Witi Ihimaera - Bulibasha

My sisters and I loved the shearing season. To this day I don’t know why. Why, for instance, would anyone love all those dusty three- or four-hour journeys to the sheds? Usually we had to travel in convoy to ensure support for one of the other cars just in case it broke down, its radiator boiled over, tyres were punctured, batteries ran flat or an axle snapped under the weight of our accumulated baggage. One year Uncle Hone’s old car gave up the ghost entirely. Dad hitched a tow line which broke as we were going up a steep gradient and Uncle Hone’s car careened back in a wild ride down to the bottom of the hill. It had no brakes. In the second attempt to get the car up the gradient, Dad lashed a spare tyre to the front bumper and our car pushed Uncle Hone’s car to the top of the hill. Uncle was supposed to wait for us at the top so we could get in front of him and prevent a dangerous no-brakes descent. Uncle must have forgotten, because no sooner had he reached the top than down the other side he went.

I can still remember that car as it rocketed out of control down to the bottom of the gradient. How Uncle managed to hold the road was a mystery — we agreed later that it must have been because the weight of all the people inside kept the car from flipping on the corners. On our own way down we had to stop every five minutes to pick up pots and pans, bedding, boxes of food and tin plates that had come loose on that pell-mell descent. What else could we do except dissolve into gales of laughter when we reached the bottom ourselves?

Then there were the fords, where one car would get stuck in the middle of the river. My aunts would yell out, ‘I could do with a swim!’ Out they’d get, their muscled arms heaving away until the car was free. My Aunt Sephora discovered that she had natural flotation when she slipped and went arse over kite down a waterfall and along the deep river.

‘Help!’ she cried. She couldn’t swim. She bobbed along, kept afloat by her natural buoyancy, her red dress inflated by trapped air like a balloon.

After that, my uncles used to sing in jest, ‘When the red red robin goes bob bob bobbin along —’

More dangerous were the swing bridges when some of the boards gave way and the car’s wheels went through. We’d all get out, carefully unload the car to make it lighter, lift the car up from the holes in the bridge and load up again once the car had reached the other side.

Finally there were roads that had been washed out or blocked by slips or peppered with mud-filled potholes. Some places had no roads at all. When such hazards or challenges presented themselves, Uncle Hone would say, ‘She’s right. Let’s have smoko.’ Uncle Hone was the boss of Mahana Four. After smoko, while we kids were skinny dipping in the river, he would korero the problem with the adults and, by the time we got back, something had been worked out. Off we would go, backtracking or sidetracking or driving down to the river bed and motoring along it until we could get back onto the road.

We drove, pushed, pulled and sometimes carried our cars piece by piece to get to the sheds.

‘It was easier when we had packhorses,’ Grandfather Tamihana said.

My mother never liked travelling at night. We had a four-hour drive ahead to the Williamson station and ‘Amberleigh’ at the back of Tolaga Bay.

‘As long as we get there by midnight,’ she said.

Like many Maori, Mum believed that kehua — ghosts — were abroad at night; humans were therefore taking their lives into their hands when they traversed the kehua’s domain. She was calm enough for the first part of our journey across the red suspension bridge and through Gisborne, but when we left Wainui Beach she started to get nervous. The darkness fell very quickly and the only lights were those from farms floating away like ships on a dark sea. Even the moonlight on the road was intermittent. Dark clouds boiled up from the south. To cap it off, it began to rain.

‘E koe,’ Mum said, nodding her head. ‘I knew this would happen.’

The rain didn’t last long — luckily, as we didn’t have a tarpaulin for the hens on top of the car — but then there was a bang and Pani’s car skidded to a halt. A burst back tyre.

‘E koe,’ Mum said again. All her fears were being confirmed. ‘The kehuas want us to go outside so they can jump from the scrub and eat us.’

Dad scoffed at her. He positioned our car close behind Pani’s and, in the light of the headlights, they jacked the car and began changing the tyre. No sooner had the engine stopped than we heard the noises of the bush, alive with bird calls, wild pigs rooting in the scrub, the sounds of the hunter and the hunted.

I got out to help. Glory wanted to come with me, but, ‘You stay in the car,’ Mum said to her. ‘You’re just the right size to be taken by a flying kehua to its nest of hungry chicks.’

We arrived at Tolaga Bay at around eleven that night. Half an hour out of Tolaga, just as Pani’s car got to the top of a precipitous road, its radiator boiled over.

‘E koe,’ our mother said between compressed lips. ‘We’re never going to get to Amberleigh by midnight.’

That meant that we would all be eaten up by kehua. Ah well, nothing else to do except have our last feed on this earth. So out came the food basket, and we ate and drank as if it was the final supper — Maori bread buttered with margarine and golden syrup, washed down with raspberry cordial.

Out of the darkness, Aunt Ruth began to tell a story about the family. There were always stories during the shearing; they leavened our work with fun, excitement and a sense of history. The stories recounted the life of the family, our travails and triumphs, defeats and victories. But this was a story I had not heard before, telling the reason why the Mahana and Poata families were always fighting. It had nothing to do with religion at all.

Grandmother Ramona was sixteen and Grandfather was nineteen when they met, just before the Great War, in 1914.

‘Your grandfather tried to enlist,’ Aunt Ruth said. I already knew this; Grandfather carried a grudge against the army when he was refused. ‘It wasn’t his fault. His parents wouldn’t have let him go anyway. Why should they let him go to fight a white man’s war? We’d only just finished one against him!’

Grandfather was visiting Grandmother’s village. They took one look at each other, and it was love at first sight.

‘They were struck by the lightning rod of God,’ Aunt Ruth said. ‘If that lightning strikes, you’re the dead duck.’ Poor Aunt Ruth — the Lord hadn’t pronged her and Uncle Albie with his divine sign, that’s for sure. ‘The trouble was, Mother Ramona was already engaged to be married to a soldier who had just joined the Pioneer Battalion in the First World War.’

You guessed it: Rupeni Poata.

‘It was all jacked up between Mother Ramona’s family and Rupeni’s family,’ Aunt Ruth said, ‘but Mum never loved Rupeni. However, her people told her, “Poor Rupeni, he could get killed and have no children”, or “This is a great sacrifice Rupeni is doing, so can’t you make his last days in our village happy?” Despite her love for our father, she agreed to marry Rupeni. Of course Dad was heartbroken. He tried to dissuade her. She said it was too late. She had to honour her family’s wishes and marry Rupeni. Our mother was supposed to be the innocent sacrifice to Rupeni’s lustful desires.’

‘What’s lustful desires?’ Glory asked.

‘Ask your brother,’ Aunt Ruth answered, casting me a murderous glance. Why me?

‘The day of the wedding came,’ Aunt Ruth continued. ‘Our father rode his white horse over to Mum’s village to ask her once more not to go through with the wedding. He arrived just as she was setting off to the church. She was wearing a beautiful long wedding dress, the one she has to this day locked in her memory chest. She was on the verandah with her father and family. Her father was outraged to see our father and got his old rifle. He didn’t want any young buck from another village, especially Waituhi, to soil his goods. But our mother restrained him from shooting our father —’