I Got His Blood on Me: Frontier Tales Read online

  Smith looked balefully out the door. I tried to make up a little ground.

  ‘Can I help with anything? Is there someone I could phone? Do you have a wife, or a next of kin?’

  He glowered and said nothing.

  ‘I’m just trying to help you,’ I said. ‘There’s not much I can do without information.’

  ‘I’m not going to tell you, am I?’ he said. With his eyes he indicated his shackled leg, his pinioned arms. ‘Look where your help has got me, Miller. Where are my weapons?’

  It scared me a little that he’d remembered my last name. I couldn’t even remember giving it to him.

  ‘It looks like they’ve fixed your knee, Smith,’ I said. ‘And your broken leg, and your lungs. And you’ll get to go home eventually.’

  ‘When?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Ask your doctors.’

  ‘You ask them,’ he said. ‘You tell them.’

  I took a breath and tried to keep calm. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘I can do that. It would be helpful, though, if you could tell me your next of kin and your real name. It would speed things up, both now and later on.’

  He looked at the TV that was suspended from the highest point at the end of the bed-frame. It wasn’t turned on.

  ‘Like, when were you born? Was it, like ... recently? And where?’

  He narrowed his eyes, then reached for the remote and fumbled around with it, and finally turned on the TV.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’ll find out what I can about your treatment. But I don’t think you’ll be getting out of here soon. You were pretty banged up when I found you.’

  Commercials were playing; he found the volume control and cranked it very loud.

  ‘I brought some magazines,’ I said, pulling them from my bag. ‘I got you the sports section of the paper, as well. I don’t know if you like sport? I do.’

  He didn’t even look at them.

  ‘That’s all right,’ I said. ‘You’re welcome.’

  Noise came from the commercials, nothing from Smith.

  ‘Did you hear me?’ I said. ‘You’re welcome. For the magazines I brought you.’

  ‘I can’t read them, can I,’ said Smith. ‘I can’t read.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Well, you’ve got the TV. Someone showed you how to use it, I see.’

  He held the remote and watched the screen.

  ‘I’m going now,’ I said, ‘but I’ll come again. Tell the hospital to call me if you need anything, plus you can push that button there for help, anytime.’ I indicated the console next to his bed, but didn’t go near it. I was reluctant to walk too close to him. ‘Maybe you knew that already,’ I said, ‘about the nurse button.’

  He didn’t look at me or the console.

  I stood to go. I had brought an old cellphone with me; I’d planned to show him how to contact me anytime, but now I decided to leave that for another visit. I went to the door and gave him a wave but he didn’t even acknowledge me, not even with a flicker of his eyes. Instead he continued to watch the screen, as if I’d never been there.

  It was two days before I saw him again. The time in between was spent reading in my shed and avoiding Mary, and shopping at Paraparaumu, that vast emporium for food and Warehouse clothing. It was a tiring place, Paraparaumu, and parking was a nightmare, but I liked it as a distraction from redundancy. It had a great name. One old book had it translated as ‘Plenty of Food’, and I still liked that interpretation. It seemed so current, somehow. You could still see it in the teeming mall and the Pak’nSave.

  When I returned to the hospital Smith was out to it, sleeping. I sat a safe distance from him, watching his orange hair frizz about him on the pillow. I wondered where his weapons were now. I wanted to get a photograph of them. I also wanted to sneak a picture of him. I was fishing in my bag for the camera when he woke up and turned towards me, and I froze. For a long moment he eyed me and I tried to smile. Then he growled to clear his throat.

  ‘Morning,’ he said.

  ‘Hi,’ I said, replacing my camera. ‘I brought these.’

  He watched without comment as I brought out chocolates, a magazine, and a pictorial history of Kāpiti.

  ‘How are you?’ I said.

  He rested his eyes on me a while, letting me feel the weight of his stare.

  ‘I don’t have to stay,’ I said. ‘If you’d rather be alone, I can go.’

  He let the silence stretch out some more, then said, ‘I can’t sleep at night.’ He indicated his cocooned leg, then his ribcage. ‘The pain. Can you get me more medicine?’

  ‘More morphine?’ I said. ‘I can certainly ask for you.’

  As he watched me I had the feeling I was being appraised—gauged for my uses—until he was taken by a noise in the corridor. It was an orderly with trays, and I noted the look of darting and sideways cunning Smith sent out there, and realised it was an old part of his character reasserting itself after the accident, not something new.

  I swallowed against something unpleasant in my mouth. ‘Is there anything else I can do?’

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Are you sure?’ I said. ‘It’s no problem.’

  ‘I’m fine.’ He watched the TV again, and I looked up there too, waiting. A few minutes passed.

  I began packing my things to go.

  Smith slid his eyes over me again. ‘It’s good to have someone to talk to.’

  ‘I can imagine,’ I said. ‘It’s good for me too.’

  He smoothed the sheets over himself and looked out the window. A stretch of the town belt was visible out there. ‘I realised something today,’ he said. ‘I’ve been here before. This area—I remember now. I remember that ridgeline from the time I came here. It was with my wife’s people.’

  I held my breath and leaned forward slightly.

  He pretended not to notice. ‘We got caught by the weather, once. We were out in the boats, heading towards the other island on a scouting mission when a bad wind blew up and pushed us through the strait, and we had to pull in here. Our boats were damaged and we had to leave them—and they were good boats too; a Pākehā boat we’d bought in flax trading, and a waka, which I didn’t travel in. When they smashed up we had to pull in here and walk all the way back to Kāpiti.’

  ‘Wow.’

  He smoothed his hair back, taking his time. ‘The big Pākehā settlement wasn’t here then, of course. Not that I remember, anyway. Maybe a tent or two. It was Māori territory still, but not our territory, and we had to keep our heads down. That’s why I remember that ridgeline. There was good cover up there.’

  I leaned to trace the skyline of town belt out the window.

  ‘This was with your wife’s people?’ I said.

  ‘Āe,’ he said. ‘Six of us men—all young.’

  Again I felt the sliding weight of his eyes. I had so many questions—I was excited—but I kept my tone even. ‘Interesting,’ I said. ‘You made it back, I take it?’

  He had a way of letting silence seep in, and he exercised it now. He eased back on his pillow and sighed.

  ‘Are you tired?’ I said.

  ‘I’ll sleep now,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you another time.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ I said, leaning back. ‘That’s fine.’

  He closed his eyes. I gathered my bags and sneaked another glimpse at him and yearned again, now his eyes were closed, to photograph him. I didn’t risk it, though. Instead, I looked out the window at the view he’d indicated, and fired with the picture he must have made out there, bright-haired and white in the clothes of his in-laws, prowling that Wellington ridgeline.

  Mary had stopped going to the gym, and it scared me. She hadn’t missed it for such a long stretch since her parents’ accident. Every morning her gear confronted me in the bathroom, the zippered bag drifted with lint from our accumulated towels. It did nothing for her tension—our collective tension. At night she lay in a taut shape, facing away from me, not sleeping. She didn’t turn when
I came in from the shed or from town.

  ‘How are you, honey? Did you go out today?’

  ‘Yes, David. I went out today.’

  Every night the list of things I could say on greeting Mary without exasperating her shrank a little more. I became practiced at coming in quietly, easing into my side of the bed and shielding my light to read as she lay the other way, finally sighing up out of bed to sit in the kitchen or walk down by the sea. She no longer told me what jobs she’d applied for; in fact the ‘j’ word no longer passed between us at all.

  As for my own new project on Smith, she showed no enthusiasm for him, beyond a vague but unspoken irritation at my trips down to see him, as if she knew I didn’t really need to go but enjoyed the chance to leave home, and knew that she couldn’t mention it, not now anyway. Soon Smith was just another subject to estrange us, another thing we couldn’t mention as we passed each other in the hallway or the kitchen, our eyes looking away and our faces closed.

  And so Smith started with his stories.

  ‘We were shifting tons of flax by this time. We had dozens of people working the plantations, and we were getting forty pound a ton for it at point of sale. So it was a real operation. You should have seen the stores.’ He shook his head as if still amazed. ‘I don’t say this to boast, but the price was twenty quid when I first started with them, and I got it up to forty pounds. That was my job, you see. That’s how I got on with my wife’s people. I could barter in English with the ships’ captains, and I could bump up those prices.’

  ‘Go on,’ I said. I was on a hospital chair by his bed, leaning forward to catch it all, wishing I could record him surreptitiously.

  ‘But we had our rivals. Everyone wanted a piece of the trade. One time I’d made a deal at Scotch Jock’s with a trader who was in from Sydney, and it was getting on for dusk when I left there. Scotch Jock’s was a sort of pub, you see. Bloody rough, mind you. It was just a hut up the coast there.’

  ‘I’ve read about Scotch Jock’s. So you went there?’

  ‘Āe, and as I walked down from Scotch Jock’s I got jumped by these four. It was a jack-up, of course. The idea was to kidnap me and force me to trade for them, but luckily I had my flax knife hidden under my armpit, here.’

  I leaned to see where he pointed, and he nodded, pleased at my attention.

  ‘Āe, I always wore a leather belt there, to secure an extra weapon. You could hide it under your blanket and no one would know. I wore it everywhere, and my wāhine used to complain—why did I have to wear this knife everywhere, even in our own whare. Well, I was glad of it now these boys were on me. I’d stabbed the nearest one before he’d even grabbed me properly. I got him here.’

  Again I leaned to check the point of entry.

  ‘Then I twisted fast on the second and stabbed him in the eye. That slowed him down, but of course the blade got stuck in his eye-socket, so I couldn’t pull it out to have another go. So I had to kick the third one on the side of the knee about four times until I broke it for him. This was in bare feet, mind you.’

  ‘Where was the fourth man?’ I said. ‘What was he doing?’

  ‘Oh, he was just a kid and he was looking scared. By the time I got to him he’d pissed himself—a big puddle on the mud underneath him—and all I had to do was screw his ear and push him into the toe-toe.’ Now some hospital staff clattered past with a trolley of meals, and he paused to peer out at what his dinner might be. ‘Yes, it was a good scrap, that one, but I broke my toe on that third man. It’s been bent right back over on itself, ever since, just like a horseshoe.’

  ‘Which one?’ I said.

  ‘The third man. The one whose knee I broke.’

  ‘No, which toe? On which foot?’

  ‘That one,’ he said, and I laughed. He’d pointed at the leg that was encased in plaster and shackled high, the bent-back horseshoe toe safely hidden from view.

  It became obvious that a fair amount of what he told me was lies. He’d never had a quiet day, apparently. He’d never fixed a mate’s roof or worked in a garden. It was all fighting and plotting and screwing ships’ captains in trade, and Smith always to the forefront in everything.

  It was my own fault, though. One night I’d left some of my cruder books on Pākehā-Māori in the hospital, next to his bedside pile of TV Guides, and though he couldn’t read them, he seemed to have picked up something from the older and more basic stories, as from that point his yarns became more bloody and exaggerated, giving me what he must have decided I expected to hear.

  It was still fascinating—I still loved to guess at the real story behind these tales, still yearned to take his photo, had even started to outline an article I would write in my shed and submit to someone—but eventually it got frustrating. It hurt me more than I liked to admit, Smith’s lying. I’d saved him from the motorway, and every day now I was making life better for him—talking to his nurses, bringing food, paying for the slot-card that fed his television. It hurt me that, after all my help, he never shared any of the real information that proper friends share. Instead he just watched me with those canny eyes and fed me these stories.

  Then during one visit he set about explaining a scar on his shoulder, a pucker of thickened skin in the shape of a butterfly. ‘It was a real stoush, that one,’ he said, fingering the scar. ‘Phew.’

  ‘What about?’ I said.

  ‘Oh, it was a disagreement,’ he said. ‘A long story.’

  ‘With who?’ I said. ‘Where?’

  He glanced at me, then out the window. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘down the coast there.’

  ‘Where, exactly?’

  ‘Round where I live now. Down there.’

  ‘Where’s that?’ I said. ‘You haven’t told me.’

  He smiled faintly and eased his head on the pillow. Keep this up, his smile seemed to say. I’m better at it than you. ‘Anyhow we snuck up in the night, and got right inside their pā. Then we ambushed them before dawn. We hit them while they were just waking up.’

  I smiled and sat back. ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Actually they were heading for water—for the creek that was just there.’

  ‘Right,’ I said.

  ‘Āe, and there were five of them, and half a dozen of us. Big men—they were all big, Miller. Their best fighters, eh.’

  ‘What were they doing fetching water?’ I said. ‘Surely that wasn’t their job. You said there were slaves. I thought the slaves would fetch water.’

  ‘Well, these were toa,’ he said. ‘These weren’t slaves.’

  ‘That’s interesting.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t stop to ask questions about who was supposed to fetch water,’ he said. ‘There was no time for talking. We had a job to do, and it wasn’t to hariru, Miller. This was real.’

  ‘I’ll bet,’ I said.

  ‘I wasn’t the first one into the fighting, but I did my share.’

  ‘What did you use?’ I said.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I suppose I used the mere. I had a whole lot of weapons to choose from, by then. I’d earned them.’

  ‘Through fighting?’

  ‘Of course.’

  I smiled. I’d never seen this mere. I’d seen his knives and his musket. Perhaps he’d seen a mere once, maybe even been allowed to handle one. But even as I grinned he kept rattling on about the spectacular violence of the fight he’d survived and the improbable odds he’d overcome.

  Meanwhile I bent to my bag and thumbed through a file of notes I’d made. Then I interrupted him. ‘You know, I read something about the first Pākehā who came here. I thought it might interest you. It said some Pākehā-Māori who recorded their stories, particularly those who returned to London or resettled in Pākehā towns, lied about their experiences.’

  Not looking at him, I began reading from my notes as if quoting someone. ‘They exaggerated the violence of tribal life and their own part in conflict for the sake of their audiences, back in Britain. The clerks and coffeehouse-dwellers of London wanted sw
ashbuckling tales of a perilous frontier, so that’s what some of these returned Pākehā-Māori gave them.’

  I glanced at Smith. He wasn’t looking at me. He’d pulled his bed-sheets close, resumed something of his old haughty mien.

  ‘Complicating things, some lied to protect their real stories from becoming known,’ I said, reading on. ‘Some of these were deserters, escaped convicts, and renegade sailors—in some cases, they’d jumped ship or run from the cruelest exploitation, and were lucky to be sheltered by Māori people. On their return some lied to protect their identities. They took new names and hid behind fantastical stories because they were scared of being imprisoned again, or because their fantasies of adventure were more entertaining for their audiences.’

  Smith was not listening, or pretending not to.

  I continued ‘quoting’ the handwritten lines I’d made up myself by mangling several extracts of books with my own guesswork about Smith’s vulnerability. By the time I’d finished he was staring stony-faced out the door. For my part I sat there feeling neither triumphant nor dirty, but something in between.

  Smith reached to his bedside cabinet and I flinched, half-standing in fear, but he was just retrieving the remote control. My reaction amused him though, and he smiled as he thumbed on the TV.

  I sat waiting for a full ten minutes while he watched a Shortland Street rerun. Then another programme came on and I realised that he wouldn’t talk to me again, that day. I left then, taking my books and my bag with me.

  It went downhill after that. I visited Smith twice more, and each time he ignored me for the whole half-hour of my visit, staring up at the television as if I wasn’t even there, so I stopped bringing him food and newspapers, and finally stopped visiting. He had no one else and it felt unfair, but I couldn’t keep that up. It was degrading.

  Then one night I decided to try one more time, made desperate after playing touch with my old Ministry team. It was humiliating to be the one disestablished guy in the side. I’d never been one of the playmakers or even very reliable, yet now everyone passed me the ball more frequently than usual, out of pity, and I dropped it with a correspondingly higher frequency.