Read the story being discussed on Jesse Mulligan’s show on Radio New Zealand on 26 April 2018
Fishing the Pungapunga
Mum was worried about the car. She didn’t tell me that then. She just said our spot was good enough and that I was a nuisance for asking.
I wanted to wade across the river and round the bend — where I caught my fish with Dad.
“This is a better spot,” she said. “Look how still the water is — and deep.”
It was her idea to go. We had spent that entire winter in the house. I went to school and she went to work, but we spent the rest of our time inside. I didn’t visit any friends, and guests only advanced as far as the front door, even Aunty Mahina and Aunty Rona.
On that warm day, she told me we were going fishing. I didn’t know what to think at first, but then I was excited. She told me that she used to go fishing with Dad too and that we still had his kit. She let me hold it on my lap as we drove to Ngapuke with his rod in the back seat. We drove the car down the narrow road to the river — the road no-one notices until after they’ve passed by. She swore when she saw a big rut in the road, but she drove over it and we got to the river.
She must have fussed over the keys and her shoes — she always did when she went outside. She would have double-checked the car doors and, even after going to the riverside, gone back again to check the lights.
She’d say I chattered her ears off, but I don’t remember it that way. I remember her voice — over-excited, scaring all the fish. Look at this, look at that, stay away from there.
She carried Dad’s kit. “You’ll drop it,” she said. I was too small to carry the rod.
“Not here,” I told her. “I caught my fish down there.” I pointed round the bend across the river. “With Daddy.”
“Well this place is fine,” she said. “And Daddy’s not here.” Those were her words for years to come — reminding me he was gone and that I was alone with her. The words fell on sharp ears, but dulled my tongue.
It was a warm day even without the sun, but the sun came out with the opening of the kit, and I pressed into her shoulder to look inside. It wasn’t a modern tackle box, but a simple construction like a metal lunch pail with a single clasp pinching it closed. Opened, it still smelled like Dad. It was filled with man trinkets, not just fishing gear. Lures, hooks, buttons, and spare pieces of twine filled the curious compartments on the top shelf. In the belly of the box was a screw driver, part of a broken reel, bits of cloth, and little tubes of indiscernible contents.
Mum rifled through the smaller compartments. I remember being distracted by a tui flying above us, scuffling from the bank across the river, filling the silence left by Mum’s voice.
“Where is it?” she interrupted the air. I waited to see what would happen. “Your father’s lure. Where is it?” she repeated. “The paua shell. Do you remember it?”
I did. It was the one I used to catch my fish, but I didn’t tell her that. “What about that one?” I asked, pointing to a grey-feathered lure.
She tried. We both did, but we couldn’t figure it out. “He showed me how to do it with the paua shell,” she said. She said this several times. I held the lure for her while she examined the rod, the line, the hook. “Never mind,” she said, but her voice was sharp as if she was biting on something.
We walked to the river’s edge, onto the large rocks against the deep pool. Mum held the hook towards me so that I could see the old bone, before she flung it out and over the water.
Dad told me the story of his hook and line. The hook was made from human bone, and the line had been hand woven. They belonged to his grandfather. He told me lots of stories the day I caught my fish. I didn’t like the one about the hook. My favourite was about Dad and his friends catching kahawai. He told me how they gathered at the Whanganui river mouth and how the fish swarmed all around them — and how they swarmed the fish with their boats.
“I wonder if the kahawai will come here,” I told my Mum.
“There’s only trout in this river,” she said.
We stood in silence, Mum holding the rod over the water and me watching for movement. Mum reeled the line closer and shifted her feet before playing it out again. She didn’t tell me stories. I just listened to the water and watched the sunlight brighten the corner of the pool. I wondered if the fish would come out to see the sun.
There was movement, and I thought it was a fish, but Mum swore again and I saw what had happened. The line was caught in a branch above the pool. She fiddled with the reel and shifted her position, jigging the line, trying to free it from its inhospitable nest. I had watched Dad free a line once, and was just about to tell Mum what I saw him do, when the line fell.
There was no snap to the line, just a collapse, a receding into the water, one half fishing from the branch, the other withdrawing to the rod at my mother’s behest. Having reeled in the broken line, she said, “Well, that’s that then.”
We walked back to the kit and clasped the lid shut, locking away the trinkets and Dad’s smell. Then we returned to the car and drove back to town.
© Antony Millen, “Fishing the Pungapunga” won the 2014 Heartland Short Story Competition. It originally appeared in the December 2016 edition of ‘Antipodes: A Global Journal of Australian/New Zealand Literature’. published by Wayne State University Press, Detroit.
Antony Millen is a Nova Scotian living and writing in Taumarunui, New Zealand. He is the author of three novels: Redeeming Brother Murrihy, Te Kauhanga and The Chain.
