Cowrie Read online

  Paneke turns to make sure Cowrie is directly behind her. She appears so distant. Her face is serene and calm. She smiles gently. Her large body gracefully weaves between the rocks like a dolphin in water. Cowrie remembers a dream where she felt a sensation like this. She was on a barque guided by a black cat and as they moved towards the entrance of a giant cave inside an island, her oar became redundant and the barque was drawn by a force that seemed to come from within the cave. A dark cloud moved over them and then she heard a strange and haunting noise. Looking up, she realised it was the slow wingbeat of a huge bird that looked like a pterodactyl. The bird opened its beak and a shower of silver and blue fish descended on them.

  “Ouch!” Cowrie stubs her toe on a thick outcrop of rock. The lava forms a skin over the land and there is a flesh-coloured reddy-brown in some of the seams. One wall of lava has solidified like strands of rope, each interwoven with the next, so that the ropes run in a vertical pattern along the shelf. Others form semi-circles that embrace each other, like rows of lovers lying tucked around the one in front. Each lava flow has a story to tell.

  By now, sweat is pouring from both of them. Cowrie can taste the saltiness of her skin as water trickles down her nose and on to her lips. Paneke pulls a flattened bottle from her lavalava and they each take a swig of fresh water. Even this is hot but the moisture soothes their dry throats.

  Vents of steam obscure their path and Paneke warns Cowrie to be careful to follow her footsteps directly. Large crevices on the surface lead down to blackened depths below. It’s impossible to see the bottom. Paneke bends over to pick up a lava rock and drops it into the vent. The craggy stone disappears into rising steam as the gorge eats it up. Cowrie imagines what it would be like to fall in.

  The heat and steam make her dizzy. Her chest is burning. Her heart throbs. Kereru wings beat in her ears. At first it is frightening, then there is a pleasant sensation that accompanies the vibrations. But with it, a searing heat. Her hei matau burns into her chest. She grabs it. An electric current sizzles her fingertips, then her hands and travels up her right arm. It scorches her hair and her head is engulfed by flames. She lets out a piercing cry and then falls with a thud on to the hardened lava.

  Paneke hears the cry and turns to see Cowrie clutching at her neck. A flame rushes up her arm and surrounds her head with a luminous halo. She drops to the ground and the fire sizzles from her hair and down a crevice. It burns into the delicate leaf of a new fern which has miraculously grown out of the split rock, leaving it brown and drooping. She rushes to Cowrie and lifts her head into her lap, pouring precious water on to her parched lips.

  Paneke gently strokes her hair and calls out to Pele. After a while, Cowrie wakes to find herself strangely refreshed. She sits up. Paneke explains that Pele has tried to contact her through her bone carving. That the burning sensation was just her voice trying to be heard. It is nothing to fear. She means no harm. Cowrie is scared that her transgression in reaching for the lehua blossom is being punished. Paneke thinks this is not so, that Pele was simply trying to contact her. Cowrie is not so sure. Paneke takes the hei matau and places it on the lip of the rock crevice, near the scorched fern. She completes a protection ritual.

  When she bends to pick up the bone carving, Paneke notices that the sizzled fern leaf has disappeared. It has dropped into the crevice. The fern has offered her hand for Pele’s embrace. She knows they will now be safe.

  Cowrie rises to her feet and is surprised to find that her body has cooled and she feels a renewed energy for the journey ahead. The vibrations have left her hei matau, made for her by Mere’s brother as her farewell toanga. It is in the shape of a fish-hook—the instrument that Maui used to pull Te ika a Maui—the North Island, out of the sea. She lets Paneke place the bone carving over her head and it rests again on her chest. This time, it is cool, soothing. She now believes the remainder of the journey will be in peace.

  And so it is. They walk the twisted ocean-lava floor of Kilauea crater without drama, aside from the internal stories that the lava flows tell them with their frozen and still-steaming shapes. Near the edge of the crater, Paneke stoops to pick up a piece of crystal-clear lace that spans the distance between two rocks like a spider’s web glistening in the rain. She lays the thin, translucent strands across the palm of Cowrie’s hand and tells her that this is called Pele’s hair and that horrendous things have happened to tourists who stole her hair from the crater rim. Later, she will take Cowrie up to the Volcano Arts Centre to show her letters from tourists who have sent back the lacy strands and pieces of rock taken from the lava fields, begging for the relics to be returned to the crater for Pele’s pardon. Cowrie needs no convincing that these stories are true.

  As they approach the far rim, what had seemed like dark crevices from the other side become patches of native tree-ferns and bush. They climb the lava rock and enter into the lush ferns with relief. Cowrie wants to look back to see the distance they have covered, but is afraid that, like Orpheus, she will lose her vision of Eurydice, her budding love for Koana, hovering in the space around her. She will wait until she reaches the rim of the crater before she will dare to cast back a glance.

  Paneke and Cowrie spend the afternoon together exploring the Thurston lava tube then return to the Volcano Arts Centre. Cowrie is inspired by Herb Kane’s paintings of Pele. One of them depicts fire smouldering in her eyes and her hair flows out from her head and down over her bare shoulders like black ropes of lava. She wears a wreath of flaming lehua blossom around her head. Her nose flares towards its base and her lips are full and luscious. She is the embodiment of fiery, creative energy. But her inherent destructiveness and power to affect others is also present. She looks proud of the fire that flames behind her eyes.

  Kane calls her Pele-honua-mea, Pele of the sacred land. She is also Pele-‘ai-honua, Pele the eater of land, as she gorges prey on her lava-surf down towards the waiting ocean. Her sacred spirit is Ka-‘ula-o-ke-ahi, the redness of fire. The lehua blossom epitomises this scarlet rage as it thrusts its bloody spikes out from its centre. It is startling-ly attractive and repellingly barbarous at once.

  Cowrie senses that there is much to learn from her brush with Pele’s fire. About Hawai‘i, about Pele, about herself, her ancestors. She appreciates the fiery, creative energy that is an ever-present life force within her, but fears its power also. Others have been intimidated by it too. They have tried to tame it in her, douse the flames with water, restrict her wild energy. But none have succeeded.

  Paneke interrupts Cowrie’s broken lava thoughts and leads her into a rich ocean of sound. She emerges from Volcano House to see a large, incredibly beautiful, fiery woman standing with her bare feet apart, a wreath of scarlet lehua around her flowing, pitch-black and ashen hair. She could be Pele.

  Her voice cavorts with the tunes of the ‘ukulele she plucks, diving down to bass depths and then soaring up to a falsetto in one note. The echo from one blends into the other producing a sound that is guttural and heavenly at once. It is like hearing the human voice for the first time. She wonders if this erotic interplay between ‘ukulele and voice is what attracted her grandfather, Apelahama, to his trade. If so, how could he ever leave this island?

  Young children and adults join in the next song. They burst into a spontaneous hula and it’s hard not to move with them. Everyone is laughing and singing. Paneke swings her wide hips in tune with the music. The crowd urges them on.

  The wind blows the tree-ferns behind the dancers and Cowrie notices, for the first time, how similar the motion of the fern fronds is to the swinging of their hips and the dance of their fingertips. Each movement seems to describe a new story, a new sweep of the brush across canvas. Paneke beckons Cowrie to join them. Mere had taught her a poi dance, but she feels shy in the presence of these graceful bodies. A voluptuous woman gets up and joins in with her children and the audience cheers them on. Suddenly, Cowrie loses all self-consciousness and becomes a part of the motion around her. She is swe
pt into the dance and surrenders to its seductive motion. Diane Aki’s voice slides from one register to the next with amazing grace and the fingers of her musicians fly over their ‘ukulele. The mamaku and smaller ferns, the scarlet ‘okika flowers, the cream plumeria merge with the coloured patterns of material dancing in the wind. Cowrie imagines them all flying through the midnight-blue sky of a Chagall painting, with only the ferns connecting them to the rich, black lava of Pele.

  That night, when Keo asks them how their day has been, they fight for words and Paneke plays a tape of Aki’s music while Cowrie shows Keo her new hula skills. Keo’s belly jellies into motion as he joins them. Paneke fetches the lehua wreaths she has taught Cowrie to make, which they wear festively while dancing to the music. Keo breaks into a sliding falsetto. He can sing as high as Aki. He steadies on a note, then slips into a rising glissando and within a split second is singing two registers higher up the scales.

  Cowrie makes him promise to teach her how to do this. It is an extraordinary sound that sends shivers of joy through her entire body.

  After they work up a sweat, Paneke collapses on to the wooden verandah bench. The sun is setting over the sugar cane fields below and Cowrie thinks she might burst with happiness before she has had a chance to share this celebration of life with Mere.

  There is a crash behind them. Peni and Nele burst in. Koana stands smiling in the doorway. “We see you dance hula, Cowrie,” cries Nele.

  Peni grins and Koana looks strangely shy. “Hope you don’t mind, Cowrie,” she says.

  Cowrie smiles warmly. Koana breaks into a silent hula, swaying her hips to the invisible music, pretending to imitate Cowrie but doing so with a lifetime of graceful movement that she can not make awkward even when she tries.

  The sun turns Koana’s face orange and her fingertips become the wings of birds, each on a different flight, but in close formation with the other. Her eyes are aflame and her nostrils widen, as if to breathe in the new air needed for her inspirational dance. The sun slides down behind her and a deep orange flames up the sky. Koana is on fire. Cowrie wants to keep her flame alive until she can bear it no longer, then moisten every inch of Koana’s body with her wet tongue. Koana catches her look and swings her hips out provocatively towards Cowrie, moving her body closer and closer until Cowrie wants to cry out for release.

  The hula is such a sexy dance, the others do not notice the particular intensity of this energy. Koana finishes her hula and slips Cowrie a seductive smile as she tucks her lavalava back at her waist. They all clap and settle down to enjoy the evening.

  After freshly roasted coffee from Kona, on the western side of the island, they exchange stories of their days. Koana tells of some Germans who arrived at the post office in search of an artist friend of theirs from East Berlin. She could not understand all of their broken English but she thinks they are looking for Eva Senkens who has been house-sitting for some Californians who shipped over a huge wine vat and rebuilt it as a home near Ka Lae. She gave them directions and they were very grateful.

  Cowrie asks what kind of art the German woman does. Koana is not sure, but someone at Na‘alehu said she had created a series of paintings and collages around the theme of Pele.

  Keo describes the plight of one of the Portuguese cane workers who was today arrested as an overstayer without a visa or permit.

  Cowrie explains this happens to Samoans, Tongans, and other Pacific Islanders in New Zealand, but a blind eye is cast towards the rich Japanese and European visitors who overstay.

  Nele and Peni talk of a new Samoan boy at school who described to them the ravages of the latest hurricane that destroyed his native land.

  “They come every December, just in time for Christmas,” Nele adds. “Imagine having your home destroyed every Christmas.”

  Paneke and Cowrie describe their day, as accurately as they can. Cowrie notices that Paneke leaves out the detail of her visit from Pele so she decides not to elaborate on that.

  When Cowrie gets to the bit about the ‘ohi’a-lehua, Keo adds another perspective. He speaks of Ku-ka-‘ohi’a-laka who is worshipped by canoe carvers because he lives inside the most-used hardwood tree, the ‘ohi’a lehua. He is also the male Laka worshipped in the hula dance. At Ola’a there is an ‘ohi’a lehua which is revered as the body of Laka. It will only ever bear a pair of blossoms in one season. If a branch is broken, blood will flow from the cut.

  Cowrie tells them of the lone pohutukawa which is the residing place for spirits before they take leave from Te Ika a Maui at the most northern point of Aotearoa. The tree is sacred and it is tapu to violate it.

  “Ah, your tapu is our kapu” ventures Keo. “That is so, that is so.”

  After their stories, there is a long and satisfying silence in which Cowrie meditates on the possibility of a hula dedicated from one woman dancer to another. She hopes this thought is not kapu.

  Kia ora Mere,

  Remember when you told me not to go into the Takatu burial ground as a kid because it was tapu? Well, it’s the same here. Their ‘ohi’a tree is like our pohutukawa, sacred. Paneke took me through Pele’s crater, but I touched the ‘ohi’a blossom (lehua) an route and Pele reminded me of her power by setting my hei matau on fire. It scorched my skin but the bone carving remained intact. A warning? (Don’t tell anyone back home I transgressed. It might call up some mean spirits there). But despite this, I’m 60 glad you encouraged me to come. Keo showed me a photo of my grandfather. He’s not fat and luscious (like me!) but tell and strong. Yet I have his eyes! Hope you got the cowrie shall I sent. Dark brown with cream markings. Bi-cultural too eh? Haha! How’s the new marae progressing? I know you can’t go in while it’s being built—but are you doing some of the tukutuku panels? I’d like to be back for the opening ceremony, yet still need to explore further here. How long will it be? Another 6 months?

  Say hi to Matiu and Maata from me—and Wiremu if he’s back from Oz yet.

  Cowrie.

  Nele and Peni have a week off school for mid-term break. Aka usually takes them but he has gone fishing with a friend. Koana can only change her post office shift for two days so Cowrie offers to take the kids over to Puako with her, and Koana will join them at the end of the week. Puako is on the western side of the island and Cowrie has been asked to house-sit and feed the cats by a friend of Koana’s. She accepted willingly, looking forward to exploring the island further and is relieved to be able to give Koana a break and return some of her hospitality beyond just a rent cheque.

  As the holiday draws nearer, Nele and Peni become more and more excited. They practise by sleeping out on the back porch with Cowrie, wrapped up in blankets pulled around them like sleeping bags. Cowrie thinks it amusing, since it’s too hot for a sleeping bag here, even at night. Within half an hour, they are lying snoring, arms flung out to their sides, blankets drooping off the edge of the verandah.

  Finally, Monday arrives. Peni and Nele load up Honu with beer crates and cardboard boxes of their favourite possessions, some fishing nets, lines, their ‘ukulele and as much food as they can lay their hands on. Their idea of essential supplies relies mainly on three weeks’ allowance spent on cans of coke and endless packets of kalo chips— labelled taro and sliced thin for the US market. Cowrie is tempted to dump the coke overboard. Mere always used to call it “gut rot—the price of colonialism” and told Cowrie to get used to the sweet taste of fresh rainwater they collected in the tank. She had. But she could hardly dump the coke without chucking the kalo chips and Cowrie has to admit she loves them. So she decides to give in. They’ll be begging for fresh fish after a few days.

  After much drama packing the truck and tying down everything then having to redo it to make seats for Peni and Nele, who have decided to travel in the back after all, Cowrie toots the horn and Koana comes out to farewell them. She lifts Peni on to the tray and tells him to look after Nele, kissing him and tickling his belly. Then she does the same with Nele. Through the rear-vision mirror, Cowrie notices tha
t they are openly warm and sad to leave her. She wants to jump out and be held in Koana’s arms also but she dares not get too close. Ever since Koana’s hula touched her hips, she has felt electric anywhere near her friend. She doesn’t want to frighten her away and yet she suspects there might be a flicker of attraction from Koana also. It’s so hard to know how to share these feelings.

  While Cowrie muses over this, Koana has walked around the back of Honu and now she lays her arm over Cowrie’s, which rests on the window ledge. Cowrie is startled. Koana grins. Her large brown eyes glisten like macadamias hanging from the trees in the afternoon rain. Cowrie looks down at her feet. She can meet this gaze no longer. Koana touches her cheek lightly with her forefinger and says, “Now you take gentle care of my kamali’i, Cowrie.” Before Cowrie can answer, she kisses her on her left cheek and whispers, “Take care of yourself also. I will miss you. I come in a few days.”

  The kiss leaves a moist dot beside her lips. Cowrie could have sworn it was Koana’s tongue on her cheek. The flames in her body rise up to meet the wet kiss like Pele’s lava sizzling into the moist ocean. She tries hard to keep cool.

  “No worries, Koana. We’ll have a ball,” she says, glancing back at the twins. Both their noses are pressed up against the window behind her and they are grinning gleefully. For a moment, Cowrie thinks they can see right through her, then realises they are just overjoyed to be starting out on a new adventure. Relieved, she touches Koana’s hand reassuringly. Koana’s fingers wrap around her own and Cowrie blushes. Koana releases her hand and Cowrie lets off the brake and throttles into gear. Looking into the rear-vision mirror, she sees Koana surrounded by a halo of dust. As it settles, she emerges like an angel from a dark rain cloud and then shrinks until all Cowrie can pick out is a mound in the distance. She longs to return and embrace this woman fully. She drives on.