Both Sides of the Moon (6 page)

But he didn’t. Principle won. His kids, I’m sorry to be telling him not so many years later, they lost. Most of them did. When one is too many to lose of your children. To death or failure or, worse, despair. Death is over. Failure can be rationalised. Despair is the cry from the living graveyard.

He only fits as an abstract. A curiosity to them, his wife’s friends. Not her sisters, they at least knew and came to kind of respect his quaint ways. It was the non-family regulars who found him fascinating — if a drunk can be fascinated by anything. They’d go for a leak and end up peering around our parents’ room, not to see how Heta Burgess lives, but how the white husband does. You’d hear them giggling like surprised children: Ooo! so neat and tidy! Look at all those books! Since books aren’t part of their lives. Not when knowledge isn’t.

And they whisper and giggle, is this where they do it? And giggle back, well, where she does it with him! Not the only bedroom she knows in town. They really think that tired old observation is funny.

You catch them fossicking about in Dad’s drawers, in
cupboards, rummaging through Dad’s bookshelves, feeling the material of his suits in his wardrobe. Dad complains he’s missing items of clothing. We found a man standing in Dad’s bedroom in one of Dad’s suits! And he asked us did he look good in it or what? And he was laughing at our astonishment. We think of them as monkeys, out of control but with sufficient intelligence to be curious. But not enough to learn.

Our father was a decent man who didn’t deserve this. Not as extreme as this. Not so hardly any of his story, his validity, would enter any picture or meaningful memory of his offspring’s lives. He didn’t even think to have a photograph in the house of himself. As if he knew how posterity would treat him. He was just a good man. A fine one. An intelligent, enquiring man. A moral man in a social, amoral mess. Who didn’t fit — who couldn’t fit. When drunken visitors to his house did. By imposition. As a warrior race does. It’s in the blood. It’s in the thinking. Well, the unthinking. I’m trying to state facts, not argue a case. They’ll make their fuckin’ own.

We’ve found them asleep on our beds. Found a couple fucking on Warren’s bed and they told me and Warren to get the hell out of it and carried right on. They’ve dumped vomit at our bedroom door, left the toilet bowl and lid filthy with liquid shit or spew, the floor awash with missed urine. Smears of period blood. Oh, don’t tell any of their wide range of children about period blood.

When it isn’t books, our sitting room is drunken, snoring bodies. An aftermath fight is like a storm has been through. But there’s been times when it could have been a little church with a choir going. We swear. But not to God. God doesn’t belong here. Not to rational, atheist man. Not to Polynesian tribal people converted
themselves
to God of Piss. And always had Tu, God of War.

Look, they’re like wild children who know no rules. Or do know but have every intention of breaking them. Wild innocents who are genetically programmed — or something — to break out fighting at the drop of a wrong comment, the blink of a challenging eye, the
glance of a slighting look. Answering insult is like answering a beer thirst: immediate gratification.

No place for intelligent, rational, good man to fit, even in his own house, his own children’s lives. Say he got overpowered by forces greater than his mild self. His father was famous, but it doesn’t matter what for, since fame gets no better fare in this house of disorder. His mother was artistically and socially eccentric, and herself a little wild and free for her time, but more acceptably so. They, Dad’s parents, were the least confounded at how their eldest son had ended up, in the life, the marriage and the race that he did. Because confoundment has a touch of denial in it, and neither was a denying person; liberated, free of mind and spirit that they were. We knew them. But they don’t fit; even less so. If you know all this, then know that the fit is even more impossible.

Know, too, and respect or not at your choice, that there must be a quality of survival about the warrior that can resist all influences, especially for the better. But still it survives. It withstands pressures of better-educated, better-trained minds — hell, it laughs in their faces. So you’ve got at least to doff a hat the warrior way.

It’s a sketch, a necessarily selective outline. No such thing as autobiography, not true, not exact, not near truth or exactness. And my father would at least be proud that this son sought broader explanation and did not concern himself with talking about people when it is concepts the wiser person is interested in. Concepts.

But not their concept of a funeral, a Maori tangi, it’s not concept but event. And it leads to a better event. It’s a concept in their minds that isn’t truly one. Someone dead is an excuse. So we’re off to another funeral piss-up: my mother and her sister Girlie and her son, my cousin Jack, and this man we’ve not seen around so often he’s a familiar, but he’s got a familiar dangerous look about him. He’s a man who’ll hurt you, like a man who’ll get in first, but he’ll pick his mark, he won’t be a walking challenge to everyone, they know how to survive do this type.

Fast conveyed as much as a small Bedford truck will along a forest road of pines supplanting the original native forests of our native ancestral half. It screams not with victorious, murdering man, but with engineered chainsaws bringing life mightier than mere man crashing down in a whipping of air and boom of great stalk rendered defeated. Meaning, symbolism going by us. And meaning
accompanying
us in the form of the driver’s son, he’d be eleven, twelve, a little younger than us. His name is Hohepa.

Up in the front cab they’re warm and start early on the beer. Whilst we’re cold and drinking in gulps of speeded air, with a single double blanket to share. And this strange-looking kid starting to trouble us.

What’s wrong, kid? Nothing. Suit yaself. Most of them, these dog-beaten types, have nothing to say, even when they want to. Little shit looks like a fledgling bird in an abandoned nest, the poppy eyes have grown a lowering lid as if he knows he’s going to die. Hey kid — what’s wrong with you?

Nothing, I said. And where’s Pinevale, is it far, what’s it like? the abandoned baby bird wants to know. We shrug, It’s the same as anywhere, what else would it be?

Then the bird kid asks, Will we be staying inside a Maori meeting house or somewhere else? We ask why? Because, he says. Because why, kid, unless you want a smack around the ears? Because I feel safer there with all the people sleeping around you.

He’s either afraid of ghosts, the dark, or his father, as he keeps throwing glances at the back his old man’s head. We’re staying in Pinevale village. The funeral is at a pa not far from there. Probably stay at our uncle’s place. In a big tent, with lots of people around. So don’t worry about it.

But he does; he looks plain miserable. I whisper to Jack, though, that we’ve seen kids like this in lots of places. He just says, Yeah. Everywhere. And the wind takes his last word.

The flicker-by of trees and light does something to my brain, but not so I can hear atavistic echoes of a man, my ancestor, his alleged panting, cowardly running. But I can see Maoris roaming this
once-forested
land with no thought that it would ever be any other. I feel sorry for them. But surely it’s been for the better.

But then is a little truckload of Maoris like this for the better? Hell, I don’t know. Why do I trouble so over this Maori stuff, what we are, what we used to be, what we’ve become? Why can’t I be normal?

Well, for starters, when you hear a piercing Maori woman’s voice calling your little truckload group a welcome on to their marae, their tribal heart, even this little rural nowhere, you feel this Maori claim over that part of you that is them. And if it wasn’t for the fact that young Hohepa was ordered by his father to stay on the back of the truck and not get off for as long as we took, this would be totally engrossing. For I love the way they send off their dead. I just don’t like my mother’s or her competing sister’s way of displaying apparent grief.

But even they, Mum and Auntie Girlie, are reduced by this starting ceremony of shrill-voiced, kind of formalised sobbing welcome, as we scuff with demanded slow dignity of hands clasped in front, heads lowered, over dirt ground that must be a sea of mud
in the rain. Voice calling us into their wharenui meeting house, of magnificent carved gable ends and carved door entrance.

I like this feeling of walking into a vast room full of people sat on mattresses on the floor, the women in black, the male elders on benches leaned forward on carved walking sticks, or sitting erect, fine, proud-looking men of sturdy build from warrior genes.

I like everywhere with traditional carvings and woven wall panels and centre poles of elaborately carved figures, taking me back to their and my past, a series of depicted ancestors, those steadfast postures, those bulging eyes of the warriors, the serene contrasts of carved motherhood, womanhood depicted. And real women clusters assessing each arrival of mourners come to pay respects to them as much as the deceased. The narrowing of their eyes at my and Jack’s mothers. The asking of who is the man with them?

The singing has aching poignancy, whether a hymn adapted to Maori wording or a traditional Maori chant. I gain strength (and fear) from the elders’ posturing, animated speeching. I marvel at how still is death in an open casket, and yet how it fits so with this room, these people, here to say farewell, here to carry some of the grievers’ burden.

I take breath at this large room filled with people who will do this for three days, at them as if wanting to go back to what they were — and this is close — when they were a simple, warrior race with all known concepts set down in their rote-learned minds like a carving, a woven pattern, but no more than the eye sees.

I look at these people and think this isn’t so bad, this isn’t floundering in some social chaos, some lost, self-destroying cultural desert. These people are reasonably okay, they’ll get by, not flourish, but get by. Whilst these arrived visitors, now moving forward to display their grief, who the women are stiffening, expecting postures over, they seem of another kind, members of a different, lower tribe.

Two drama queen sisters competing to throw grief-stricken live bodies over the absolutely still dead one (I don’t remember seeing that face on their drinking circuit), wet sobbing lips on waxen mouth, warm-blooded hands on cold blood-still face. And the pair of
cheap-arse
mourners are another definition to themselves.
Why
do they insist on behaving like this?

Oh, Pera! she, especially, wails; my mother as though to an audience, as if on a real-life stage, thinking her part is played with such commendable grief. Later she’ll ask me, What did they say about me? Did they talk about how upset I was? Did I get some of them crying again? Did you hear them say how fast we got here to pay respects? I bet they did. I bet they said things like that. (I bet they didn’t, Mum.) Did they say how close Pera and I were, and that’s why I lost it like I did? (No, Mother. They sniggered and sneered into their hands, they hid in pulled-out handkerchiefs. They must have said: Look out, the drama queen bitches from Two Lakes have arrived. If only they weren’t from a related tribe.)

Look, Mother, look around at the eyes on you, how they set you apart from them. Look at their proceedings, their dignity, they come from another place from you, you are an embarrassing intruder, who if you weren’t related to them would be subject of an elder’s bellowing speech.

For a people not self-conscious, they manage a lot of
squirming
at the sisters’ grief-stricken act. Then an elder makes a speech that even us younger ones who don’t have the language can hear is perfunctory. We’re at a party we weren’t invited to. Girls, your act has been milked, you were sprung before you arrived.

They’ve left Hohepa’s father, with me and Jack, standing there about twenty feet from the coffin, with nowhere to go since he being the male accompanying us is expected to reply to that short, supposedly welcome speech.

But he’s got the face of a boozer; boozers don’t know this culture, no time, no inclination to learn. He’s got the stranded face of a boozer who wants out of here, he only came for the piss-up. Left his son stranded out there on the back of his truck, in this place he’s never been to before, the local kids will be giving him hell, especially with a face like he’s got.

There’s justice here in this man not knowing what he has to do and none inclined to assist or relieve him of his strained social, ceremonial burden. He is so desperate he whispers to us that he doesn’t even know who this dead guy is.

Finally, the two queens take their leave. We can almost hear the sigh of relief. Been a long hour for everyone. Normal grievers
are expected to be around for the three days’ duration. Here they’ve endured enough in an hour.

We depart, Jack and I know, with a hundred and fifty sets of contemptuous eyes on our mothers’ backs and on that of the man without culture and therefore their respect. And we don’t blame them, do we, Jack, our old-hand eyes say as soon as we get outside and get our shoes back on.

As for Hohepa, sure enough, the truck’s surrounded by
jeering
, finger-prodding kids and his father yells at them to fuckin’ piss off before he starts kicking arse. But it’s only to gain revenge against these people for how they treated him back there, or why would he whack his son and tell him off for crying and not sticking up for himself?

Us two cousins are paused before climbing on to the back of the truck, seeing the same image: that this could be Hohepa in his own hearse. But, oh well, now to the real purpose of this visit. And it ain’t children.

Pass the beer, dear. Have some fun, hon. Giz a kiss, miss. Kiss my bum, dumb. Gee, you’re ugly, girl. Heck, you’re fat, boy. Fill me up again.

We’re at Auntie Molly’s, she’s the second to youngest sister of four, married to Uncle Bill, he’s a millhand at the company that owns and rents out this entire village. Of life-contented boozers. Our mothers are amongst their own kind. The deceased Pera
whatever-hisname
is only a vehicle, for emotional mention, for self-compliment on how grieving they are, to tell how good he looked in death (when he wasn’t much in life). And then how is every one of you, anyway? And good to see you, it must be, what, a month? Nah, not that long. We were over your way last time. For Shonty’s boy’s twenty-first. Oh, that’s right. Ended up in a big fight. That’s right. But only because that Betty Bennett said something to Girlie, didn’t she, Girlie? She said something all right — said I was a cheating bitch, that I cheat at every card game, even my own sister’s. (Which she does.) Which you do. Which I don’t. But you do. I done it once. More than once, Girlie. Well, a few times then, but not all the time. Anyrate, that’s in the
past, it’s in the past now, and our thirst is in the present, right here and now. Let’s get started.

How the time flies when you’re drinking. Drink day and night, night into day, grab a feed from the big pot on the fire-stove, plenty more where it came from, boiled pig bones don’t cost much, the Pakeha would only throw them out, doesn’t know what he’s missing, the white man, these lovely spines of swine boiled till the meat falls off, suck the marrow from the hole, dig out with practised fingers, skilled even in their drunkenness, the pockets of meat in bone recess, in the catacombs of calcified skeleton structure, ah there’s a bit, mmm, and here’s a bit, mmm, social swine eating pork swine. And keep that beer flowing; it keeps the talk, the fun, the expanding expression, the sweet-all of it going. Flow, beer. Sweet flow.