Is that what happened? Who would know? Who would possibly know? The trees? The night looking in the windows? The dying embers in grate? The furious stars blinking impotently in the window? The world that might tell is mute. But if we know anything at all about the human condition, then we do know.
My mother was born in December, so she was probably conceived in the early autumnal days of March. The scorching firebrand light dying in the sky. Night air tangy with old fruit lying beneath the trees in the paddock on the south side of the homestead. How strange it was, how extraordinary, to stand in the room where my mother was conceived, and to breathe in the sooted air of this old ruin where the conditions of my childhood—absence, silence, repudiation of the past—were cast.
Scratching around in the dark and dirt on the floor of May’s room I find novels belonging to her, as well as an exercise book filled with poems by Gwendoline who, I’m told, loved to write and ride horses. Gwendoline died at the age of twenty, officially of leukaemia, but Margaret Evans, Wylie’s sister, suspects hydatids was the cause of death. On the floor by a pair of ancient waders I find a volume of Sacred Songs and Solos with Gwendoline’s name inscribed, and a novel, Stella’s Fortune by Charles Garvice, enormously popular in its day, with May’s name handwritten inside, Mary Olive Kinley.
Apparently May had no other family. Wylie Evans isn’t sure where she hailed from—Christchurch, he believes, or possibly Rangiora. All that is reliably known about May is that she was illegitimate. On that fact alone May’s persona rests.
In Wylie’s recollection, May was always there, working in the background, almost one of the family. After Maggie died, May stayed on, not that there was anywhere else to go. She had grown into Taruna and Taruna into her.
Apparently there was no one else in May’s life. She never married. No one came calling, and O.T. always made sure she stayed inside the house whenever a swaggie came in the gate. I’m told he didn’t like women to be left alone in the house.
Shearing gangs came and went. The shearing sheds are up the back of the farmhouse. A shearer might have stood in the shade of the shed towelling the sweat off himself and seen May hang out the washing or picking fruit, moving through the shadowed and lit patches beneath the trees surrounding the house. But no one can recall such a scene. Wylie remembers May shouting up the hall for his grandfather to shift his bones before the porridge grew cold.
I wonder about May—the facts of her life recall that basic need to love and to be loved. She’d been flung out and taken in, like a dog from the SPCA.
May is in Christchurch with Maggie and her new baby Geoffrey, when Maud moves in to Taruna as housekeeper. After Maggie dies, in 1943, May moves into the armchair by the fire and sits into the evening with the farmer. Perhaps O.T. cannot think of May in any other way than as ‘service’, or even as ‘illegitimate’, in which case he has saved her. She is forever the fourteen-year-old who arrived out of the blue. I imagine he felt an affection, even a love for this woman who will never leave the property.
On her birthday he will have a present for her. He will rest a hand on her shoulder, plant a chaste kiss on her cheek. It may cross his mind that he has been here before. There was Maud, and he nearly paid dearly for that, worrying himself silly that word would get out.
There was Maud, but where is she now? With Nash? And the little girl, Betty? Whatever happened to her? Is there someone out there who looks a bit like him? Before a blazing fire on a winter’s night with May, does his mind wander? The body stirs in the old familiar places. Funny how memory and flesh are so closely linked. He looks across the fireplace to the woman in the armchair. How bright her face looks, almost flushed.
There are sheep to move, to shear, to crutch. There are horses to breed. Race meetings to attend. There are birthdays and wedding anniversaries to celebrate. The birthday of his daughter Gwendoline comes and goes; perhaps it is too unbearable to dwell on. Then, after a period of time, perhaps not. In the weeks and months following his daughter’s death, did he find himself wondering about that other girl, Betty?
He remembers his promise to look after her educational needs, and he acts accordingly—paying for his ‘sin’ as he saw it. Presumably he sent the money to Maud. In which case they must have stayed in touch. Or, more likely, Maud kept that Rangiora post office box address for when the moment came to remind O.T. of his promise.
The post office still has its thickly painted fire-engine-red postal boxes. I stared at P.O. Box 3—that is what it came down to. I stood where he had all those years ago, I imagine in a calmer state than he had. When he died in 1959 I was four years old. I don’t imagine he knew anything about me or my siblings. But you never know. I’m inclined to extend to him the privilege of knowing because, half a century later, there I stood, in his old footprints, my eyes set in the same direction as his, occupying a moment that surely he never imagined the future would deliver—an unacknowledged grandson, as I am, aware of his secret.
Maggie passes away three years after Gwendoline—two blows in quick succession. And then the war and its noise, which diminishes personal suffering. The nights continue—no avoiding them. He will sit up with May. May is good company. She knows him and his habits. She knows his breathing when he is asleep. She knows things about him that even he doesn’t know. And for those moments that come between them, a silence or a bit of silliness, when they want to fill the room with something other than themselves, parked in the corner is the pedal organ record-player.
O.T. dies, aged eighty. The obituaries mention his success at horse and sheep breeding. Twelve days later, May dies.
In the Horsley Downs Cemetery, a few graves along from O.T. and his son, Geoff, lies May, ‘loved friend of the late O.T. Evans and M.A. Evans and family’.
I find myself thinking about the cattle that stood against the ridges as they waited for their new home to the west to be cleared by men in hats wading through the smoking Spaniard grass. A century later this is the landscape I drive through, with Harper at the wheel. The road is as straight as a needle, and those foothills which have always stood on the edge of time begin to rear up with surprising haste. Out the side windows is the flat unyielding pasture. It is the same countryside that welcomed Maud all those years ago. I take more care than I usually would to look and note things. The big things—the alps, of course, belittling and at the same time uplifting, the skies forever streaming overhead, and the concentration of self that comes with yawning space.
We slow down for the bridge, clap across its timbers. Below, a river flat is filled with sun hats and colourful beach towels and sparkling water. Children clinging to inflatable tubes float around a bend and out of sight as we come off the bridge onto a bumpy shingle road.
We are travelling through land also abandoned by grand ideas. Harper says there were once plans to build a railway line connecting this valley with the West Coast. The land was surveyed but the railway never eventuated. Old surveyor pegs still crop up in the tussock. As for older footsteps, Maori took this same route through the alps to the west coast. At some point along this dusty road, Harper judges that we have seen enough and turns around. For the second time that day we cross the bridge, this time without looking down, and fly past the gates leading to Taruna. At the church we turn north and carry on a short way to the small country cemetery.
It is quiet, and the late afternoon heat has knocked the stuffing out of the day. The car doors crack as we get out. I can hear the distant noise of a tractor, but nothing else intrudes. Behind us the mountains are still, watchful. We stop by the graves of two teenagers done up like children’s playpens. There are toys and flowers, and rocks painted with messages from friends and family. A chair has been placed next to each grave for the visitor to sit and chat with the deceased.
O.T.’s undecorated grey slab, on the other hand, represents another era with its grim austerity. There are no fine words or biblical passages inscribed on it. Information about the deceased is plainly stated. Trotting and shooti
ng are his recreations listed in the Who’s Who for 1938, as well as a bit of other biographical information. On leaving school O.T. worked at the Central Dairy Company in Addington, Christchurch, for four years. Then for a number of years he worked at a threshing plant in the Kaiapoi district. In 1902 Messrs Evans & Sons acquired Clifton, a farm of 2500 acres. The picture of the wheatfield taken by the Tourism Department photographer was of Clifton in 1917.
In Hawarden there is an old church with the name Evans scratched into the concrete of its foundations. These days it is a museum. Amid its stifling air and farm implements dating back to the time Maud arrived at O.T.’s farm, Harper dug out a wedding photo.
O.T. looks solid and dependable, but he also looks like any other groom—all personality has been scrubbed from his face for the moment that he and his new wife present themselves on the steps of St Andrew’s.
Vainly I search his face for clues to my own, but cannot find a way past the obstructing factors of the smart suit, the carnation, the dutiful, checked smile.
Then Harper showed me a photograph of Richard Evans, O.T.’s father, and I was amazed to find traces of myself—the eyes, the mouth, the thin smile. It was a great surprise, especially recognising those facial features that suggested a kind of muscular pull and take on things. It was as though I had come upon a replica of myself, a bit like Christchurch’s old stone edifices built to resemble an older model. I have never felt more unoriginal than at the moment I looked upon Richard Evans.
Harper told me that Richard Evans’ father was the sheriff of a village in Monmouthshire, Wales. I wasn’t surprised, not the slightest. Some long dormant computation of personality was confirmed. A sheriff? Well, of course it makes sense—and explains those occasions when it befalls me to tell the drunks in the alley beneath the shoe factory to kindly piss off and take their empties with them. I may even get some of that from Dad, who had the same tendencies to present himself as an unlikely figure of authority—coat and scarf and bristling eyes to cover up the fact that he could barely talk—and to rise to his feet in a rugby crowd to remonstrate with a drunk over his use of ‘language’. I would crawl deeper inside my collar, in spite of the fact that I was vaguely proud of him getting to his feet to do what others seated around us were too scared to do. But that pride only ever came later, in a quieter reflective moment. At the time I wished he would sit down and shut up. Now, I find myself doing the same—parting a crowd to go to the aid of someone having a seizure. The crowd always responds favourably and I ride in on some assumed authority. The crowd’s unquestioned acceptance of my role continues right up until I kneel to ask the prone person if he or she is all right, and then I sense a shift in the air and the unspoken thought that they—well, anyone—could have done that (ask someone if they are all right), and clearly I am not the doctor they took me for, not even a relative, but, it seems, a distant relative of a sheriff in Wales, acting on ghostly initiative.
Richard Evans, Mum’s grandfather, experienced respiratory problems in his youth and when a doctor recommended he leave Wales and move to a more agreeable climate, instead of sensibly setting off for Brazil, he travelled to New Zealand, arriving in Lyttelton around the time the swamps identified on the ‘black map’ of 1854 were drained for the city to extend its boundaries.
He wasted no time in making his way in the world. He established the flour mill at Kaiapoi, a large brick building on the banks of the river, which was partly damaged in the September 2010 earthquake. He took an active role in local politics. He chaired the Waimakariri River Board, and was active in the Methodist Church.
The sheriff’s son enjoyed a long and productive life until the fatal day in 1921 he crossed the railway line in Kaiapoi to talk to some men at the timber yard, as he had on other occasions. This time he failed to hear the train’s approach and was hit from behind—scooped up by the cattle catcher. His leg was cut off.
O.T.’s brother, Llewellyn, was first on the scene. He told the coroner, ‘When I saw him after his accident he said, “This is a bad business, my boy.” I asked him how it had happened. The reply, “Well, I really can’t say.”’
Years earlier, in 1902, Llewellyn went to Wales where he managed a brick-manufacturing plant in Rhyl. He played hockey for Wales, winning a bronze medal at the 1908 Olympics. After his return in 1912 he managed his father’s flour mill in Kaiapoi.
But it is his brother O.T. in whom I recognise certain aspects of myself—the way he holds himself is like my own stiff bearing, all the tension rising to the shoulders. Modesty prevents him from showing more than a prim satisfaction. I think that would explain his facial constraint, together with the flattening out of high emotion that comes to those in late middle-age. O.T. has the unfussy grave that he would have wished for.
The sun is low and fierce, and stupidly I’ve forgotten to bring a hat. I have to hold a notebook up to my eyes to pick out the dark and spare outline of Mt Tekoa. I assumed it is a Maori placename. But Harper corrects me. He says it is from the Book of Amos.
Later that evening I read in the Old Testament about Amos who was among ‘the herdsmen of Tekoa…two years before the earthquake…’ It turns out to be a depressing sermon on man failing his duties to himself and to God. Amos was a sheep and cattle dealer, a native of Tekoa.
All the way to the alps is sheep farming country, and so perhaps it is not so strange to name a crag after the birthplace of a shepherd from the Old Testament. I wonder if the daily sight of the crag ever set O.T.’s mind wandering. The deeper meaning of Tekoa would not have been lost on him. Just as the Maori meaning of Taruna—‘connected’—is not lost on me.
It does not feel so long ago that at Wylie Evans’ house I sat in O.T.’s rather uncomfortable armchair, the same one he used to occupy by the fireplace in the old farmhouse, and I watched on an early home video a ghost—the father whom my mother never saw and a grandfather I never knew—hover into astonishing proximity.
Suddenly there he is—the shock of white hair, a suit, a dark vest, a white collar, a white handkerchief stuffed into his breast pocket. He wore the same suit day in day out, through summer and winter. ‘If it can keep out the cold of winter it can keep out the heat of summer,’ he used to say. Wylie passed this on to me. Some words can come from anyone. Other words shuffle out of personality. If it can keep out the cold of winter it can keep out the heat of summer. It was like hearing a voice from the grave.
The Buick has been down to Christchurch for a spray paint and O.T. has driven it back to the farm. He pulls over outside the house, the one I had wandered through that afternoon, pacing the rooms, interrogating the walls. There, beyond the rose bed, he parks and gets out. A bit wobbly in the hip. But he is seventy years old. He wears a dark hat. White hair as blunt as a spade hangs out the back. He is in his dark suit and the vest, and there is the white handkerchief. He has no idea that he is being filmed; no cause to suspect it. This is the first time he has been captured on film. His son, Geoff, was among the first in the district to own a movie camera. I wonder what my mother would have made of this moment as the grandchildren—Wylie, Bruce and Margaret—swarm around the car. It is clear that Buick has a status in the family. It is up there with a prize Corriedale. The Corriedale is a curious-looking breed. Its face is narrow, like that of a poodle, bursting out from an enormous shagpile of fleece. Later in the film, O.T. holds a Corriedale against his legs. I am more interested in the detail of O.T.’s face than the sheep’s, but it is hard to make out his face in the shade of his hat and the smoke from his pipe. The sheep gazes up at him and then I see the ‘clear face’ and ‘the straight back’ and the ‘big bum’ that I am told characterises a good Corriedale. This is what it is like to acquire history. You become knowledgeable about things you never expected.
Then I recognise a gesture of my own—a distribution of body weight as O.T. leans against a fence, again, of course, in a dark suit, and hat. And then he appears for the last time, driving a tractor across a paddock. He comes closer and closer in
to view. One of his grandkids is parked on his lap. He turns his head to look behind at what he has ploughed. And then he is gone.
AFTERWORD
Late one Monday afternoon in March 2013 I returned to the Karori Cemetery with Eleanor Gwendoline Jones’s plot number. This time the woman in administration altered her directions—‘turn right at the last street light and look for her in public section 2 next to Hearn and Eliot’. Fallen leaves covered the walking area between the graves and there was a strong smell of eucalypt in the air. I found Eliot, then Hearn, covered in eucalypt leaves. Next door was Eleanor’s plot, little more than the collapsed side of a bank. One hundred years after she was interred she at last had a visitor.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s description of the workhouse women on page 195 is from The English Notebooks of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Vol II, Riverside Edition, Houghton, Mifflin & Co, Boston, 1883.
The cures for melancholia described on page 236 are from The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton, George Bell & Sons, London.
The land where O.T. Evans once farmed has passed into new hands, and I am very grateful to Jenny and Alex Fergusson for allowing me to poke around in O.T.’s crumbling farmhouse.
I am extremely grateful to the Evans family for their good grace and generosity, and for their hospitality. In a letter circulated to the wider Evans family, Wylie concludes, ‘We now all have some relatives of which we weren’t previously aware, something I personally think is a bonus.’ I concur.
I wish to thank the office of Chris Finlayson, Minister for Culture and Heritage, for putting me in touch with the staff at CERA (Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority) who made so many things possible at a difficult time.