Authors: Delia Sherman
The missionaries settled at last on Mota, which they had called Hat Island, and which you could see from the shore of Vanua Lava every day even when clouds formed like a screen. And they took on the language of Mota, and taught in it, and their ship, the
Southern Cross
, made frequent visits to the islands of the Banks, as the white men called them, and they still took young boys to their distant school, and returned educated and dressed in the waetman's fashion. And their god was all-powerful, beating even Qat.
So when his own time cameâthe old man, who was then not old at allâhe, too, had wanted to go and learn of the power of their magician-god. And when he saw the
Southern Cross
approaching the bay, coming across the point which they now called Port Patteson, he was excited, and waited for the bishop (it was Wilson now, after Patteson's death and Codrington's short service) to come on shore, and vowed to join him.
But the bishop didn't come on shore. The ship remained in the distance, and the boy could see, faintly on the deck, the figure of a man in the robes of the bishop, making gestures with his hands as if blessing the island. A small boat came from the ship, with two men in robes sitting inside it, and they said the bishop was ill and had to remain on board, but that he would love to see his friends again, and anyone who wanted to come to the school at Norfolk Island should come on the boat with them.
And he had gone. His father had bidden him goodbye, and gave him a stone, and as he did a shark surfaced in the water ahead and then disappeared, and his father said, “Remember Surevuvu when you need it."
Then he had gotten in the boat with the two white men, he and several of his friends, young men and a couple of the women, too, and they went to the
Southern Cross
and boarded it, and the ship departed, sailing away from Vanua Lava.
But it was not the
Southern Cross
.
He remembers the captain's laugh as the ship sailed away from Vanua Lava and headed south, and into open ocean. Ross, the others called him, and when he laughed his whole body shook, like a man sitting around the fire enjoying a good joke just told.
"The missionary gambit!” he bellowed, “The missionary gambit works every time!” and he addressed them in fragmented Mota and in beche-la-mar, the pijin English they hardly understood then but learned to speak so fluently once they got to the plantations of Queensland and worked the sugarcane. “Yufala I go wok kwiktaem, kanakas,” he said, once laughter had drained out of him like mud. He called them kanakas. “Yu laki tumas, from yu go wok long Kwinsland, hemi wan kantry blong waetman ia."
Queensland. He remembers Queensland the way it was, the heat of the sun, naked torsos gleaming black in the fields, and the overseers shouting, and there were men and women from every island, and no one spoke the other's tongue. They communicated in pijin, and they worked, and they slept, and sometimes they loved, but love in a foreign land is hard and can be taken away from you.
But that first night on the ship, helpless, he had merely sat with the others, and there was no escape; the sea was their jailer then, and the white men had guns. And yet as he watched the islands receding in the distance and saw the arm of the Milky Way reaching from one end of the sky to the other, dense with untold stars, a wild joy rose in him, unbidden and unexplained, a feeling that stole on him like a rush of wind, for there was a strange freedom in his exile, and the world grew large, expanding like a growing tree.
There was a girl with them, Met?r, a name which had once meant a leader of women, what the white men called chief. She was from Mosina, the village on the other side from his home, and the two of them could talk. He had comforted her that night, a solid, strong girl, her hair tawny and her bare arms black, and they talked quietly in the dark, and made plans, and thought they'd see the world, and the place the waetman came from, and dreamed of returning to their homes laden with knowledge and cargo. Ross made them sign a contract, and said it was for three years, and after that they could return to their homes. He had heard of people like Ross, of course, for the man thieves had come before, and one heard of them in every island, but he had not thought it would be him to be so caught. Like fish, he thought, and found comfort in the comparison. Caught like fish. At least that was something he knew about, and he also knew sometimes fish struggled, and sometimes they broke away from their hunters. Sometimes.
The journey was long and hard, though he could not compare it to any others. They had stopped at other islands, and anchored a distance from the shore, and Ross dressed in the robes of a bishop and paraded on the deck, and his men rowed to shore and told the people there that Bishop Wilson wanted them to come on board and greet him, and then there would be a hasty retreat and the ship would be crowded further.
Two weeks into the voyage one of the sailors wanted Met?r, and he woke up to her screaming as she was dragged out of the hold, and he tried to rise against them and was butted with a gun and kicked until she was removed.
He was angry that night, and he clutched the stone his father had given him, and he called on the shark spirit, the âataro as it is called in San Cristoval, and it came to him, and with it came the sea ghosts, and they rose out of the depths of the sea. At that there was a commotion on deck and the running of many feet and the firing of muskets, and he and the others, too, came onto the deck, and he saw Met?r again, for the sailors had to abandon her when the sea ghosts came.
The sea ghosts rose out of the sea and their bodies were fishes, shaped into the form of a man, and their weapons were swordfish and they fired stone-fish onto the deck, and one of the sailors fell badly ill and his leg was amputated when they got to Queensland; he had gangrene. The sailors shot into the waves but they could not hurt the vui, and the sharks circled the ship and the water churned foamy-white and hot, like an oncoming fever.
But Met?r was safe then, and he came to her, and held her hand in the dark, and let drop the stone; and his shark departed, and the sea ghosts sank back into the sea. The captain swore and shouted and cursed the rocks and the sharks as though he could not see the ghosts at all, and his men were frightened, and the prisoners were allowed back into the hold and were not disturbed. And he had spent that night with Met?r, who lay against him in the darkness of the hold and was herself as hot as the ocean and as deep, and he had felt like a man who had gone too long and too far into the sea in a canoe and could no longer find his way back.
"Angkel? Yu save gerap?” It is his niece, shaking him awake, and the old man stirs, and for a moment feels himself a bird, light-boned, filled with air, as insubstantial as a vui. “Yes,” he says, “I was only resting a moment.” His niece nods, and there is something in her eyes, like a sadness, but luckily it is gone too quickly. “Bae mi karem kakai long yu,” she says, and she goes, and returns with food, a plate of rice and a boiled yam and two white-fish boiled in coconut milk, and he eats.
In Queensland there was plenty of rice, and there was the meat of buluk, red and heavy, which he had tasted a few times, and always there were the sugar canes, and they had seemed a great delicacy to him then, and more than that he remembers Met?r's love for them, the way she would peel the bark off the cane and drink the juice inside and spit out the remains, and she laughed as she did it. Once there was a dance, and she wore a European dress and he a European suit of clothes, and they danced the Europeans' way. He had a polished cane of dark, rich wood, and he twirled it and wore a hat tilted at an angle, and she laughed; she was bare-foot in the dress and tall, and her hair was a rich yellow like the sun, and they danced a long time under the electric lights. The overseers worked them hard, but there were other white people, like missionaries, or if not olsem exactly then semak lelebet, who came to look at them and to make sure they were not abused, or not too much, at any rate, and to teach them about their god Jesus, who could save their immortal souls, if only they repented from their heathen ways and accepted him.
It seemed easy enough to do, and many took it on with enthusiasm. You could get many things that way, like shoes, and many people wanted guns, too, which they could take back to their islands and fight their neighbors with, who would be bound to try and steal their lands if they did not return. Many of the Europeans were glad to sell them, and the overseers were happy to give them in payment when the workers left. When he was only a boy, his father had taken him to the land of the great waterfall in the west of Vanua Lava, where they had family, too, and there they took a canoe and came to a small landing and hiked a short distance through the bush and came to a cave, dry and secluded and sloping down into the rock, and there he saw many skulls, which had once belonged to their enemies.
"Do they still have them?” he says, not realizing he is speaking aloud, and his nephew looks startled for a moment and says, “Have what?"
"The skulls in the cave. Did I take you there once?"
"I took some tourists there last week,” his nephew says, “for the festival. They have a festival there now, once a year. There are many kastom dances, and string bands. I bin gat plante plante kavaâ” and he grins, for his nephew is a pikinini blong kava, one who likes to drink until he is drunk. Many nights he returns from the nakamal, weaving a makeshift snake dance as he walks, and when he arrives he lies down on a mat outside, where he sleeps. But the old man doesn't say this and asks only, “Did you go to the cave?"
But his nephew is not interested in old skulls, and he shrugs and says, “The tourists went. But there are few skulls left. Men have been throwing them into the sea, and making plaeplae wetem. Now the chief keeps them somewhere else and only puts them back when the tourists come."
The old man sighs, but a part of him is happy. For they have no guns now, beyond the few muskets used for shooting flying fox, and there is no war in the islands, and the people are peaceful, though there are so few of them now, so fewer than there had been before. The waetman's sickness had killed many, too many, more than guns could ever kill.
When the sickness came to the camp, it came swiftly and without mercy, and the waetman blong Jesus stopped coming, too, for they were afraid despite their god. At first it was nothing, a mere irritation, and then one and then another man fell sick and couldn't work, and they were afraid. Many died, and their bodies were burned, but he was well and did not know why. He lived with Met?r then, as husband and wife, and their nights were happy, and she was become thick with child, which the overseers didn't like.
When she became ill, he was angry, though it shamed him to feel it. He was angry at her for being weak, and for succumbing to the sickness, though he knew that was wrong. He sought a klever, a man of kastom medicine, and together they searched hard for the leaves that might help her body struggle, and he danced for her, with the other men, and he even prayed, to the god of the waetman, but the sickness had taken so many, and was too strong, and Met?r stopped working and lay in their hut and didn't eat. He sat with her, and told her of their island, of Vanua Lava, and said that when she was better they would go back and build a house at Sanara, and eat fish and lobster every day, and have many children, and he thought it made her happy. Her face eased when he spoke, but perhaps it was just on hearing his voice.
She died one afternoon and he wasn't there, for the men were few now and had to work harder even than before, and so she died alone and was burned with the rest.
That night he tried to follow her, remembering his father's words, and he drank kava with the men in the nasara until it sent him to a drugged sleep, and then he flew away from the plantation in the shape of an owl, flew away from Queensland and the waetman's bigfala aelan and across the sea and over Tanna, Efata, Malekulah, and Gaua, until he reached Vanua Lava at last and saw in the distance one hill shining with a pure white light and knew it was Surevuvu, the meeting field.
When he landed there, he changed back into a man, and the hill was full of people. He wandered amongst them, and some welcomed him as a friend and some shied away from him, and some seemed not to know he was there.
He called her name.
He wandered through the hill of the dead and sang out her name, calling Met?r, Met?r, but he could not find her. He saw the moon rising and falling over the sea and once, in the distance, strange men oli no blong ples ia, with slanted haunted eyes and unknown uniforms, who seemed lost and silent here.
He felt the pull of the sun and knew the day would soon come and that he must return, but yet he persisted, calling out her name, walking Surevuvu as if he himself was a vui, and at last he found her.
She was standing alone on a ridge and looked east, toward Mosina and the small island, Lenoh, that lies off it, close to where Sanara lies. Her hair was as tawny as he remembered it, her eyes as dark, but there was no laughter in her anymore, not then, and they didn't speak.
She tried to hold his hand, but her hand passed through his, as insubstantial as ocean foam, and as the sun rose he changed back into an owl and raced away and took only that memory of her with him.
He had lived a good life. When he returned to the island he married a good woman, wan woman Mota, from the hat-shaped island across from Vanua Lava, and they had children and had been happy. But sometimes he remembers that night when the air was full of sound and she was dancing in her dress, and her bare feet moved across the packed-earth ground as if stamping them into solidity, and on those nights he thinks of Sanara, and of standing on the rocks catching fish when he was young. He had wanted to take her there with him, but he never did.
Living in Vanuatu means having to accept two worlds existing at once: the everyday and the fantastic. In the sea where you fish there are also shark-familiars, and in the forest where you might go gather wild yams also live the uturgurgur, the little people of the bush. Rocks are really legendary beings and objects, frozen into the landscape: the great snake of Sola is now a hill where the Anglican diocese stands, and the black rocks off the coast are Qat's canoe. Men talk matter-of-factly of sorcerous battles carried on in dreams, of people changing into the shapes of animals, of curses being laid and warded. The spirits of the ancestors still gather at the great volcano of Gaua island and on Surevuvu, the hill of the dead on Vanua Lava. Everything in this story is true. Which is to say, it is woven from the stories that still shape life, daily, on those remote Pacific islands where clouds obscure volcanoes and children shoot at fish with bows and arrows, where tabu sticks can still be found in the sand and men measure worth by their rank in the suqwe, the secret societies of the islands. Life and
storian
âthe art of telling storiesâcan't be separated in Vanuatu. Nor should they.