Solomon's Song Read Free Page B

lightest fingers in London Town, the small boy who never knew his real name, ended the way he’d started his life, unknown, unwanted and unloved, his final epitaph a beak’s joke in bad taste. He will lie headless beneath a tombstone, which, when Satan asks him for a reckoning of his life, he won’t even be able to call his own.
    Hawk wishes Mary ‘Long life’, which is what Ikey would have done in the same circumstances.
    Mary returns to Hobart after the funeral. Hawk gives Maggie’s two-room home and all her possessions to Flo, Maggie’s little friend, now married to the grocer’s son, Tom. He visits Caleb Soul, who accompanied Tommo and himself to the gold diggings at Lambing Flat and has since become one of Hawk’s dearest friends, to say his farewell. Then, after telling all at Tucker & Co. that he is going home to Hobart, and attending a gathering in the dock area of the entire company where he receives a handsome crystal goblet in gratitude for his services from Captain Tucker, Hawk sets sail for New Zealand.
    On his arrival Hawk makes his way to the stretch of Auckland Harbour where the Maori boats moor and catches a coastal ketch that will take him to the Ngati Haua tribe under Chief Tamihana, in whose household Tommo’s daughter, Hinetitama, is being raised.
    Hawk discovers that Tommo is dying from the wound to his head and is in constant pain. Often he sinks into a delirium but even when he is conscious, the pressure on his brain renders him incoherent, so that the words in his mouth twist into gibberish. But sometimes he has brief periods in the early mornings when he is quite lucid.
    During one such period he asks Hawk to leave his daughter with the Maori until she comes of age and can decide for herself whether she wants the life of a pakeha or wishes to stay with her people.
    ‘The Maori be her family now, even if her name be Solomon. Let her choose later, though Gawd knows why she’d want to be one of us.’ In these coherent periods it is the same old sardonic Tommo, ever on the alert for the mongrels.
    ‘I shall see she never lacks for anything,’ Hawk promises. ‘I will respect your wish, though Mary pleads she would very much like her, as her granddaughter, to be brought up well at home with every privilege and the very best of education.’
    ‘Tell her then to leave something in her will for my daughter, my share,’ Tommo replies. ‘Although from what I’ve seen of privilege and education it breeds only greed and superiority.’
    Hawk protests and Tommo laughs. ‘The Maori have all but lost their land and it has been took from them by educated men, men of the Church, committing a crime in the name of God and the governor himself doing the same in the name of the Queen. These are all educated men, all greedy and superior, all mongrels.’
    Hawk, ever the rational one, replies, ‘That is an oversimplification, Tommo, goodness is not replaced by greed when a man becomes educated nor is greed absent in the poor. Man is by his very nature rapacious and wealth has forever been the precursor of power, the need to be seen as superior. Hinetitama must have some learning, you would not want your daughter to be shackled by ignorance and superstition.’
    Tommo looks wearily up at Hawk. ‘You are the only good man I know what’s keen on book learnin’. Let my daughter grow up the natural way of her people, she will be taught to read and count and that will be enough.’ Tommo grins, it is near to being the old Tommo grin and Hawk’s heart is filled with love for his dying twin. ‘Unless you can teach her how to handle a pack of cards, eh? You must give her my Tiki.’ He touches the Tiki Hawk has returned to him and his expression grows suddenly serious. ‘Hawk, there is bad blood in me and it will be in my daughter also. If she stays among the Maori it will not come out so soon. Please tell her to wear it always, that the Tiki will protect her.’
    ‘Your axe? Is this the bad blood you