Atolls of the Sun

by Frederick O'Brien

“Would not Tepeva a Tepeva wish to refresh himself?” I said quietly, and passed the bottle to the cripple. He took it, weighed it, removed the cork, smelt the contents, and poured out a shellful,—a third of a pint,—tossed it off, smacked his lips as if it were cocoanut-milk, and began to speak more freely.

“Ea, that ramu is good. I do not drink it as a Mormon but because I am weak. It is makivi, this thing I tell you. It is stranger than the stick of Moses turning into a sea-snake. It costs me dear, as you see, though it paid me well. I am as I am, a cracked canoe, because of it. But I have my house, and all the debts of my family are paid, and I owe Mapuhi a Mapuhi not a sou. It is good to be free. I was a diver at Penrhyn for the British when I met the foreigner. He was a Taote. He said that he was trying to cure the lepers. He had a wonderful medicine. He did not let them drink it, but put it into their arms through a pipe. But also he watched the diving. Doc, they called him, and he never covered his head. But no man said Itataupoo to him. He was no man to laugh at. He spat his words and was done, but he would mend a broken bone, or cure a coral cut or the wound of a swordfish. He looked through a tube with a glass in it at blood from the lepers, and at pearls and oysters. He had lamps that made a light like the blue sky. Through his tube the water from our wells was as a fish-pond. Hours and hours he watched the shells being opened, and every pearl he must see, and the shell from which it came. I thought he searched for a pearl to charm the leprosy. All through the rahui he stayed in Penrhyn. He went to Tahiti on the Pani. I was on the Pani, and much we talked about oysters and the different lagoons.

“I came to Takaroa, my home. Months afterward the Taote arrived here in a ten-ton cutter. He had but one sailor, a Tahitian, Terii. They lived in that house over there. I would not go into that house now for ten tons of shell. It is ihoiho. When the moon is dark a spirit dances there, the spirit of Mauraii. He was my cousin, and the Taote hired him to help the other man. One day the Taote began to buy provisions, a great quantity which were stored in the cutter with other big boxes, as if for a long voyage. They sailed away, Terii and Mauraii, too. ‘Nuku-Hiva will see me next,’ said the Taote to us all. That was a lie, but I did not know it then. They went to Pukapuka. It is a little atoll, toward the Marquesas, and far from any other island. Mauraii had dived there, and the Taote knew that. Five moons later the cutter sailed into this lagoon. Mauraii was with the Taote, but Terii was not. The Taote paid Mauraii, and left in the cutter with another sailor. For two years Mauraii lived without labor. For two years his jaws remained tight as the jaws of the pahua. He spoke well of the Taote, but he was afraid. When I asked him more about Terii, he would not talk. Terii had eaten poisonous fish, he said once. He had trodden on the nohu, he said another time. I knew Mauraii had not been to the Marquesas. He was a Mormon, Mauraii, and he prayed like a man with a secret.

“We forget soon, and it was four years when Patasy came in the Potii Taaha, his own cutter. He was of Irélani, and drank much ramu. The cutter was leaky, and Mauraii worked to calk the seams. Patasy gave him hardly any money, but food, and night rum. Mauraii, with rum in him, would now make many words to Patasy, and to me. He spoke of a secret that lay between him and the Taote. He spoke of an oath he had sworn on the book of Mormon and the picture of Birigahama Younga. He spoke of something at Pukapuka that was growing bigger and bigger. The Taote was in his native land, and would return soon, and they would both be very rich. Mauraii’s talk was like a cloudy day that does not let one see far. Sometimes I would ask him about Terii, who had gone with Mauraii, and who had not come back. That would still his big word-making. He would shake a little then, all over. He would say: ‘I must not talk, Tepeva a Tepeva; I must not talk.’ But with more rum he would talk. He was worried, though. He stopped going to the temple; he lived on Patasy’s cutter. Often I saw him lying on the deck, full of drink.

“One night he came to my house late. His heart was very heavy. He had been drinking with Patasy, and he had done something wrong. He cursed Patasy. He said that Patasy had forced him to do evil—that he, Mauraii, had taken an oath, and that now, this night, he had broken it. It would bring him harm. The Taote was coming back soon. Mauraii shook when he said that, shook just as he did when I would ask him what had become of the companion who had gone with him to Pukapuka and had never come back.

“E mea au! I am not the man to search the heart of a brother for what should be hidden. But having broken his oath and told his secret to Patasy, I thought it right he should tell it to me. But he would say no more. And he sailed away alone with Patasy.

“For many weeks we heard nothing more of Mauraii. Then from sailors who came from Tahiti we heard that he and Patasy had returned to Papeete in a month. Then we heard that Patasy had sold his cutter and had taken steamship away to his own country. He never came back.

“Mauraii stayed in Papeete. Every little while we heard about him. He had much money, and he was drinking all day in the Paris rum store, and dancing the nights with the Tahiti Magadalenas in the Cocoanut House.

“When Mauraii had spent all his money the French Government brought him back to Takaroa, and he was mad. Something had broken in his belly, where the thinking-parts are. He would sit all day, looking at the lagoon and saying nothing. Never did he say anything. Sometimes he would shake all over. And all the time his back was bent as if some one was coming from behind to strike him.

“It was a long time after this that the Taote returned, on the Moana. He came first to my house. He asked me where Mauraii was, and I told him Mauraii was here, but was maamaa, that he was possessed of the demon. He asked me if it was a talking demon, if it made Mauraii say everything there was in his head. I told him it was the other way. The poor man said nothing, but sat by the lagoon all day, and was fed and cared for by the women.