Keri Hulme - The Bone People

"And she said, 'Go away, learn some limits of yourself. Learn to enjoy all that towns and people can offer you. Get married if you must. But when I send for you, come back!' By then I had learned to obey her least word without hesitation. She was a terrifying old woman, and she had more knowledge than any one person should have.

"I went, and I found I was a stranger wherever I went. Women were afraid of me. I was too serious for the men to find me a good companion. I drank and learned to dislike drinking. I took to smoking, and enjoyed that. I went to bed with whores and easy women, and found my imagination and the blurred pictures I had retained from childhood were more vivid that what occurred. I read a lot. I listened a lot. Then I came back to my grandmother, and returned to her seventeen gold sovereigns. I didn't say much about what I had done, and she didn't ask at all.

"Since then I have left this place one time only. That was two years ago, when I became ill with phlegm in my chest… it wasn't the illness that drove me away, but fear that I would die before the people I was waiting for arrived, digger and stranger and broken man. I made a deal with a lawyer in Durville, that is the town nearest here… a strange deal he called it, but an acceptable one. I made a will, which is unsigned as yet, with no beneficiary, yet. I left with the lawyer a complicated design which I said I would draw over the name of the beneficiary and my own name on my copy of the will, so he would know I had completed it with a sound mind, without being under duress. I told him if he never received the will, if I died too soon, he must hold the land in trust, and find a suitable person… but I didn't think that would happen, even then. The lawyer directed me to a doctor, and the doctor healed the lung disease, and then, days later, I returned home.

"My grandmother died nearly forty years ago, and she died hard. She whispered to me, before she choked, that I must wait until the stranger came home, or until the digger began the planting, or until the broken man was found and healed. Then they could bear my charge. They could keep the watch. They could decide the next step on the way… she instructed me to dispose of her as I told you. She said if I deserted this place, the land would curse me beyond my death. 'Keep watch!' she cried to me, 'Keep watch as I have taught you! While you watch, it will be safe, and when your watch is done, if you have kept faith with me, it will be safe…' she pleaded in the end, when her mind snapped, pleaded with me, which she had not done since that long-ago day she collected me from the farm.

"I have remained, and kept watch here. Many times, I have cursed bitterly, because I am doomed to live alone and lonely, and to what end? To keep guard over something that modern people deem superstitious nonsense. Something modern people decry as an illusion. And yet, forty years after the death of my grandmother, I am visited by the person who bears in his heart two of the people my grandmother foretold. And he is the broken man… is it not strange?"

The soft high voice has been hypnotic. The old-fashioned phrases slide easily into Joe's ears. He has been staring, eyes fixed on the fierce sharpened face. He hasn't been aware of thinking anything while the voice told the tale.

Told what? he asks himself, told me nothing. A tale of a lonely old man, warped and defeated by a domineering old woman… but he says,

"Yes, very strange, quietly.

The old man chuckles. It has a breathless sound to it, as though there is not enough air left in his lungs to support mirth.

"And you think I have gone off my head with the pressure of loneliness and the years, eh? Or maybe you think I was like that to begin with? hell!"

Joe looks at the table, blushing. He studies his soup cup; the mouthful left in the bottom has a scum on top, with golden globules of fat studded over its surface. He doesn't say anything. The old man wheezes again.

"Small wonder!" he adds, "I think I would too, if I were you. But let me tell you some more… o Joseph, would you have some tobacco with you? See," taking out his battered tin, and holding it out open, "mine is nearly finished. Like me." Cackle, cackle.

No-one can laugh at their madness if they're mad, can they? Joe stands clumsily.

"I've got some smokes in my pack, I'll get them."

He fetches the two cigars and places them on the kaumatua's lap.

"Anana!" he says with surprise and delight. "These were the kind I smoked first of all… what a kind gift."

He's peeling the wrapping off one with shaky fingers.

"My friend Kerewin left those for me. She left them with my relations in the town I came from, with a letter. Well, it isn't really a letter…."

The old man nods.

"Tell me soon, if there is time… but first I must finish what I have to tell you."

He lights the cigar carefully, and breathes out smoke with a deep sigh of satisfaction.

"It is odd how the mouth and nose remember, nei? Well, let me see how to reassure you… I think the heart of the matter is that I was waiting for you, the broken man. Or one of the other two People, right?"

To Joe's nod, he answers,

"I have been here for fifty years, no, nearly sixty years, and very few people have come during that time. There was a sawmill here at one time, but they quickly cut down all the trees, and it ceased to operate before my grandmother died. After her death, there have come pig and deer shooters. Once, three men, looking for gold. Some survey people. I watched what they did, and where they went. I followed them secretly. And never did any of them fit the descriptions. They were all whole people, rough strong ordinary men. There was one man who was very different, and for a while-"

For a minute, the old man muses, his eyes clouded. Then he shakes his head, and his eyes become bright and aware again.

"When I came back from the town, after preparing this will of mine, I didn't come back alone. There was a man with me, who wanted to die in peace. He had been in hospital, in the bed next to mine, and he had said this, and I invited him to come here to die. That is his picture," gesturing to the photograph of the young white man, "and his name was Timon. He was a singer, he said. He had no family. His wife was dead, and his child gone too, he said, and soon they would all meet again. He seemed very happy at that thought. Though it may have been the drugs. He injected himself with them many times a day, and he was always resigned and placid afterwards. One day, a week after he arrived, I found him dead outside the door, the needle still in his arm. He looked so peaceful that I wept. I stopped the bus the following day, and told the driver, and later that afternoon, the police arrived and took him away."

A puff of smoke.

The old man says,

"He was a beautiful man, or he had been beautiful. He had a marvellous voice, that even in his pain could ring and soar. He didn't say very much about himself, only that he had been a singer, and that he lived with a lady old enough to be his mother. Those were his words. 'She's old enough to be my mother, and mother of god, she's lovely. I mean, she was. She wasn't lovely when she died.' He cried sometimes for her and his child. He cried at other times because he said they were all far from home. And sometimes, he cried for me. 'A wait I could sing of,' he said, 'the wait of a hero indeed… may it finish soon, sir, very soon.' He never called me anything but Sir, although I had given him my name and circumstances."

He shrugs.

"The day before he died, he sang a song for me. I don't know what the language was, but the melody has haunted me since. That day he gave me the photograph. He had had it taken before he went into hospital, he said, because he thought he was going to die there, and he wanted to send it to someone, a woman I think, as a memento of him. But he said he wanted to give me all there was to give, and that was all there was, his song and his picture. I wish I could remember enough of his song to give it to you. It is a shame I cannot keep his song going." He drew a last inhalation of smoke and coughed as he breathed