Heartland (7 page)

‘Miss Roe!’ says Aureole at last. ‘Did you hear that!’

‘He’s taken my name.’ Roe’s tone suggests theft.

‘But we must be related! We
must
be!’ Aureole’s downy faded skin is flushed with excitement.

‘There is no point in getting excited.’ But Roe’s stick, tapping the floorboards, is as agitated as Aureole’s hands. ‘We know full well that we are the last of the McAnenys.’

Delia turns her head to look at them both. She hasn’t spoken for a month.

‘It seems we may have been mistaken,’ she says.

Next morning, Donny Mac is summoned by an excited Aureole to the dark house behind the macrocarpas. They sit in the front room. No one speaks until Delia has poured tea and offered shortbread. There is an unusual light in the eyes of all three sisters as they watch Donny Mac sip.

Aureole speaks. ‘We would like to employ you to make repairs to the house, but first my sister would like to ask you about your background.’

Donny Mac sighs. He scratches his head. ‘Yeah? References, you mean?’

‘Family background.’

‘Yeah? Look … did someone say …? I got in a bit of trouble but it wasn’t …’

Roe clears her throat and stirs in her chair. Donny’s words tail away. Everyone waits.

‘Who gave you your name?’ she asks.

‘Donny Mac?’

‘Munroe McAneny.’

‘Munroe? It’s just a family name. I’ve got a cousin Munroe, and my granddad was Munroe.’

The sisters draw breath.

‘How can it be?’ whispers Aureole. The tears are flowing already.

‘Munroe McAneny,’ says Roe, ‘this is important. Where are you from?’

‘Well,’ says Munroe, with some pride, ‘on my mother’s side I’m Ngai Tahu, though I’ve also got—’

‘Your father’s side.’

‘What is all this? I don’t get it.’

‘My name,’ says Roe, her lizard’s eyes glaring, ‘is Munroe McAneny too.’

‘Whoo hoo!’ murmurs Donny Mac.

There is silence in the room. Aureole dabs at her eyes; Delia is watching Donny closely. Suddenly the boy jumps up, goes to the window and looks into the macrocarpas as if the answer is in their tangled branches.

‘I reckon! Yeah! I reckon … you’re my great-aunts!’ He frowns for a moment, thinking. ‘Or maybe great-great?’

‘We are the last of our line,’ says Roe. She has said it many, many times.

‘Like smoke! You had two older brothers, right?’

Aureole’s tears flow harder. She flaps a hand towards the photograph of the uniformed young men. ‘Poor dear Munroe and brother Harry! Killed in the war.’

Donny turns from the window. ‘No! No, they weren’t! Munroe was my great-grandfather. Granddad McAneny told me the story.’

He stops in his telling. One big hand turns upward and he looks at the palm, perhaps seeing something in it. ‘Granddad used to talk to me,’ he says, as if remembering a wonder. ‘He owned the place over there where I live now. He told me stories.’ Now it is Donny Mac who has tears in his eyes. ‘He
took me hunting and told me all sorts of things.’

Roe clears her throat again. Her voice threatens. ‘His name was Munroe McAneny?’

‘Yeah.
His
dad, another Munroe McAneny — the one in that photo, I guess — went to the war all right, with his brother. Both got wounded, one trying to rescue the other. They were good mates, those two young fellers. After a while in hospital they got better and were sent back, Granddad said. Back to the war. Back to the trenches. Granddad said it was cold and muddy and your toes rotted off and there were rats as well as all the shooting. The worst kind of life. Then his dad got wounded
again
. Both of them! Or gassed or something and sent home for a break. That’s when the brothers deserted together. Ran off to Australia.’

The shock dries Aureole’s tears. ‘They
deserted
?’

‘That’s what Granddad said. Their family back in New Zealand —
your
family — decided to forget them. Why would they do that?’

Donny looks at the three sisters. ‘Granddad’s dad came back here but your family wouldn’t speak to him. He was a good bloke, Granddad said. Not to be ashamed of.
Then
he married a Catholic. That was worse than death to the McAnenys, Granddad said.’

‘Oh!’ cries Aureole again. She glances nervously at Roe, whose flinty eyes glare at the big boy.

Donny is into his stride now, indignant over his family’s treatment. ‘Any letters they sent home to tell the family they were okay and married never got a reply. Someone posted their letters back unopened.’

Roe begins to slap the arm of her chair as if she is beating the story back into oblivion.

‘Roe!’ cries Aureole. ‘Did you know? That they deserted?’

Roe won’t look at her sisters. ‘They died,’ she says. ‘They were dead. I was given the Munroe name in the dead one’s place. Our father bestowed on me the name.’

‘Oh shame, Miss Roe! You knew! All these years!’

Roe McAneny faces her sisters. In her rigid back, her stony eyes, clenched old hands, there is no sign of repentance. ‘They were deserters. Shameful. Dead to the McAneny name.’

But here is her young namesake, his broad shoulders and strong arms solid in their room full of old furniture and memories. A big, simple boy telling a story that won’t be put back into any box or photograph.

There is silence again.

Aureole doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. ‘All those wreaths! Every year I laid one. Every year. Oh, Munroe! Oh, Harry!’ It is difficult to relinquish her dead heroes.

But Delia has no difficulty. For the second time in two days, she speaks.

‘They were right to desert. Poor boys. And what about your father, Donny Mac? Our great-nephew? Where is he?’

Donny hangs his head. He doesn’t want to tell the story of coming here to Manawa with his parents when he was eleven. How his mother and father disappeared after only a week, leaving a note for Granddad which the old man never showed to him. The boy has not heard of them since.

‘He shot through,’ he mumbles. ‘I don’t know where he is.’

‘Well then,’ says Delia, recognising, perhaps, the hurt.
Another McAneny disowned, forgotten. ‘And now we have a baby in the family. Have you named him?’

‘Nightshade — Pansy — doesn’t want a name yet. She’s …’ Donny sighs. ‘I guess you hear her.’

Aureole’s hands flutter around her shoulders. She would like to hug the big solemn boy but doesn’t know how. ‘Oh dear. Dear, dear, dear. She’s very sad, isn’t she? The mother. Or is it angry? Can we help?’

Roe looks sharply at her younger sister. ‘Aureole, we are too old to help. We have no experience in such things. Be sensible, if you please.’

But Donny Mac seizes on the offer. ‘Maybe … maybe one day when I go to work, I could bring him over here? He cries and Pansy gets angry and then he cries more. All he wants is a feed. But she just gets mad at him. And I’m not there to stop it …’ His voice fades away. The women are too daunting. Especially the old one.

Roe will not look at him, is not ready to acknowledge the great-grandson of a deserter. ‘We cannot help,’ she says, her eyes fixed on a point above his head.

But here is Delia, speaking again. ‘Nonsense, Roe,’ she says. ‘Nonsense.’

A small cry escapes from Aureole; she’s thrilled and amazed at this subversive statement.

‘Great-great-nephew Donny McAneny,’ Delia continues, her rusty voice distant as an echo, but firm, ‘we will try to help the baby. Our old arms can surely hold a bottle, rock a child. Surely. For an hour or two. Bring him tomorrow and we will see.’

Granddad Manny Mac's Manawa

Donny's granddad's first memory was of fire — great swirling flames tearing across a dark sky, the thick rolling smoke, and shouts and running feet. Donny loved his granddad's stories, but this one always frightened him for the haunted look in his granddad's eye when he spoke of that fire, the memory of it still burning, still a horror.

‘I wouldn't of been five — maybe three or four, Donny. We lived close to the mill, see, where my dad worked. Just around the corner from here, near the railway. The whole mill went up — the shed, the stacks of timber, the trash. Then the bloody wind drove the fire down the row of workers' houses — ours included — and on to the shops. That terror has stayed with me till this day — couldn't find Ma and Pa, couldn't breathe, screams
and shouts outside somewhere. And the explosions! Like a war it was, like guns going off. I found Ma and Pa in the kitchen. Pa huddled in a corner with his arms over his head, Ma tugging at him to get up. Jesus, I howled to see the two of them. It was the war, see, that done that to him — put that fear into his head. He could never stand loud bangs or even a bit of a barney between two men. Pa had to have a quiet life or he went kind of crazy.'

Donny's granddad sucked in his cheeks, then coughed, the rumble of it shaking his whole skinny body. ‘That fire! You wouldn't want to know, boy.'

Manny Mac, Donny's beloved granddad, was born in Manawa in 1922 when the town was still a bustling, lively place — a town hall, post office, three general stores, several boarding houses, two drinking clubs, a school, a champion rugby club, not to mention hockey and even a jazz band. And in the general area eight mills logging the red totara and pale beech, the dark tough matai and the beautiful rimu — all woods in great demand for weatherboard and joinery and flooring and fencing — and the blond kahikatea useful only for boxes or burning. Once the timber was cut and milled and loaded onto railway wagons, the trash was burned off and the rich volcanic soil laid bare for farming. Oh yes, in those early days Manawa was an energetic, rowdy kind of a place, known for its Saturday dances and its fierce rivalry with Ohakune.

Disastrous fires were not uncommon in the district, but
Donny's granddad reckoned that Manawa's proud spirit was also consumed in the fire of 1926 that burned down his father's workplace and then spread to several shops and houses.

‘The drift started then, boy; not in a rush, but family by family, drifting away to larger towns, surer work.'

Since Donny arrived, the drift has continued. Manawa is no longer really a town. The school still staggers along with two teachers; the one last shop on Matai Street has dwindled from store and post office to store and, finally, to a sad,
half-empty
‘Emporium' containing examples of Notso's many failed money-making projects and one or two racks of old clothes. More than half the houses are empty, ownership reverting to the Ministry of Works. Houses owned by ski-happy townies outnumber locally owned homes. Manawa, which sprang into life as the railway came through, has sunk again, the forests felled, business and jobs moved elsewhere.

Manny Mac would walk down with Donny to the rugby ground and show him where the mill had been — all ploughed field now, behind Kingis' farm. ‘See, a mill would employ maybe twenty-six or thirty men, let alone those in the bush bringing down the timber. How many people are needed to plough a field or milk a herd? Two? Three? No need for a town any more, eh Donny? No need for us buggers unless we can earn a crust in Ohakune or Raetihi. Fact of life, boy.'

Then he would grin his gap-toothed grin and slap Donny on the back. ‘But we still beat them all at rugby, eh?'

And young Donny would let loose his great hooting laugh and punch the air for the sheer joy of walking down the road to the rugby ground with his granddad Manny Mac.

The seven years that Donny Mac lived with his granddad were the best of his life so far. When his parents dumped their large embarrassing son in Manawa and shot through, Donny was eleven. At school up north he had been ridiculed and taunted for his size and his slow speech; at home his parents either shouted at or ignored him. Beatings were routine. Living with Manny Mac was different in every way that Donny could imagine. First, his granddad was pleased to have him around. Manny Mac was a small wiry man, his legs a little bowed, his hair and his teeth mostly gone.

‘I got the Munroe name,' he joked to the boy, ‘but that's about where it stopped. My dad, also Munroe, was tall but, you know, a broken man. The war broke him once and then his family broke him a second time. His stooped shoulders, his limp from the war wound, his need to hide because of deserting — all them things made of my dad a silent sort of a fellow, when most around that time were loud and brash, liking their beer and their dances and their girls and the odd rowdy fight down at the club. He didn't fit, no more than my mum did. She was a quiet one too, worked in the post office, like my missus after her.'

‘That would be my gran then?' Young Donny loved stories about family, couldn't get enough of them, starved as he was in his early years.

‘It would, lad, it would. If she could, she would come back from the dead to hear she had a grandson living in the family home. A lovely pearler of a lady, your gran. Smallish like me and a sweet way about her. Everyone loved Mavis. A
relative of Mona Kingi.' Manny Mac went silent for a while, thinking about his Mavis. ‘Looking back, I reckon she had a bit of Mona's problem, you know, the ups and downs, though it wasn't so obvious in my missus until the boy shot through.'

‘My dad?'

‘Your dad, our Jimmy.' Manny's face clouded. ‘We only had the one. Mavis had her heart set on a girl but we never managed that. So she lavished all her great powers of loving on the boy. Then when he was seventeen he shot through: no note, no sign, no letter later. A big bloody hole in her heart that never healed.' Manny spat. ‘Sorry, lad, but I don't hold much of a candle for Jimmy, even though he is — or was — my son. After he left, the missus just wasted away, quieter and quieter day by day. Not interested in her job or food nor even me. None of us could drag her out of it. It was a sickness, I suppose, but Jimmy set her feet on the path. You might as well know, boy, that your gran hanged herself. Bull Howie found her at the railway station, hanging from a beam in the waiting room, cut her down, but she was long gone. A sad, sad day.'

Young Donny moaned to hear it, clapped his hands over his ears and rocked.

‘Yea lord,' said Manny Mac, still inside his story, ‘a great talent Jimmy had for shooting through. Done it twice. Once to leave my Mavis in his wake, and then to leave you behind.'

That was the only time Donny remembered his granddad speaking about Jimmy and shooting through. What stuck in Donny's mind, in particular, was the way his granddad sighed and then changed tack completely. He grinned and draped a scrawny arm around Donny. ‘But here you are, boy, my great
good luck in my old age. A fine lad to help me, and a willing ear. You're a good listener, Donny Mac, and a strong boy. I am a blessed man.'

No one had ever before even remotely suggested that Donny could be good luck or a blessing.

‘Back in those days,' said Manny Mac, one soft evening when he and Donny were sitting on the back porch watching the snow on the mountain change from white to pink to steely grey, ‘when I was a smart-arse lad and a pretty useful half-back, my best mates were Bert and Smiley Goodyear. Butcher's sons, they were, and as such owned a couple of horses. Bert and Smiley did the deliveries to the outlying mills — the mill hands and their families mostly lived close to work in accommodation provided. Anyway, on days off, the three of us would take the nags into the bush with three or four dogs, and hunt pigs. Sometimes deer, but the wild boar were our favourite. I'll show you how to hunt, Donny, and use a gun properly. You're old enough now.

‘Well, on one of those hunting trips I told those Goodyear boys about my dad. It was supposed to be a secret, how he had deserted, but I told them anyhow, and how Dad's family had turned their backs on him. I was a hot-headed lad in those days and was pretty mad about it all, especially at how low it had brought my dad. So we hatched this plan, all bright and bushy tailed as lads are, that we'd charm our way into the
stuffy old family up in Auckland and somehow bring about a reconciliation. So. Not a word to the ma and pa, off we head to the bright lights, all shaved and washed in our Sunday suits. The Goodyear boys were not bad lookers, taller than me, and fair, eyes a surprising blue — clear and happy-looking. I was pinning my hopes on my mates to do the charming, you see.

‘Well, we get to Auckland and take the train out to St Heliers Bay. That's where the family home used to be, according to Dad. It was a fair enough bet that the parents were dead, but we hoped that someone still lived there and the brothers and sisters might be overjoyed to find a long-lost brother. Desertion not to be mentioned.

‘It was a big old bungalow, Donny, your ancestral home, long and low, looking out over the sea, on a sloping lawn shaded by a beautiful jacaranda tree. The three of us stood on the road above, eating our sandwiches, looking for signs of life. Suddenly the whole scheme seemed crazy. Smiley and I were all for walking away, but Bert, who had a bit more gumption to him, started off down the path, so we had to follow.

‘Just as he raised his hand to knock, the door opened and there was this smart lady in her dark coat and hat, handbag over her arm, obviously on her way out. Grim faced she was, not at all pleased to see the three of us.

‘“What's this?” she said. And waited.

‘Bert gives me a nudge, but I couldn't get a word out. I was only a lad, Donny — sixteen maybe — and was ready to run all the way back to Manawa. But Bert doffs his hat and asks is she a McAneny.

‘“Miss McAneny, yes, and who might you be?”