Inheritance (10 page)

It soon got out that Stuart Roper had been damned by the old lady’s dying words. Differing and increasingly bizarre versions of Gertrude’s death spread like a plague. Stuart Roper was determined to inherit the plantation so had deliberately left her to die; Stuart had suggested she go out to check on her precious sacks of beans, then shut her out of the house; Stuart had pushed her down the stairs and then disguised his actions by cutting down a banana tree and dumping it on her.

Drunk and negligent were just as culpable in my book.

We buried her next to her husband behind the house. Hardly anyone came – the roads were too difficult, and let’s face it, Gertrude had not been loved. John O’Dowd and Jeanie managed to drive up with Hamish and Simone. Poor John wept like a child to see his aunt dead. It was touching – he’d only known her a few weeks, but clearly she meant a great deal to him. Such a shame. Maybe he could have sweetened the old dragon in her last years with a bit of family devotion. All her babies died in the flu epidemic. John said a few words and the palagi minister read the rites. A short, insignificant sort of burial, by Samoan standards. Sad.

Stuart Roper stayed on in the house, alone, drinking. The workers continued to clean up the plantation, but they took their orders from Samasoni, not Stuart.

I kept wondering about Jeanie. Surely living with her husband must be a nightmare?

A few weeks after the hurricane, Teo announced that he was sick of clearing away debris – too depressing! He had the idea to take Jeanie and her father out to see the archaeological site near our village. They should know something of our past, he said, if they were going to settle here. Teo would have had other reasons – an attractive girl; a chance to make an alliance if the inheritance went against us; but he wasn’t completely wayward and wild as some of the elders would have it. He was passionate about the dig, and not only because the young archaeologist was an attractive palagi woman. He had a genuine interest in what our past might have been. His views often flew in the face of the elders who offered rather ridiculous explanations for the existence of the great stone mounds. And being Teo, he didn’t hesitate to point out the flaws in the views of our patele and our most senior matai. Which didn’t help Tiresa’s promotion of her son for a good title.

Teo was in Apia with the truck, having just delivered a small number of banana to the wharf. The harvest this time was pitiful. The ship might not even arrive next month, some said, if the crop didn’t increase. But how could it increase? The situation worried me. My work would suffer too, if shipments weren’t regular. Hurricane relief supplies were coming we were told, but where were they?

Teo drove up Leifiifi Road to the hospital at Moto‘otua, where I had an office, and danced around in the drive until I noticed him. What a show-off he was in those days!

‘Come out to the dig!’ he shouted. ‘Let’s take Jeanie and her father.’

No mention of the husband, I noticed. It turned out Teo knew Stuart was up at the plantation. No one would want to be crammed in the truck with that boor. He had ruffled feathers on more than one occasion already with his insensitive remarks and loud views. I had been invited to a tennis afternoon with some of the palagi community and was partnered with the wretch. He cheated blatantly! Had to win at all costs. In front of everyone’s eyes called balls out that were clearly in; abused me for missing a shot when the ball was in his area of the court; argued with the other pair over silly little details. Lord, it was embarrassing. How that nice Jeanie came to marry him was a complete mystery. I wanted to find out.

‘I’ll come,’ I shouted through the mosquito screens. ‘Give me half an hour to finish this report.’ In Samoa such impulses are possible. ‘And tell them to bring a lavalava. Or togs. We’ll go to Papaseea afterwards!’

Teo gave me the thumbs up and headed down to the Ropers’ place. He came roaring back, horn blaring, with Jeanie. No father. Not very proper, especially with half the hospital staff and a good number of the patients watching through the screens.

‘I’ve brought a picnic,’ said Jeanie, smiling to see me. ‘Sandwiches, some cake, mangos and pawpaw. And lime juice. Will that do?’

She was learning our ways fast. Every occasion needs a feast! I liked this girl immensely. Evidently the father was busy with a Samoan lesson.

‘If we are to make our lives here he wants to be fluent
in the language. Hamish is teaching him,’ Jeanie said. She grinned, ‘But I think also he knows he would not enjoy bumping over rough roads and climbing around an archaeological site in the heat.’

‘You won’t mind?’

‘Oh, no. Simone was right – two weeks and I seem to be acclimatised. Already I find the air-conditioning inside MacKenzies uncomfortable.’

She was proud of her easy adaptation to our climate; enjoying the sights and sounds. On that bouncing trip into the site, she chatted about her father, her training as a nurse (that interested me! I resolved to use her), her excitement over this new turn her life had taken. Never a word about her husband, I noticed. She was full of questions too. Such an alive person!

The three of us were crammed into the cab of the truck. Just as well the father didn’t come or I would have been roughing it in the open tray. Jeanie sat between us. Teo’s eyes constantly left the rough track to give her the full benefit of his charming smile.

‘There’s a big project on just now,’ he explained, ‘to find out how our ancestors lived. I help with this one, now and then.’

‘Now and then’ would have been Teo’s favourite phrase in those days. Never a full-time commitment. A bit of this, a bit of that, and nothing much in between, while I walked straight into a strenuous full-time job with the World Health Organization. The archaeological thing was interesting though. New Zealanders and Americans working together to uncover and document as many of the overgrown old mounds as they could. Some time ago, it seems, our people lived inland and
built these huge stone mounds, a bit like pyramids, but flat-topped. This one was star-shaped. Today, almost all our villages are strung out along the coast, and none of the stone foundations of our fale are anything like the size and scale of these mounds. Even our many and monumental churches can not rival the mounds. Teo had his theories.

‘I’ll bet they were for ritual sacrifice. Our elders don’t want to think we might have killed other humans and offered them to the gods.’ He laughed. ‘Or, horror of horrors, eaten our enemies like the Maori. But why else would they build such things? One old matai says they were platforms for catching birds, can you imagine! In the middle of a village! They just don’t like to admit that they haven’t a clue.’

‘Teo,’ I said, ‘have some respect. You’ll be shocking our guest.’

Teo put an easy arm around Jeanie’s shoulders and drove one-handed. ‘Am I shocking you, teine?’

‘And don’t call her teine. Jeanie is a perfectly good name.’

Teo laughed and squeezed her shoulder. ‘I will call you Siene then, how about that?’

Jeanie, it seemed, liked it quite a lot. She laughed along with him and let his arm lie where it was. My cheeky brother, honestly. She was married and he practically engaged to a very high-born taupou. If my mother had been there she would have given him a good slapping, grown lad though he was.

We ground our way over the roughest of tracks, ploughing over saplings and weeds, bottoming on great boulders, lurching madly from side to side. Teo was
forced to return the wayward hand to the wheel. For some reason we were all three madly happy. I started up a Beatles song, ‘Penny Lane’, and the three of us roared it out, harmonising at will, la-la-ing when we forgot the words. Above us and around great trees leaned in. A wild, forgotten area.

Finally we bounced our noisy way into the clearing. It was a truly impressive sight; much more so than I remembered. Several small mounds had been uncovered. As the truck engine steamed and gurgled, we stared out through the windscreen at a great stone heap stretching up higher, I would have said, than a three-storey building. The carefully stacked boulders of volcanic rock stood out black and shocking against the green riot of the bush. Here and there in the clearing, smaller stone mounds were half cleared, vines and creepers still clinging, like unruly hair, to their sides. Something like steps or a pathway formed a slash in the side of the great mound facing us. Clearly people had once climbed up this to the flat platform on top. The small hairs on the back of my neck pricked. Tears welled. There was something huge here in the air. I thought of giants, of half-human rulers like the Greek heroes. Of mighty deeds. Who were they? Who on earth were they, these ancestors of mine, and why did I not celebrate them and their deeds? How had we forgotten? Why had we deserted this inland place, which they had built with such care? Why had we moved to the coast?

Jeanie touched my arm. She had noticed my tears. ‘Yes,’ she said quietly, ‘if I can feel some part of this, what must you be feeling?’

She understood.

Over to the right was a small canvass lean-to, protecting a table and chair and a few instruments. Further away, three lads were slashing at vines and weeds that seemed to be hiding a smaller mound.

‘I can’t believe it,’ breathed Jeanie. ‘However could they get the stones up there? It’s like the pyramids!’

Teo didn’t seem so moved by the enormity of what we saw. ‘We’ve always been mighty builders,’ he said. ‘Look at our churches!’ He, of course, was prepared to take the credit on behalf of his ancestors. He jumped down from the truck and helped Jeanie out, leaving his sister to make her own way.

‘Come and meet Janet, the archaeologist,’ said Teo. ‘She’ll be here somewhere. You’ll like her.’ He spoke as if he owned her and the whole project, while in fact he had probably put in a couple of desultory hours waving a slasher. Teo is no expert with the bush knife, or anything else – except charm and driving too fast.

Probably my memory is too harsh. The truth is that for a while he led Jeanie away and left me behind.

For some time I stood in front of that great mound, mesmerised, listening for the voices of ghosts. I felt them; their tombs would be here, their spirits wandering among the trees. Were they angry that we no longer visited this place? Did they scorn our small villages on the coast and our palagi churches?

I walked slowly up to the mound, and then began to climb, step by rugged step, until I reached the top. It had been well cleared of debris; the platform of interlocking stones revealed. Here and there were holes, which might have once housed poles for a giant roof. At certain points stone seats or tables were set into the platform.
Perhaps altars? One seemed particularly suited for a normal human being. I sat and waited, looking in to the dense foliage of the canopy. Tell me; talk to me!

An army of cicadas filled the air, their high-pitch scream and click so familiar that normally I would not notice. That day nothing was normal. I craved silence. I needed the ancestors to speak. For years I had been schooled in New Zealand; had learned palagi subjects and palagi ways. Here was evidence of an important forgotten Samoan history; of pagan ceremony, perhaps; of a grand village where my ancestors lived and loved and fought before the missionaries encouraged us to forget the past.

I must have fallen into some kind of trance. I opened my eyes to find Jeanie looking anxiously at me.

‘Elena! You look so pale. Should you be sitting in the open sun like this?’

She took me gently by the arm and led me to a shaded area of the platform. We sat together on a stone slab, neither of us speaking. Below, we could see Teo and Janet examining drawings at the little table. They seemed so distant and unimportant.

‘The cicadas!’ said Jeanie finally.

‘Yes. Are they sending us some coded message?’

Jeanie smiled and shrugged. A little later she announced, ‘This was a place for kings. They were set high here.’

I liked the poetic way she spoke. She seemed sure and strong that day. We felt the same mystical power of the place – Lo taua mea lilo.

‘What?’ Jeanie touched my arm. We were so close there in the suffocating, windless heat, above the
ordinary world yet enclosed by trees and the sound of the cicadas! ‘What did you just say?’ she repeated.

I hadn’t meant to speak out loud. ‘It was just something I felt. You and me, Jeanie. Our secret place. It’s not secret, we are not alone, but I feel we are sharing something mysterious.’

No doubt I was over-emotional, tearful – I was much younger then – but she understood. Such opposites in many ways, Jeanie and me; she so neatly made and me so big-boned. Her sandalled feet looked so vulnerable beside my broad brown paddles; her fingers disappeared inside my wide palm. We held hands and sat there until Teo shouted from below that we should come down and take our picnic to Papaseea.

Sliding Rock was not far away. In our family we consider our district, Tuamasaga, to be the most beautiful in all the islands. Those from Apolima would argue of course, but I consider our bush is richer, our mountain, Fao, is definitely the tallest, our plantations the most productive – and of course, we have not only beautiful Palolo Deep on the coast, but the lovely cool Papaseea Falls among the trees. Inland, the water is crystal clear and cool, while the shallow water of the lagoon is so tepid it’s scarcely worth bathing. At Papaseea, the stream, coming fast from the mountains, has smoothed the rocks to glass. In the whole descent over the waterfall at this spot, there is not one sharp projection.