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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 3

[Tonight, after a day of grief ]

[Tonight, after a day of grief ]

Tonight, after a day of grief and the kind of discouragement that hangs like a fog-bank over my life at Jerusalem, I come down the hill from the wharepuni to the presbytery. The Maori star that belongs to my wife Te Kare shines through bars of cloud above the gorse.

When I came up the river yesterday, sitting beside Kat, I pointed out that star, and said to her – ‘Behind it is the gate to the Maori paradise. I hope to go in there when I die. Your dead grandmother is there. What good would it be for her to go into a paradise where no Maori was spoken and there were no eels to eat. In that place the Lord has a Maori face.’

Kat is Maori. She believes that the spirits of her relatives guard her when she is walking the roads at night.

‘You say your rosary, Hemi,’ she tells me. ‘I like to hear you saying it. It makes me want to cry.’

Tonight the star tells me only of hope in Heaven, not of hope on earth. Unless God works miracles for us, as he did for the Israelites, we will not survive long. Our last food bill was one hundred and sixty dollars. I have only sixty dollars in the bank to pay it with. There are other bills.

Pommie, with his long whitish curly hair, is sleeping with us. He was sleeping like a child in the front room when I walked out of the house ten minutes ago. In town he . . . in jail just for being out of work. He looked for a job for a month in Hamilton without finding one,

Cam and her boyfriend have called. Her boyfriend cooked the apples and pastry tonight. Apples from the heavy trees around the cottage. Francie and Mary picked them. Cam has a remarkable gift for love. One sees that very slowly the towns are beginning to blur it. One can hardly remain spontaneous in the kingdom of boredom and avarice. She still embraces people when she meets them, but her eyes have a new shadow in them.

Chris shows me the scapular he wears around his neck. He belongs to a Carmelite Third Order. Though he is immensely kind and gentle, he finds it hard to get through to other people.

1972? (688)