He bathed and changed into a clean ie lavalava and the colourful floral shirt Peleiupu had given him for Christmas, leaving the shirt unbuttoned because it was hot. ‘Where are you going?’ Lalaga asked. ‘It’ll be lotu soon.’

  ‘Visiting,’ he replied, and then strode out of their fale and down to the malae.

  The breeze was dragging the evening shorewards from the horizon, and being butted by the palms and trees along the beach. Some children were playing outside the church; they paused and smiled at him. He told them to go home: it was time for lotu. Smoke billowed from the kitchen fale as aiga prepared their evening meal, and was swallowed up quickly by the falling darkness. The chorus of cicadas started. Some of the elders invited him into their homes; he declined.

  The strong smell of kerosene invaded his nostrils as he entered the store. Poto was at the counter, reading the Bible. At the far side Semisi was weighing bags of sugar on the small scales, and whistling. As Mautu had expected, Peleiupu was immersed in recording accounts in a large ledger. No Tavita.

  He stood, saying nothing.

  Poto glanced up and said, ‘Sir, have you come?’ He nodded.

  ‘Get Mautu a chair, Semisi.’ Semisi pushed Mautu the chair he’d been sitting on. Peleiupu shut the ledger and got up. Poto saved him from having to plead with his daughter. ‘Pele, don’t go. I think your father has come to talk to you.’

  ‘And Tavita if he is around?’ he asked.

  Poto started leaving. ‘Semisi, you come too.’ They left quickly.

  Awkwardly he stood gazing out through the front door at the darkness that was gliding in over the beach, and trying to find the words to say to her, knowing she found it difficult making small talk. When he glanced at her, she too was looking out the door. She looked drawn and tired, the mellow soft contours of youth were gone from her face.

  ‘It’s the anniversary of Barker’s death next week, isn’t it?’ he heard himself asking.

  ‘Yes, I think so,’ she replied. ‘Tavita and Poto are organising for us to visit him.’

  ‘Your mother has told me you are with child.’ He was surprised at the spluttering sound of his voice. She nodded once, her hands clasped together on the counter. ‘I am very happy,’ he murmured. She gazed directly at him for the first time. ‘So is your mother. It will be our first grandchild.’ There was a long pause as she struggled to reply. ‘You have been punished enough, Pele,’ he said.

  ‘I had no other choice, Papa,’ she began. ‘I chose to follow my heart, knowing it would bring shame and pain to you and Lalaga. For that I am very sorry.’

  ‘But you do not regret it?’

  ‘No, I do not regret marrying Tavita.’ He’d always admired and loved her determination and honesty.

  ‘Your mother and I and our community have made you pay dearly for it …’

  ‘They certainly have …’

  ‘… and your mother continues to exact her payment.’

  ‘Yes, she certainly does, but I knew Tavita and I would have to pay for a lifetime, for our choice.’

  ‘I am satisfied. That is what I came to tell you. From here on, I’m ignoring Lalaga’s demands on you and Tavita. So promise me you’ll not keep away from me?’

  She nodded. ‘My mother is like me, Papa. She finds it difficult forgiving anyone who has hurt her and her aiga. So when she finds out what you’ve done, how’s she going to react?’

  ‘The usual way, but I’ll do my usual back — I’ll just ignore her.’

  Just then Tavita entered and, seeing Mautu, looked at Peleiupu. ‘It’s all right, Tavita, I’m no longer keeping Lalaga’s contract with you,’ Mautu told him, smiling. ‘And I want to come with you when you visit your father’s grave next week.’ Tavita nodded and asked if he would conduct the memorial service. Mautu agreed. Silence. ‘It’s going to be a girl, eh?’ Mautu asked. They looked puzzled. ‘Your first child?’ Tavita grinned; Peleiupu shrugged her shoulders. ‘May I name her?’ he requested. ‘I’ll consult Sao, of course.’

  ‘Sir, it would be an honour for us,’ Tavita said.

  ‘Sao and I will come up with a relevant and poetic name.’ Mautu tingled with joy.

  As the dark settled into Satoa, the chorus of cicadas and the evening hymns embraced it. ‘Shouldn’t you hurry home for lotu, Papa?’ Peleiupu asked.

  ‘You can have lotu with us,’ Tavita invited him.

  ‘I don’t feel like being in a lotu tonight,’ Mautu said. ‘Let’s just stay here and talk.’ He wanted to know about their life since they married in American Samoa.

  ‘It might bring back painful memories,’ Peleiupu cautioned.

  ‘Leave out the bits that might,’ he joked.

  So while the sound of lotu and cicadas and mosquitoes measured the edge of their hearing, Peleiupu and Tavita did what he wanted. By the end of it they could barely see one another in the darkness. Tavita lit a lamp.

  ‘I hope my granddaughter doesn’t look like your father!’ Mautu joked with Tavita.

  Peleiupu laughed softly. ‘Papa’s right — your father wasn’t handsome!’

  ‘No, he wasn’t handsome like you, Tavita!’ Mautu emphasised. They laughed about that.

  ‘Anyway, how do you know it’s going to be a girl?’ Tavita asked.

  ‘Because God whispered it to me on my way here.’ They laughed about that too.

  Tavita went to the shelves and started getting goods for Mautu to take home.

  ‘No, I don’t need that,’ Mautu insisted. ‘All I need is your alofa and forgiveness. We’ve made you pay far more than you needed to. I’m proud of your service to our church, our school and our village.’ He turned to leave. Peleiupu stopped him and straightened his collar and buttoned his shirt. ‘By the way, are you keeping an eye on Ruta?’ he remembered.

  ‘Yes, every time the Lady Poto calls in a Fagaloto, I send her and Lefatu some supplies,’ she replied. ‘Everyone there loves her.’

  It had rained all night and, as he picked his way over the soggy ground to the school, mud oozed up between his toes, so he had to wipe his feet on the sacking in the doorway into the classroom. Lalaga, Peleiupu and the other teachers were there already.

  ‘We need to continue our classes in gardening,’ Lalaga was telling the others.

  Mautu sat down beside Peleiupu, who smiled at him and didn’t move away. ‘Do we need to do that?’ he asked Lalaga. ‘All our families have gardens now and can’t eat all the vegetables they produce.’

  ‘Yes, our family is feeding the surplus to the pigs,’ one of the others said.

  ‘I support Mautu’s view,’ said Peleiupu. The other avoided looking at Lalaga. ‘Those who’ve been trained can teach the rest of their families,’ she added. The tension intensified as Lalaga struggled to reply. ‘And Tavita and I can’t continue teaching gardening — we have a lot of other work.’

  ‘I’ll do it on my own then!’ Lalaga snapped. ‘Do we need to discuss anything else?’ No one responded. ‘So, let’s start our day.’ She jumped up, glared at Mautu and hurried out. Her limp seemed more pronounced.

  ‘I thought you were in charge of this school!’ Mautu quipped as Peleiupu got up.

  ‘So did I, so did I!’ Peleiupu said.

  At interval Mautu kept well away from Lalaga and Peleiupu. From the playground he saw them through the windows, arguing heatedly. He couldn’t hear what they were saying. Lalaga waved her arms and pointed repeatedly at Peleiupu, who just stood there motionless. Periodically Lalaga would turn her back to her daughter and clutch her face. Their soundless argument, their mime, looked funny and melodramatic.

  Lalaga didn’t even wait until the servers had cleared away the remnants of their evening meal. ‘So you and your daughter have reconciled, eh?’ she started.

  ‘Yes, she and Tavita have atoned for their bad actions as far as I’m concerned. And you have no right banning her from seeing me.’

  ‘What about our bargain with them?’ she demanded. The embarrassed servers packed quickly and left.

  ‘You made the bargain, Lalaga, remember? You even told me you weren’t going to tell me the conditions of it.’

  Furiously she shook her head and said, ‘Once again you’ve given in to her, allowed her to get away with it.’

  ‘I have not given in to Pele,’ Mautu stressed. ‘There is nothing to give in to. Pele has paid the price and far more.’

  ‘You and your spoilt daughter are again siding against me!’ She started weeping. ‘She almost killed me. Your daughter almost killed me!’

  ‘That’s enough!’ he interrupted. ‘I want our family to be as it was. Pele has paid enough.’ Lalaga buried her face in her hands and continued weeping. ‘The work and responsibilities you and Tavita’s aiga and others have imposed on her would break anyone else.’ He paused, breathing deeply, and then added, ‘Besides she is now with child, remember?’

  She slapped at her sides and rolled away through the curtain to where they slept.

  Later, she slept well away from him, and, throughout the night, tossed and turned and sighed. She was at school before he was awake, and refused to speak to him when he got there. Throughout the day, she set work for her classes and then just sat at her desk gazing out to sea.

  ‘She’s very cross with me,’ Mautu told Peleiupu, ‘but I’m not giving in to her.’

  ‘Neither am I,’ she said. She went in and, while Lalaga glared at her, informed her she couldn’t run the school any more because of other demands. ‘Tavita and I are setting up a bakery.’ She left before her mother could say anything.

  When Lalaga reached Mautu at their home she loomed above him. ‘I’m going to have another stroke! Is that what you and your ungrateful daughter want, eh?’ He wrapped his arms around her. She struggled and fought against him. ‘Your daughter wants to see me dead. That’s what!’

  ‘That is not true, Lalaga. Pele loves you.’

  As he held her, her shaking eased away. ‘You have always loved our children more than me,’ she accused him. ‘And Pele the most.’

  ‘That’s not true, Lalaga.’

  That night and all that week she slept away from him, and refused to talk directly to him or Peleiupu. During the week she visited all the wives of the matai, supposedly to discuss their gardens. Mautu knew something was up and warned Peleiupu who hesitated and then said, ‘I don’t want to speak ill of my own mother, but I have to, Papa. She is gathering information about what’s happening in Satoa, and in particular what’s happening to Tavita and me.’ She pondered again and added, ‘She’s trying to get their support.’

  ‘For what?’

  Peleiupu smiled. ‘Papa, I am so like her, I can read her easily. She wants them to help her put me back into “my proper place”. My own mother!’

  ‘Your mother is not like that, Pele. She is not a devious and calculating person.’

  ‘You’ve always been a hopeless judge of people, Papa, especially of those close to you!’ Peleiupu laughed.

  Hurt by her remark, for he’d always believed he was an astute judge of people, he said, ‘I suppose so.’

  With a slow, wicked smile she said, ‘The wives will pledge their support to her, but will not act against me, Papa.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘You will, Papa, you will soon.’

  Two days later, on his counselling round, some of the wives asked him, respectfully, if Lalaga was well; others asked, respectfully, if Peleiupu was well; still others asked, respectfully, if Lalaga and Peleiupu were well together; one, the bravest of them, asked, plainly, if Lalaga and Peleiupu were quarrelling. To her, Mautu told the truth; to the others he pretended surprise that they should even think his wife and daughter were not well, singly, and not well, together.

  All the wives started their conversations with him by declaring their love and respect for Lalaga and her ‘remarkable and generous daughter’. Then they left Lalaga out, and heaped praise on his ‘remarkable and generous daughter’, whose great intelligence, judgement, planning, unbelievable capacity for work, money and husband were transforming the whole of Satoa into the most prosperous and progressive community in Samoa.

  ‘I think I understand now,’ Mautu said to Peleiupu the next day at school. She didn’t know what he was referring to. ‘You know, remember?’ She smiled. ‘Your poor mother doesn’t know, does she?’ She shook her head and smiled again. ‘She hasn’t got a chance, eh?’ Her smile widened, her teeth gleamed. She turned and headed home briskly.

  The congregation grew quiet, waiting for the service to start. Mautu knelt in the pulpit and prayed, then sat up and gazed down at the front entrance. Sao, who looked frail and weak, entered with Peleiupu and Tavita supporting him on either side. Their white clothes gleamed in the morning light.

  Theirs was a slow procession up the aisle as Sao shuffled and surveyed the congregation, smiling and nodding at the other elders. The congregation exuded an enormous feeling of pride as they observed the procession. Tavita walked with an easy confidence, no longer the shy, self-conscious youth Mautu had known. As for Mautu’s daughter, well, she was playing the role of daughter-in-law perfectly, with the proper degree of shyness, humility and respect, the appropriate lowering of her eyes, and the devoted attention to her ali’i. Unexpectedly, she glanced up at Mautu. He saw a mischievous sparkle in her eyes, the faint trace of a wry smile before she looked away again. At that moment, Mautu understood and was breathless. In the proud possessive way Sao was holding on to Tavita’s and Peleiupu’s arms and displaying them in front of his whole community, his message was clear: these were his heirs. And the congregation was applauding.

  Tears threatened again when Mautu remembered Barker and how proud he would have been of his son and Peleiupu, and even prouder that his children were now part of Satoa. When Freemeade’s lecture on afakasi started intruding, he rose to his feet, held on to the front-piece of the pulpit and declared ‘Today is a beautiful day to praise our Lord. Let us begin this service …’

  On 3 December 1908, his first grandchild, a girl, was born. Sao and his wife and Lalaga agreed to his choice that their granddaughter be called Lefatu.

  It was as if he and his family were back on that first evening when he had brought home the English Bible that Barker had given him, in the expectant hush and stillness of evening with Lalaga and their children circling him and the large parcel in his hands, waiting for him to open it; with the same tightness in his belly as the trembling rippled up from the book and up through his arms into his eyes.

  They were waiting for him to open the hefty parcel with the black waterproof canvas wrapping that Poto had brought from Apia, saying she’d been given it by the German firm she traded with. The parcel had been handed to the firm by a black sailor — a Fijian? — from an American ship docked in Apia Harbour. The firm knew Poto was from Satoa, the village to which the parcel was addressed.

  Dirt-caked, scratched, hand-written address on white paper stained wet brown, the thin rope around it frayed, the parcel looked as if it had travelled a long way over a long time, and passed from person to person, ship to ship. Now it was with the people who owned it and who desperately wanted to open it but were afraid to do so. Finally Mautu pushed it towards Lalaga, who shook her head once, then reached down and started unknotting the rope. As she untied the rope she rolled it neatly around her right hand and then laid it on the floor, and looked at him.

  He watched his hands as they gripped the opening between the central edges of the black canvas wrapping and pulled it open slowly. He looked at Lalaga as she pulled up the lid of the paper box, and looked away from the contents.

  ‘It’s from him, isn’t it?’ he dared.

  ‘Don’t know!’ When she glanced at him his arms were in the box almost up to his elbows. A rich satiny smell rose up from the box.

  ‘Here, you take out the things,’ he said.

  Out of the box came three rolls of calico and silk, five long-sleeved shirts, three silk ties, four white hats for church, four dresses …

  ‘No letter?’ he ventured.

  From the depths of the box she took a white envelope and, with a trembling, fearful hand, handed it to him. Slitting it open with his forefinger, he showed her what was in it. Money, notes: a thick wad of money.

  ‘No letter?’ she asked quietly.

  He shook his head. ‘Just money.’

  ‘I’ll look again,’ she offered. He watched and waited as she searched methodically through the contents, unfolding even the material, emptying everything onto the floor and running her hand along the bottom of the box. He sensed she was trying not to cry.

  ‘Are we sure it is from him?’ he asked.

  Nodding her head furiously, and clutching one of the dresses to her face, she murmured, ‘Yes, yes, it is from Arona, our son, our son!’

  And so began another strand in The Tales of Arona the Sailor — of large black parcels, with exotic gifts and money, arriving when the Mautu family least expected them; parcels that came without letters from Arona.

  In the House of Sorrow

  Every Friday, an hour before the cicadas erupted in chorus and the sun started slotting into the darkness, Peleiupu and Tavita retreated into what Satoans referred to as ‘Pele’s office’ and shut the door on Satoa, and no one dared intrude. For that hour, she told them, she and Tavita belonged to themselves, and were not to be fed upon by others.

  She would relax in her prince’s chair, which Tavita had given her for her thirtieth birthday eight years earlier, while Tavita smoked (and drank a glass or two of whisky that no one was supposed to know about). Most Satoans believed that wanting privacy, cutting yourself off from family, was a strange thing to do: privacy encouraged conspiracy, plotting, furtive consumption of food and other things you should be sharing with your community. Sao claimed it was a very papalagi characteristic, and said it was really Peleiupu who insisted on it, not his grandson, who was a true Satoan who loved being with others, always. As for her insisting that she and Tavita speak only English during that hour, that was really peculiar! (It was strange enough that she spoke mainly English to her children.) Her office was cluttered with books that she actually read, Sao reported. All those books and all that reading was one of the reasons she was so different from normal people.