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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 3

[I walked south . . .]

page 467

[I walked south . . .]

1

I walked south from Raetihi. It was eight p.m. by the clock in the closed hash shop where I had looked for a meal. But I had bought a bar of honeycomb chocolate at another place a minute before it too closed for the night.

The truckdriver who picked me up near National Park offered me a bed and a meal at the Raetihi hotel. A good man and half full of booze. ‘A man needs a mate,’ he told me several times. He meant a woman. True enough. But what we need is not always what we get.

That was the first invitation I turned down. The second came when a Maori lad ran up to me at the edge of the light, when the dark began. ‘My father says, would you like to sleep at our place?’

I said no. ‘It’s very good of you.’ I gave him a bit of my chocolate.

Two angels of hospitality, pakeha and Maori. I thought it was not part of my job to say yes to either of them.

2

From Raetihi to Wanganui is more than fifty miles. Twenty miles is the most I have ever walked in one stretch, and I think I had sandals on that time. This time I was barefooted.

I learn my religion through my feet. If you start walking fifty miles with bare feet, at eight p.m. on a winter night, it means you are depending on Te Atua to provide transport. It means you are a bludger.

‘I’m a bludger,’ I said to the Maori prophet at Taumaranui. ‘I bludge on behalf of my family. But all men are bludgers before God.’

He showed no shadows of disagreement.

To be a bludger is to be entirely poor.

Te Atua tells me to be poor. Therefore I go with bare feet and bludge rides along the roads. If he doesn’t want me to have a ride, then I don’t get one.

3

I learn my religion through my feet. The rock fangs of the road, set in tarseal, are designed for the rubber of car tyres to grip on, not for a man’s bare feet to walk on. After a mile or two they burn like knives.

Te Atua speaks to me through my feet. He does not need words. Pain is the simplest language of all, closely allied to the Sacrament of death, by which we pass through the visible earth to the invisible Father. The priest of pain is fear.

Cold is another dialect of the same language. Sometimes they constitute one solution. Cold makes the feet numb, so that they do not feel the bite of page 468 the road metal. Then it is as if you were walking with shoes on, shoes made of cold flesh. But as the cold increases the numbness goes away and it seems you are walking on embers.

The wind blew down steadily from the snow of Ruapehu. The bride of the sun, I have seen her shining delicately when he rose like molten fire, the image of Te Matua, parent and most beautiful of all created signs, because Te Matua puts life in his soul for him to give to us. But now the mountain joins herself to Te Po. She is waiting in her shawl for her bridegroom to come again. . . .

1972? (687)