CHAPTER TWO
Paraiti is not the name she was baptised with.
She was given it when she was six years old and became ‘The One with the Blighted Face’, for the bright red welt that travels diagonally from her right temple across the bridge of her nose and, luckily missing her left eye, reappears to feather her left cheekbone.
The scar was caused when Paraiti was a young girl, six years old, in 1880. Her parents and other kin were travelling deep within the Urewera country; her father Te Teira was a tohunga, a revered priest and healer, and the other men and women in the group were accompanying him to a Ringatu church service at Ohiwa. One evening, just as they were settling down for the night’s meal, they were set upon by constabulary forces who were hunting bigger game — their leader Te Kooti Arikirangi. They recognised Te Teira: although Te Kooti and his followers had put aside their arms, they were still being pursued.
The constabulary restrained Te Teira and the other men with ropes; Hera, Paraiti’s mother, had tried too late to take Paraiti into the bush while the forces ransacked the encampment. When the constabulary couldn’t find Te Kooti, one of them, a burly menacing man, took a burning branch from the cooking fire. ‘Tell me where your leader is,’ he shouted at Te Teira.
He was waving the branch so close to Te Teira’s face that sparks flew all around him, setting fire to his shirt. Te Teira cried out with terror and fell back onto the ground. The man advanced on him and raised the branch threateningly. ‘It will be the worse for you if you do not tell me your leader’s whereabouts.’
Te Teira persisted in his pleas: ‘I don’t know where the prophet is.’
Looking on, Paraiti felt only one desire, to save her father, and she jumped onto the attacker’s back to distract his attention.
The man reached behind him, clutched Paraiti and, holding her up by her hair, dangled her before him. ‘Is this your cub?’ he asked Te Teira. He slashed Paraiti’s face with the burning branch and then threw her against the trunk of a tree.
It happened so quickly, but the memory has never left Paraiti in all these years. The pain of the burning. The shock as she slammed into the tree. The pain again, waves of it almost overcoming her. Dazed, she had tried to stand. As her parents and relatives were led away to be imprisoned, Te Teira cried out, ‘Daughter, quickly, go to the stream and lie down in the cold water.’
Somehow, Paraiti found the strength to follow his instructions. Her face was on fire as, stumbling, she made her way down the slope to the stream. No sooner had she immersed herself in the water than she fainted.
How long she was unconscious, Paraiti didn’t know. Covered in mud, she was found by local Maori who cared for her as her face bubbled and blistered. They applied healing ointments, but there was nothing they could do to reverse the scarring.
A month later, Paraiti left her caregivers and followed the constabulary, looking for her parents. Having heard that they had been taken to Whakatane to await sentencing, she found them in a small jailhouse. She threw stones through the barred window until they looked out. They were overjoyed to see her but Te Teira grieved to see her face.
Once, she had been such a pretty girl.
‘Aue, daughter …’
Paraiti stayed with local Maori, waiting for the circuit judge to arrive to hear the case brought by the constabulary against her parents and her whanau; she visited them every day, squeezing small food delicacies to them through the bars.
At the trial she managed to slip into the courtroom to await her parents’ release. Instead Te Teira and Hera were sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for taking up arms against the government and were transported by coastal steamer from Whakatane to Auckland. She followed overland and eventually found them again in the Pakeha prison on the outskirts of the boisterous town.
‘It is too dangerous for you here,’ Te Teira told her. ‘Go to Te Kuiti and wait for us there.’
‘No,’ she said, shaking her head.
Instead, she lived close by the prison in a small squatter settlement with others who had also come to wait out the jail sentence of loved ones. Sometimes she would hear her parents singing comforting songs to her. That is, until the constabulary chased her away.
One day Paraiti witnessed the hanging of one of the faithful. His name was Hamiora Pere, and when the hangman placed the rope over his head he requested that he be given the chance to sing a waiata of farewell. ‘Unloose the knot from my throat that I might sing my song,’ he said.
His was a terrible death — the sudden fall through the trapdoor, the crack as his neck snapped. Looking on, Te Teira cried out angrily to Paraiti, ‘Now will you go to Te Kuiti? If I am next, I don’t want you to see me, lifeless, dangling from the scaffold.’
On her father’s instruction, Paraiti therefore joined a band of Te Kooti’s followers who were travelling east. A year later Te Teira was finally released. He went straight to Te Kuiti. As soon as father and daughter saw each other, they clasped each other silently. It was there that Te Teira told Paraiti that her mother, Hera, had died in prison. ‘There’s only you and me now,’ he said.
‘What shall we do?’ Paraiti asked.
‘Go on living,’ he answered, ‘and do what we have always done: serve God and the people.’
He resumed his calling as a tohunga, preaching the gospel and working as a healer among the morehu, the followers of Te Kooti.
From that moment, they were never apart.
On this first day of June, in the Year of Our Lord, 1935, Paraiti is sixty-one years old and the land wars between Pakeha and Maori have been over for some forty years. Although she has not succeeded her father as a tohunga, Paraiti has continued his work as a traditional healer. Modern medical services may now be available in the many towns and cities that have sprung up around Aotearoa, but Maori in the backblocks and remote coastal areas still rely on their traditional medicine men and women. How can they afford the Pakeha doctors during these years of the Depression?
A few weeks ago, Paraiti was still in her village of Waituhi, in Poverty Bay, where she had settled during the second decade of the twentieth century. At the height of the terrible Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918, when the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse reaped a rich harvest among Maori, Te Teira had received a plea for help from a powerful kuia of Waituhi. Her name was Riripeti and she was setting up a hospital to cater for the ill and dying, but she needed people with medical skills to staff it.
Paraiti was then forty-four, and Te Teira had implicit trust in her. ‘I have to stay here, daughter. You must go to Riripeti in my place.’ Obeying her father, Paraiti set off for Waituhi. As soon as she saw the valley, with its sacred mountain at one end and ancient fortress at the other — and the sparkling Waipaoa River running through it — she knew this would not be a temporary visit. Her sense of wonder mounted when she saw Riripeti’s canvas hospital, which people called Te Waka o Te Atua, The Ship of God, because when the tents were erected they looked like sails.
And then Paraiti saw the valley’s great meeting house, Rongopai, holding up the sky. Word of its fame had already circulated among the faithful, but even so, she was unprepared for its holiness. It was indeed a cathedral to the vision of the prophet, Te Kooti, so beautifully decorated and carved that she felt, on first entering it, that the angel who guarded it had sheathed his golden sword and let her into the Garden of Eden. The walls were like tall trees, elaborately painted in greens, blues and reds; she was wrapped in the glow of an illuminated forest. Through the branches flew fantastic birds, such species as were dreamed of in Paradise. And the Maori ancestors were everywhere, standing, running, climbing through this world before the Fall.
It was only a matter of time before she returned to stay.
The autumn was unseasonably cold in 1935 when Paraiti began preparing for her travels from Waituhi. The southerlies had driven into the foothills where she now lived in a two-room kauta close to the meeting house.
No matter the bitter weather, Paraiti was determined to keep to her seasonal trip as ordained by the Maori calendar — and the Maori New Year, Matariki, was imminent. Also, she had become stir-crazy and wanted to be out on the road.
After all, the people were waiting.
From her stockpile of medicines Paraiti carefully selected the small bottles and tins of ointments, philtres and lotions she thought she would need for the various village clinics, wrapping them separately for her saddlebags so that they wouldn’t clink or clang on the journey. Most of her medicines, however, she would gather fresh from the special secret places in the forest and along the coast, among them rimu gum for haemorrhaging, the mamaku pith for scrofulous tumours, seaweed for goitre and pirita for epilepsy.
For personal provisions she took only kao, dried kumara and water. Food would be her payment from her patients, and, should she require extra kai for herself and her animals, as always, the Lord and the land would provide: fern grounds, pa tuna, taro and kumara gardens and bird sanctuaries.
Paraiti took a small tent and a bedroll. For protection she put her rifle in a sling and a knife in her left boot. Although she might not be attractive, she was still a woman, and men were men.
She went to Rongopai to pray for safekeeping on her journey — surely there was no better place to set out from than this testament to the resilience of the people. Then she filled five blue bottles with the healing waters that bubbled from a deep underground spring behind the house, and sprinkled herself and her animals with the water.
Finally, Paraiti strapped the saddlebags around Kaihe’s girth, bridled and saddled Ataahua, got him to kneel as usual and climbed on. ‘I know, I know,’ she said to the horse as she straddled him, to stop his usual irritation. Straightaway, she urged him up: ‘Timata.’
She whistled to Tiaki to follow her. ‘Don’t fall too far behind,’ she called as she headed Ataahua into the foothills behind Waituhi.
As she passed by the houses of the village, people looked out and sighed, ‘Good, the old lady is on her way with her travelling garden. All’s right with the world.’ Every season without fail, the takuta was always about her work among the people; this season, the star cluster of Matariki was already gleaming in the night heaven.
A day’s ride took Paraiti to the boundary between the lands of Te Whanau a Kai and Tuhoe, and there she sought Rua’s Track, one of the great horse trails joining the central North Island to the tribes of Poverty Bay in the east. She followed the track up the Wharekopae River, through Waimaha by way of the Hangaroa Valley to Maungapohatu. Once upon a time there had been such a thriving community there, the holy citadel of Rua Kenana, another great prophet; survivors were still living within the mists of the mountain, waving at Paraiti as they scrabbled among their plantations, eking a living from the land.
Those who travelled Rua’s Track were mainly Maori like Paraiti herself; sometimes they were families, but most often they were foresters, labourers or pig hunters.
On her third day, she joined a wagon train of some forty people travelling in the same direction. ‘E hika,’ they jested. ‘Is the forest moving?’ Her saddlebags were overflowing with her herbal supplies. ‘Oh, it’s just you, Paraiti. E haere ana koe ki hea? Where are you going?’
Paraiti was a familiar sight and they were honoured to have her with them. She, in turn, valued the opportunity to sharpen up her social skills, to share a billy of manuka tea and flat bread, to spend time playing cards and to korero with some of the old ones about the way the world was changing. But the wagon train made slow progress, so Paraiti took her leave and journeyed on alone.
‘Ma te Atua koutou e manaaki,’ she called in farewell.
And now, Ruatahuna lay ahead.