Dead Lemons Read online

  Tai tells me that many Māori prefer to think of themselves as black, not because their natural olive complexion is particularly dark but because, “otherwise we would be thought of as white.” When I think of what Western colonization has done to some other cultures around the world I get where he’s coming from.

  “Hi, Albie, I’m Finn Bell. I spoke to your cousin Tui and he suggested I meet with you to learn a bit more about the history of the area,” I say.

  “Mmmm, yes, mmm, Tui said,” he responds, nodding.

  “So he says it all actually started out here at Preservation Inlet, and then they moved the town to where it is now?” I ask. It’s an odd thought to me, actually moving an entire town.

  And that’s about the last full sentence I get in as Albie, with near constant nodding and “mmmms,” showers me with the history of the area. I don’t even have to ask about the Zoyls because it’s all there, right from the start.

  The history books say that the town of Riverton was moved from Preservation Inlet to the Jacobs River mouth because conditions out here were too harsh but Albie says no, the Māori told them to move it there.

  “Mmmmm, not so, the tribes were worried that the rules of Tapu would be broken in too many places, mmmm,” he tells me, still nodding away.

  “Tapu?” I ask.

  “Mmm, Tapu. It’s hard for white people to understand Tapu, mmmm,” Albie says, smiling. “Tapu is about what is sacred in everything around us, and the rules of how we should be people because of it. Without living the right way, we lose our connection with the world and ourselves. Tapu, mmmm.”

  “You’re right, I’m not sure I understand that—but what does this have to do with moving the town?” I ask.

  “Mmhm, when the whalers came to build the town here in Preservation Inlet, Tapu was already broken by the Zoyls over by the Jacobs River mouth,” he continues. “We are a practical people, mmmmm, Mr Bell. Why have two bad places when you could have only one?” he asks.

  “So the Zoyls were here from before the town started?” I ask before Albie can get up to speed again.

  “Mmm, yes, a long time. There were stories from before Bloody Jack’s time. We don’t go on their lands and they stay away from us. Only when the town started did the Zoyls come again into the land, but then they built that town, mmmmmm, around whaling, and for a time there was no more Tapu there and it made no difference to us. Only, some say that’s why Bloody Jack was taken by the sea so young. Because he took their gold instead of their lives when he knew, mmmm.”

  “Mmm, come, I will show you the pictures, mmmm,” he says as he leads me through his house, which is a crowded space of boxes and stacks of books and papers everywhere.

  The conversation then winds its way here and there as I’m told various anecdotes and shown old drawings and pictures and pieces of art and old weapons, but in truth I’m still preoccupied by what Albie said about the Zoyls.

  How long have they been out here? And why doesn’t anyone find it strange? Okay, everybody has ancestors and history. We all come from somewhere. But surely their story seems a bit weird.

  I know enough of history to know that families were bigger back in the 1800s, and that they often all lived and worked together. But a family of whalers living down in the middle of nowhere since way before the rest of Western civilization even shows up?

  I’m brought out of my reverie when Albie hands me another clear plastic folder with an old black-and-white photo in it, and I have to look twice at the face that stares back at me.

  It’s an old, grainy photo of a whaling station on a beach, with the tail end of a massive whale in the background and big, dark-grey streams running from it back into the ocean which, given the context, I can only assume is blood. Lined in front of the whale carcass are two truly massive, cast iron pots spewing huge, dark-black smoke trails into the sky. They’re big; each could easily hold more than one person.

  But that’s not what catches my eye.

  It’s the men lined up in from of them, the one in the middle particularly. Because there, from hundreds of years ago, wearing that same movie-star smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes, is Sean Zoyl.

  CHAPTER 13

  June 4, PRESENT DAY . . .

  I think it’s the seagulls that must have woken me but I can’t tell for sure. I only become aware of my arms trying to flail them away from my face; no idea who gave them that instruction. Nothing like the local wildlife trying to eat your lips to get you up and going. Or in my case, down and going.

  I don’t blame the birds. They probably thought I was dead. I was certainly coming around to the notion myself.

  So the good news is, both my arms still work, kind of.

  I’m trying not to inspect myself too closely.

  And as the bad news has become a list too long to bother mentioning, I decide to try to just ignore things and be wildly athletic and roll over.

  This achieved, I lay there gasping, and as I vomit for the first time today, I think to myself that this is just the worst day to be under-intoxicated. Ever.

  This would all be so much easier drunk.

  But looking on the bright side, after you vomit lying face down as a cripple, you have that little added impetus to get moving.

  So I start the painfully slow process of dragging my collection of open wounds through saltwater and sharp rocks back to the beach side.

  It’s horrible, as expected, but at least I’m moving. I’ve got a chance now.

  I don’t know how long till the tide turns, and some of these rocks are big. I may not be able to make it all the way to the sand without needing legs, but I’ve got nothing else to do. I’m still bleeding, and I don’t know how much more of that I can do either, so I decide I may as well keep going while I still can.

  I stop to rest after what feels like a good half-hour’s work and make the mistake of checking back over my shoulder to see how far I’ve come.

  I’m only a few steps away from Darrell’s body. Then I do something even more stupid and look ahead to how far I still need to go to reach the beach. That’s just to the beach, then I still have to work my way back up the hill to my car.

  I think the secret here will be something I am actually pretty good at—really low expectations.

  But then, this is about more than just survival for me.

  Because I swear if I make it up that hill, I’m not going straight to my car. I’m going back into that shed and somehow, some way, I’m taking those bones with me.

  No more. Me and Alice and James, we are leaving the Zoyl farm.

  Those absolute fucking bastards.

  CHAPTER 14

  FEBRUARY 8, FOUR MONTHS AGO . . .

  Sean Zoyl.

  The resemblance is uncanny, and for a few seconds I’m just too weirded out to think anything.

  Then I look closer, and see that the Sean Zoyl in the picture looks a little older than the one I know, a little more weathered but God, it’s like looking at the same person.

  “Albie, who are these men?” I interrupt to get Albie’s attention back on the picture.

  “Mmm,” he says as he takes it out of my hands and carefully turns it over, then reads:

  “Whalers from Riverton. This is from later, 1905 or 1906. Mmmm, this is towards the end of the whaling time. By then they had mmmm killed so many, the sea was empty and they had to start fishing and farming. But not the Zoyls; that’s some of them here in the picture—the Zoyls were whaling here before the rest, and they kept on after everyone stopped, mmhm,” he finishes.

  “Do you know where they came from?” I ask.

  “Mmmm no—but I remember it was said they didn’t speak English at first. Mmmm when they first came they traded with our people mmmm and they had different words for things than the English. But later, when the town started, they spoke English too, mmhm.”

  “What language did they speak?” I ask.

  “I mmmm don’t know, the stories just said it was something different. The Z
oyls were different, mmmm,” Albie finishes, and for the first time since I’ve met him he actually falls silent and stops nodding to himself.

  “How were they different?” I ask.

  “Mmmm, good at things. They were good at things, not like the English. The Zoyls lived out there alone, and it was said they hunted as good as us mhmm, and they could make things, all kinds of things mmmm. Not like the English mmmm,” he finishes.

  “What things did they make?” I ask.

  “Mmmm, lots of things with metal, but mostly they were known for try pots,” Albie replies.

  “What are try pots?” I ask.

  Albie turns over the picture again and points to the two massive pots in the picture.

  “Mhm, these are try pots—they were pots you used to render the oil from whale blubber. To make mmmm whale oil, mhmm,” he says. “It is said that the Zoyls made the best whale oil because they had the best pots; everyone wanted them mhmmm. They were bigger, you see, mmm, bigger than the others. The Zoyls mmmm made them clever. Some try pots you could only use on land, and others you could only use on ships, but these you could use on both. Well-made things. Everything they made was like that, mhmm, simple but clever mhm. Maybe that’s mmm why people tolerated them for so long,” he nods to himself.

  “But mmmmm later their secret came out about their pots, mmm,” Albie continues as he again smiles and nods more vigorously. “The secret was, it wasn’t about the pots at all, mmmm. See, when you harpooned a whale, you brought the carcass to shore and then cut thin slices of blubber off it, mmhm. This is called flensing, and the slices of blubber were called “bible leaves,” mmm. You put the bible leaves in the pots and boiled them to get whale oil, mmhm. But the mmmm Zoyls found a way to make better oil. They harpooned to wound, not kill, mmmm. Then they kept the whale alive mmmmm when they cut the bible leaves, kept them mhmm alive for hours. They had a trick mmmhm, see, the Zoyls were always clever. They caught the baby whale calves, too. Kept them alive close to the mother whale mmhm the whole time so the mother could hear it and see it. Mmhm then the mother, she stays alive a long mmmm time, see. They say Bloody Jack saw it once, heard the screaming of the whales from early in the morning until late in the night, mmmhm.

  “The story goes that my people prayed for the sea to come take the Zoyls then, mhmm, but the sea didn’t come,” Albie finishes.

  I think to myself that you have to wonder what kind of person thinks up a “trick” like that.

  “We were worried that the mmmm English would learn this way too, and they did eventually see it done, but even they would not go that far for oil, just the mmm Zoyls,” he says, still nodding.

  Albie then starts telling me about other parts of Riverton history and I lose track, thinking how horrible it must have been to make a living like that.

  What did you tell the wife and kids when you got home at the end of the day?

  Which makes me think something else.

  “Albie, the Zoyls were a family, right? What about the women and children? Do you know how they lived? Did they ever marry any people from here?” I ask.

  “Mhmm, the Zoyls were a big family once, many men, many kids, but few women, mhmm. Always few. Nobody knows mmmhm much about them. They kept people away from their land, mhmm. But they traded with us, and more with the English, and then sometimes there were marriages, mhmm but the women always stayed on the land, mhmm, only the men and the boys came to town, mmhm,” he finishes.

  If Albie becomes suspicious of my interest in the Zoyls he doesn’t show it, but I start asking some general questions, just in case.

  I don’t want to get an earful from Tai and he’s a cousin, and thus far I’ve learned that word travels fast in this family network.

  Most of what I then learn is about the Māori, and how they see themselves as caretakers of the land, and how they try to do things still to keep the old ways alive.

  On the weekends, Albie teaches local kids how to live off the land, and Hot-Water Tui finds and preserves Māori rock paintings, crisscrossing the countryside on foot. Tai teaches people wood carving. They do these things for free just because they are them and it’s their culture.

  It lifts my spirits a bit, but I guiltily ask myself—so what good do I do just because I’m white?

  As I listen to all this, I almost wish they had colonized us instead of us doing it to them.

  I’m back in the car heading back home on autopilot, my mind skipping between the Zoyls of the past and the Zoyls of now. Again I think to myself that maybe I’m making this all into more than it is. They’re just strange people who live out there on their own, so what? Yeah, I get the creeps whenever we meet, but that proves nothing.

  And all this conjecture about what happened to Alice and James—there’s nothing concrete here. I’ve just got an overactive imagination I tell myself as I pull up to the cottage.

  And that’s when I see my cats.

  I couldn’t make it out at first, my brain taking a few seconds to fit what I was seeing into my world. They were in a neat row. My five cats. Mine.

  Someone had nailed them to my front door.

  CHAPTER 15

  FEBRUARY 8, FOUR MONTHS AGO . . .

  I touched each of them. I already knew they were dead, but I couldn’t stop myself.

  They were still warm.

  The cats were hanging from halfway up the front door, neatly arranged from largest to smallest with their bellies against the wood.

  Momcat to Babycat.

  Each held up by a nail driven through the base of the skull, deep into the wood.

  Five individual, tapering trails of blood, bright-red against the white of my door, pooling together on my welcome mat.

  I’m not angry. I’m not sad.

  Those are just feelings. And while I can sense them start to happen, they are superficial—they will come and eventually they will go. I’m thinking of later, beyond all the emotions, when only the loss remains along with whatever little wisdom a foolish man like myself might make of it.

  Mostly, right now, I just feel old.

  I know I should probably stay in the moment, call the cops and check the house, but I just don’t have the energy right now. So I just sit there, staring at them. It’s a nice day out, sunny, with a slight breeze. It doesn’t really fit with what’s in front of me.

  Of course they did it.

  It could be no one else.

  Somehow they found out I was asking questions about them.

  Maybe they saw me talking with Emily or Pruitt or in the Library or something and they put things together. Or maybe they just did this because I live here now and they don’t like me. Or maybe even just because they could—but I know it’s them.

  And I don’t know if it’s supposed to mean something but I don’t think so—this isn’t some kind of message or warning. I think it’s just because they wanted to hurt me. I think the Zoyls like to hurt.

  And I know I’m not entirely rational right now—but hey, you leave everything you know behind and go make a life alone with just your kittens or puppies, and then one day go nail them to the front door and see how you feel.

  So I sit here for a while longer.

  When I finally decide to go into the house—I’d just finished calling the cops, who promise to send someone out—I see Tai’s yellow van pull up next to my car, his massive arm waving cheerfully out the window.

  “Morena, bro!” Tai says as he sticks his head out the window, but his smile stops as he sees my face, then his gaze is drawn, like mine was, to the front door. It takes him a few seconds to figure out what he’s seeing, and then he looks back at me and sighs.

  “What you do now matters more than what you feel, bro,” he says. Tai’s always been surprising with the things he comes out with. Right from the start.

  He makes a quick exit out the back of the van and is up next to me on the porch without a further word, but I see he’s also got a thick wooden club on his lap. I realise it must be really large, as
in his big hands, which usually makes everything look toy-sized, it seems to fit fine.

  “You stay here, hey,” he says as he opens the door and rolls inside, but I follow right behind him. Not that I’m concerned for Tai’s safety; I’ve seen him on the Murderball court, and that was when he wasn’t armed.

  We make our way through the house, room by room, but nothing seems out of place.

  I’m busy checking in cupboards when the police arrive and basically do exactly what we did, room by room.

  The interview is fairly short:

  Did I see anyone?

  Do I know why anyone would do this?

  And that’s when I tell them everything from first meeting the Zoyls to running into them on the wharf to what I’d been finding out. I can see that Tai’s not happy.

  They write things down and dust for fingerprints.

  They ask if I want to have a case opened, explaining that given the circumstances, it would have to be a minor charge like for destruction of property, trespassing, or potentially breaking and entering pending more evidence. None of these even carry serious jail time. So I say no, somehow those charges just don’t seem to match what I feel has been done here.

  I want more.

  Then they ask if I need to be referred to counselling, and offer to remove the cats and I say no again, twice.

  And that was it, really. As they left they said that someone may be in touch, and then they were gone.

  Tai, who was quiet the whole time they were here, rolls out to his van again and comes back with a hammer, which he hands to me.

  “I’d do it for you but it’s better if you do this yourself, bro,” he says. “I’ll dig a hole,” he says after a moment, and moves off.

  So I take the hammer from him and set about pulling the nails out of the door one by one.

  When it’s all done, a fresh mound of soil is drying by the side of the gate and Tai finally asks me, “Now what?”

  “I don’t know . . . yet,” I respond.