The Shark God (10 page)

 

Most communities in Vanuatu have a
kastom
chief, a man who holds no political power but whose job it is to sustain and promote the old ways. Geoffrey Uli was Maewo's
kastom
chief. He lived in a shack near Betarara. I figured his mandate might logically encompass public relations, which meant he should help me.

Uli managed to evade me for four days. I finally caught him in his yard one afternoon just before kava time. He was an old man. With his shirt off, his skin looked as though it had been shrink-wrapped to his bony frame. His eyes were birdlike, sharp and cunning. They darted back and forth across his garden as though looking for an escape. Eventually they settled on me.

Uli told me that people on Maewo already had God before the missionaries came. Their
kastom
stories were the same as the ones in the Bible. Only a few names had been changed. Maewo's own version of Eve was created not from Adam's rib, but from his collarbone. There was a great flood, and Tagaro had weathered it in a big canoe, like Noah. As Uli told me these things, his wife, who was sitting in the dirt, howled with laughter.

“That rubbish woman had me baptized when we got married,” he said. “Now I must pray twice a day. First I do
kastom
prayers, then I pray to the church God.”

Uli wouldn't say exactly to whom his
kastom
prayers were directed. Not to Tagaro, anyway. But he did make this point: The old gods never had a problem with magic, so why should the new one?

“But isn't the Christian God opposed to
kastom
magic?” I asked.

“The Anglican missionaries never told us our
kastom
was rub
bish. It was their students, boys from Maewo, who smashed the
tabu
stones. They went into the
nakamal
and spoiled the kava grinders and the drinking shells, too. They thought that this would get them into heaven. Now we know better. We have our kava back. And there is plenty of
kastom
magic left on Maewo.”

“I don't believe it. I don't believe you people still have the power,” I said, hoping to shame him into a demonstration.

“Sir, you are wrong,” said Uli. “We have rocks that can make rain, wind, and sun.”

I looked at the sky. There was rain, wind, and sun every day on Maewo. “How about thunder?”

“The thunder man lives far, far away in the bush. You'll never find him.”

“There must be something, some way to prove…”

Uli's wife spoke up from the shadows. “
Sipos hem wantem looklook long kastom magic, hemi mas findem tufala ston blong etkwek
,” she suggested.

Uli shot her an irritated look. She ignored Uli's glare and turned to me. She lifted both hands as if shaking an imaginary rock. Then she trembled and fell over on her side. I got it.

“Yes, yes, earthquake stones. Wonderful,” I said. “When can we go see them?”

“I cannot help you,” said Uli.

“Why not?”

“Because I have no time. Sir, I have been keeping an eye on you. I know you have been on this island for four days already. If you had come to see me first, I could have helped you. But I know what you have been doing. You went off with Dudley, didn't you? You have not paid me respect. You have spoiled your luck.”

I tried to explain that he was wrong, that Dudley had been avoiding me for days. But there was no point in arguing. Uli had told me just enough to make it clear to me that he was the real
kastom
expert on Maewo. He hustled his wife back toward their shack,
clucking and poking at her, shaking his head like a bird. How was I to know that Uli and Dudley were bitter rivals? I was left to gaze east toward the serrated crest of the island and ponder the location of the stones that made the ground shake. I wanted to find those stones.

 

I met Faith Mary on the coast road.

“Dudley is avoiding me,” I said.

“You have chosen the Betarara people and Geoffrey Uli.”

“No, I haven't—”

“You have chosen,” she said again. “We won't interfere, but we can't protect you anymore.”

My fever returned. I spent most of my days in bed. Once they realized that Dudley had spurned me, the citizens of Betarara took me on as their cause. They brought me crackers. They boiled water for tea and instant noodles. They sat and watched me for hours. First, there were the chief and his wife, who mumbled to me soothingly. One night, a handsome young catechist dropped by to read me excerpts from the New Testament. Then came the lady with magic hands. She leaned over me, her immense breasts inflating the expanse of her island dress. She prodded my belly, grunted knowingly, then kneaded my internal organs for an hour, whispering, “God,
plis mekem alraet disfala
boy.”

The people at Betarara told me stories, and all their stories were infused with magic and fear. Like the one about the pelicans that had recently appeared on a beach near the airport. Pelicans were not native to the island. Everyone was terrified of them. “They haven't attacked us yet, but they are huge. We are quite sure that white men brought them,” said one kava-drunk visitor. But there was hope. A boy had brought one of the pelicans down with his slingshot. His family cooked and ate the bird. Now there were only four.

The villagers were suspicious of foreigners. Once, a white yachtsman came ashore near the village and dug for an hour in the sand. When he sailed away, the village children discovered that he had buried the eggs of man-eating crocodiles. Once, a Russian ship had anchored just off the coast. Villagers insisted that a crew member came ashore and let loose a copra snake. The snake slithered up a tree, and now everyone was afraid to go into the palm groves. Perhaps, the villagers whispered, the sailor had also let a tiger loose on the island. There was so much to fear on Maewo.

Curses were a constant danger. The strongest kinds of poison on Maewo were not sprinkled on your food or left on the road for you to step on. They were administered to you after the fact. In other words, a sorcerer could use your footprint or a banana peel you might have discarded to make you sick. The best way to stay healthy on Maewo was to bury your dinner scraps and sweep away your footprints. It was especially important not to make enemies, since many sorcerers kept their talents secret. Never forget to lock your door at night, they said.

The people of Betarara were scared of things they could see and things they could not see. Some things they did not wish to discuss at all. Like the earthquake stones about which Geoffrey Uli's wife had pantomimed, and which I very much wanted to see. Very bad, they said. Very dangerous. End of the world.

Each night, after the villagers went home and I had extinguished my oil lamp, the noises would start again outside my window. Scratching on wire. Rustling. Clucking. Whooshing. I locked my door and did my best to contemplate the rationalist tradition.

Then a white man arrived at my doorstep. Wes was Texan, barely out of high school. The Peace Corps had sent him to Maewo to teach English. He had the trusting face of a puppy and the glassy eyes of a kava enthusiast. Wes explained to me why the chief of Betarara's son spent his time howling and barking like a dog. The boy had once been considered quite clever, and had been sent to the An
glican high school over on Santo. That's when he had fallen in love. The boy's passion went unrequited, so he turned to
kastom
for help. He tried using some version of sweet mouth love magic on his beloved, but the prayers and leaves failed to make her crazy with love. The magic boomeranged. The boy had been crazy ever since. No exorcism could save him.

It was Wes who helped me find the earthquake stones. It was no secret, he said, that the stones resided in Kwatcawol village, which clung to the crest of the forested ridge that ran the length of Maewo. I was still too weak to make the trek on foot, but a track had recently been bulldozed up the mountain from Betarara. Wes's adopted brother had a truck.

We left at sunset, following the red scar of the new road up through the jungle. The evening's first fireflies twittered like green sparks. Flying foxes dropped out of the banyan trees to chase them up and down the road.

We pulled into a field in the middle of the village. A crowd formed around the truck. I stood up in the box and explained my mission. There was a whispered debate. Wes interpreted. He told me my timing was perfect. The custodian of the earthquake stones had never permitted outsiders to see them. But the old man had died a year before my arrival, and his seven sons, all Christians, were not quite sure how they should handle their pagan legacy. Voices were raised. Heads were shaken. Finally, one man's eyes lit up: perhaps the visitor could offer a gift. Ah yes, a gift. It was not so much a bribe or an admission fee as a tribute to Melanesian
kastom
. Traditional relationships in Melanesia were always based on symbolic exchange. A murderer could be let off the hook with the right exchange of pigs.

I handed over a bag of rice and a can of corned beef, and we all filed somberly toward the sturdiest hut in the village. It had been built in the traditional style: one great room under beams of black tree fern trunks, with palm leaves hanging so low to the ground
they were spattered with mud. The roof beams were reinforced every few inches with smaller poles. This was the Melanesian version of the earthquake-proof bunker.

Inside, it was dark, crowded, and confused. Then someone lit an oil lamp, revealing what looked like two bundles of garbage hanging on the wall at the back of the hut. The earthquake stones. I moved closer. Hands reached out from the shadows toward me, not touching me, but straining and ready.

The stones may have been the size of potatoes, or they may have been bigger. I couldn't actually see them. They had each been wrapped in strips of dirty canvas, then bound in chicken wire and suspended from a crossbeam by lengths of hemp rope. It hardly seemed dignified.

The new guardians of the stones appeared to be a husband-and-wife team: he was bare-chested, tattooed, and scowling suspiciously; she was plump and beaming warmly in the glow of her oil lamp. At first nobody said anything. Then an old man stepped out of the shadows. He wore a towel wrapped around his head like a turban. His pupils were opaque. He pushed his face into mine. I will translate his monologue into English:

“Ages ago, in the time of the ancestors, the people found three stones in the forest,” he said—or rather, shouted through the silence. He cupped his leathery hands together as though he were holding a great weight. “The stones were all hanging in midair, and they were shaking. One man touched them, and they stopped moving. He played with those stones. He put one of them on the ground—that caused the ground to shake in another village. Oh, yes, that man saw how powerful the stones were. He played so much and caused so many tremors that one of the stones rolled into the ocean and was lost forever. Since then we have been very careful with the other stones.”

“Can I touch them?”

The old man made a gurgling sound, as though he were chok
ing. The guardian exhaled through his nostrils like a bull, but his wife steadied him with a glance, then nodded her head at me encouragingly. I reached for the bigger of the two bundles, lifted it, turned it in my hand, peered through the chicken wire. It was an industrial-strength cocoon.

I felt a hand on my elbow. Foreigners could not be trusted. It was true. I was desperate to test the stones' magic.

“Can I untie it? Just touch it to the ground to see if the stone still works?”

“No! Of course not,” croaked the old man, now breathing hoarsely. “If you did that, you would cause a terrible earthquake.”

“But if we did it quickly, you know, a quick touch to the floor, perhaps we could make the ground shake for only a few seconds. Wouldn't that be fun to see?”

It was rude to push, I knew it. But the stones did not radiate power or history or the slightest whiff of danger. They looked like cobblestones. I wanted to give them a chance to be something more or nothing at all.

“
Yu no savve!
The last person to try anything like that was this boy's grandfather,” said the old man, pointing at the bare-chested guardian. “He made Maewo shake for eight days. Eight days! It was one awful something. But at least the
olfala
knew how to make the tremors stop, he had a special leaf. But he never passed on his secrets. The knowledge is dead in the ground. That's why we have to take such great care of these stones. They are very sensitive. When a big wind comes, someone has to stay here to hold the stones tight, even if the house collapses around him. And if a rat or a pig was to find its way inside this house, watch out! The ground would shake, because the stones don't like those animals. We have to be careful!”

The story wasn't good enough. Proof. Part of me yearned to pull out my knife, cut the hemp, pound that rock on the bare earth even as the people screamed and leapt on me and beat me sense
less, because in those moments we would all know. I could feel my muscles twitching. The bare-chested guardian took a deep breath and said in a commanding baritone, “
Yumi go long drink kava nao.
”

“Um,” I said.

“
Nao ia,
” he said, and he stepped toward me like a bull. “
Yumi go raet nao.
”

I looked to Wes for support. But he had already turned for the door.

“Kava,” Wes was murmuring to the men who clung to him like a teddy bear. “
Mi likem kava
.”

Late that night, after three shells of muddy kava and a dizzy ride home, I lay awake in bed listening, for the last time, to the distant cries of the chief's son and the rain on my tin roof, drumming and dripping me toward sleep. And then I heard the rasping, the same staccato click and metallic hum I had heard every night on Maewo, and I knew that something was tapping at the wire-mesh fence outside my room. I rolled quietly out of bed and crept to the window, holding my breath. The rain had stopped. The yard was empty. The sky was starless and muddy. A shadow teetered on the curled edge of the mesh fence. Before I could focus, there was a sudden, explosive beating of wings, and the creature flapped through space and landed on my porch. I could just make out a great plume of tail feathers and the glint of tiny eyes. A rooster. I exhaled. I suppose I should have felt relief. I didn't.