Caravan of Love

Last October I took a break from some writing to check the news online for a natural disaster or unexpected political misconduct, or even better in 2016, a celebrity death. There was a red breaking news banner and brief accompanying article about an elderly pedestrian who had been hit by a car in South Dunedin. I guess you could say I had a feeling that it was my Nana who had been hit by the car but I dismissed it and went on with my work.

The year before she had tried to get off the bus at the exact spot of this accident and her arm had got caught in the back door as she went for her green tartan shopping trolley. The bus driver began to drive off, not realising she was stuck, and she was only saved from being dragged down Hillside Rd by two teenage boys who told him to STOP. She weighs less than a bird and would never have survived it.

I probably thought it was my Nana (I have never used her name and the possessive pronoun is the only way I know how to describe her) because I had been thinking about her all morning as I was writing about my friend. My friend is a relative of my grandfather’s best man at his wedding, Maui Whaanga. Sorry, this is one of those convoluted relational descriptions that is so off-putting to a listener or reader but when my Nana met my friend Julz in a garden centre with me, they made the connection instantly.

I had my grandparents wedding photo on the table as I was writing. You can hardly see Maui in it; the fluty vase of freesias on top of the cake gets in the way. My Nana is wearing a dress similar to the one Grace Kelly wore in 1956 and it’s the same year. Her face is wide and beautiful with the high beam of her smile. It’s a lovely face she has always dismissed as being too round like the moon. Moonface she says and slaps her cheeks so she must have been called that in the playground. She was “Tom” at home, the only one of her sisters willing to climb trees like a boy.

In the photo her hand clutches the cake knife in that pent up fist she still wears even when her hand is empty. My Nana’s hands are the first pair I remember being in love with, they were warm, dry paddles and I’d play with her rings in church because church was so boring Jesus nailed himself to the cross.

Later in the day my mother rang me and I finished her sentence by saying, “Oh, I had a feeling that was her”, meaning the accident I’d read about online. Of course we have all sorts of intuitions that regularly don’t come true because for the next couple of weeks I was certain that she was going to die and made weepy spiritual preparations for the fact. Mum protected me on the phone and said it wasn’t that bad, but really, everyone including the doctors thought her injuries were going to be fatal.

Old people can’t survive that kind of bodily trauma, they are too ‘frail’. Her pelvis was shattered and at 85 the other horror was that she might actually live and not be able to walk again. My Nana is the busiest, most capable people I know and I couldn’t imagine her wanting to live without the use of her legs. As a former nurse of steely and saint-like reputation she was used to doing for others, the last thing she would want was for people to have ‘to do’ for her.

*

Grandad chose the site for the Mormon chapel in Dunedin. When I was about eight he showed me the cliff looming over it and said there had been an earthquake long ago which had thrust the cliff up and now you could see the layers of life in the stacked lines of coloured clay, it was like reading the rings of a tree. From here on the hill you could see across to the ocean and to the left up the harbour and the seven hills of the city looking back at you. But mostly you could see South Dunedin laid out like a perfectly square puzzle, all the poor little houses packed in together tighter than sardines. Dunedin has so many gothic, gingerbread temples to Jesus but the Mormon latecomer has the magnificent view and modernist needle in lieu of a cross.

When they built the chapel it was just a few families and the Māori(s) who did it. Nana has these small sixties black and white photos of toddlers bumbling around a building site. My mother is one of them and is wearing a dress for once.

Nana thought she was being generous making vats of vegetable soup and sandwiches for the Māori boys, she’d heard they were big eaters. When they still seemed hungry my Grandad told her to make a boil-up because that’s what they’d mumbled they really liked to eat and in her embarrassment she even made doughboys. She still thinks Māori(s) are big eaters, and that you mustn’t tell them that you like anything of theirs because they will give it to you on the spot. I laugh in the car when she tells me this and remind her that my father did the same thing when she liked his Ella Fitzgerald cd. She is also from the generation that is yet to acknowledge how generous we were with our land.

Nana says the night before the accident Jim, my Grandad, came to see her in her room. This was the first time in four years that he’d made a visit back from the dead. I can remember her saying before this that she just wanted him to ring her from heaven, collect even. I gloat to her that I dream of him at the caravan in Wanaka all the time and she gives me that suspicious look because she knows I have supernatural affectations.

Lying in the hospital bed she keeps an eye cocked to the general deficiencies of the nurses around her. Perhaps it was watching people do a job badly that she used to do so well which made her live and even walk again. That she clung onto life because all around her were systematic failures, balls of tangled wool to unpick like her mother did for 10 years in a Lazyboy Nana fed and watered.

The Orthopedic surgeon calls her “his” miracle and the entire hospital exhales when she is released. Except for the orderlies who remembered her from the eighties, the Health Care Assistants and the Filipino male nurses who pass her forensic scrutiny of their compassion. She has nothing but the greatest affection for the latter, they take their time with the lotion to stop her skin breaking down from the pressure of stagnant blood and are gentle when they hoist her because she can’t be manually turned onto her side, the pain then is shrieking and immense. It is possible that they flirted with her a little and it is possible she enjoyed that.

Really it was my mother that tethered my Nana to the earth like a get well balloon in a box. She goes into the hospital every day and proves herself as gentle and dedicated as her mother. She out cares for her and it woos her back from the brink. I don’t go in to the hospital much because I am too frightened of how I’ll find her, if she’ll be liking me that day... Because the last time I ‘d seen her before the accident we’d fought about a fridge and I’d made the grave mistake of asking what Jesus would do in this situation involving white ware. Like Jesus could belong to the angry sinner more than the furious saint.

For a long time she seems angry that the accident didn’t express pass her to heaven to be with Jim but lately she seems almost satisfied with the miracle of her survival. I tell her there is footage of the accident and if she ever wanted to fill in the blanks there is a journalist who would like to speak to her about her recovery and in return she could ask him questions about what he saw that day at the scene. She has no memory of the accident or the hours after.

We watch the news video of her being wheeled onto the ambulance. I find this ghoulish and she finds it fascinating, the mystery of a coat that survived unbloodied is solved. She turns to me and says, “I really am a miracle” without even mentioning her heavenly father and she looks like young Tom again swinging from tree to tree.

*

Before the accident she had just made a pilgrimage to the Temple in Hamilton to seal her dead sister-in-law’s name into the genealogical tomb of a Mormon heaven. Never mind that Aunty Jean wouldn’t have wanted this and would’ve flashed her bum at the notion of having to spend eternity with a queer sect; Aunty Jean’s resistance may even have spurred Nana on. In Hamilton she stays in a Mormon dorm with bunks, no less, and a group of Māori women remember my grandfather playing stick games with them at the big Mormon hui–a–tau they used to have in the sixties. They make her sit with them for meals and coo and fuss over this white kuia to have a proper feed.

*

For the last couple of years she has been writing a book about the history of the Mormon Church in Dunedin, I have helped her with this a little, and so has my mother, a lot. It’s our penance for not believing a word of the faith to act as handmaidens for her grief and to overlook her creative punctuation, erratic capitalisation and breathy syntax.

My Nana says really it was the Māori(s) who took to Mormonism first in New Zealand because the missionaries took advantage of their hospitality and were willing to eat pots of eel and sleep on flax mats in smoky, smelly whare. I don’t tell her I think the Māori(s) are the ones who have really got their clutches on my Grandad and maybe even Aunty Jean and it was good of them to give him a break from throwing rolled up newspapers between hands to warn his wife of the danger that is both everywhere and nowhere at once.

Of course, there is no sign of him in the footage of the accident except for the view we used to share from the church and me hanging over the fence while he talked the shape of the city into me. The morning is crisp and Gwen, my Nana, is on a mission to cross the road like a river but she won’t make it to him this time, the women aren’t ready to receive her just yet*

*Nana died this morning. On Sunday I made my peace with the women. This time they were ready.