Free The Shark God by Charles Montgomery Page B

through men’s hearts. The people stand dismayed
    By prophecies as mantic ghosts invade
    With alien voice the soothsayers in their trance.
    â€”J AMES M C A ULEY, Captain Quiros
    The nearest village to Fred’s mountain camp was Port Resolution, on the south side of the volcano. I followed Stanley there and found the village chief on the dirt floor of his hut, holding his stomach. There wasn’t much to him. Flies gathered at the edge of his eyes, which had sunk deeply into his skull. Skin hung from his face like soggy paper. A doctor had told the chief that his liver had simply given up trying to process all that kava, but the chief and everyone else in Port Resolution knew that grog wasn’t the problem.
    â€œIt’s Fred,” Stanley told me as we retreated from the hut. “He has poisoned the chief with his magic.”
    Port Resolution was a perfect teardrop of glowing aquamarine nestled against a long sweep of black sand. Palms hung languidly over the beach. Men threw fishnets from outrigger canoes. Steam curled from vents on the forested ridges that led to Yasur. The bay once served as the base for Tanna’s first Presbyterians, but now its two hundred villagers were served by no less than four churches: Presbyterian, Seventh-day Adventist, Assemblies of God, and an outpost of the Neil Thomas Ministries, an evangelical outfit from Australia. The residents drifted back and forth between faiths like butterflies on flowers. There was a Seventh-day Adventist school, which meant that children born to pagan families learned the Bible early on, then switched back to kastom , pigs, and kava when they hit puberty. Church bells rang each morning, but Stanley’s John Frum string band practiced on the soccer field each afternoon, after which we retired to the nakamal for our kava. If a boy was Adventist he couldn’t drink kava, but he was still expected to chew it for his father’s nightly brew. The chief of Port Resolution was pagan, but his son, Wari, was Adventist. That caused a slight problem, since Wari was responsible for the village’s shark stone, a magic rock that could be used to manipulate the habits of sharks and mackerel. He wouldn’t show me the shark stone, but he told me how it worked.
    â€œIf you want to attract fish,” said Wari, “you get some kastom leaves and rub them on the stone and leave it in a special tabu place.”
    â€œBut you are Adventist. You can’t eat fish without scales. You can’t eat shark.”
    â€œTrue, but if I am the keeper of the shark stone, it’s tabu to eat the shark anyway. I must treat it like a god. And besides, the ancestors didn’t use the shark stone for catching fish. They used it to make the sharks eat our enemies.”
    Thus Wari dispatched any ideological conflict.
    The villagers had built a kitchen and a clutch of rough bungalows on a bluff above the bay and erected a sign: Port Resolution Yacht Club. There was no dock, but the yacht club had a commodore who went to great lengths to take care of visiting yachties: for example, if the radio forecast a cyclone, it was his job to put special leaves in the ocean in order to calm the wind and waves.
    Nobody wanted to help me track down Fred. No wonder. People were terrified of him. The prophet had eclipsed John Frum as the source of gossip and myth on Tanna. Everyone had a Fred rumor to pass on. Some accused Fred of cursing people. Others said that Fred was a pervert: according to one story, he enjoyed sitting in a pit above which were placed two thin boards; women were forced to step across those boards so Fred could peer up their skirts. Then of course there was the one about Fred throwing babies into the volcano.
    Those were rumors. What seemed more alarming to me was the effect the prophet was having on human geography. Families from all over Tanna had abandoned their gardens in order to join Fred on the volcano. Farmland was going fallow. Pigs