The Luminaries

body rolled and juddered with each lurch of the cart. When they reached the Police Camp Tauwhare did not move. He sat waiting, still holding Wells’s ankle, while the other men conferred.
    The Hokitika cooper had agreed to knock together a pine coffin, ready for the funeral, and to fashion a rounded wooden headstone on which he would paint Crosbie Wells’s name and the two dates that bounded his life. (Nobody was sure of the actual year of his birth, but the year 1809 had been inked upon the flyleaf of his Bible: this was a plausible birth date, for it would place Crosbie Wells at fifty-seven years of age, and it was this date that the cooper would inscribe on the dead man’s wooden headstone.) Until these two orders were completed, however, and until the grave was dug, the gaol’s governor had directed Crosbie Wells to be laid out on the floor of his private study at the Police Camp, with a muslin bed sheet between his body and the ground.
    When the body was arranged with his hands folded across his chest, the gaoler ushered everyone from the room and pulled the door closed, causing the hallway to shiver. The interior walls of the gaoler’s house were made of patterned calico that had been stretched tight and tacked to the building’s frame, and when the timber creaked in the wind, or was disturbed by a heavy footfall or the sudden slam of a door, the walls all quivered and rippled, like the surface of a pool—so that, watching them tremble, one could not help but call to mind that two-inch space between the doubled cloth, that dead space around the framing, full of dust, and patterned by the moving shadows of the bodies in the room beyond.
    Someone has to stay with him, Tauwhare insisted. Wells could not be left alone, lying on the floor, without even a flame burning in the room, with no one to watch over him, touch him, pray over him, pray for him, or sing. Tauwhare tried to explain the principles of the
tangi
—but they weren’t principles, they were rites, too sacred for explanation,too sacred even to defend: they were simply the way things ought to be done, must be done. A spirit has not fully departed until the body is interred, he said. There are songs, and prayers … The gaoler reprimanded him, calling him a heathen. Tauwhare became angry. Somebody has to stay with him until the burial, he said. I will stay with him until the burial. Crosbie Wells was my friend and my brother. Crosbie Wells, the gaoler returned, was a white man, and unless a passing shadow has deceived me, certainly no brother of yours. The funeral will be on Tuesday morning; if you want to make yourself useful, you can lend a hand to the digging of his grave.
    But Tauwhare stayed. He kept vigil on the porch, and then in the garden, and then in the alley between the gaoler’s cottage and the Camp—and from each station he was chased away. At last the gaoler emerged from the gaol-house with a long-handled pistol in his hand. He would shoot Tauwhare if he saw him within fifty yards of the Camp at any hour before the moment Crosbie Wells’s body was lowered into the ground, so help him God, he said. So Tauwhare backed up fifty paces, counting the steps, and sat down against the wooden façade of the Grey and Buller Bank. From this distance he watched over his old friend’s body, and spoke beloved words for him, on the final night before his spirit sailed away.
    ‘When Crosbie died,’ said Tauwhare, ‘I was in the Arahura.’
    ‘You were in the valley?’ said Balfour. ‘You were there when he died?’
    ‘I was setting a trap for kereru,’ said Tauwhare. ‘Do you know kereru?’
    ‘Some kind of bird, is it?’
    ‘Yes—very tasty. Good for stewing.’
    ‘All right.’
    Balfour’s derby hat had begun to drip. He took it off and banged it against his leg. Already his suit had darkened from grey to a sodden charcoal. His shirt had become translucent, showing through it the pink of his skin.
    ‘I set the trap before nightfall, to catch the birds in the morning,’ Tauwhare said. ‘From the ridge you can see Crosbie’s house—from above. That night four men went in.’
    ‘Four?’ said Balfour, replacing his hat. ‘You don’t mean three—one man on a black stallion, very tall; two other men with him, shorter, both on bay mares? That’s Alistair Lauderback—and Jock, and Augustus. The men who found his body, you know—who alerted the police.’
    ‘I saw three men on horseback, yes,’ said Tauwhare, nodding