Song of the Spirits (101 page)

“I could get used to this!” Elaine declared enthusiastically.

Timothy smiled. “Then you should have remained Kura’s pianist. She’s still raving about her idol’s private train car. What is that woman’s name again?”

“I don’t know, some opera diva… Adelina Patti! Doesn’t she actually travel with her own train? Maybe you should have started working with Julian Redcliff. As a railroad man, you probably get a discount on trains.” Elaine leaned happily against Timothy’s arm.

The McKenzies were awaiting the travelers at the train station in Christchurch, and Gwyneira wrapped her arms around Elaine with great
emotion. Unlike Helen, whose features had grown more haggard and severe over the last few years, Gwyneira seemed to have hardly aged.

“How could I have aged gracefully with a house full of children?” Gwyneira remarked happily when Helen paid her a compliment. “Jack and Gloria, and Jennifer is still quite young too, and such a sweet girl. Look!”

Jennifer Greenwood, who was still teaching the Maori children on Kiward Station, blushed as she greeted Stephen O’Keefe. The two of them were discussing—employing impeccable legal-argumentation language—whether one was permitted to kiss in public or not. They ended up doing so behind Jennifer’s parasol.

“That will be the next wedding. After he completes his studies, Stephen’s going to start working as a corporate attorney for Greenwood.”

Helen nodded. “Much to the dismay of his father. Ruben would have liked to see him as a judge. But c’est la vie. Now, someone’s grown up!” Smiling, she pointed at Jack and little Gloria. Jack was now eighteen, a tall young man with wild auburn locks who reminded Helen greatly of a young James. Despite his lankiness, he moved with astounding dexterity as he steered his tiny companion through the muddle of the train station.

“Railroad,” parroted Gloria as she pointed like Jack at the steely monster.

“Dog, come!” she said next, with considerably more enthusiasm, reaching for Callie. Elaine whistled for her dog and indicated that she should give her paw to the little girl. Callie was distracted by other things though, Jack’s own dog most of all.

Elaine took Gloria by the hand. “She’s certainly pretty,” she said. “But she doesn’t look a bit like Kura.”

That was true. Gloria did not resemble either Kura or William. Her hair shone neither black nor golden blonde, but rather, brown with a hint of red. Her porcelain-blue eyes were a little too close together to lend distinction to her face. And although Gloria’s features still contained their baby roundness, they might later be a little too square to be beautiful.

“Thank God,” Jack remarked. “By the way, Lainie, your dog must have gotten some pretty slipshod training. It doesn’t look good to have a Kiward collie running all over the platform, letting strangers pet her. The dog needs sheep!”

“We’ll be here for a couple of days, you know,” said Elaine, smiling.

Kura’s concert in Christchurch was a triumph. She had expected nothing less. Indeed, she had floated from one sensational success to the next. Kura and Marisa attributed this to their talents as musicians; William, to Kura’s reputation as a spirit conjurer. In every interview, he lapsed into obscure innuendo, and Kura feared he had already supplied the agency in England with similar stories. She did not bring it up with him, however. She did not really care why the people came. The main thing was that they talked about her and paid for their tickets. Kura enjoyed being rich again. And she had done it all on her own.

Marama and her tribe had not only attended the concert but enriched it with two of their own
haka,
performed at William’s express request. Marama took it as an apology for the affront at his wedding when he had not allowed the tribe to perform, and happily agreed. She was a conciliatory soul and quick to forgive. And when her singing voice, as high as though it were soaring among the clouds, mixed with Kura’s dark, powerful organ playing, William would have loved to sign her on for the entire tour right away.

The White Hart’s hall was quite a bit more diverse than usual that day. Tonga had come to Christchurch with half his tribe to pay homage to the heiress of Kiward Station and to say his adieus, likely forever. However, most of the Maori did not stand out. Almost all of them wore Western clothing, though they sometimes combined the various articles rather inexpertly. Tonga appeared in traditional clothing, and his tattoos—he was practically the only one of his generation who wore them—lent him a martial air. Most people initially took him for a dancer. When he joined them in the audience, they edged away from him uncomfortably.

Tonga was also the only one who frowned over Kura’s performance. He would have preferred to retain the purity of the Maori songs than have them arranged for Western instruments.

“Kura will remain in England,” he told Rongo Rongo, their tribe’s witch doctor. “She sings our words but does not speak our language. She never has.”

Rongo Rongo shrugged. “Nor has she ever spoken the language of the
pakeha
. She belongs to neither of our worlds. It is right that she seeks her own world.”

Tonga cast a meaningful look at little Gloria. “But she’s leaving her child with the McKenzies.”

“She’s leaving the child to
us
,” Rongo Rongo said. “The child belongs to the land of the Nghai Tahu. To which tribe, she will decide for herself.

Jack sat with Gloria in the second row. He was making a big sacrifice for her, as he would never have set foot anywhere near a Kura-maro-tini concert of his own accord.

“I can certainly understand why that fellow in Blenheim was out of sorts,” he had told his mother. “I’d probably end up in an asylum after spending that much time with her too.”

Neither promises nor threats from Gwyneira had been able to convince him to go the concert. Then, however, Kura had insisted on the presence of her daughter, and Jack changed his mind at once.

“Gloria’s only going to scream again. Or worse, she won’t scream, and Kura will suddenly have the idea that she has talent and have to go with her to England. Under the circumstances, I’d rather go and keep an eye on her.”

Gloria did not scream but merely played with a wooden horse Jack had brought along, clearly bored most of the time. When Kura conjured the spirits on the stage, though, the little girl scampered out of their row and ran down the aisle to the back of the room, where the Maori were seated and Tonga was leaning against the wall with a threatening expression on his face. Jack did not follow the girl, but he watched her out of the corner of his eye. It was no surprise to him that Gloria had fled all the caterwauling and preferred to play with
other children. He, too, was happy when the concert was finally over. He left the hall with his parents—James winked at him, likewise relieved—picking Gloria up on his way out.

The little girl was with a somewhat older Maori boy who was wearing, to Gwyneira’s amazement, a traditional loincloth. Moreover, the boy was not only decorated with the typical amulets and bands of a Maori child of good family but he was also already sporting his first tattoos. Though many
pakeha
were disgusted by them, Gloria did not appear to be bothered by them.

The children were playing with wooden blocks. “Village,” the boy said, pointing to the fenced-in complex in which Gloria had just set another house.

“
Marae
!” Gloria declared, pointing at the biggest of the houses. Next to the meeting hall, she had also marked out storehouses and cooking lodges: “Here
pataka
, here
hanga
, and I live here.”

Her dream house stood next to a lake drawn on the ground in chalk.

“And me!” the boy exclaimed, self-assured. “Me chief.” Tonga appeared behind Gwyneira, who was listening to the children with a smile.

“Mrs. McKenzie,” Tonga said as he gave his customary bow. He owed his comprehensive
pakeha
education to Helen O’Keefe.

“Kura-maro-tini impressed us greatly. It is a shame that she is leaving us. But you still have an heiress,” he said, indicating Gloria. “This, as it happens, is my heir. Wiremu, my son.”

Helen stepped behind the two of them. “A handsome boy, Tonga,” she said, flattering him.

Tonga nodded and gazed, lost in thought, at the children at play. “A handsome couple. Don’t you think, Mrs. McKenzie?”

Wiremu was handing Gloria a seashell. Gloria gave him her wooden horse in return.

Gwyneira beamed at the chieftain. But then she restrained herself and met his gaze with a mischievous gleam in her eye.

“Children will be children,” she said.

Tonga smiled.

D
aily life in a New Zealand coal-mining settlement at the end of the nineteenth century is described in as much detail as possible in this novel. The descriptions of the work in the mine and the miners’ all-but-unbearable living conditions, the miners need to seek comfort in alcohol in the evening, and the representation of the local brothel as a “second home” are all historically documented, as is the often inhuman greed of the mine operators.

Nevertheless,
Song of the Spirits
is a historical novel only in a limited sense. The social history is meticulously researched, but many settings and historically important events were changed or are purely fictional. For example, though there existed in the area around Greymouth roughly one hundred thirty coal mines from 1864 until modern times—operated privately, jointly, or by the state—none of them belonged to a Lambert or Biller family, and no former mine operator had a comparable family history.

The mine accident depicted in the novel is based on that of the Brunner Mine in the year 1896 with respect to the number of dead, the first rescue attempts, and the cause of the accident. Sixty-four pitmen and both of the first rescue workers perished; all of that is recorded. Recordings of the witnesses’ memories of the event exist as well. With the necessary research, I could have used the names of the victims and those they left behind. However, it is precisely this sort of painstaking documentation of New Zealand’s history that makes it difficult for me—and ethically questionable—to set a truly
historical
novel in New Zealand. And by “historical novel,” I mean a story in which several somewhat fictional characters act in original settings in front of a real, researched backdrop. The plot
should not seem tacked on but clearly and strongly influenced by factual occurrences.

New Zealand was first discovered in 1642 by Dutch seafarer Abel Janszoon Tasman and mapped in sections in 1769 by Captain Cook. The North Island only first started being settled by whites in 1790, and the first forty years can be considered narrative material only if one is enthusiastic about whale and seal hunting. True settlement did not take place until circa 1830. Although New Zealand’s history is relatively short, it has been all the more precisely recorded as a result. Practically every town has an archive that contains the names of the settlers, their farms, and often, details of their lives.

Theoretically, as an author, one could “pick and choose” at his or her discretion and endeavor to breathe new life into real history. In practice, however, we are not dealing with people of the Middle Ages, whose traces have been lost over the course of centuries, but rather with people whose descendants may still live in New Zealand. Naturally, they might take offense if a stranger took their great-grandparents and furnished them with a fictional personality—particularly if it is one as unsympathetic as that of the Sideblossoms.

Since New Zealand is not as large as Australia, for example, one cannot plant completely fictitious farms and towns in real-life settings without some problems. For that reason, I have denied myself the pleasure of letting my readers follow in the footsteps of my novel’s characters. Landscapes and settings—the surroundings and architecture of farms like Kiward and Lionel Stations, for example—were altered, and historical personages supplied with new names.

Nevertheless, some information can be easily verified. For example, the name of the sheep breeder who caught the historical James McKenzie can be researched with a few mouse clicks. I can assure the reader, however, that he had as little to do with my John Sideblossom as the real McKenzie with his counterpart in this novel. James McKenzie, it should be noted, is the only one whose name is not fictional, as his fate has been lost to history. Two years
after his trial, he was given a reprieve, disappeared somewhere in Australia, and was never seen or heard from again.