satan? The Devil? Evil? She looked up into the belly of the air, the blind morning.

‘God, forgive me!’ she cried. ‘Please, I don’t want to see!’ But God wasn’t there, and the water was deepening, sucking at her. She shut her eyes but the line tugged up her head again. In the water, under her unwilling eyes, was the clear reflection of the alia, as if it had always been waiting for her to discover it. She raised her gaze up to the ball of fire breaking over the horizon, and the morning air, tanged by sea, rushed down through her gullet and she was breathing freely again. She spat out the bile and pain and fear into the reflection of the alia. She looked up at the craft.

Abruptly she shoved her head back into the water, wanting to drown her eyes, her mind, which could never leave her alone. She wanted to be protected from the truth, to see only the pleasant surface of things, this tide’s skin but not what held it up, powered it, gave it shape, truth, intelligence.

But the water pushed up her face, expelled her, wanted her to see.

She shut her eyes again. Against the tears. Against the creature in the branchless tree above the alia, floating as the sun rose and illuminated all that was — is — as it must be, together in the wisdom of the unity in Peleiupu’s sight.

She heard the tide lapping against the hulls of the alia, as the earth rocked around, waiting for her to open her sight to another dimension of knowledge into which, she sensed, only grief could take her.

And she opened her eyes to the vision of the tree, the central mast of the alia, to the taut rope arm of the creature that was fastened to the top crosspiece, to the creature hanging down, heavy, still, no longer black vapour without name; shadow become flesh become man.

Barker.

The sun continued rising to the silence of Le Sa-o-le-Sauali’i-Pa’epa’e.

Rising.