A Canoe In the Mist (9 page)

W
as it like a shipwreck? Or like going into battle, braving the bullets with each soldier telling himself that somehow he’d come through?

Joe McRae pulled on the sou’wester that hung by the door and stared into the blackness. No fireballs were coming at the moment. The balustrade had given way all along the verandah and muck was piled against it. Out into the devil’s rain he went, to help the children over with their short legs, and the women with their hampering skirts. The Maori grandfather, more agile than he looked, took care of his own. The baby stayed firmly on its mother’s back, hidden under a thick velvet table-cover that Bridget had found.

Straightening up, Joe bumped his head against the small signboard pointing the way to the bar. He’d had trouble over that board. It had arrived with its finger pointing the
wrong way, and they wanted to charge him twice over when he sent it back. He grinned to himself as he wrenched it off to protect his head. It didn’t matter now which way it pointed. He thought he heard Lollop howling, but there was no help for that.

People were sorting out their partners in the darkness. Charlie Humphreys and his wife had already got away. Joe would have to curve around the hotel to reach Sophia’s whare, yet in this blackness he couldn’t see his own walls a few feet away. All sense of direction would have been quickly lost if it wasn’t for the fire on the hill at Haszard’s place.

‘This way, folks!’ shouted Joe.

When they came along the verandah he had shoved the muck aside by sliding his feet. He couldn’t do this now. At every step his foot went down into a hole and it took a real effort to drag it out. The wind was still blowing a gale. Two hundred yards would be a long way at this rate, even for a man of his strength. ‘Here, here!’ he called. Sean Falloona’s Irish voice responded with, ‘Where?’ followed by other shouts. Too many voices calling will confuse people, thought Joe, especially if they’ve gone wrong. But what if he himself went wrong?

The stones battered his shoulders all the time. When a big one struck him he choked back his cry of pain and went on calling ‘Here! Here!’ as if nothing had happened. Perhaps those other cries were for the same reason. They
were all being pelted. A loud crashing told him that more of his hotel had fallen in. Just as well that everybody would be well clear by now.

A figure loomed before him. ‘Who’s that?’ he said. There was no answer. His hand touched the aukati board, the man-sized Maori carving that carried notices on its flat belly. ‘Nobody’s coming to look at you any more, my boy,’ he said, and barely heard his own words.

Joe ploughed on stubbornly. Any of them could be knocked over into the mud. They might manage the two hundred yards to the whare only to find it had also collapsed. Joe too had read
The Last Days of Pompeii
and knew that the eruption could go on till they were all overwhelmed. But on top of that gloomy thought he saw the marvellous signal.

‘The light!’ he boomed. ‘Here, here! Sophia’s light!’

‘We see it,’ replied Mr Hensley from quite nearby.

Twenty more strenuous steps and a Maori voice called, ‘Haere mai! Ki konei!’ A young man wearing the old-fash-ioned rain cape of coarse flax was raking the mud from the roof with a long pole. Joe had been right: the sturdy whare was standing up to the eruption. The heavy boards that had made a pathway to the door had been taken up and used as extra props for the ridgepole.

Mr Hensley hoisted his wife over the step and went inside. Mattie wasn’t with them. Deeply troubled, Joe stayed on the porch, calling into the blackness, and saw the first
of another shower of fireballs arching over.

The fact was that back there at the hotel, Mr Hensley had clambered on all fours over the broken balustrade in the wake of his wife and daughter.

‘Take my arm, Mattie,’ he said.

‘No, Papa, you’ve enough to do with Mama. She’s hardly fit to walk,’ Mattie said firmly. ‘I’ll go with Lillian and her mother.’

‘Will you be all right?’ he said doubtfully.

‘Am I brave enough, is that what you mean?’ snapped Mattie. ‘We’ve got to be, haven’t we? Do get started, Papa.’

‘Bless you,’ said Mrs Hensley. ‘We’ll see you at Sophia’s then.’

‘We’ll be right behind you,’ said Mrs Perham.

The three linked arms, with Lillian in the middle. Mrs Perham thought that being the tallest she could somehow tramp out a path for the two girls, as the men had done along the verandah; but this was different. They hadn’t expected the force of the wind. The only use of linking arms was in staying upright. The cushion on Lillian’s head was firmly fixed with her shawl, but Mrs Perham had to use her free hand to keep her cushion in place, and the towel Mattie had tied over her tam-o’-shanter kept slipping.

The stones were pelting down. There were stories in the Bible about being stoned, Lillian remembered. It must feel like this. People got hurt, but they didn’t die. She couldn’t
talk to the other two. The cushion cut off some of the awful noise from her ears but the fumes of the eruption carried by the gale got down her throat.

And the mud, the horrible, sticky, smelly mud! Every step meant plunging her foot right into it and pulling it out again. After perhaps twenty steps Lillian’s left foot came up without its boot. Why, oh why hadn’t she tied the laces tighter! She couldn’t reach down for it, not daring to let go of those supporting arms, not sure she’d find it anyway, and how could she carry it? Down went her stockinged foot into the mud. The stocking soon began to come apart. Grit chafed her and she trod on something sharp. She sobbed with misery but didn’t complain. If the others did hear her they still couldn’t help. They had to go on, one step at a time, slow, slow, slow. A sympathetic squeeze on her arm told her that Mattie had at least heard her sob.

As for staying right behind the Hensleys, that was impossible. Though she’d been over this ground hundreds of times Lillian couldn’t tell where anything was. Mr McRae’s voice came through the cushion over her ears, but so did other voices. She hoped her mother was going in the right direction.

But Mattie’s ears were wide open. She ignored every sound but that Scottish voice. The falling stones were hissing in a peculiar way that reminded her of mosquitoes preparing to bite. Through the noise she heard the dismal howling of the dog, and hoped that he wouldn’t try to come
after them, that he’d stay crouched in some safe corner. Some other part of the hotel came crashing down and the howling was lost in the din.

A stone butted her cheek, knocked the towel aside and slid down inside her dress. It felt as big as a golf ball as it scratched its way down, but it couldn’t have been. The towel dragged her tam-o’-shanter askew but she let it be. Something had happened to Lillian and Mattie knew she was sobbing, but all she could do was squeeze her arm. They needed all their energy simply to go on, and on, and on.

Mrs Perham kept her cushion to the windward side, but the stones took no account of the wind. They came all ways at once. One of them set her nose bleeding. She pressed her lips together to keep the blood and ooze from her mouth and bent forward lest another should strike her in the eye. On edge with the cacophony of noises she was not aware that Lillian was sobbing. The next stone hit her on the forehead, while blood also seemed to be trickling at the back of her neck. She felt quite dazed and kept plodding on more by instinct than by resolution.

Every nightmare comes to an end.

It was Mattie who heard Joe McRae bawling out through the din—

‘The light! Here, here! Sophia’s light!’

Twenty more of those plunging steps and with her face upraised, Mattie saw it for herself. Her mouth caught
another stone front on, but she didn’t care. The lantern shone through the devil’s rain like a lighthouse, and Mattie steered their way towards it, up over the step, past Joe McRae and into the whare.

How will they ever believe it! thought Mattie as that wonderful feeling swept over her, of crossing from peril into safety. Her English schoolfriends sitting primly in their well-furnished, well-spaced schoolroom, with flowerbeds outside the windows—why did she think of them now?

The light made Mattie blink, although it was only candlelight shining from two lanterns made out of upturned bottles with the base knocked out. The crowded room was as noisy as the night outside, but the sounds were human. She could hear women keening as the Irishwomen did when someone was dead. They were praying and chanting, in desperate anxiety, but the warmth of their welcome rose through all their fears, rejoicing at every soul who came alive through that devil’s rain. She was searching for her father’s face when suddenly Lillian stumbled at her side, and fell forward into a pair of brown arms rising to catch her.

‘You cry, that make you better.’ The plump, motherly woman rocked Lillian gently like a baby.

‘I lost my boot,’ Lillian blurted between sobs.

‘Here, I take off your other boot. Your feet not hard like ours. Easy for us to come barefoot. Some come bare skin too, they leave their place too quick. That box of things
the tourists leave behind, Sophia open that box.’

‘Your foot’s bleeding through the mud,’ said Mattie. ‘Let me look.’

Taking the foot on her knee and using the cleanest corner of her towel, grey and damp as it was, Mattie wiped the foot. ‘You’ve got one big cut and a lot of scratches,’ she said. ‘No wonder it hurts.’

Her voice sounded peculiar. Lillian looked up to see the lower lip swelling into an ugly bruise.

‘Mattie, you’re hurt too!’

‘We’re all hurt.’

‘Here’s your father—oh, Mr Hensley, who else has got here?’

‘Mr Falloona, and Willie Bird—see him there, with his arm around his wife? She was here all the time. You look a sight, Mattie,’ said her father, affectionately, ‘but who cares about your looks? Lillian, I’d better hang your boots on that nail so that you can find them again.’

‘She’s lost one, Papa, can’t you see her foot?’ said Mattie. ‘She’s hurt it.’

‘Oh, rotten luck! Still, I’ll hang up the one you’ve still got,’ said Mr Hensley.

The woman loosened her arms from around Lillian’s body and broke into a torrent of Maori words as Makuini with her baby came in, pushing Tamati before her, and followed by the three old people. Lillian turned and saw her mother hunched over.

‘What’s the matter, Mumma?’ she asked tenderly.

‘I’m dizzy, that’s all. It will pass,’ mumbled Mrs Perham.

‘You’ve got a big lump on your forehead. Sophia might have some smelling salts,’ said Lillian.

‘Sophia gone out looking for people,’ said the motherly woman.

‘You mean she’s gone out on purpose?’ Mattie was appalled at the thought.

‘She bring some already. When we hear that big bang, they go porangi and rush outside. Sophia drive them back in. They do what Sophia say,’ said the woman proudly.

‘Come over by the wall, Mrs Perham,’ said Mr Hensley. ‘You two girls squeeze through. Look, here come Bridget and Nora.’

People pulled their feet out of the way and huddled closer as Mrs Hensley helped Mrs Perham to the space by the wall where Mrs Hensley sat. Mattie came next and then Lillian, wriggling on her knees.

‘Just look at you girls,’ said Mrs Hensley, who looked properly dishevelled herself. ‘What a mess! But isn’t it marvellous, all five of us safely here! I’m quite proud of myself. You never know what you can do till you have to.’

‘We’re proud of
you
, Mama,’ said Mattie. But she was thinking of Sophia, out there looking for people.

J
oe McRae stood on the porch and kept on calling out. The Hensleys were inside, the Perhams, Sean Falloona, Willie Bird and all the Maori family. Next came Johnny Bird, and then Bridget, bruised and dirty but still with enough strength to drag the exhausted Nora.

‘Bridget, did you pass Humphreys and his wife? Or Edwin? Or George, or Mr Stubbs?’ Joe asked anxiously.

‘Not since way back, master. I kept on after you.’

‘They should be here by now. I’m going out to look for them.’

‘Oh no, master, you mustn’t! The fireballs are coming again. If I hadn’t ducked quick I’d have caught one fair on the nut.’

‘I
must
go, Bridget,’ said Joe.

‘Well if you don’t come back I’m not looking for you, and I’ll not break the news to your wife either,’ answered
Bridget tartly.

That was an unfair blow. Joe had already told Willie Bird he shouldn’t do foolhardy things to make his wife a widow. Many times already he’d thought of Margaret and their six daughters, blessing his lucky stars that they were far away. But he’d taken these people into his care and he couldn’t desert them now.

‘I’ll come with you,’ said someone in Maori.

It was Ruka from the boat crew. Like a conjuror he produced a bottle lantern and lit it. ‘That’s better,’ said Bridget. ‘Here, take this. It’ll make you look proper zany but that’s what you are.’ Off came her shawl, as thick as a blanket.

They laughed a little as Joe tied it over his sou’-wester. With Ruka holding the light the two men started out. It was too good to last. They’d gone only about thirty yards when a torrent of mud blew in their faces and put the lantern out.

‘You’d better go back, Ruka,’ Joe said. ‘My feet will find their own way, like horses do.’

‘Taihoa. Listen,’ said Ruka.

A faint and pitiful wail told the whereabouts of Mr Stubbs. He had been knocked over with his ankle painfully twisted beneath him and was sure his leg was broken. It took the two of them to get him over to the whare. After that Joe went on alone, calling for George, Edwin, and the Humphreys. The mud continued to blind him. He was
everlastingly wiping the filthy stuff from his face with the corner of Bridget’s shawl.

A groaning from over to his left told him that someone was struggling to get up. After the effort of reaching the place he found it was a horse, hopelessly bogged. With a chill in his breast he drew close enough to see if it could be his own Rosinante, but it was one of the Maori horses. He could do nothing to help it. Cursing the waste of time, Joe worked his way back towards the hotel, guided by the fire on the hill and the flashes of fireballs.

When next he heard a groaning it was definitely human. ‘Who’s that?’ he called.

‘It’s me, master, and I’m done. Save yourself,’ replied George Baker.

‘Nonsense, man! Sophia’s place is over yonder. You’ve only got to get that far.’

‘I’m past caring. I been down three times already.’

And knocked half silly, thought Joe. George was leaning against the trunk of a tree stripped bare of its leaves and giving no shelter whatever.

‘You can’t leave my service without giving notice,’ said Joe. ‘Come away with you.’ He pushed George out from the tree, got his hands under his armpits and tried to march him ahead. George only stumbled. Joe reversed positions and dragged him. ‘George, be a man and help yourself a bit,’ he yelled. ‘Get your legs moving. You can do it if you try!’

‘I can’t,’ George persisted, and in the next minute showed that he could. All the same, by the time they reached Sophia’s porch, Joe himself had to sit awhile with his head on his knees. He felt in his back pocket for the whisky flask he’d slipped in there in case of need, and took only one small nip. It might be his lifeline before the eruption was over.

Those two were a couple of weak fish, said Joe to himself as he set out again. But that wasn’t the case with the Humphreys, and as for Edwin Bainbridge, he was the fittest man of the lot.

The violent wind eased off but Joe still had to forge through the muck underfoot, the rowdy choking air and the fireballs. When again he called out, ‘Humphreys! Bainbridge!’ it was Sophia who answered. She was almost beside him, a strange shape in the darkness wearing three rush hats atop one another, and with her a small boy.

‘You have lost that young tourist?’ she shouted into his ear.

‘Yes, and Humphreys and his wife. The others from the hotel are safe at your place.’

‘That is good. All the Pakeha buildings are wrecked and the schoolhouse is burning. You mustn’t try to get up to Haszard’s, Joe. I have done all I can and must get this tamaiti home.’

‘I will search a little longer—’

‘Perhaps they are at Hinemihi. It is strong and will not fall.’

‘Aye! That’s where I’ll make for. If I find them safe, I’ll stay awhile. Tell the others that.’

Joe began to cough with the fumes in his throat. Their shouted talk was over and they went their separate ways.

Like lights on a stage, a great fireball revealed the remains of the Rotomahana Hotel. It was enough to satisfy Joe that none of the missing three could have gone back inside. They must have gone in a different direction.

Wondering about Lollop but careful not to call him, Joe set out on the road up the valley. The fire at Haszard’s was soon hidden by the shoulder of the hill, and the other fires gave him no help. Perhaps his search was hopeless after all. If they were in shelter they didn’t need him, and if they were not, most likely they were past help. Still, so long as there was a chance, his feet kept going on.

He stumbled over a great log of wood. That meant he must be off the road. He had only just got to his feet when a stone knocked him down again. After that he was unsure which way was north, west, east or south.

For some yards he plodded on, hoping for a fireball. It came, but directly at him. The burning blow struck the side of his head and felled him, with no one to hear his cry.

When he came to himself he could hardly breathe through the mud caking over his face. He sat himself up
and wiped the smelly mess from his nose and eyes and mouth. His sou’wester and Bridget’s shawl seemed to have tightened. Feeling carefully around his head he discovered a great hole burnt through to his skin and a blistered lump behind his ear.

Slowly he puzzled out what must have happened. The fireball had bounced off and the wool had resisted the flame, or else the cold wet mud had quenched it when he fell. ‘Thank God for that,’ he said aloud.

Next he felt for his flask and found it undamaged. This time he took a really good nip. Despite the painful throbbing in his head he began to think clearly. He mustn’t move till he could get his bearings. Stones were thudding against some kind of wall nearby. The next fireball might show him what it was.

When that fireball came it was a small miracle. It struck the ruins of a shed and set it aflame. Joe found he was sitting on a rise beside a collapsed wall of sawn timber. Only one of the Maoris lived in a timber house, the chief, Wi Keepa Te Rangipuawhe. Hinemihi was not far off.

Joe struggled to his feet. His progress was hard and slow but at least it was sure. He crossed the road and found the fence of manuka stakes which marked the track to Hinemihi. It was firm, but as he felt his way along it the fence was made to shake by other hands.

‘Who’s there?’ he shouted. ‘Ko wai tera?’

‘Charlie Humphreys and my missus. That you, Joe?’ came the answer.

He could have wept with relief and joy. Instead, when he came up with them he asked angrily, ‘Where have you been all this time?’

‘We overshot the mark and missed Sophia’s place altogether. Did the others manage to find it?’ said Mr Humphreys.

‘All except Edwin. Have you seen him?’

‘No. We’ve had a devil of a job finding our way anywhere.’

‘It’s like a desert,’ said Mrs Humphreys wearily. ‘I don’t know how many times I’ve fallen or been knocked over.’

‘Let’s get inside,’ said Joe.

They crawled over the stile. As at Sophia’s place, a man was raking the mud from the roof. He said rather desperately that the ridgepole was beginning to bend.

Joe marched in and sang out in Maori: ‘Where are those two long forms that the tourists sit on?’

‘What do you want them for, Joe McRae?’ Wi Keepa answered from his place near the door.

‘To prop up the ridgepole. That’s what they’ve done at Sophia’s.’

‘Ah! That’s good! Kia ora!’ came the cries of approval.

The action was confused but quick. Those sitting on the forms were bustled on to the floor, spaces were cleared and the forms up-ended, all by the light of two bottle
lanterns. Joe had judged correctly. The forms were the right length to meet at the peak of a narrow triangle, making an excellent prop.

‘E hoa Pakeha, come here and rest,’ said Wi Keepa’s wife.

Joe sat down gratefully on the flax mat with a pillow to rest his back against the wall. He was mortally tired and dreadfully thirsty, but there couldn’t be anything to ease a thirst in this place, and he must conserve the last of his whisky. Most likely every drop of water in the valley was spoiled. The beer? Oh God, preserve us the beer, he prayed silently, and send us a morning that lets us drink it.

And take care of Edwin Bainbridge, he added in his heart, for I cannot find him until morning comes.

Joe turned to the chief and said, ‘Your house has fallen in, Wi. I am sorry.’

‘No matter. It was a Pakeha house, and a Maori house is stronger, as we see. But people came to shelter with me and some have gone missing since. Au-e! We have failed to find them.’

‘My house has fallen in too, and all the Pakeha buildings. I had twenty-one people under my roof. The others are at Sophia’s now, except for the tourist Edwin Bainbridge. He is missing.’

‘Name me the others at Sophia’s.’

The ring of eager faces kept growing as Joe told what he knew. In the dim light he studied those faces carefully,
knowing that on his return he’d be questioned about who was there. Hinemihi was twice as big as Sophia’s and every bit as crowded. He knew these people well with their different personalities, humorous, vigorous, cantankerous, all sorts; but today every face showed a common grief, anxiety and despair.

After they had moved away, and gone back to singing hymns and praying and chanting, Joe thought of Tuhoto and his prediction that all these lands would be overwhelmed. Nobody had mentioned his name although it must be on all their minds. No doubt such a powerful tohunga could see to his own safety, and was better left alone.

As if reading Joe’s mind, Wi Keepa spoke.

‘Tuhoto said we built this wharepuni for the tourists,’ he said quietly, without bitterness. ‘He was wrong. It was not for the tourists that we carved our friendly taniwha on the centrepost. In our time of need, Hinemihi has received us with her sheltering arms.’

‘Aye,’ said Joe. ‘It is for us, the tangata whenua, the people of the land. I feel this too, Wi Keepa.’

Soon the rhythmic chanting took hold, and soothed him into a drowsiness that came near to sleep. From this he was roused at last by a voice crying out in Maori that the volcano was no longer hurling out its fiery, rocky heart. Only the mud was falling now.