The Colour (35 page)

She kissed his cheek. He remembered the smell of her, which had a tang to it, as of salts or sherbet. He knew that, somehow, he still smelled of Kokatahi, despite the bath he'd had, he still smelled of the blue clay and the soiled bedding of the tent.

She moved a little away from him and they were both elbowed this way and that by the crowd and almost lost their footing.

Then Harriet reached out and put her hand on his face and he endured the hand because he saw something serious and pleading in her eyes.

‘Your mother died,' she said. ‘Poor Lilian is dead.'

Distance

I

Chen Pao Yi examined the lump of gold he'd found in his onion bed. He examined it in sunlight and in the darkness.

It was about the length of his thumb and a little wider. Its weight was remarkable. He understood from what he'd learned in Otago that gold found near the surface of the soil often acted like a sample of merchandise, indicating the riches that lay underneath it. Pao Yi knew that the true gold-digger would immediately abandon the vegetable plot to begin sinking shafts. He recognised that, for many men, the growing of carrots and potatoes would now appear as a pathetic endeavour.

Pao Yi pondered this. He thought that, later on, the patheticness of vegetable-growing might suddenly reveal itself to him, but that it hadn't done so yet. To tear out all the living and rooted things he'd planted was, at the moment, impossible for him. And he was wise enough to understand something else: the moment word got out that ‘Scurvy Jenny' had struck gold on his market garden, the hordes from Kaniere and Kokatahi would arrive. They would try to squeeze him off his land.

In days, he would have destroyed his own world.

Pao Yi asked himself what that world consisted of and why he was there.

He knew that at the end of all his endeavours in New Zealand lay the journey back to Heron Lake. He had crossed the ocean only in order to return. Paak Mei and Paak Shui were waiting for him, waiting with their hands outstretched. But, just as he wasn't yet prepared to abandon his market garden for the sake of gold, so he wasn't yet prepared to abandon his solitude for the sake of Paak Mei and Paak Shui. He could picture them in their world, picture them fondly in that land around the lake where the water-buffalo moved so slowly, yoked to the plough, that from a distance they seemed hardly to move at all. He could hear the green frogs gurgling and calling from the rice paddies under a sea-grey wash of sky. He could see the hills behind the rice fields, rich with tombs. He could smell the tallow trees. He could see the men of the village, his old friends, treading the bamboo water-wheels, in times of drought, like dancers, hear the click-click of the one-wheeled carts on the rough cobbled streets. And the faces of Paak Mei and Paak Shui, waiting at the doorway to his house, were so vivid to him that he sometimes thought he could see them blinking.

He could even hear his own voice offering ‘freshwater crabs, freshwater crabs' from the rickety quayside in the sharp air of evening. But it often seemed to him that the villagers, too, heard his voice and came scurrying out in their boots or in their cloth shoes to buy the crabs. ‘Pao Yi, Pao Yi,' they babbled. ‘Brother of Righteousness . . . why did you stay away so long?' And then he walked away, always walked away. It surprised him that he did this, but he always did it. He left the bucket where it was, told the villagers curtly to help themselves to the crabs, and walked away up Long Hill, past the tomb containing the incompletely reassembled bodies of Chen Lin and Chen Fen Ming, towards the highest slopes where the dragon spruce grew so thickly and where Pao Yi could lose himself in the blessed darkness under the trees.

He hid his lump of gold in the cave.

Forgoing the cave as a place to smoke and sleep, he took some time to haul stones and earth to its low entrance and arrange them there in such a way that the presence of a cave no longer revealed itself. Sticks and moss and a single fern pushed in amongst the stones completed the deception. But Pao Yi knew that – if he needed to reach his gold – the false wall would collapse with a mere few blows from his pick and he was disposed to be pleased with his own ingenuity. Yet there was something about the cave as a hiding-place which troubled him.

He thought it too conventional. He told himself that a man entering a cave
expects to find something
. He decided it would therefore be far better to hide the nugget in a place where nobody expected to find anything. But Pao Yi couldn't see exactly where such a place might be. He was living in a land where men expected to discover gold in every meagre handful of earth; indeed, he felt that expectation covered the entire landscape with a kind of invisible blight.

It then came to him that he should replace the gold exactly where he'd found it – under the baby onion. For, surely, when a man looks at an onion bed, all that he expects to find underneath the earth are the bulbs of the onions? The idea that there is something beneath what is beneath would very rarely occur to him.

Pao Yi dismantled the cunningly made wall at the cave entrance, climbed over the fallen stones and went into the cave. The sweetness of its darkness always gladdened him. He picked up the golden nugget and returned to the vegetable garden. A pigeon was feasting on a worm and flew away with the thing half eaten and had to land again almost immediately to swallow it down, and this made Pao Yi smile.

He walked slowly to the exact place, under the seventeenth baby onion, where he'd found the gold. The onion appeared to have done nothing since he'd planted it, but when he lifted it, he could feel the minute hairy roots clutch at the earth and Pao Yi was reminded that the inclination of almost every living thing is to cling on, to remain where it is, but that his own inclination – his own nature – suspended him always in a kind of no man's land between remaining and leaving.

With his blackened fingers, he gouged a well in the soil, laid the nugget in, covered it with more soil, then made a well in this for the onion.

He shored up the onion. Then, he fetched his hoe and swept away every trace of his own footprints in the earth.

He looked at all of this and congratulated himself for listening to his own anxieties. Now, he felt that his gold was safe. But Pao Yi also knew that his task wasn't finished and that, by perverse logic, he had to block up the entrance to the cave all over again. Though he knew that the cave now contained nothing, he felt a compulsion to wall up that nothingness. He knew that he was behaving as though the cave contained something after all, something which he hadn't yet seen. Half-way through his task of walling it up again, Pao Yi was almost tempted to take down the stones for a second time in order to go and look inside for the unseen thing. But he told himself that this was truly childish. He had to stop changing his mind, or else his tasks would never end.

He continued to rebuild the cave entrance and finished this within an hour or so. Nevertheless, almost a whole day had passed while Pao Yi went to and fro, to and fro like a water-buffalo, between the onion bed and the cave. Now, the sky was a deep violet blue and the vegetables were shadows in the ground. But he felt at last that everything was almost as it should be.

He expected to sleep very well. But his sleep was fitful and crowded with dreams.

He kept seeing Chen Lin and Chen Fen Ming, walking around with limbs missing from their bodies. Chen Fen Ming had only one eye, and this one eye flamed with a terrifying, intense anger, cursing her living son.

Pao Yi woke and lay in the dark of his hut. He knew how much he missed his parents. Filial duty had always played such a large part in his life, submitting to his father's bad temper, trying to become skilled as his father had been skilled as a fisherman on Heron Lake and to cast the nets in precisely the same way as Chen Lin; devising pleasant small surprises for his mother, letting her eat first, even when he was faint from hunger, kneeling beside her to take his turn at brushing her long hair and massaging her wounded feet.

He had tried in each and every thing to obey Chen Lin and Chen Fen Ming. Now, there was no one to obey, nobody to be filial to. And Pao Yi knew that the appointed order of things, with which he had been comfortable, was broken. He felt that a kind of chaos was lying in wait for him somewhere and he didn't know what he could do to keep it at bay.

He tried picturing Paak Mei, as she shuffled round his small house in her beaded slippers, but he found that this shuffle of Paak Mei's, to which he'd thought himself perfectly attached, irritated him. Perhaps it had always irritated him and he had just never admitted this, or never noticed this before? He wished his wife could walk elegantly. He wished she could leap and run like a child. The sound of her shuffling was like the snicker of a broom, endlessly pushing little eddies of dust towards some ever-retreating dust-pan. It was ridiculous.

When Pao Yi slept again, he dreamed of dancers. They wore red silk skirts and satin shoes and they moved with a fluid and entrancing grace. Their feet were curved, with a high instep, but not broken. They could balance on the tops of their toes. They could leap and fly. And the surface on which they danced was made of gold and a big golden light shone upwards into their faces.

Pao Yi wanted to prolong this dream, but it evaporated with the sound of the wind rattling the makeshift door to the hut, and he lay there, marvelling at the scarlet dancers and waiting for the morning.

II

Joseph's room at the Hokitika hotel was small and contained one narrow bed. This bed, after the hard ground of Kokatahi, had felt, to Joseph, like the most comfortable place in the world, and when he understood that he was going to have to play the chivalrous husband and give it up to Harriet, he felt sick at heart.

He managed to procure a thin straw mattress for himself and laid this on the floor by the bed, but he felt stupid lying there, so much lower than the bed; felt like an infant, consigned to a lowly position, and when he looked up at Harriet, sleeping soundly, almost carelessly, in the place that was rightfully his, he hated her. The dog Lady began the night under the bed, but soon jumped up on to it and went to sleep lying contentedly across Harriet's feet. And this exacerbated Joseph's fury. Now, of the three breathing creatures in the tiny room, only he could feel the hard planks of the floor, breathe the dust that had been allowed to accumulate on the skirting . . .

Joseph felt tears come to his eyes. He thought that he'd hardly ever cried before coming to New Zealand, but that now he wanted to weep all the time. The man who had built the Cob House – and had not minded where he laid his head and had not minded the way the men teased and mocked him as a ‘cockatoo' – this man was gone, just as the Cob House was gone and Lilian was gone, and the creature who had replaced him was going mad with suffering.

He let his tears fall. Why should they not fall? Who saw them? Who cared whether he wept or not? His mother might have cared, but she was in her grave at Rangiora, in a cheap coffin made of totara pine, in a graveyard no one would visit . . .

Harriet had described Lilian's funeral. In Parton Magna, perhaps most of the village and half of Parton Parva would have turned out for the wife of the livestock auctioneer, but at Rangiora, there was hardly any village to turn out and no one had known who Lilian Blackstone was or seen the trouble she'd taken over broken china or remembered her love of singing or witnessed the neatness of her darning. The only mourner had been Harriet. Joseph could imagine his wife, ‘carrying herself well' even here, and mouthing a few prayers, then watching silently as Lilian's body was put into a grave like a horizontal mine-shaft, a grave of blue clay.

‘I didn't know what to give her, what to lay in the coffin with her,' Harriet had told him, ‘because I really had no idea what object she loved the best. I thought about one of her pieces of Staffordshire, but in the end, I chose the pastel drawing of you as a child, wearing your little white dress. I think she would have wanted this with her. Was I right?'

Joseph had said nothing. He felt more than ever glad to have no child to humiliate in lace frills and white petticoats. He wished there had been a picture of him as a grown man, wearing a smart coat and a silk necktie.

‘Was I right, Joseph?' asked Harriet again.

‘I don't know, Harriet,' he said. ‘Who can ever know?'

But he could imagine Lilian's thin hands folded neatly over the picture.

Indeed, he could imagine his mother dead very clearly and it broke his heart to think that now, whatever he did or however he succeeded, she would never be there to witness it, but always and forever remain dead in her coffin, her fingers decaying to bone as they lay on the ridiculous picture of him, done before his life was barely begun.

And there was one other thing which began to torment him.

He hoped and prayed that Lilian's coffin had had some lining or other, something to hold his mother in its grip, because she had been a person who had always inhabited her space very meticulously, keeping her knees side by side and her elbows in and her shawl pulled tight, and he couldn't bear to think of Lilian May Blackstone sliding around inside a wooden box: a state of affairs she would have detested.

Joseph wanted to ask Harriet whether the coffin had had a lining, but he was too afraid that her answer would be no. Because what he saw, when he imagined the small church at Rangiora, made of planking painted green and topped with a warped little bell-house, was a fearful kind of makeshift frailty. He saw things gaping, nailed together, splitting and buckling in the heat and cold; everything thin and shoddy and not built to last. He knew, therefore, that the chances of there being a coffin lining for Lilian were remote and so – lying on his mattress while Harriet and the dog slept comfortably on the bed – Joseph told himself that he was weeping for this, for the absence of a coffin lining for his dead mother, and that this was a perfectly legitimate reason for a man to cry.