The Colour (34 page)

II

Six hours after they began their descent into the Hurunui Gorge, Pare saw them: two p
ā
keh
ā
men, roped together, stumbling past the waterfall. They came on in silence, their faces moon-white in the dusk of the evening.

They were heading for the river, where Pare had crawled to bathe her feet, and she stayed very still because she knew they hadn't seen her, knew they could see nothing, after what they had been through, until they had lain down by the water and drunk.

She let them drink, let them sit up and slowly begin to unwind their rope. And it was then that she called out to them and they jerked their heads up and the younger man began screaming.

When they'd recovered from the shock of seeing Pare like a ghost at the river's edge, Flinty Fairford and John-boy Shannon slowly realised that they were in luck.

A Maori woman.

Everybody knew that the Maoris understood the bush, knew how the sun moved, knew where rivers could be crossed, knew which plants to eat, knew how to snare birds, soothe hornet stings and sandfly bites. It was said that the Maoris could start fires by rubbing the palms of their hands together, cure fever by laying their foreheads against yours. And so, once they realised that Pare was a Maori, the two exhausted and terrified men greeted her politely and after a while crossed the river to where she sat, bathing her feet.

It surprised Flinty and John-boy that she spoke English and was able to explain to them that she, too, had come over the Hurunui. She asked them tentatively for food and they gave her slices of bacon and made tea for her on a little fire. She ate hungrily and thanked them and said: ‘You want gold? I can show you where there is gold. But I can't walk. You will have to carry me there.'

They looked at her, measuring her up. They saw that there was no spare flesh on her Maori bones. ‘We'll carry you,' said John-boy. ‘If you can show us gold, we'll carry you like a baby.'

They slept on Pare's ledge and heard the waterfall roaring in the dark. A canopy of stars hung above them and Flinty and John-boy stared at the far-away light and felt triumphant that they had survived the descent of the gorge. Pare showed them how to cut ponga fronds to cover themselves against the cold and they slept like tired dogs.

They made a sling for Pare with her blanket and she rode on John-boy's back with her thin legs dangling down.

The way was dark and treacherous. The overhang of the cliff was so low in places that they had to crawl on hands and knees under it and all the while the river rushed onwards, and where they couldn't go round or under the overhang, they were obliged to cross the water. Before each weary crossing of the river, they stopped and John-boy set Pare down and she would kneel at the river's edge and stare at the water and try to gauge how deep or fast was the current and where the eddies swirled and what kind of shale or stones lay on the bottom.

Seventeen times Pare guided them over and back across the river, until at last the gorge began to open up and they reached the swampy flats of the Taramakau. John-boy set Pare down and untied the blanket and kissed her cheek. ‘Good girl,' he said. ‘Led us right to where we wanted to be! Eh, Flinty? Eh?'

‘Not yet,' said Flinty. ‘Not quite. No gold here, is there?'

‘No gold here,' said Pare. ‘Not here. When we reach K
Å«
mara, we go south. Two miles. Long ago there was a forest there. Now, it's underneath the earth. It sleeps and the gold sleeps in it.'

‘In fifty-four years of this miserable life, I never heard,' declared Flinty crossly, ‘of gold being found on the tops of trees!'

‘The Maori know that gold is there,' replied Pare, ‘in that sleeping forest.'

They were resting from the never-ending walk, sitting on soft tussock instead of rock for the first time in a long while. Flinty drank from his water bottle and spat on to the grass. He looked at Pare with his stoat's eyes.

‘I don't believe you
know,'
he said. ‘Do you? You've no bloody idea where the gold is! You just wanted us to carry you through the gorge. You've tricked us fine and well.'

‘Wait, Flinty,' said John-boy. ‘Why's she come over the Hurunui herself, down that underwater hell, if she doesn't know where the gold is?'

‘Ask
her
why. To be some gold-seeker's whore, I reckon. Get rich on a white man's work. Aren't I right, eh? Aren't I right?'

Pare didn't look at Flinty. His eyes frightened her. She looked at the river and all the grey boulders which tried to impede its desperate course.

‘I must find greenstone,' said Pare quietly. ‘I must find greenstone or my life will be lost.'

‘What d'you mean?' asked Flinty. ‘What the devil does that mean?'

‘It means I promised greenstone to the spirits.'

‘What's she saying, John-boy?'

‘I'm not a mind-reader, Flinty. You fathom it.'

‘If you're tricking us,' said Flinty, ‘you'll be very sorry. Those bleeding feet of yours will be as nothing –'

‘No tricks,' said Pare. ‘I led you here . . .'

‘We could have got here ourselves! We only had to follow the river. The trekking down was the hard bit. We could have done all the rest without you.'

Pare felt cold.
Te riri p
ā
keh
ā
: the white man's anger.
She'd seen it in Toby Orchard. It had damaged her life. She knew that in the North Island a land-war between Maori and p
ā
keh
ā
was still raging. She knew there was no limit to the things this anger could do. She knew that she might not be able to survive it.

She forced herself neither to be afraid nor to sound as though she was afraid. To calm herself, she thought of the p
ā
and the stones she'd laid out in a waiting circle.

She spoke slowly, looking again at John-boy, at his soft mouth, not at Flinty. ‘I led you here because the gold is here,' she said. ‘The Maori know that there is gold in the buried forest.'

‘If they know there's gold, then they'll
be
there, won't they? There'll be a fine fat quantity of natives digging it up!'

‘No,' said Pare. ‘The Maori do not love gold. Greenstone is our treasure.'

III

Joseph lingered in Hokitika.

He paid for a hot bath and a small back room at the hotel, which he was lucky to get, said the owner, because a crowd of new chums was expected to arrive on the
Wallabi
any day.

Joseph had promised himself he would buy a woman for a few hours – any woman. But now the feeling of needing to be with a woman went away and he begrudged spending precious money on something he didn't really want.

He walked out from the hotel, along past the stores and shanties that he remembered, past the shop where he'd bought Will Sefton his fishing rod, past the banks and the grocery stores, in search of something, but not knowing what. He thought, after a little while, that he longed to hear music, some melodious sound, because all that had filled his head in the last weeks had been discordant and ugly.

There was no music on the Hokitika wharves, only the distant music of the sea, and so Joseph stopped and looked at this once more and noticed, after a moment or two of watching, a dark speck on the wide, grey water. He stared at it. It was the
Wallabi
coming in, slowly nearing the Hokitika Bar. And Joseph found himself wondering how his fortunes might have been altered if he'd delayed his journey, if he was even now among these gold-seekers, on
this
SS
Wallabi
which was and was not the
Wallabi
where he'd met Will Sefton and seen the Chinese men cooking rice on a lamp.

Life is a war that never ends between you and the intrinsic arbitrariness of things
 . . .

Joseph returned to the beach, to watch the crossing of the bar. The breakers were rougher than when his ship had crossed, but rough seas didn't necessarily mean that the bar was high. The bar moved and drifted all the time. The bar was the random and the unknown epitomised.

It was an overcast April day and the visibility wasn't good, but Joseph shaded his eyes and tried to see the people on the
Wallabi,
whom he knew would be clustered on deck, trying to make out what kind of a place Hokitika was, longing for the moment when land was reached but faced now with this new worry about the bar. He felt that he could imagine exactly what they were feeling. To be so near the end of their journey, to have endured the West Coast water, and yet cut off from the shore by some treacherous, invisible thing . . . how could destiny be as capricious as this?

He could just make them out now: huddled figures crowding the ship's rails. And a new feeling of excitement that he hadn't experienced in a long while took hold of him, and it didn't take him long to understand what had brought it there:
he was hoping to see the
Wallabi
go down.
He wanted to witness a catastrophe of which he was not a part, wanted to see other men's fortunes brought to nothing, wanted to hear their anguish as they tried to swim to the beach –
his
beach, the beach where he'd cried for his lost life – in the churning, icy sea.

His heart beat hard against his chest, as though there were hardly any flesh left on his ribs to protect it. His mouth was dry. He saw the
Wallabi
turn, as though to leave, then come round for a different approach, so he knew from this that the bar was high, that the captain had seen its tentacles under the water, felt them with his lead-line. Joseph fancied he could hear a child crying.

Was it this that he'd been searching for along the Hokitika wharves? A glimpse of a fate worse than his own? Some sign from God that he, Joseph Blackstone, wasn't alone ordained to suffer and to lose?

He imagined how he would play his part in trying to rescue the men on the
Wallabi.
He thought that he would gladly help to save the few, in the sure knowledge that many would not be saved. And then, perhaps, after this, when he'd feasted his eyes and his mind on this, he'd be able to go back to Kokatahi, to the ruined land and the rats and the eight barren shafts slowly filling with rain? After he'd had proof that he hadn't been uniquely singled out for affliction. Once he'd seen this and stored the memory of it inside him like hard currency, then maybe he'd be able to go on with his search for gold?

Joseph wasn't alone on the beach. Silently, it seemed, all the inhabitants of Hokitika had come out to watch the
Wallabi
try to cross the bar. Small boats were being readied to go out to the ship, if it went aground. Ropes and life-buoys were being loaded aboard. Joseph turned and saw two men come out of the Bank of New Zealand, the place where he longed to go with his fistfuls of the colour, to see it weighed and measured and exchanged for more money than he'd ever possessed.

The men from the bank, dressed more smartly than everyone else, now stood watching, too, but a little apart from the rest, with their arms folded in exactly the way that the arms of Hamish McConnell had been folded across his brand-new shirt.

Black smoke streamed from the
Wallabi
's funnel as it came in a second time, pursuing a more southerly course. Joseph held his breath, waiting for the thrilling moment when the keel of the steamer would strike the sand.

But the passengers were disembarking now.

There had been no disaster. No deaths.

And sure enough, Joseph experienced a kind of disappointment, a dull return to familiar boredom and pessimism, as he watched the new arrivals come off the ship. More than ever, he felt that everything was designed to cheat him of all that he wanted.

He eyed the men as they tottered, unsteadily, on to the quayside. Some carried with them all the cumbersome paraphernalia of gold-digging; some carried almost nothing. All looked pale in the cold light.

The hotel owner was calling out: ‘Bed and board for a few pennies! Come and rest your bones at the hotel! Best accommodation in Hokitika!'

The bank employees had disappeared back inside the bank. The warden was handing reminders, printed on yellow paper, that Miner's Rights cost thirty shillings and that gold-mining without a licence was a crime punishable by fines.

Joseph was about to turn away, to return to his room before some new chum stumbled into it and laid his flea-bitten body on the bed, when he heard somebody call his name.

He looked about him. The voice was high and light and, just for a moment, he thought that it could belong to Will Sefton.

Then Joseph saw the person he'd hoped never to go near any more: he saw his wife.

She was coming down the gangplank of the
Wallabi,
with her head wrapped in a shawl. She was moving towards him.

Instinctively, Joseph tried to back away, but there was no room to back away in the press of the crowd. So she came on, nearer and nearer to him, Harriet Blackstone, tall and full of purpose as she always was, leading her dog, Lady, and the dog saw him too and began whining as the memory of him – of Joseph Blackstone, who was master of nothing, not even this animal – traced a flickering pathway through its brain.

Harriet's face was white and bleak and unsmiling, her eyes large and tired. Joseph saw that her cloak was dirty.

He didn't move. He saw the seconds pass. He saw the inevitability of her arrival at his side and braced himself against her touch.

Now, the dog jumped up against his legs. Harriet tugged it away and bent forward to embrace him.

‘Joseph,' she said.

He couldn't speak, couldn't say her name, couldn't even think about anything except that he had planned never to return to her and now – as though she'd read his mind – she'd boarded the ship and stood beside him on the grey planks of the Hokitika wharf.