The Colour (26 page)

The trudge was uphill and in and out of the newly roped ground and, when the mist lifted and the sun came out and the bush began to shimmer near, the walking seemed vain and arbitrary.

Joseph stopped and looked around. He was waiting to see some sign, some instruction in the lie of the terrain, to tell him where to stake his claim, but nothing presented itself. He set the barrow down and listened. The trees still dripped into the river and some bird called from the shingle banks. In the distance, he could hear the sound of a waterfall. He took a shovel out of the barrow and dug it into the soft earth between two grey stones. He turned the shovel and lifted up his first heap of West Coast soil and looked at it.

Will set down the swag and came and peered at the lifted earth and then knelt and began to sift it with his hands. It was pale in colour but mixed with a dryish, dark grit.

‘Easy to work,' Will commented. ‘We could get down to the blue clay quite fast, through this, ‘less we're flooded out. And there's pine up above for slabs.'

Now, again, the pain of indecision began to take hold of Joseph.

Had he been wrong to walk this far upstream? Did the men with the windlasses
know
the ground there was auriferous? Had he put himself beyond this vital knowledge for no sensible reason except his old reason of wanting to be alone, ahead of the Rush?

He let the shovelful of earth fall away. He turned in a circle and noticed that, behind him and to the left, there was a grassy plateau, level and dry and free of manuka, where the tent could sit.

‘Pitch the tent there?' he asked Will.

‘For you to say, Mister Blackstone.'

‘Will,' said Joseph, ‘I'm tired of all this
Mister Blackstone
! Call me Joseph, won't you?'

But Will shook his head. ‘Never do that. Clean against my credo, Mister Blackstone.'

‘Your
credo
?'

‘Isn't that the word? Learnt that from an educated miner on the Arrow. Meaning my
policy.
Never say a man's precious name, see? Never let him be my darling. You understand, don't you? I'm sure you understand.'

Joseph stared at the boy. He saw that in the sunlight, his mouth looked very red, exactly as Rebecca's mouth had been red – red and moist, with the lips just slightly parted as though she were always and always about to speak or laugh. He looked away and down again at the earth.

‘Yes,' he said. ‘I understand.' And he felt, in that instant, that he couldn't walk any further, so he made a decision: he would peg his claim here. He took out from his pocket his Miner's Right, with its elegant rendition of his name, and he pressed it against his lips.

‘Kissing it for luck, are you?' asked Will, laughing. ‘Think that'll help you, Mister Blackstone?'

Joseph measured the ground he had chosen not once but several times. Where boulders lay on the periphery, he ran his rope round the back of these, so gaining a few inches here and there, for boulders could be prised out of the earth and the colour had been known to sit right underneath them, as though it had glued them to the ground.

When the task of pegging and roping was complete, Joseph stood and looked at his claim. Seventy-two feet square. It ran down to the north bank of the river, to a small shingle spur. If the southerly bank were staked by another miner, then Joseph would have rights over the water only to the middle of the current. But for now, this portion of the river was his, and a comfortable flat rock nearby would make ‘a nice chair', so Will had announced, ‘for fishing'.

Marking out the ground had reminded Joseph of his first days on the flats, when he'd chosen the site for the Cob House and felt the grandeur of the empty valleys and the watchful mountains, except that, now, he had backed himself into a narrow corridor of land between the dense bush and the sea, and the feeling of vastness here was of a different order. Only the prime, unanswerable question was the same: was the claim in the right place? On the Okuku flats, he'd put his house in the pathway of the winds; here, would he make some similar mistake?

He decided he would work the claim outwards from the river, leaving himself a firm strip of land, running north-south along the side of the claim, for barrowing away as much of the mullock as he could. He didn't want to work surrounded by his own leavings; he wanted the river to carry these away – down to the Scots' camp and beyond, to Kaniere. The thought of this gave him pleasure. He had put himself at the head of the Kokatahi workings.

A good part of the day remained, so Joseph set his cradle at the water's edge and then began to shovel in dirt and wash it through. Now, he thought, I'm a true gold-miner, a digger, a prospector, a new chum.

And it was as though everything that he'd done, everything he'd achieved in New Zealand so far had been a preparation for this moment.
Now,
he would make his fortune.
Now,
he would dig himself a new future. The sun shone on his neck and on his back, bent over the cradle, and he was happy.

In the night, Joseph heard a squeaking and scuffling outside the tent and knew that the bush rats had arrived. ‘Dig a hole and put your stores in it,' a passenger on the
Wallabi
had said, ‘and the bush rats will smell it from nine miles.'

But Joseph was too tired to get up, to look for his gun. Let them eat the bacon tonight. Tomorrow, he would begin sinking shafts in the ground, to get down to the blue-clay bottom. Tomorrow, he would contrive some ingenious way of outwitting the rats.

He closed his eyes and began to drift back to sleep. He could sense that Will was awake beside him, but he didn't turn to look at him.

In the mist that came again with the morning, they started cutting pine from the bush, to saw it into planks, or ‘slabs' as the miners called them, to shore up the shafts. Joseph told Will he would contrive a windlass, too. He had no length of chain, but he thought rope would serve.

He knew that all this preparation was known as ‘dead work'; it brought you nothing while it lasted, but you couldn't operate a claim efficiently without it and Joseph wanted his plot to be a model of its kind, tidily and methodically worked, so that every inch of ground could be excavated and sifted. And he realised now – faced with the relative smallness of his seventy-two-foot holding – that his first attempts at trying to find gold in Harriet's Creek had been chaotic and wasteful.

As they hacked at the trees, Will began chattering about his time as the undertaker's apprentice. He'd often helped, he told Joseph, with ‘dressing up the dead in their finery' and laughed his mocking laugh when he recounted how ‘sometimes, we would find an instruction to put an old hag into her wedding dress and it would be half rotted away or else we'd split it trying to make it stretch across her, where her fat tits hung. But a coffin conceals a multitude of sins, Mister Blackstone, for you cannot see the
back
of anything, so there can be pins or tape holding everything in together, but on the front side, where the living come to have their last look, all appears neat and proper.'

‘What about the men?' asked Joseph. ‘What did they like to be dressed in?'

‘Black. Like as they were going to be guests at their own funerals! But then sometimes, if you hadn't put the band round, the mouth wadding would start to come out and you'd get staining on the shirt or necktie.'

‘The band?'

‘It's like a buckram you tie round the jaw and up to the crown of the head and pull it tight with hooks and eyes, to stop the mouth from gaping. But my employer, Mr da Costa, he used to pride himself on tipping the head back at just the right angle, so you didn't have to display it with the band. For the relations, they don't like to see any contrivance. They know it is contrived, or some do, but they just don't wish to see it.'

Joseph was silent for a moment, then he said: ‘With some of the short slabs, Will, why don't we make a coffin for our food? In the night, I heard –'

‘Rats,' said Will. ‘You'll never outwit them. In Otago, I saw men sleeping with sacks over their faces to try to keep the bush rats away and that was one of the stupidest notions I ever came across. For what had the sacks contained but oats or flour or rice and so the rats came to lick what was left of this, and one man had his nose bitten clean away. Yet he went on digging for gold without his nose, and he found some, and he thought this would buy him a bride, but no bride wants a man with only half a face, am I right?'

‘I expect so. But with nails and planks we could build some kind of box for the stores and sink it underground . . .'

‘We can try, Mister Blackstone. But they'll still come, you wait. Not only the food that stinks, is it? It's us, too. And they smell that smell of the human from a long way off.'

It was soon after this that Joseph looked down towards the river, looked back at his claim and at the little tent which stood on the grassy plateau in the morning sunlight, and saw a figure walking along towards it.

The figure had come out of the bush. He wore a fur hat and carried on his shoulders a bamboo pole and at each end of the pole was strung a wicker basket and from the way the man walked, Joseph could tell that the baskets were heavy.

Will rested his axe and stared at the stranger. ‘That's a Johnny, I warrant,' he said.

‘A Johnny?'

‘John Chinaman. A Celestial. A Chinky. Only the Johnnies carry baskets like that. Otago was crawling with them in the end. They used to come and fossick where the real diggers had already been. Didn't mind picking over what other men had left behind.'

Joseph and Will watched the man. When he reached their claim, he stopped and set down his baskets.

‘Aye-aye,' said Will. ‘Now, he'll try stealing something and popping it in his panniers. You see if he doesn't.'

Joseph remembered the Chinese men on the
Wallabi
cooking rice on their tiny lamp and staying apart from the crowd, as though in a different world, and he now saw that this man – even at this distance – had something of the same containment about him, in the way that he moved so quietly and in the way that he had struggled to hold himself tall and upright under the weight of the baskets. He watched the man walk a little nearer to the tent and heard him call out something which he couldn't catch. Then the Chinaman stood perfectly still, waiting, with the sun of mid-day shining on him and on the river as it flowed past him, clear and bright. And after a while, when no one came out of the tent, he shouldered his pole and the heavy baskets and walked away.

‘He took nothing,' Joseph remarked to Will.

‘No,' said Will. ‘Not this one. But they do. And you cannot know them. That is what used to vex me on the Arrow. You can never read their thoughts.'

II

His name was Chen Pao Yi.

He'd been in Otago for a year and then he'd come here, not to dig for gold, but to start a little market garden and sell what he grew to the West Coast diggers. The diggers never called him by his real name; they called him ‘Jen' (deliberately mishearing the name Chen) or ‘Jenny' or sometimes ‘Scurvy Jenny' because people said the vegetables he grew held that sickness at bay, but Chen Pao Yi suffered this without moving a muscle of his face and bowed to them when they handed over their money or a few grains of gold in exchange for his produce.

He was forty years old and there was grey in his hair, which he wore plaited into the traditional pigtail under his hat of rabbit fur, and he dreamed of his home, which was a small house on the shores of a lake called Heron Lake in Panyu County in south-east China, and he dreamed of his wife whose name was Paak Mei and of his son whose name was Paak Shui.

Paak Shui meant ‘white water' and this boy had been named in honour of Pao Yi's parents, Chen Lin and Chen Fen Ming, who had died trying to rescue their neighbours in a spring flood on Heron Lake, when their boat had gone over a weir, throwing them on to a water-wheel and all the bits and pieces of their bodies had glided around Heron Lake for all the days of the flood and never come to shore until the eighth day and then Pao Yi had to go and gather them up – a leg, a hand, a severed foot, their precious heads bruised and dented – and lay them out on the reeds and try to piece them back together.

But it had been impossible to find every bit of them for there were fingers that had been eaten by fish and hair snagged on sow thistles and eyes lost among the amber-coloured shingle and so what Pao Yi buried was part of his parents and not all, and it seemed to him that all the while he remained in China, they called to him and begged him to find the missing bits of themselves and lay these bits in the burial site so that they could be whole again, with ears to hear the wind in the fir trees and noses to smell the plum blossom in winter and feet to carry them to Pao Yi's side and see his child, Paak Shui, take his first steps.

They had been poor. He and his father were fishermen on the lake.

And when Pao Yi saw other men leaving for the Gold Rush in New Zealand, he thought he would try to overcome poverty, because poverty and hunger tired him almost as much as hearing the calling of his parents' voices tired him and he saw that if he remained in his house on Heron Lake he would soon shoulder a burden of tiredness so great that he would be able to do nothing except lie down on his straw mat with his opium pipe and fall into an eternal sleep.

And then he discovered that, as he travelled south, the voices of Chen Lin and Chen Fen Ming began to grow fainter, as though the Pacific Ocean were too immense for even their powerful spirits to cross and he wondered whether they called to his son, Paak Shui, instead or even to his wife, Paak Mei, who had always been a dutiful daughter-in-law and cared for Chen Fen Ming when she'd been ill with a black fever and paddled her own little boat in the lake, collecting water-chestnuts to put in Chen Lin's favourite dishes.