The Bone Tree

by Airana Ngarewa

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

After the death of both parents, Kauri and Black must find a way to survive in a world that doesn't care much about them. Kauri embarks on a journey into his father's past, to come to terms with the trauma he's experienced in his short life, and to break the cycle of violence he fears perpetuating as he raises his younger brother.

The Bone Tree is a gritty coming of age novel, where the unforgettable young protagonist faces immense challenges, and the stakes are life or death - yet it also has a lyrical beauty, and a powerful message of love at its heart.

It gives voice to characters who are on the margins of society, raised in poverty, and who have a deep mistrust in the systems that are meant to protect them - and it considers the question of how we can best protect the ones we love.

Release date: August 8, 2023

Publisher: Hachette New Zealand

Print pages: 304

Sample

We left the house early to get some practice in, burying ourselves beneath our hoodies, tucking our hands in our pockets, bending at the hip and following the maze the rabbits, stoats and runaway sheep had carved through the gorse. Mum says the first of the gorse came here on a boat. Like the farmers and the old man’s family. When it hooked up with our soil, it gave birth to this new kind of plant. It was still gorse, but it grew as hardy as the maunga was tall. Through heavy winds and droughts and snowfall it spread, flowering yellow half the year and spending the rest of the time sharpening its limbs, crossing its roots beneath the soil, waiting for some kid to come charging by in shorts.

Ahead of me, Black dodged the thorns with ease. I was longer, lankier and the gorse’s limbs stretched every which way in the shadows. My calves always got cut. Would help if I covered them, Black reckoned, but you can’t manu in pants.

The kid was named after the All Blacks. Apparently, the old man won big on them the night before Black was born. Dad might’ve been taking the piss when he said that, though. Who could know for sure? If not the rugby team, the kid could’ve been named for the gang. The old man did have a fist tattooed on his calf. I guess neither of us really know too much about him. His life before us anyway. Drinking, smoking and blowing up over this, that and everything.

We stripped down to our shorts and shoes on the other side of the gorse, shaking out our hoodies and plucking spikes from our clothes. I spat on my fingers and cleaned the fresh cuts below my knee. Old Māori medicine, Mum reckoned. Nothing like a little saliva to stop the bleeding. And they were only scratches anyway, barely drawing blood.

Once we were sorted, we chucked our clothes back on, climbed the steel-wire fence that bordered the hills of gorse, and gunned it across the ballhead’s paddock. Fella was hard-case – a straight-up nutter. Lucky for us, he hardly ever came this way so early. Was most likely still hosing down the cowshed. The kid sprinted, leaping every ditch and mound, while I powerwalked with all the grace of a koro without his cane. My shoulder was buggered from one of Dad’s blow-ups so I couldn’t run too good.

A chatter of magpies watched from a broken trough, their whare nestled beneath a slab fallen from its concrete base. They’re why this paddock was abandoned. Not even the ballhead was nutty enough to stick his stock near these taniwha. They were violence incarnate, protecting their turf like they were prospecting for a patch.

By the time I’d cleared the final fence, the kid was in the water, his hoodie, socks and sneakers thrown over the rocks. Black’s cheeks were soft, his arms gangly, his stomach distended. The top and sides of his head were cut short and the locks at the back were long and brown in the water and curly and ginger in the sunlight. Handsome, half-caste and ranga though he was, he couldn’t manu for the life of him. Boy’s body came out of the water redder than the behind of his head.

He floated in the belly of the river bend, doggy paddling ’til I approached, then ducked underwater. The bend was wider and deeper than the rest of the river so the water moved slow. I waited on the grass, searching for him and he exploded out of the tide, eyes rolled back into his head, tongue stretched out across his chin.

‘Pūkana!’

The water swallowed the kid again and I bit my tongue until he resurfaced. ‘You’re an idiot, aye.’

‘Nah.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Why?’

‘I saw all that water you swallowed.’

‘So?’

‘So you’re an idiot.’



This bend in the river was our own. We’d discovered it like Kupe. No whitebaiters, no whalers, no cows shitting in the water upstream. For that, we were grateful for the gorse. It kept everyone away – even Mum and the old man, when those two were still walking ’round.

I’ve always done all I could to keep the kid away from their drama. From Dad’s going at the old lady when his temper got the best of him. By saving Black from all that, I reckoned I could trick him into loving his daddy. It’s hard work hating a parent, hating every piece of them you find inside yourself. And anyway, the old man has been better the past couple of years, his blowing up more a monthly mistake than an every–other–day thing like it was when I was little.

The river bend was bordered by a pair of cliffs, the side nearest our house partially collapsed, creating a sketchy ramp up and down. There were trees and flax and toetoe and masses of stone spotted about the place – a tribe of little ones at the water’s edge and a few giants ones, the chiefs, cooling their feet in the river. You couldn’t jump from all of them; still, me and the bro were always finding new places to manu. Our latest favourite was a tree that’d half fallen over to become a diving board.

That’s where I taught the kid the technique. You squat, you pop, you stretch while you swing your legs, then just before you touch the water you fold your body into a V, arms over your puku. If it sounded like a gun going off, you’d fucken nailed it.

‘Give it a go, aye, and I’ll watch from underwater.’

I let out the air in my lungs, letting my body sink into the river. The kid’s silhouette danced above the ripples, the boy leaping into the air and breaking water with the small of his back.

‘Was that it?’

‘Nope.’

‘Was it close at least?’

‘Close enough for today, I reckon.’

Where the water was shallow, you could see the critters darting backwards and forwards between the rocks, a greenstone hue concealing anything further than a few metres from shore. Where it was deep, you could feel you weren’t alone, the occasional monster brushing against your feet. The best of the lot were the ducks; the kid and I were their friends. Every day, they would float by us, snapping at the tide, and every day, we would call to them.

‘Haere mai e ngā rakiraki.’ They were Māori ducks so Mum reckoned we had to call to them in Māori.

It was a waste of time. Weeks went by and the ducks never turned their heads. Eventually, we’d asked Mum if there were any other words we should use and she told us to take some bread down. ‘No Māori, man or woman or rakiraki, would turn down a good feed.’ After that, we were off to the races. The ducks wouldn’t leave us alone. They followed the kid while he doggy paddled and watched me while I manu’d, and they tore up the bread the moment it hit the water. They didn’t share, so the kid and I fed them separately. It was one of our river rules.

We’d made all sorts of rules to look after this place. You had to bring bread and you weren’t allowed to fish and you had to say thank you before you left; you couldn’t come alone and you weren’t allowed to drink the water and if you needed to pee you had to go up and do it on the ballhead’s fence.

After a few more manu, we said thank you to the river and drip-dried on the biggest rock, where the rising sun had left it warm. We never brought towels. Drip-drying was another one of our rules; the time the kid and I would talk, trading questions and spitting in the cracks in the rocks, watching the saliva bubble. It wasn’t that we ignored each other at home, just had enough going on between the house and the old man that we didn’t talk much.

‘Better head back before you get burnt, aye, Black?’

‘Soon.’

‘You like that name? Or you reckon we should get you another one?’

‘Nah.’

‘Nah to you liking your name or the other thing?’

‘I like it.’

‘Yeah?’

He screwed up his face, sat up and poked his tongue at me. ‘It’s better than yours.’

I laughed. ‘You reckon?’

He rolled onto his stomach, where the rock was dry and still warm and rested his head on his hands. ‘Yeah, no-one even knows how to spell it.’

‘K – a – u – r – i. Kauri.’

‘That’s not how Dad spells it.’

‘That’s ’cause Dad hates the reo.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means Mum wanted me to have a Māori name and the old man wanted me to have an English one. So Mum called me Kauri after the tree, and Dad called me Cody after the bourbon.’

‘What’s the real one?’

‘Dunno.’

Dry everywhere except our undies, we brushed the dust from our bodies and got dressed, and started on our way home, pulling at our jocks sticking to the insides of our legs. We used to take our undies off and stow them in our pockets until one day the kid’s shorts caught on a thorn in the gorse and he had to walk home with his buttcheek out. Boy had no shame but I was embarrassed for him. That day, we started a new rule: undies, whether soaked through or damp, stayed on. Washing the old man’s every other night was more than enough ass in my life.

I helped Black through the fence and scaled it myself to cross the ballhead’s paddock one last time, the kid sprinting as fast as his wet jocks would let him. The ballhead must have spotted us down at the bend because as I stepped foot on the field I heard an engine roar, and that no-hair-having muppet came tearing through three sets of paddocks towards us.

Ignoring him, I walked on, edging myself as close to the gorse as possible in case things kicked off, buying some time for the kid to get ahead. The ballhead pulled his ute up beside me and watched the kid disappear, his engine idling in first gear, rolling only a little faster than I was. Then he put his foot down, swinging the vehicle in front of me, cutting me off.

‘Up to, sir?’

‘Wondering what a little shit like you is doing on my land.’ His face twisted into a snarl. ‘I had a quad stolen the other day. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would yah?’

‘No.’

‘What about that old lady of yours, she know anything?’

The fire grew hot in my hands. ‘Get stuffed.’

If I got anything from the old man it was his quickness to explode in anger.

‘You cheeky fucken Maari.’ I must’ve looked to the ballhead like the kid looked to me. A lanky little half-caste boy – the only difference being my hair was less a Māori mullet than a mop without a bucket. ‘You disrespect me again and I’ll shoot you like a dog. You ever read that thing?’ He pointed with his eyes to a red and white sign strapped to a gate. ‘It says if anyone steps foot on my farm, I’ll put a bullet in ’em. You know why I put it there?’

I didn’t answer. The heat in my hands disappeared on me and I was a coward again.

‘Because one day, when I’m sick and tired of my shit being taken by a bunch of no-good fanatics like you and yours, I’m gonna load my shotgun and scream bloody murder.’ He hoicked a load of snot and spat at the grass in front of my feet. ‘And when the cops come to clean up the mess, I’m going to kick back on my La-Z-Boy with a cup of tea in my hands and answer every question of theirs by pointing to that there sign.’

A chorus of cicadas sung in the background, the ballhead’s rage an insult to the softness of the world around us. A light wind blowing, the lunchtime sun radiating warmth.

The redness in his eyes eventually settled. His frame dwindled and he re-revealed himself. A harmless stick of a man taking his stress out on the only one in range. Still, I didn’t reply. Didn’t square up or bark back. I watched the man un-puff his fur and slowly regret what he’d said. Farming was a hard life, I knew. Hours like that will make a young man old, a fat man thin. A good man paranoid the locals were plotting to take back what they both knew should never have been taken.

Mum almost never talked about this side of things – the confiscations. It slipped through only when she told stories about famous fighters. Wiremu Kīngi and Tītokowaru and those kind of guys. Even the old man liked those stories. Ancestry aside, he must’ve seen himself in them. Fella was might-makes-right down to the core of his being.

The ballhead swung his ute around, told me to get the fuck off his land, and drove into the distance. For a moment, I stood still. Unable to move. It wasn’t ’til the kid popped his head out of the gorse and hurried me on that I got to walking again.

I scaled the fence, pulled my hoodie over my head and buried my hands in my pockets and followed Black through the gorse maze. He stopped every now and again to check that I was still there. When at last we popped out the other side he said, ‘All good?’

I nodded, my tongue swollen in my mouth.

‘Don’t worry,’ the kid said. ‘He’s a fricken racist.’



The sun took his seat atop the sky. The maunga called it from the horizon, a snowcapped summit bordered by a family of ranges hardly tall enough to be seen above the rolling landscape. The fields of the other farmers. Mostly quiet types. Men never seen without a whip. A tractor or a motorbike. Always somewhere to be, something to do. Black used to wave at them. Dickheads never waved back.

Our own paddock sat at the bottom of a small basin, our house at its heart, a full kilometre from the road. We were caged in by fences, number 8 wire and chicken mesh and boxthorn, the southwest hillside alive with gorse. The fences guarded nothing, could not guard anything given their state. Each munted in its own way. They boxed a no-man’s-land, no crops growing nor sheep nor cattle grazing. The whole area was a dump. Our family – what was left of it – a lonely island floating among the rubbish.

The dirt was littered with stone, the dry earth every shade of yellow and green. The soil was unfriendly, supporting only the hardiest plant life, weeds and a single tree. Back in the day, that tree was the guardian of this place. The only thing beautiful here. It used to bear berries that could keep for ages. Life has left it jack but a mound of bones shaking and rattling with the wind, warning any would-be visitors back the way they came.

When we first moved out here, people used to come by all the time. Always men. Always in shirts and dress shoes. They came with legal spiels and reams of paper, insisting that Black and I attend school. Or else.

Else what, the old man would say. And that was that. No cop cars. No bad guys with baseball bats. They waited longer and longer before each visit and then one day stopped coming. Who knows why? Maybe Dad finally scared them off. Scowled at them and they went running. Maybe Mum wrote one of her letters, telling them how she was teaching us the old way. Probably they were just over it. What’s another couple of country bumpkins fallen through the cracks? Got enough to deal with in the city, they must’ve thought, let alone driving all the way out here only to get nowhere with this lot again.

Don’t blame them, to be honest. I’d have done the same. Fuck dealing with the old man if you had any other option. Fella was a monster: another shade of nutter. Like the ballhead went at me, the old man used to go at Mum, threatening violence and, when he didn’t get his way, making good on it. Of course, I got my fair share too – nothing like what she got, though. The difference was I was quick to cower. Mum would bow to no man.

Dad was built like a bull in his day. Small and mighty, short and muscled. His face was pale and his shoulders broad and when he marched the streets men would open up to him like the parting sea. None risked crossing him. His presence warned all passers-by to keep their distance. But, like the old lady said, everyone’s made soft in the end. Same thing that raises them high slowly and suddenly cripples them.

He was an old man now, lying alive and lifeless in the centre of the lounge – lost in a sort of purgatory. Fella has lain like that for nearly a fortnight, his chest shifting, his bottom lip quivering and the rest of him fading away.

We don’t know exactly what happened. Mum left us six months ago and the old man moved into the lounge, never sleeping in their bed again. After that, every day it was the same old: go get wasted in the city, walk back well after midnight, coma out on the couch, jacket and boots still on, jersey reeking of cheap piss and cigarettes. Bourbon and blues. Then finally, the weekend before last, he didn’t wake up. Wasn’t the first time he slept through the day, so Black and I weren’t too fussed. When another two passed, we knew it was over. The old man on the way out.

We haven’t called an ambulance yet. And we don’t plan to. The old man was the only one keeping CYPS away, stopping the kid from being taken. If they found out Dad was dying, no doubt they’d come again.

I don’t reckon the doctors could help anyway. We tried before, with Mum. A fat lot of good it did. Too much time in the books made them know-it-alls, too clever to listen to a bunch of snot-nosed Maari worried about their health.



One day, the old lady’s stomach started to conspire against her, sharp pangs of pain knocking her to her knees. Months went by, and the pangs came and went, the old lady collapsing every time they struck. There was no predicting when they’d come, morning or night, doing the washing or reading or growling at me for picking on Black. Then it was like the old man hit her, Mum folding over in an instant, clutching at her middle, the book or the washing or the rest of her growling spilled all over the floor.

The first two or three she ignored. After the fourth, she called a doctor ’round to check on her. I took Black to the river bend to give the old lady some space and when we returned she was wild, storming through the house, performing her chores with violence, muttering to herself. The next time the doctor came around, I hung out on the porch, eavesdropping, pretending I was hanging the laundry.

‘How’ve the cramps been, ma’am?’

‘I’ve told you this … they ain’t cramps. It feels like my stomach’s trying to burst through my ribcage.’

‘I understand—’

‘I don’t believe you do, actually. This ain’t lady stuff. Something’s happening. I can feel it. My body’s warning me.’

‘If the pain is getting worse, I can prescribe you some analgesics.’

‘I’m not asking for painkillers. Hika mā. I’m trying to warn you that something is up. More than cramps. I’ve had them. Whakarongo mai: This – ain’t – them.’

‘Let me be frank, ma’am. I am listening and your symptoms are entirely consistent with menopause. Everything you’ve said to me, I’ve heard it before. You’ve been going through it for a fortnight; I’ve been dealing with it for years. Now I might come across like some overeducated white ma. . .