Tauhou

Tauhoua novel Kōtuku Titihuia Nuttall Copyright © 2023 Kōtuku Titihuia Nuttall Published in New Zealand in 2022 by Te Herenga Waka University Press Published in Canada and the USA in 2023 by House of Anansi Press Inc. houseofanansi.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. House of Anansi Press is a Global Certified Accessible™ (GCA by Benetech) publisher. The ebook version of this book meets stringent accessibility standards and is available to readers with print disabilities. 27 26 25 24 23 1 2 3 4 5 Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Tauhou : a novel / Kōtuku Titihuia Nuttall. Names: Nuttall, Kōtuku Titihuia, author. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20220431310 | Canadiana (ebook) 20220431337 | ISBN 9781487011697 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781487011703 (EPUB) Classification: LCC PR9639.4.N88 T38 2023 | DDC 823/.92—dc23 Cover artwork: Kōtuku Titihuia Nuttall Text design and typesetting: Alysia Shewchuk Ebook design: Nicole Lambe House of Anansi Press is grateful for the privilege to work on and create from the Traditional Territory of many Nations, including the Anishinabeg, the Wendat, and the Haudenosaunee, as well as the Treaty Lands of the Mississaugas of the Credit. We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada. While this book has been written with care for its readers and characters alike, it does contend with violent themes that should be approached with caution. These include residential schools, domestic abuse, and mental illness. I’ve done my best to handle these subjects with respect and to illustrate how Indigenous lives transform and transcend our trauma. That being said, take care when reading.— Kōtuku Titihuia Nuttall For Māmā Tukua mai he kapunga oneone ki ahau hei tangi māku.Send me a handful of soil so I may grieve over it. ĆENȾOȽEṈ Cold Earth Daughter Creator throws them into the ocean, Mother and Daughter, to become islands. This transformation is accompanied by a covenant of mutual care between the people and the new land. They lie side by side. Mother wraps herself ever so slightly around Daughter. An island is a golf green, a private hunting ground for exotic animals, a scientific reserve. An island can be bought with money, if you’re into that sort of thing. An island is the only thing between you and the bottom of the ocean. SṈITȻEȽ The train cuts through the swampy grasses quickly — it’s barely on time. Behind the huge exotic conifers, passengers can see the body of the expressway demanding its feed. Men work round the clock to cut through the earth and replace what they remove with concrete. Farther down the road is the makeshift factory that blows plumes of dust and fuel into the air. The hills all around grow pines to be milled. Farther down, the forest becomes quarry. Kererū swoop from those hills towards the other island, through the smog. When they built the concrete factory across the bay, on the other island, the workers had to create a small town of shacks and poorly made houses. Eagles watched as all the waste from the factory was dumped into the inlet nearby. Those waters had been the bluest, that land the most full of game. The factory foreman had the biggest house of all, surrounded by new plantings of fruit trees and invasive hedging. The lady of the house loved to garden. Her roses still poke through the overgrown blackberry a hundred years later, when the settlement is no more than concrete foundations in a clearing. Later, when the people were allowed to hunt there again — on their own sacred land, where the first man fell from the sky as rain and built the first village on earth — deer were killed and carried home to be butchered. It was joyful. Knives were sharpened to cut the animals open, only to find their stomachs lined with concrete dust. Water Cousins The morning air is still. Hīnau steps out of her apartment and messes around trying to lock it behind her. The mechanism of the lock is loose in all the wrong places. It probably doesn’t help that her key is bent out of shape, but she tries to ignore that. She achieves a level of lockedness and hurries down the stairwell towards the street, which is more of a boardwalk. The sea spray reaches up towards Hīnau. There is water all around, everywhere. The condos and apartment blocks are built out and out and out, until most of them rest atop stilts in the water. More than half of the city sits over the sea now, on metal beams made to sway with waves and tides. The buildings rise up so high they become glassy pillars that reflect the sunlight, which bounces and sparkles off the ocean. The most expensive condos are still closest to the shore. Beyond those at the shoreline are the smaller, cheaper, and more poorly built buildings. A small tramline operates between this shore and the floating suburbs farther out into the water, carrying the workers who live on the sea onto the land to work. The water is dark and still. There isn’t any wind but there is cloud, which threatens to turn the ocean. Hīnau steps carefully out from under the awning and onto the perpetually wet concrete, bracing for the chill. The streets are empty. Plenty of the more important office workers don’t need to be awake just yet. The most organized will barely be having breakfast now, scrolling through the news and wearing down their molars on tough but nutritious granola. Hīnau doesn’t have to get up as early as some of the other workers — those who live farther out into the sea and have longer commutes, with earlier starting hours. Hīnau tries to