His Best Stories Read online

  She slammed down a full house.

  The other women goggled at the cards. Mrs Heta looked at her own cards. She did a swift calculation and yelled:

  ‘Eee! You cheat, Miro! I got two aces in my hand already! Only four in the pack. How come you got three aces in your hand?’

  Everybody laughed. Nani and Mrs Heta started squabbling as they always did, pointing at each other and saying:

  ‘You the cheat, not me!’

  And Nani Miro said:

  ‘I saw you, Maka tiko bum, I saw you sneaking that card from under the blanket.’

  She began to laugh. Her eyes streamed with tears.

  While she was laughing, she died.

  Everybody was silent. Then Mrs Heta took the cards from Nani’s hands and kissed her.

  ‘You the cheat, Miro,’ she whispered. ‘You the cheat yourself —’

  Ma wai ra e taurima

  E te marae i waho nei?

  We buried Nani Miro on the hill with the rest of her family. During her tangi, Mrs Heta played patience with Nani, spreading the cards across the casket.

  Later in the year, Mrs Heta, she died too. She was buried right next to Nani so that they could keep on playing cards.

  I bet you they’re still squabbling up there.

  ‘Eee! You cheat Miro!’

  ‘You the cheat, Maka tiko bum. You, you the cheat.’

  THE SEAHORSE AND THE REEF

  THE HALCYON SUMMER

  A TENT ON THE HOME GROUND

  Here are three more stories about Maori, all from the same pastoral period of Pounamu Pounamu. All of them acknowledge the alternative histories of Maori, the histories that lie behind what you see, the unseen and unspoken rather than the seen and spoken.

  ‘The Seahorse and the Reef’ is another of those stories that bears my signature, one that people say of it, ‘That’s an Ihimaera.’ People still stop me on the street to say ‘I really liked the story about the seahorse.’

  I’ve wrestled with ‘The Halcyon Summer’ through three versions. Although the central story deals nostalgically with rural Maori life and those universal values of aroha, whanaungatanga and manaakitanga, you have to look at the margins to see what was really happening to Maori during the 1970s, when we were endeavouring to hold on to our land, language and culture — our tino rangatiratanga. Other Maori writers also told what they saw — Rore Hapipi, Patricia Grace, Hone Tuwhare, Arapera Blank, J.C. Sturm, Katerina Mataira and Syd Mead are among them. They are a distinguished academy with stories to be treasured.

  ‘Tent on the Home Ground’ is from my second collection of short stories, The New Net Goes Fishing (1977), and deals with a time when Maori took their protests to the very heart of New Zealand’s governance, Parliament.

  Originally, I had planned a trilogy: Pounamu Pounamu begins the series by focusing on the exclusive presentation of Maori in a rural setting during the 1950s; Pakeha have no place in this setting. By contrast, The New Net Goes Fishing looked at the first generation of Maori living in an urban setting ten years later in the 1960s; the stories are explicitly political, dealing with the engagement of Maori with Pakeha, Pakeha life and Waitangi issues. The third collection, Kingfisher Come Home, was supposed to follow and to cover the 1970s, except that I placed an embargo on my work and stopped writing from 1976 to 1986, the year I came back with my novel, The Matriarch. I’ve often wondered what stories I would have written in those ‘lost years’, and only managed to pull some of the fragments and plot lines together into some semblance of what the third book was supposed to be some twenty years later; Kingfisher Come Home finally completed the trilogy when it was published in 1995.

  Together, the three collections provide interrelated stories spanning thirty years of Maori experience, the rural to urban migration of Maori and the creation of postcolonial New Zealand.

  Writing, too, is a Waitangi issue.

  The Seahorse and the Reef

  Sometimes through the soft green water and drifting seaweed of my dreams I see the seahorse again. Delicate and fragile it comes to me, shimmering and luminous with light. And I remember the reef.

  The reef was just outside the town where my family lived. That was a long time ago, when I was a boy, before I came to this southern city. It was where all our relatives and friends went every weekend in summer to dive for kai moana. The reef was the home of much kai moana — paua, pipi, kina, mussels, pupu and many other shellfish. It was the home too of other fish like flounder and octopus. It teemed with life and food. It gave its bounty to us. It was good to us.

  And it was where the seahorse lived.

  At that time, our family lived in a small wooden house on the fringe of the industrial area. On Sundays, my father would watch out the window and see our relatives passing by on their old trucks and cars or bikes with their sugarbags and nets, their flippers and goggles, shouting and waving on their way to the reef. They came from the pa — in those days it was not surrounded by expanding suburbia — and they would sing out to Dad:

  ‘Hey, Rongo! Come on! Good day for kai moana today!’

  Dad would sigh and start to moan and fidget. The lunch dishes had to be washed, the lawn had to be cut, and my mother probably would want him to do other things round the house.

  But after a while, a gleam would come into his eyes.

  ‘Hey, Huia!’ he would shout to Mum. ‘Those kina are calling out loud to me today!’

  ‘So are these dishes,’ she would answer.

  ‘Well, Mum!’ Dad would call again. ‘Those paua are just waiting for me to come to them today!’

  ‘That lawn’s been waiting even longer,’ Mum would answer.

  Dad would pretend not to hear her. ‘Pae kare, dear! How’d you like a feed of mussels today!’

  ‘I’d like it better if you fixed the fence,’ she would growl.

  So Dad would just wiggle his toes and act sad for her. ‘Okay, Huia. But those pipi are going to miss us today!’

  Dad was cunning. He knew Mum loved her feed of pipi. And sure enough she would answer him:

  ‘What we waiting for! Can’t disappoint those pipi today!’ Then she would shout to us to get into our bathing clothes, grab some sugarbags, don’t forget some knives and take your time but hurry up! And off we would go to the reef on our truck.

  If it was a sunny day the reef would already be crowded with other people searching for kai moana. There they’d be, dotting the water with their sacks and flax kits. They would wave and shout to us and we would hurry to join them, pulling on our shoes, grabbing our sugarbags and running down to the sea.

  ‘Don’t you kids come too far out!’ Dad would yell. He would already be way ahead of us, sack clutched in one hand and a knife in the other. He used the knife to prise the paua from the reef because if you weren’t quick enough they held onto the rocks really tight.

  Sometimes, Dad would put on a diving mask. It made it easier for him to see underwater.

  As for Mum, she liked nothing better than to wade out to where some of the women of the pa were gathered. Then she could korero with them while she was looking for seafood. All the long afternoon those women would bend to the task, their dresses ballooning above the water, and talk and talk and talk and talk!

  For both Mum and Dad, much of the fun of going to the reef was because they could be with their friends and whanau. It was a good time for being family again and for enjoying our tribal ways.

  My sisters and me, we made straight for a special place on the reef that we liked to call ‘ours’. It was where the pupu — or winkles as some call them — crawled. We called the special place our pupu pool.

  The pool was very long but not very deep. Just as well because Mere, my youngest sister then, would have been drowned, she was so short! As for me, the water came only waist high. The rock surrounding the pool was fringed with long waving seaweed. Small transparent fish swam among the waving leaves and little crabs scurried across the dark floor. The many pupu glided calmly along the sides of the pool. Once, a starfish inched its way into a dark crack.

  It was in that pool we discovered the seahorse, magical and serene, shimmering among the red kelp and riding the swirls of the sea’s current.

  My sisters and I, we wanted to take it home.

  ‘If you take it from the sea it will die,’ Dad told us. ‘Leave it here in its own home for the sea gives it life and beauty.’

  Dad told us that we must always treat the sea with love, with aroha. ‘Kids, you must take from the sea only the kai you need and only the amount you need to please your bellies. If you take more, then it is waste. There is no need to waste the food of the sea. Best to leave it there for when you need it next time. The sea is good to us, it gives us kai moana to eat. It is a food basket. As long as we respect it, it will continue to feed us. If, in your search for shellfish, you lift a stone from its lap, return the stone to where it was. Try not to break pieces of the reef for it is the home of many kai moana. And do not leave litter behind you when you leave the sea.’ Dad taught us to respect the sea and to have reverence for the life contained in its waters. As we collected shellfish we would remember his words. Whenever we saw the seahorse shimmering behind a curtain of kelp, we felt glad we’d left it in the pool to continue to delight us.

  As soon as we filled our sugarbags we would return to the beach. We played together with other kids while waiting for our parents to return from the outer reef. One by one they would arrive: the women still talking, the men carrying their sacks over their shoulders. On the beach we would laugh and talk and share the kai moana between different families. With sharing there was little waste. We would be happy with each other unless a stranger intervened with his camera or curious amusement. Then we would say goodbye to one another while the sea whispered a
nd gently surged into the coming of darkness.

  ‘See you next weekend,’ we would say.

  One weekend we went again to the reef. We were in a happy mood. The sun was shining and skipping its beams like bright stones across the water.

  But when we arrived at the beach the sea was empty of the family. No people dotted the reef with their sacks. No calls of welcome drifted across the rippling waves.

  Dad frowned. He looked ahead to where our friends and whanau were clustered in a large lost group on the sand. All of them were looking to the reef, their faces etched by the sun with impassiveness.

  ‘Something’s wrong,’ Dad said. He stopped the truck. We walked with him towards the others of our people. They were silent. ‘The water too cold?’ Dad tried to joke.

  Nobody answered him. ‘Is there a shark out there?’ Dad asked again.

  Again there was silence. Then someone pointed to a sign.

  ‘It must have been put up last night,’ a man told Dad.

  Dad elbowed his way through the crowd to read it.

  ‘Dad, what does it say?’ I asked.

  His fists were clenched and his eyes were angry. He said one word, explosive and shattering the silence, disturbing the gulls to scream and clatter about us.

  ‘Rongo,’ Mum reproved him.

  ‘First the land and now our food,’ Dad said to her.

  ‘What does it say?’ I asked again.

  His fists unclenched and his eyes became sad. ‘It says that it is dangerous to take seafood from the reef, son.’

  ‘Why, Dad?’

  ‘The sea is polluted, son. If we eat the seafood, we may get sick.’

  My sisters and I were silent for a while. ‘No more pupu, Dad?’

  ‘No more, kids.’

  I clutched his arm frantically. ‘And the seahorse, Dad? The seahorse, will it be all right?’

  But he did not seem to hear me.

  We walked back to the truck. Behind us, an old woman began to cry out a tangi to the reef. It was a very sad song for such a beautiful day. ‘Aue … Aue …’

  With the rest of the iwi, we bowed our heads. While she was singing, the sea boiled yellow with effluent issuing from a pipe on the seabed. The stain curled like fingers around the reef.

  Then the song was finished. Dad looked out to the reef and called to it in a clear voice.

  ‘Sea, we have been unkind to you. We have poisoned the land and now we feed our poison into your waters. We have lost our aroha for you and our respect for your life. Forgive us, friend.’

  He started the truck. We turned homeward.

  In my mind I caught a sudden vision of many pupu crawling among polluted rocks. I saw a starfish encrusted with ugliness.

  And flashing through dead waving seaweed was a beautiful seahorse, fragile and dream-like, searching frantically for clean and crystal waters.

  The Halcyon Summer

  Once there was a nest, floating on the sea at summer solstice, and happy voices to charm the wind. The nest is gone now, drifting away on the tides. But somewhere, somewhere must surely float scattered straws, even just a single straw, which I may light upon.

  1

  It was the year that Sir Apirana Ngata died. That summer the children’s parents decided to go to the Empire games in Auckland. Tama was the eldest — an important eleven-year-old — and had two sisters, Kara and Mere. It was decided that the children would stay with their great-aunt, Nani Puti, while their parents were away.

  ‘What about the land troubles?’ their father asked their mother.

  ‘The kids will be all right,’ their mother answered.

  The children had never been to Nani Puti’s — all they knew was that it was way up the Coast somewhere, past Ruatoria.

  ‘I’m coming with you,’ Tama said to his father.

  ‘No, you have to look after your sisters,’ his mother responded.

  ‘Then you go with them,’ he answered.

  He tried to pinch her but she only pushed him away. ‘Just as well you’re going up there,’ she laughed. ‘Nani Puti will sort you out.’ But as a bribe — only if they were good children, mind — his mother said she would bring back some toys: a red clockwork train for Tama and a doll each for Kara and Mere. That decided the matter.

  One morning, while the children were still asleep, their mother got up and packed a small brown suitcase with the clothes she thought they would need: a few shirts, shorts and a pair of sandals for Tama and some cotton frocks for his sisters.

  ‘You kids won’t need much,’ she said. ‘It’s summer and it gets hot at Nani’s place. Most of the kids up there run around with no clothes on anyway.’

  At that remark the children started to kick up a big fuss because they were very shy and didn’t relish the idea of showing their bottoms and you-know-whats to strangers.

  ‘Oh, don’t be silly,’ their mother told them. ‘You won’t have to take your clothes off if you don’t want to.’

  Tama wasn’t too sure about that either.

  The children had to take a nap in the morning — they always took a nap if they were going anywhere, even to the two o’clock pictures at the Majestic. But they couldn’t sleep. The thought of being deserted by their parents, and of being taken against their will to a strange relative’s place in the strange country, frightened them.

  When their mother found them awake she was very cross. ‘It’s about time you got to know your relatives,’ she said. ‘You kids are growing up proper little Pakehas. And your Nani is always asking me if she’s ever going to see you before she dies. Don’t you want to see her?’

  Tama was not feeling very respectful and would have answered ‘No,’ if he’d been able to get away with it. This Nani sounded alarming — she was very old for one thing, being sixty, and had white hair and tattoos on her chin. How she ever managed to get married to Uncle Pani and have twelve children was beyond his comprehension. Not only that, but the whole family had names longer than Tama’s mother, which was Turitumanareti something-or-other, and they spoke only Maori. How would he be able to talk to them? Thank goodness he had been to Scouts, and Kara had learned some sign language from Janet, the Pakeha girl next door, who was a Brownie. But Tama still didn’t like the idea of going — it was all Maoris up the Coast, no Pakehas, and he and his sisters were used to Pakehas. Furthermore, Maoris wore only grass skirts and probably never even wore pyjamas to bed, and he knew that was rude.

  ‘You kids are going and that’s it,’ their mother said. ‘Nani Puti is expecting you.’

  At that, the children knew their fate was sealed, because it was impolite not to go to someone’s place when they were expecting you; just like the time when Allan had invited Tama to his birthday party and his mother got cross when he hadn’t turned up.

  So after their nap the children’s father put their suitcases in the car and yelled out to them to hurry up as he didn’t have all day — both he and their mother acted as if they couldn’t wait to get rid of the children. Mere started to cry and was given a lolly. Tama and Kara told their mother not to forget the toys. Then the children all hopped in the front with their father and waved.

  ‘Goodbye, Mummy.’ They hoped that she would change her mind and take them up to Auckland too — but she didn’t. Instead she fluttered her hand.

  ‘Look after your sisters,’ she cried out to Tama, and went into the house.

  Tama wondered if he would ever see her again.

  The children slept most of the way to Nani’s place. The heat from the Ford always made them sleepy. But most of all they hoped that when they woke up they’d find that leaving home had just been a bad dream. It wasn’t a dream though, because every now and then Tama would make a small crack in his eyes and look out and watch as Gisborne went past, then Wainui, and then Whangara. At Tolaga Bay their father stopped to refill the car with petrol. He bought some orange penny suckers for Tama and Kara because they had pointed out that Mere had been given one. At the shop Tama saw a newspaper billboard: Trouble Deepens On The Coast: Arson Suspected. For a while after that they sat quietly licking their suckers and watching the hills ahead. Then Tama realised that Mere had been given another sucker at Tolaga Bay and that wasn’t fair either because it meant that she had had two and he and Kara had only had one. But their father wouldn’t stop the car again. He said it was a long way to Nani’s place and he was in a hurry.