The front door was nailed shut. The two front windows were dirty but unsmashed. Inside there was a glass kerosene lamp on top of a coal range, and the frame of a single bed in a front room on the right. Beside the bed were two empty tuna cans, a rusted Jensen clock radio, and an instruction manual for an electric blanket. The bed suggested a child but the shack lacked tenderness. A woman’s touch clings to a house and so does the presence of children. No matter how long the cottage had been abandoned, a trace or a sense would have remained of a family, but nothing hovered above the hard bare floorboards.
A woman appeared: she had walked up the road from her nearby house. She was dark-haired and her accent was a mystery. It gave a lovely unfamiliar music to her voice. Her name was Jacqui Kehoe and she was forty-eight. She said, ‘I’m Chilean. I’ve lived here 28 years. I call myself a Chiwi.’
A stiff spring wind raked the grass. Jacqui hugged herself in her zip-up jacket. She wore a pair of dark glasses that covered her face and she didn’t take them off. We stood and looked at the empty cottage. She said, ‘There was a lonely old fella who lived here.’ These were the first words I heard spoken about the ghost of Maromaku Valley.
‘We would visit him and make sure he was all right,’ Jacqui continued. ‘I always feared I’d come over and find him lying on the floor, dead. And then someone did find him lying on the floor, dead.’
She couldn’t remember his name. ‘He had no family but a lady came to visit him. Not in that way. She was the only person he had who was anywhere close to being family.’
When had he died? Jacqui couldn’t remember exactly; maybe last year, or early this year. But the cottage looked as though it had been empty for longer than a few months. There were cobwebs nearly as thick as ropes. She said it had looked even worse when the man lived there. ‘The house was so filthy. A complete mess. It was full of empty cans of salmon and tuna, which he fed to feral cats. And he smelled. I don’t think he ever had a bath. But he was a nice old fella. It was very sad when he died. He was lying down as though he’d tripped and fallen and hit his head. When I think of him lying on the floor, dead…’
She shivered. I turned away from the dead man’s cottage, and changed the subject by asking about a house to the east, a striking example of modernist architecture. The entire front of it was glass. Jacqui said, ‘Have you heard of Sid Going?’ ‘Yes,’ I said, surprised to be asked about a legendary All Black half-back by a Chiwi on a country road. ‘It’s his daughter’s house. And that one’s his son’s house.’
I thought back to photos of Going, a small, mobile, audacious player, and then remembered he was a Mormon. Jacqui said, ‘That house over there – Mormon. That one – Mormon. That one – Mormon.’ She continued pointing, moving her finger in an arc across Maromaku Valley. ‘Mormon. Mormon. Mormon. Mormon.’
She had identified every house we could see except her own, so I pointed to it and said, ‘What about that house?’ She said, ‘Mormon.’ She was born a Catholic. ‘But they have missionaries, you see, and they teach you about the church. They taught our whole family.’
Her parents had moved from Chile to Melbourne when she was a little girl. They were obviously considered ripe for an English-speaking God. ‘The Jehovah’s Witnesses came to our house first. They were nice people but I didn’t feel anything with them.
‘Then the missionaries came. They knocked on our door on a Saturday. My brothers and sisters and I, we were really angry. We wanted to go to the beach. It was just after lunch when they came. Three hours later they were still talking. We were spewing. Then, when they were leaving, they said, “We’ll come back next week.” We said, “Oh, great. Another wasted Saturday!” It was summertime and I was fifteen, sixteen.
‘But when they came back the next week, there was a moment. There were things that touched deep.’ Her hand went to her dark glasses and she trembled. A spring afternoon in the Far North, and a Chiwi Mormon in tears at the memory of a crucial moment in her life, now standing outside an abandoned house where a nameless man had maybe last year or this year tripped, hit his head, and lain on the floor, dead.
She brightened, and continued her story. Her entire family converted. She met John Kehoe of Maromaku Valley. ‘He was over there on his mission.’ He married her, brought her home to his dairy farm. ‘It’s been hard the past couple of years,’ she said. ‘There was so much rain last winter that the paddocks got all pugged up. Then we had a drought. But we survived it.’
I was thinking how much I liked the faraway Chilean music of her voice when she had said that flat New Zealand sentence, ‘The paddocks got all pugged up.’ And then she said, ‘His name – it was Stan. He died in February.’
Three years of appearing at homes as strange as Lance Roberts’ converted slaughterhouse loft in Hicks Bay, Jim Dennan’s dusty whare in Whakarewarewa, the igloo at Scott Base, the fales of
