I Got His Blood on Me: Frontier Tales Read online

  ‘I have been about the pā, Mrs Burtt,’ he said. ‘I have been among John’s congregation. All of the people are distressed. They are very sad at his passing. They share your sorrow.’

  She nodded, tolerating this diversion.

  ‘I share their pain,’ he said. ‘But I know I need to offer you no consolation. I know your faith has taught you—’

  She huffed, and Marcus stared at her.

  ‘Our brother is in the better place,’ he said. ‘We rejoice for him—we remember to rejoice, because tonight he walks in the Kingdom of Glory.’

  Mrs Burtt turned a sour expression at the wall.

  ‘We have suffered a severe loss,’ said Marcus. ‘You and I, and all of John’s people. We all feel it keenly. I feel it especially. I have lost a brother in the Lord; I have lost my fellow labourer and my friend.’ He swallowed. ‘But I remember that what I feel as a loss to me is a gain for John, for he goes to the Kingdom of Glory, and therefore I rejoice. Oh that we may follow him—may we both join him, when the time comes.’

  Mrs Burtt didn’t move or speak but he knew that she wished to deny this. It was in her body; it was in her hard face. She did not want to acknowledge the consolation.

  ‘We are lifted up in the Lord, Mrs Burtt. We rejoice in His plan.’

  Now she looked him in the face and spoke as if irritated and bored. ‘But it is so hard to see it, isn’t it, sir. It is so hard to see. All we have done—all John has done. All that has been asked of us, and all that he’s given.’

  ‘Yes, and he has given—’

  ‘John has given everything of us,’ she said. ‘There is nothing of us remaining.’

  ‘It is true that John was blessed with the true zeal.’

  She waved this away. ‘Our life is all for the mission. It is all for the mission and the travelling, the interruption. We are plagued by interruption, Reverend. We never have a moment to ourselves. Everything he does—everything he did—it is all for the Lord and the salvation of the people, and now he is drowned.’

  ‘John would ask us to rejoice, Mrs Burtt,’ he said. ‘I know that is what John would want.’

  ‘Oh, what John would want,’ she said.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘What John would want,’ she said, plainly.

  Somehow Marcus was standing. His face was hot and so were his palms. ‘I’m afraid I don’t understand you.’

  ‘I’m saying, What John would want.’ She cast an unfavourable look about the whare. ‘He would want this, I suppose. All of it—exactly this.’

  ‘You are not yourself, Mrs Burtt,’ he said. ‘I should leave you. You need rest.’

  ‘I have rested all afternoon. I have lain—’ she jerked a thumb at it ‘—on those blankets. If you can call that rest, I have rested.’

  ‘You have suffered a great blow,’ he said. ‘You have my sympathy. But the Lord lifts us up, Mrs Burtt. John has gone to God and we rejoice in the divine appointment. We must acquiesce to his will. I know your faith has taught you to seek all the consolation you might need in a covenant God.’

  There was a long silence in which the fire crackled and Marcus’s quickened breaths wheezed.

  ‘Do you really think so, sir,’ she said. ‘Do you honestly.’

  ‘I do,’ said Marcus. ‘And I know you do too. Although it is hard.’

  She turned to look at the fire a long moment. ‘I am with child, Reverend. It is my third time.’

  Marcus went to say something, but didn’t. He followed her eye to the fire and drew no peace from its flames. He wished he was somewhere outside, far away. She was too much for him. She was older than him, and beyond him.

  Finally she gave a great sigh. ‘I apologise, Reverend. You are right, sir. I am not myself.’

  ‘You have my sympathy.’

  She let another silence work in, then said, ‘My faith does not waver, Reverend.’ She had the sound of an older sister agreeing to play a childish game.

  ‘You are constant in your true love of the Lord,’ said Marcus. ‘I know you are firm.’

  She gave a tolerant nod.

  ‘It is a blow,’ he said, ‘it is sudden. But the Lord asks from us, and we—’

  Mrs Burtt laughed.

  ‘Good Lord,’ said Marcus. ‘Mrs Burtt.’

  She continued to laugh for what seemed a long time. Then she wiped her eyes. ‘You are right in that, sir—that is one thing you are right about. It is a shock. It certainly is sudden.’ And she laughed again and sighed.

  ‘I will read to you from the Book, Mrs Burtt,’ he said. ‘I will bring you the comfort the Word brings.’

  ‘I apologise, Reverend,’ she said. ‘I am not myself. Thank you for sitting with me. Thank you for lighting the fire.’

  ‘We will sit again,’ he said. ‘Let us sit at the table.’

  He found her a stool and she brought her hands before her and he reached to his coat and brought out the Book and flipped through the pages unseeing, his hands shaking at her nerve, at her trouble, and it was not until he’d flipped many pages and found the passage he wanted that he realised it was Te Paipera Tapu he held, that he’d left his English copy with a friend up the pā. He glanced at Mrs Burtt, who had bent her head now in a seemly fashion, and decided to read from it anyway. She was as fluent now as Burtt had been and had taught in this tongue and surely it would comfort her just the same to be read to in the Word of her hosts, to be reminded of the nature of John’s appointment and of the great many around her whom he’d brought to God, and who had sheltered her and Burtt throughout their time here.

  And now just to look again for the precise words he’d intended brought him comfort, to leaf through the pages and watch the Word column and column before him. And at last he found the passage and sent the gospel across the table to her, his hands firm now about the margins, his voice steadying, and he knew the relief she was receiving from it, the rhythmical endless rightness of the sounds, the brave eternal truths of the words.

  *

  Marcus jerked awake and coughed, gasped with a constricted wheeze. His breath caught and came as through a thicket, whistling. And with each gasp a cough tickled in his chest, and to suppress the cough made him sweat. In the half-light across the whare he could see the outline of his friend Ruka under a blanket sleeping soundly. He was one of Burtt’s teachers and had accompanied Marcus throughout his rounds that day, and ridden up the river to fetch a fellow teacher who’d been away. Having opened his whare to Marcus he was now enjoying the sleep he deserved.

  Marcus had no wish to wake him, but the discomfort of suppressing the cough was considerable. Slowly he pulled himself upright to sit against the wall and wait for his breathing to plateau. It hurt just to breathe, and he got hardly any air in, and he could move only very slowly, so starved were his muscles of air, but he did not panic. It was about two or three in the morning, he judged, and the night’s progress from here was familiar. Since accepting his mission he’d spent many nights this way. Asthmatic nights had long been his trial. He brought his blankets about him and looked into the half-light and began the long wait until dawn.

  It disrupted his work and had brought him near death several times, but deeply Marcus knew that his asthma was a blessing, for seldom were these hours of the night wasted. On any day at the mission he had scarcely two moments for himself, and even those were subject to interruption. Too seldom were the times he could find at Ōtaki for private prayer—that very source of ministerial usefulness—and thus by the very practicalities of ministering to his people was his faith hardened and made cold. Therefore he valued these hours of sickness and discomfort, these parcels of opportunity for communion with God.

  Careful not to wake Ruka he brought his hands together and, dictated-to by the demands of his breathing, its rasp and pain, he waited for the stillness to come to him. He was unsettled, and as a way towards the calmer place he went to the Lord’s Prayer, enumerating the first lines in his mind.

  But he could not get f
ar. He couldn’t get free of the frustration that would not be hidden now. His chest hurt and perhaps it fed the irritation—perhaps if he’d not been so burdened—but John had behaved stupidly. He had ridden badly. Marcus could not put down that plain and pragmatic fact now. He had knelt on a flighty horse—who would kneel on his horse to ride into the Turakina, let alone when it was swollen? It was the work of someone completely without experience. It was the work of the most naīve of new chums, and it was bad ministership, and now it had wrought disruption on his people and his family to come. Right now, down in the mission whare, his wife was under that strange and volatile strain—and she’d not even begun to feel the worst of it yet, Marcus knew. She was with child and suffering immense grief and pain. He feared for the life of the child.

  In three years, Burtt had not grown. How vividly Marcus remembered meeting the couple off the brig at Port Nicholson. From the first Burtt had been eager to begin his work up the coast, yet exceedingly ignorant of how to get there, unsure even of how to handle a mission horse once he’d been brought one. And how nervously, on entering Marcus’s accommodation at his own mission, the couple had looked over its bare floor and nibbled at the spartan diet Marcus allowed himself—the hard biscuits and water—and chattered to each other and, as the night wore on, visibly made the best of what were clearly, for them, reduced surroundings.

  And now Marcus flinched to recall the look of sour regard Mrs Burtt had cast, earlier that day, at him and over the whare she now lived in. It had shocked him—she had put up a hard cliff of denial, a resistance to the only consolation Marcus knew. He didn’t know her, this new person. Perhaps it was grief. Perhaps she’d already changed, before the drowning, perhaps because of the very burdens of mission life. He didn’t know.

  But Burtt had not changed. He hadn’t learnt. In three years he’d not become a properly pragmatic man, as was his duty as a missionary of the Society, and Marcus shook his head at the pain of it—the unnecessariness of it—and he couldn’t dwell on it for long, but it was hard. Going towards his old routes to prayer only gave him more time to go over the frustration. He was here in this night and unable to breathe because of that eccentric ride, that poorly chosen horse. He couldn’t breathe properly and his chest tickled madly and Ruka slept on, and he couldn’t get to prayer and for a moment the discomfort seemed very great—too great.

  He needed to stand and be outside, to have the air and the high dark around him, but to walk from this heat to the cold outside the whare would only attack his lungs further and, besides that, out there he would only see down the moonlit pā the new church that had been Burtt’s labour, and the whare of Mrs Burtt, who had turned that bitterly humouring face on him, who had become that hard person he couldn’t understand.

  She was beyond him.

  He had no light to read and could find no path to comfort. Sitting against the wall in his blankets, he sweated for air and itched for the night to end.

  *

  He was in the pulpit. Burtt’s body had been found and returned, and now his congregation crammed the pews. Down from the pā and outlying areas they’d come, and right along the walls and at the back and outside the door people were standing, craning to hear what Marcus would say in final tribute to their Reverend.

  So many had arrived since the morning. It was a testament to Burtt—this number of Christian people brought to God. Looking over them, Marcus felt a complicated surge of love and pain. It had made Burtt boyish with joy, this church, his knowledge that all its pews could be filled.

  Marcus shuffled the few pages of notes he’d written for the service. It was impossible to begin. He had not expected to bury Burtt. He wasn’t ready to do so. It was an entirely different thing, to bury in his own churchyard a man like Burtt, freshly ordained a Reverend not three months before and expecting a child.

  But he lifted his head. They were all looking to him.

  ‘Mē inoi tātou,’ he said, and he led them in the Lord’s Prayer. ‘E tō mātou Matua i te rangi, kia tapu tōu ingoa.’ And the words lent him solidity. He was short of breath and he had to pause, and he felt the congregation listening for him each time, knowing his asthma was on him, but through the wheeze of his own breathing he heard the growing certainty of his voice, the comfort of his own lilt and timbre. ‘Homai ki a mātou aianei he taro mā mātou mō tēnei rā.’

  He did not need to lift his eyes to see the heads of the congregation, row upon row, bent in devotion; Mrs Burtt and Mrs Williams in the pews nearest him, then Williams and Burtt’s teachers alongside, then the hierarchy of the people of the pā, those who had converted to the faith, which was most of them. He saw them without looking, stretching right back to the door and beyond. ‘Ake, ake ake. Āmine.’

  Then they sang, and the hundreds of voices swelled out the rafters of the new church, and reverberated there richly. And again at the end of it they looked to him.

  ‘Ka koa te hunga e tangi ana: ka whakamārietia hoki rātou.’ And he went on, and again the words lent him strength, the rhythmic on-and-on certainty of the passages he’d chosen and the phrases that went with them, that had flowed in comfort to so many people along the coast for years at moments just like these, and in comfort to him now, until he looked up and saw at the back of the church Jackson, the one Pākehā layman in the building. He was not following the reading in Māori, so Marcus returned to the beginning and gave some of its essence in English, returning and returning to the key messages, its joint building blocks—Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted, and, Whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel’s, the same shall save it.

  It was a reward for Jackson, this reprise in English, for Jackson had helped with materials and expertise for the church they all sat in now, and Marcus saw him respond; he saw his eyes lift up and shine. Jackson was from the same shire in England as Burtt, and his faith was of a similar fire, yet carpentry had claimed him and not the church. He’d come to the colony in pragmatic trust in the need for his trade, and in spiritual kinship with Burtt and his new wife, and the death had rocked him. Already he’d come to Marcus and sought reassurance from him about Burtt, about his friend’s spiritual rest and the future of the mission.

  And Marcus returned to te reo Māori so the congregation could follow him again, and they nodded at his words and some murmured agreement, and some simply gave their silent and idiosyncratic responses that every congregation everywhere gave, and Marcus felt the responsibility of them. These were his people again. With Burtt gone these would be part of his work—added to the people of the many pā and the scraps of Pākehā settlement along Kāpiti. He did not protest it, indeed he welcomed the work, but realistically the travel would spread him more thinly among more people.

  He was at the end of what he’d planned to say. So many faces looked up at him.

  ‘Friends,’ he said. ‘Reverend Burtt would ask us to voice our approval, for he passes now into the company of the Lord. By the Lord’s favour may we observe his pious example here on earth and hereafter. May the Lord keep his soul. And now we pray for him.’

  He was nearing the end of the service—he’d almost done his duty to Burtt—and involuntarily he glanced at Mrs Burtt and his throat caught, and simultaneously he realised he’d uttered this last in English, but the congregation didn’t seem to mind and he did not reverse the blunder, because Mrs Burtt was looking beyond him to the front of the church, her ear tilted towards his words as if yearning to hear something in them, and as he looked at that hard and hoping face and the grief it suggested he feared that the unborn child that burdened her now would be lost as well. This child would follow its siblings into death, he felt sure—that seemed very obvious now, just from a glance at this unlucky, obdurate woman, though it would have destroyed Burtt to know of that coming sorrow.

  Marcus couldn’t continue. His voice caught and tears came into his eyes. He was grieving now. His eyes were wet for his friend. He abandoned his last notes and went straight to suggestin
g the hymn, and he felt a look pass between some at the irregularity of it, and he didn’t care, and the people lifted their voices and sang, the women high above the men, and he passed his sleeve over his eyes, and though it had the smell of the river in it, the rough contact of the wool was good, and when he took it away the high last harmony of the waiata was circling, and he joined them in the Āmine.

  Then he led them outside and the pallbearers followed with Burtt in the casket and he felt much better out there, in fresher air. Beyond the people and the church and the mission whare he saw unclaimed sky and some lifting scraps of cloud and it calmed him. Burtt had ministered here and felt the rewards of it here, and he would end here, and tomorrow or the next day Marcus would be able to return to his own mission home.

  He said the last words over the grave and went among the people, and thanked them and reassured them. He expressed his gratitude for their long hospitality towards the Burtts and him and the Missionary Society.

  Finally he let Mrs Burtt come to him. He took her hands. She looked exhausted, but seemly. She had been washed by the service and cleaned.

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ she said. ‘I know John would be honoured.’

  He smiled gravely.

  ‘You know John had a very high regard for you, Reverend,’ she said. ‘The very highest. He considered you the most noble of Christians.’

  Marcus felt very tall above her. Behind her most of the congregation had turned and were walking up the pā.

  She released his hands, but talked on. ‘John said it was the highest honour to work this coast with you. He admired your work at Kāpiti and wanted only to emulate it here. And I am grateful to you, too.’

  ‘I see you have Mrs Williams with you,’ said Marcus.

  Mrs Burtt turned to survey the catechist’s wife across the yard, and again it was that look of plain regard that she sent across, the look that had alarmed Marcus several times now. ‘Yes, I do have her,’ she said. ‘That is true, I suppose.’

  ‘It is good to hear that of John,’ said Marcus. ‘I am sure I felt the same for him, poor fellow. He was a true friend. I admired his love of the Lord. He goes with God now.’