‘Ruta, in the short time left before we return to Satoa, I want you to school Iakopo in our ways and maps, which our Tuifolau ancestors devised to live our lives by,’ he instructed. ‘One day he will need those maps to guide him and his mother back to Niuafei.’ Suddenly Peleiupu was aware that even the birds were silent. Their dead were with them and they felt safe and complete. ‘Lalaga, I want you to promise …’

  ‘No, no!’ Lalaga denied him. ‘I know what you’re going to ask!’

  ‘Then you’d better leave us, so I can discuss it with my daughters,’ he said. She rose, stopped, and sat down again. ‘Lalaga, my beloved, you have been my star-map all our life together. I want you to help me return to the start of that map, to here.’ He pointed to his father’s grave. ‘I want you to promise that I will be buried here beside my father.’ Silence, long and demanding. ‘Ruta and Pele, you will devise a way to get me back here, secretly. Bury only my work and my life in Satoa, but bring my bones back to Niuafei and my aiga.’

  ‘Papa, I’ll help Mama do it!’ Iakopo promised.

  ‘I also want you to promise that when you find Arona, you must persuade him to return home …’ He stopped, unable to finish.

  ‘If he is dead, promise you will bring him home still,’ Lalaga finished his wish.

  ‘And bury him here, beside me,’ Mautu added.

  Lalaga’s Song

  Monday 27 October 1919, three months after their return from Fagaloto. From the school, through the fierce noonday heat and light, wafted the sound of singing:

  Amuia lava o peau o le sami

  E aga i sisifo, e aga i sasa’e,

  Ae le iloa mai lo’u tino a mate …

  Mautu’s eyes were heavy with drowsiness. It was time for his afternoon nap. He staggered up from his desk, rehitched his ie lavalava — his body was covered with a thin film of sweat — and shuffled out to the veranda.

  Just before he took his canvas chair he looked down and across the village and bay — a methodical loving sweep of a world in which everything and every creature knew its proper place and role, a world he’d helped to build in the wisdom of God’s Light. When he gazed up into the sky the light stung his eyes and, for a burning instant, he was blind. He reached back, found the chair and slid back into it, into the familiar smell of his own sweat impregnated into the canvas; wriggled his frame left, then right, then left again, until the pliant chair fitted him snugly, like Lalaga’s embrace; leaned his head back on the wooden support, turned it a little to the left to correct the touch of dizziness, sighed and relaxed. Just before he shut his eyes he caught sight of Lalaga framed in the centre classroom window, frizzy white hair gleaming, face suffused with pleasure as she conducted the children’s singing:

  … ma lo’u fatu e ua momomo, le ula,

  i au amio e fe’olo,

  Anei a malepe si a ta soa,

  Ma si a ta soa …

  For a while as he sang with them, he caressed Lalaga’s image in his mind. Caressed it …

  ‘Is this all you’re entitled to, Mautu, after your long dedicated service to God and community?’ the question came over his left shoulder. That voice? …Mautu turned and was surprised he could move so swiftly and painlessly at his age. But there was no one there — just the watching, lush bush and that familiar flying-fox smell. ‘Is a comfortable nap your only reward, my friend?’

  ‘Barker?’ he asked the surrounding bush, but his friend refused to step out of the green. ‘Where are you?’ He felt the bush and sky shaking with Barker’s ironic laughter. Mautu glanced at his arms, his legs, his torso. Incredible! He was again the young pastor who’d first come to Satoa. ‘Is that all you’re good at, eh?’ Mautu taunted. Still the invisible Barker laughed on. ‘Yes, you’re a callous, know-it-all cynic!’ Dead silence. Mautu knew he’d gone too far, and wanted his friend to forgive him. He heard footsteps running away decisively through the dry, brittle undergrowth. ‘No, please, Barker!’ he heard himself pleading, but the sound of Barker’s unforgiving escape continued.

  ‘And you’re a bloody liar, too!’ Mautu shouted as he started crashing through the undergrowth, which scratched and tore at his skin. ‘A bloody con-man!’ When he realised he was young and fit again he ran faster, his feet tracing Barker’s hobnailed-boot prints in the thick carpet of dead leaves print by print and gaining on him. ‘You’re a bloody con-man!’ he shouted, his blood pumping wildly with the exhilaration of the chase.

  He broke into a narrow clearing that was covered with shattered lava rock. The clammy air was heavy with Barker’s exhausted panting and smell. ‘You can’t run any more, eh? I’ve got you!’ Mautu called.

  For a long fascinated while he watched as the shattered lava moved and, like a jigsaw puzzle, connected piece by piece to form the Barker with whom he’d explored the Satoa Valley for gold: the pith helmet, red bushy beard and hair, sunburnt nose and forehead and all.

  ‘So you’ve got me!’ laughed Barker. ‘What are you going to do with me, la’u uo?’

  ‘More correctly, I’ve got one version of you!’

  ‘So I’m a cynic and a con-man, eh?’ Barker confronted him.

  Mautu didn’t want to offend his friend further, but he heard himself saying, ‘Yes, you see no good in people, and you lied to me and my children about your life …’

  ‘Lied?’ Barker raised his voice. ‘Lied?’ He jumped to his feet.

  ‘Yes, the confessions you bequeathed to me and Pele are — are incredible!’

  Barker settled back. ‘No, my friend. I was an orphan and queer …’

  ‘… But … but!’ spluttered Mautu.

  ‘But what, Mautu? What?’

  ‘When you came to Satoa you married a woman!’ Mautu felt ridiculous saying that.

  ‘And had children and in no way showed I was of Sodom?’ Mautu nodded. ‘Perhaps God answered my prayers and cured me of my disease,’ Barker added. ‘You do believe your God can do that, Mautu?’ Mautu had to agree. ‘Yes, God cured me of my evil,’ Barker repeated, a cynical smile on his lips.

  ‘How do I know you’re telling the truth now?’ Mautu couldn’t stop his doubts.

  ‘You just have to trust me.’

  Mautu found the whole world empty of sound. He tried speaking but the emptiness swallowed up his words, while Barker just stood there smiling. Mautu grasped at the silence, and felt as if he were trying to swim through thick oily liquid. As he shouted to be heard, the silence started clogging his mouth. Smiling still, Barker plunged his right hand down into Mautu’s throat and in one swift motion pulled out the silence. Mautu gagged and spluttered and the sounds of the world rushed into his ears again. ‘Are you all right?’ Barker asked.

  ‘You took our son away!’ Mautu finally had the courage to say. ‘You filled Arona’s head with your stories of the world beyond the reefs; filled it with your lies, your exaggerated, fanciful adventures, so much so he had to go away and find out …’

  ‘No, Mautu, you can’t hang that seduction on my head,’ Barker interrupted.

  ‘My son had to find out!’ Mautu wept. When Barker reached over and touched his arm, Mautu jumped away. ‘Don’t touch me!’

  ‘I love you!’ Barker whispered.

  ‘You’re dead, and that’s that!’ Mautu countered.

  Inexplicably, Barker started peeling off his human appearance and, as the rubber-like layer snapped and ripped away, feathers, sleek wings, bird body and then the head and beak of a frigate bird appeared. Mautu’s heart lifted in wonderful admiration and love as the bird preened and strutted. ‘Do you believe me now, Mautu?’ Barker whispered. Mautu nodded and nodded. ‘Do ya wanna fly with me, lover?’ the frigate winked.

  ‘Yes, please, please, please!’ Mautu pleaded.

  He was on the frigate’s back, his arms and legs wrapped around its neck and body, the feathered body lush and silky and warm against his bare chest and torso. As the Frigate lifted, wings outstretched across the heavens and the whole expanse of the world, Mautu felt profoundly secure and safe for he knew — and his happiness was complete — he was going home …

  The heat was lifting, and the house was cooler now that it was covered by the shadows of the mango trees. Relieved her teaching was over, Lalaga placed the stack of slates on Mautu’s desk and, as usual, hurried out to the veranda to see him.

  She stopped a few paces away, surprised that he was still asleep. He looked weightless, free, suspended yet utterly at home in the embrace of the chair. The white of the canvas and his wispy hair and stubble made him appear as if he were turning into light. And there, right there at the centre of the light, was the smile of a child who’d discovered what the light was all about and wasn’t going to reveal it.

  She knelt down beside him and, as the shadows lengthened and the breeze grew stronger, she caressed his face, caressed his shoulders and arms, caressed his hands … ‘Thank you, beloved. Thank you for the good life you provided for me, for us and our children …’ She placed her head on his thigh and said, ‘We have only one wish that God has not granted, Mautu: our son has not returned.’ And she wept, silently.

  Iakopo found them and rushed off to get Peleiupu. Their household and other Satoans gathered quickly, but Lalaga refused to let them touch Mautu’s body. With Peleiupu’s help she carried him to his bed, drew the curtains and shut out Satoa. She instructed Peleiupu to prepare the house. ‘Don’t cry,’ she ordered her daughter. ‘Make sure no one else — absolutely no one — comes in here.’

  She fetched water, washed and oiled his body, dressed him in his favourite suit. The chorus of cicadas was pulling in the evening from the horizon.

  When Lalaga emerged from behind the curtain Tavita and all the matai were seated around the house. ‘He is ready,’ she told them. Toanamua’s tulafale started to speak, but she said, ‘No, no speeches will be made.’ Turning to Peleiupu, she asked, ‘Is his bed ready?’ Peleiupu gestured to the thick bed of mats and ie toga near the middle of the room.

  Aided by Tavita and Peleiupu, she brought his body and, after laying it on the mats, covered it up to the neck with ie toga. She sat down beside his head.

  Poto and other leading members of the aualuma gathered beside her. The ritual wailing began. ‘Stop, that is enough!’ Lalaga ordered. ‘Mautu lived a long and happy life: there is no need to mourn.’

  Peleiupu dispatched the Lady Poto to fetch Lefatu, Ruta and the other elders of their Aiga Sa-Tuifolau. On its way back, it called in to Manono and collected Naomi and Pate. Peleiupu, Ruta and Naomi, with Tavita’s support, would organise and control the whole funeral.

  The Satoans expected Lefatu, their pastor’s supposedly pagan sister and curer of ma’i aitu, to behave in bizarre pagan ways. She didn’t. She came into the house quietly, with head bowed, sat down by her brother’s head, opposite Lalaga, leaned forward and kissed him on the forehead. ‘Mautu, I have come,’ she said to him. She would say little else for the whole period of mourning, but the large numbers of mourners who came to pay their last respects knew who she was and why she had come.

  ‘Our pastor must be buried here with us,’ the matai instructed Tavita. ‘That is the practice. We cannot let Lefatu and her aiga take him back. What would Samoa think of us?’

  So they were surprised and relieved when Lefatu made no such demand. On the fifth day of mourning, in the late afternoon, with Lalaga’s agreement, Lefatu declared politely to everyone in the house that, because the heat and length of time were treating her brother’s body ‘unforgivingly’, they had to close his coffin that evening.

  Iakopo was the last mourner to kiss his grandfather goodbye. Copying his grandmother, he didn’t cry.

  The Satoans expected Lalaga and her daughters, at least, to weep and wail and try to stop Tavita and Mikaele from nailing down the lid. They didn’t. In fact, Peleiupu handed Tavita the nails. ‘Such unfeeling afakasi behaviour!’ many of them said, but not within Tavita’s hearing.

  The next morning Pate, Naomi’s husband, aided by two LMS pastors from neighbouring villages, conducted Mautu’s funeral service. The Satoans expected it to last at least three hours, befitting their beloved pastor’s status. It lasted one hour. Again they blamed it on Peleiupu’s and Tavita’s afakasi behaviour. They were mistaken. Lalaga had ordered Pate to have a short service.

  Mautu was buried in a large grave beside his beloved church. It was the first concrete grave to be built in Satoa; it was also going to have a gravestone, designed by Mikaele, and ordered from New Zealand.

  That evening, when the matai gathered at the pastor’s house for lotu and to continue comforting Lalaga and her family, they were told by Lalaga, through Tavita, that she had to return the following day with Lefatu and her aiga to Fagaloto to have a funeral service there for Mautu; she told them it was a practice unique to the Aiga Sa-Tuifolau. She asked the elders to continue welcoming the late mourners, on her behalf. She knew the elders were worried about having to feed the mourners, so she assured them Tavita and their aiga would continue ‘treating the mourners in the aristocratic manner they are used to’.

  Peleiupu told Tavita to use the opportunity to send Semisi and some carpenters to build their store at Fagaloto. ‘We’re supposed to be mourning!’ he insisted. ‘One day’s mourning at Fagaloto will suffice,’ Lefatu told him. So Semisi and Mikaele chose two carpenters, and loaded the boat with building supplies. They didn’t pay any attention to the long crate that came on with the supplies, and they would not notice it disappearing when the cargo was unloaded in Fagaloto.

  Of the grandchildren, only Iakopo was allowed to accompany Lalaga, Lefatu, Ruta, Peleiupu, Naomi and the elders of the Aiga Sa-Tuifolau.

  After their first night in Fagaloto, fearful stories erupted in Fagaloto of mysterious lights carried by floating female figures and a boy, in a funeral procession, moving through the outskirts of the village and disappearing into the wild darkness of Totoume Peninsula. When the elders gathered at the Aiga Sa-Tuifolau’s faletele for Mautu’s commemoration service, Lefatu calmed their fears by interpreting the mysterious funeral procession as the spirits of Mautu’s ancestors returning to welcome him home.

  When the crew of the Lady Poto spread the stories in Satoa on their return, the Satoans scoffed at Fagaloto’s pagan backwardness, and congratulated themselves on their enlightened Christian ways: they had Mautu’s Christian body buried in their Christian soil, and his Christian soul was now with their Christian God.

  It was the practice, when a pastor died while still serving, for the village to return his wife to her aiga. So while Lalaga and her daughters packed her things and the house, Tavita and the matai organised for the journey. Elders of her aiga had attended Mautu’s funeral and were now back in their village organising to receive Lalaga and the elders of Satoa.

  Ruta, Naomi and Peleiupu assumed that was what their mother wanted. And for the first few days, while they packed, she didn’t indicate otherwise. She set her usual quick pace, kept at her chores methodically, and they found it difficult to keep up with her. Then she surprised them, she started laughing, joking and then humming. The hesitant, broken humming gained confidence and turned into a tune, a melody, about Mautu and Arona, which started infecting them all. This was another wonderful surprise because their mother had never composed a song before.

  The lyrics emerged as Lalaga worked around the house, and they picked it up bit by bit:

  Ali’i o le Galuega, ua e sola i Niuafei

  Lua te fa’atasi ai ma le atua lalelei.

  Ua e sola i Niuafei

  O lagomau ai gafa paia o le Tuifolau.

  Loa tausaga o le ta mafutaga

  I galuega na tofia ai taua e le atua.

  Ae paga ua motusia le ula o le alofa

  Ae le’i fo’i mai Arona i ana tafaoga.

  Po’o fea o i ai le ta tama

  Na sola i le vasa o folauga?

  Fea o i ai Arona le i’omata?

  Paga, Mautu, ua e alu ae le’i sau le tama …

  Iakopo taught it to his sisters and friends, who taught it to theirs, until many Satoans were singing it.

  Tavita suggested to Moegamalu, Satoa’s songmaker and leader of their choir, Ali’i ma Faipule o Satoa, that they should learn and sing it at the annual church fono at Salua to honour their pastor, who’d been a Faifeau Toeaina in their national church.

  Moegamalu would do that and, after the Salua fono, the delegates would take the song home with them and teach it to others.

  Pese A Lalaga would become a national hit.

  But before that happened, Lalaga sat alone with her daughters and asked, ‘Pele, why haven’t you invited me to stay here with you in Satoa?’ There was a huge surprised silence. ‘I’ve been waiting, Pele. I can’t invite myself to stay.’

  ‘Mama, we’d love you to stay!’ Peleiupu crawled over on her knees and hugged her mother. ‘We never thought you’d want to.’

  ‘This is my home. I’ve spent most of my life here. I’ve taught just about everyone in Satoa.’ For the first time since Mautu died, she started weeping, openly.

  Her daughters engulfed her in their embrace.

  Lalaga refused to live in Pele’s and Tavita’s house, so a large fale was built for her behind it. There she lived with Pili, her adopted son from the terror of the epidemic, her grandchildren, and the women Peleiupu chose to care for her.

  Lalaga sensed rain on the dark morning horizon as she sat up and wrapped her sleeping sheet around her body and gazed out at the village and sea. The pain in her joints and the smell of the air told her that. Six months, three weeks and eleven days since Mautu died. Pili stirred beside her; she put her hand over his shoulder. Each day as the boy and her grandchildren grew, she hoped they’d fill the enormous, everpresent emptiness left by the death of Mautu, which made her feel unreal and divorced from the life around her. She tried to persuade herself that the children were a reason for continuing her life. Mautu had been the largest presence in her reality, and even now her dreams were full of him. At times and to her shame — pastor’s wives shouldn’t — she craved him sexually …