The Colour (25 page)

‘There is no certainty . . .' she said.

Toby and Dorothy both looked up at her, expecting this sentence to continue somehow, but when it didn't continue, Dorothy said: ‘Distance is so mighty here. Not so much in miles, but in the
obstacles
we must contend with. Isn't that true, Toby?'

‘Yes, Doro, it is true,' replied Toby. ‘If this were America, there would be a railroad through the passes by now. But there are too few of us here to build it. We are too isolated and alone.'

In the night, Edwin crept into Harriet's room. She woke and saw him standing there with his candle and he was shivering, so she lifted the coverlets and the boy got into bed beside her.

‘Now . . .' she said.

Edwin was silent for a long time. Then he said: ‘Will you find Pare?'

Edwin's candle rested on a small table and the flickering light cast enormous shadows on to the wall. Harriet began stroking Edwin's head, but she suddenly saw the giant shadow of her hand as a strange, unwanted creature alighting on him and she asked herself whether the fondness she felt for Edwin Orchard was born only out of her own childlessness. She didn't know the answer and thought that perhaps she never would know it because her childlessness would never have an end.

‘Is Pare with her tribe?' she asked.

‘No,' said Edwin. ‘She's in a high-up place, on a ledge sort of thing. And underneath her there's a waterfall going into a river.'

‘And where is this waterfall?'

‘I don't know. She calls to me all the time, but I don't want to go there because I don't want to leave Mama and Papa and Mollie and Baby, so somebody has to find Pare and tell her to come back, and no one else knows about her except you.'

‘But how am I to find her?' said Harriet. ‘How am I to know where to look?'

‘Look in the mountains,' said Edwin. ‘You could ride there on Billy, couldn't you? You told me you wanted to go into the mountains.'

‘Yes. I did.'

‘Please, Harriet. Just find the waterfall and call to her. Say “Pare, are you there?” Remember? “
Pare, are you there?
”'

Harriet was silent for a long while. Then she told Edwin that both Joseph and Pare were people who had to be found and that she would try to decide very soon how best this could be accomplished.

III

The Orchards persuaded Harriet to stay with them until the weather brightened and then she rode back to the Okuku flats, with Lady running beside the horse. The sun on Harriet's head felt warm and the wind had died.

She was counting the tasks that awaited her when she crossed the southerly arm of the creek and turned into the valley where the Cob House stood. And it was then that she saw that what the drought had turned to dust, and the rain to mud, the rain and wind together had finally broken apart.

Harriet reined in Billy and he slowed to a walk and Lady began running ahead, barking at the strange things she saw: the sheets of red tin roofing resting in the tussock grass; the front door, blown almost to the creek's edge, sticking into the mud like a meat cleaver; and all the yards of white calico lying across what remained of the walls and half covering the wild assembly of objects with which Harriet and Joseph had tried to begin their married life.

Harriet dismounted and walked slowly towards the peculiar scene.

In the still air, almost nothing moved, not even the calico, which was here and there stretched taut, attached to nails or snagged on thorns.

Staring at this, it came to Harriet Blackstone that what she was looking at was a painting of a life, a torn canvas which, at the moment of cutting, instead of holding its colours flat and fast to its surface, had spilled out what it had once depicted into three-dimensional space.

In escaping the confines of the painting that had held them together, objects had forgotten what purpose they were supposed to have. One of the iron beds stood on its end, as though offering itself as a perch for eagles. Pillows, lying here and there in the tussock, had the appearance of mushrooms. Broken shards of plates and cups decorated the ground like flowers.

Harriet remained a little way off. Dorothy Orchard had once said to her that men and women were destined always to make ‘a small world in the midst of a big one' and she remembered this now and saw that it was exactly what she and Joseph had tried to do. They'd made their ‘little world' for Lilian, with all the possessions she'd so laboriously and so insistently carted here from England, but also for themselves as well, because
that was all they had known how to make.
In a cave of ice, Harriet supposed, man would try to light a fire, carve chairs and tables from the walls. For what other means of living did he understand? What better thing could he aspire to if he wanted to survive?

Lady had returned to Harriet and was looking up at her now, for even the dog knew that some habitual arrangement of things had been turned on its head. Harriet stroked Lady's neck to reassure her, but she asked herself what reassurance was there to be had on the empty flats? How could anything be put back together now? Struggling to save the Cob House with her sacks of stones had killed Lilian. Joseph was far away and knew nothing of what had happened and wouldn't return – not even when winter came – unless he had filled his pockets with gold. She was alone.

A mocking voice in her head reminded Harriet that this was the very state after which she had yearned – to be alone in front of the mountains and under the sky. But now that she was face to face with her solitude she could only feel its enormity.

She nevertheless swept aside any thought of a cowardly return to Orchard House. She knew that if she went there, she would probably never leave, because her affection for Edwin Orchard was greater than her affection for her own husband. And she didn't want to grow old as she would have grown old in England – as the caretaker of other people's children. Why travel half the world to arrive at a place almost identical to the one you had left? Better to return to England, to her father, and care for him at least, than to become a cuckoo in the Orchards' nest.

It was mid-afternoon and Harriet judged that there were four or five hours of light remaining. Before the night stole up on her, she must busy herself with inspecting what remained and seeing what shelter she might be able to contrive. She told herself that at such a moment, it was best to move from simple task to simple task, going slowly and keeping watch, like a mariner who prepares his small boat for the coming storm. Yet the mile upon mile of emptiness around her made her more afraid than she had ever expected and she found it difficult to move from the spot where she stood. She looked down at her feet, shod in dusty black boots, with the laces beginning to fray, and was struck by how small they appeared.

Dead Work

I

For Joseph Blackstone, the moment of pegging out his miner's claim – a moment he had imagined for such a long time – brought him to a torment of indecision. With thirty shillings, he'd bought a patch of ground seventy-two feet square. Every speck of gold that he found on this plot would be his to keep. But where should he peg it? How was he supposed to guess where the colour was lying?

He walked a little way from where he'd pitched the tent, towards the Scots diggers, and stood and watched what they were doing. He knew that sometimes, claims were ‘shepherded'. This meant that newcomers to a goldfield waited to peg until they'd seen what results were coming from this area or that. Beyond the Scots' camp, four or five other claims had been pegged and were already being worked with sluices. Windlasses had been erected to speed up the business of bringing the dirt out of the ground, and the squeaking of the windlass, thought Joseph, was like the first sound of protestation here, the first lament for the alteration that was coming to Kokatahi.

It was early in the morning and misty. Joseph had instructed Will to boil a billy-can to make coffee and to cut up some bacon and he thought, as he walked away from the tent, how satisfying it might become to impose upon Will Sefton the tasks of a housewife. In the coming chaos, Will would keep the tent ship-shape and purchase supplies and cook trout from the river on fires that he'd made with his small hands. He would do the washing.

Joseph nodded to the Scotsmen, as he approached their claim. They were working as a team, one setting out the pegs, the other measuring and remeasuring the ground. Joseph saw that their pegs went right to the river's edge and he knew that diggers always had hopes of creeks and gullies and these would be the first claims to be taken up and worked here. Gold-mining needed water, too, for the sluice. Hill claimers had to buy water rights or pay for the construction of water flumes, but the gully men had all the water they could ever need – and more, when a fresh came and filled the shafts they'd dug and swept away their tents and their tools.

‘What's the word?' Joseph asked the Scotsmen. ‘How much colour has been found here?'

One of the men kept on with his task of hammering pegs and barely looked up at Joseph, as he stood there in the mist, but the other man straightened up and replied: ‘All we heard tell: nugget this big ta'en out of a duck's throat.'

‘If it was a duck, then it was from river ground, I suppose?'

‘You can suppose it if you will. Ducks can fly, too.'

Joseph smiled. He indicated the workings further up the river, where the windlasses were turning. ‘What have they taken out so far? Did they tell you?'

‘Say it's only tucker ground. A few pennyworth. But when does a miner ever admit to anything else?'

Now, the second Scotsman removed his hat and wiped his forehead with his sleeve. ‘Diggers are the biggest blood-curdling liars on God's earth, mister. Did naebody tell you that?'

‘I don't need to be told . . .' began Joseph.

‘They are,
by their natures
, of a lying disposition. Every last one of them. We'll lie to you, too, when we find our share, eh, Hamish?'

‘Aye. We'll lie to you and to everyone. And we don't want to be shepherded. You keep your distance. And tell your boy not to play his blasted penny whistle in the middle of the night.'

Joseph stood his ground. ‘And your mouth-organ? You'll keep that quiet, too?'

‘We'll keep it quiet at two in the morning, mister. But we'll play our songs. Songs of home. Englishmen never cared for our songs, never did care for them at all, so you move somewhere else, if they make you afraid.'

‘They don't make me afraid.'

‘Kaniere's full of English. Why don't you go back there?'

‘Because', said Joseph, ‘we heard about the duck. But what kind of duck was it? Did nobody tell you that, in New Zealand, there are very many birds who have
forgotten
how to fly?'

Joseph turned and walked away, pleased with his parrying of the Scotsmen's hostility, but, without looking back at them, he could tell that the men paid him no heed and resumed their work without glancing further at him. He understood that, wherever he decided to peg out his claim, it would have to be in a place where they couldn't see him, in a place where he could forget them as absolutely as they wanted to forget him.

The mist lay just above the river and wreathed itself in among the trees on the further bank and sometimes drifted to where Joseph sat, at the mouth of the tent, drinking coffee and gnawing biscuits and bacon. There was almost no wind, so Joseph could hear the dripping of the trees and began to feel the melancholy of this sound.

He didn't look at Will. He was glad that, from time to time, the mist thickened as it lifted off the water and almost masked Will from his sight. Because the memory of the night still seemed very heavy in him, as though some new weight were tugging him down. Images transfixed him as the trees dripped into the water: Will's mouth on his; the smoothness of Will's body; the wanton way he'd knelt above Joseph and held his own sex, to show off how it bucked and paraded in his hand. Joseph hadn't ever thought to find such a thing arousing, but now, even the mere memory of it made the blood come and the bones of his thighs ache – these altered, heavy bones of his. And he knew there was shame in this, shame that he didn't wish to think about.

So he kept his face turned away from Will, who sipped his coffee noisily and swore at the cold. And he prayed again to choose a good claim, to find gold so that he could bribe Will to stay with him. For he understood that Will Sefton could sell his ‘services' to almost any lonely man between here and the mouth of the Grey River. In the night, Will had boasted that in Otago ‘two miners had such a rivalry for me that they fought in the mud like dogs, like curs, like fighting cocks, Mister Blackstone, and one of them had his brains beat to pulp'.

‘Were you proud of that?' Joseph had asked, coldly.

‘Yes, I were proud of it,' Will had replied, taking up his penny whistle and caressing it softly with his lips, coaxing from it just the merest whispering sound, very close to Joseph's ear. ‘Sign of my talents, it were. Sign I were the best at my trade. After that, I could name my price.'

In the dark, but with sufficient moonlight to make every shape and movement clear to him, Joseph had looked at Will's face and remembered his torn jerkin and his down-at-heel boots. ‘And where did it go, then, the money you made in Otago?'

‘Where did it go? Where does it always go, Mister Blackstone? On this thing and that thing and then it's gone.'

Joseph finished his coffee and stood up. He began to walk along by the river, in the direction from which they'd come the evening before, with his head lowered and staring all the while at the ground by the water's edge. To be far enough away from the Scots' claim, he had two choices: to press on southwards, inland beyond the further workings, or choose a spot here. He knelt and rinsed his hands in the water and saw it running clear and fresh now, but imagined how, in a short while, the detritus from upstream would come flooding down and muddy everything to a brown soup. He didn't want to see other men's leavings in his bit of the river. He wanted to be above them, for them to suffer
his
mullock, his tailings. And so this decided him: he would instruct Will to help him pack up the tent and supplies and load the barrow and they would trek further inland, nearer to rising ground, and not think of pegging out his claim until they could no longer hear the noise of the windlasses.