The Colour (30 page)

Joseph stared at Will, thin and tattered and half covered with clay. He thought that he could kill them both – Will Sefton and the scurvy Chinaman – batter them to death with his shovel, and then he would be alone on his claim and the ground would hear his cries and yield up its treasure and all his world would be fine and bright. But he found that he had no strength left. No strength and no voice. He let the shovel drop. He searched in his muddy pocket and found a couple of pennies and he threw these at Chen's feet and Chen picked them up. Then the Chinaman selected the greenest cabbage from his basket and added a small bunch of radishes and gave these to Will.

‘Ta,' said Will. ‘Ta, Jenny. Now I shall get well.'

A week had now passed since Will had left to join the Scotsmen.

Though Joseph was getting accustomed to being by himself, he began to find that time moved much more slowly than before and hunger nagged at him, not just for food that he didn't have, but for the happiness that eluded him. He felt that contentment was present in every other creature and every other thing – in the water-birds which drank from the river, in the rats which scurried around his claim, looking for food, and in the songs the Glaswegian miners sang in the evenings. He alone lacked it.

And his nights were bleak. Sometimes, seeing moonlight beyond the tent flaps, he'd imagine he could hear the plangent sound of Will Sefton's penny whistle. He knew it was too far away to hear and yet he heard it just the same and kept wondering whose bed Will slept in now. One of the Scotsmen was called Hamish, but this was all he knew.

II

Chen Pao Yi liked to get up very early in the mornings.

Sometimes he slept in the hut of stones and sacking that he'd made and sometimes he slept in the dark cave beyond it, the cave that went into the heart of the mountain, and Pao Yi thought that the silence of this cave must be as absolute as any silence in the universe.

He liked to get up with the dawn and come out on to the hillside and see the brightness of the day beginning and feel the dew under his feet. It was April now and winter wouldn't be long in coming and the early mornings were cold, but he didn't mind. He knew how to endure cold. He would boil water on his fire to make tea, which he often drank scented with tarata leaves, and, while the water was boiling, inspect his garden and then sit by his hut and drink the tea and listen to the river and sometimes remember dawn on Heron Lake, when the clouds sat in white folds on the mountains and his red fishing boat moved quietly through the mist.

It wasn't that Pao Yi was homesick; he didn't feel any great longing to return to his other life, it was merely that his memories of this life – with Paak Mei and Paak Shui – were exceptionally vivid and full of a kind of tumultuous colour which his present seemed sometimes to lack. And Pao Yi liked to sit and admire this colour in his mind: the scarlet kites Paak Shui flew on Long Hill, the orange clay bricks of his house and its green windows, the brightly painted pictures of Chen Lin and Chen Fen Ming on the tiny ancestral altar near the cooking fire, the yellow and green glass beads of Paak Mei's tiny shoes, the shining silver of the fish in the lake. Nothing moved far nor changed in his imaginings. The scarlet kite was forever almost still, the fish swam slowly just under the surface of the water, Paak Mei stood quietly waiting in her beaded shoes. But neither did anything lose its vibrancy, and now, these days, it was beginning to dawn on Pao Yi that perhaps he had found his vocation as a market gardener. On his vegetable plot, he was replicating the colours of his past.

On the night after his encounter with Joseph Blackstone and Will Sefton, Pao Yi had had a terrifying dream in which he'd returned home to Heron Lake with nothing – no gold, no dollars, no gifts,
nothing
– and he'd knelt down and held out his hands to Paak Mei and they were empty and Paak Mei had begun to cry, and then the small room had filled up with members of Paak Mei's family, mother, father, brothers, sisters, cousins, and they all crowded round him and stared at him with pity.

He had lost face.

He thought he would have to kneel like that for the rest of time.

Some singing began, started by the brothers who sang with deep, resonant voices, and the song was about him, Chen Pao Yi:

When Pao Yi woke up from this nightmare and discovered that he was alone in his hut above Kokatahi, lying on his flax mat, he felt such great relief that he got up at once, even though it was barely light, and went out to his garden and looked at the moon which was still visible in the morning sky. He was very fond of the moon. He'd tried a few times to compose a poem to it and the words of the poem had seemed quite satisfactory at first, even tinged a little, in a sentimental way, with the moon's beauty. But when Pao Yi came to transcribe his words on to paper, he recognised that his calligraphy was crude and he felt that the badly written Chinese characters had infected the poem with badness. In another life, he said to himself, in my
next
life, I shall study with a Master Calligrapher and compose letters for all the inhabitants of Heron Lake and carve the names of their ancestors on the tombstones on the south side of Long Hill. And I will write poetry.

Pao Yi made his tarata-scented tea and, as he drank it, remembered the things he'd seen yesterday: the man lying shamed in the mud; the half-naked boy. He wondered how their lives had led them to this moment and whether it could have been foreseen and prevented. Pao Yi's father, Chen Lin, used to say: We may avoid shame if we choose, for shame seldom takes us unawares, but has its warning cry and we can hear that cry as clearly as we can hear the coming of the north wind.

The man lying in the mud hadn't heard the coming of the north wind.

But Pao Yi didn't care to think about the man and the boy for very long, just as he didn't care to think about most of what he saw and heard on the goldfields, neither about the names men called him, nor about the way, wherever they went, the Chinese were looked down upon and mocked and threatened and their once great Empire forgotten or belittled. These things had to be endured. They were part of each day. They were part of Time. But to think about them for too long made Pao Yi's head fill with a kind of unendurable clamour, as though he'd been shut away in the engine room of a paddle steamer, where the air was black.

Here, on his hillside, drinking his morning tea as the sun broke through the mist, he was able to forget them or hide them away, just as his son Paak Shui hid his collection of stones in a hollow pine tree, covered up with moss. But he knew they were always there, the unendurable things which had to be endured. They were always more immediate to him than he would have wished:

Pao Yi ate a bowlful of mashed k
Å«
mara and started work.

He was planting out tiny onions, nurtured from seed. He knew what they liked, these baby onions, they liked a snug, soft bed exactly the right size for them, made with his thumb. So Pao Yi walked very slowly along the row of earth, following his planting string wound between two sticks, making the beds for his onions and putting them in. He would plant them all, then walk back down the row again and cover them with earth.

He'd made sixteen of these baby beds, when, on the seventeenth, he felt resistance from a flint underneath the pad of his thumb. Pao Yi liked to have all the onions perfectly spaced, one from another, so instead of making another bed a fraction further on, he dug down to remove the flint that was in the way. The flint was quite large – much larger than his thumb pad – and Pao Yi held it in his palm for a moment before throwing it away. But, as he threw it, he saw the sun catch it in an unexpected way, with a bright gleam, and so he turned to look at it, where it had fallen, and his eyes rested there. He didn't move: he remained exactly where he was, squatting down over his onion row, but regarding the discarded flint and formulating in his mind what – if anything – he wanted to say about it.

Chen Pao Yi had perfected a quality of stillness. He had learned it from his father, Chen Lin. It was a stillness of both mind and body, a stillness that had mastery over words. Perhaps almost any other man in New Zealand would have gasped out the word ‘gold', but Pao Yi didn't do this. He refused to comply with any
naming
of the thing he had found in the onion row.

But he moved now. Very carefully, without hurrying, he finished planting the row. Then he stood up and walked to where the golden flint lay. He picked it up, noting its heaviness, and held it out, to let the sun touch it again.

He said nothing. He thought of the weir over which his parents had tumbled to their deaths and of their graves on Long Hill, which, perhaps, did not contain all that had been left of them. Then he thought of Paak Shui's scarlet kite above the hill and what a brilliant, beautiful speck it made in the sky. And then at last he thought about Paak Mei and how he might one day replace her beaded shoes with slippers encrusted with precious stones.

III

When the news of the Scottish find reached Kaniere, forty or fifty miners who had been toiling there for weeks for poor returns decided to cut their losses, buy new licences and make for Kokatahi. In the time that it took them to get to the warden's office at Hokitika and back, the Scottish strike had been talked up into a ‘homeward bounder': a discovery so huge that it would change men's lives at a stroke and enable them to return home as rich men.

They came up the river in pairs and groups. They looked like a race apart, like convicts fleeing death, like a starving army. Many of them had fallen sick in the wet-flat swamps of Kaniere and couldn't eat and were as thin as wraiths, with their skin a waxy yellow and their eyes huge with pain and disappointment. Such clothes as they possessed were now so encrusted with mud that it had seemed to them pointless to try to wash them any more. ‘The mud keeps us warm,' they quipped. ‘Extra layer of insulation against the winter, it is. And it's camouflage, 'less there be crows waiting in the sky.'

When they reached Kokatahi, they saw that the ground was firmer here. Some of them hadn't stood or slept on dry ground for a month. But already all the river claims near to the Scots' camp had been bagged. The new arrivals from Kaniere could count twenty-seven windlasses and two horse-whims. The air was clotted with noise. The piles of discarded wash-dirt now made an almost unbroken embankment along the south side of the Kokatahi River.

Plenty of land was left on the northern side, well away from the water, good dry land where a tent would sit nicely, and where there seemed to be no sign of swamp rats, no itch of sandflies. The Kaniere men paused and set down their tools and looked at it and weighed up comfort against chance. They longed to recover their health, but what was health worth if they were going to remain poor? They knew that Hamish McConnell and Marty Brenner had made their strike close to the water, that what was now known as the ‘Brenner–McConnell homeward bounder' was a river claim, and they also knew that gold very often lay in the earth in lines and seams and what the successful digger had to do was predict where the seam would go and stay on that same line. And so, although the dry grassland away from the Kokatahi seemed like heaven to them after Kaniere, not many men pitched a tent there. They walked on up the river.

Joseph heard them coming one late afternoon, as the light was fading. Then he saw them and he knew what they were: they were the unlucky ones. Perhaps they'd dug out a few pennyworth of gold dust at Kaniere, enough to keep them in grog and rice, but the way that they came shuffling and stumbling along the river-banks revealed to him their lack of fortune. They were like him.

And now they were going to invade his world.

Joseph stood on his claim and didn't move. He'd been at the head of the Kokatahi workings for almost a month, in his own universe, and now everything was going to change.

He hadn't yet made his fire. He knew that he must be almost invisible to the men arriving in the dusk and his instinct was to go into his tent, to hide from them, so that he wouldn't have to look at them or talk to them. But he stayed where he was. Hopeless as his claim was proving, he knew he had to defend his ground, defend his right to his section of the river, make sure that his ropes, which stole an extra foot or two by circling round rocks and boulders, weren't disturbed.

‘How's it go, here?' called out one of the men to Joseph. ‘You in on the Brenner–McConnell bounder, mister?'

Joseph could smell the men now, a filthy scalp smell, a stench of sore crotch and rotting feet.

‘Got a prime claim here, eh?' said another man. ‘Got a riser at least, haven't you?'

Joseph said nothing to this, but asked on impulse: ‘Is Will Sefton with you?'

‘Will Sefton? Who's Will Sefton?'

‘My boy,' said Joseph. ‘Went down to the Scots' camp.'

‘The Scots' camp's like Piccadilly, mister. You can't hardly get near it. The Brenner-McConnell homeward bounder's known as far as Greymouth now.'

‘I doubt it was a homeward bounder,' said Joseph.

‘Why's that? I heard they dug out a lump the size of a man's fist. McConnell's bought a horse, did you know? Big expensive horse. And he's got women there.'