The Best of Albert Wendt's Short Stories by Albert Wendt

Author:Albert Wendt [Albert Wendt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781869799847
Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand
Published: 2013-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

From their fale the next day, at mid-morning, they observed Barker and his wife and children and their aiga arriving at the graveyard, with shovels and picks and baskets of river stones and pebbles. They started piling the stones and pebbles onto the graves, neatly. Mautu went out to them.

‘So you not believe in our bones, eh?’ Mautu asked Barker in English.

‘I never said that!’ Barker replied. Mautu chuckled. ‘I suppose being human like us they needed to be buried decently.’ Paused, then turning and focusing his smile on Mautu, said, ‘And, after all, we found them and are therefore equally responsible for them. You can say we are now their family!’ They laughed together for a long while, and the others were puzzled by it. ‘You can even say we struck gold!’ And their laughter continued to echo around the graves and ripple through the church and dance out across the malae and dive mischievously into every Satoa home, and brought all the Satoans running, skipping, hobbling, scuttling to the graves of their people.

And while the old people and Mautu and Barker sat joking in the shade, everyone else built up the graves with the sleek black stones and pebbles that the young people had brought in baskets from the river.

Mautu’s aiga and other nearby aiga made umu and cooked a delicious variety of food, and, when the work on the graves was finished, they invited everyone into Mautu’s home and they ate heartily and laughed uproariously at Barker’s and Mautu’s exaggerated stories about their futile, mad, ridiculous prospecting for gold up-river, up-valley.

It was the first time Barker had been in Mautu’s home.

As the sun was setting, after Barker and all the Satoans had left with their infectious laughter, Peleiupu cut some branches from the pua trees and started planting them between the graves. Arona observed her for a while, then dug up some shrubs and flowers from around their fale, took them and, without saying anything to Peleiupu, replanted them around the central grave. Ruta and Naomi and a frisky gaggle of friends got more plants from the neighbouring area and planted them around some of the other graves. Yet more children came with more flowers, shrubs and plants.

And the same darkness that fell on the deserted village on the hill in the wilderness fell protectively over a noisy, mushrooming garden of children.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.