Witi Ihimaera - Pounamu Pounamu

‘My, what a strong bunch of boys,’ she said. ‘But I can only have one of you marvellous specimens so … eeny meeny miney mo, I pick one, the others go. And the one I pick is …’ Her finger bounced from one head to the next, up and down the line, almost stopping, then returning, then moving on, wavering, and then …

‘Him,’ she announced.

‘Him?’ the others gasped.

‘Who?’ I gasped.

‘Him,’ Mrs Jones said again. And she waved me over and got me busy straight away taking the stores out to her van.

I couldn’t believe it! I’d got a job!

‘Anyway, who wants to work for a woman!’ Winti said as he walked out.

‘Yeah,’ the others chorused.

But I didn’t care about them. Afterwards, I asked Mrs Jones why she’d picked me.

‘I like losers,’ she answered enigmatically. ‘I’m one myself.’

I got to know Mrs Jones very well during those long delivery trips. I even fell in love with her. She was a strange woman, laughing one minute and sad the next. Sometimes bursting into a song, then swearing. She had a silent mood as well. When she was in this mood, she drove very quickly, as if trying to leave her thoughts far behind her. The dust would churn thickly behind us, and at every stop, it would catch up like her thoughts and she would be very hard on me.

‘Make it snappy, Tawhai.’

‘Tawhai, hurry up. There’s lots more deliveries to be done.’

‘Come on, boy! Move!’

Sometimes her thoughts would make her voice smoulder and she would be unapproachable. I learnt this mood well and left her alone when it came upon her. And after it had gone away, I knew she wouldn’t say she was sorry for treating me so badly. She was very proud: ‘I’m sorry’ wasn’t in her vocabulary. But I could tell, from the slow closing of her eyelids and sudden softening of her face, that she was conveying to me what she couldn’t put into words.

Otherwise, Mrs Jones was a generous and kind woman. I also thought that she was very clever and often wished I was quick enough to catch her wit. Mrs Jones was famous for her wit. She had a silver tongue, often playful, but also slightly barbed so that you sometimes couldn’t tell whether she was joking or not. The tone of her voice conveyed a thousand different meanings to every witty phrase she said. It could be mocking and teasing at the same time. Along with her fist, it was her other main defence against what she used to call ‘the wicked wiles of men’.

It was her voice and the sharp way in which she often used it, which brought her into conflict with Mr Hohepa.

Even before I was born, it was customary that all Mr Hohepa’s mail and stores were delivered right at his doorstep. From what I’ve heard, it took him a long time to establish this privilege. Usually, rural mail isn’t delivered right to the house. Farm houses are generally too far off the road to make it practicable. But Mr Hohepa was convinced he was a special case. He was a tohunga, after all. He’d written to the Postmaster-General, the Minister of Maori Affairs, the Minister of Transport, but they, courageous people, had refused his request. However, he’d got his own back, by makutu it is reputed, when that particular Government changed the next year. But even the following Government wouldn’t do anything for him, despite his helping them to power, so he’d seen the Mayor. The Mayor referred Mr Hohepa to the local County Council, who politely asked the mail contractors to ‘let the old boy have his way, just to keep him happy!’ Although they had baulked at first, the mail contractors finally accepted the polite request and that was when Mr Hohepa’s mail began to be delivered right to his door. There he would be, sitting on the verandah like a king, acknowledging the service with a grunt and one tap of his tokotoko stick on the floor. Two taps meant: Wait, there is something to be taken back to town. Three taps meant: You are now dismissed. And sometimes he would tap sharply four times if you left in seeming disrespect. So you returned and he looked you over disdainfully before tapping three times again.

Mrs Jones thought him insufferable. She said it was too much to be expected to open and close three gates to get to his place, and then open and close them again to get out. Servility was not in her character. What grated even more was the fact that Mr Hohepa made you feel so common, as if he were royalty and you were one of his lowest subjects. Mr Hohepa knew a rebel when he saw one. During the first few rounds I was with Mrs Jones, he taunted her with his silent disdain. One day, he went too far.

That particular day, Mrs Jones was in one of her moods, only this time it seemed to issue from her and create whirlwinds along the road. The trees bent, the tall grass swayed violently and the dust swept along with the van. Mrs Jones drove so fast that the bends of the road leapt at us like gloves being thrown in our faces. I couldn’t do anything fast enough that day. I did my best though, and kept silent, staring straight ahead at the unwinding road and not at Mrs Jones’ grim face. By the time we arrived at Mr Hohepa’s place, her mood was at its peak. It was unfortunate that that day Mr Hohepa had a huge carton of legal papers being delivered to him — no doubt concerning one of the court cases he and Miro Mananui had about our land — as well as his usual bag of flour, bag of sugar, other stores and his newspapers. Had it been a small delivery, nothing might have happened.

The van sprang at the first gate. I opened and closed it, and then ran to the second gate where Mrs Jones had driven the van. As she went through I could feel the whirlwind whistling around me. The next gate was much further away, so Mrs Jones waited for me and I jumped on the running board. I could see her hands gripping the steering wheel tightly. At the last gate, while I was waiting for the van to go through, Mrs Jones was lighting a cigarette when I suddenly saw her eyes flash like lightning from a black cloud. She threw the cigarette away and stared straight to where Mr Hohepa was waiting, his hands folded over his lap, sitting in his rocking chair on the verandah. As I jumped back into the van, her quiet whisper exploded around me.

‘I’ll show him!’

We drove quickly up to the house. Some of Mr Hohepa’s hens, almost as proud as he was, were wandering across the track, quite sure that the van would stop and wait until they had reached the other side. They scattered and squawked loudly, and flapped away, outraged, as the van careered through their midst. Mr Hohepa saw all this, and his face stiffened. But he didn’t say a word — not then, anyway.

I jumped down from the van and opened the back. The carton wasn’t too heavy. I carried it up the steps and waited for instructions. The tokotoko made a wide sweep and ended pointing at the door. I laid the carton to one side of it and went back for the bag of sugar. This too, by royal decree, was to be placed near the door. All this time, Mr Hohepa didn’t even look my way. He was too busy disdainfully eyeing Mrs Jones.

It was while I was carrying the bag of flour up the steps that it happened. I slipped and the bag fell. I waited for Mrs Jones to tell me off. She yelled all right. But not at me.

‘Well, don’t just sit there as if you owned the world, Hohepa! Help the boy!’

Mr Hohepa’s eyebrows arched. Then he sniffed and tilted his chin a little higher in the air.

And me? Was I scared? Was I what. I’d never heard anybody call Mr Hohepa by his surname alone.

Mrs Jones got out of the van. She slammed the door. Grimly, she took one end of the bag and helped me drag it onto the verandah. Then she looked at Mr Hohepa with disgust and went back down the steps.

The tokotoko drummed on the floor. Four sharp taps. I trembled. I saw Mr Hohepa level a gaze at Mrs Jones and give a challenging smile. Then his tokotoko circled in the air and began jabbing at the door. He wanted us to take the bag of flour right into his kitchen.