32. My Favorite Day
Summer
The redheaded woman set her kids down and said, “Hi. I’m Poppy, and I’m guessing you’re Summer.”
“You guess correctly,” I said, trying not to feel out of place. “This is my cousin, Delilah.”
“Matiu told me about you,” she said. “My husband. Oh, and these are Isobel and Kai, my two youngest. The one Roman was chasing is Olivia. Somebody’s always chasing Olivia. I’m glad you came with Roman. It’s heaps, meeting all these people, even if they’re your relations. Here’s a clue. The one who matters is Koro.”
“You’re not Maori, though, are you?” Delilah asked. She had her phone out and was holding it like she was planning on taking notes.
“You can’t always tell by looking,” Poppy said, “but you’re right, I’m not. I’m a bit of a cousin to Roman all the same, at least by Maori standards. My brother’s married to Hemi’s sister-in-law Karen, and I’m married to Hemi’s cousin Matiu, so you see …”
“And that’s a cousin?” Delilah asked.
“I told you,” Poppy said, “Maori standards. That’s a cousin twice over. Here come Matiu and Roman. Time for introductions, I think.”
“Right,” I said. “We’ll hang back.”
“Oh,” Poppy said, “you won’t be allowed to do that. Come on.”
“Because I have to sing Koro the song,” the little girl said. “We’re all going to sing the song.”
“Yes,” Poppy said, “you are. Because it’s a special day.”
That was how I ended up threading my way through the crowd, holding Roman’s hand, with Delilah following us and typing on her phone. I hissed, “Stop doing the notes thing,” and she said, “How am I supposed to remember names otherwise? Or what people say about other people? So far, I’ve got that everybody loves Koro, everybody wishes Daniel would take a hike, and Hemi’s weirdly scary. Not exactly news, but the day is young.”
At that moment, the crowd opened up, and I saw a very old man sitting in a wooden chair painted like a peacock’s feathers, smack in the middle of the patio, one hand on the rounded handle of a wooden stick. It was hard to say which was more gnarled, the hands or the stick, and he looked small in his clothes, as if he’d lost weight recently, but his brown eyes were bright in his wrinkled face.
“Koro!” It was the older girl, Olivia, still holding the banner. “We are going to sing you our special song now. I made it up myself.”
“Go on, then,” the old man said in his scratchy voice. “I’ve been waiting a hundred years to hear my special song.”
“But we need you, Hamish,” the girl said. “We have to all sing the song, because it is a family song.”
An older boy, still a redhead but with a more serious face, stood up from where he’d been sitting at the old man’s feet, petting the duck. “OK,” he said, taking the other side of the banner from Olivia and stepping carefully along the patio until the banner was stretched out, then adjusting his grip so it was level. “Come on, Kai,” he said. “Come hold my side with me.” Kai, apparently, was the baby, because he toddled forward and, rather than holding the banner, reached for the other boy’s hand. On the other side of the banner, the younger girl grabbed for a corner, but Olivia yanked it away and said, “No. Holding it is for grown-up kids who are in school.”
“Nah,” the old man said. “Holding it is for all of you.”
Olivia sighed, but she grudgingly allowed her sister to clutch the lower corner of the banner and said, “This is our song,” and started bellowing it out at the top of her lungs, the other kids joining in raggedly, the younger girl a couple of words behind.
There wasn’t so much of a tune to it as the suggestion of a tune. These were the words.
Koro is one hundred, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay.
Koro is one hundred, just for today.
He’s very old and wrinkly, but he has lollies. Oh yay!
Run and run before he’s dead,
Run and get lollies.
Yay yay yay yay yay.
Matiu had a hand over his handsome face and was laughing. Poppy was saying, “The ‘dead’ part is new to me, I swear,” but she was laughing, too, and so was everybody else. As for the old man, his face was split by a grin in which a few teeth were missing, and he said, “Everybody sing now. Tane, take the lead.”
“Matiu’s older brother,” Poppy said in my ear. “Lives next door.”
Tane, a big man of late middle age who was standing behind the old man’s chair, shouted out the lines of the song one at a time, and everybody else sang it in a call-and-response fashion. In full voice, too, twice over, laughing hard at the “before he’s dead” line. After that, Tane shouted in the same fashion, “Tutira mai!” and they started singing to the same tune, vaguely familiar, the words in Maori. Poppy, still beside me, muttered in my ear, “Maori song about togetherness and so forth.”
Roman stood beside me, silent, still holding my hand. When the song ended with a rousing chanted phrase and a burst of applause, the old man looked at him, beckoned him closer with the hand that wasn’t on the stick, and said, “You’re Roman, eh. Not singing, because you don’t know your whanau, or you’ve never learned the song. Never thought you were Maori, maybe. Never mind. We’ll soon teach you. Haere mai, my son. Welcome. Give me a hand, Hemi.”
Ah. Hemi Te Mana. Going incognito in shorts and jandals, like every other man here, instead of the dark suit and white shirt he’d worn in every picture I’d seen of him, but you couldn’t mistake that face and the strength of his broad body, or the ends of the intricate tattoo that showed below his very large bicep. He stepped forward, got a hand under the old man’s elbow, and helped him to his feet, and Koro said, “Your brother, eh.”
“Half brother,” Hemi said, his face expressionless.
I saw Daniel, then, at the edge of the crowd. He shuffled forward and said, “Both my sons here for this. That’s a good day. A good day.” I couldn’t have said whose face was blanker, Hemi’s or Roman’s.
A woman, then, probably in her fifties, shoving her way through, saying, “What am I, then? Nothing?”
“And my daughter,” Daniel said. “Ana. Your sister, Roman.”
Koro said, “Everybody’s here, yeh. Let me have a good look at you, Roman. I don’t see as well these days. Some parts of me wearing out faster than others, eh,” and laughed.
Roman’s face was still. Almost grim. So was Hemi’s, and seeing the two of them together was … odd. If Matiu seemed like Roman’s photo negative, Hemi was Roman through a different lens. Fifteen years older at least, his still-handsome face looking carved from stone, or maybe something more organic. Teak, possibly, and proud and dangerous as an eagle. Roman stood still and looked at him, Hemi looked back, and there was a sort of quivering tension in the air, like the singing vibration in power lines. If energy were visible, there’d be waves of it on view here, and sparks where those forcefields met.
Koro beckoned Roman forward, and he took a step, then two, until he was standing directly in front of the old man. Koro’s wrinkled hand went onto Roman’s shoulder, and I could just see the side of Roman’s face. It wasn’t still anymore, because something was happening in his eyes, around his mouth. The entire crowd had gone quiet, watching, except for Olivia, who was still marching around waving her banner, singing her song. Finally, Roman put his hand on the old man’s shoulder.
“Ah,” I heard from beside me. An older Maori lady, built along comfortable lines, beaming approval as Koro shakily leaned his head forward and touched his forehead and nose to Roman’s. One beat, two, and I knew what this was. The hongi, touching foreheads and noses, mingling breath. A sign of respect. Something I’d read about but had never seen.
Finally, the old man stepped back, Matiu stepped forward, and he and Hemi lowered Koro into the chair again, after which the chat resumed as if a bubble had been popped.
“Come sit by me when we eat, Roman,” I heard Koro say, “so I can talk to you. Introduce me to your friends now.”
“This is Summer,” Roman said.
Koro put out his hand to me, and I took it. Gently. The skin was paper-thin and blotched with age, but the eyes were wise. However bad his vision, I had a feeling he saw plenty. He said, “Nau mai haere mai, Summer. Welcome. You’ve had a bad time, Matiu says. A hard time.”
I said, “How did he?—”
Hemi spoke up, then. His voice was a little gravelly and very deep. “Word gets around,” he said, and looked at me.
My temper flared, just like that. I said, “Roman has been very kind. And I’ve done my best to repay him for his kindness.” Stiffly, but I was so tired of this.
Roman didn’t say, Back off, or whatever you’d expect. He just stared at Hemi, and Hemi stared back, and I thought, This is not going well.
“He’s a good man, you think,” the old man said.
“He is,” I said. “Not just to me, to my cousin also. This is Delilah.”
It was Delilah’s turn, then, to take the old man’s hand. He smiled and said, “Haere mai, Delilah. Welcome to our home.”
“Thanks,” Delilah said. “I don’t know anything about being Maori, though, and neither does Summer. We’ll probably get the etiquette all wrong. Of course, I generally get the etiquette all wrong anyway, so oh, well.”
Koro chuckled. “You’re a lively one, eh. Like wee Olivia here. Never mind. We don’t have as much etiquette as all that. Just need to know how to eat, and maybe how to sing along. Olivia can teach you her song. That’ll make a start.”
“A great start,” Delilah said, “if that means singing about grabbing all your lollies before you’re dead.”
He laughed, a rusty sound. “Nah, I’ll take my song. Matiu worries. Hemi worries, too, but what is there to worry about? When it’s time, I’ll die, and that’s all right. Old men get tired.” He smiled his gap-toothed smile. “But not today. Today is for celebration, because we’re all here. Ana from Aussie, and Hemi and his whanau all the way from the States, and all the rest of them, too. Being happy with what you have—that’s the only real trick of life.”
I said, “I know a good quote for that.”
“Oh, boy,” Delilah said. “How did I know?”
“You have wisdom, eh,” Koro said. “Wisdom’s good. Tell me.”
I smiled. “‘What day is it?’ asked Pooh. ‘It’s today,’ squeaked Piglet. ‘My favorite day,’ said Pooh.” I gestured at the crowd. “There you go.”
“There you go,” the old man agreed. “My favorite day.”