Pounamu Pounamu

Fire on Greenstone

When my Nani Miro died, her husband, my Nani Tama, stayed alone in their old homestead.

The homestead was right next to the meeting house, and set a little back from the road. It was a big house encircled by a verandah. Nani Tama used to sit there alone, basking in the sun. The people of the whanau would often visit him, bringing with them their crates of beer, and they would sing songs and talk about the old days with him. Nani Tama liked that. He would sigh and lean back in the wicker chair and dream. Then his old lips would quiver with emotion, and sometimes he would ramble on about the times gone, and about his wife, my Nani Miro.

‘She sure loved her cards,’ he would whisper. ‘Sometimes, I used to think how good it would’ve been if only I’d been a King of Clubs. She used to say that the King of Clubs was her lucky charm. Always got her out of trouble, she used to say. I don’t know why. I don’t know why.’ And he would smile to himself, remembering.

Sometimes, remembering made him sad. Then he would grasp his tokotoko, his walking stick, and you would see him shuffling slowly along the road, going through the gate at the bottom of the hill where the graveyard was, and up the slope to where the headstones pricked the skyline. There, beside Nani’s grave he would sit, a small black speck, unmoving against the rushing clouds and turning world, talking to Nani as she lay beneath the earth. Then, after a long while, you would see him descending the hill, the emerald sparkling slope, returning to the homestead.

I was waiting for him one afternoon, waiting for him to return. I’d come back home from Wellington on one of my infrequent holidays. From a long way off, I saw him and went to meet him. It had been a year since Nani Miro had been buried on the hill. After I had embraced Nani Tama, he looked up at me and whispered:

‘Your Nani was a great lady. All her life she kept Waituhi together. All her life she protected the land we live on and fought to get back the land that was taken away. Who will carry on the work now that she is gone?’

We sat on the verandah for a long time. We talked and laughed together, and we shared a beer.

‘Don’t tell me you booze now,’ he whispered.

‘I’m trying to catch up to you,’ I answered.

‘Boy!’ He laughed huskily. ‘You’ll never catch me up. I drink this stuff like water!’

I elbowed him playfully. ‘If Nani Miro was here, she’d soon put a stop to that. Look at you! You’re even skinnier than me now, you’re turning into a bag of bones.’

He chuckled. Then he beckoned me inside the homestead.

The homestead … As a small boy, I used to think it was like a palace. The wooden lattice-work fringing the verandah with its curved and whorled designs was like lace decoration. At each corner of the verandah were thin moulded and tapered columns, and the doors had panels of frosted glass in them. The windows too, were set with coloured glass, and I used to like peering out of them and seeing the world made crimson or green or deep, dark blue. From afar off, you saw the homestead like a big white wedding cake, gleaming on a sunny day.

Like everybody else, I called it ‘The Museum’. In a way, that’s what it was too, and as I followed Nani Tama, I began to look around for the ornaments and pictures with which I’d been so familiar as a child.

In the kitchen, the old newspapers which served as wallpaper were still there, now yellowing and ripped in places by the procession of mokopunas who’d come to stay from time to time. And there, to one side of the safe, was the old newspaper spread which I’d always found fascinating: a report with fading pictures of men and antiquated vehicles on the Western front during the Great War. Above the sideboard, a tarnished silver ornament that my Nani Miro had won when she’d been a young girl, in a roller skating competition of all things!

‘Oh, you should have seen me, mokopuna,’ she used to say when I went to visit her. ‘I could do a lot of tricks on those skates … and then I met your Nani Tama and he made me have one kid after the other and —’ she would sigh ‘— now the only sport I’m any good at is poker.’

We walked along the short hallway, Nani Tama and I, and he opened the door to the sitting room. The same sensation crept softly over me as I used to feel as a child whenever I saw that room.

This room was the whanau; the whanau was this room. If ever you wanted to know the whanau’s accomplishments, here they were all on show. Here were all the sports trophies, shields, photographs of the old people who’d died long ago, whakapapa or genealogy sheets, carved feather boxes, panels, figurines, feather cloaks, piupius — all spilling a riot of colour and shadow throughout the sunlit room. In this room, surrounded by the past and ancestral memories, Nani Miro had presided over meetings with other elders discussing Treaty matters, the politics of the times and the return of the land.

And, on more informal occasions, right in the middle was the big round table where the kuias used to sit with Nani, playing cards. Looking at it, so lonely now, I could almost hear Nani Miro squabbling with Mrs Heta, to see Mrs Heta’s one googly eye reaching right across the table to sneak a look at Nani’s cards.

‘Keep your eyes to yourself, Maka tiko bum! You can cheat all right!’

‘You the cheat, Miro Mananui! You the cheat! I saw you sneaking that ace from the bottom of the pack!’

And crammed in one corner, was the old piano that Nani Miro used to like me to play. Whenever some of her younger mokopunas wandered over to it, she would yell: ‘You fellas keep your hands off! Only two people are allowed to touch that piano! Me and him!’ she’d said, pointing to me. At the time, I’d felt proud that Nani thought me somehow special. But later, my cousins gave me a hiding and said:

‘Anyway, who wants to play on that stink piano!’

After that, I didn’t like it when Nani Miro used to refer to me when talking about the piano.

I wandered over to it, stepping between the piles of piupius and old clothes.

‘It’s still open,’ Nani Tama said.

I caressed the keys softly. They were all yellow except for one which had had the ivory covering prised off it. I grinned, remembering that my cousin Hirone had done that. He’d seen a film about ivory hunters, gotten it into his head that the keys of a piano were valuable too, and sneaked in to remove one of them. Nani Miro had been real mad when she found out.

My fingers moved across the keys, and began playing a tune. From somewhere far away, I heard an old voice softly singing:

The voice drifted away as I took my hands off the piano and I smiled at my Nani Tama. He nodded wisely. Then we heard a truck draw up outside, and a voice yelling out: ‘Tama! Hey, Tama Mananui!’

Nani Tama went out to see who it was, and I was left alone, to wander in the room.

When I’d been a child and bored with watching the old women playing their card games, I used to like wandering through that room, looking at the old photographs and fingering the carvings and the soft sheen of the feather cloaks. I did the same thing now, alone, a year after my Nani Miro had gone away from me.

This photograph: the Waituhi Men’s Hockey Team, 1938, and Nani Tama young and tall, holding the winner’s shield.

In the glass case on the other side of the room, there was the shield itself, darkly varnished, with rows of shining silver inlaid squares where the names of the winning teams throughout the years were inscribed.

Another sports photograph, and another, and another.

Scattered throughout the room, silver sports trophies, big and small, all shapes and sizes, cups and shields, gleamed in the light.

A big oval photograph, coloured by an artist long ago, of a young woman with the moko tattooed on her chin: that had been my Nani Miro’s grandmother and my great-great-grandmother. A handsome woman, wearing a cloak proudly over her shoulders.

Above the fireplace, the cloak itself was draped, still softly glowing with rippling bird feathers. I reached up to touch it, and it was warm and silky to touch. Then my fingers strayed over a small carved figure, following the curves and spiral whorls and feeling the rough edges left by the carver.

Next to the cloak was a piupiu, spread wide across the wall. It swished and crackled and fell coolly around my arms like a waterfall. Beside it, hung two long pois, my Nani Miro’s pois, which she used in action song competitions at Takitimu Hall.

In one corner, were the bodice tops, piupius and peruperu spears used by the men in the haka. And I remembered that they would soon be used again — for I had come home for the Maori Hockey tournament and there would be action song competitions during the night.

And on an old table, a photograph of Nani Miro herself, her face creased in a smile and her one black tooth showing. She used to say that if it wasn’t for that porangi tooth, she’d have been a film star.

I picked the photograph up and grinned back. Then my eyes fell upon a large book, opened, and showing entries written in different inks by different hands. This held the whakapapa of the whanau, the genealogy of the people of the village. I looked over those names, so familiar, because although these people were dead, they were all my family too. And I saw where Nani Tama had made the last entry: Miro Heremaia Mananui.

Then Nani Tama returned.

‘That was Joe Baker,’ he told me. ‘He brought your Nani some kanga kopiro. You like rotten maize, mokopuna? You want a feed?’

I shook my head.

‘No, Nani,’ I said. ‘I have to go soon.’

He nodded his head. Then his eyes grew serious. He motioned me to a cupboard and brought out a wakahuia, a small carved box.

‘You remember this?’ he asked.

I nodded. I opened the box. Inside was the greenstone. No one knew how old it was, only that it was very old. When I’d been a young boy, I’d discovered it there and asked Nani Miro if I could have it. But she had growled at me.

‘I know you,’ she’d said. ‘You’d only play war games with it! No mokopuna, not now.’

It was a big piece of greenstone, not the valuable dark green kind, but a smoky green like an opal. But I used to like to hold it to the sun and look into it, and feel the soft luminous glow flooding around me. And I used to whisper to myself, ‘Pounamu … pounamu … pounamu …’, and almost hear the emerald water rushing over the clay from where the greenstone had come.

‘Yes, I remember,’ I said to Nani Tama, ‘I remember.’

That’s when Nani Tama looked around the room and asked, ‘Shall I give it to him now, Miro?’

For a moment there was silence. Then Nani Tama nodded, turned to me and firmly put the greenstone in my hands.

‘Your Nani Miro told me to give this to you when you were ready. Are you ready, Tama? When you are, come home and, this time, stay.’

I went to see Nani Tama again before I left to come back to Wellington.

But one night, the telephone rang for me.

It was Dad and he had bad news. The old homestead, Nani Tama’s place, had burned down to the ground that night. Some people had been staying with Nani, and one of them had gone to sleep smoking a cigarette. The blankets had caught fire and the fire had spread quickly through the house. Luckily Nani Tama and the people had been able to get out. But Nani Tama, so Dad said, had gone crazy, looking at the flames and crying:

‘Miro! Miro!’

Everybody in the village had rushed to the homestead, bringing buckets, tins and basins full of water. The old people, the young children, all helped, but it was no good. The homestead was old and the flames were hungry upon it. By the time the fire brigade arrived, it was too late. Afterwards a Pakeha had tried to comfort Nani Tama by saying, Never mind. He hadn’t understood when Nani had said to him: ‘All my family, all this whanau, were in that house. All. And Miro.’

I wept when Dad told me. The homestead wasn’t just four walls and rooms. It was the manawa, the heart of the whanau, the heart of the family, and my Nani Tama’s heart too. For a long time afterward, I could think only of the flames leaping through the sitting room, licking at the photographs, a sports shield burning, a feather cloak afire, around a table where women used to sit, across an old piano, into a drawer where the whakapapa sheets were kept. But then I remembered the greenstone and Nani Tama’s words about carrying on Nani Miro’s work. There are some things fire can never destroy. And I saw not fingers of flame but a soft luminous glow reaching out and around me.

‘Fire on Greenstone’ is a kind of sequel to ‘A Game of Cards’ and is about handsome Nani George Tupara, although in the story he is called Nani Tama. It’s the King of Clubs story to go with Nani Mini’s Queen of Hearts story. I wasn’t much of a card player in those days, nor am I now, but I think that in some card games you have to have what’s known as an ‘off suit’, and if it’s not in a red card it’s in a black.

The story is set about two years after the fictional Nani Miro has died, but its setting is really Nani Mini’s blue house in Waituhi. As I’ve already said, I loved going to see her whenever I was in Waituhi, and that didn’t stop until the day she died. Apart from anything else, The Blue House was where all the feather cloaks, piupiu, trophies and shields were stored. In the story, however, I ‘shifted’ her house next to the meeting house so that I could make it into something imagined and metaphorical. It is this, imagined, house which burns down. At the time I was writing the story, the burning down of ‘Miro’s Museum’ was supposed to be symbolic of what I saw was happening to rural Maori culture and tribal continuity. Sometimes I can get too clever: the New Zealand Fire Service asked if they could use the story in a fire prevention campaign directed at Maori.

Throughout 1970 I kept writing my one story a month. I was being supported by a number of people, including Gill Shadbolt (I was working in Post Office public relations in Wellington) and also my dear, wonderful friend Joy Stevenson, editor of Te Ao Hou, a magazine of Maori writing, who saw that there was a new kid on the block joining other Maori fiction writers such as Arapera Blank, Riki Erihi, Mason Durie, Katarina Mataira, Patricia Grace and Rowley Habib. I used to sneak into the Wellington Public Library from time to time to look at Jacquie Sturm, but I was too shy to approach her.

Among other supporters was a gentleman by the name of Arthur Jones, then a script editor for the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation. My good friend Fiona Kidman introduced me to him. I credit Arthur with the directness in my writing: in those days you didn’t get much mucking around in my stories. This is because Arthur wanted stories that only took ten minutes maximum to read, so I had to learn how to set up a story fast, get listeners to laugh — or cry — fast, and then get out of the story fast. ‘A Game of Cards’, ‘Beginning of the Tournament’, ‘Fire on Greenstone’ and ‘In Search of the Emerald City’ were all originally written for radio. I wrote two series of stories, twelve in all, and they were read by George Henare, actor, cuzzie bro and fellow East Coastie.

And Fiona and I, ever since, have been hitched to the same star.