Witi Ihimaera - Uncle's Story

He sighed and, in a moment of tenderness, kissed Sam on both cheeks.

‘Go now, Sam. May God have mercy —’

Auntie Pat’s mouth was open in a soundless scream.

‘For thirty years,’ she said, ‘I have lived with that night on my conscience. When Dad did that to Sam he exiled him, banished him forever. Sam was moaning, almost driven mad. We took him back to the house and bathed him and put ointment on his wounds. But the punishment had gone far deeper than skin. Sam said to us, ‘I have to go, Mum, I have to go, Patty. Dad’s left me without a country. I haven’t a place here anymore. I’m going to meet up with Cliff.’

‘It was Mum who organised everything. On the day that Cliff was due to leave Auckland she rang George and told him to lend Sam his car. She took Sam into town to collect it. As he left I flung my arms around him and told him I loved him.’

Auntie Pat’s eyes were streaming with tears.

‘I think it happened about five in the evening. Sam was two hours out of Auckland. He had almost reached the intersection where the Tauranga highway connects with Highway One at the bottom of the Bombay Hills. It was Friday night and traffic was heavy — people wanting to get home, big trucks from the port of Tauranga trying to get to Auckland during the rush hour. There was an accident involving a truck and another car — and Sam. A really bad pile-up. And Sam … Sam … was killed.’

Auntie Pat has always disliked close physical contact. But she was crying so much that I had to put my arms around her. She started screaming and screaming.

‘Leave me alone. It wasn’t my fault, I didn’t mean to do it —’

Over and over again.

That evening, sleeping at Auntie Pat’s, I dreamed the dream that always had me waking up screaming. But something was different about it. I was an onlooker and not involved in the dream. I saw a young man stumbling along a never-ending road. There was a thrumming sound. Something was coming from out of the darkness behind him. The young man stopped. He looked back down the road. I knew what it was. I cried out to the young man:

Run.

You know what it’s like in recurring nightmares. The adrenalin starts to pump. The fear turns your blood to ice. You moan and thresh. Did you really think that the nightmare had ended? Foolish, oh you were so foolish! Yet again the nightmare has pounced on you when you were least expecting it.

The young man began to run but he could only move in slow motion. I tried to help him, crying out to him, Come on, come on . Faster. Faster. I heard myself moaning with helplessness, my pores popping with explosions of fear.

I saw the stallion. Eyes of fire. Hooves arcing showers of sparks like flints. Then it was no longer coming down the road but circling him with tight rings of flame like a noose being tightened. Thrum, thrum, thrum. Suddenly it was there, in front of the young man. It reared on its hind legs and plunged down on him.

Only it wasn’t the stallion. It was a truck speeding through the night.

I woke up crying out the young man’s name:

‘Uncle Sam, no. ’

The next morning, Auntie Pat took me to Gisborne Airport to catch my plane back to Wellington. Her face was calm and I thought I had never seen her look so beautiful. In telling Uncle Sam’s story, she had delivered herself of thirty years of guilt, denial and pain.

The boarding call was made. I kissed Auntie Pat on the cheek. She smiled at me.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘you do look like him.’

It was then that I decided:

‘Auntie, I’m going to Canada soon. I think I’ll stop off in Chicago —’

‘You’ll try to find Cliff Harper?’

‘Yes.’

Auntie Pat flung herself into my arms.

‘Thank you, Michael,’ she said. ‘That’s the final thing to do, isn’t it? Find Cliff, find him. Even after all these years you know what still haunts me? That Cliff didn’t know Sam was on his way to the airport. We must make up for what happened to Sam and set everything right.’

I walked to the plane. I heard Auntie Pat calling to me.

‘Cliff has to know. Find him. Tell him.’

May God have mercy.

I returned to Wellington on Monday morning. All the way back on the plane I kept thinking over what Auntie Pat had told me about Uncle Sam, Cliff and Grandfather Arapeta. In particular, I couldn’t get Grandfather’s words, ‘May God have mercy’, out of my mind. I had heard or read them before — but where? Then I remembered. They were the last words in Uncle Sam’s diary, but they weren’t in Uncle Sam’s handwriting. Had Grandfather written them? If so, why? As a last-minute act of regret, perhaps? Of penance after Sam had died? I pictured grandfather going through Sam’s belongings after he’d had news about the accident. Coming across the diary. Taking up the pen, his hand quivering with emotion, and writing in it.

I tried to fit the memory of my grandfather around such an act of contrition.

‘Go and kiss your Grandad,’ Dad would say whenever we visited him, Nana Florence and Auntie Pat. At that time, Dad had shifted Mum, Amiria and me from the old homestead, and we lived about ten kilometres away — at the present location of Mahana Wines. Auntie Pat had elected to stay behind to look after Grandad and Nana.

Grandad was a dark man with wrinkles which looked as if they had been sliced into him with a knife. His best years were behind him. He’d transformed the farmland into vineyard country and passed the running of it over to Dad. He was bedridden from a stroke, and half of his face had collapsed. His eyes were always watery, and he had a permanent drool of saliva from the right side of his mouth. Perhaps the stroke had tamed his temper. All I know is that I associate him with Sundays — the days we visited — and that I always kissed him on his left cheek or forehead to avoid his sticky slick of drool. I think he was proud of me — and he sometimes allowed me to hold his medals and swagger stick.

Grandfather died when I was eight. I thought:

‘Hurrah, I’ve got the day off school.’

His tangi was huge, with representation from all the tribes of Maoridom. His erstwhile opponent, General Collinson, now retired, turned up with Army officials from Wellington. I heard grand speeches extolling his virtues and recalling his great army career. His mates from the Maori Battalion did a haka — a raging, eyeball-rattling, vein-popping expression of their grief. While the men were shouting their anger, the women set up an intense wailing, the likes of which I have never heard since. Throughout the haka, Nana Florence and Auntie Pat sat by the side of Grandad’s coffin, stroking his hair and face.

Surely somebody who people revered like that could redeem himself by being sorry for what he’d done to his son. Surely —

Roimata was waiting for me at Wellington airport.

‘Have you got a passport?’ she asked. ‘Is it valid? Our trip to Canada’s only a week away and I want to make sure you’re on the plane with me!’

We went immediately to the office of Toi Maori where we were scheduled for a strategic planning session with her trustees. Our nickname for them was the Maori Jedi and we called the chairman Obi Wan Kanobi. His name was really Piripi Jones, a farmer from Eketahuna, and his gentle manner belied his history as a Maori activist from way back.

‘Okay, people,’ he said. ‘Let’s hear how our submission has fared. Roimata, do you want to kick off?’

Roimata preened and purred.