The Colour (21 page)

‘I'd swim,' said Will Sefton to Joseph. ‘I wouldn't care if I was drowned. Rinse me out, that salt sea. Rinse away the maggots in me.'

Joseph thought of how in his life he had very often got near to something and then lost it. Now, he was face to face with the landscape where his future lay waiting in some harsh stone gully or beneath the roots of the manuka scrub. But this capricious last stretch of water still lay between him and the hard ground of his hopes and he dreaded to die here, within sight of it, but never reaching it. He swallowed the last crumb of the ginger biscuit and said a prayer: Let me come to riches, let me come to the happiness of riches before I am taken away.

‘I'd swim,' he said to Will. ‘I'd fight my way through.'

But the steamship was still making headway. Everyone was waiting for the moment when the keel would strike the sandbar, but the moment never came. The
Wallabi
had a draught shallow enough to elude the tentacles of the bar on this cold day and sailed gamely forward, pressed on by the breaking waves. At last, Joseph and Will and the other passengers felt the wind die and the rain miraculously cease as the wide arms of the Hokitika River took the
Wallabi
in and let it glide towards a safe mooring.

II

It was barely there yet, the town of Hokitika: a place so lonely and far from everything, it looked as if it had never expected to become a town or anything resembling a town, but had imagined itself soon enough breaking adrift from the coast, like a raft, to wait for the tides to carry it away.

There was a wide wharf, buttressed against the unknowable rise and fall of the water, and along the wharf a cluster of low shanties. But now, muddy streets were beginning to straggle outwards from the quay, backing hesitantly towards the bush, surprised by their own existence. These were yards and alleyways brought into being by the gold-diggings: stores offering tents and picks, fishing rods and matches; a bakery; two banks; a hotel with a flagpole already rusted in the salt winds; a warden's office, painted yellow, selling miners' licences for thirty shillings.

As night fell, the arrivals on the
Wallabi
crammed into the hotel and paid a few farthings for hot water and a place to lie down and sleep. Some of them already had their licences clutched in their hands; others had felt unable to undertake the simple transaction of parting with thirty shillings and told themselves that their lives were somehow suspended, that there would arrive, in due time, some necessary tomorrow in which they would be resumed, but it was not now. All that
now
contained was rest and the knowledge of firm ground under their bones. They washed themselves and ate each a meagre plate of stew and lay down to sleep. They spilled out from the bedrooms into the passages and public rooms, lying on thin mattresses, wrapped in grey blankets, and the sound of their snoring was like a snarling of their souls, disgruntled at having found themselves so near to being lost.

Joseph lay among them for a while, but he couldn't sleep. He'd been one of the first to hurry to the warden's office and buy his Miner's Right, and now he took the licence from his pocket and stared at it in the dark. It entitled him to peg out a seventy-two-foot claim and work the claim ‘for a period of one month'. His name was written on it in fine calligraphy:
Joseph Blackstone
. And this had thrilled him, as though the licence were itself a bank bond of substantial value. But now, in the darkness, Joseph understood that what it resembled most was a ticket in some enormous lottery. For no one knew precisely where the gold was to be found. Greenstone Creek on the Taramakau had yielded the colour to the first comers but, as others arrived in the Rush, the gold had begun to vanish and now Greenstone was declared ‘exhausted' and no one remained there, except a few hardy fossickers, picking over the tailings other men had left.

Rumours now were all of Kaniere, five miles upstream on the Hokitika River and most of the new arrivals would head there when the next day came. But Joseph understood that the men of a Gold Rush were like moths, going towards a golden light and in time – inevitably – that light began to die, and so they hurried blindly on to the next and the next, always hopeful but always aware of the enormity of the pursuing dark.

Joseph got up, with his blanket wrapped around him, and made his way among the sleeping men to the door of the hotel. He walked out into the dirty street and, following the sound of the breaking waves, arrived once again on the beach, where the grey driftwood lay all around. The big pieces of wood reminded Joseph of the dead, lying in attitudes of ecstasy or torment, as though some final and terrible human conflict had taken place here on the sand. A half-moon was up and glimmering on the roaring sea, and Joseph thought that he'd never seen any place on earth like this or felt the power of it in his heart.

Though the wind was cold, he was glad he'd left the hotel. He walked to the sea's edge and stared at the water and remembered that he'd travelled this ocean in a paddle steamer and survived. To the wind and the waves he said:
Let this not have been in vain
.

He stood unmoving for a long while and then he searched for a sheltered spot and made a fire from grass and twigs and sat by it, feeding in small grey limbs of driftwood, until he'd achieved a blaze big enough to warm him.

Then Joseph Blackstone lay down on the sand, swaddled in his blanket and began to cry. He wasn't crying because of what he'd suffered on the
Wallabi,
nor because he knew now that his dreams of finding gold had led him to this place with nothing in his pocket except a piece of paper that was probably worthless. He was crying because he understood, now and for ever – or so it seemed to him – that the person he had loved was Rebecca Millward, truly loved her, as much as any man is capable of loving anyone outside his insistent self. Joseph was crying because he knew, as his driftwood fire blazed up and hurled sparks out into the sky, that he should have given in to what he'd felt and honoured it instead of denying it. He was crying because it was too late; he should have married Rebecca. But he had not married her: he had killed her.

Joseph slept a little and woke as it began to get light. His fire was out. As the sun rose, he felt the bite of the sandflies on his neck sand hands.

He returned to the hotel, where he found his fellow-passengers from the
Wallabi
eating a breakfast of porridge, tea and fried herring. He took a bowl of porridge and a mug of tea and sat down with the men. Their mood was loud and jocular and their talk was all about Kaniere and the finds there.

‘A riser,' they told Joseph. ‘A good riser.'

‘A riser?'

‘You're a new chum, eh? Never heard the term “riser”? Better than tucker ground, mister. On tucker ground you can pay your fees and get something for yourself, for your stomach and your thirst, but not much else. With a riser, you could make a good bit more. Send a few pounds home, or where you will.'

Joseph drank his tea, which was strong and bitter. He had no appetite and let Will Sefton eat his porridge as the men began to leave the hotel to walk to the warden's office for their licences or begin their trek up-river to Kaniere. He told Will to follow the diggers and not wait for him, but Will shook his head, wiped his mouth on his sleeve and said quietly: ‘I heard a tale, Mister Blackstone. Heard two of them whispering in the privies. Kaniere may have a riser, but something's happening at Kokatahi. Trapper killed a blue-duck there. Found a lump of gold in its gizzard. Lump the size of a beech nut! So that's where them two pissers are headed.'

Joseph nodded. He saw that Will Sefton had adopted him. He didn't know whether the boy was giving him protection or seeking it, but he thought that this didn't matter.

‘How far is Kokatahi, Will?'

‘Beyond Kaniere. Further up-river. Wet-flat ground, they said. Nothing there but birds and bush rats. So, if we're lucky the Rush may not come.'

This was what Joseph wanted and Will had understood it: to be apart from the horde. He felt inclined to marvel at the boy's ability to read his mind, but then at once became aware of his own naïveté: for wasn't this exactly what every gold-miner longed for, to be in front of all the others, to strike out and strike lucky on his own and keep his finds to himself? Perhaps, only latecomers to a Rush were truly happy men? The miner in the vanguard saw all his patient workings brought to insignificance by the invading havoc around him.

‘Shall we get some gold before the night, d'you think?' asked Joseph.

‘Don't know, Mister Blackstone.'

‘Or shall we stay here and not trouble ourselves after all?'

‘We should trouble ourselves or we shall get nothing. And I know what that
nothing
can do to a digger. I know a song from the Arrow and it goes:

‘Where it be, there aren't I?'

‘Yes. And I've seen that: some who peg out claim after claim, thirty shillings a time for the Right, and they find nothing. Only a little dust.'

Joseph remembered his creek. He put his hand into his pocket and touched the handkerchief containing the scant accumulation of gold dust, hidden for so long in the tea box behind the calico wall of his room in the Cob House.

‘I want more than dust, Will,' he said.

‘Then we should make a start. Begin our journey. We should hurry on, Mister Blackstone.'

Joseph bought a handcart, like a barrow with a single wheel made of wood and rimmed with iron against the hard ground. He found a sluice-box, on sale for three shillings, which had, instead of canvas on its collecting tray, a piece of faded green velvet. He imagined how the gold would shine, lying on the velvet, and thought this box might bring him luck, so he bought this, too, and found that he didn't seem to care any more about the cost of things.

He discovered Will staring longingly at some fishing rods. With a rod, the boy said, he could catch ‘all the fish in the river and us live like pigs in clover', so Joseph, who now cursed himself for leaving behind his own rods and the fly box with its hidden curl, bought a rod and a can of maggots. ‘This is called a grub-stake,' said Will. ‘I'll owe you some gold for this, if I find any.'

Joseph lingered, pushing the handcart, among the shanties of Hokitika.

A girl called to him from a doorway, and he stared at her and met her eyes for a moment, but passed on. All the while, he could hear the roar of the sea and it was as though he was afraid to leave it and go into the silence of the hills.

III

Joseph and Will Sefton followed the Hokitika River in its south-westerly course. Along its length, they saw diggings begun and abandoned among the scrub. Near the mounds of wash-dirt, they saw broken shovels and picks, crates which had once contained hens, sacks of flour left out in the rain and turned to glue and scraps of newspaper blowing about in the wind.

The ground became steeper, and to their left the forest crowded in between them and the sky, and their pathway by the river became narrow. They heard the sweet song of the bellbird.

Now that they were finally moving towards their destination – or at least towards some destination that Joseph could envisage – he began to feel better. His stomach settled and he and Will rested a while and chewed a piece of bacon. And, in the wake of his night of weeping, he felt calmer than he'd felt for a long time, as though the persistent fever in him had broken and gone.

As they approached Kaniere, Will stopped and told Joseph to listen.

‘Sounds of the Rush, Mister Blackstone. No other noise like this under the sky.'

Joseph set down the cart. He wiped the sweat from his neck with a rag. The walls of the valley were still steep, throwing echoes into the air, and now he could hear what sounded like a wild orchestra assembled among the scrub, beating out music on the stones and in the tall trees.

‘Cradles,' said Will. ‘You hear them? Rattling back and forth?'

‘Yes, I hear them.'

‘And picks striking the flint. There's a windlass, too, I reckon. I can hear the shrieking of a wheel.'

‘Bring the wash-dirt up with a windlass, do they?'

‘Yes. Or use it for draining their shafts. Gold lies on the blue-clay bottom and it's that bottom you have to find. But sometimes the water's your enemy. Fills your shaft and keeps filling. You can see the blue, but you can't reach it.'

They walked on. The narrow track was gently rising all the time and Joseph had begun to feel the weight of the loaded cart in the ache of his arms. He would have gladly stopped at Kaniere, but this was not what he wanted, to peg some ‘duffer' claim among the hordes. He wished that he and Will could skirt round the diggings, but they had to follow the river until it divided and they saw the open pathway to Kokatahi. So they went forward at a slow pace and the winds that tormented the coast began to drop and the sun was warm on them. In the fast-flowing water of the Hokitika River, they began to notice the rubbish of the mine – the stirred mud of the pay-dirt, slices and ends of rope, greasy wrappings of stale food and tobacco, old bottles and jars – borne away towards the sea.

And then the Kaniere goldfield opened up in front of them: the scrub uprooted and burned, the trees felled and stripped down into saplings and planks for the windlasses and for the flumes on stilts that carried water from the river to the hillside claims. The ground had a pocked and tousled look. Tents stood on this ground at tilted angles, in untidy rows. The scene, thought Joseph, resembled a field hospital for the remnants of some small, forgotten army. Slab huts, roofed with ti-ti leaves and barely larger than dog kennels, had also struggled into being: shelter for those who'd had no money to buy rope or canvas. These were hovels held together with nails and flax, and Joseph saw men sitting in their narrow shade, puffing on pipes or brewing tea, or just staring into vacancy, nursing the pain in their arms from their ceaseless work, like convalescents.