Chapter Six: So Comes the Big War
Te Ika-A-Maui.
Maui-tikitiki-a-Taranga wanted to go fishing with his older brothers, but they refused to take him. So he hid under the bottom boards of the canoe and only revealed himself when the vessel was far out to sea. The brothers were annoyed with Maui and wanted to return him to shore, but by this time the land was too far away. So they began to fish, and after a long while they filled their canoe with their catch.
Now Maui produced his own hook, the barb of which was made from a fragment of their dead grandmother’s jawbone. The brothers refused to give him bait, so Maui struck his nose and smeared the hook with his own blood. He lowered his line and almost immediately hooked a fish of great magnitude. The only way he could haul it up was by reciting a sacred chant, a holy chant which makes weights light.
When the enormous fish broke the surface, Maui left the canoe to find a tohunga, a tribal priest, to make an offering to the Gods and perform the appropriate ritual. He warned his brothers not to touch the fish until this was done. As soon as he was gone, however, the brothers leapt from the canoe and began to scale the fish and to hack bits from it.
The fish raised its fins, opened its mouth and writhed in agony. Then the sun rose and made the flesh solid underfoot. The surface of the fish became rough and mountainous because of the rough mutilation. It remained that way and the name given to it was Te Ika-a-Maui. The Fish of Maui. This is the North Island of New Zealand.
“Hail Mary, full of Grace, the Lord is with thee, blessèd art thou amongst women and blessed—"
As soon as we entered the front door of the little house in Whatuwhiwhi, we could hear Dee’s voice, coming from the living room, whispering, mumbling, petering out, then starting again.
“Hail Mary, full of Grace, the Lord is with thee, blessèd art thou amongst women and blessed—”
We left our shoes inside the door and tried to enter the living room as quietly as possible.
“Hail Mary, full of Grace—oh you’re back. How’d it go with the builder?”
“Don’t let us disturb your Rosary,” said Beau. “We’ll fill you in later.”
Dee was sitting in the big white easy chair with both legs stretched out on the ottoman. Kanji was lying across her lap, well ok, he was lying across her fat tummy because Dee didn’t have much of a lap when she sat down.
(I read here that there are two dangerous shapes for old people to have, she once told us, two dangerous shapes, an apple shape or a pear shape, I’m an apple, she had said with a happy look on her face as she looked up from a Health Digest. Back in Palm Springs she always read each month’s issue religiously from cover to cover. She enjoyed reading its good health advice and enjoyed even more the disobeying of it.)
Kanji’s beautiful blind eyes were closed, and his purring machine was turned on at full blast. The other animals were out on the deck, snoozing together in the warm winter sun. Dee put down her Rosary.
“There were big fish in the Bay today while you Boys were gone. Huge. Swimming back and forth around the point here.” Dee indicated the little peninsula point our house sat on. “I been trying to do my Rosary all morning long but I can’t get through it, it’s so beautiful I get lost in the Bay, just looking out. So beautiful. Now I understand why Marcel never came back to New Bedford.”
“They were Orcas, Ma, we saw them over at the farm, too. They’ve been making the rounds of the whole Bay all morning long.”
“Big fish,” Dee nodded. “But I saw on PBS that orcas aren’t fish. They give birth to their babies just like we do.”
“They calve every year just around the corner of the point here at Pattiya Beach,” I said.
Dee stroked Kanji’s snow-white fur and gazed out at the Bay. Kanji raised his head, stroked his whiskers and yawned widely. Dee yawned too.
“PBS said the mother helps her calf swim to the surface within the first ten seconds, to take its first breath, you understand. And the mother and calf stay together for a year or longer. And they live to fifty years or more. Doesn’t sound so long to me. I still didn’t know anything when I was only fifty.
“Quick,” she said slowly. “It goes quick. And everybody always wants the same thing. More time.
“Anyhow, they look just like big fish. Really big fish. Imagine hooking a fish like that on your line, Oy vey.”
Beau smiled. “Aaron and I are gonna take you up to the top of the North Island tomorrow. Spirits Bay and Cape Reinga. Where the spirits jump off the Islands when they go—” He didn’t finish his sentence.
The night before we were laughing so hard about I don’t know what. Dee and I always played off each other, to Beau’s supreme amusement, one of us getting more outrageous than the other. Well, she was just naturally outrageous but I had to work at it.
Ray and Marie, our next door neighbors, had gone fishing and brought us a beautiful filleted snapper, ready to cook, and some lovely terakihi, smoked by Ray himself. Marie is blind but unlike Kanji, she has been blind since her birth 65 years ago. It’s strange but our next door neighbor back in Orange County had been blind, too. Why does life present you with all these odd coincidences?
As Beau put the beautiful snapper down on the table, we three sat for a few seconds and looked at it. The aroma was delicious, the sight was delicious. We delayed the taste for a few seconds of gratitude. I thought of the snapper swimming around in the beautiful clear waters of Doubtless Bay just that morning, not a care in the world. These kind of thoughts always humbled me into silence. This time I thought of Doc Stearn’s words. Aaron, do you know—?
“Thank you God for this beautiful meal.”
“Amen.”
“Om, Shanti Shanti Shanti.”
“So I’m six months pregnant,” says Dee loudly.
Remember, she is hard-of-hearing and lost her hearing-aid somewhere on the airplane coming over from California. Like a lot of people with poor hearing, she always speaks very loud. Even when she wants to whisper something confidential in public.
[i.e. Dee and I are sitting on a park bench in Newport Beach, California. Beau is off looking at flowers or something. Or just walking around and being beautiful. An old guy comes along and sits down on another bench facing Dee and me. He smiles. He is no more than ten feet away from us. Judging from the wrinkles on his face and hands, from his pained way of moving, from the huge sigh of relief he let out as he sat down on the bench, I would say he must have been about 150 or 200 years old. I mean, this gentleman was Methuselah in the flesh, now hanging around the O.C. He was nicely dressed. But had a cheap toupee. And this bargain toupee was badly askew.
Dee leans up against me and pokes me gently with her elbow, looking at the sky above the old gent’s slipping toupee. She whispered in a booming voice: “Does he think he looks good like that?!” Then she straightens up and looks straight ahead, as though nothing has transpired. A look of innocence on her face. I am praying that the old dude is completely deaf.]
“So I’m six months pregnant.”
Six months pregnant. I don’t say anything. Dee is 78 years old.
Beau looks down at his plate and says in a quiet voice that only I will hear, “Estelle Getty, the Golden Girls, Sicily 1928, picture this.”
I get the picture. Dee’s telling a story. About when she was six months pregnant. It turns out to be a story about Arleen, who died tragically at sixteen when Beau was only eight. It was a story Beau and I had heard a hundred times before, told from different angles. But at the end of the story Dee veered off, took a different tack, turned her head into and through the winds of memory. I think it was being in New Zealand that took her there.
“When I was fifteen I had my first boyfriend. Marcel Bousquet. A nice boy. Oh, my first love! So sweet and so handsome. So handsome, that Marcel. But he had no future, you know, his whole family had no present and no future. My family had no present, oy gevalt, but I was determined to have a future. I’m only fifteen and already working ten-twelve hours a day in the beauty shop I bought ten years later. So I says, Marcel you gotta do something different, I don’t wanna be poor all my life, you gottta get a trade, learn to do something, then come back and see me, so he does it, goes off and studies to be an electrician and he becomes one!”
Dee looks out at Doubtless Bay. But sees New Bedford, Massachusetts, 1941.
“So comes the Big War and Marcel goes off to the Pacific with the Navy. As an electrician. Was I proud of him! And of me too, ’cause I’m the one who told him, Marcel you gotta do something different.” She shook her head slowly. “Oh-boy-oh-boy.”
“So he’s an electrician with the Navy on the USS Alhena and off they go to Australia, and you know what? Marcel, he stays in Australia. Never comes back. Never comes back to New Bedford. Never comes back for me. He got married in Australia and never comes back again to New Bedford. I never see him again.
“New Zealand is so beautiful, now I understand why he never comes back. Now I understand.”
Like many Americans, Dee thinks Australia and New Zealand are more or less the same — which they are not.
Dee looks up from her plate and then gazes out at Doubtless Bay. “You know, I wonder what happened to Marcel.”
“I’ll Google him,” I said, jumping up from the table. I Google everything. That’s me, Professor Google. This time, however, Google was not one of my best ideas.
I run to the garage off the kitchen, which is where we have our computer set up in the little bungalow, and type it in.
M-a-r-c-e-l-B-o-u-s-q-u-e-t-A-u-s-t-r-a-l-i-a
He pops up on the screen. By this time, Beau is looking over my shoulder.
“Oh God.”
There is a newspaper photo of the handsomest old man, thick white head of wavy hair, white moustache. The most beautiful smile you have ever seen on anybody. Except on Beau’s beautiful face. Beau, the spitting image of Marcel, only years younger. If Beau hadn’t been born years after Marcel went to the Pacific, you would say, yep, father-son.
Dee obviously had her type when it came to her taste in men.
Dee has made her slow way to the garage, down the two steps from the kitchen, the steps which give her so much trouble, and is now looking over my shoulder too.
“That’s him! Oh, my God!” She starts to read. “Marcel Bousquet, Sydney, Australia—
“Oh!”
Beau puts his arm around her shoulder.
“Oh!”
End of Chapter Six.
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Aaron Allbright’s novel in five parts will be published on Substack.
Before too long!
In a Desert or a City
BOOK I
‘PRINCE CARTIER’ or HOW I LEARNED TO LOVE BEING GAY WITH MY SAUDI PRINCE AND TO START WORRYING
BOOK II
MONSIEUR LE PRINCE, PARIS
BOOK III
THE MYSTERIES OF PARIS
BOOK IV
TYROMANCY AND LUCIFER
BOOK V
WHY WAIT FOR THE LIGHT?