The Load Of Fire Wood

By Earnest Mararunga

"IjS/'AKE up, Kallii, and throw some ** wood on the fire.”

I was getting fed up with this.

Kallii fetch water. Kallii start the fire. Kallii do this and Kallii do that.

I wished I was only a little bit bigger, I would leave this mob and go to the mission station and work there as some of the other boys had been doing. I rose from my cosy nook next to the fire place and threw some wood on the embers, sending up sparks and ash. The solemn group in the hut shifted uncomfortably, and I had to smile but broke off abruptly when . . .

“Watch out, boy! You want to burn the house down round our ears or something!”

It was my turn to feel uneasy as the voice belonged to Kaii and, if there were anything I was frightened of, it was Kaii. A man as old as time itself, with skin laying in folds over his skeleton, and eyes sunk so deep into his skull that when he looked at you it was as if death itself was facing you. It was reputed that in his youth, he had killed and eaten a lot of young boys, raw. I cleared my throat. Pretending to look for more wood, I disappeared behind the broad back of one of the men.

THE sparks had settled and the fire was throwing out more flickering light, darkening the interior more with shadows than ever. Some smoke lingered about the low ceiling. The heat was bearable, a cosy, sleep inducing type of heat, very bearable.

With droopy eye-lids I took in the scene. The bearded faces were all serious as they listened. The flicker ing light played on their faces, some times darkening them and at other times bringing them out a golden brown colour. I was fascinated.

It was the youth from the neigh bouring clan who was holding their attention. I saw him when he came that afternoon. He was dressed in whiteman’s clothes, and was carrying a pack on his shoulders. Later when we were eating at the men’s house, I found out that he had gone to the coast and had worked in a big place where they grew a tree known as a coconut, and where everyone wore whitemen’s clothes and spoke with whitemen in the language which only the ‘tanim talk’ from our clan under stood. In fact I heard him use it once when the Kiap came to collect our names. I shook sleep away, pricked up my ears and listened. His voice was light and carried very well in the closely packed hut.

“It is true that some of you have been on the mission station and you have seen the type of houses the ‘patas’ live in and the kind of food they eat and the clothes they wear and the lights they have at night.

It is not beyond our means to have those things. In fact, during the time I was down at the coast, I saw many people of our colour who had these things and, besides these, some even had cars and motor bikes.” (I had seen a motor bike but, after he had explained, I found out that a car was a four-wheeled thing that carried

more people.)

“All we need is to have some of our younger boys go to school and learn about the ways of the white men, and a side reward from this education, the things we now think are for the privileged whitemen only, will be ours.”

A sigh of disbelief rose from those assembled.

He continued, “I hear that some of you are now asking your ancestors to bring you things, but this is im

possible. How can the dead bring the

living any thing?”

Before he could go on, the voice of Karipan cut in. It was sharp and very authoritative and precise: "Then why does the Pata ask somebody who was now long dead to help him out all the time?”

“What do you mean by that re mark?” the youth asked.

“It is true, the white Pata at the mission station does ask a dead per son, and that person supplies the Pata with everything that he asks for.”

Being the orator he was, Karipan did not beat around the bush once he had the audience under the grip of his oratory. His voice was cool and calm and had the confidence that comes with many years of prac tice. In fact, Karipan was the leader of a movement that was telling my people that if we desired any thing that the patas or the kiaps had, all we had to do was to destroy our gardens and our tree crops, kill some pigs, and then ask the ancestors’ spirits to give us houses of corrugated iron, kerosene lamps, tinned food and blankets and mats, and that we would never have to work again in our lives. Recently his movement was losing some of its followers. No wonder! We lived through a famine because of his preaching, and recently we had slaughtered some pigs but still there was no indication of when the ancestors would heed our re quests.

Karipan went on, “When I was on the station a couple of years back, the Pata gathered all of us and we went inside this big building, and the Pata, who was dressed in clothes that rivalled the sun and the moon and put the birds and the flowers to shame, went to this little platform where there were some light sticks and he bowed and he begged, and some people in the crowd sang but there was no dancing, and next morn ing the shiny bird came and I person ally helped to unload rolls of cloth, crates of food, and drums of

liquids”.

His voice was very firm. “Those things could not have come from anywhere else but from the person he was bowing to the day before.”

The youth shook his head in dis belief.

Karipan continued, “There was a man from the coast, who was on the station with the Pata, and he told me that even the Pata gets his things from the spirits of the people that were already dead. He even said that some of the goods the Pata gets are sent to us by our ancestors, but the Pata does not redistribute these to us, the rightful recipients.

I am not saying that our young guest

is wrong. I am saying that he was misled when he was down on the coast. You all know that I was given £5 money when I went and swept my father’s grave. I have always said that you will get your just rewards if you can only bear with me for a while longer”. Once his old grip was established over them again, he sucked in the air and settled back on his buttocks.

I watched the old con-man smile to himself knowing that no youth could break his hold over the clan.

I withdrew in disgust. I wondered how many times my father had killed pigs at his father’s grave and had come away frustrated because his request had not been granted. 1 wondered how many times he had complied with Karipan’s requests and had burned his gardens and cut down his trees so that he could not be ridiculed by the men of the clan for his non-conformity.

I made up my mind, there and then, that I would go with the young man to the mission station and get educated for a day, and come back and lead my people away from the influence of the rogue Karipan. The fire was down to its embers again.

We rose and went to sleep when Parou said it was very late.

1 COULDN’T sleep that night. I

tossed and turned and my imagi nation ran riot. There I was wearing whitemen’s clothes, eating their food.

I imagined I could even come home with a stomach as big as the kiap’s and I might even have something to cover my feet. I laughed loudly to myself in the dark only to catch an elbow in my stomach. I grunted and rolled over on to my side. Minutes became hours. A rooster crowed.

Other roosters took up the call, and

it re-echoed up and down the length and the breadth of the valley. Birds called to' one another, and, at last, after what seemed a million years, dawn broke. The grey light crept in through the holes in the bark walls of the hut. I rose.

Not bothering about the other sleepers, I threw back the dried bamboo leaves. The cold engulfed me as I stepped out into it. It was a biting cold, wet and clinging.

Around me the mist was hugging the ground. Further away the mist broke up into gigantic balls and went leap frogging over the kunai patches and pitpit grass. I stepped up to the nearest clump of bananas and lifted up my apron cloth. Finished, I re turned to the hut for my leaves to cover my buttocks and then raced for my mother’s pig house. Behind me voices called to me to close the en trance, others implored me to get the fire started. Not today! This boy was off to get his share of education and the whiteman’s goods.

I arrived at the pig house out of breath, the body heat steaming from my body. My mother was up already.

Smoke was lifting slowly from the thatched roof, and lingering in the still air. I poked my head through the low opening.

“You are early, boy. Don’t tell me you are hungry. I sent enough to the men’s house last night. Didn’t you get enough to eat?”

She went back to spinning her strings for a new string bag. She would pause now and then to throw more wood on the small fire. Hell, here was I about to go out into the world and claim my share of for tune, and there she was concerned only with whether I was fed or not, and that infernal fire.

“Mother, I am going to the mission

station to get educated and claim my share of cargo there,” I said im

patiently.

“Oh, yes?” she replied, without a trace of interest in her voice. “And don’t forget to bring in a load of wood this afternoon,” she added.

Women! I cursed. What do they know about education and cargo.

I’ll show her. Without waiting for her to say more, I raced back to the men’s house. The men were all up and were now gathered around the fire.

“I am going to the mission station with the man in European clothes,” I

said uneasily as I had not yet asked the youthful speaker of last night to take me to the station with him.

“You are not!” My father was a man of a few words.

“Yes I am!” I was on the verge of tears.

The young man in European clothes came to my assistance, and, after telling my father that he would take me there and bring me back himself, my father gave his per mission but added, very strongly, that I was not to be educated. I reminded him that I would be away only for a day. My father made it clear that I

was not to be educated not even for a day. With this ringing in my head, we took off for the mission station.

And what a sight we made, the youth in his white shirt and khaki shorts, and me in my apron cloth with a bunch of leaves to cover my back side, and him towering above me.

But that morning I was the bigger person. My head was already in the clouds.

WE followed the old track, which had been worn smooth by countless feet over the years, until the hills were miles behind us, and the grass plain, unbroken by not

even a solitary tree, stretched before us. The sun was high in the sky by the time we arrived at the station.

I had never seen such a collection of buildings at one place before in my life, and I was astounded. (Very much later in life, I found out that there were only 12 huts of crude corrugated iron and bush timber dressed down.) My friend went up to one of the buildings and tapped on the wall, and a door was opened and a person looking very much like the Kiap appeared. He too was white and had a fat belly. This must be

the Pata, I thought. They talked for a long while, and pointed at me

occasionally.

The Pata beckoned to me, and I went towards him with some mis givings. Before I could come to my senses, I was introduced to a lot of other boys, and my apron cloth was taken away. I was washed, dressed in an old pair of shorts sizes too big for me, and was told that I was going to school with them.

Now, 20 years after, I am still wondering how my mother got her load of firewood that afternoon.