The Tooth
Authors: Des Hunt
‘Hey, what’s this?’ shouted Mits, digging deep into the chest and pulling out an old exercise book. He held it up and read from the cover: ‘The Ballad of Wee Timothy Thomas’. He looked up at me with a big grin. ‘Someone’s written a poem about you.’
‘Yes,’ I replied, quietly. ‘Grams wrote it years ago.’ I leaned over to grab the book.
‘Not so fast there, Tiny,’ he said, pulling back. ‘I think we should take a look at this.’ He gave me an evil smile.
I knew that smile well. Mits might be my best friend, but he could never pass up the opportunity to tease me. ‘Leave it, Mits, we’ve got homework to do.’
‘Oh, that can wait. This is
much
more important.’ He opened the book revealing a page of drawings and writing. ‘Wow! Did your grandmother do all of this?’
‘My
great
-grandmother,’ I replied, leaning over to look at the page. The water-colour drawing showed a river scene with a child playing in the sand and a woman lying under a tree. Further up the river was a red canoe. Below it were three verses written in Grams’s beautiful style. It was a flowing, joined-up script like you can do with some computer programs.
Mits stood and held the book out, as if he was reading to a class. ‘The Ballad of Wee Timothy Thomas,’ he began in an excellent imitation of our teacher at school.
Wee Timothy Thomas was still only four
When he played in the park by the river.
Such a happy wee lad with his toys by the shore,
Making holes in the sand with his digger.
He looked up. ‘Aw, how nice. Wee Tiny Tim playing with his toys. Did you make all the right noises—
vroom, vroom, chugga, chugga, toot, toot?
’
I pulled a face at him. He just laughed and returned to the rhyme.
His mother was reading, caught up in a dream
Of events in a land far away.While his father was paddling his kayak upstream—
Enjoying the late-winter’s day.
A young family group so relaxed and content,
Absorbing the heat from the sun;In a scene full of peace and with nothing to hint
Of the pain and disaster to come.
That was the end of the first page. Mits glanced at me before turning to the next. The evil smile was fading—I think he’d worked out what the rhyme might be about.
Who knows why he went in the river that day?
It’s doubtful he went for a swim.
More likely it was just a part of his play,
And would seem quite normal to him.
That river was swift and that river was wild
From the rains of the winter near finished.The currents were strong and they plucked at that child
Causing Timothy Thomas to vanish.
We can only assume his mum stirred from her dream
To see her young son disappear.
For we know she let out the most terrible scream
That only her husband would hear.Bill Thomas spun round, paddling back to the spot,
Which he found had now been abandoned.
And his stomach soon twisted up tight in a knot
When he thought of what things might’ve happened.
His eyes searched the valley, unsure where to look,
As he prayed for godly assistance.
All seemed to be lost when he spotted the book
Now floating away in the distance.
Mits turned to the next page. For a while he just looked at it, and I knew he was seeing the painting of my father frantically paddling through the white water of the river. Without looking up, he continued reading:
Bill paddled downstream with all of his might,
While hoping he’d find them still living.
But ten minutes later with nothing in sight,
His spirits were rapidly fading.He searched that river until it was dark;
Until he could see nothing more.
By then he was miles from the car and the park.
Only then did he go to the shore.Some thirty-two folk joined the search the next day,
All looking for signs big and small.
They combed that river in all sorts of ways,
With choppers controlling it all.Rebecca Jane Thomas was found before nine,
Her clothing all snagged on a rock.She’d plainly been dead for most of the time,
And for Bill it was a terrible shock.
Again, Mits turned the page. This time he looked up. ‘Do you want me to stop?’ he asked, his face now showing sadness and concern.
I shook my head. ‘No, you’ve almost reached the end. You might as well read it all.’
From that point in time they expected the worst.
How long would it be till they found
That tiny wee boy in the water submersed,
And learn that he also had drowned?Yet, at times there are things that we don’t comprehend—
When we turn our thoughts to the spiritual.
One would happen that day as it drew to an end,
And some there would call it a miracle.Just a few miles from the start of the search
Was a road that few vehicles travelled.
But Sarah and Fred were returning from church
When a child staggered onto the gravel.Fred slammed on the brakes and they slid to a stop
Just a touch short of knocking him down.
Then Sarah ran out and with arms swept him up,
Full of joy that the boy had been found.We never will know why the boy did survive
At the time when his mother had perished.
But something inside must have kept him alive,
And for this he will always be cherished.In the end there was light from within the dark cloud,
A faint ray of hope and some promise,
That the one who survived would some day make us proud
That we knew him—wee Timothy Thomas.
Mits stood for a time staring at the book. Then he sat and turned the page towards me. Below the last two verses was a painting of me as a four-year-old, lit by the lights of the car that had almost run me down. My eyes were shut and my mouth was open, as if I was calling out. My yellow T-shirt was hanging off one shoulder, with the front all covered in red. I looked like a terrified, lost baby, and I suppose I was, although I don’t remember anything about that moment. The few memories I do have are strange and make little sense. In fact I only assume that they are memories from then because I can’t attach them to any other time.
‘Do you remember that?’ asked Mits.
‘Not that part. Some other bits, though.’
‘Such as?’
I paused before answering, wondering if I really wanted to drag up those hidden memories. ‘I remember a tooth,’ I said, almost in a whisper. ‘A giant tooth, stuck in a rock. One that glowed in the dark.’
‘Yeah!’ said Mits, his eyes lighting up. ‘Tell me more.’
Straight away I regretted telling him. He was a fantasy nut: fantasy comics, fantasy novels, fantasy movies, fantasy everything. I should have known how he would react to The Tooth. Even I had trouble sorting out which parts of the story were fact and which were fantasy, to Mits there would be no difference between the two.
‘Not now, Mits. Maybe later.’
‘Aw c’mon—’ Then he looked up and saw my face. ‘All right,’ he conceded. ‘But we
will
talk about it later. This could be very important.’
I gave a little smile. ‘Yeah, maybe. But right now we have homework to do.’
Mits’s full name is Michael Ian Todd Smithson. Everyone calls him Mike, but he’s been Mits to me for as long as I can remember. We both live in Napier, which is a city on the east coast of New Zealand’s North Island, in a region called Hawke’s Bay. Napier is just as well known for its past as its present. On 3 February 1931, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck the city and surrounding districts. Two hundred and fifty-six people were killed, which, to date, is the worst New Zealand disaster on record.
Napier is a lot different now. The earthquake lifted land out of the sea, and that has become part of the city. The business area was rebuilt in a 1930s style called Art Deco which uses colours much like the water colours in Grams’s drawings. The earthquake and this colourful architecture have helped Napier to become a popular tourist destination.
Grams was the one who taught me about the history of Napier, partly because she had experienced a lot of it, but mostly because she believed that the past is important. She had plenty of time to make sure I felt the same way, for after Mum died Grams became my mother. In fact, she is the only mother I can remember. Dad and I moved into her little house in Shakespeare Road, and we’ve stayed here ever since. It’s not a big house and it’s definitely not flash. Most of it was built in 1894, so it has seen plenty of changes, including surviving the earthquake.
My great-grandmother was twelve when the earthquake happened—the same age I am now. I know it had a big impact on her life, because that’s when she started making her scrapbooks. The first one was just a large exercise book full of magazine cuttings and some handwritten stories. Already her writing was wonderfully neat and beginning to show the style that would make the later books so beautiful.
Her death, two years ago, was a painful time for me. She had been such an important part of my life that, for a while, I wondered if I would ever be able to cope. Of course I did, and, while I still miss her, I enjoy remembering what she was like. To help me remember, she left me her metal sea chest full of all her special belongings. It is like having my own mini-museum.
This is the chest that Mits and I were fossicking through in the shed on that Friday afternoon in March. We had an assignment to do as a commemoration of the earthquake. Part of it was to write about what it would have been like to have been at school on that day. Grams had already written about her experiences and we planned to modify those.
We found her story and read it through together. It was easy for us to see the scenes that Grams described, because we go to that same school: the buildings are different now, but the grounds are much the same.
We sat at the kitchen table copying out what she had written, changing a few words here and there to make it look like our own work. It was a rush job as I was keen to be off to the Smithsons’ house. I always stayed overnight on Fridays, as Dad went to the pub and was often not home until late.
Mrs Smithson is the nearest thing I have to a mother now that Grams has gone. She treats me as one of the family.
Actually, she treats me as if I’m slightly more than one of the family. This is because she knows how Mum died. It’s not something I ever talk to people about, but I can always tell when somebody knows, because they treat me differently to other kids. As far as I know Grams never showed her poem to anyone—I only found it after she’d died—yet there are a lot of people who feel the same way as she did: that somehow I’m special because I lived and my mother died. It’s not the way I always see things. Sometimes, when I’m feeling low, I easily remember that I was the first to go into the water. At those times I don’t feel very special at all.
Shakespeare Road, where we live, passes up and through the raised part of Napier called Scinde Island. Many thousands of years ago it was an island, and later it would have seemed like an island to the first people to see it, because then it was almost surrounded by sea or swamp. However, since the earthquake it looks just like a hill stuck on the edge of a large plain, and nowadays the major part of it is called Bluff Hill.
Our little house is tucked into the cliffs near the bottom. During winter it hardly gets the sun. Mits’s house is quite the opposite. It sits near the top, facing out to sea. By road it is about a kilometre from our place, but, by ducking through alleys and the back of a couple of sections, I can get there in under three minutes.
The welcome I received that afternoon was no different to usual. Mrs Smithson turned from the sink and waved a cheery hello. Mits’s older twin sisters simply said ‘Hi Tim’ without looking up from their reading. Mr Smithson was not
yet home. He’s a lawyer and often didn’t appear until just before dinner. Mrs Smithson is a great cook and I looked forward to Friday nights just for the meals. There’d always be a range of things that I like, and it was a whole lot different to the packet meals that Dad and I normally ate.
Mits’s room seemed almost as big as our house. It had everything you would ever want in a room: computer, DVD player, panel TV, PlayStation 3, lots of storage space, and a king-sized bed. Tucked away in the corner was the stretcher bed that could be dragged out whenever I stayed.
That night we watched
Eragon
; just one of the fantasy movies from Mits’s DVD collection. I soon found out why he’d selected it. After it was finished, he propped himself up on an elbow and looked over at me. ‘So, what did your tooth look like? Was it anything like the dragon’s?’
‘Maybe,’ I replied without enthusiasm. ‘It might’ve been.’
‘So, it
was
a dragon’s tooth. I knew it would be.’
‘Hold on, Mits. Dragons don’t exist. They’re fantasy, remember?’
He stared at me as if I’d just given him some really bad news. ‘They might not exist now, but that doesn’t mean they never did. If they never existed, then how come there’re so many stories about them?’
I didn’t say anything. We’d had this discussion several times before. Mits wanted to believe in dragons and nothing I could say would stop him.
He took my silence as agreement. ‘So, tell me everything that you remember.’
I gave a little laugh. ‘Everything I remember? Mits, I was only four. It’ll be easier if I tell you what I don’t remember.
I don’t remember playing by the shore. I don’t remember going into the water. Nor being in the water. I don’t remember walking a long way to the road. And I don’t remember being found by a car.’
‘But you remember The Tooth, don’t you? Tell me about The Tooth,’ he said impatiently.
‘All right, all right. I have a picture in my head of crawling out of some water onto a lot of slimy stones.’ I paused for a moment, trying to fit the rest of the images into some sort of sequence. ‘The next picture, I think, is to do with some bushes. I’m trying to get through them, but they won’t let me. It’s almost dark and I want to get to the light. That’s it; I wanted to get to the light.’ I was pleased with myself—this was something I hadn’t remembered for a long time.
‘A-ha,’ said Mits. ‘So The Tooth was glowing.’
‘I don’t know whether it was The Tooth, but something was glowing and I wanted to get out of the dark. But the bushes wouldn’t let me.’
‘How were they stopping you?’
A flash of memory came to me. ‘They were thick and they were stinging me.’
‘Yes!’ shouted Mits, thumping the bed. ‘The bushes were guarding The Tooth. I knew there’d be something like that.’
I almost gave up then. He was off into fantasy land, and when that happened there was nothing I could say that would bring him back. Yet I’d already remembered more than I ever had before, and that was enough to keep me going.
‘There was also a beautiful butterfly.’ This image often came into my mind, yet this was the first time I’d associated it with The Tooth.
‘Tell us more about the bushes.’
‘I dunno. They were just stinging bushes, but somehow I got past them. And I ended up in something like a cave, but it wasn’t. It was freezing, freezing cold. I moved towards the light, hoping to get warm, and that’s when I saw it. It was at the back of the place, stuck in a rock, and surrounded by the glowing things.’ This was the strongest of all my memories, and yet, this time, I realized that it was not The Tooth that was glowing but something around it.
‘Hold it!’ interrupted Mits. ‘This afternoon you said that The Tooth was glowing. Now you’re saying that it was something else.’ Clearly he suspected that I was trying to trick him out of something. ‘Which was it?’
‘The Tooth was not glowing.’
‘But something was glowing?’
‘Yes.’
‘Were they in the rock or on it?’
I thought for a moment. ‘In it.’
This satisfied him. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘I’m glad we cleared that up.’ He waved his hand. ‘Keep going.’
I searched my memories, but nothing more came to the surface. ‘There’s nothing more. That’s the last thing I remember.’
‘That’s it?’ he shouted. ‘That’s it?! What did The Tooth look like? What colour was it? How long? How wide? How sharp? How—You know, what was it like?’
‘I don’t know. All I remember is a white thing sitting in a rock. I can’t say how big it is or how sharp. It might not even be a tooth. It could be a fossil shell or something totally different. Remember, I was only four years old. What did I know then?’
Mits swung his legs off the bed and sat on the edge. He
leaned forward looking at me. After a while he said, ‘Oh, it was a tooth all right. I
know
it was a tooth.’ He looked at me for a while longer. Then he smiled. ‘And you know what, Tiny? We’re going to find it. You and I are going to find The Tooth. And then we’ll be famous. Just you wait and see.’
I said nothing. What could I say? All I could do was hope that by morning he’d have forgotten all about it.