Witi Ihimaera - Pounamu Pounamu

Cursing to himself, Hema puts the milk bucket down and goes off in search of the disobedient cows. It is a dismal prospect because the paddock is a big one with two great humps in the middle and a steep incline to a patch of willow trees at one end. There are so many blind spots in the paddock too, and this means he’ll have to go up into them to look for the cows. Gosh, his father was dumb putting a cow bail in this paddock. Just because he didn’t have to do the milking every day. The pain of it!

Hema begins walking along the fenceline. Some of the battens are rotten and he kicks one to show his displeasure. Oh hell! It’s fallen off! He picks it up and wedges it against the fence, otherwise Dad might get him to nail the whole fence up properly. It wasn’t fair. It was always, Hema do this and Hema do that. Why wasn’t Georgina a boy too? All she did was the cooking now and then and maybe washing the dishes. And even though he was two years younger than she was, he had to milk the cows, light the fire in the morning, feed the dogs and Mum’s stupid fowls, chop the wood and millions of other things! But now that he’s a man, aha, things are going to change around here. He’ll soon crack that whip! And Georgina putting on all those airs as if she was a lady. Huh! She’s as much a lady as her b. behind, and that’s being charitable. He’ll fix her.

‘Georgina!’

‘Yes, Master?’

‘Get my kai, chop some wood, press my pants, comb my hair, make my bed, shine my shoes, cut my lunch, and then come here and kiss my … You dogs just shut up!’ he yells.

Hema has come to one corner of the seven-sided field and the dogs have started to howl and bark from the direction of the shearing shed. They rattle at their chains, hoping that Hema has brought them their breakfast. But he ain’t no servant to dogs neither! The dogs begin to howl more loudly and Hema answers them. He lifts his throat into the morning air and …

‘Oooowwwwwuuuuu,’ he yodels.

The dogs rejoin in chorus, and for a few minutes boy and dogs embark on a cacophonic symphony of excruciating power. The melody screams through the air, is counter-pointed, floridly embellished with little barks and grunts and small squealed appoggiaturi from the pups, and then soars again. Then Hema laughs. He turns to the dogs and wiggles his behind. Stupid dogs! They’ll just have to wait. Everybody will have to wait now that he’s a man! He sniffs disdainfully, delicately skirts two large cow pats, puts his nose in the air and his foot in a third.

‘Aaargh!’

He retreats and a steely gleam issues from his diamond-hard eyes. Vengeance will be his, because he is the Lord. Just wait until he gets Queenie and Red. He’ll teach them not to leave their deposits all over the place.

With renewed purpose, Hema continues to follow the fenceline as it zigs and zags back towards the house. He climbs the first incline and is gasping and chuffing for air when he finally reaches the top. He moans: does his father think he’s a train? Fancy making this paddock the one for the cows! He looks to the front of him and looks to the back of him. He looks to all sides too. Queenie and Red are nowhere to be seen. Misery. That means they must be on the other side of the next hump, dang and blast it. He starts to walk in that direction when suddenly, he hears wild geese cackling overhead. He looks up and sees them, arrowing sharply through the bright cloudless morning. So beautiful they are, and they have all the sky as their dominion. Breathless with wonder and happiness, he watches them until they are like feathers falling over the pine trees and farmhouse, falling, falling, then gone. And with their going, he feels strangely sad. It is good to be a man, but how wonderful it has been to be just a kid! He looks down upon the farm and the house and caresses them with his memory.

To the left of him is the house. It is still and quiet and the smoke from the chimney is soft and grey. Is his mother up yet? From here, he can see the kitchen window.

And from here he can remember …

Our farm isn’t flash, but we’re lucky to have it. It’s one of the ‘pieces of broken biscuit’ that were left to our tribe after most of our land was taken in the land wars. Dad’s mother, Nani Miro, paid the rates on it until she died to make sure it stayed in the family. We still miss her.

The roof of our house needs painting again, but Dad will leave it as he always does for ‘next year’. The guttering needs fixing too. There were bees in the roof last summer. Dad tried to get rid of them but almost burnt the house down. The bees are still there and will probably stay until the house falls down. It doesn’t hurt when they sting. In the winter when it was cold, the bees liked to drop through the cracks in the ceiling and crawl into warm places such as the beds. Georgina didn’t like that. But bees don’t hurt when they sting. Old Bulla, the roadman, used to catch them with his hands, he wasn’t afraid! They’re only a nuisance in the summer when the grapes and the fruit trees are ripe. Last summer the grapes were purple-sweet and the bees soared all over the place in drunken delight.

Behind the house is the woodshed, the wash-house, Dad’s tool shed and a few other sheds that aren’t used. Mum has to wash the clothes by hand. Until Dad finally built the bathroom, all us kids were washed in the copper. In one of the unused sheds is a big stack of old newspapers and some of them have reports on the Second World War and King George’s England. One of the wild cats had her kittens in there, right on top of King George! That cat was just plain careless. She had a lot of kittens, but they went wild too. They would only come to Hine, my younger sister, and used to follow her as if she were their mother.

Next to the sheds is the vegetable garden. Mum got sick of waiting for Dad to build a fence around it so she did it herself. Before that, Bluey and Stupid, who are two of our horses, used to eat all Mum’s cabbages. Stupid could eat anything! He used to come to the kitchen window and we would throw him the potato peelings and our kai if we didn’t like it. The hens would come to the window too. And then we got Porky, our pig, and he used to join the hens and Stupid and snuffle around for the kai. Actually, Porky turned out to be a she and had some piglets.

The house is on a small rise, and beyond it is the garage for the truck, and the fowlhouse. We had ducks once too, but the dogs got at them, worrying them. Most of them died. Dad asked me if I’d like to rear some more, because the ducks belonged to me. I couldn’t.

There were lots of fruit trees here, but most were chopped down by Dad when we moved onto the farm. The house was almost choked of light before. There are still lots of trees: lemon, orange, fig, plum, nectarine and even a loquat tree. The loquat tree bore fruit for the first time last summer. The trees all need pruning, but as usual, Dad says he’ll do it ‘next year’.

Beside the house, but a bit higher on the rise, is a huge outspreading walnut tree. Mum is afraid of that walnut tree, but she likes walnuts. Every winter, it creaks and sways and the wind tears the older branches away and flings them at the house. For a long time, Mum has been trying to get Dad to cut the tree down. Not ‘Next year’, but ‘Now’! However, every time he says he will, then she changes her mind. If you cut it down, she says, it might fall on the house. Let it stand. First she’s scared that it might fall down in the high wind, and then she’s scared to have it chopped down. But then, perhaps she knows as I do about the opossum in that tree. He was there before we came, and he will probably stay there until the tree finally does fall down. We don’t have guns in our house. Dad doesn’t like shooting things.