The Colour (22 page)

Everywhere, the rattle of the sluice-boxes bore witness to that work: for there was no other way to get gold here but through the digging and washing and sifting of the earth, and all around the diggers of Kaniere, the earth spoke to them and insinuated itself into their dreams and wouldn't let them rest.

No one paid any attention to Will and Joseph. The Kaniere miners knew the Rush was on and that, day by day, more and more people would arrive and the claims would spread out wider and further, right up to the implacable bush-line. In the nights, by their fires, the men would drink and tell stories, but the daylight was a precious commodity never to be squandered in words. It was thirty-shilling light.

‘We could try our luck here, Mister Blackstone,' said Will, ‘if you want to.'

Joseph stared at the scene before him and found it hateful. A memory of his father, trapped against iron rails by a squealing cartload of pigs, holding high his precious gold-edged auctioneer's ledger, came into his mind. Afterwards, Roderick Blackstone had been embarrassed by the smears of pigs' slobber on his black trousers, but had been ‘victorious', he said, ‘absolutely victorious because my ledger has no trace of my ordeal upon it'.

‘No,' said Joseph. ‘We will go on, Will. We must get up-river of all this, to where the water is clear.'

It was much further to Kokatahi than they had imagined and the sun was already going down over the mountains when they heard, in the misty distance, a mouth-organ being played:

‘Scots,' whispered Will. ‘There's our signal, isn't it? The pissers I overheard in the privy were Scotsmen.'

Though the melancholy tune was consoling and seemed to lure them on, Joseph set down the cart where he stood, at a good distance from the music. He waited for a moment, looking about him, feeling the dusk coming towards him and aware of how exhausted he was.

He told Will to search for twigs and wood for a fire while he set up the tent he'd bought such a long time ago. His back and arms ached as they had never ached on the farm, but he set out the tent with as much patience and care as he could muster. The music stopped and, in its absence, Joseph could hear again the glide and fall of the river. As he hammered in the tent pegs, he realised the ground he was standing on was much softer than any ground that they'd passed that day or any that he'd imagined.

In the night, after some hours of a deep sleep that seemed as though it might have no end, Joseph woke to a strange sound.

Will Sefton lay beside him, and the boy was naked with his blanket pushed aside and he was playing his penny whistle, making short repetitive sounds, like a bird.

‘What are you doing, Will?' Joseph asked.

‘Playing my whistle. Like a bellbird, ain't I?' said Will. ‘Just as sweet, ain't I? Just as sweet?'

‘Yes,' said Joseph, his voice thick and slow with sleep. ‘Just as sweet.'

‘I only whistle in the night,' whispered Will. ‘Always the middle of night, because I like it that way, in the darkness. On the Arrow they called me Whistling Willie! Apt as any name could be. But they knew I would only do it in the darkness.'

Joseph lay on his back and stared at the boy and he thought then that he'd known all along that this moment would come.

‘What way do you like it, Mister Blackstone?' Will said. ‘For I've learned they like it different ways and it's all one to me.'

‘All one to you?'

‘All one. Told you. Do my services. Get my pay . . . Some liked me to kiss them and I'd even do that. Kiss their lips like a girl. And that'd craze them sometimes and they'd call me tender names: Willie-my-sweet, Will Sefton my lovely boy . . .'

Joseph reached out a hand and touched Will's thin shoulder. He opened his mouth to say to Will that he didn't want his ‘services', that he hadn't befriended him for that reason, that, if he found gold, he would give a share to Will because Will and he had travelled together and that travelling together was better than travelling alone. But he felt too stunned, by all that he'd endured and by what he knew was happening now, to form these words, to form any words. So he just lay there, touching Will and staring at him and understanding that Will would leave him the next day – leave him to take up with another man who would want his ‘services' and pay handsomely for them – and that his own gift of the fishing rod would count for nothing. And he saw his own approaching loneliness as something unendurable.

It seemed to Joseph that a long time passed without either of them speaking or moving, but only looking at each other in the dark.

Eventually, Joseph heard himself say: ‘Kiss me like a girl, then, Will. Kiss me gently like a girl.'

A Neat and Tidy Room

I

On the Canterbury flats, after the heavy rain of early February, which the land drank fast and forgot, the drought came in again on the hot wind.

The Maoris of Pare's tribe saw a season of hunger approaching. They stared at their k
Å«
mara plantations, which were yellow and sickly, and they prayed to the spirits of the air to send rain. Some of them saw the spirits turning cartwheels in the flames of the sunset, but still no rain clouds appeared in the sky.

Pare sat alone in a corner of the p
ā
that was seldom visited and looked out at the dusty earth and heard the fury of the wind and knew that she was responsible for the drought. She had offended the gods of the the natural world. She heard their anger in the trees, saw it in the cracks which began to split the furrows of the fields, felt it in her stomach and in her heart. They had already commanded her – or so she believed – to cease her journeys to Orchard House – and she'd done what they asked. But now she saw that this was not enough. It was as if the Maori gods understood that Pare's love for Edwin Orchard was stronger than her love for her own people and they were determined to punish her. To make this punishment yet more bitter, they were visiting suffering upon the whole tribe.

Pare stared at her legs. She noticed they were much thinner than they had once been. It frightened her to know that her old sickness had returned. She felt intensely aware of the ever-moving, ever-changing nature of the world, realising that no minute of existence is identical to that which precedes it nor that which follows it. She saw herself being hurried faster and faster through time, towards her death.

The sun was going down and Pare could smell fires and roasting meat, but she had no appetite. Even in the sheltered place where she sat, the wind discovered her and blew her hair across her face. She held her arms out to the wind, to Tane, the fierce God of the Forest, and prayed to be forgiven. Then she began to ask herself what she could do to appease the gods. Her head burned with a fever and her thoughts were confused, as though insects were swarming inside her skull or the skull itself were turning to dust. The darkness settled quietly round her and she didn't move.

Pare dreamed that she stood again at the river's edge, where she'd seen the taniwha so long ago.

In the dream, the tea-brown water rose and slopped about her naked legs and it was icy and she felt its intention, to pull her down among the weeds and the black eels. But she knew that it was not to drown her there, but only to make her search for something in the darkness of the mud. So she let herself be carried down and down into the depths of the cold river and her hands explored the oozing mud of the river-bottom. She didn't know what she was looking for, yet she knew, even though her lungs were hurting and the eels were winding themselves around her arms, that she had to remain there until she found it.

Then, at last, there was something solid in her hand. Pare clutched it. She unwound the eels and pushed them away and swam to the surface and when she reached the surface, she saw that the sun had risen and was sparkling on the water and touching the leaves with silver and she knew that she had found the answer to her puzzle. In her hand lay a piece of greenstone.

The next day, Pare told her mother she was going on a journey to find greenstone for the gods. She was going to walk across the mountains to the place where the p
ā
keh
ā
were digging for gold, for gold and greenstone often lie along the same lines in the earth. And when she had found the greenstone and offered it to the spirits, the rain would come and all the seasons revert to what they had once been and there would be no more drought or suffering.

Pare's mother stared at her daughter. She touched her nose, her glossy hair. She reminded her that the mountains were treacherous and cold. Then she went and fetched her few precious things: a shark-toothed knife, a wooden pot filled with poroporo balm, a coloured blanket, a phial of red ochre, a paua shell and a coil of fishing line with ten hooks. Pare already had the small greenstone pendant, which had in turn been worn by her mother and her grandmother before that.

‘Take these,' said Pare's mother. ‘Break up the shell into little pieces that will resemble minnows in the water and tie them to your hooks, and with these you will catch large fish. And you will survive.'

Pare hung the greenstone pendant round her neck and wrapped the other objects into a bundle, which she would carry on her back. Then she swept a corner of the p
ā
and shook out her flax mat and folded this into the bundle. Where her mat had lain she placed a small circle of stones. Before leaving, Pare arranged and rearranged these stones several times until each one seemed perfectly settled in the place where she'd put it. She knew that, in the cold silence of the mountains, she would dream of her life here in the p
ā
and long to return to it. And, to comfort herself, she would imagine the stones, waiting for her, untouched and unmoving.

II

In the continuing drought and in the hot winds, something irreversible was happening to the Cob House: it was turning to powder.

Harriet stood low down on the flat and looked up at her home. Silhouetted against the evening sun, she could see an unending swirl of dust blowing off the Cob House walls. Mixed with the dust was a speckling of dry, mashed grass and Harriet understood now why everybody had said that cob was ‘temporary', ‘contingent', ‘unstable'. With every gust of wind, the house was beginning to crumble.

She and Lilian tugged out a ladder from the cow barn. They went back and forth from the creek, filling cans with water and then Harriet climbed up the ladder and poured water down the walls and with their hands the women tried to tamp down the brittle cob and press new handfuls of mud into the places where gaps were appearing.

Wiping this mud from her hands, Lilian commented: ‘Some unorthodox girls of my acquaintance, when I was young, had a fondness for the pottery wheel, but I was never among them.'

Harriet smiled. Less and less did Lilian dress herself in fine clothes or bonnets; she wore smocks now, and sacking aprons, and pushed her grey hair into a net under a crumpled linen hat to keep off the sun. She said that she was ‘getting quite attached to the pigs' and even her struggles with the smoky range seemed to vex her less than they had done. Her bread became crustier, ‘more', she said proudly, ‘as Roderick would have liked it', and sometimes she and Harriet were so hungry after their day on the farm that they consumed an entire loaf, smeared with dripping, between them. ‘If only,' Lilian said one evening, as she sat contentedly sewing, ‘there could be no return to winter.'

Harriet, who was working on her scrapbook, placing in it a shrivelled ear of wheat and a turquoise kingfisher feather, looked up at Lilian. She wondered whether this slow arrival of cheerfulness owed itself to Lilian's hopes for Joseph's expedition. Was her mother-in-law simply dreaming of the way their lives would alter when her son returned as a rich man? For even the fact that the Cob House was disintegrating did not seem to dismay her particularly. Perhaps poor Lilian felt so certain that a new dwelling – one more resembling the Orchards' magnificent place – would be built at last that she was perfectly resigned to patching up the walls of the old cob shack for a little while. For they wouldn't be there for very long. One winter? Or, at worst, one winter and one spring? Harriet supposed that Lilian comforted herself with a vision of polished floorboards, marble mantelpieces, carpets from Chengchow. And who was she to say, if Joseph was alive and working on the goldfields, Lilian might not be given them one day?

Harriet preferred not to think about Joseph.

She discovered that almost every memory she had of him produced in her a feeling of disquiet. Though she had to work harder, she found life much easier without him. In her bed, she let Lady lie in the space where Joseph had been. In her dreams, Joseph and the odious Mr Melchior Gable became indistinguishable in her mind.

Yet, she also lay and wondered about her life. She hoped that something else awaited her, beyond the drudgery of the farm.
Better that we never know,
she wrote to her father,
what lies beyond the next hill
.

She rode every day now. She thought Billy the nicest horse she'd ever encountered. His gallop was skittish, earnest, like a pony's, but his heart and lungs were strong and he never seemed to tire. Harriet wished she could reward him with the grass of a green field, but she let him graze by the pond, where the tussock was still moist, and fed him carrots from her vegetable plot. She talked to him as she groomed him and he would sometimes turn his head and rest it against her back. She told him that the task of keeping all the animals alive was getting harder and harder as every day passed. Yet she knew she wasn't unhappy. She told the horse this as well. She told him she was happier than she'd been for a long time.