The Colour (37 page)

Washing became Harriet's chief task. This was what Joseph wanted her to do. Nothing else, really, as though he didn't trust her to search for gold: he just wanted her to make things clean again.

So she carted Joseph's stinking clothes and foul bedding up-river, out of sight of the diggings, and soaped and slapped them on a wide white stone and rinsed them in the icy water and pegged them to the trees. She asked no questions about the state of these things, not even to herself. She saw what she saw. She turned her face to the mountains or to the sky.

Harriet had questioned some of the Kokatahi diggers about Pare, but none of them had seen a Maori woman. They cackled at the idea of a Maori ‘invading our diggings'. They told Harriet there had been Maoris at Greenstone Creek and one or two had been seen at the beach-workings, ‘but not at Kaniere, Missus, and not here, no fear'.

But, while doing her washing, Harriet had thought she heard the sound of a waterfall. It was a steady, reverberating noise, as though the rock itself were roaring. And so, with the washing pegged and flapping in the breeze, and her hands raw and red from the river water, Harriet began to walk towards the sound.

The way was encumbered by rocks and boulders. The river had taken a tortuous course around everything that had fallen across its path.

After walking for thirty or forty minutes, Harriet realised that she could no longer hear the noise of the goldfield. She decided to mark the exact spot at which Kokatahi ‘disappeared' into the air. And so she retraced her steps and when she found the place, she laid a stick across the path, to mark the line between the goldfield and herself. And she thought how everything in the world had its boundary and was finite, and her awareness of this cheered her.

She walked faster as the banks of the river began to stretch out again into shingle beach where a few long-legged birds pecked and sauntered. An hour or more passed. She grew thirsty and knelt to scoop up water in her hands and then stayed still, listening to the roar of the fall and to the wind.

It was at this moment that the sun came out and Harriet looked up and saw Chen Pao Yi's vegetable garden. She had to blink, to shield her eyes against the sun – which had lit up the garden on the other side of the river like a bright lamp lighting a darkened stage. She stared at the garden. She found it a model of what she'd being trying to achieve on the Okuku flats. The variety in it, the neatness of its planting, the dark soil patiently worked . . . here, when her own garden had long ago been abandoned, was the paragon of what it should have been.

She noticed Pao Yi's hut, built of stone, tucked in against the rock face to protect it, neatly thatched with fern. She saw a fishing net, slung out between two trees in the shallow part of the river.

Though Harriet had drunk a good cupful of water, she was aware of a residue of thirst, but it wasn't water that she wanted; her thirst was for some fresh green thing from this garden.

She took off her boots and began to cross the river. The current was fast and cold and tugged at her skirts and she knew that if she fell, she might be swept away, swept back down to Kokatahi to join the rats and the rubbish as they rushed on towards Kaniere.

She bent down, to pull her skirts out of the water and discovered a rope running along the shingle of the river-bed. When she lifted the rope, she saw that it was attached to a post at the edge of the garden. To arrive safely on the other side, all Harriet had to do was hold on to the rope.

She dried her feet on the grass and put on her boots. She stood where she was and called out, but nobody appeared. She saw a hoe with a red handle sticking into the earth of the onion bed. She noticed that the garden was divided up by narrow grass paths and that the edges of these paths were neat.

Along the western edge of the plot, the gardener had planted a small plum tree and, though the fruit was gone and the leaves sparse, there was a soft, lingering scent to this tree and Harriet sat down beside it. She pulled a carrot from the earth, cleaned it on her damp skirt, and ate it – both the body of the carrot and its green tops. The taste of it was as sweet as anything she'd ever eaten and Harriet thought that she must have been starved of sweetness for a long time because what she wanted to do now was to stay here by this plum tree, munching her way along the carrot bed.

She plucked and cleaned and ate a second carrot and then she waited. She was waiting for the gardener to return so that she could apologise to him for stealing his vegetables, but she was also waiting because she didn't want to move. The noise of the waterfall was still quite loud, but Harriet had put it from her mind because all her mind was concentrated here. She thought that this garden was one of the most strangely beautiful places she'd ever seen.

Still nobody came. The sun climbed higher and was warm and Harriet's skirts began to dry. She wanted to go into the hut, to find out who was responsible for all these thriving plants and for the hut itself, which seemed well made and strong, as though, when the winter winds came or when the fresh arrived, it alone – among all the temporary shelters that had been begun along this river – might remain standing.

But she didn't want to act like a trespasser or a spy. She ate one more carrot and then she laid her head down on the narrow grass path.

When she woke, the light had tilted away behind the mountains and the air was cold.

Harriet looked around her, but nothing had moved or changed. She got up and brushed her skirts and slowly walked to the river, where she quickly found the submerged rope and used this to guide herself safely to the opposite bank. The thought of returning to the Kokatahi camp made her feel suddenly sick, so she sat down on the shingle bank, waiting for this sickness to pass. She rested her hands on her knees and kept her head lowered. She stared at the grey and amber colours of the shingle. She told herself that she'd come back here again the next day and resume her search for Pare and the waterfall.

It was then that Harriet saw the gold.

The gold was a coarse dust in among the grey and amber stones. It shone in the blue, approaching dusk.

II

While Harriet was gone, Will Sefton returned to Joseph's claim.

‘Mister Blackstone,' Will said with a mocking smile, ‘I hear your wife couldn't live without you. I hear she missed you so much, she followed you all the way to this graveyard!'

Joseph let go of his windlass handle and looked at Will. The boy wore a new jerkin. His curls looked clean and soft. He stood with his legs apart and his hands in the pockets of his moleskins.

‘What are you doing here?' Joseph asked.

Will took out his penny whistle from one of his pockets and caressed it softly, making the familiar small shrill sound.

‘Go away, Will,' said Joseph, turning his back on the boy, to resume winding the windlass.

The whistling stopped. ‘I'm going,' said Will. ‘A few more weeks and you'll never hear my whistle no more on the Kokatahi. Going to Scotland, I am, with Mr McConnell. Dress me in a kilt, so he will. A fine
kiltie.
And nothing beneath, and all that cool breeze between my legs. What d'you say to that, Mister Blackstone?'

Joseph half turned. The sound of Will's voice, the least prepossessing thing about the boy, summoned back a familiar feeling both of longing and of wretchedness.

‘It's all one to me where you go,' replied Joseph.

‘Not true, though, is it, Mister Blackstone?' whispered Will, moving a step nearer to Joseph. ‘For if I'm gone, then you can't go where you long to go, can you, for don't tell me your wife lets you –'

‘Leave me alone!' said Joseph. ‘Go to Scotland. Go wherever you like, Will, with whoever you like. But leave me in peace.'

‘Aye, I will. Isn't that what they say there?
Aye
? I'll leave you in peace, Mister Blackstone, soon enough. But I thought, before I leave, I could be introduced to your wife and tell her what “services” I performed for you in her absence. Then, everything would be straight and true, eh? I don't fancy leaving till everything be straight and true.'

Joseph kicked out at a slab of pine, sent it scudding over the mud towards Will, but the boy stepped daintily aside.

‘If you think,' said Joseph, ‘that blackmail can work with me, you've overlooked one thing, Will Sefton. I have no gold. Not an ounce. Not a speck. Nothing. Look all around, if you don't believe me.'

‘I believe you all right. I can see it in your face. No colour. But you still have money, Mister Blackstone. You still buy your stores at Hokitika and your new Miner's Right. I know you do, for I saw you there. And you never paid me a cent for all that I did. Never a cent. And I told Mr McConnell, “I'm angry with Mister Blackstone. I'm angry with a man who promises to pay and never keeps his promise.” And Mr McConnell agrees with me. He says to me: “You go and get your dues, Will, for you're the sweetest little prick-sucker in the southern hemisphere, and if you're not given your due, then I'll come after Blackstone.” He called you “Blackstone”, not
Mister Blackstone,
you see, so I think he despises you. “I'll come after Blackstone myself and get it off him with my bare hands.”'

Now, Joseph felt that he was falling.

He felt that there was nothing underneath him to save him from this endless, terrifying fall. He saw a rat arrive at the edge of the shaft he was working on and go down into the hole. He saw Will watching the rat and grinning, his mouth red and damp as Rebecca's had always been. He saw that the distance between him and a shovel lying on the mud was no more than an arm's stretch.

He knew that he was under-nourished, that he was becoming weak and lacked speed – speed of thought and speed of action. He knew he had to feint at what he was about to do, as though he intended some slow retreat towards his tent – as if to find money for Will. So he took out a piece of rag from his pocket and began wiping his hands. Will didn't take his eyes from him.

Then Joseph lunged forward and picked up the shovel. With all the strength that was left to him, he raised it high into the air. He felt it reach its arc and then he brought it down, down through the heavy, stinking air of Kokatahi, and he waited for the sound of the iron shovel crashing into the skull of Will Sefton and silencing him for ever.

But Joseph was slower even than he realised, his actions more predictable. He heard Will shriek and then he realised that the boy had leapt away, leapt backwards, well clear of the intended blow. For a moment more, they regarded each other, eye to eye, then Will turned and ran away over the pocked ground, towards the rope that marked out Joseph's claim and he vaulted the rope and sped on, jumping the piles of stones and mullock that lay all around until he was gone from Joseph's sight.

Joseph threw the shovel aside.

He was aware that, on the adjacent claims, men had stopped work and were now staring at him as at a man who had taken leave of his mind.

III

In the night, Harriet came to Joseph's tent.

He lay without moving, pretending to be asleep because he dreaded that she'd come to ask for love.

He heard her open the tent flap and close it behind her and crouch down beside him, where he lay with his head in the crook of his arm and his shotgun within his reach. She touched his elbow and he made as if to wake from one of his nightmares.

‘Joseph,' she whispered. ‘Light a candle. I have something to show you.'

She was wrapped in her red blanket, with her face severe and half turned away from him, so he knew by her look that he was safe from her embrace. He lit a candle and set the light between them. As she bent forwards to open the small bundle she was holding, Joseph remembered that she used to have long, wild hair and that he had once liked the touch and feel of this on his face and shoulders. But then she had emulated her friend, Dorothy Orchard, and hacked the hair away; she and Dorothy liked to believe they were modern women, exemplary colonial pioneers, and didn't seem to care if they made themselves ugly.

He watched her closely. She untied a damp rag and the smell of the river came into the tent and Joseph saw revealed in the candlelight a heap of muddy shingle, through which Harriet began to run her hands. She brought the light nearer and whispered: ‘Do you see it? I'm not mistaken, am I?'

Joseph Blackstone found himself looking at grains of gold.

Barely breathing, he reached out and touched them, then picked a few of them up and rolled them between finger and thumb, feeling their weight.

‘Where?' he asked.

Harriet explained that she'd walked up-river, a long way beyond the Kokatahi diggings, towards the sound of a waterfall, and on the way to the waterfall she'd found an extraordinary garden . . .

‘Scurvy Jenny,' said Joseph quickly. ‘Was this gold on his plot?'

‘Who's “Scurvy Jenny”?'

‘Chinaman. Sells vegetables. Was this his gold?'

‘Ssh,' said Harriet. ‘Or you'll wake the –'

Joseph let the gold fall and grabbed Harriet's wrist. ‘Where did you find this?
Where?
'

Harriet stared accusingly at Joseph, holding him in an icy gaze until he relaxed his grip on her arm. Then, she said: ‘Not on the Chinaman's garden, Joseph. On
this
side of the water. There's a flat piece of land, where the river widens . . . and that's where I found it. I just scooped it up in my hand.'

So then Joseph let himself look at it again and touch it and begin to pick out the grains of gold and set them to one side. And something rose in his heart which threatened to choke him and he thought he might weep or begin babbling pure meaningless nothings and it seemed to him as if all the blood that flowed through him had been filtered of its poisons and was fresh and bright again and his limbs were strong again, like the limbs of a younger man.