Page 40 of Kiwi Sin
When the first tear fell on the white plastic, I released the fabric and used it to mop it up. I couldn’t get salt water on my beautiful sewing machine that Gabriel had bought me with the money he’d saved, that he’d fastened down under a tarp against the weather, that he’d carried into the house for me. That he’d wrapped in pinkpaper.I’d folded the paper neatly and laid it beside the machine, and now, I stroked my hand over it. It was shiny, and slick, and so cheerful.
Happy Birthday,written all over it, because he’d wanted me to be happy. To have a present. To have a cake. To blow out candles.
He'd bought mepink.
When my throat closed, my chest heaved, and the sobs came, I buried my face in that scrap of fabric.
I’d brought shame on my family. I’d caused so much trouble. Daisy wouldn’t say it, but Gray knew. That was why he’d looked so sad, and so tired. He’d done everything he could to help Daisy, to helpus,and I’d ruined it, because I’d wanted too much. Because I’d wanted a birthday, and more than that. I’d wanted Gabriel, and somehow, they all knew.
I couldn’t have him even if he’d wanted me, though, because I was too young.
I’d thought that, when we were out of Mount Zion, we could make our own rules, but there were always rules.
I couldn’t sit anymore. I lay down on the bed on my stomach, held the pillow tight, and cried into it, so Frankie wouldn’t hear. So Gray wouldn’t hear. So Daisy wouldn’t hear, after she’d risked everything—risked herlife—to get us out.
I didn’t know how to do things right. I tried and tried,but I could never seem to work out how to do this. How to go to school and like it. How to be with my family and stay in the background like I always had, like I was supposed to do, and not ask for things. It was like the needs just came out anyway, and everybody could see them.
I couldn’t hurt Gray. I couldn’t hurt my uncle and aunt, who’d always been so kind.
And, oh, how I couldn’t hurt Gabriel.
16
ANOTHER BIRTHDAY
Oriana
Winter passed, like winter always did, and spring came. I never saw Gabriel now, and only heard anything of him and the rest from Gray. I told myself that it was for the best, and if I thought of him at night … well, I knew pain. I’d left my mum and my sisters, my cousins and my friends and the life I’d known, and now, I’d left Gabriel, or he’d left me, or, more likely, there was nothing there to leave. I had to go on, because I couldn’t go back, and besides—“pursuing your dreams” isn’t exactly a value you’re brought up with in Mount Zion. So I sewed myself new clothes on the machine he’d given me, grateful for the gift every time I used it, learning from my mistakes and discovering how to find inexpensive remnants of the beautiful fabrics I craved, just enough for a pair of flowing trousers or a soft shirt. I rode the bus to school with Frankie and watched lambs frolicking in the paddocks and new buds swelling on the trees, and, back at home again, helped Iris prune the fruit trees and prepare the beds for spring planting, clean the beehives and install new ones, and, most excitingly, shear our little herd of silken-fleeced Suri alpacas for the first time.
Cream, fawn, brown, black, and white, their fleece falling away to make blankets of fibers soft as cashmere, warmer than wool, with a luster that could only be compared to silk. We cleaned and combed the fleece into roving, then sent it to the processing mill and got it back as … yarn.Beautifulyarn, which would yield garments with the most wonderful drape. Some of it, we sold at the market, giving Gray his share of the proceeds, Iris most of the rest, and measuring out a percentage for me. That last had been Gray’s idea. He’d said, “It may be my land and my cash outlay, but it’s your labor and your idea, and you deserve to profit from it.” More money in my savings account.
Some of the yarn, though, I held back. I bought for a wholesale price I worked out with Gray, which he kindly advanced me against profits, because I had a plan.
People would pay somuchfor hand-knitted garments, I’d noticed from the other market stalls, if you were good enough at making them, if they were truly beautiful, if they could feel that they’d got a “find.” The tourists would pay the most of all. They liked the small, easy pieces, without sizes, that they could pack into their luggage and give as gifts, and they liked them more if they heard the story behind them. I knew that, because I talked with them every Saturday as I sold them honey and jam, springtime rhubarb and asparagus, and the pale-green and blue Araucana eggs that were everybody’s favorites. I noticed what they lingered over, and how excited they got about anything “authentic.” They wanted to remember their time in New Zealand, and they wanted gifts to take home. So, one day in early October, I took a breath, told myself,If it doesn’t work, I’ll sell the yarn instead,and started my venture.
Every night, as spring warmed into summer, when Frankie was working out quadratic equations and chemistry problems in her exercise book from her favorite spot at the kitchen bench, I made us a pot of tea, sat in the chair that looked out at the soft light in the garden, and knitted luxurious scarves and hats and fingerless gloves with a mitten flap, experimenting with cables and ribbing and bands of colorwork and, best of all, lace. Black and gray and brown for men, but mostly, beautiful things for women. White and cream and fawn, because they were so lovely, but also something extra. I learnt to hand-dye the yarns and worked with colored pencils to find the shades I wanted, mixtures of reds and oranges, of soft pinks and peaches and creams. My favorite colorway, though, was a glorious melding of vibrant blues, greens, and purples that became my bestseller. There was that pride again, but surely, God couldn’t hate your pride in working hard to make something beautiful from His gifts.
I tied each completed set into a bundle with rattan ribbons, put a sprig of dried lavender under the bow, and hand-lettered brown gift tags with my name and the name of the animal. Across the top, I wrote,Lavender Hill Farm, Otago, New Zealand,because that was the name Iris and I had given to our enterprise. All of it in dark blue ink, using a fountain pen and my best handwriting, so it looked authentic again. Personal, and special. My Mount Zion schooling had taught me beautiful handwriting. It was about the only thing that was actually useful.
I knitted at night, and I knitted more when it wasn’t my turn to make dinner. I knitted on the bus, during my babysitting jobs, and before my classes, and I knitted at lunch, once I’d finished eating and cleaned my hands.
Aisha told me, the first day I brought my work in to school, “That’s intensely odd of you,” and I said, “But Iamintensely odd. You already knew that. Besides, I can talk and knit at the same time,” and kept on doing it. If Daisy could become a nurse practitioner, if Frankie could catch up two missed years of school and go to university, if even Aunt Constance could get a job, why couldn’t I knit scarves? People Outside didn’t think anything was worth doing unless other people paid money for it, and I wasn’t going to make any money out of my biology knowledge.
Summer came, and two things happened. First, and most excitingly, three dams in our little alpaca herd gave birth to their crias. The first two births happened while I was at school, as everything I wanted to participate in seemed to do, but for the third, Iris came up to the yurt on a Sunday afternoon and got me.
The joy of watching the skinny little male emerge, all sticklike legs and an elongated tube of a body, with his coat of gorgeous chocolate brown, and the tenderness with which the new mum cleaned her baby … it gave me gooseflesh. I cleaned up mum under Iris’s direction, crooning soft words to her, telling her what a good job she’d done, carrying her baby for nearly a year, then giving birth to him so competently, her very first time. I watched to make sure she got rid of the afterbirth, too. Seeing the cria stagger over on his spindly legs to take his first drink, and the mum’s nose nudging him along to the right spot was pure sweetness, and watching him frisk around, still wobbly as anything, with his five-days-older cousin made me laugh. So that was another good thing.
Oh, and I also made it through almost all of Year 11, somehow, and didn’t look like failing anything. That was the second thing that happened. I was seventeen and a half, and it was over a year since I’d left Mount Zion.
And then there was the third thing. The warmth of summer was in the air on the early-December day that was my sister Prudence’s sixteenth birthday. The day we headed to Mount Zion once more.
The holiday season was in full swing now. My second Christmas Outside. There’s no feeling odder than driving through streets decorated with lights and wreaths and a gigantic, bearded figure called “Santa Claus”—the most blasphemous personage I’d ever seen, stuck up onto the outside of the Centre City Mall, beneath whose grinning visage shoppers were coming and going, carrying huge bags stuffed with things they probably didn’t even need—and heading for a compound where Christmas was a workday, just a shortened one with an extra-good dinner with a sweet afterward, cooked by women who didn’t get a shortened day at all.
This time, we hadn’t brought an army. This time, Daisy and Gray and Frankie and I headed for Mount Zion’s gate at nine o’clock on Sunday morning, after collecting Honor, Gray’s mum, from Honor’s house in Wanaka.
Frankie and Prudence and I would be staying in Wanaka over the summer holidays, working for Honor cleaning holiday houses, because Gray and Daisy were going to be moving back into the yurt once the holidays started, and the house wouldn’t be available at all. It would be “remodeled” by a crew from Mount Zion, led by my uncle and including my cousins. All three of them. While I was here, in Wanaka. I didn’t know whether they’d got Honor to offer those jobs on purpose, just in case I tried to see Gabriel again. They didn’t realize that he’d never tried to see me, and that I’d long since realized he’d just been being kind.
Gray never said that was the reason, of course. He said the house was terrible and that it had to be fixed, even though it seemed like a palace to me, full of bedrooms, with a big bathroom and a kitchen twice as large as the one in the yurt, just for one person to cook in.
