Tales of the South Pacific (38 page)

From the altar the chief presented his oldest Mary with a long, ancient ironwood spear. As she held it aloft, he blessed it. Then the old woman placed the spear upon the testicles of the boar she had reared. As she did so, the other wives in turn solemnly placed then-hands upon the long spear. Then they moved to the next pig. They were seeking the blessing of fertility.

Now from the huts came a terrible screaming. The chief's favorite Mary was bringing forth the pig whose tusks made two complete circles. It was a small pig, grown wizened in misery. When it was tied, protesting, to its stake, the proud woman who had coaxed it to maturity signified that all barren women in the kraal were free to share the blessing of its magic testicles. This they did, reverently, proud to participate in their friend's good fortune.

The women retired. Within his circle of palm fronds the old chief waited. "This is his wonderful moment!" the chaplain whispered. "Watch."

Slowly the other chiefs moved forward. Their tail feathers bobbed in the hot sunlight. They chanted a song of praise in honor of the man who was truly rich because he had so much to give away. Half-doleful at first, they later burst into violent shouting. At the height of their song, one suddenly grabbed a pig that screamed horribly. Even Fry, who knew what to expect, gasped.

Swiftly the old chief raised his massive ironwood club and smashed it down upon the pig's snout. He then thundered twenty blows upon the pig's skull. With great passion he crushed every bone in the pig's head. Then, with delicate precision, he gave two ceremonial blows that ended the sacrifice. He completely caved in all the bones surrounding each eye. Yet in all his apparently wild smashing, he never touched either of the tusks. Stained in deep blood, they fulfilled their function. They brought a fleeting immortality to the man who gave them away and to the woman who had reared them. Now they dug at the bloody earth into which they were tossed by excited chiefs who chanted new songs and hauled new pigs to the slaughter.

After the fifth pig was killed in this shuddery manner, Benoway found that he had to look away. In doing so he noticed that all other eyes were straining intently at the savage ceremonial. "It must have been like this when Aztecs killed their human sacrifices," he thought. But he, too, looked back when one pig in death throes broke loose and destroyed the circle of palm branches. Drenched in blood, the graceful branches trailed through the red dirt. "How different the significance we place on palm branches," Benoway thought.

"You'll notice," the chaplain was whispering to Fry, "that these people use palm branches, too. I understand the ancient druids did, also. Or something like palm branches."

Fry turned to relay this information to Benoway, but he saw that the doctor was sick at the stomach. "Sorry, old man," he said.

There was a new rain of crunching blows when the pig was recovered. The animal screamed madly, died horribly, and the ceremony drew to a close. Then a hush fell over the packed kraal. The pig of them all was finally hauled forward. For the last twenty minutes he had heard his fellows die protestingly, but he had made no sound. He remained quiet while the chiefs grabbed him. He allowed them to drag him before his ancient master. He cried out only slightly when the first terrible, face-smashing blow fell. By the time his eyes were beaten in there was no more than a dull murmur over the kraal. Benoway had to get up and leave. No one smiled.

The sacred ceremonial branch was broken by the chief. He threw it to the ground and made a short speech in which he divided the dead pigs among his friends. Then, with a rush, the chiefs and their sons fell upon the carcasses and began to dress the meat. They used long knives. With one slash they cut away the pig's head. Then they gutted him and threw the entrails to the Maries, who salvaged edible portions. Dogs dragged the remainders to the corners of the kraal. Finally the carcass was slashed into eight or ten pieces. Deftly, the jungle butchers passed tough loops of fiber through the tendons to make handles. These they handed to their wives.

The Americans were offered the four choice chunks. The chaplain started to decline for all, but Billis nudged him. "Hey, Chappy!" he whispered. "Take a couple. We can trade 'em down at the shore. They're mad for hog meat!" So the Americans took two large pieces. Billis breathed more easily. "Hell," he whispered to Fry. "You could get maybe a dozen pineapples for them!"

Young men and women now left the kraal to gather branches for the great fires that would be built. The chiefs talked among themselves for a moment and then deftly cut out the lower jaws from the heads of the dead pigs. From each jawbone two tusks, of varying quality, protruded. Some were mere circles. Others had grown back into the jawbones. All were dirty white against the dark red of the bloody bones.

The old men discussed long and ardently the attributes of each tusk. Never, they agreed, had any chief in their lifetime given away such fine boars. Lovingly the tusks were appraised, but when the double-circle ones were reached the men sat in silent admiration. Such tusks might never again be seen in their declining lifetimes.

Delicately the chief who had dispensed this largess picked up the jawbone with the sacred tusks. He deftly knocked at it with his knife. Then he grasped the tusks firmly and with a harsh, wrenching motion, tore them loose from their long tomb of misery. One he gave to Fry, one to the chaplain. He smiled at them and then nodded. They must go. Soon there would be dancing and feasting and love-making. That was a private affair.

Down the long trail to the ocean they went. The chaplain, after carrying his messy tusk for a short distance, said, "Benoway, do you want this?" The doctor leaped for it. Chappy smiled. "The appurtenances of the religion are slightly revolting."

"I feel that way myself, sometimes on Sunday in Connecticut," Fry laughed.

"You're right, lieutenant," the chaplain said. "But it takes strong ritual to affect some sinners."

Luther Billis swung along the jungle trails, pushing lianas from his face, shifting the heavy bundle of pork from time to time. He was singing snatches from an old South Seas song he had picked up from a Burns Philp trader: Right above her kidney Was tattooed the "View of Sydney."

He was terribly pleased with the day's expedition. Close behind him followed the little native boy, dreaming his heart out as he watched the pork slapping Billis on the back.

WINE FOR THE MESS AT SEGI

I THINK that Segi Point, at the southern end of New Georgia, is my favorite spot in the South Pacific. Opposite the brutal island of Vangunu and across Blanche Channel from Rendova, lies Segi promontory. Behind the point hills rise, laden with jungle. The bay is clear and blue. The sands of Segi are white. Fish abound in the near-by channel. To the north runs the deadly Slot.

I cannot tell you what the charm of Segi was. Partly it was the natives, who made lovely canes of ebony and pearl. Partly it was the mission boys, who, as you will see, sang in Latin. It was the limes, too, best in the Solomons, the fishing, the great air battles where your friends died, and the blue-green coral water. But mostly, I guess, it was Tony Fry.

On my trips up and down The Slot I made it a point to stop off at Segi whenever I could. Tony had a small hut on the hillside overlooking the tiny fighter strip. There I was sure of a welcome, a hot bath, some good food, and a native boy to do my laundry. I think the Roman emperors made war the way Tony Fry did. No man worked less than he, and few accomplished more.

An unkind critic would have called the indolent fellow a cheap Tammany politician. A friendly admirer would have termed him an expediter, such as they have in big plants to see that other people work fast. I, who was Tony's staunchest admirer, call him a Yale man. Since I am from Harvard, you can tell what I mean.

Tony would never have died for Yale. Don't misunderstand me. I doubt if he even contributed much money to the college's incessant alumni drives. But when he pulled out the cork of a whiskey bottle, draped a long leg over a chair, pointed a long finger at you, and asked, "How about those planes?" you could tell at once that his combination of laziness, insolence, competence and good breeding could have been concocted only at Yale.

For example, it was Tony's job to run the Wine Mess at Segi Point. Officers who drank more than I never missed Segi, even if they had to wreck their planes to justify a landing. Admiral Kester might be low on whiskey; Tony Fry, no. Where he got the stuff I never knew until one Christmas. And that's quite a story.

Word seeped out that there would soon be a strike at Kuralei or Truk. There was pretty good authority for the belief that the crowd at Segi Point would be in on it! Therefore the skipper said, "This will be our last Christmas here. We'll make it the best there ever was!" He appointed the chaplain to look after the sacred aspects of the holiday, Tony Fry was given the profane.

It was the third week in December when Tony discovered that he could get no more whiskey from his regular sources. I was his guest at the time. He was a mighty glum man. "Damn it all!" he moaned. "How can a man celebrate Christmas with no Wine Mess?"

Now nothing prettier than the phrase "Wine Mess" has ever been devised in the armed forces. It is said that an ensign fresh out of divinity school once went into a Wine Mess and asked for wine. The man behind the bar dropped dead. A Wine Mess exists for the sole purpose of buying and selling beer, whiskey, rum, gin, brandy, bitters, cordials, and at rare intervals champagne. It is called a Wine Mess to fool somebody, and if the gag works, so much the better.

Well, Tony Fry's Wine Mess was in a sad state! He decided to do something about it. With nebulous permission from his skipper he told Bus Adams to get old Bouncing Belch stripped for action. The Belch was a condemned TBF which Fry and Adams had patched together for the purpose of carrying beer back from Guadalcanal. If you had your beer sent up by surface craft, you lost about half of it. Solicitous deck hands sampled it hourly to see if it was getting too hot.

The Belch had crashed twice and seemed to be held together by piano wire. Everything that could be jettisoned had been tossed overboard, so that about the only things you could definitely rely upon when you got up in the air were gas tanks, stick and wings.

Four pilots had taxied the Belch around the South Pacific. Each loved it as a child, but none had been able to finagle a deal whereby it got very far from Tony Fry. It was his plane. When ComAirSoPac objected, he just sat tight, and finally Admiral Kester said, "Well, a certain number of damned fools are killed in every war. You can't prevent it. But Fry has got to stop painting beer bottles on his fuselage!"

For every mission to Guadalcanal Tony had his crewmen paint a rosy beer bottle on the starboard fuselage. The painter took pride in his work, and until Admiral Kester saw the display one afternoon at Guadal, the Bouncing Belch was one trim sight as it taxied in after a rough landing. Tony always rode in the bombing compartment and was one of the first out. He would pat the beer bottles lovingly and congratulate the pilot on his smooth landing, no matter how rough it had been. His present pilot, Bus Adams, was just slap-happy enough for Tony. Fry was mighty pleased with Bouncing Belch. It was some ship, even if he did have to scrape the beer bottles off. "I suppose," he philosophized, "that when you got braid you have to sling it around. Sort of keep in practice so that if you ever meet a Jap..." His analogy, whatever it was, dribbled off into a yawn.

We started out from Segi one stinking hot December morning at 0900. We had with us $350 in mess funds, four dynamotors, a radio that would pick up Tokyo Rose, and an electric iron. We proposed to hop about and horse trade until we got refreshments for Christmas.

Since we knew there was no whiskey in the warehouses at Guadal, we decided to try the Russells, the secondary liquor port in the Solomons. At Wimpy's, the jungle hot-dog stand where pilots came for a thousand miles to wink at the Red Cross girl, we learned that the Russells were dry. "But there's some up on Bougainvillea!" a Marine SCAT pilot assured us. "Got two bottles there the other night. Off'n a chaplain. For a Jap uniform. He was sendin' it home to his two kids."

We revved old Bouncing Belch for about a minute and roared northward up The Slot. When we approached Segi I prayed that Bus wouldn't buzz the field. But of course he did. I pulled my shoulders together, tightened my stomach, and waited for the whining howl that told me we had reached the bottom of our dive. At such times I prayed that TBF's were better planes than the little blue book said.

Then we were off again, past Rendova, Munda, Kolombangara, Vella and up to the Treasuries, those minute islands lying in the mouth of Jap positions on Bougainvillea. Aloft we saw the tiny airfield on Stirling Island, the famous one at which the young pilot asked, "Do you tie her down in a heavy sea?" And ten miles away four thousand Japs studied every plane that landed. In this manner a few Americans, fighting and bombing by day, guarding the beaches in the tropic night, by-passed the Japs and left them not to wither but to whimper.

Now we were over Bougainvillea! A dark and brooding island, most difficult of all our conquests after Guadal. Its natives were the meanest; its rains the hardest, its Japs the most resourceful. We skimmed the southwestern coastline, searching for Empress Augusta Bay. Then, heading for the gaunt volcano's white clouds of steam, we put the Belch down at Piva North. It was growing dark. There was the sound of shell fire near the airstrip. It was raining. It was Bougainvillea.

We found a jeep whose driver took us to a transient camp. That night, amid the rain, we met a group of F4U pilots who were fighting daily over Rabaul. We talked till nearly morning, so next day it was useless to try to do any business. Tony and Bus arranged to go out on a bombing hop over Rabaul. They rode in a Liberator and were very silent when they got back. Rabaul was a flowery hell of flak in those days.

Early next morning at about 0930 Tony set out in a borrowed jeep. Late that day he returned with no whiskey but two ice-making machines. By some queer accident the two valuable articles had been sent to Bougainvillea in excess of need. Tony traded our radio for them.