Settlers' Creek (14 page)

‘We’d like a place for Mark. A plot.’

‘Of course. Come with me and I’ll get the map. It’s all laid out, you see, what’s taken, what’s still available.’

They walked back to the church and Box waited while the vicar unlocked the door. The air inside was cold and the only light came through the stained glass windows — three down each side and the large one behind the altar. Box remembered from his childhood the smells of musty prayer cushions and oiled wood. He remembered the sound of footsteps on bare stone, the rows of pews and the feel of the wood, smooth and cool on the backs of his legs and beneath his fidgety boy’s hands.

The last time he’d been here was for his grandfather’s funeral. It had been chocka, standing room only.

Box followed the vicar down the central aisle to a door off to the side. He noticed for the first time that the snowflakes continued right around the back of the man’s jersey.

‘I won’t be a second. The church stores all the paperwork in here.’

‘Sure.’

Box was left standing in front of the lectern. It was carved into the likeness of an eagle. He remembered that as well. As Box had sat between his grandfather and his brother in
the pews on a Sunday morning the lessons had seemed to be carried out to him on darkly varnished wings.

The vicar reappeared. ‘Right. Here they are. Let’s go out again and have a look.’

Box nodded. He followed the snowflakes out the main door and back to the lawn behind the church.

‘Mr Saxton?’

‘Yes?’

‘I said, this row all along here is free.’

‘What about up the back, near the cabbage tree?’

The vicar studied the map in his hands. The cool breeze off the harbour jostled and flapped the edges of the paper. He frowned. ‘A lot of the plots along there are already taken, I’m afraid. Higher up is popular. But let’s see. There’s still twenty-three through to twenty-nine, over there. And thirty-six, over in the corner, that isn’t taken either.’

Box walked up the sloping grass to the top of the lawn. Behind the graves was a wire fence. When he turned and looked back he had a view over the church’s roof to the choppy water of the harbour.

‘This will be good, right here.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can I suggest that if anyone else in your immediate family is intending to be buried here that you might buy several plots at once.’

Christ, though Box, he’s giving me the hard sell. Would you like fries with that grave? He choked back a sickly laugh. The vicar gave him a quizzical look.

‘Is there any discount for buying in bulk?’

A rueful smile cracked the man’s long face. ‘I don’t think so. No, sorry.’

There was no question, though. This was the right place for Mark to be. Heather could be buried here too, when her time came. God willing that would be long after he’d gone himself. Liz could lie here if she wanted it. Both Liz’s parents were ashes in a faceless wall on the edge of some manicured rose garden; a McGraveyard that had no special significance for them, or for her.

And of course he would lie here himself, alongside all the other Saxtons. Next to his wife and his children. Soon enough, he thought.

‘I’ll take the four along here.’

‘Good. I always tell people that it’s best to plan ahead. No one wants to think about themselves dying, but planning solves problems later on.’

‘Is there any way I can delay paying until a bit later?’

‘Yes, of course, but we’ll need a deposit.’

‘How much?’

‘Normally we ask for a hundred dollars for each plot.’

Four hundred bucks. ‘Can I write you a cheque?’

‘Of course. And I’m sure the church will be willing to wait for the balance, given your family’s long history in the area.’

‘Thanks.’

He wondered what Liz would say. The little money they’d saved in the last year was already earmarked — and not for graveyard plots. Mark’s funeral alone was going to push them a long way into the red. He was spending money he didn’t have. Right now, though, Box couldn’t think of anything more important.

They talked for another half-hour about the arrangements for Wednesday’s funeral but it was clear to Box that the vicar and the funeral director pretty much had
everything covered. They were like tugboats nudging big blind ships in the right direction.

They’d never found his brother’s body. Three weeks after Paul went missing there was a funeral, of sorts — a commemoration ceremony. The black marble headstone had already been chiselled and set into the undisturbed lawn. It was only the fourth grave on the new grass.

For the first week the house had been like a train station. People visited at all hours. They pored over maps spread out on the top of the piano in the singing room. Dee went into a flurry of cooking for the searchers.

Then the first week passed. The numbers of visitors shrank dramatically.

Pop was still out on the water from dawn until it got too dark to see. He was at home only to eat breakfast and dinner and to sleep. He sat at the kitchen table and ate quickly and silently. During that time, Dee wore a tissue-thin mask. Box often caught her crying when he came into a room. She’d wipe the tears away and slip on the mask again and ask him what he wanted to eat, even if he’d had a meal only half an hour earlier.

‘Don’t worry. I think they’ll find him. I’m sure of it.’

By then Box knew that Dee didn’t mean that they’d find Paul alive. She meant that they would find his body.

But days passed and then they were measuring time in weeks and Paul’s body had not washed up among the yellow-brown kelp in any of the dozens of small bays up and down the harbour.

One day, when he was down at Harbidges’ dairy, Box
heard Ozzy Taylor and Terry Fowler, the oldest of the Fowler boys, speculating that maybe a fisherman would snag Paul in a set net.

‘Not that there’ll be much left of the poor bugger,’ said Ozzy.

When they saw that Box was loitering by the bike stand, clearly listening, they went quiet. And then Ozzy offered to buy him an ice cream. It was a hot day and Box took advantage of the situation. He asked for a double scoop hokey-pokey.

But Ozzy and Terry’s gruesome prediction never happened. Paul was never dragged from the water, entangled in mesh like a gill-snagged flounder. No skeleton was ever dredged up from the mud at the bottom of the harbour. Not so much as a finger bone was found. That would have been something at least — a single finger bone, picked clean by crabs and sea-lice — something to confirm the worst. Like a Catholic relic, thought Box: the finger bone of the martyred St Paul of Regent’s Bay.

Box had came to believe that the currents had carried his brother out past the heads, to the open ocean. Once out there, where the water changed to the deeper blue of diluted ink and the current was a one-way highway up the east coast, there was no show of Paul ever being found.

With no body to bury, no small part of a body, Box had always thought that there was something theatrical about Paul’s grave. It was like the cardboard façade of a cowboy town, specially made for one of those television shows he’d been so fond of as a kid:
Gunsmoke
or
Bonanza
. The marble headstone was just a painted front, a plywood thing propped up by wooden struts. It was arbitrary. The ground below was empty.

After the meeting with the vicar, Box navigated the winding road back down the north side of the hills. With the city spread out in front of him and the drifting feeling of two beers downed at the Regent’s Bay pub well and truly settled in his brain, it occurred to him that with Mark gone the Saxton name would soon die out in the bay. He took his eyes off the road to glance at the Bible, sitting in the sunshine on the faded vinyl of the passenger seat. Box imagined how future generations would see what was going on now. What would be written there in the front of that book? Probably something as blunt as ‘Mark Saxton — deceased’ and the dates — born and died; hatched and dispatched. Or maybe they would write down something closer to the truth. ‘Took his own life.’ That had a certain ring to it. Either way, Mark’s name would be the last: a sterile fruit, left hanging tenuously from the end of a brittle branch.

Box returned home to find the house full of Maori.

He stood in the doorway of his lounge and looked out over a shifting lake of brown faces. There must have been at least twenty people in the room. A few standing close to him turned their heads and regarded him curiously, as though he was a stranger who’d become confused and wandered into the wrong house. A woman on the couch was breastfeeding a baby. Most were listening to an old man speak. His face was as brown and crevassed as a walnut shell. He stood at the end of the room by the fireplace, wearing blue jeans and an aged brown sports jacket with leather patches on the elbows, both hands cupped over the bulbous head of a heavy walking stick.

The old man was speaking in Maori with long pauses between the clusters of earnest words. To Box, the gaps between the words seemed as much a part of the performance as the words themselves. He watched as the
old man rocked his weight forward into the stick and nodded his head solemnly, seeming to agree with his own sentiments. When he lifted one hand to gesture, Box saw that the top of the walking stick was carved into the shape of a dolphin, the wooden tail curved down and folded into the shaft.

Of course Box knew immediately what was going on. Liz’s phone call to Stephen, to whatever his name was now — Tipene Something — had summoned not only the boy’s biological father, but this lot as well. The whole bloody tribe. Here they were, filling up his house, speechmaking in his lounge.

Box didn’t understand a word the old guy was saying. Actually, that wasn’t strictly true. You couldn’t be raised in this country and not pick up a smattering of words that had come into common usage. Kaipuna. The old man had said it several times. That’s the town where Stephen — Tipene — and, presumably, most of this lot were from. It was north, up the coast, four hours’ drive. Box knew that Kai meant food, but puna? He had no idea. Puku, yes. That was another word of the old man’s that he caught. That meant stomach. And then he heard the word for grandchild — mokopuna.

Behind him the toilet flushed. The door on the other side of the hall opened a few seconds later and an old woman come out of the bathroom, still adjusting her skirt, muttering to herself. She looked up and saw Box watching her. She frowned and then nodded curtly.

He took a quick headcount. He’d been almost right. There were eighteen people in the lounge, including the old man, who was still speaking and showed no sign of letting up. There were some kids about the place too. He’d
seen three of them playing on the front lawn as he came in. A man close to Box laughed and white teeth flashed against brown skin.

‘Excuse me.’

Another woman, younger, with long dark hair and black jeans, was trying to edge past him into the hall.

‘Sorry.’ And then he found himself annoyed for having to apologise for standing in his own doorway.

‘No worries,’ she said.

‘Have you seen Liz?’

‘In the kitchen, I think, helping with the kai.’

Box tilted his head towards the old man. ‘Do you understand what he’s saying?’

‘Yeah, mostly. He’s introducing himself. Explaining where he’s from, who his ancestors were, you know, giving the whakapapa of his hapu — our people.’

‘How long’s he gonna be?’

She looked at him quizzically, trying to read his face, his tone. ‘Not too long. But you can never tell with the old fellas.’

‘Thanks.’

In acknowledgement she raised both her eyebrows and at the same time raised her chin slightly, and then went past him into the hall.

Box found Liz in the kitchen with two more Maori women. She was standing behind the counter stirring a wet mixture in a bowl. ‘The egg beater’s in the bottom drawer,’ Liz said to one of the women and then she turned and saw him. ‘Box. Hi.’

‘Can I talk to you?’

‘Okay. I’ll just wipe my hands.’

She used a paper towel, then crumpled it and threw it
into the bin. Box saw that she looked better, more relaxed, than she had since he’d got back from down south.

‘Where?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the house is pretty full. How about out the back?’

The two Maori women carried on with what they were doing but gave Box sideways looks as he led Liz out the back door.

When the section was subdivided and a townhouse plonked on the land at the back, the villa had been left with a token rectangle of lawn that you could mow with a push mower in two minutes flat. A cracked concrete pad took up almost half the space. Out of the concrete leaned the metal base of a clothesline like a denuded umbrella.

Liz closed the door behind her. ‘Promise you won’t get angry.’

‘I’m not angry. I just want to know who all these people are.’

‘They’re Steve’s relatives. His whanau. They’ve come down for the funeral.’

‘Christ, Liz.’

‘Box.’

‘You said he might not even show up.’

‘Well, he has, and he’s brought his family. It’s okay, Box — actually, I think it’s good.’

Box realised that his fists were clenched. He deliberately relaxed his hands, stretching his fingers. ‘How’s it good?’

‘They just want to help, to pay their respects. I didn’t know this was going to happen, honestly.’

‘Not one of those people in there has seen Mark since he was a baby, most of them not even then.’

‘I know, but to their way of thinking Mark was family.’

‘And you’re okay with this?’

‘Yes. Honestly, I am. I like having the house full of people. It makes me feel better. Just go with the flow for a change, Box. I think this could be a good thing for us all
.
’

Box shook his head. ‘Did he have to bring the whole tribe?’

‘Probably.’ She grinned ruefully.

She hugged him, hard and close, and he prayed that the smell of the two beers had worn off.

‘Where’s Heather?’

‘She’s at Kate’s house.’

‘Any word from the funeral director?’

‘He thinks we’ll get to see Mark this afternoon. Box, try and relax.’

He took a deep breath. ‘Okay, okay.’

‘Come on. I’ll introduce you to Tipene.’

She led him back inside, through the kitchen, down the hall and into the lounge. Incredibly, to Box, the old man was still speaking. If anything, the pauses between his phrases had grown even longer, as though now it was the silence and not the words that made up the core of the oration.

Liz led Box over to a man who was standing in the bay window at the back of the crowd. She tapped him on the shoulder and he turned.

‘Tipene,’ she said. ‘This is my husband, Box.’

‘Gidday. I’m really pleased to meet you,’ said Tipene.

‘Me too.’

Tipene stuck out his hand and they shook, both grips firmer then they had to be. Box was annoyed to see that Tipene was good-looking. He looked a bit like that Maori actor who was always popping up in Hollywood movies playing Mexican drug dealers or Arab terrorists. Box
couldn’t remember the name. It was the same guy who played the young girl’s father in
Whale Rider
.

Tipene was a little shorter than Box but he had broad shoulders and a thick slab of a back. Knowing that he was setting himself up, Box began searching the man’s face for any resemblance to Mark. Maybe there was something there, around the slight droop of the eyelids and in the shape of his top lip. The build was the same as well. But that was where the resemblance ended. There was always a hell of a lot of Liz in Mark — in the shape of his face and in the boy’s long fingers and the high arch of his feet. And, more noticeably, he was restless and alert, just like her, always looking for the next thing to capture his attention.

Tipene withdrew his hand. ‘I’ve never met anyone named Box before.’

‘That’s what everyone’s called me since I was a kid.’

‘Some kids have all the luck.’

‘I don’t mind.’

Tipene’s expression turned serious. ‘I was really sorry to hear about Maaka.’

‘Mark. Nobody called him that. His name was Mark.’

Tipene frowned slightly, nodded. ‘Sure, Mark. Well, anyway, I was sorry. It’s a tragedy. If there’s anything I can do, anything, just ask.’

‘Thanks.’

For a moment Box thought about saying that Tipene could lead this group of strangers out of his house and they could head back north to wherever it was they came from. They could leave Mark’s real family to grieve in peace. In pieces, more like it. And then Box immediately felt petty. These people had come a fair distance to pay their respects. That had to be a good thing, right?

Box and Tipene stood weighing each other up. There seemed little more to say.

‘Good to meet you at last,’ said Tipene.

‘You too.’

They shook hands again and Box followed Liz back out into the hall.

‘What’d you think of him?’ she asked.

‘He seemed all right.’

‘I think he really just wants to be part of this.’

‘I get it. I was just surprised, that’s all, walking in and finding them all here. Why didn’t you ring to warn me?’

‘Box, you left your phone sitting on the hall table.’

‘Shit. Sorry.’

She hugged him again. He suddenly felt drained, as though all the people in the house were sucking out any little reserves of energy that he had left. He was tired. Even after the music had stopped the night before he’d hardly got any sleep.

‘I think I’ll lie down for a bit,’ he said. ‘I feel like I’ve been run over by a bus.’

Box half expected there to be a Maori or two in his and Liz’s bedroom but of course it was empty. He lay down on top of the bright duvet. He was fooling himself — there was no chance that he’d be able to nap. Within a couple of minutes, though, exhaustion had press-ganged him down into a sleep where he lay so still that he could have been dead himself.