Author's Note:
So, after Part Two what else could come but Part Three, and our adventurous columnist Allie and her husband Patrick have well and truly settled into life on Blackwell Island. But there is still more to discover about this island of naked inhabitants, and many more erotic rituals to discover and new friends to make.
As always, all characters are over eighteen, and any resemblance to any person, living or dead, and any company and/or organisation past or present is unintentional and entirely coincidental.
One last thing, this story includes some words and phrases in Irish Gaelic and Hawaiian, the latter of which I have used as the basis of the native Pã'ele language spoken by the island's indigenous population (don't worry, I have included translations in italics wherever possible!) But there is only so much one can do with Google Translate, so if you are a native speaker of either Gaelic or Hawaiian, please accept my apologies if it looks like complete and utter gibberish!
Enjoy!
Part
Three
A Day Of Giving Thanks
With the prospect of getting to spend at least five more years on beautiful Blackwell Island, and the sizeable pay rise that went with it, I threw myself into my work with even more enthusiasm than usual. Marea had told me about an upcoming traditional festival that the islanders observed annually - she didn't tell me exactly what it entailed, but she did tell me its name, which like many things in the local tongue was a bit of a mouthful:
Ka lã o nã kãnaka.
The Day of the Men.
"It's a day of thanksgiving really," Marea explained as I sipped a glass of crisp white wine in the comfy surroundings of her living room. "An opportunity to give thanks to the goddess Haumea for her most precious gift to her daughters - the men of our beautiful island."
"Seriously?" I gasped in absolute disbelief. "You give thanks for the men?"
"Without the men, our community would not have survived," Marea explained. "Remember, we are not like the western world you left behind, our customs can be quite... unorthodox, compared to what you've been brought up with."
"Yeah, but giving thanks for men? That's just ridiculous!" I scoffed.
"When the Pã'ele people first arrived here, the men sacrificed a lot for the benefit of the women and children," Marea went on, clearly undeterred by my apparent derision. "They were the first to go without clothing so that the women and children could continue to be clothed. They went out into the ocean to fish the waters for the bounty of the seas, they toiled on the land to feed the community, and they defended the island from invaders. Well, that last one is a bit of an anachronism nowadays, as the island is so remote that until Henry Blackwell's men arrived, nobody had been anywhere near the island, let alone invade it. But the tradition of the men being warriors remains to this day, albeit merely for ceremonial purposes."
"Plus, they give the island something that we women can't," Lisa added, who was sitting on the settee opposite me.
"Such as?" I queried.
"I guess you'll find out on the day," Marea said, giving her daughter a stern look that expressed that the younger woman ought to have kept her mouth shut.
Well, now my journalistic curiosity was well and truly alerted. What on earth could Lisa have meant? I didn't get a chance to find out however before Marea abruptly changed the subject.
"So, Allie, I see you went ahead and got your
Ohana Mãka'u done
."
"Oh, yes, well I guess there's no way to hide it," I replied. "Yes, I wanted Patrick and I to take another step towards becoming proper Blackwell Islanders, so the logical thing to do was take care of the one last thing that was keeping us from visually blending in to the native population fully."
"It's pretty painful, ain't it?" Lisa said, lifting her behind off the settee briefly to display her recently inked family marking on her derrière.
"Yeah, she's a bit of a wimp sometimes!" Aiden quipped as he entered the room.
"Am not!" Lisa protested.
"Now, you two - no arguing," Marea cautioned the twins. "Aiden, go and join your father and Patrick in the summerhouse."
"Yes, Mum," Aiden responded with a sigh.
The young man turned and left the room, giving me an opportunity to admire his shapely rear with his recently inked family marking on his left buttock. It had healed fully now and it gave me a sense of how good Patrick's would look in a few weeks time.
"I have a potential wife lined up for him," Marea said once her son was out of earshot.
"Ooh! Anyone I know?" Lisa asked her mother.
From the knowledgeable smirk on the girl's face it was clearly some kind of in-joke. After all, as Blackwell was such an isolated community pretty much everyone knew everyone else.
"Merryanne Gray," Marea replied. "You know, Ellie and Marcus's daughter."
Marea turned to me and continued.
"She's just back from California where she's spent the last few years training to be a vet - she's definitely a desirable prospect for Aiden, and her parents are certainly keen for her to settle down now that she's a qualified veterinarian. She'll be joining the island's veterinary practice as a junior partner soon, so Aiden could be a perfect husband for a young professional such as her."
"As long as they get on well," Lisa pointed out. "They might hate each other!"
"Well, he's free to say no to her proposal of course, but if he has any sense he'll jump at the chance to be a vet's husband," Marea responded.
"So, he won't be forced to marry her then?" I asked.
"Of course not!" Marea chuckled. "The custom for arranged marriages here goes back generations, but there is a distinct difference between forced marriages and arranged marriages. Think of it along the same lines as a traditional matchmaking service - all myself and Merryanne's mother is doing is merely introducing them to each other, nothing more than that. If they get on well and decide to get engaged, that would be wonderful, but if they decide that they're not suited to each other they are both free to call it off."
"I see," I nodded in understanding.
I guess it wasn't too dissimilar to the custom for arranged marriages in the Asian communities back home in England. I'd always had mixed emotions about arranged marriage - part of me felt I had to respect it as just a part of the culture that existed in those communities, whilst another part of me saw it as some kind of horrendous form of patriarchal oppression in which young girls were bartered off and married to older men who would sexually abuse them and force them to endure pregnancy after pregnancy. Now while I don't doubt that that sort of thing
does
indeed happen, and what a horrible thing it is too (and you don't have to be a placard-waving bra-burning, crazy, man-hating feminist to abhor it) hearing about arranged marriage in a matriarchal, rather than patriarchal setting definitely forced me to re-examine my feelings on the matter.
"So anyway, we'll be going to dinner at their place next Sunday evening for the formal introduction, and I guess we'll just have to let things go from there," Marea went on.
"Do you think they'd get on well?" I asked her. "I mean, what if they're just fundamentally incompatible?"
"Well as the old saying goes, we'll have to cross that bridge when we come to it," Marea replied. "Of course I hope they get along, and I see no reason why they wouldn't. Her parents, and Jackson and I, can clearly see the positives in their daughter marrying our son, we just have to hope that Aiden and Merryanne can see them too."
That last statement seemed to have "parked" the discussion about Aiden's potential nuptials and so our conversation returned to the subject of the upcoming day of thanksgiving for the island's male population.
"So, this day of thanksgiving... what was it called again?" I asked.
"
Ka lã o nã kãnaka,
" Marea responded.
"Yes, that," I went on. "What exactly does it entail?"
"Well, I suppose you could say that it's a bit like Mother's Day," Marea replied.
"So, it's basically just like Father's Day then?" I responded. "I can't see what makes it so much more special."
"Not really - on
Ka lã o nã kãnaka
we give thanks for
all
the men, not just those who are fathers. Mother's Day has been celebrated here since Henry Blackwell's men first settled here, but
Ka lã o nã kãnaka
can trace its origins much further back than that. Father's Day, as the rest of the world knows it, only really came into being during the twentieth century."
So, that was at least one comparison struck off.
"You'll have to enlighten me then," I said as I took another sip of wine. "What sort of things go on then? On this... thanksgiving of men day?"
I decided not to try and get my tongue around the correct pronunciation just yet for fear of utterly embarrassing myself - yes, I did feel a mild stab of jealousy that it just tripped off Marea's tongue with such apparent ease!