17

IT WAS THE YEAR of the Water Dragon. Lydia and Whata, Dennis and Corinne had been married for two years, and Desiree and Tony married a year before. The ceremony partly celebrated their young love, but for the Kokopu Waters residents it was a final act of desperate hope. And still nobody got pregnant.

Sean gave up. There was no hope. They were doomed. That winter he slipped into a black depression. By the time spring arrived he was just going through the motions — feed the animals, dig the garden, chop the wood. Sometimes he even forgot to eat. Why bother?

One day he was in the orchard, inspecting the trees, mechanical and almost unseeing, when he looked at The Tree. To hell with it, he was thinking. What was the bloody point anyway? Why had he bothered? He was just about to kick the trunk when he noticed little green bumps between the unfurling leaves. Buds? They had to be. His eyes opened wide and he stepped back. Yeah, boss. Buds for sure.

Sean told Kevin and Hoheria, nobody else. Who else would understand? Who wouldn’t dismiss him as barking mad? As it was, enough people gave him funny looks. Even Alex was in two minds. He’d caught her sidelong glances that made clear her opinion he was a couple of oat flakes short of a full bowl of porridge. He was even unsure himself. Perhaps the Maeroero had succeeded. Maybe he had lost the plot. But the buds gave him new hope. What did they mean?

The first thing they meant was blossom; pink, white and the most beautiful flowers Sean had ever seen. Alex burst into tears at the sight of the first delicate petals.

‘They’re lovely,’ she said. ‘What do they mean?’ Sean just shrugged.

‘No big deal, probably.’ But it was, to him, Hoheria and Kevin anyway. They’d helped him sprout and grow Uruao’s apple seed. The three of them kept telling each other they didn’t want to get people’s hopes up for nothing, but when the petals wilted and dropped and tiny green apples appeared they could hardly contain themselves.

‘I’m late,’ Lydia said to Alex one day. ‘You don’t think ...’ Alex took a long look at her girl.

‘Something’s going on,’ she said. ‘We’ll get Frangipani to check you out.’

Frangipani felt Lydia’s pulses and examined her irises. Her voice was loaded with suppressed emotion when she spoke.

‘I want to see Corinne and Desiree too.’

‘I am, aren’t I?’ said Lydia.

‘You might be. I want to see the others first.’

‘Wait a few weeks before you tell anyone,’ advised Alex. ‘And no horses or sex just in case.’

‘What about my husband?’ said Lydia.

‘What about him?’ said Frangipani, who had long held to Germaine Greer’s last-century dictum that the ideal man was a metre high and lived quietly under the stairs.

‘Never mind. That’s my problem.’

The three young women managed to keep the news to themselves for a month but eventually Desiree’s husband, Tony, guessed the reason for his prolonged loss of privs.

‘You’re pregnant, aren’t you!’ he said one night when it was suggested that yet again he sleep on the couch. Desiree lowered her eyes. She could take the weight of the deception no longer. Bugger the secrets. This was their business.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I am!’

People were delirious with excitement. They danced and partied. They held ceremonies thanking everyone from God, to the Tree Spirits, to an endless list of multicultural deities. They organised communal feasts. They listened to a thousand variations of ‘I knew it all along’. Cats appeared wearing ribbons. Eggs were painted and distributed. There was a frenzy of knitting, sewing and carving. Pita and Jacqui even dyed their goat blue and gold, why Sean wasn’t sure. The three couples were hardly able to move unaccompanied. Their houses were repaired and refurbished for them and their gardens dug and planted. Their well-being was constantly scrutinised and inquired after. The merits and meanings of names were discussed endlessly.

The apples were the size of golf balls now. They were starting to change colour, glossy green with paler streaks. Nobody noticed and Sean couldn’t see any point now in saying anything.

At first the community kept all news of the pregnancies to itself, but before long an announcement was made at the markets where they discovered that two of the young Kahuika women were also pregnant. The small number of people who knew had kept quiet for similar reasons to the Kokopu Waters folk, but like them they had great difficulty containing themselves. When word of the pregnancies got out the festivities spread and overlapped. Frangipani set up a two-day-a-week clinic at the markets and within a fortnight she’d diagnosed two more pregnancies. Dr Kamisese Prakesh started travelling around the district on horseback, as far as the Taieri Plains and almost up into Central Otago.

‘I’ve got a big surprise for you,’ Beatriz said one day when Kamisese arrived home after three weeks away.

‘No thanks, dear,’ he said. ‘I’m not really very hungry.’ He’d diagnosed four more pregnancies and had helped the happy communities celebrate.

‘It’s not that sort of surprise,’ said Beatriz. ‘Unless you have the same expression in this country.’ Kamisese caught the excitement in her voice.

‘And what expression would that be?’

‘I’ve got a bun in the oven,’ she said. She helped him to the floor when he fainted.

In the middle of all the excitement Fairgo arrived, looking like he’d been let out for the day.

‘Do you know that bloke?’ said Alex. ‘He looks like he’s been at the sheep dip.’

‘You’d look like that too, if you’d seen what he’s seen,’ Sean said. Alex was puzzled.

‘Never mind. He saved my life once.’

‘Uruao doesn’t understand how we did it,’ Fairgo told Sean, who heard a clear echo of rocks on a tin roof. ‘All the Maeroero are grumpy as hell. They thought you’d be loose as a goose by now, good for nothing.’ He peered at Sean. ‘You’re okay, aren’t you?’

Sean laughed. ‘You tell me, mate,’ he said. ‘How did you get away anyway?’

‘I kept a straight face for ten years. It’s easy in those mountains. Then I thought, to hell with it, and I started laughing.’

‘Do you know what happened?’

‘I had more flying eel dreams,’ Fairgo said. ‘I’m glad our trick worked, even if we did get it arse-about-face. The Maeroero finally couldn’t stand the sight of me. They told me to bugger off.’ He laughed and thumped the table. ‘I found out about the pregnancies from them. Uruao had a real hissy fit. He demolished my hut.’

Fairgo liked working with wood and made bassinets for all the expectant families. As fast as he worked more women became pregnant.

‘I’m hapu too,’ Hoheria told Sean one day.

‘We just have to wait,’ she’d been saying to Sean ever since she and Kevin helped plant The Tree. ‘Things’ll happen when they’re ready.’

‘See,’ she said. ‘We must be ready.’

Kirsty joined the gravid ranks, refusing to name the father. Genetically he seemed to be up to scratch, she said, but he had a few personality problems that she didn’t care to live with. And anyway what was wrong with getting pregnant and then finding a partner? There weren’t any hard and fast rules on the matter as far as she knew, and speculation on the father’s identity would only cause offence.

One day, at the height of summer, Sean and Tao were returning home from the inlet foreshore. They’d been checking on the ducks and Sean had been picking over the driftwood left at high tide, looking for good pieces to carve. A movement on the hill, away in the distance where he’d gained his first view of Kokopu Waters, caught his eye. Two tiny figures on horseback had come through the cutting, gazing down as he, Alex and Lydia had, all those years before. Who were they? The sight made his hair stand on end and he legged it home, stoked up the stove, and put the water on to boil. A cup of tea. The familiar chore calmed his nerves.

With the water heating, he stood waiting, leaning against an oak tree in full leaf. Before long two people rounded the corner at the end of the street and rode towards him. Tall, on a large brown standard-bred like Bojay, was a Maori man in his late twenties, dressed all in black — a silver-disc band on his flat-brimmed, black hat and a black wool poncho that left his arms free like an old western movie gunfighter. Beside him was a Pakeha woman, a few years younger, with long dark hair hanging loose under a peaked cap advertising an Old Time beer.

Both were travel-stained and weather-worn. They sat on their horses with the ease earned after many hours in the saddle. The man spoke first.

‘The eyepatch suits you.’ He was clearly enjoying some private joke, grinning all over his face. The woman burst out laughing.

‘Cally!’ Sean shouted. ‘Hemi!’

Hemi swung off his horse and helped Cally dismount. They all fell in each other’s arms laughing and weeping.

‘I said we’d come.’ Cally rested her hand on his arm. ‘I wasn’t kidding.’

Sean looked at them. His friends. People from his past, people he loved. He was just about to offer food and drink and his open home when Cally spoke again.

‘I’m pregnant,’ she said. Hemi looked protective. Sean’s jaw dropped.

She was too. Between three and four months, Frangipani said, suggesting that she keep off horses for a while.

‘You’re here to stay, girl,’ she said. ‘Hope you like the place.’

Maybe she did, maybe she didn’t. She and Hemi could have been anywhere. Every evening was filled with stories. They couldn’t believe Kevin’s adventures and, even though he’d shared many of them, hearing them retold shocked even Sean. He and Kevin caught up on all the news from Ngahere, only a year out of date. Hemi and Cally took them over every inch of their journey. Sean had never been so interested in anything and Hemi turned out to be a gifted storyteller, leaping, dancing and gesticulating, as he acted out incidents from their travels.

Edgar had died eight years before, Hemi told Sean, remembering his affection for the old man. Sean could still see Edgar sitting in his deckchair waiting for the dogs. Edgar had taken advantage of the occasion of his death for a final practical joke.

As people gathered round his bed, solemn and tearful, he’d feebly lifted a hand for silence.

‘I suppose you’re wondering why I’ve gathered you all here,’ he said, and promptly expired.

‘I didn’t think it was all that funny,’ Cally said, when Sean’s outburst of raucous laughter had finally petered out and he’d dried the worst of the tears. She turned to Kevin who wasn’t laughing either, and tapped her temple with a forefinger.

‘Things must have got to him,’ she said.

The Kaiwaka folk had arrived in the same year, sailing a yacht on the short trip across Bream Bay from Mangawhai Heads to Whangarei Harbour. Sean wished he could have been there. Merenia said gidday to Jim and inside a week they were an item — daily practising the arts of crockery-hurling, invective and riding off in a huff for solitary sojourns deep in the bush.

‘They really love each other,’ said Cally. ‘Nothing could separate them.’

Marie and Doug had watched over Cally and Hemi as they’d grown. Sean could see they’d done a job they must have been proud of. It would have been very hard for both of them, he was sure, waving goodbye to the two young ones, knowing they’d never get a letter or a phone call and they’d probably never see either of them again. They wouldn’t even learn about Cally’s pregnancy, though when Marie had asked one day Cally had apparently smiled mysteriously saying that anything was possible.

‘Did you know what was going to happen?’ Sean asked.

‘Tinirau told me. It must have happened about Wellington.’

Hemi laughed at almost everything, but he didn’t laugh at that and he didn’t laugh when Sean asked him about Brian. He just looked at Cally and Sean had his answer.

‘It was the flu,’ Cally said. ‘It killed Cathy. Brian died a year later. He couldn’t sleep, he wouldn’t eat properly. It was a broken heart really.’ She snuffled and next thing they were all weeping, their painful memories reawakened, their heartbreaks still close to the surface.

‘What about Matapihi?’ Sean asked Hemi the next day. ‘Did you meet my mate?’

‘Sure did,’ said Hemi. ‘That’s some moko. He’s the big kamokamo at Okahu Bay now. He wanted to ride south with us, but he reckoned he’s too busy looking after a thousand people.’ Hemi reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a small packet. ‘He sent you this though.’

Sean opened the packet and sniffed the yellowish spice. It was a strong curry and it made a delicious possum stew. Sean was delighted when Fairgo added whisky, distilled by the wild men of the Hokonui Hills according to an ancient recipe.

‘I often wanted to do this when I was eating dog,’ he said.

Cally and Hemi had stopped in Ngaruawahia and were told by an ancient Oriental man in a rust-red blanket sitting in the sun with an elderly Pakeha couple that Sean had arrived safely in the south.

‘But you know that already,’ he’d told Cally.

They’d ridden right through the centre of Maui’s Fish, camping among the pines.

‘Bad buzz,’ said Hemi. Cally laughed.

‘I told you we’d be safe,’ she said.

‘I don’t care. That was the scariest thing I ever saw. Worse even than Auntie Thelma telling me off when I was little.’ They’d seen Kurangaituku in the moonlight, her beak and claws terrifying. Cally called out a greeting. Hemi cocked his sawn-off. Kurangaituku hadn’t moved.

The folk at Tokaanu remembered Sean and Kevin well. Along with Kurangaituku, they were now a local legend.

‘In our own lunchtime,’ Sean laughed, remembering Roha’s kindness. Uncle Ruka was still alive. He sent a letter for Sean, painstakingly written on good notepaper, stamped and addressed C/- the Kokopu Waters Post Office.

‘Pai tou mahi,’ Uncle Ruka said.

‘How did you guys get across Cook Strait?’ Sean asked. Hemi looked him straight in the eye and spoke without a flicker of a smile.

‘We didn’t go that way,’ he said. Actually they’d crossed the strait with Geoff and had heard a lurid tale of Sean and Kevin’s storm-tossed voyage years before. They’d also stayed with Zed and Fiona and had heard an even more fanciful story about how they’d crossed the renamed Ngerunui Plains, fighting off lions and packs of wild dogs.

They helped Hemi clean up a house for him and Cally, and the pair of them fitted into the community as if they’d been there all along — and in a way they had. That was one of the things Sean learned over the years, that people kept their past with them, the important thing being how easy it was to live with. Sean had no trouble living with his, but he was very wary about spending too much time wandering around in it. If he wasn’t suddenly blasted with a noise like a train wreck, he’d be bumping into some long-dead auntie or uncle.

‘C’mon, boy,’ Sean would hear. ‘Watch what you’re doing.’

One day he saw Cally down at the foreshore. She was getting large and so were the others. Cally was gazing intently at a spot a few metres out in the water where huge bubbles were rising. She was having a boy, she told Alex and Sean, and they were going to call him Tinirau.

‘Do you want to have a baby?’ Sean asked Alex that night. She gave him a look.

‘Doubt it,’ she said. ‘Been there, done that. I’ve even got the tee shirt somewhere. What about you?’

Sean thought for a moment. ‘No thanks. The dreams are enough.’

But were they? Were they really? He reached for the bowl on the bedside table.

‘Here,’ he said. ‘Try one of these apples.’