Chapter Thirteen: Angel of Death
In the middle of the night, our two dogs throw themselves at the surf, barking and snarling furiously. A small boat is landing in the moonlight, the moon has moved over to the west now, and seven or eight figures are jumping out of the boat and on to the sand, now they are hauling the boat further up the sand.
Our dogs fall instantly silent. Strange.
I notice one shadow leaning over, leaning down to the dogs and then Deva and Sophie turn quietly and lead him up the beach and towards the pohutukawas where we are just getting out of our sleeping bags. The others follow him and the dogs up to the pohutukawas.
There is talk but we can’t make it out until they are right upon us.
“Here they are.”
“Someone camping.”
“Of course, someone. You don’t think these pups are here all alone.”
“Kia ora.”
“Kia ora,” I reply.
“Kia ora, mate,” says Beau.
“Kia ora, oh, kia ora korua, cheers, hello there, you two. What’s up? Sorry to wake you, mates. Didn’t know youse was here on this beach when we landed, ’til them pups welcomed us.”
Soon, we are sitting around a small fire they make out on the open sand, well above the surf, we are eating baked fish they just caught in Doubtless Bay, and kumara, Māori potatoes, drinking beer and watching the moon falling further towards Puheke Mountain to the west of Doubtless Bay, that ancient extinct little volcano cone.
I notice that three of the seven are Māori, an old man and two teenagers, maybe sixteen, eighteen, hard to say in the light of the moon and fire. The others are Pakeha boys, all but one of them local fellows. That other one has beautiful and thick red hair and has a thick Scottish accent that is hard to follow, beautiful but mysteriously hard to fathom. It turns out he is from Stewart Island, New Zealand’s third Island, the small, beautiful but almost uninhabited Island off the south coast of the South Island. Between New Zealand and Antarctica.
“We’re a bit isolated down there, mate, yaah we kept our accents and naah, I ne’er been to the ole country. Me great-grandparents come out here in, I dunno, come out here a long time ago. And we been in Stewart since. Actually we been livin’ th’air five generations European, 40 generations Māori. And we got trees that been livin’ th’air longer than that.”
The North Island is Maui’s Fish
The South Island is Maui’s canoe
Stewart Island is the Anchor Stone of Maui’s Canoe
Te Ika a Maui — Te Waka a Maui — Te Punga o Te Waka a Maui
“What’s that, mate? Four hundred. We are four hundred or so. We are four hundred or so souls who live th’air year ’round. ’Tis a good, wee place. Cold some, but good.”
“So he come up here to the populated Far North!” They all laugh gently.
“What are youse two doing up here in the Far North? Eh, mates?” This is directed at us, New Zealand’s newest immigrants.
“We live here now. Permanently.”
“Under this pohutukawa tree?”
“Well, no.”
“From? Not Scotland.” They all laugh.
“California.”
“Dude,” says Stewart Island. They all laugh again.
“So where do you stay? When you’re not sleeping on the sand under this grand tree.”
“Well. This is our farm now. We’re going to build a house up there.” I indicate with my head.
“That’s good,” says the old man, the one named Hoani. His is the only Māori name I remember from that night because it almost sounds like “Ronnie” which is what Beau and all my family usually call me.
Now I can joke that I am Aaron Ronnie the-Whole-World-and-a-Slice-of-the-Moon-on the-Beach Allbright. Aaron Hoani the-Whole-World—
So Hoani is the only Māori name I remember from that night. And James is the only Pakeha name I remember from that night’s little landing-party. James was the boy visiting from Stewart Island. I had a brother named James. Or I would have.
“So you want to build up there. That’s good,” the old man nods his head. “That’s good,” he repeats. “As long as you don’t build up there by the pa.”
“Pa,” Beau says.
“Don’t build near the pa and nobody’ll mind.”
“Whose pa?” says Beau. I wonder, too. What’s the old man talking about?
He laughs. They all laugh.
“Pa, pa. You don’t know what a pa is. No I guess you got no pa in 90210. Or in The O.C.”
“No pa in th’ Hooollywoood,” says Stewart Island, drawing his odd vowels out as long as possible.
You just can’t get away from American TV and movies, even in the Far North of New Zealand.
Hoani goes on to explain that a pa is an ancient Māori fortified village. Built as refuges in times of war, they were secure places for the people to live and store food. Tangata Māori lived in open settlements most of the time, only going to the pa in times of trouble. Pa were always on the tops of hills so the people could see in all directions.
Times of Trouble.
Times of Trouble, I think, looking around at the peace and beauty.
Aaron do you know you have leukemia
“New Zealand is full of pa. Look at the hills that are terraced and flattened on top and you’ll find traces of a pa. Don’t build there or near there. He pointed to the highest place on our farm, off to the west side on the hilltop. “Māori don’t like you to build near there. Dead or alive don’t like it. Too many killed around pa in the old days.”
I told them what had happened to me the afternoon before. “Big, something heavy back over my shoulder. I could feel it, physically. Big. Heavy. The closest I can find words to describe it.”
“So you were visited,” he said. Almost inaudible. “And told.” Everyone remained quiet for a time. Only the logs on the fire crackled, the wood hissed and popped at us.
I looked across the moonlit Bay to Whatuwhiwhi and imagined Dee sound asleep, Kanji and Poggio making cat dreams. Or maybe Dee was walking around the house talking to herself in the middle of the night, as she often did. Talking loud because she cannot hear herself and thinks no one else can either. I thought of Beau’s sister Arleen. Dee had told me the story so many times that it almost felt as if I, too, had been there and lived through it.
Beau was only eight, his big sister Arleen was sixteen. Dee was troubled by a bad feeling.
“Bertha, my name is going to be splashed all over the front pages of the papers. And I’m telling you, Bertie, it’s not nothing. Something bad is going to happen, I don’t know what it is but it’s bad, really bad, Bertha.”
Dee put the last of the pastries in the white box and closed the lid, fastening it with bright red Beret-shaped tape stickers that read, The Little Basque Dough Boy. She accepted the bills and made change for her regular customer and best friend.
“Dee, just stop worrying yourself to death. You’re just having your period.”
“No. Something bad. Something bad is going to happen. Real bad.”
“Now how do you know that, Dee? How? Just tell me that.”
“I have a feeling. When I have a feeling like this—”
She sat down on a stool behind the counter. She felt dizzy. “A feeling like this—I just know.”
Two days later, something was wrong with the hot water heater at the little house on Longwood Avenue and there was no hot water. Dee was ironing clothes and so Arleen was boiling water and carrying it to the tub for Beau’s bath.
“There you go Beau La Joie, our little Beautiful Joy.” Arleen handed Beau a clean towel and a new bar of ivory soap, his favorite because it would float in the tub like a boat. No matter how many times he crashed it and sank it, it would always come up again.
“Watch out, Murielle, we’re going to crash!” Murielle was Beau’s imaginary friend.
Grandpapa La Joie, Pépé La Joie, always teased little Beau by saying She is rocked but does not sink, petit Beau, it is the motto of Paris, she is tossed by the waves but is not sunk, fluctuat nec mergitur, you’ll visit France and see it on the coat of arms when you grow up.
Arleen gave Beau the new bar of soap and tousled his thick black hair. “Scrub and soak and go to bed all clean and have a sweet little dough boy pastry dream. Sleep with the angels. Me and my friends we’re going bowling tonight.” She kissed him on the top of his head.
Beau La Joie Rodrigue. Never again saw his big sister Arleen alive.
Arleen went out with three girlfriends in a Ford Galaxy, a beautiful new convertible owned by the father of the only rich girl of the four. When they left the bowling alley, while Beau was home fast asleep—
Did he dream? Did he sleep that night with the angels?
—the girls were involved in a near collision with another car and they ran off the highway and dead straight into a giant oak tree.
Like this giant pohutukawa we’re sitting under so far away in New Zealand, I thought to myself.
Arleen and two other girls were in the front seat. One friend, 15, an only child, exquisitely beautiful as Beau remembers, was in the back seat.
Arleen and the one girl in the back seat were killed instantly. The other two girls were in critical condition but survived.
Arleen was named as the driver and it was said in the newspapers that she was speeding recklessly. Dee was quoted as saying none of this was true and they put her own photo in with the newspaper account, along with a photo of the wrecked car at the scene of the accident, and with the high school photos of the four girls.
On the front page. For four days running this was the biggest story in the area.
“This is not true. My daughter Arleen was not driving that car.”
Dee had one of her feelings.
Laurie, the girl whose father owned the convertible, took to visiting Dee and Beau. She would drop by at least once a week. She and Arleen had been good friends but she had never come to the house so often. Dee and Beau and Laurie would sit in the living room, awkwardly, quiet. Finally, one day, Dee put a stop to it.
“Laurie, I’m sorry. Please, dear. I don’t want you to come visit me and Beau anymore. It’s just too painful. I’m sorry, dear, I’m so sorry but please don’t come again. We’re both so sorry.” Beau started crying softly. He still does if he talks about it. A lifetime later.
Eighteen months after Laurie’s last visit to the little white house on Longwood Avenue, Dee was sued by the girl’s father, the owner of the beautiful Ford Galaxy convertible. And she was sued by the distraught parents whose only child had been in the back seat of the car.
But during the trial, the truth came out. Laurie had been driving. Fast. A car filled with teenage boys had overtaken them and as it passed, Laurie panicked and ran off the road.
Arleen was in the front passenger seat, in the middle. The engine of the car had come straight back and crushed her to death. Laurie had been driving and somehow was thrown clear of the car on impact. She had been frightened and said Arleen was the driver. She thought it didn’t matter to Arleen since she was dead and—
Laurie broke down and admitted everything. Dee always knew the truth and the girl knew that Dee knew. Somehow.
Besides the trauma of losing her daughter, Dee never recovered, I believe, from the fact that she knew in advance that something bad was going to happen. If she knew that, why didn’t she know what the bad thing was, why wasn’t she given enough knowledge to prevent it? Was she somehow at fault? This, I gathered from the way she always told her story, is what she thought and still believed or feared.
Another casualty was Dee’s customer and friend, Bertha. She went into shock and did not, or could not, speak a word for months. Once she spoke again, she was always different ever afterwards. Her spontaneous joy was gone.
I wondered. Had Dee been visited? By whom? Or what? And why such partial information? It did not seem fair.
Had I been visited the afternoon before? By whom? Or what? Why?
Times of Troubles. I wondered.
I thought, too, of my own mother, Eva. I had grown up with the story of my brother’s death. He was the second child, my older sister was only four years old at the time. All this happened years before I came into the world but again, I heard the story so many times that it seemed as if I had been present, I had the movie in my heart and head and had replayed it so many times that I was a witness.
My uncle Arnie, my father’s younger brother, only seventeen years old at the time, was visiting my folk’s little shack of a house, down at the end of a country road, a dirt track really, in the backwoods. He had driven his truck, I don’t know why, my mother always added. I don’t know why he drove that big truck all the way out there. When he left, Arrnie backed over my little brother, who adored him. James was killed instantly.
But just before we moved to New Zealand, a new twist, new information from my ninety-year-old Mom, something she told me in a story that had become almost a litany in the order of its facts and retelling. Something new.
She told me that my oldest sister is the only one who saw the whole thing. She was only four years old at the time, as I have said, and she was on the front porch. It was her scream when it happened that brought the truck to a halt after it backed over James and brought my mother running out to see what was wrong.
But this is the strangest piece of information. Something Mom never told me in all my growing up years, nor in all my adult years. Not until she told me for the first time just before Beau and I moved to New Zealand.
My brother, James, was sleeping in the bedroom. Mom had put him down for a nap in the only bedroom in the little shack. She heard him cry out loudly, in terror, and she rushed in to get him. But, no, he was fast asleep.
A little later, she heard him cry out loudly again and she went in again to get him. But, no. Again, he was sound asleep. Sound asleep and peaceful. A little angel sleeping quietly in the same position. He had not even moved.
A third time she distinctly heard him scream and she went in yet again. Sound asleep and peaceful.
How then did he get up and go out the back and around to the front of the house when my uncle was leaving, without my mother hearing him? How did it all happen without her hearing anything? Why did she hear him yell three times, in her mind? When he was fast asleep?
She always believed she had heard him scream before it happened. She had heard his scream of death before it occurred. Three times she heard it. And yet. Why? To what avail?
We had to leave that house She went back to her old, traditional retelling I kept finding little things he liked to play with, stuck in little places in the yard and around the house, little things he liked to play with He hid them, you know, to play with them later I told your father, we have to get out of here Or I will go crazy
Eight years later, I was born. The only son in a family of four children. The only surviving son. My mother had a nervous breakdown after I was born.
Times of Trouble
“It’s calm out there tonight. The Sea is like a great big lake this night. Flat. Smooth.” The old man threw a small stick on the fire.
“But she can be rough, the moana nui. I seen some rough seas.”
END OF CHAPTER THIRTEEN
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Aaron Allbright’s novel in five parts will be published soon.
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?