Anthropology and Humanism 23(2):196-208. Copyright © 1998, American Anthropological Association.

1998 Fiction Contest Winner

John Brown's Body

DON MITCHELL

Department of Anthropology

Buffalo State College

1300 Elmwood Avenue

Buffalo, NY 14222

Elliot was standing in the Tavera River, his feet in the cold tropical water, thinking, A cat's gotten my tongue, while trying not to look at his grandfather Polanara, who had been about Elliot's age before he'd even seen a cat. And when he did see one he thought it was a demon and tried to run away. Elliot let the cat hang onto his tongue while the water ran over his toes and the leafy aftertaste of the drink his grandfather had just given him lingered in his mouth, and thought about how to answer his grandfather's question, which was whether or not Elliot knew who had killed his wife.

    Elliot did not in fact know who had killed his grandfather's wife, but he didn't think that a simple "No" or "Sorry, Grandfather, I don't know" would satisfy the old man. So Elliot said he did know and then invented a story to wrap around the lie. He couldn't see what else to do at the time, even though he didn't like to lie to his hosts, especially to his Nagovisi kin, even fictive kin such as his grandfather, who was no more Elliot's grandfather than Elliot was his.

    After it was all over Elliot tried to convince himself that the lie hadn't hurt anyone, that it had satisfied the old man in a way the truth could not have. For all that gloss it was a lie, nevermind that Elliot thought it more an invention than a lie. The real lie at the core was to have said that he did know. What followed that was just a story, a story inspired as much by cats and the demons lurking at the edge of Elliot's consciousness as by his sense of obligation towards the old man.

    The first cat in Nagovisi was a feral one that walked boldly from the bush into the Big Man's feasting house and went for the scrap of pork that had been hung on the lodge pole for the lomado, the clubhouse demon. It must have escaped from a mission or plantation, or maybe from black-birders, labor recruiters little better than slavers, who would have come ashore near Jaba as the 19th century wound down.

    Lomado, the spirits of dead infants, allied themselves with Big Men. Once attracted to a clubhouse, once having taken up residence there, a lomado could only be satisfied by pork. The quantity was not important. What mattered was what the pork implied: if there was pork on the lodge pole then that pork must have been cooked in the clubhouse, so there must have been feasting and celebrations, slit gongs drummed, luster added to the Big Man's reputation. All of which the lomado helped bring about and advance, on account of the pork.

    But a lomado was a dangerous ally. Lacking regular offerings, it would cause the Big Man's pigs to die, would cause his taro to rot in the ground; his betel palms would fail to yield. An angry lomado would cause the Big Man and his entourage themselves to waste away, even die.

    Polanara had told Elliot that when the cat went for the pork those who happened to be looking cried out in fear because they were frightened, but also in dismay because even though nobody was sure what a lomado looked like, nobody had thought it would look like that. The demons they knew either resembled humans but behaved differently (being unwilling to look people in the eye, for example) or did not resemble human beings at all (manifesting themselves as fireballs, flying in river valleys searching for loved ones).

But there the thing was—fur like a possum, four legs, a long tail, climbing that post to get at the pork. When Mesiamo, who was braver than anyone else, went over to the creature to see what it was, it jumped down and ran into the bush, pork scrap in its mouth. He told Elliot he'd been surprised and a little apprehensive because you never know what an unknown animal might be capable of, but that he hadn't thought it a demon.

    "It's like this," he said. "If it had been a demon it would only have sniffed the pork. Demons don't really have bodies, so they don't eat. As soon as the thing started eating the pork I knew it couldn't be a lomado, so I went to see what it really was. Everybody else was frightened, which is what happens when you see something new and you forget what you know. When the cat ran away your grandfather jumped up to run too, but Karinamba grabbed his arm and made him stay. He said, 'We're safer here in the clubhouse. Who knows where the demon has gone?'"

    Elliot had his own demon in those days too, but it had no name. He had toyed with the conceit of calling it his lomado but gave it up when he realized that it would take a mighty act of conjuring to produce a demon who had already been advancing his interests. The very argument for a lomado's existence was post hoc

ergo propter hoc: the Big Man had succeeded in gaining renown, so he must have had a spirit helper. Elliot's demon failed this test because so far Elliot had gained no renown, except among the Australians for being weird and boring and among his friends, the Nagovisi, for being able to repair radios more often than not.

    Standing in the garden Polanara had looked directly at Elliot and said, "Grandson. You asked me to take you to the garden I started when the war came, and so I did. Even though I've only been here two or three times since the war, I told you everything about it. I remembered where I felled the trees, and I showed you

the stumps. I showed you where we planted taro and sweet potatoes, greens, where I made the fences, everything. I showed you, and held the end of your tape, and you made your map and put soil in your little bottles. Are you finished working?"

    Elliot had nodded and waited. They were in fact standing in a forest, full second-growth tropical forest, rather than a garden, but that did not matter. Elliot had learned to visualize gardens long gone. He knew how to ride the long fallow cycles driving the Nagovisi garden system, the endless wheeling of bush to

garden to bush he had come to understand. He had learned to look at forest and see how it must have been twenty or thirty years before, shades of green and brown opening to the sky, plots framed by logs, fringing trees, trails disappearing darkly into the bush. A little garden house, some smoke. And work, always work.

    Polanara the grandfather looked around. This was the time to ask his question, the important question to which he thought Elliot might have an answer. When Elliot had asked him if they could go to the old garden so he could map it and see what the bush was like, he'd agreed immediately. On the hour's walk to the

garden, he'd been thinking about how to do it.

    Polanara had been thinking about asking his question ever since Elliot had come to live in the village, but he had never found the right moment. When Elliot had asked to have his name given to Polanara's real grandson, in this way becoming Polanara's fictive grandson, the moment hadn't felt right; when Elliot

bought a pig and gave it to his namesake to fasten their names, and old Siku came down from the mountains for the pig killing and to cast a few spells to settle quarrels, it hadn't seemed like the right time either. But today in the garden seemed like the right time.

    Polanara cleared his throat, spit, and began. "I can remember everything. Yes. But my strongest memory is how the airplane killed Katenai, your grandmother, here in this garden. Now that we're standing in it I have something to ask you."

    He paused, walked a few paces away from Elliot, then turned quickly and, looking directly at him, said, "I'm asking you if you know who did that thing."

    Surprise was what made the cat get Elliot's tongue then, surprise and uncertainty about what to do. Elliot knew the story of Katenai's death; everybody knew it. But he hadn't been expecting to be asked about it. He'd been expecting to be shown garden boundaries so he could map them. He had only thought that he might be told about it, that he might be told about what happened. He never expected to be asked who was flying the warplane that had gunned down his grandmother.

    So Elliot was startled and blurted out, "No, why would I know anything about that?" but then caught himself and added, "Wait. I don't know. Wait. Maybe I do. That's a hard question, Grandfather. Remember I wasn't even born when it happened. Let's sit down and chew some betel. Or maybe you want to smoke. I

have some tobacco, but I'd rather chew betel."

    Polanara came over and the two of them sat on a stump.

    The biggest town Polanara had ever seen was Kieta, a sorry mildewed colonial backwater on the other side of the island, a place where the white population numbered thirty or forty on a good day, on a big day, a day when the copra ship docked and there might have been a couple of missionaries, a trader or factor, some admin people as supercargo.

    Polanara knew some things about white people: plantation and government masters and missionaries. One thing was that you couldn't rush them. Mainly this was because they were the bosses. White people always made you wait until they decided what to do or until they felt like doing it. And white people would always pretend not to have understood you, which let them avoid doing what you wanted them to or acting on what you told them. Polanara laughed to himself when he thought about this, because most Nagovisi, but especially old men like himself, who had worked on the plantations, were masters of the same technique, and for the same reason: to slow things down. To have time to think.

    All those Australian white men seemed to know each other, so it seemed likely to Polanara that all Americans knew each other, too, that at least all the important ones did. And because Elliot was an American, and Polanara already knew that the airplane that had killed Katenai had been an American one, it seemed possible to him that Elliot would know or could find out.

    And if he knew he would probably be willing to tell Polanara, because he didn't act like other white men. No other white man had spent time talking to him and the other villagers, living with them, living out in the bush without electricity and servants and a Land Rover. Elliot might be some kind of emissary from

America, masking himself as a student of gardening. Maybe he was carrying a message he was not ready to reveal, a message from America and its leader President Nixon, a man whose name Polanara had heard on Radio Bougainville.

    Polanara had learned that he could understand what individual white men were like—this one was always angry, that one liked to joke—but that didn't mean you knew what they were thinking or what they'd do when they were with other white people. White customs were mysterious, white society was opaque. Did they behave in their own countries the way they behaved here? Were they all equally powerful? What was Elliot's role among the whites?

    Polanara thought he understood Elliot's nature well enough—he could usually predict what he'd do; he could tell when Elliot was sad or irritated, gloomy, when he was elated, when he was in the mood for foolishness. He knew that Elliot liked to have things explained to him in such a way that he could see the explanation unfolding and sometimes even get ahead and grasp something that hadn't been spoken about yet. And Polanara and the others would do this every so often, because they knew it made Elliot happy. It wasn't Elliot's manner that was mysterious; it was the scope of his knowledge and the nature of his connections with the white world that Polanara knew he didn't understand.

    And there were connections. All these Americans were connected. Even when you thought there couldn't be a connection between them, there was. A white man had come to stay in Siwai, a day's walk away, before the war. Polanara had even gone down into Siwai to take a look at that white man, who had lived in a

village, learned Siwai, asked questions, and poked around in the bush just like Elliot was doing. Maybe there had been some connection between that man and the war, because soon after he left, the Japanese came and the war began.

    And a few years ago there had been another American over the mountains in Nasioi. Polanara's nephew had seen this white man and had talked to him, too. Elliot himself had said there was a connection between them. The white man who was in Siwai is my teacher, he had said, and he also sent the white man to Nasioi.

Elliot had said that somebody would be coming to Banoni soon, too. And even more important, Elliot had said that the American government was paying him to come to Nagovisi. So perhaps President Nixon was sending these white men to Bougainville one after the other, one to each language group. It's possible,

Polanara had said to himself, because Elliot has a connection to President Nixon.

    Polanara had asked Elliot if he knew this President Nixon, and Elliot had said that he didn't but that his father had met Nixon. If Elliot's father knew President Nixon, Polanara thought, then there must be a connection between Elliot and the American Big Man's entourage. Maybe Elliot's father had asked Nixon to tell him about Bougainville as soon as he found out his son was going there. Or, if Elliot's father hadn't, or had but wouldn't tell because fathers and sons didn't share secret knowledge, perhaps one of his uncles was close to Nixon and knew or could find out who the pilot was. And that's what he wanted to know. He'd been

wondering about this for a long time. And now he had an American to ask and had found the right moment.

    "First, tell me how it happened," Elliot said to Polanara as they chewed and spit. "I only heard about it from people who weren't there."

    "All right. It was like this," said Polanara. "It was in the morning. She was over there, restarting the fires from the day before. I was swinging my machete around, thinking of what to do first, maybe repair the fence, maybe weed, maybe cut some new bush. You know how it is. There's always work. It was still a little chilly, and I was turning around, moving, and then the airplane came."

    "You knew what planes were, didn't you?" Elliot asked.

    "Of course. We knew men flew them because some of us had seen them land in Rabaul, and we knew they carried cargo because some of us had helped unload them. What we hadn't known was that they could be used for fighting."

    Polanara paused and spit betel. "And we hadn't known there could be so many. First they were rare but then they were always overhead, not droning in straight lines but diving, tossing like bats, flitting. Usually we saw them in pairs, like hornbills, but sometimes they were all together, like crows mobbing an eagle. We thought we saw some fall, you know we can't see much over the trees, so we realized they were fighting each other. But we thought they were just fighting among themselves. What they did was nothing to us." Polanara paused.

    The betel Elliot had spit on the large flat leaf he'd cut and leaned against the stump slid redly down its spine, joining Polanara's. Elliot remembered the first day he'd gone walking in the Solomons and had seen blotches of red, puddles even, on the hard-packed dirt, thought them blood, and had been afraid of what he might encounter down the trail. But it had only been a group of men chewing betel as they walked.

    "It was a long time ago and we didn't know anything. That day I understood about airplanes and what they could do, but not until after Katenai was dead. So when it happened it was new to me, understand? I can still remember what I was thinking, all these wrong things I was thinking. Because I didn't understand at

all." He sighed. "I'll show you how it was."

    Polanara got up and motioned to Elliot to come with him. Elliot followed him through the trees and undergrowth to the edge of the ridge. Polanara cut some bush so they could see out over the Tavera better.

    Elliot squinted in the sunlight, blinding after the forest shade.

    "The sound I heard wasn't the airplane sound I knew. It was much louder, and it was changing pitch, and I thought, That sounds like an airplane except there's no airplane up in the sky."

    He grabbed Elliot's shoulder, spun him around, said "Look, you see? This was all clear, from there to there to there, you know what a garden on a ridge looks like, so I could see the sky but there was no airplane in it. And I turned around and around, looking, like this"; and he spun around, looking up, "Katenai was busy with the fires, kneeling, blowing on the coals, making noise with the branches, concentrating, so I think I heard the sound before she did." Polanara pointed down the Tavera. 'The sound got louder and louder and then suddenly at the bend there it just appeared, so fast, fast, and it flew right at us. I hadn't seen an airplane do that. I hadn't seen one except high up, from underneath, the wings, and here we were, and all of a sudden, the airplane coming at us."

    Polanara shook his head and slashed at the air with his machete. "I was so surprised. It shot lightning, winking, but slower, slower than lightning, and I remember thinking fire flies, fire flies in the morning? I didn't understand it at all. I turned towards Katenai and I saw the earth around her spurting up—I'd never

seen such a thing before—and blood spurted from her, too, from her back, because she had jumped up from her fire and turned to look at this thing, to see what the noise was.

    "Such a roaring! And with it a crackling sound like fire, only louder. And it seemed like a wind flung her over there, Grandson, when the blood shot out, it was right over there, there, it shot out," he pointed with his machete, "right over there. First I thought wind did it, it seemed like wind, because what else flings you down except an earthquake, and I knew it wasn't an earthquake because the ground wasn't shaking and the trees weren't swaying. And then there was a wind and the trees did shake, but it was after she was flung, not before. So I knew the airplane had caused the wind, but only afterwards."

    Polanara breathed out hard and put down his knife. Elliot could barely feel himself breathing. He said nothing.

    "Now I know it was bullets hitting her that flung her back onto the heap," swinging his arm in an overhead motion, chopping, fingers clawed, "like when wind, wind that rushes before a storm, takes a rain cape or a mat. That's what it looked like. I still remember it. You know how wind sweeps down from Wakupa sometimes, you hear the noise, look up, see brown clouds, and then it's on you, the wind, you run to the garden house to be safe, the thatching jumps and slaps in the wind. This was more sudden. No wind from Wakupa ever came so fast, wind never made that noise, and no storm ever swept in like that with fireflies

for lightning. No. And the blood spreading." He sat down, picked up the leaf, and started shaking it. Then he stood up again, agitated.

    Elliot still said nothing.

    "Grandson, after she was down I couldn't do anything. I just stood there, stunned as if lightning had struck near me, and I remember thinking fire flies killed her, even though I knew the airplane had done it somehow. It bellowed over me and flew away. So fast. It was all so fast. I knew she was dead but I couldn't understand how.

    "Finally I ran over to her. Around her was all red, blood on the dirt, blood splattered on the leaves she had been going to burn, and those big drops of blood sizzled, because the fire had heated the leaves and they were getting brown and curling up around the blood even as I stood looking. And all I could think of was how much it looked like betel spit into a fire, the way it hisses and boils on hot wood. I looked at the blood and I looked at Katenai and I didn't know what to do. Would it come back? I lay down and I pulled some branches over us, and I hid there with her until I couldn't hear the airplane any more. I could hear her body making noises, but I knew she was dead."

    Elliot tried to imagine what it had been like. He stood up, arm and machete pointing down the Tavera to where the plane must have appeared and slowly cut a great arc in the air over to the bush where Katenai had died, followed through and whirled again, seeing it all now: a man, knife in hand as Polanara had been, the plane coming, traced it once more in the air, then dropped the knife to his side. He turned to face Polanara, who had been watching him closely.

    "You see, don't you? How it was. The way of it."

    Elliot nodded.

    Polanara had not told the story for years. Now he wanted to slow things down, to spread things out a bit because it might take time for Elliot to decide whether to answer his question. Now he was sure Elliot understood how it had been, except maybe for the stunning and the terror and the stink of death. He began to

slit and feather the leaf with his machete. 'That day I realized airplanes could shoot bullets. I had thought that only rifles did. When the police shot old Karinamba up in the hills, do you know that story?"

    Elliot nodded. "I never heard it from you, though. Was that the same Karinamba in the cat and lomado story?"

    "Yes. When the whites came, Karinamba ran up into the mountains because he was afraid. He became more afraid when the whites continued on up the Tavera into the mountains. Finally he was so frightened that he got angry, took up his bow, and shot arrows at them, and they killed him. That was easy to understand, Grandson, because he shot at them and they shot at him, only they had rifles and he had arrows, so he died and they didn't. Sometimes we laugh about old Karinamba and in the mountains they do a dance about him, how he jumped out from behind a boulder in the Tavera to shoot an arrow, and caught a bullet in the head, Bang! And fell down dead. I laugh myself now, but 1 was sorry for him at the time.

    "Grandson. Katenai did nothing to the airplane and neither did I, none of us did anything at all. An American came and killed Katenai for no reason. So I'm asking you to tell me if you know who did it. I'm asking here in the place where she died."

    Elliot only looked at him and nodded, continued chewing and spitting.

    Polanara, uncomfortable, turned away and went back to feathering the leaf.  He still wasn't used to putting direct questions to white men, even to his grandson. And here at Wira Nami he felt the past was pressing in on him, curling around him like a green leaf on a fire.

    His own story had taken him in its grip. He'd never told it where it had happened, and even now he had stopped before the end. The story that had taken root in the village had been the story of her death, not of what happened afterwards, and now the memories were spilling out. He was remembering how he had picked up Katenai and carried her back to the village, slung across his shoulders because he had not known how else to carry her. On the open parts of the trail he had run, fearful of what he heard in the sky above him, a sky that had become filled with airplanes. Crashes and booms came from the shore, so he ran in the open and walked when the bush hid the trail, but he never stopped.

    His back and chest were covered with her blood, and he remembered how it had mixed thickly with his sweat, matting his body hair. Her arms, slap slap slapping against his back, her feet bobbing in front, and her smells so close to his face: smoke, sweat, her wrap, woman-smell.

    He remembered entering the empty village and standing at the center, shifting Katenai from his shoulder into his arms, cradling her like a child, calling immediately without clearing his throat or catching his breath, calling in a huge voice which hardly seemed his own, "Katenai is dead! Dead! An airplane killed her!" And all the people who had run back from their gardens when the aerial commotion started, who had run back carrying food and infants, who had been hiding in the bush around the perimeter of the village, all the people ran towards him to see if it was true.

    And when they reached Polanara and Katenai they encircled them in silence and without saying anything more Polanara kneeled on the hard-packed dirt and put Katenai down on her back and arranged her arms properly and put her legs together. When he stood up the immediate lightness of his body lifted him, and

he thought he would surely rise like smoke into the sky where airplanes circled, waiting to kill him. A ring formed around Polanara and Katenai, and the people began the dirge immediately in full sun, not waiting to wash the body and lay it out in a house, decently covered with a mat.

    Polanara and Katenai became the center of the moving, dancing ring of mourners, the center that was reserved for the dead. To be surrounded by such moving singing was to be dead; to be a singer, to be alive. He remembered how he stayed in the center with his dead Katenai, remembered how he had begun to

sing, because he was alive and so must sing for the dead. But he could not leave her. Crying and turning, stepping over her body, stepping and turning, not knowing what else to do, he would not join the outer ring.

    For half his circle he looked up and was attacked again by a winking airplane, and for half he looked down to earth and Katenai and wanted to run away. Enduring assault and misery by turns, he stepped carefully, even delicately, over her body again and again until Mesiamo, who was not afraid of the center, stepped through the dancers, took him gently by the arm, and led him away.

    Then when it was dark and Katenai's body washed and put safely away as it should have been before anybody had started to weep, he was made to tell his story over and over, because Katenai had been the only one killed and everyone wanted to understand how. Everyone wanted to hear the story, in hopes of being

kept safe by what they learned from it. Polanara remembered how they kept asking him, What did she do to anger the airplane? Why did it kill her and not you? Questions repeated, changed, repeated, encircling him again as if the questions were mourners and he again alive in the center where the dead should be, alive but surrounded, buffeted, so he kept repeating, I don't know, I don't understand it, until Mesiamo rousted everyone.

    Polanara remembered curling up on the dirt floor of their cookhouse, covering himself with a mat, no fire at all, not only because the newly bereaved could not use fire or eat cooked food, but because he was afraid that an airplane would see the fire, or even see him, the one who had escaped, and come wink winking in

the night to shoot him. He dreamed of Katenai and Wira Nami, that Katenai had really flung herself at the piled up brush, that her lurching rush to the heap had been her escape into safety under branches and logs. And when he ran to her she was not there but called to him from the heap, Husband, I'm not dead, under the logs I'm alive. But no matter how much vegetation he pulled from the burning

heap, heedless of coals and guttering flames, he could not find her.

    After a while Polanara said softly to Elliot, "I couldn't ask you before. I thought maybe you wouldn't want to tell, if you knew, for fear that I'd ask you to go kill him if you could, even though I suppose he's an old man like me, maybe already dead from old age. Then I thought, Better if I ask him in the garden, I'll show him the

spot and when he looks right at it and hears about my wife, his grandmother, killed there, shot for no reason, maybe he'll tell me something. If he knows. So that's what 1 think, that maybe you know, and if you do, that you'll tell me. Now I've said everything I have to say."

    How can.I not lie? Elliot thought. All he knew was that the Americans had indeed bombed and strafed everything in sight, targets of opportunity they'd been called. How could he let his grandfather down? What good would it do to tell him that Katenai must have been gunned down by a jumpy pilot who suddenly

saw smoke and raked it with machine-gun fire, a pilot who probably realized what he'd done and said, "Oh shit, that wasn't a Jap," and flew on looking for the real thing while he still had fuel and ammo left—that that must have been the way of it: an accident.

    "I'm thirsty," Elliot said to Polanara, realizing he needed a little time to settle on his story, "and it's hot here. Is there a drinking place?"

    "Down by the Tavera," Polanara said, getting up. Was Elliot going to tell him anything? He could wait. "I'm thirsty too. Shall I tell you its name, the spring? You always ask anyway. It's named Waikis Tavena. Will you write it down?"

    Elliot shook his head. "No, later. I'm still thinking about what you said, and I'm trying to remember about the war. But I can't actually remember because I was just born or maybe not even born when this happened. So I have to think about whether or not my father or my uncles told me anything about this. I think they did, so I'm trying to remember."

    They scrambled down the bank to Waikis Tavena. Polanara twisted a leaf into a cup—a skill Elliot had never been able to master—and handed it to him. Elliot dipped it into the running water and drank.

    By the time Polanara had made one for himself and had had his own drink, Elliot's mind was made up. The cat had let go of his tongue. He would give this pilot a name and go from there. Elliot thought Polanara needed something to seize. A name, a few details, a person to join his bloody memories, or perhaps

contain them: Katenai's reddening body flung like a rain cape, the noise, the surprise, boiling red puddled on a leaf. To know the man behind those fire flies.

    He didn't know where the story would go after the pilot killed Katenai and flew away, but he didn't think it would matter. He had heard enough wild, looping Nagovisi stories to understand the forms they took. Stories connected people and place but allowed jumps and twists, transformations, anachronisms. Sometimes the characters hurtled from place to place, time to time, flowing along a crazed time-surface where, it seemed to Elliot, cracks could carry the story anywhere. People were always entangled with place. But since outsiders and some spirits had no places and could exist out of time they sometimes appeared and moved through stories unentangled, as in his favorite, the one that opened so plainly into mystery: A red woman was crying.

    "Let's go back up to the garden," Elliot said. "I want to be there when I tell this story. And I want some more betel to chew, too."

    When they had settled themselves back at the garden Elliot began. "Grandfather, I do have a story to tell. I heard it from my father's brother, who lived at Waimanu."

    Elliot was startled when Polanara abruptly got up, walked a few paces away, and started to cut some new leaves.

    Polanara's stomach had lurched when Elliot had said he did have a story to tell. He had to get clear of Elliot so he could think. What will surprise me now? So he has been keeping things from us! But does this mean he's been lying about everything? What other things has he been hiding? The young people say all white people are false, that you can't trust them, that you should just tell them what they want to hear and get away from them as soon as you can. Maybe if s true.

    If Elliot knew about the killing the world must have another layer that Polanara had not perceived. It was easy to understand that there were people in the world you'd never seen. But it was hard to accept that people you didn't know anything about knew things about you even though you didn't know who they were or

where they lived. If Elliot knew what had wrapped itself around Bougainville before he was even born and he had carried that knowledge here, knowledge that extended even to knowing who had been flying the plane, then Elliot must know everything.

    No, Polanara said to himself. Elliot doesn't really know everything. He's just a man, not a demon. Polanara realized that Elliot knew many things, including some Polanara hadn't known he knew, but he didn't know everything about Nagovisi and Bougainville. Had he been lying about not knowing their language? And if he knew everything then all this asking of questions, writing down of things, all this mapping and weighing and measuring—all this would have to have been a sham. No, impossible.

    Polanara felt a little ashamed of himself, because he was beginning to realize that although he had wanted an answer, he had not wanted one that would make him question everything about his grandson. He had wanted an easy answer, but now he saw that any answer he was going to get would itself pose further

questions. He had wanted to get his answer the way the schoolchildren looked up answers in books, but now that seemed a stupid, vain wish, because what good would the answer be if he really didn't understand how the white man's world worked or why the pilot was flying low that day and killed Katenai. Knowing the white man's name wouldn't help him. How had he thought it would? Stupid. He took his leaf and walked back to where Elliot was sitting.

    He said, "I wonder why, if you knew a story about Katenai, you never told it to me?"

    Elliot had anticipated this. "Because I didn't know it was a story about Katenai. What happened that day wasn't just that Katenai was shot. That wasn't the important part of the story. I only knew it was a story about Bougainville. Those pilots didn't know the names of the places where they fought or the people they shot. Pilots don't name places in the sky. Also, I only thought it was a story about what happened to a pilot and so I never told you about it. And also I was afraid that if Nagovisi knew that my family knew people who had been here in warplanes they might fear me or maybe hate me because of what the Americans did before they landed."

    When Polanara had come back to the log he had seated himself a little farther from Elliot than he had been. Seeing this, Elliot thought, now he's worried about me. He's probably looking at me as if I'm a missionary. This was a mistake. I could have just said / read it in a book. I should have. That would have been safe. Now I've fastened Katenai's death to me, as if it were something I kept in my pocket, ready to take out when I chose.

   Elliot busied himself with preparing more betel and handing it to his grandfather. He would have to send the story in another direction. Best it should enter the spirit world, where anything could happen and blame didn't attach itself to humans. He closed his eyes for a minute, as if trying to remember, but he was actually running down a list of mythic figures, of spirits he knew. Who could he put in the cockpit? Who were the fabulous outsiders in the war, the battles? Quick! Battles. And from the word battle Elliot's mind leapt like the cat for the pork and gave him his character. Battle. Hymn. Mine eyes have seen the glory.

    "My uncle said the pilot's name was John Brown."

    "John Brown," Polanara said slowly, and then again, "John Brown," pronouncing it Yan Brum.

    "Yes. That was his name. He was a great pilot. He wasn't afraid of anything, so he flew his airplane close to the ground. He liked to surprise the Japanese the way he surprised you, flying along valleys so they couldn't tell where the engine sound was coming from.

    "The other pilots wondered why he was so successful, this John Brown. John Brown wouldn't tell them, but my uncle said it was because he had his own demon helper who flew ahead of him and led him to targets."

    Polanara asked Elliot, "What kind of demon was that? Did it have a name?" Elliot took a moment to think about what Polanara might know about war planes, words he might have heard during the war. "My uncle called the demon radar. If there was only one or if there were many, I don't know.

    "The more Japanese John Brown killed, the more his radar helped him search out and kill more. John Brown began to believe that if he didn't kill Japanese every day, the radar would make him sick and he'd crash and die."

    Polanara kicked at the leaf and said, "Grandson. I didn't know that whites had demon helpers. Is that a secret? Yes? And this radar demon sounds like a lomado, except that lomado don't help kill people."

    "Well, I guess it does, but I don't know for myself," said Elliot, "I'm only telling you what my uncle told me. And I only heard about this demon. I never saw anything myself, right? I don't know how many whites have demon helpers. I don't and I don't know anybody who does. Maybe it was only in the old days."

    He spit and continued. "Anyway, soon there were only a few Japanese left to kill here in Nagovisi, but you know that yourself, Grandfather. The ones down in Buin had no food and so President Nixon decided to let them starve instead of fighting them. John Brown wasn't sent out in his airplane even though he wanted to fly, because President Nixon was getting ready to attack Rabaul. John Brown's radar got angry and started making him sick, so John Brown radioed President Nixon and begged to be allowed to fly, but President Nixon wouldn't let him."

    "There must have been only one radar, John Brown's," Polanara said, "Otherwise the other pilots would have sickened, too."

    "I guess you're right. I never thought of that. Well, what could John Brown do? Every day he lost strength. Every day he felt sicker. And even though he couldn't see his radar he knew it was there, hovering over his tent, flying back and forth, sniffing for Japanese blood but smelling nothing.

    "Finally John Brown decided to disobey President Nixon. He believed he would die if he didn't. Early one morning he went to his plane, loaded it with bullets and bombs and pumped benzine into it by himself. No one saw him. No one stopped him. Everyone was asleep because they were resting, waiting to attack Rabaul.

    "When John Brown started his engine, Grandfather, the other soldiers woke up. But it was too late. He was already taking off, his radar ahead of him. The radar was happy, Grandfather, happy to be flying, looking for Japanese to kill. John Brown flew up by Lambalam first, then turned and flew down the Pangala all the way to the beach, looking for soldiers. His demon guided him but there were no Japanese left in that part of Nagovisi, even in the Banoni lands."

    "That's true," Polanara said. "Mesiamo and his soldiers had killed so many that they just stayed in their camp at Mosigeta."

    "He told me about that," said Elliot, wanting to slow the narrative while he decided where to take it. "And also I read about it in a book. Did you know the Americans called him the 'Black Brigadier/ which is like a chief soldier? They knew his name but they spelled it wrong."

    Polanara said, "Did you know Mesiamo's name before you came here?"

    "Yes. From that book."

    "Did you know any other names before you came?"

    “No. Not people. Not Nagovisi. I knew some Siwai names from my teacher. The books I saw had maps with place-names, but they were usually spelled wrong."

    "If Mesiamo was the only one the Americans put in a book, then why didn't they give him a medal? The Australians gave him one. Hasn't he showed it to you yet?"

    Elliot said, "He has. I don't know why they didn't give him a medal. No one told me. And the Australians put him in jail after they gave him that medal, too. So maybe it was better that the Americans didn't give him one."

    Polanara shook his leaf at Elliot. "Grandson. You're forgetting what you know. You know they jailed Mesiamo for killing Kavebura's husband down in Siwai so that she could marry him. It didn't have anything to do with the medal. But Grandson, do you think that the Americans might come here again and look after

us? I think it would be good, because after they landed at Torokina they were friendly and helped us. Before that they tried to kill us, but not afterwards. We don't like the Australians much."

    "I don't know," said Elliot. "I don't think so, because the war is over, so they have no reason to come here."

    "Well, the Americans are fighting the Communists in Vietnam," said Polanara. "So maybe after they win they'll come here."

    "Maybe. I don't know anything about that," said Elliot, and he spit emphati cally. "Now I'm ready to finish the story my uncle told me."

    Polanara leaned forward, listening intently.

    "John Brown felt weak and sick. It was the radar's anger that made him weak. It guided him back down to the beach and he flew up the Puriaka, all the way to the mountains, but there were no Japanese there either. He flew back to the beach.

    "John Brown felt even sicker and weaker, and the radar got angrier and angrier, so John Brown decided to fly up the Tavera, which he had never tried before because it was so narrow and crooked. The radar kept him safe but there were no Japanese. When John Brown got near here he was ready to give up. He flew around the last turn, desperate to kill, and there was smoke, and you and Katenai were in the garden. So he fired his guns and he killed her."

    "Why didn't he come back and kill me?"

    "I don't know. Maybe the radar knew Katenai wasn't a Japanese soldier. Anyway, the radar wouldn't let him go back to Torokina because it still needed Japanese blood. John Brown could barely fly his plane, but he headed for Buin to try to kill the starving soldiers there. When he got as far as Siwai the radar was so angry that he led John Brown into another valley—1 think it was the Mivo, Grandfather—and when John Brown tried to get out he caught his wing tip on a tree, spun around, and slammed into the big bush. And no one saw it happen except the radar, so nobody, none of the other pilots, not their Brigadier, not President Nixon, no one knew what happened to John Brown."

    Polanara grunted and rustled the leaf. "So how did your uncle know?"

    "He didn't," Elliot said, thinking fast because he hadn't anticipated this. "He only told me that the radar led John Brown down towards Buin and he was never seen again. But Grandfather, didn't you hear on Radio Bougainville last week about the warplane that the road builders found in the Siwai big bush? And a man was dead in it?"

    Elliot's grandfather nodded yes, he had.

    "Well," said Elliot, "I heard on the American radio I listen to that when they went to get the body in the airplane they discovered that it was John Brown himself. His bones were still in the plane. They took them away. So that's how I know what happened. After John Brown killed Katenai he died down in Siwai, killed by his own demon helper. That was the manner of it. And that's the end of what I have to say."

    Polanara sat quietly, chewing and spitting. The leaf was all feathered, and Polanara was gently stroking his leg with it. The soft touch of it pleased him.

    Elliot waited a while, then, spitting out the rest of his betel, said, "So, Grandfather, what about all this? Did I answer your question?"

    "I think so," said Polanara. "But I'm not sure. I don't understand it all. Some of it makes sense but some of it doesn't. At least you gave me a name, and, Grandson, I've heard that name before, too, but it wasn't the name of a man who killed people."

    "I've heard it before, too," Elliot said. "There was a John Brown in America who helped free black people. Other whites killed him for doing it. We even have a song about him, how his body is rotting in the grave but his soul goes marching on."

    Elliot sang a little of the song, in English. 'That song belongs to a time when we had a big war in America. Two halves of our country were fighting. But this was a long time before John Brown and his demon came to Bougainville."

    Polanara said, "I think I've heard that song on the radio. And have you heard the story about Yan Brum, the white man who made the Australians treat Big New Guinea people like men even though they had tails? I heard that story long ago."

    "Mesiamo told me," said Elliot. "But I never wondered if they were the same person until just now. I don't see how they could be. The old John Brown helped people and the pilot John Brown killed Katenai and Yan Brum must have been an Australian.

    "Ah, Grandson," Polanara said and sighed. "Time doesn't matter to demons and it doesn't matter to dead people or their spirits. And some kinds of spirits can go anywhere. You don't know what happened to your John Brown when he died a long time ago any more than you know what happened to mine when he died down in Siwai, or where Yan Brum went either. And you Americans think that John Brown's spirit kept going on, so even you don't believe he really died. Me, I don't know. I'm going to be thinking about this for a long time. But right now I'm thinking about another John Brown. Maybe you know about him, too."

    "Who's that, Grandfather?"

    "I hear that down in the New Hebrides there's a crazy church called John Frum. All I know about it is that they say an American soldier came there during the war and helped them. I don't know if he was a pilot or not, but his name was John Frum. He died or he left, I don't know which. But they're waiting for him

to come back and save them, to bring them cargo, bring them self-government, show them how to live in new ways, all those things the young people want. The people who have gone to school."

    "I've heard about that," said Elliot.

   Polanara sighed. "The people who worship John Frum are mostly old, I hear, like me. People who saw strange things in the war, saw new things, but didn't die from them. People who wondered what was coming, the way I did when I heard that sound just before John Brown or John Frum came around the bend in the Tavera and killed Katenai."

    Polanara turned away from Elliot and walked slowly towards where Katenai had died. Elliot got up and followed. Polanara slashed the bush while he talked, his back to Elliot, who could see his head nodding as he swung the machete back and forth, cutting a few leaves, bending over and clearing the shrubbery down

to the dirt.

    He turned towards Elliot and pointed at the ground.

    "This is truly the place where she died. Here."

    Polanara paused a moment and then, looking at Elliot, said, "Grandson, if John Brown's a good man, it's hard to understand why he killed her. Because that was no gift to me. John Brown never helped me. He didn't tell me what was coming. I wish I'd known what was coming. Even after he killed Katenai, I didn't know.

After the war was over I still didn't know. I didn't know a white man would come live with us. I didn't know I'd sit chewing betel with an American I called Grandson, a white man with white people secrets, who told them to me anyway. And I never thought I'd ever know who killed Katenai."