A Many Coated Man by Owen Marshall Read Free Book Online Page B

languages.
    Eleven o’clock and there are about two hundred people; some wandering over the site, some still at their cars in the school grounds below the hill. A few have claimed chairs, one or two are already slipping behind the screen to theportaloos. Thackeray Thomas shouts loudly that he wants to invite Paul Hurinui to make a start with the meeting, but people dislike to be called to order and so give their attention rather to a group of horse riders who come trotting up the track like a detachment of Boer guerrillas. Thomas walks down to welcome them, but finds that they have mistaken the Tuamarina gathering for the assembly point of the gay riders’ safari to Nelson. Despite the Rev Thomas’s charity in inviting them to stay, the riders don’t want to miss the start of their trek. Several of the audience recall noticing riders heading towards Waikakaho and so the gay guerrillas move off again, some of the horses farting with the jolting of the slope. Despite the motive for the Tuamarina meeting and the example of Thackeray Thomas, not all those who remain are able to show toleration. Les Croad, resting by his truck, shouts that it’s a good riddance.
    Miles has been sleeping in the warmth of the car. The small excitement of the gays on horseback wakes him. It takes time for him to orientate himself, at first imagining that he is in old Otago. When the truth comes to him he is sad not to be accompanying the riders. Two or three days on a bridle-track across the Richmond Range to Nelson; the lower ridge-lines of scrub, the spongy trails through the valley bush which meets overhead and folds in sounds of the wood pigeon and bellbird.
     
    There are other places you must know. Past the street of car yards — bunting and flags strain in the wind’s gaiety, you didn’t know that the purchase of a vehicle is so much a carnival, pink, green, yellow, red and blue, the pennon strings lead up to the central maypole. Then a side road and a place with a reduced showroom at the front to display the kitset furniture made at the back. It’s close to the reclaimed harbour land, zoned light industrial, and across from it you will remember is the headquarters of the vintage car club and on one side is the crowd who import Persian rugs from Korea, on the other a large tin shed in which galvanised guttering is made for the trade. The kitset showroom was once the front two rooms of a cottage and the dull, tiled fireplace is still there at one end. They use mainlyreconstituted hardboard and three-ply. You can buy your three-drawer desk built up and stained, or take the kitset and the single sheet of photocopied instructions in which the possessive its is apostrophied and a lacquer finish is termed most unique. Two men do the manufacturing, two men sell when necessary, two men are the proprietors. The same two. Perhaps Gavin Buttery is the one you knew better, killed by a monsoon bucket during the scrub fires behind the city. Quietus now.
     
    ‘Tena koutou, tena koutou, tena koutou katoa,’ Paul Hurinui welcomes the people, who drift to a loose focus around the Angel Hire chairs. He stands before the officials’ chairs, facing downhill to the crowd. Seated behind him are his two fellow elders, together with the Rev Thomas, Slaven and Eula Fitzsimmons, spokesperson for Gender Plus. Hurinui, who for three years was Chancellor of the Iwitini University, speaks for only a few minutes in Maori, then changes to English to explain the significance of Tuamarina as a setting for consideration of policies to ensure greater unity and progress for all New Zealanders. He explains with a compassion as fresh as if the events were only yesterday, something of the Wairau Incident. The pressure on the Ngati Toa to sell land to the Company, the provocation by the Europeans in sending the survey team in early 1843 and the Maori repudiation of it. Then an aging Te Rauparaha interrupted at his breakfast of potatoes by the arrival of the armed party to