MOKOPUNA MOKOPUNA

On their well worn hikoi northward they know how to pass the time — past lava hill and a dragon’s cave/past squid sea and the castle of shadow knights. Their story telling and talk, boys on holiday/here again.

“The land,” Max insists, “it’s our second home really.”

We like to think so.

That one, he’s wan and needing a moe.

“I ache all over my body and to the roots of my bones. I’ve been letting myself go lately,” he muffles/a quilt pulled over his nose in one of the small beds.

Leaving him to dream of scout magicians/daughters of light, and dark lords with swords, Finn and I scuffle off to visit and explore. Prowling down hill to the old church that pup finds a pair of local dogs to bound around with.

He’s shy, dawdling through the crowd at a league match, shy but curious about the game/the first he’s likely to have ever seen. I’m puffed up with pleasure, his small boy’s warm hand in mine. He’s all eyes and ears on thudding bodies at play, awed by sideline shouting, the lines-woman waving flags/in pink. When/his dad has asked/when will that boy grow into his own eyes?

Off around the neighbourhood on the first Saturday afternoon of school holiday, I whisper in Finn’s ear that I am glad we are having this time/just the two of us…..

What matters…..the depth and length of puddles, our habit of dawdling up to the bridge/to toss sticks over one side/racing to the other to see whose floats past first. Water rings on the creek, practising the skimming of stones/who can make the biggest splash with rocks. What might lurk under the mud/which bird rustles up the undergrowth?

What matters to me…..that they know this place and its freedoms and the responsibilities that go hand in hand. Lids must go back on tubes of paint, brushes go into water after use. There are scissors for fabric/scissors for card, and one piled up corner of Poppa’s shed is theirs.

A pile/a pile of radio parts, the keyboard and insides of old typewriter/drill bits/bent bolts and screws/the makings of robots, of this and that.

What’s forbidden — Pop’s precious stash of this and that for fixing things. Gets hōhā when Max, eyes on fire/pushing limits/sees the potential and does the big — help yourself!

In the dark, shadowy damp thicket, of bamboo/close to the roar and foam of the falls after rain there is talk of tree blossom dragons lurking, and choices to be made —

“Would you rather dive into the river at flood Mort, or climb Everest in a snow storm?”

“Would you rather dive into the river at flood Mort, or never take another photograph in your life?”

“I would rather,” I reply, “you told me one of your jokes.”

How do you start a teddy race/ready teddy go.

How do you start a flea race/one two flea.

“Remember when the chestnuts exploded in the basket above the chimney?”

“They burst, exploded, went everywhere,” laughed Finn.

“We scraped the bits of nut out of the shell with our fingernails. Yum.” said his brother.

The chestnuts grown from seed have gone, the quarry encroaching further in/ or out. The moko know bleak when they see it, and the older they become the more there is to remember. As they grow the kaupapa changes/don’t go out the gate/gives way to asking them to check the letter box.

“Kerurū get drunk on the berries and fall out of trees Mort. Did you know that?”

“I did, my darling. And did you know the pūriri need the birds to spread their seeds just as the birds need their fruit for kai?”

Gorging pigeon and gorging boys sucking nectar from the rose pink flowers, barefoot for better grip, climbing hanging ladders and ropes strung from branches of those fine old trees in the playground of their mother’s childhood school.

Wide eyed, “Our mother’s past! Really?!” exclaims Finn.

Their mother’s past/our old home town, both unchanged/and strangely, uncomfortably unfamiliar. I’d never acknowledged its war memorial before, never walked through the train tunnel. I had never put my feet into the lake. Did I ever know it at all? I was never really happy there.

A pair of vaguely furtive teenagers press themselves into the shadow of a pūriri/a man with a nail gun is building a new fence next door, but otherwise — a quiet Sunday in cycle-town. Poppa playing pool for Ōtaua in their new blue club shirts, against Ōkaihau at the bowling club.

Remember this…..scootering the empty back streets/stopping for an ice cream at the top dairy above the valley. Your mother’s past.

Look/look — I beseech the moko/gaze down on the Waihou which sweeps its incessant winds up to the town above it, on the ridge. A valley so beautiful it was impossible not to love.

“Samuel, he was a nice boy,” said Max.

“That teen Mort,” added Finn, “he was a nice teen.”

How immediate and easily children connect and make friends. The bigger boy teaching my moko how to pass a basket ball. Samuel showing them how to go head first down the skate ramp.

“Go on/go on/you can do it,” he encouraged, “see/like a penguin,” Samuel’s arms against his sides, flapping.

The unbridled glee of children at play/giving it a go.

Eyeing up/hey, what’s your name/how old are you/what school are you at/do you live here/is that your nannie?

Samuel on holiday with his poppa Willie who lives/Samuel said, on a dusty road.

“Mort and our poppa live on a dusty road too,” Finn replied.

“Why do people do that?” asks Max, solemn and aghast at the sight of accumulated litter in the bottom of the skate bowl.

“The skatepark in Mangawhai is spotless,” he tells me.

“What do we do?” I ask him.

We complain/and a few days later Angela from the local council calls to say the contractors have been in to clear the rubbish from the bowl.

Power to the people moko. We complain, and what else do we do?

We complement — “Mort, did you remember to thank that woman for getting the litter cleaned up?”

“Got a big whānau, need a big smoker,” says Narn.

He and Gloria had been out on the river the night before, their catch hanging from the porch to bleed. Gloria is sharpening knives on a small, thick set, circular stone.

“My dad,” Max tells her, “he uses a steel.”

“That’s cheating!” laughs Gloria.

Their moko and mine playing hide and seek around the back of the whare. Gloria and Narn, they’ve got twenty six grandchildren and eight greats.

“Hard to keep count when you’ve got that many,”

Narn’s counting on his fingers to be sure. Gloria/her eyes bright and a little damp/her face gone all dreamy with love lists them by name/oldest down.

The winter sun is warm on their porch, Wai next door starts up his weed wacker down the back/a group of young fellas lift the hood of a car and peer inside/one of them reeves its engine. Augustine walks up the drive for a visit.

“She looks just like her mother,” says Gloria, giving me a whakapapa lesson.

“What’s Michael up to?” asks Narn.

I tell him he could be in his shed working, or he might be in my shed adding a piece to Finn’s new op shop puzzle.

“I’ve no time for jig saws,” replies Narn engrossed in turning eels, in a low roasting pan, as he salts them.

“I love jig saws,” says Gloria, “mean as ones.”

“I’ve seen a mean as puzzle, all the pieces were white except a tiny whale in one corner,” Max tells her.

“Nah, the meanest puzzle is a bunch of people and they all look the same,” Gloria counters.

Finn speaks so quietly she asks him to speak up, “My new puzzle was divided into plastic bags, all the corners and sides in one bag, all the other bits in another.”

“That’s cheating!” laughs Gloria.

Jimmy-Blue is up the feijoa breaking off a small branch for one of the games.

“You watch out for my tree!” shouts his nannie.

Gets her started — “that lemon in your drive way that’s got small fruit, you need to kick it. My mother used to do that, give a tree five or six good kicks and the fruit would grow bigger.”

“”We’re off,” I tell Gloria rallying up my reluctant moko.

“I’ll go home and give that lemon a good kick.”

Walking off with our sticks, pup keeping an eye out for dogs, we pause at the gravel pit and talk to Ernie who is walking around his truck banging every tyre with his twitch-bar, checking for flats and pressure.

“You can hear the difference in the sound,” he tells the moko who are watching him at work/all eyes.

“If it’s real flat you can see it/low on air, it makes a different sound.”

The bottom of the logging industry, Ernie mentions, is falling out/drivers are loosing their jobs/yeah, he thinks, he’ll be alright.

“I listen to rocks,” Finn whispers.

Finn and his rock mountains, sitting with a small digger in hand, his pile gets higher/holes grow deeper.

“There is a lot of steam in that boy,” says his mother, “needs a lot of quiet time.”

Has that, beside rock mountains/unearthing/listening.

We amble on, and when Ernie passes he gives a prolonged toot on his fog horn. I am as delighted by it as the moko.

“People,” I remind them, “people in the Hokianga……”

I love this place/I love its people. The mokopuna they know that.

“Gloria is not the sort of woman who would say this is my bread and not your bread, is she Mort?” Max asks.

Māori fried bread — Gloria’s was the first the moko had ever eaten and, shy/they’d hesitated the way children can with unfamiliar kai.

“Think donuts, without sugar or cream,” I’d suggested.

Now/come to stay/do you think we might eat some of Gloria’s fried bread?”

There is a moment before the boys recognise each other from a chess game in the library.

“Remember, it was cheat chess we played,” Lewis says to Max, and that fact established they’re off/thick as thieves, running down hill to a pine log, siblings in tow. I remember the stormy night the branch fell and blocked the start of Ramsey Road before someone drove by with a chainsaw in their boot, got it sorted.

“We’re playing push tag Mort,” Finn shouts out.

They teeter, all pōrangi and leap like frogs — their landings padded by the kikuyu soft/right up to their thighs. Taking it in turns, children left to their own devices/organise their own play.

Curious and deeply happy, I ask Shonny why she carries around a notebook.

“I like drawing human beings,” she reveals.

My habit/never leave home without paper and pen/is Max’s habit.

Shonny’s habit too.

“I’ve been waiting for this,” I say to Max, “all my life.”

That boy who only very recently learnt to ride a bike is riding mine, his legs stretched to full capacity to push the pedals around/having a good tutu with the gears. I’m on an old mountain bike once belonged to uncle Joe, riding behind to keep Max in my sights on state highway 12, yelling instructions, watching the sway of his lower back/his mahi/all the joy in him.

My moko and I out riding bikes/I’m nine again.

What matters……..

Their bird watching — Finn with an old, scuffed leather knitting bag in the crook of his arm/its zip broken/inside the telescope they fashioned from an empty toilet roll. Max’s precise list of birds most frequently spotted, names and numbers. Their favourites.

That bright, clear afternoon a neighbour used a chain saw on a fallen gum/a small plane droned above us. After lunch the rescue helicopter rattled the windows of my shed/to and from Rāwene/some poor bugger I said, as I always say.

“I think the welcome swallows are back,” called Finn, pleased as punch.

And Poppa told him, “they never really left.”

They leave behind their footprints in the mud, a speckled pink petanque ball had rolled under the box hedge. Lost somewhere in the garden is a beanie of mine Finn had worn with a hole at the top for me to pull my bun through. I empty the pockets of their land clothes before washing — a palm full of tiny, rusted springs/a metal pencil sharpener/lengths of electrical tape twisted into shapes.

At the end of a chain Finn has made of coloured paper clips hangs the old front door key from Poppa’s family home. Small boys/collectors and kea.

For safe keeping/he said, Finn leaves the taonga behind he had found in the whispering woods.

“Seriously Max,” he shouted at his brother, “seriously, you nearly stood on it!”

An empty shell of a kauri snail partially buried in the humus and moss. The first he had ever seen.

What matters/there is room to breathe here.

Sniff the air/sniff around corners till the smell of this place will never leave your nostrils. Practise bird calls.

Running at night from shed to shed, their mother reassures us, is good for Finn/the cold blast opens up his air ways.

Max learnt to ride an adult size bike and rode on a state highway for the first time/left me needing to reconfigure its gears. Michael put the last few pieces of Finn’s 1000 piece puzzle into place after they’d gone. Finn/not thinking it/seeing it.

“Good,” he told his mother, “if Pop finished it he can put it back in its box and I can start another puzzle next holiday at the land.”

I miss the sight of their languid limbs sprawled across Poppa’s lap for the spinning out of his shaggy dog stories. I miss the sound of them sleeping/the smell of their morning cocoa.

I miss their whoopee/and glee/their pow pow.

“Mort,” said Max in the slightly hesitant voice of a child not quite sure of what he’s about to say, “Mort, I am not being rude but I am glad we are going home tomorrow.”

Not rude/my darling. This holiday Finn hadn’t counted off the days and nights on his fingers/hadn’t said he missed home.

I had told the moko I’d once seen the awa run over the road. If it happens again I hope they are here to see it.