The Colour (27 page)

But Pao Yi couldn't know, for no word could come from Paak Mei because she couldn't write, nor barely form the characters of her own name, ‘White Plum Blossom', and it felt to Pao Yi after he'd been in New Zealand for a while, as if the voice of Paak Mei was becoming fainter, too, as though his wife had caught a chill and had trouble speaking above a whisper. Only in his dreams did he hear her clearly, hear her high laughter and remember the sound of her walk, which was a little ghostly shuffling on the heels and knuckles of her bound feet in cloth shoes.

‘To walk is pain,' she sometimes observed, but in a neutral voice without complaint, as though she were observing the rain or the sunshine or the grey hairs in Pao Yi's pigtail, and it had been one of Pao Yi's self-imposed duties to unwind the bindings of Paak Mei's feet and hold them in his hands and try to soothe their agony with lavender oil. And when he knew he was going to leave for New Zealand to put an end to poverty in his family, he attempted to show Paak Shui how to care for these feet, but Paak Shui said he didn't want to do this, he liked his mother's small feet when they were bound up and in her shoes, but to see them unwrapped, with the bones of the toes broken and turned over towards the soles, like a bird's claw, made him feel queasy.

Pao Yi reminded Paak Shui that filial piety was his first duty in life because that life had been given to him by his parents and without them, he would have remained a mote of dust on a distant, treeless hill. He said: ‘This pain likes to go where it will and do as it pleases. But it is afraid of lavender. The lavender oil is your weapon, but weapons are of no use sitting on a shelf or hanging on the wall. You must take the weapon in your hands to show duty to your mother and chase the pain away.'

Paak Shui protested that the pain was too headstrong for him. He was eight years old. He said that he could see and feel, from the queasy feeling he got when he looked at Paak Mei's feet, that the pain was wilful and cruel like the tail of a dragon; but Pao Yi put the pot of lavender oil into his hands and told him that wilfulness and cruelty must not be allowed to enter the house on Heron Lake. He said: ‘In the name of your lost grandparents, Chen Lin and Chen Fen Ming, who sacrificed themselves for others, you must chase these things away.'

But now, Chen Pao Yi often wondered, as he dug and watered his vegetable garden, whether his son had been able to do what had been asked of him. He was a child. His favourite pastimes were making lures for fish out of broken shells and flying his kite in the wide sky above Long Hill in Panyu County. He loved things which moved in ripples and loops, not things which looked already dead, as his mother's feet looked dead to him. And Pao Yi was gradually coming to believe that the pain might be howling round Paak Mei's bed like a tiger and that it might be for this reason that her voice was becoming almost too weak to hear.

But he couldn't go back to China. Not yet. Not until he was a rich man.

To go back without the riches that he'd promised would be to lose face in his village and even with Paak Mei and her parents. He'd made a little money in Otago from his market garden there, but just as his enterprise had begun to prosper, so the Gold Rush had ended and the miners had drifted away and Pao Yi had been left alone in the mined landscape with its abandoned shafts and box flumes and the old horse-whims which still turned on their own in the wind.

So, when the new Rush began on the West Coast, he had made his way here and thought to rent a plot of ground directly behind Hokitika, within sight of the diggings. But the Commissioner had informed him that all of this land was deemed auriferous and none of it could be given over to the growing of food. ‘Go further inland,' the Commissioner told Pao Yi. ‘Go towards Lake Kaniere and find a plot there and we will send the warden to tell you whether you can work it or not. Canterbury County is in favour of market gardening, but not at the expense of the gold. Now, shoo, Johnny, for we are very busy, and do not waste my time with any more talk of coastal land.'

So Pao Yi walked up the Hokitika River towards the bush-line.

He passed the Kaniere diggings and the tiny settlement at Kokatahi and then he walked on until he found a flat curve of land in the arm of the river and sheltered on its northern side by tall rocks. In the rocks was a small cave and Pao Yi crawled into the cave and buried his Otago money under a stone, then he lay still and quiet in the silence of the cave and felt that the cave was a beautiful place.

The rent for the land was fair. He counted it out and was given a piece of paper with a snarled signature on it, which he couldn't decipher, and he went down to the Hokitika mining stores where he bought himself new boots and his rabbit-fur hat. Then he returned to the cave and began to construct a tiny dwelling out of sacking and stones, leaning against the rock face and having the cave as its inner secret sanctum. He roofed it with ti-ti palm and laid his mat on the earth floor and dreamed of Chen Lin and Chen Fen Ming gliding over Heron Lake towards the weir. Endlessly, they glided towards it but, in this dream, they never reached it and when Pao Yi woke up from this dream he began straightaway turning the earth for his new garden and he saw that the soil was black and rich.

By the time Joseph and Will Sefton caught sight of Pao Yi with his baskets on his bamboo pole, he had been working on his garden above Kokatahi for a year. Once a week, he walked to the Hokitika diggings with his panniers full of cabbages, onions, leeks, turnips, radishes and potatoes. In the high summer, he'd grown lettuces, k
Å«
mara, beans and peppers. He was trying to nurture a plum tree. He caught fish in the river with lures made by his son.

In the long nights of March, he sat by his fire and smoked his opium pipe and said English words aloud:
river, potato, duck, woman, gold
.

III

Sinking shafts and slabbing them was arduous work.

‘The blue clay's down there, must be,' remarked Will, after two days of digging, ‘but you never know how far down.' And later on, he added: ‘I've seen a digger cry like a woman when he thought he'd got to the blue and then hit stone. Cry for all that lost dead work.'

Soon, the first shaft on Joseph's claim went so deep that it was almost impossible to climb in or out of it. Joseph had to stop digging and fashion a ladder out of pine branches and rope. And still the excavation was bottoming on gravel and not on clay, and water was beginning to seep into it, making necessary a parallel drainage bore, sunk deeper than the shaft.

Standing on his makeshift ladder, Joseph examined the strata of earth, going down from the sandy turf, through a blackish silt, into a dull brown marl, with flecks of grey and white visible in it, but not a shard of the true colour. His anxiety that he had put himself beyond the gold line would be present at every moment, he knew, until or unless he had his first sighting of the colour. He kept reminding himself that on the Arrow and on the Clutha, gold had been found high up in the gorges. Gully workings had become bush workings. Miners had died falling from rocks and waterfalls, but many had dug their fortunes out of the mountains.

In the nights, when Joseph lay awake in the tent and wondered if his work here would all be in vain, Will Sefton would sometimes turn away from him, indifferent and aloof, and fall asleep in moments. Yet at other times the boy would read Joseph's thoughts and take up his penny whistle and play one of his melancholy tunes and then say: ‘Forget the earth, Mister Blackstone. Go to a different place.'

The Road to the Taramakau

I

Harriet rode to Christchurch and hired a dray.

The big cart, with its melancholy drayman chewing tobacco and spitting into the tussock, made two journeys to and from the ruins of the Cob House. First, it took the pigs and the chickens to the little market in Rangiora, with the milk cow attached to the dray and trotting behind it, her udders humiliatingly swinging side-to-side and her eyes a raging, startled white. Then the dray returned and all the furniture which had remained intact and the china and glass which wasn't broken and all the kitchen utensils were loaded on to it, including the mangle and the butter churn. On top of these things were placed Joseph's clothes in his trunk and his fishing rods and his fly box and his poetry books and the tools he'd left behind and Lilian's bonnets tied up in a sack and her boots in a wicker basket.

Only the range remained. The solitary drayman swore blue at the idea of lifting it. ‘Besides,' he pointed out to Harriet, spitting more tobacco into the dusty grass, ‘the flue of it goes up into the stone stack, Miss. To get that out again would take more time than I've got to give you.'

Harriet saw that there was no point in arguing. So the range and the stone chimney stood alone on the flats and it made Harriet smile to think that a stranger could arrive here and light the range and then stand under the open sky and bake a cake.

The loaded dray would then make its slow journey back to Christchurch, to a place called Bloomington's Warehouse, not far from where Mrs Dinsdale lived. The clerk at Bloomington's, Mr O'Malley, had already explained to Harriet that the rates charged for storage were high at the moment. ‘For what you have in New Zealand,' he'd said, ‘is an epidemic of abandonment. Say the word “gold” and men will desert their dearest things.'

When the dray was almost ready to leave, Harriet pulled down what remained of the calico rooms and she and the drayman stretched the torn calico over the piled-up cart like a tarpaulin, and the dray set off, leaving Harriet alone, with the wind picking up again and blowing her short hair into her eyes and buffeting her skirts among the dry grasses.

She stood and watched the dray swaying slowly along until it was out of sight and then she turned away and went down to the donkey, still racked with a cough, waiting in the paddock. Harriet had got money for the cow, the pigs and the hens at Rangiora, but she knew no one who would buy the donkey, unless to slaughter it for its sinewy meat. So she had made up her mind what to do with it: she would bring it to paradise.

With a hammer, she smashed down the tin fence that surrounded her vegetable garden and kicked the pieces away, and she led the donkey here, where it could smell all the varied and succulent green. She left it untethered so that it could drink at the creek and graze all day on carrot tops and the stalks of beans and pale winter cabbage and the leaves of beets. She wondered whether, in all the empty landscape, it would know something of loneliness, and begin braying at the sky, but she thought that she was doing the best she could for it and she told herself that seldom is any ‘best' so good that it could not be further perfected. But she liked to think that, after all her work, the vegetables she'd nurtured on her plot wouldn't rot in the ground. She stroked the donkey's neck and felt it shiver and saw its ears twitch forward and then she left it to eat its way to death in its own time. She didn't look back.

Harriet was abandoning the Cob House, not only because so little of it remained, but because she had found the tea box from China buried behind the calico wall.

At first, Harriet had thought the box was empty. Then she had run her finger round the bottom of it, into its hard, dark corners, remembering what she herself had consigned to it. And what she found there was a shard of gold.

When Harriet saw this shard, the pity she'd been nurturing for Joseph in the wake of Lilian's death was replaced with a fury so cold it was like a weapon made of ice. She wanted to tear this weapon out of her and lodge it in her husband's neck. She felt that Joseph Blackstone had stolen her life.

She'd kept apart some food and a few possessions of her own and these she put into sacks and tied to Billy's saddle. Billy stood patiently waiting, flicking his tail at imaginary summer flies. Lady crouched in the grass, her yellow-brown eyes large and bright, her ears alert to the next command.

Harriet packed the gun Joseph had given her at D'Erlanger's Hotel and a compass that had belonged to her father and then she put on her cloak and a woollen hat knitted by Dorothy Orchard and climbed on to the horse. In the hat, she knew she looked older than she was, like someone who had survived a long time in New Zealand and understood how to read the signals in the wind.

Lady stood up and began barking. Back into the earth had gone the tea box, with its lid nailed down, just as she had found it. Inside it, a note to Joseph read:

Then she began to ride towards the mountains, skirting them to the south and turning north again towards Amberley. She let Billy canter or walk, as he had a mind to do, never urging him, and Lady ran along by the side of them, always keeping pace.

Five or six miles south of Amberley, Harriet picked up the dray road that went from Christchurch as far as the Waitohi Gorge, a dirt track, sluiced by the rains and sculpted with the ruts of heavy wheels and the imprints of men's boots. And it was not long before she was joined by a straggle of gold-seekers, some riding in drays, others pulling handcarts, some carrying almost nothing beyond a swag and a pick.

All were men. They stared at Harriet on her smart chestnut horse. She saw in their eyes disbelief mixed with something else, which might have been fear for her and might have been disdain, and she couldn't tell which.

‘Stopping at Amberley, miss, aren't you?' one of them ventured. ‘Not going over the Hurunui, are you?'

Harriet didn't want to have to engage in any kind of conversation. She wanted to be alone with her purpose, or at least alone with her thoughts, from which she was all the while trying to disentangle her purpose.