THE BONE CARVER

The faint aroma of cooking meat could be discerned in the kitchen as I walked in there one lazy afternoon to wash my coffee mug. Judging from the dewiness of the scent, I gathered he was boiling something.

I turned off the tap and gently laid my mug upside down in the center of the dish drainer. I lifted the cover off the stainless steel pot and looked inside. An off-white, dirt-smudged, thigh bone – probably from a cow – lay in the shallow water, simmering from the heat of the gas range. Bubbles of air pushed their way to the surface. Resilient pieces of red meat still stubbornly clung to the bone.

“I have to draw out the remaining fat from the bone,” he explained from the kitchen doorway, answering a question I had not posed to him. He had emerged from room, where he liked to copy an assortment of music cds, borrowed from the library, to his cache of media files. The headphones were no longer clipped to his ears.

All the material things he possesses are second hand, retrieved from piles of garbage brought out to the sidewalk before collection day, or bought cheaply from opportunity shops, where he browses more frequently than on occasion. Even the bones he used for carving are second hand, carefully selected and then stored away after the dogs were done gnawing on them.

“After the remaining oils seep out, I have to dry it out for several days. It makes the carving easier.”

He had begun another project in tandem with this latest meat boil, had already drawn the outlines of a symbol on a previous one, the roughly sketched outlines of a figure indicating that the bone on this one was dry, but was also in the middle of a finishing the touches on an amulet, a tiki tiki, for me.

This work in progress was tucked securely in one palm, the fingers of the other, deftly filing and sawing at the figurine, as he spoke to me from the doorway.  

When he and I met in February of this year, it was at a bus stop across from the Mangere East public library, where he had asked me if he could have a taste of the banana sago soup that sat in a plastic container. On that day, deciding I would go to another poetry writing workshop the following afternoon, I had stopped at a Polynesian counter restaurant to sample the grayish liquid and stop the craving for something starchy and not too heavy.  

To me, he looked like an interloper, rough and a little on edge. The body art, which covered the length of his arms and the curly unkempt hair, contained by a single ponytail, made him look tougher.

Months later these outer layers, personality traits that characterized his reticence, peeled off to reveal a hidden, gentler nature. His voice had softened and he easily spoke about music – an obsession – and annoying things that crossed his path.

With obvious mdesty, he occasionally spoke about the carving tips he had acquired here and there, presumably from various, informed sources. One day he showed me an earlier wood carving, over which he had labored, to reveal a latent talent downplayed by low-toned revelations.

I went with him one day to Mitre 10 to buy a new set of filing tools. He thought it fit to treat himself to new ones so that his work could be more masterful. This purchase would replace the decaying set already in his possession.

Using these new tools, he smoothed out the edges of the amulet. He had left the kitchen doorway and now sat on the edge of the stone steps at the front of the house. He drilled and edged like a master carver, releasing bone fragments that blew onto and clung to his shirt. When he finally finished, the tiki tiki was an exact replica of the model that was his inspiration, right down to the firm upper lip that marked the face of a warrior.       

Preparing for carving

A work in progress

Still refining

Almost there . . . 

One more step . . . 

Finished tiki tiki