Solomon's Song (4 page)

‘”Your life? Right now it ain’t worth a pinch o’ shit. I’ve ‘ad a chat to Johnny Terrible, he’s told me everything, you bastard!”

‘”Please,” he says, “spare me and you’ll not regret it, Tommo!”

‘”Spare you? Jesus! Whaffor?”

‘”We could go into business, son. I’ll cut you in for ‘arf o’ everything, we’d make a bleedin’ fortune you and me.” He cocks his ‘ead to the side, “You with the flats and me managing the game. There’d be none better in all the colonies.” He tries to smile, to crawl right up me arse. “Mr Ace o’ Spades, you’re the best, the very best there is with the cards, never seen better, a bloody miracle them ‘ands. Miracle o’ motion and deception. You’ve got talent nigh to genius, no, correction, you is genius.”

‘”And both of us needin’ the poppy regular, eh? A fine threesome, you, me and the opium pipe. Bullshit!” His nose is running and he’s commenced to snivellin’ and shiverin’ and I can see that the courage ‘as suddenly leaked out o’ him, there’s wet tears runnin’ down his cheeks.’

‘”What say you, then?” he whimpers, his teeth achatter. I don’t know whether the shaking is from the cold or his fear, both perhaps. Mr Sparrow spreads his hands and shrugs and appeals to me with the wet eyes, “Please, Tommo, spare me,” he cries.

‘”Mr Sparrow, I didn’t come to bargain, as I see it right now, I ain’t got too much time meself. I come to do what I’ve promised I’d do since I were seven year old and four of you mongrels, you dog fuckers, stretched me over a Huon log in the Wilderness. Pulled down me torn britches and threw me over that fallen log. I remember its lemon-yellow bark were stripped, just like me, me and the pine, both bollock naked, me with me face kissin’ the damp forest earth and it fallen to the same by the cruel axes o’ the wood fetchers. Then them buggering me, laughing, snotting over me back and me arse bleeding so the blood’s running down the inside o’ me legs. Them leavin’, footsteps crackling through the fern and myrtle bush, laughing, whooping, doin’ up their buckles and buttoning their britches. You fuck little boys too, don’tcha, Mr Sparrow?”

‘”Tommo, Tommo! I’m like you,” Mr Sparrow wails. “They done the same t’me! The very same! Ask Ikey! He took me from Hannah Solomon’s brothel where I were a catamite! He said I were too smart to be raped for sixpence by a turd burglar!”

‘”Ikey’s long dead,” I snap. I don’t need Sparrow’s begging. I don’t want him to be like me, even in this.

‘He begins to sob again. “It’s true, I swear it’s true!” For a moment there I’m almost sorry for him, then I remember Maggie and other things I’ve ‘eard about what F. Artie Sparrow’s done if a whore angers him, Maggie ain’t the first he’s done in.

‘”So?” I says, “You knew about the mongrels and you grew up and became one o’ them, a mongrel yerself and worse than most. Does that make it right, then?”

‘He sniffs and gulps back a sob. “I survived, Tommo. I stayed alive.”

‘”Me too, only just, but I didn’t join the bloody mongrels.”

‘He is silent for a while, sobbing and wiping his snotty nose, pinching at it with his thumb and forefinger. I don’t say nothing, letting him think to himself awhile. Then he slowly raises his head and looks at me. “What you gunna do to me?” he asks, his voice real small.

‘I don’t even really hear meself saying it, it just come out natural, like I’ve been wanting to say it since I were seven years old and in the Wilderness alone. “I’m gunna kill you, Mr Sparrow, it’s what’s long overdue for your kind.”

‘He begins to sob even harder than before, not looking at me, gulping and choking and taking to the hiccups and all the while begging for his life between his blubbing. I’ve had enough, so I taps him hard on the head with the blunt o’ the axe and he slumps out of the chair to the floor. I stretches him out on his back and goes to work.

‘Me head’s hurting like hell and I know I ain’t got much time, the craving for the poppy is buildin’ up and I’m beginning to shake for the need o’ the blessed pipe. I take the Tiki from my neck and lifts his head and puts it round his neck, then my purse with four pounds and several o’ me calling cards in it. I put it in his jacket pocket, then me hunter with the ace of spades on the outside lid and the gold sovereign ‘anging on its chain which I fits to his weskit pocket and secures the fob.

‘I stands back and looks down at him. Matter ‘o fact he don’t look that unlike me and with a bit o’ splashing around in the sea water and after the fishies ‘ave a go at him nobody will be able to tell the difference. Not that I expect he’ll be washed ashore before a shark gets to him, though you never know with the ship still hugging the coastline.

‘Like I said, in me anger to get to him, to get aboard and kill him, I’ve not thought too much about escaping after. Now me plan’s changed. So I put me axe in the holster to my back and lifts him again and carries him up the hatchway, it’s harder even than before. He seems heavier somehow and I’m exhausted as I get up the last o’ the steps and dump him on the deck. I’m puffing like a bull mastiff after a pit fight and I’m forced to sit and rest. It’s still dark, the moon not broken through yet and I’ve only a few feet to go to the starboard rail.

‘I get up and half drags him and then slumps him over the ship’s railing and I’m about to lift him over when I remember something Hammerhead Jack once told me on the Nankin Maiden. How it comes to me at that moment I can’t rightly say, it were not thought out, just comes into me ‘ead like before.’

Tommo looks up at Hawk. ‘Hammerhead Jack once told me if the Maori want to get rid o’ someone with no trace they takes him out to sea and chops off his head, so nobody can identify the phiz and the moko markings upon it. “The body float but head it sinks like a stone, Tommo, eh. No head, no know him!” He gimme this grin so I don’t know if he be serious or what. “No meat on head, on body plenty to eat?”

‘I’m only glad Sparrow is out to it. It is sufficient he knew before I tapped him that he was gunna die. He’d shit himself at that, I could smell it as I carried him up the hatchway. Even after what he did to Maggie I can’t bring meself to wait ’til he come round to tell him the Hammerhead Jack manner o’ his death. So I lops him there and then. Three sharp blows at the back of the neck and the head drops into the waves below like a stone and the blood pours out his neck like a pipe’s burst, four feet into the air and arches into the foamy brine below, enough to attract a hundred sharks. I wipes the blade on the back o’ his jacket then grabs him by the ankles and tips the rest o’ him over the ship’s rail. Over he goes, a complete somersault and hits the waves spread-eagled. Good riddance to bad rubbish. With the wash against the bow it don’t hardly makes a noise. Then I throw up over the rail.’

Tommo pauses at last and Hawk can see that he’s been pretending to be calm, but is terribly upset at the telling, never having brought what happened to the surface before. He puts his arm around Tommo’s shoulders and holds him against his chest, his brother is shivering and then begins to sob. ‘I got them, I got the mongrels, didn’t I, Hawk? Maggie would ‘ave been happy knowing what I done for her, hey?’

Hawk is himself crying, holding his brother, sobbing for the agony of Tommo’s bitter life. His tiny brother just twenty-one years and some months old, now with his life so nearly over. Hawk can see that Tommo’s eyes have lost their focus and his twin is shaking violently. ‘Do you need a pipe, Tommo?’

‘Aye,’ Tommo replies, his voice barely above a whisper.

Hawk has grown accustomed to preparing Tommo’s opium pipe. The great ball of opium Tommo carried away from Mr Sparrow is almost used up. It is as though Tommo’s life is to be measured by the diminishing size of the sticky black paste.

Hawk finds the oil lamp, its glass like an upside-down bell the shape of a lily and lights it; the flame in the centre of the glass looks like a golden stamen looking down into a lily. Then he takes a small clay bowl and fills it with the black paste which he heats slightly until it reaches the consistency of treacle and with a long steel needle he dips into the bowl and winds a small amount of paste onto its end. This he warms over the flame until the small pearl of opium begins to bubble. He places the smouldering opium into the bowl of Tommo’s pipe and watches as his twin pulls the opium smoke into his lungs, his very life seeming to depend on it. Each pearl allows only three or four puffs and Hawk repeats the process until the bowl is empty which takes almost an hour. Afterwards Tommo drifts into a deep contented sleep.

Hawk has long since given up trying to stop Tommo from using the poppy. He knows it is the only way to kill the pain that is slowly bringing his twin’s life to an end. Carefully he cleans the pipe and the bowl and blows out the lamp and stores it with the little opium that remains. He has no way of obtaining more unless he should visit Auckland and hope to find it on the waterfront. It is a task he is willing to do if his twin survives beyond the last of Mr Sparrow’s supply. Though the idea of leaving Tommo for the three, perhaps four, days it will take to make the journey and return fills him with the utmost concern that Tommo may die while he is away.

Now, as his twin sleeps on his reed bed, Hawk covers him with a blanket. ‘I loves you, Tommo,’ he says softly, ’sleep now awhile.’

The remainder of Tommo’s story comes out over the next week or so. Tommo had the presence of mind to retrieve Mr Sparrow’s hat, then wearing the scarf about his face as Mr Sparrow had done, he simply assumed his identity. It seems nobody on board had seen the little villain without his hat pulled down low over his eyes and his scarf wrapped about his face. Mr Sparrow did not even want the captain to know his true appearance when he was smuggled aboard.

Tommo left the ship at Levuka and a few days later caught a ketch going to Auckland and found his way back to Chief Tamihana’s village and his baby daughter, Hinetitama.

Over the next three weeks Tommo’s lucid periods become less and less frequent, and at night Hawk sleeps on a rush mat on the earthen floor beside Tommo’s bed. In the morning he carries him outside to do his business and then prepares his pipe. One morning just after sunrise and three months after Hawk’s arrival, Tommo reaches down to touch the slumbering Hawk who thinks he wishes to go outside. Hawk rises and goes to lift him, but his brother shakes his head and now Hawk sees that his eyes, his sad blue eyes, are clear and his mind is lucid.

‘What is it, Tommo? Water?’ Tommo has neither eaten nor taken anything to drink for two days and Hawk reaches down for a small earthenware dish filled with water and holds it to his twin’s lips. Tommo’s lips are cracked and they tremble with the effort of swallowing so that most of it runs over his chin and down his neck, brightening the emerald-green surface of the Tiki about his neck.

Hawk places the gourd on the floor beside the bed and takes Tommo’s tiny hands in his own. ‘Do you want a pipe, mate?’ His twin’s hands are cold to his touch and Hawk starts to gently massage them, hoping to transfer some of his own warmth into his brother’s trembling fingers.

Hawk thinks about the hands he holds, so deceptive, clumsy to look at, ugly even. The palms are criss-crossed with white axe scars, several fingers bent and knobbed from being broken and not set back straight from his twin’s time as a captive child in the Southwest Wilderness. Yet Tommo’s hands are proved so elegant and mercurial when they hold a pack of cards and so certain and deadly when clasped about the handle of a fighting axe. His brother’s hands, always his chief mischief-makers, now look innocent and helpless clasped in his own great paws.

‘No pipe, not yet,’ Tommo whispers. ‘There are two more things I must speak of, Hawk.’

‘What is it?’

Tommo tries to rise, his hand trembles as he points to the corner of the hut. ‘It’s buried in the corner, the satchel, Mr Sparrow’s. I don’t know how much, but it’s a lot.’

‘Shall I fetch it?’ Hawk says.

Tommo shakes his head, ‘Nah, just to know it’s there. Jewels, everything, a king’s ransom.’

‘What is it you want me to do with it?’

‘Buy land. For the Maori. Buy it back for them from the pakeha, much as you can.’

‘You mean in perpetuity?’

Tommo doesn’t know the word and he rests for a moment, panting. ‘There is a Maori saying, “Until the sun is dowsed in the sea”, buy it for them so it can never be took back, much as you can, spend it all.’

‘It won’t be easy, I’ll have to get a land agent and tell him it’s for a big pakeha interest.’

‘Aye, you do that. Then give it to the Ngati Haua people forever, tell Tamihana it’s Hinetitama’s, my daughter’s gift to her people.’

‘And what of her? Will you not want some of it to go to her, some small portion?’

Tommo’s shake of the head is barely perceived. ‘Nah, it’s tainted.’ He brings his hand slowly to his neck and touches the Tiki, ‘Give her this, the God Tiki has seen all my wickedness and will protect her from the same.’

‘What of your axe, will she have that too?’

‘Nah, you keep it, if she should have a son, give it to him.’

Hawk can see that Tommo’s strength is fading fast. ‘Will you take a pipe now?’ he asks. Hawk does not know how to tell Tommo that there remains barely enough of the Angel’s Kiss for one more pipe.

To his surprise Tommo shakes his head, refusing the pipe. ‘Hawk, I loves you,’ his voice has an increasingly hoarse quality and Hawk must strain to hear him. His twin pauses, licking his dry lips, breathing heavily, trying to catch his breath again, ‘Hinetitama. Don’t let the mongrels get her.’

Hawk, overwhelmed with sadness, places Tommo’s hands gently back into his lap, then gathers up his twin in his great arms and begins to rock him. ‘Oh, Tommo, oh, sweet Tommo,’ he moans. ‘Oh, my sweet, sweet brother, I shall guard your little daughter with my very life.’ Hawk starts to weep as he feels his twin beginning to slip away from him. ‘No, no, stay, Tommo, stay a while,’ he chokes. ‘Please don’t leave me!’

Tommo sighs softly and, safe at last from the mongrels, dies in his brother’s strong, loving arms.

Within minutes the first of the death-wailing begins, a great and sudden overflowing of grief, as if by some osmosis the tribe knows Tommo is dead. Those who possess firearms commence to shoot them to announce his passing and show their respect. Chief Tamihana arrives at Tommo’s hut minutes later and squats before the grieving Hawk and their noses touch. They hold this nose-rubbing position for nearly ten minutes so that the old chief might show his respect to Hawk and Tommo and their ancestors. Then he announces the hui for the tangihanga, the wailing for the dead.