Free A Many Coated Man by Owen Marshall

sky is a cool, slate blue, cleansed anew, the immediate environment beneath it soiled. On the hill around the isolated cemetery and in the paddocks by the country school and the minor cheese factory, whole areas of grass are trampled down, littered with pie wrappers and plastic kiwi juice containers. Some fire sites still smoulder and the hundred Angel Hire chairs have been taken late at night and set around them as the last of the crowd sought warmth. On the morning air a stench drifts from the portable loos which have been quite unable to cope with the numbers. The eucalypt tree in the graveyard has been partly broken down and Les Croad and a few helpers from the Charismatic Cambrian Church have already a pile of abandoned property on the gravel of the small cemetery carpark — coats, car rugs, bags and food bins, a hearing aid and a Panda Bear, a size eleven left shoe, a book of chutney and relish recipes, a Kurdish prayer belt with its crescents far from home. Cars are scattered over the lower site, some left because they wouldn’t start, some not found before the offer of a lift, some stymied in a search for a new exit, some used to sleep in by people wholike Slaven were too dog-tired to face the drive. Old Hurinui is a small figure walking down from the bush where he has seen in the new day.
    ‘Ah,’ says Slaven. ‘Jesus, I’m stiff.’ He arches and stretches as best he can in the car.
    ‘Was it what you wanted though?’ says Kellie.
    ‘It’s odd. Only since the hospital have I felt the compulsion to speak like that, of those sorts of things, and now I find that people do respond. Do you know what I mean? You wonder whether there’s the possibility of real communication. I find I can do it.’
    ‘What’s the outcome, though. I mean if you can create all this enthusiasm for agreed views, how do you use it to make things better? What’s the process by which the gathering of so many people actually gets anything done?’
    ‘Political pressure, I suppose. We’re just feeling our way, aren’t we. At least now I know I’m not kidding myself. After all I could have had some aberration as a result of the accident. No one likes to be a laughing stock.’
    ‘You feel okay when you do it?’
    What can he answer. Does he tell her that when he gets underway, lifts himself and soars on the convections of expectation and identification from his audience that he feels too the stirring in the chrysalis of the world yet to be revealed. Look instead, then, on the reassuring texture of Tuamarina around them both, the exact physics of the kinks in the plastic of the kiwi juice bottles, the small, pale cross on the top of the Wairau monument and the cynicism in the lines of Croad’s outdoor face as he wonders how best to deal with the mess.
    ‘Do they remember when they all get home,’ says Kellie. Like Les Croad she is inclined to be disillusioned by the aftermath of such magnificent and complete conversion. ‘Perhaps it’s like a rock concert, or an open air Shakespearean performance and they get it all out of their system and carry on just the same as before.’
    ‘I guess we’ll find out about that.’
    Despite the stink of the latrines, the litter, abandoned fires and trampled camps and tracks in the grass as if a circus had moved on, Slaven is sure that an important thinghas happened at Tuamarina. He has been given a sign, a mandate even. Croad is standing with Thackeray Thomas at about the place on which the speakers’ truck was parked last night. Croad waves an arm despairingly to indicate the enormity of the clean-up before them and Thackeray is placating him, telling him that there will be a full Cambrian youth team out within an hour. His church is very big on conservation and ecological matters. Thackeray comes over to Slaven’s car to congratulate him anew. There is no envy — he has his own achievements and is grateful to be part of what has happened. ‘I’ve never before seen the like of it,’