The forever world is ended. The tangi is over. Father has been laid to earth in the graveyard near Rongopai. The world runs calm again.
It wasn’t Dad who needed forgiveness.
It was you.
You and Dad started to talk again.
Without letting you know, he came to Wellington and walked into the freight office. Introduced himself to Mr Ralston. Turned to you:
I thought if I told you I was arriving you would take off.
When you embraced your dad, you wouldn’t let him go.
At Wairoa, I mill with other passengers at the railway cafeteria. They shove forward to the counter for pies, soft drinks and cigarettes. Among them are the young apprentices who left their girlfriends behind. Lucky those girls can’t see their boyfriends now: they watch, eye up and talk to every pretty piece of fluff that walks by.
The stationmaster calls: All aboard the express to Wellington.
The train speeds across a countryside scattered with small farms. For a moment it stops at Raupunga. And then the hills rear up. The sky is a cleft disappearing between peaks as higher we go, along a ridge to clatter across the Mōhaka viaduct. Far below the bridge, a road winds down the side of the valley, to twist and turn its way upward from the other side of the river. The awa from this height is like a small stream trickling amid the dense bush. But the water is white with foam, deep with dark green, and the wind scatters the surface with a sudden shimmer of sun-stars.
Kia kaha, Tama, Uncle Pita says after I have paid my respects to my beloved father.
The whānau gather around me in the dark. They are faces I know well. Charlie Whatu, my father’s best friend. Nani Maata, sister of my grandfather. And her husband, Nani Piripi, who tries to make me smile:
Your father and me, he says. We had great yarns when he brought meat to us. Who have I got to talk to now?
Auntie Rose shows me her hands and laughs through her tears: So many potatoes to peel, auē! How can she turn so quickly from immense sorrow to laughter?
Hēnare Tipene embraces me quickly because his clothes are muddy from digging the hāngī.
Nani Kiri lifts her face up for me to kiss. She touches my tears and then her own and nods her head sadly. Your tears, my tears, she whispers. For him, your father.
With each of the whānau, I share a private memory and affection. Auntie Ani’s cupboards were always opened to me if I was hungry. Uncle Hēnare, one night when I was small, he let me sleep in his bed with him and Auntie Makareti because I was afraid of the dark. Nani Piripi whittled me a kaitaka, a spinning top to play with. My cousin Anarū taught me how to play the guitar. Remember? And Uncle Pita …
Come with me, Uncle says. He guides me to the kitchen. We have to talk business.
Waiting for me are Nani Miro, Nani Tama, Tamati Kota, Te Hinutohu, Auntie Mary and the other whānau who wish to take the jobs of organising the tangihanga off my shoulders. The first four rangatira are especially important: they are the pou tikanga, the Ringatū elders of the iwi and the guardians of the religious mātauranga, the rituals that will govern the next three days.
Nau mai, Tamati Kota begins. He is the oldest member of the tribe and was known as the priest of Riripeti, the matriarch. Why is it that I am still here and your father has gone? he asks. Auē, a wilful and stubborn heart still pumps the blood red rich through my veins.
And Nani Tama tells me, This is our job, it is our duty.
His demeanour is dignified and old-fashioned.
Nani Miro, however, wags a stern finger. Where have you been all our lives? If you don’t watch out, we’ll forget what you look like. And look at you! You’re too skinny. Are you sick or are you in love?
When I grin, Nani Miro is triumphant. See? she shouts to the women in the kitchen. I told you I could make him smile.
The other women come and sit with me: Auntie Ruth, Aunt Sarah, Haromi and some of the younger girls.
You haven’t made him laugh though, Maka tiko bum says. I could do the thing with my eyes. Or shall I wiggle my bum?
Oh, puh-lease, don’t do that, Auntie Rose answers. If you wiggle your bum a few screws might come loose and it will fall off.
Uncle Pita brings everyone to order. We are all here for you, Nephew, he says. There are some duties and expectations we will have of you, but we will go ahead and do our thing, okay? The paepae of elders is all set and ready to go with Nani Tama representing us. Your cuzzies, the cooks and those responsible for the kai have got the kitchen under control. There will be some costs for essentials like milk, sugar and bread that Auntie Mary wants to buy, but, otherwise, we’ll be sweet. The three marae of the valley are all set to receive visitors. When we need you, we’ll whistle.
Nani Tama thinks that over and whispers in my ear:
I’ll have to find my false teeth first.
The sky is wide and bright with the sun, the hills are like jagged fins thrusting proudly into the horizon. The train curves through the hills and, ahead, the sea is a strand of blue, sparkling with the sun. The rays fall brilliantly upon the land, ropes of the net cast across the sun by Māui. On the other side of the train, a cliff face rises. Once, not long ago, the sea rushed over this land the train traverses. The cliff face felt the sting of the sea’s spray. Then Rūaumoko awoke from the breast of Papatūānuku and split the earth with his awakening yawn. With his fiery hands, he pushed up the land and toppled the city that has been rebuilt there.
With a hiss of steam, the train halts at the platform in Napier. Passengers alight, passengers depart. People rush on the platform. Bags are unloaded, luggage loaded. Passengers board the train. In the background, the city is strong with life.
This is where the well-dressed woman from Gisborne alights. Her place in the carriage is taken by a young Māori girl. She winds down the window and whispers affectionately to her grandmother: E Mā, kaua koe e tangi e Mā.
E tangi ana ahau mō tāku mokopuna.
E Mā, ahakoa e haere tawhiti ana ahau, ko tōu manawa tōku manawa, mō ake, mō ake.
A bell on the platform rings. Passengers rush back to the train, shoving past the kuia.
Haere rā, Arihia. Haere, ka hoki mai anō.
Later in the evening I have a chance to speak with Mum and my three elder sisters.
There’s never going to be a good time to talk about this, I begin, but the boys will need to dig Dad’s grave soon. Uncle Pita says we have two options. We could put Dad on top of Teria …
I think your Auntie Rose has already reserved that space, Mum says.
Or we start a new line for the Mahana clan. This might be better, Mum, if you want to be buried with Dad.
Must we talk about you, too, Mum? Wiki weeps.
Mum kisses her and then nods at me: I want to be buried with your father when I die. And all you children, if you wish to, will you join us when it’s your time?
She takes a breath:
Start a new line, Son.
The express thunders through the city. Houses have been built where the sea once was. A road runs where there was previously no road. Farmland has been developed on the old sea bed. Some day, my life, too, will be rebuilt again.
Passengers look out the windows at the passing houses. The carriage is filled with their chatter and laughter. The houses form small clusters along the railway track. Then the clusters enlarge, thicken and expand around Hastings.
The train comes to another stop. The cycle of people departing and boarding the train begins again. A thousand destinies evolving like a wheel forever turning. Each destiny is separate and at different places on the wheel. Some rising; some falling. Mine is one of them.
The minutes pass, the clock shunts each destiny forward. More minutes gather on the faraway side of the hour.
Then away from Hastings the express rumbles. Past houses, parks, humanity blurring past. The passengers settle themselves for the long journey. The carriage hums with their quiet conversations. A chance meeting, perhaps. Introductions exchanged. A life enriched with a new friend. Laughter. Sadness. Life, too, is people on a train.
The young soldier has buddied up with the young apprentices. They smell a fall guy and ask if he wants to play poker. The carriage fills with their bantering. In the background are the strains of the girl as she strums idly on her guitar and sings quietly to herself. The train rocks and sways, as if to the rhythm of her song. The girl is recalling her own life with her nanny.
Her song also fills me with more memories, taunting and playful, of Waituhi. Some of the images are wistful and magical and as fleeting as the wind.
Me he manu rere au e,
Kua rere ki tō moenga,
Ki te awhi tō tinana,
Auē, auē, e te tau tahuri mai …
I remember a family gathering at the old homestead where my grandparents, Teria and Pera, lived. All my aunties, uncles, cousins and friends were there. The men started the hāngī. The children yelled and played games among the flax bushes. My mother laughed with the women as they prepared the kai. Nan had been brought onto the verandah into the sunlight. Perhaps she knew that this would be the last whāmere hui she would ever see. Although she was smiling, her eyes were also filled with such tenderness, as if she wanted what she saw to last her forever.
There was a Māori hockey tournament at Waituhi. The teams came from all over Poverty Bay, parading with self-conscious pride around the muddy field. Pennants fluttered in the wind. Nani Kiri hopped onto the field in her gumboots, her dress tucked into her pants, because the home team was short of players. Fierce games and humorous arguments. Roars of pleasure and displeasure from the sideline. Goals scored and recounted with pride afterward. Myself playing against my father, and his whispered words to me: You let your father get a goal, eh? He’s old. You be a good son! And the laughter when Dad did sneak past me and slam the ball into the net: Hey, Tama! Don’t let your old man beat you!
The close kinship of the shearing gang, that too creates fond images. Five o’clock starts, day after day through summer. The drone of handpieces. The bustle of women on the board. The cry of Sheepo! Hot dust. Somewhere, the clanking of the press. And listening to Kōpua, the widow Karaka’s son, bragging as he sheared: I was born to this game!
Then there were the kapa haka performances at Takitimu Hall. The thunderous applause and yells for a number well sung. The swishing and crackling of the piupiu. The quivering of hands moving in unison. The stamping feet of the men as they moved through the ranks, chanting the haka:
Ko Rūaumoko e ngunguru nei!
Hi au! Au! Auē hā!
I stood beside Dad, grinning at him: Come on, old man! Lift those feet! Not enough kaha!
A dance at Pātūtahi: Kōpua and I lounged near the door, eyeing the girls as they walked past. Which one do you want, Cuz? he asked. That one there, in the red dress, I answered. That hakurī thing, he laughed, trying to put me off because he wanted her. Anahera actually liked me better than him, and we went out for a while as boyfriend and girlfriend.
There was a party at Nani Tama’s home. Nani Miro had conveniently gone to a land meeting held by the Whakatōhea people of Ōhiwa. The beery songs echoed through the darkness. People going, people coming, people passing out. Nani Tama said to me: Come on, Nephew, have a glass, I won’t tell your father. Come on, it’ll make you a man! I arrived home to the farm after the party, drunk. And Mum was waiting for me: You just go and sleep with the dogs, tonight, Tama Mahana! I’m not having a drunk in this house. Afterwards, I was really sick. Good eh, Tama! Have some more of the pirau! Next day, Nani Tama said to me: Boy! How does your old man put up with your mother! She really gave it to me because I made you drunk last night!
Waituhi … It was the close kinship the whānau shared with one another so that we never lived apart from each other. Rīpeka used to moan that everybody knew each other’s business, even before they did themselves. It was big family with big heart, laughing and squabbling, then laughing again. It was helping each other with money or in the fields. It was growing up with uncles, aunties and cousins as one family.
It was keeping open house, too. If anybody didn’t have a home, you invited them in. Kōpua came to stay with us for a month because his mother had kicked him out of her house. I went to stay at Uncle Pita’s after a party one night, scared that Mum would smell the beer on me. The next day I sneaked home, but Mum was waiting for me as usual: Boy, you’re just like your father, don’t know where your home is.
I got a big wallop from her. She still had a big hand, and Dad shrugged his shoulders and said, That’s love, Tama. That’s love.
Waituhi, the place of the heart. When you went out getting kina and pāua at Makarori Beach, you stopped off at other houses to ask if anybody else wanted to come with you. When you returned home, you told everybody to come to your place and have a good kai. If somebody got married, you didn’t wait for an invitation, you just went to the wedding because you were a member of the family. And if there was a tangi, you stopped whatever you were doing, no matter if you were working in some flash factory or at some flash job, and you went home to help out. One of the family had died, and the tangi was the home calling.
Waituhi is family. The whānau is my home. The love and affection they hold for each other are the ridgepoles of my heart. The sharing and enjoying of each other are the rafters. And within those walls and roof, no matter that my heart is errant, it is so closely intertwined with theirs that we are inseparable one from the other.
The city recedes. The train travels through the greenstone country, taking me further away from the greenstone years of a boy with his father.
I look out the window. In the sky, a bird flies softly and calmly like a white feather drifting. Higher above it, another bird approaches, a sparrow hawk. The kārearea glides upon the streams of air. Its wings hardly move, and with outstretched pinions it follows the whim of the wind. Surveying the land through the slits of its eyes, the hawk sees a white feather flickering over green fields. The wings fold back. The hawk plummets down. A scattered turbulence. Then the hawk rises triumphant. Within its claws is a small white bird. I watch the hawk slowly ascending until it disappears like a dream.
The sun falls into the afternoon as the train pulls into Waipukurau. Across this land of Te Ika a Māui the express will roar, to Palmerston North and through other small towns of this country.
A long journey. But there is a longer journey ahead for me. A long road that I must travel alone.
I begin travelling the ara on the first morning of the tangihanga. It is around 4 am, everybody is sleeping, though a few whānau are still gossiping around the hāngī fire. The moon is up as I stir from my sleeping place on the porch of Rongopai and look at Dad.
I have a promise to keep to him: The lambing season … time waits for no man … and the cold snap, makariri … the ewes are on the northern incline … two are down a gully … you know what to do.
I wake my mother. I’m going to the farm, I tell her. I’ll walk up the horse track. Do you want me to bring back any extra blankets?
She looks puzzled, shakes her head and doesn’t ask any questions. I wish I could come with you, Son. A walk in the moonlight was something your father and I liked to do when you were all asleep.
I know, I answer, remembering their filigree laughter in the dark. I kiss her on the forehead and brush my lips across Hōne and Mārama’s sleeping faces.
Then off I go, across the paddocks. When I reach the track, it is a ribbon of moonlight ascending through the foothills. Thank God for the lull in the weather, the snow is disappearing from the ground. But the temperature is still bitter cold, the breath steaming from my nostrils.
By the time I reach the farm, the sun is tipping over the mountains. The sight of the farmhouse is enough to set me weeping.
On our first night here, in this house, I lay in bed watching the lamplight flickering through the room. There, on one wall, I would start measuring how tall I was growing. The pencil marks would still be visible in later years for me to see. On another wall, I would scrawl both sad and happy memories so that I’d always remember this beginning and this life. On a desk in the corner, I would pile my schoolbooks, and it would become a bigger pile over the years. In the wardrobe I would hang my clothes and see them changing from schoolboy shorts to a young man’s trousers. In this bed, my body would change through adolescence to manhood. In the same way, my sisters would grow from young girls into women who boys fought over. Rīpeka would marry at seventeen; Mere would follow a year later and forsake the chickens she used to bring in front of the kitchen range during winter when it was cold, for Koro her husband. Little Wiki would leave school early at fifteen to go nursing in Gisborne. And I would go to Rīpeka’s and Mere’s weddings, just knowing that everybody would ask: Ehara! Here’s your young sisters getting married and what’s wrong with you! You better watch out, your gears will go rotten.
Well … there were some things a young man did not disclose to his whānau.
All this would happen and much more. The ceiling would leak the first time it rained, and we would place pots, pans and even cups under each leak while Mum growled Dad for not fixing the roof earlier. Bees would build a hive in the loft and we’d be stung every summer. Storms would come and, after the tempests, the heart-breaking work of setting the land right again. Mustering sheep into the woolshed. Shearing during the summer. Hard days of sweat and the drone of the handpieces. Helping Dad as I grew older. Ploughing the land. Going down to the river to fill tanks with water for the fields during droughts. Mum weeping over dying plants. Quarrelling with my sisters and even Mum and Dad. Going to school each day, and then returning home to work late into the night, helping the farm grow.
Long years ahead, filled with aroha and momentary pain. Sickness would come to my mother and leave her in bed helpless. Dad would be thrown from his horse, and I would search through the rain for him, and see him trying to crawl back to the farmhouse, his left leg broken. Mere would run away from home for a while, and then a bus would come, and she would be back again.
But enough of memories. Keep going, I have a duty to do for Dad.
Even so, when Peg and Bruce, our dogs, start to bark at my approach, I am still a bit of an emotional wreck. They haven’t seen me for a while so they are a bit perplexed. I feed and water them and take them off their chains.
Next, I give Blue Mist some hay and saddle up. While the horse and the dogs are getting used to me, I go into the equipment shed, dress myself in Dad’s all-weather rain cape and hat, and pack a lambing kit into a saddlebag: iodine spray to ensure the newborn’s navel cord doesn’t become infected, wool coverings for the newly born to keep warm, sugar fluid for weak lambs, disinfectant, I think that’s everything.
If I keep going, I can hold myself together.
The dogs start jumping up on me and Blue Mist gives a snort of pleasure at the smell of Dad’s sweat. You think I’m him, don’t you! I say to him.
We head away from the farm and stockyards down the river track to the swing-bridge.
There, another memory socks me in the stomach.
Of a cold, windy morning when Dad and I were taking sheep back across the swing-bridge to the northern incline after shearing them. The bridge was swaying dangerously in the wind coming up the valley. That morning it had poured down and the rain, dripping from the wire frame, transformed the bridge into a shivering jewelled cobweb spun in the air. With every gust of wind, the bridge would yaw dangerously, the wires twanging with the strain. The raindrops scattered like diamonds.
No time to admire Nature’s beauty. The sheep were baulking at the sounds the bridge was making, crack, crack, crack, and I was already clambering my way over the backs of the flock to the front to haul the leaders across by hand.
It’s too dangerous, Dad said. We’ll ford them across the river.
It will be faster if we use the bridge.
Yes, he said. But you’re with me. When you’re a man and have the capability of getting yourself out of trouble, then you cross whatever bridge you want to. You’ll be old enough to make your own decisions, stupid or not, and, if you find yourself in a bad situation, you won’t be able to blame anybody else but yourself. But you’re still a boy and I am your father, and this is my watch.
I urge Blue Mist across the valley.
An hour later, I am riding the horse on the northern incline. The ground still shows signs of melting snow, but the sun, rising over the mountain peaks, will soon warm the earth. The paddock is filled with mothers and their young; Dad will have a good lamb count this year.
I make a quick circuit to see if any sheep need assistance and notice the birds are making a racket: Over here, this way.
But first, tie Peg and Bruce to a fence. They are barking too much, I should have left them back at the shearing shed.
There’s a mother on her side, kicking her feet. She has already given birth to two lambs, but she must have another inside her. I hop down from the horse, restrain the ewe with one hand and explore her body with the other.
Yes, I can feel the third, I say to the mother. Let’s get it out before it dies inside you and you die with it.
In I go, trying to mould my right hand around the trapped lamb. Haven’t done this for years.
Sorry, girl, I’m a bit rusty.
Some careful manipulation and easing of the lamb and out it slides, covering me with blood, shit and other fluids. What to do now? Clean the lamb’s pito and rid the ewe of its afterbirth and then take the triplets to the special shed Dad has constructed for new mothers. The ewe trots behind me, baa-ing for her children.
In the shed, check the lambs are feeding from mum and that she has taken to them.
Now: find those two mothers Dad said were in a gully.
Where are you ladies? I call.
Misery. They are not down in the gully but, rather, they have climbed up to the highest, most slippery spur.
Why do sheep always choose the worst place to drop their lambs?
One of the ewes has already given birth and is fine and dandy. It’s warm in the sun up here and she and her baby will find a way back to the flock in their own good time. The other errant ewe isn’t ready to drop her twins yet and eyes me suspiciously: Who are you?
Sorry, girl, I tell her. Dad’s not coming.
That’s when I really lose it, blabbing like an idiot. And then my heart stops as, through my tears, I see a figure approaching on a horse. Is that you Dad? I call.
It’s not him, it’s Hata on the pinto. And he is cross with me:
What are you doing here! Me and Koro have got Dad’s lambing all sorted out between us, me today, him tomorrow, for as long as it takes.
My brother-in-law is alarmed at my distress: Hata, what am I going to do with my life? With Mum? With the farm?
Get through your Dad’s tangi first, he scolds me.
He won’t give my self-pity an inch.
Figure out the rest later.