The Missionaries, Marriage and Children

  Mautu taught the older students, and in the days before Barker intruded into his life his lessons were severe, unimaginative and therefore boring — but pity the inattentive student. (Even his children feared him during classes because to prove his impartiality, he treated them more harshly.) His capacity for teaching was enormous — sometimes his classes lasted all afternoon and his students staggered home mentally battered to families who were annoyed with their pastor for keeping their children away from their afternoon chores. But none questioned him.

  Those students, who were also members of his household, continued their lessons in Bible reading after evening lotu and serving the meal, with Mautu laboriously correcting their errors. But when exhausted or angry he never shouted at any student. A cold lowering of his voice, a pronounced frown, a sharp clicking of his tongue was enough to frighten the culprit into obedience.

  Lalaga was the more imaginative and dynamic teacher. Small, quick and of strong nerves, she worked from the first light until late at night, with the hems of her starched dresses whispering around her ankles. The students enjoyed her classes, and whenever they were bored she told them stories from the Bible.

  As a student at Vaiuta she had modelled her behaviour on Miss Beth (Misi Peta) their papalagi missionary teacher. A frail middle-aged Englishwoman, with skin the hazy, milky colour of smoke, Misi Peta had timetabled every waking minute of her students’ lives, and each activity was a lesson in godliness, frugality, cleanliness, punctuality and good Christian living.

  They woke at 5.30 am to the jangling of a hand-bell, which Misi Peta told them had been bequeathed to her by her beloved mentor, Misi Isapela. After lotu, which usually ended with a prayer by Misi Peta admonishing students who’d committed misdemeanours, they went out to the grounds to pick up the fallen leaves and other rubbish. Then it was cold showers at 7 am and a breakfast of orange-leaf tea and home-baked bread or fa’alifu. The students were rostered to cook and serve meals, and their first lesson began at 8am.

  Misi Peta taught the whole group, aided by two graduates. Apart from the three Rs and Bible knowledge they learned sewing, embroidering, cooking, weaving and first aid. Misi Peta was always nearby with her precise instructions and meticulous demonstrations, her untiring inspiration. Endless work was a supreme virtue — armour against the temptations that arose out of indolence. Samoans, she emphasised, had to learn that. You were far more than a Samoan girl from the village, you were a Christian aspiring to love God and His Holy Son, Jesus; a Christian who would one day serve God more devotedly through your pastor husband. You were a child of the Light that the courageous John Williams, whom she’d known personally, had brought to Samoa.

  Though they were in awe of her, there was that permanent wall of aloofness between Misi Peta and her students — a fear of skin touching skin, of their glimpsing who she really was, of what she referred to as ‘our savage and evil instincts gaining control’. There was a proper time and place for everything, and a correct Christian woman’s way of doing those things. Moderation should govern one’s appetites so whenever their laughter or singing or dancing became immoderate in her measure Misi Peta promptly corrected them. Bible class on Sundays was devoted to students rising and, in moderate, matter-of-fact, respectful language, confessing the ‘sins’ they’d committed that week. Misi Peta forgave them, always.

  With her senior students, Misi Peta often talked of love, passion, ‘the weaknesses of the flesh’ and self-control. Love and affection between a man and a woman were not to be displayed publicly; ladies were to be ladies even in their sleep; the flesh was weak and had to be policed constantly; and a good Christian wife was to obey and serve her husband unquestioningly, bear him many children as was her duty to God, and devote her life to performing good deeds and serving her community and God. Though she described Solomon as a king who’d given way to the temptations of the flesh, she loved reciting his psalms to them, her face flushed red, her trembling upper lip beaded with sweat, her voice hoarse with emotion.

  In Samoa many people were still pagan, their eyes clouded over with the Darkness, and it was the duty of every Vaiuta graduate to save those pagans for God and His Church, she exhorted them. Lalaga was to recall that she never once saw Misi Peta in anything less than black shoes and starched dresses that covered her from neck to ankle. On Saturdays when the whole school in their sailor suits marched in double file to Mulinu’u, where they fished the reef and mudflats for seafood, Misi Peta never entered the water. She sat in the shade, fanning herself and reading poetry. Her love of poetry was perhaps the one thing that Misi Peta could be accused of being immoderate about. She tried to conceal it but she recited poems during her lessons, after lotu, during church services, used them to correct their behaviour with, and she made them memorise many of her favourites. Lalaga could still recite some of them. For instance:

  Let me sleep in the loving arms of our Lord,

  Let His light shine upon my sinful soul,

  Let Him bring the gentle rain of His love

  To quench my spiritual thirst …

  It was rumoured that Misi Peta also wrote her own poems in the black notebooks she kept locked in her study. But for most of the time it was as if she’d been born Misi Peta: ageless, always in control of everything, untouched by the immoderate tropical sun.

  And Lalaga worshipped her.

  At first when Mautu went into Barker’s orbit he still took his classes regularly. Noticeably, however, his lessons became stories about faraway places, and as he continued to orbit with Barker, a subject such as arithmetic became inhabited by exotic creatures, heroes and adventurers performing incredible tricks of combining, plussing, minusing, and sailing in magical ships to fabulous lands. For instance, there was a hero called One-Plus which could stretch its body to fit any shape, distance or size, and which could, with its plus factor, add to itself any other creature. In one adventure, One-Plus used its plus factor to add all the Pacific Ocean to itself and was thus able to reach the kingdom of All-Plus, inhabited by creatures called Ever-Happy Positives. The mirror image of All-Plus was the kingdom of Ever-Unhappy Negatives, ruled by King Minus who, with his touch, could make things disappear.

  Eyes aflame, Mautu laughed, joked and gesticulated wildly as he told his tales. Soon his stories merged into one golden stream that wove its compelling, healing, dazzling way through the enraptured imaginations of his students. Within six months Lalaga was losing students to her ever-storytelling husband.

  However, as he spent more and more time with his books and Barker, he began to neglect his classes. So Lalaga, in the spirit of Misi Peta and aided by her older students, who were training for entry into Vaiuta, assumed the responsibility of teaching all the students. She revelled in her work; it was her duty to bring the virtues of Vaiuta and Misi Peta to Satoa. Soon she was also taking classes in cooking, first aid, hygiene and sanitation for her students’ mothers and other women. The more she worked, the happier she was.

  When Mautu started neglecting their household as well, Lalaga took charge of that, and within a brisk time the lives of their children and the other members of their household ticked to her punctual timetable. Soon their home, church, school and the surrounding area were always trim, tidy and clean like her starched dresses, and, through her classes with the women, her cleanliness spread through the village.

  It was a cold evening, the fale blinds were drawn, blocking out the wind that was sweeping in from the sea, everyone had bathed earlier than usual and the mosquito nets were up. The lamp in the centre of the fale flickered and cast a swimming light over everything. Mautu called his children into the side of the fale where he slept with Lalaga. He drew the curtain to separate them from the rest of the household, lit a lamp and, after looking at each child, declared, ‘Up till now I’ve given you the new knowledge in a very disorderly fashion, and in Samoan. An important part of the treasure is the language in which it is coming to me: English. Tonight I am going to start teaching you that language.’

  ‘Yes, yes!’ Peleiupu said. The others agreed eagerly.

  The wind hummed and clattered around the fale as if it wanted to enter and participate in the lesson. Opening the English Bible, Mautu said, ‘“In the Beginning …” Repeat!’

  “‘In the Beginning”’, chorused his children, led by Peleiupu.

  ‘“…was the Word…”’

  ‘“…was the Word…”’

  ‘“…and the Word …”’

  ‘“…and the Word …”’

  “‘…was with God…”’

  ‘“…was with God…”’

  ‘Once again!’ he instructed them.

  As their lesson continued and their tongues struggled to fit the new language it was as if the whole fale and the light were being named by another system of shaping and inventing. The wind slowed down, wrapped itself around the fale, held its breath and listened. Ruta and Naomi fell asleep and Peleiupu and Arona carried them to their mosquito nets.

  Three nights later Lalaga joined the lesson around the lamp. ‘The village will notice you are favouring your children,’ she told him. He didn’t seem to hear her. He opened the Bible and started the lesson.

  She didn’t mention it to him again. Worried about the transformation he was undergoing and the effect it was having on their children, she participated from then on in the English lessons. She noticed that Peleiupu was swallowing up the new language avidly, easily, at a pace she herself had to struggle to keep up with. And when the other children fell asleep where they sat and Mautu started drowsing off, Peleiupu was stridently awake and wanting more. More.

  Lalaga believed Mautu was on the most important journey of his life (and, consequently, theirs): a journey into regions she was frightened to contemplate, away from the realities she cherished because they tied her securely to the earth’s pulse. But because he wasn’t aware he was taking their children with him, she feared for their safety and wished Barker (and his difficult language) had not entered their lives.

  When Mautu stopped teaching his afternoon classes altogether, Lalaga used that time to try and influence their children away from Mautu’s journey. She was harder on them, gave them more difficult schoolwork, punished them often, insisted at home that they do most of the chores and no one was to help them. They deferred to her, and did everything perfectly, without complaining. Especially Peleiupu, who did most of the work and rallied her brother and sisters whenever they threatened to rebel against their mother. It was as though Peleiupu had decided (on behalf of the others) that Lalaga’s taxing lessons and demands were the price they had to pay for the wonderful education their father was giving them.

  Lalaga harboured fears she was afraid to admit to herself but which made her observe, vigilantly, every change in her children. The first fear concerned the history of abnormalities in her aiga.

  Earlier that century a cousin, so it was whispered, had been born with six toes on his right foot and a large black patch of pig’s fur on the nape of his neck: a result, so everyone said, of his father’s adulterous ways. He spurned his father, and eventually in his adulthood went mad and rushed through their village ripping with his nails at the fur on his neck and crying, ‘I’m a pig! I’m a pig!’

  Before him, a female ancestor in her fifth year had sprouted a large hump on her back — the result, so rumour had it, of her father’s insatiable appetite for cooked human flesh. In her fiftieth year, after a granddaughter was born with a similar hump, she stabbed sticks into her father’s grave and into the holes poured boiling water, cursing, ‘You cannibal! Take that, you cannibal!’

  Another ali’i ancestor and head of their aiga was disgraced by his eldest son’s cowardice in battle so he cursed him, invoking a ferocious aiga aitu to inhabit his son’s centre and remind him that he’d sired a coward. The aitu, who also felt disgraced, went further and burst open the son’s insides, revealing to all that the youth was without a liver, the organ where courage resided.

  Most frightening of all to Lalaga, because it was recent and concerned people she loved profoundly, was the fate of her two brothers, who had been groomed by her parents and the papalagi missionaries for the ministry.

  Just before graduating, the eldest, Mose, had been found wandering through the missionary settlement, boasting loudly about the size of his manhood, and cursing God for denying him indiscriminate use of it. Their distressed parents took him home where at least once a month, despite their vigilance, he broke out of their fale and paraded his erectness through the shocked village. He hanged himself a year later, on Christmas Eve, after their father had chastised him for tearing out the first page of Ecclesiastes and eating it.

  Ionatana, Lalaga’s second brother, had lasted one year at the theological college, returned home and told their enraged father he didn’t want to be a pastor. Their father refused to talk to him for week after week after week. Eventually Ionatana disappeared from their village, and Lalaga hadn’t seen him since. She’d heard he was living in Apia and working for a German trading company.

  She missed her brothers deeply. She’d loved them intensely, so when they’d both denied God and their duty to serve Him, she suspected she was tainted by the same madness. Not only was she afraid of the curse — the strain of insanity that seemed inherent in her aiga — reappearing in her children, she was also frightened of what they may have inherited from Mautu and his aiga.

  Four months before Lalaga had graduated from Vaiuta her parents had visited Misi Peta and spent a long time talking in her office. Eventually Misi Peta had sent for Lalaga. She was drenched with sweat before she reached the office.

  As she entered the room, head bowed, she caught the sound of a fly — an almost inaudible buzzing like a small finger twirling gently in her left ear. She was to remember that throughout her life every time she entered a place in which she didn’t feel secure. She sat down beside Talaola, her mother, by the door, clasped her hands in her lap and gazed down at them.

  ‘Lalaga,’ Misi Peta started in her slow deliberate Samoan, ‘now you are in your twenties, your parents, with God’s guidance, have reached an important decision concerning your future and your life.’ Lalaga continued staring at her hands. ‘You have spent nearly three years with us, learning the ways of God as laid down in His Holy Book. You have been a very obedient and diligent student, a credit to your people and aiga. Now your life as a student and girl must give way to your life as a woman, and a woman of God who, in His wisdom, has chosen you to spread His Word, His message, throughout this country, which in large measure is still pagan.’ She paused, and Lalaga could feel those intensely blue eyes focused on her. ‘Lalaga, your parents have chosen a servant of God — he will finish his training at Salua at the end of this year — to be your husband. I want to congratulate your parents for coming to that wise decision …’

  As Misi Peta went on, Lalaga grew more bewildered. Becoming a woman, an adult and a wife and mother, and all at once, was too sudden, too overwhelming a transformation for a girl — yes, she was still a girl. And the responsibility of being a pastor’s wife and spreading God’s Word made it even more harassingly unbelievable. She had always accepted that her husband would be chosen by her parents but she couldn’t believe that choice was being made now.

  ‘We know, Lalaga, that you will make an excellent missionary. All you need to remember is that our Heavenly Father will always be with you. Be a good, loving wife to your husband and God and the people you are going to serve. Live by the Christian ways and rules of conduct of your school.’ Misi Peta got up. ‘I will leave you now to talk to your parents.’ As she passed Lalaga she patted her head. Lalaga would always cherish that first and last touch of Misi Peta’s blessing.

  Lalaga’s compact physique, the quickness of her movements and gestures and the melodious way she spoke reflected her father, Malaetasi, a small but tenacious matai, the first in their aiga to become literate, who had spent a large part of his adult life trying unsuccessfully to get one of his sons to be a pastor. In bitter desperation he had accepted the second option: his youngest daughter (and his favourite) was to be a pastor’s wife. From him, Lalaga had inherited a quiet, relentless tenacity, realism and practicality. You never gave up on, or into, anything.

  Her mother, Talaola, on the other hand, was illiterate, accepted most things and people for what they were, and was loved for her talent as a storyteller and her capacity to forgive others. From her, Lalaga derived an indomitable solidity, and the will to forage for what was enduring and good. Although at times Lalaga was ashamed of her mother’s illiteracy, lack of sophistication, and what Misi Peta called ‘superstitious and uncivilised ways’, she loved her more than anyone else.

  ‘He is a good person, a student at Salua,’ Malaetasi said. Lalaga looked at her mother, who nodded. ‘I have talked with his teachers, especially Misi Simaila, the papalagi missionary, about him. They agree he is an excellent pastor. He is from a good Christian aiga, too. Lotu Ta’iti, like us. His father is one of the ali’i of Fagaloto. Excellent lineage.’ He paused, waiting for Lalaga to reply. She didn’t; she was trying to accept the unreality of the future being mapped out for her.

  ‘It will be an honour for our two aiga to be united through your marriage. And a greater honour for my daughter to continue serving God in the work as a pastor’s wife.’

  Lalaga looked at Talaola, who rarely said anything when her husband was present. Talaola coughed and said, ‘Your father, who has cared for and loved you all your life, is correct in his decision. As you know, I am an ignorant person, so I am very proud to have an educated daughter, one chosen by our Heavenly Father to do His work. And even prouder that my daughter is marrying an educated man.’