The Colour, page 30
Yet she waited. She thought that perhaps Pao Yi had gone to fetch something to show her and would quickly reappear. She tried to envisage what he might keep in his hut and whether he slept on a mattress or only on the hard earth or even in a hammock because he was a fisherman and could tie a net.
But he didn’t reappear and, after five or six minutes had passed, Harriet felt stupid waiting there. She picked up the vegetable sack and walked back towards the river. She began thinking of the fine broth she was going to make and the long letter she was going to write to her father.
II
With his pick and with his hands, Pao Yi unblocked the entrance to his cave, stone by stone. He went into the cave and took with him a small oil lamp that burned with a steady blue-and-yellow flame. The lamp gave out a little heat, as well as light.
Pao Yi lay down, resting on one elbow and lit an opium pipe. He saw the walls of the cave begin to swell and gleam. He was filled with an apprehension of the beautiful strangeness of the world.
He began to dream of an avenue of lime trees. The scent of the trees and the vision of his own feet walking under them created in him a sense of the harmoniousness of all things.
Far away, a man hurled a fishing net into the air from a scarlet boat on Heron Lake, but the man was not he. Crabs came creeping into the net, an accumulation of whiskers and claws and eyes like seed pearls, but they were not his to sell when the man rowed to shore, for he was not the fisherman, he was not there; he was treading the long, soft road under the limes.
On he walked. And soon he saw that a woman, stately as the trees, was moving in step with him on slender, dusty feet and the lime seeds lay all about them like green grasshoppers, and in his own language he began to describe to her how, when a plague of grasshoppers had come to Heron Lake and devoured the string beans and choked the water-wheels, he had shown his ingenuity, his ability to adapt and survive, by netting the grasshoppers and roasting them in oil with salt and sesame seeds and they were as succulent as crisp, fried sea-grass, a veritable delicacy, and soon everybody was gathering them and eating them and praising him, Pao Yi, Brother of Righteousness, for inventing such a delicious recipe.
The woman smiled as she walked, smiled at his story of the roasted grasshoppers, and Pao Yi felt the attraction of this smile, which he knew to be flawed by some small detail that he couldn’t identify, but which seemed to lead him, by slow degrees, to a feeling of desire.
The avenue of lime trees stretched out ahead of the two walkers in a swaying and shifting and endless green and Pao Yi knew that this garden, where the avenue had been planted, had been created on such a varied and colossal scale that he would be able to wander in it for a long, long time and never take exactly the same path nor tread twice in his own footsteps and always, as he went along, he would be aware of the woman engaged on her own journey – separate from his and yet by some coincidence in step with his – and find himself looking forward to every patch of dappled sunlight between the trees which revealed her face to him and searching his muddled head for some other story to tell her, like the story of the grasshoppers fried with sesame seeds, that would make her smile.
The day declined outside and the oil lamp in the cave flickered and burned low and Pao Yi finished the pipe and laid his head down on the hard floor.
He still walked in the avenue of his imaginings and he thought that when the trees finally ended, there he would discover a pond where pink carp swam in circles under the broad lily-leaves and where he would watch the woman lean over to wash her feet among the fishes.
III
Every morning, Joseph began work once more on the eighth shaft and its accompanying drainage bore. Bucketful after bucketful after bucketful of earth was hauled to the surface by the makeshift windlass, but Joseph didn’t bother to wash any pay-dirt above the line of the blue clay, nor did he barrow it down to the water; he just tipped it out at the shaft-head, where it piled up and hardened in the late sun and the dry wind.
Though the windlass kept turning, though the heavy buckets were lifted and emptied, Joseph accomplished these tasks without giving them any thought and he knew that his life here at Kokatahi had become a sleep-walking life.
Alone in his tent, persecuted by nightmares, he examined the golden grains that Harriet had brought him, but he found he now had difficulty believing that what he held in his palm really was gold. Sometimes, he scratched at the grains with his nail, half expecting the sheen to peel away, to reveal the dull base metal beneath. He thought that this find of Harriet’s had an illusory quality to it; it had been too easy, its timing too particular. He began to suspect her of some deception, knew her to be capable of outwitting him with ease, and he cursed his parents – his father in particular – for bequeathing to him a slow and unremarkable mind. If only he had been cleverer, he reasoned, then life would not have tortured him as it had.
But at other moments, he would see everything more positively.
He was able to tell himself to be patient, to trust his wife, to wait out the month that they had agreed upon and never be tempted to walk up-river to where she was camped and risk being followed by other men from Kokatahi. He thought her plan ingenious. She had understood what was needed; she had seen that their only hope lay in being ahead of the crowd.
That Harriet was panning for gold without a licence was a question which now and then worried Joseph, but he saw that there was no way to purchase a miner’s right and still keep her whereabouts a secret. He tried, therefore, to ‘adjust’ the matter in his mind, told himself that she was only ‘fossicking’, that she had no real equipment, that once the gold was safe, then he would deal with the Government Licensing Office, bribe somebody if need be, or plead ignorance: ‘My wife went in search of a friend of the Orchard family, sir. She came upon her bank of gold by miraculous chance when washing her feet in the river . . .’
And then at the fly-blown hotel in Hokitika, he would gather the colour into his arms and know at last that he was free. Free in the way that Hamish McConnell was free, to embark on a new phase of his life, to begin everything again. For Joseph Blackstone knew now what he wanted to do: he wanted to make amends to Rebecca’s family for his crime.
In his nightmares at Kokatahi, he returned to Parton in the time before the crime, to the days in which he was planning it with his friend, Merrick Dillane, the veterinary surgeon, a man who had soft, red hands and a tender voice and a cold, calculating mind. He saw again the ease with which he and Dillane had done what they’d done and walked away and thought themselves clever and free for a little while. He remembered that the whole process from beginning to end had rested upon Dillane’s desire to be rid of a bad-tempered Shire horse . . .
Merrick Dillane bred Shires in his spare time. He loved the greys especially. He liked to stroke the white tresses of their feet. But he had one mare, named Dido, who bit him whenever he tried to do this and kicked at her fencing and bucked like a steer in the daisy field and generally vexed Dillane with all her ungovernable behaviour.
He came to Joseph, his friend the livestock auctioneer, to say he wanted to sell Dido. The day that he came was the day that Joseph had been told by Rebecca that she was carrying his child.
These two things would be for ever and always yoked together: the child and the horse.
The plan was swift to arrive in Joseph’s mind and swift to accomplish. Joseph promised to guarantee Merrick Dillane a ‘pretty price’ for Dido at the auctions if he would only help him with his present problem. He called it ‘getting help’ and never referred to it in any other way. And Dillane picked up this term for it and carried it forward through the coming days. He would help his friend. Together, they would help Rebecca. What were friends for, if they could not help each other?
Dillane promised Joseph that Rebecca would have no memory of what they were planning to do to her. He said there would be no trace of it in her consciousness, neither at the time nor in memory in the time to come, that it would vanish as though it had never been. ‘All she will remember’, he said, ‘will be the foal . . .’
They took her to see a new-born Shire foal in Dillane’s stables. The soft-hearted Rebecca had a weakness for small creatures. She leaned into the stall, all entranced by the foal – as Joseph and Dillane had known she would be – and cooed to it, as to a baby of her own. She reached out her hand to stroke its nose. And at that moment, she was felled to sudden sleep by the passing under her nostrils of rag soaked in ether of chloride, cut with a pearly opiate, a ‘useful vapour’ devised by Dillane himself and known to grateful farmers and pet owners as ‘Dillane’s Dream’.
‘Good,’ said Dillane. ‘Now she will enter a cloud of forgetting.’
They carried her into Dillane’s house and laid her on the operating table, where sheep and cats and bulldog terriers had so often lain, and Dillane put on his surgical apron and his gloves. He told Joseph that he could stay ‘to see it done’ if he wanted to, but Joseph began to feel faint, as though he had inhaled some of the vapour, and he understood that he wanted not to know how it was going to be done, so that he would never have to imagine it, could choose to think, if he wanted, that it had never really happened and that the events which it would bring in its wake occurred of their own accord and through no fault or design of Joseph Blackstone.
So Joseph went out of the room. It took very little time. Merrick Dillane’s red hands, holding the surgical instrument, parted Rebecca’s thighs, reached in and accomplished with two stabs all there was to do. He made sure the wall of the womb was ruptured. Then he came out and told Joseph that ‘our part in this is almost over’.
The two men carried Rebecca back to the stables, and laid her down on the floor by the foal’s stall, exactly where she had lately been. They let her sleep for a while and then patted her cheek to wake her, and when she opened her eyes they told her she had fainted. They gave her smelling salts and Dillane went off to fetch a cup of water and Joseph stroked her curly hair and she clung to him and said: ‘Lord, Joseph Blackstone, that child of yours has begun to lead me a pretty dance already.’
She drank the water that Dillane brought. She stood and smoothed down her rumpled skirt and tried to smile. Then Joseph lifted her into his pony-cart and drove her home.
This was the last time he saw her.
Dillane had promised him that ‘all will proceed exactly as though she were undergoing a bona fide miscarriage’.
‘And then she will be as she was before?’
‘Oh yes. She will be quite well.’
But Rebecca Millward never got well.
She bled for three days and died on the fourth of blood poisoning.
Perhaps the instrument with which Dillane had ruptured the wall of her womb had been insufficiently cleaned after one of his operations on an animal? Nobody would ever know. All they knew was that Rebecca Millward died of a violent, puerperal fever no doctor could alleviate.
Joseph Blackstone stood in the road and saw her coffin carried to the church in Parton and knew that there was no difference between him and a man who has committed murder.
The nightmares didn’t end there.
The auction of the Shire horse never went as planned. Joseph had meant to bribe someone to stand in the crowd to talk up Dido’s price. His father had sometimes used this method to sell animals and usually with good success and tankards of ale at the Plough and the Stars to celebrate afterwards. But so haunted was Joseph by the sight of Rebecca’s coffin that this necessary part of the plan went clean out of his mind. And when the day of the auction came, the assembled bidders already seemed to know that Dido was a bad-tempered horse. Nobody wanted her. Joseph’s gavel had to come down on a paltry sum.
And then he saw Merrick Dillane striding towards him. Dillane led him away beyond the crowd at the market. He jabbed a finger at his dusty black lapel. He told him he had performed his part of the bargain; now he wanted ‘a correct sum’ for his horse.
‘Rebecca died . . .’ was all Joseph could stammer. ‘You shouldn’t have let her die.’
But Merrick Dillane began to walk away. He turned only to say that he would tell the whole village what Joseph had asked him to do.
So then Joseph knew that he had no idea how to escape from the darkness closing round him, unless it might be to engineer his own death, to pass the way she’d passed, in her oak box, towards Parton Magna’s Church of the Redeemer, where among the ancient graves the primroses were shining.
He was helpless. He paid Dillane, but he knew it would not rest there. Dillane would ask for more. Joseph’s money began to leach away. Even Lilian, from whom he withheld so much, understood that something was wrong. She tried to tempt him back to happiness with his favourite food and with small kindnesses. But nothing could tempt him back. Nothing under the sun until he met Harriet Salt and understood that this tall young woman was in need of a husband.
He burned all the small, illiterate notes Rebecca had written him. He put the curl she had given him into his fly box. He wooed Harriet with dreams of a life far away, of a life begun afresh in the Land of the Long White Cloud . . .
A simple story, thought Joseph, as he lay in the stink of his tent. So simple in its progression from one event to the next; so lethal in its outcome.
Damage compounded by further damage.
Damage growing, expanding, subdividing, multiplying, never ceasing . . .
But now the damage was going to cease. In his more lucid and optimistic moments, this was what Joseph tried to reassure himself. It was about to become finite. Harriet had found the colour.
And then Joseph would allow himself to remember that, although the winter was coming in at Kokatahi, the seasons in England would revert to what they had once been and that, perhaps, when he saw Parton again and arrived at the Millwards’ door to unburden himself of his secret, a stray wasp of summer, half intoxicated with death but still alive, might yet be creeping along the garden path.
Between Two Worlds
I
Pare led Flinty Fairford and John-boy Shannon along a swampy track in the valley of the Arahura River, going towards the buried forest she’d heard the Maoris describe. The squashy ground was kind to her feet; the pain of walking was less than it had been.
For a while, they could feel the wind at their backs, blowing off the sea. Then, as the river divided and they began to follow its northerly course, the breeze faltered and Pare stopped and put down her bundle and looked around and sniffed the air. She’d heard that you could smell the ancient trees as they slowly petrified under the black soil, a smell like fungus, tangy and dark, and she felt that she was near it now.
They went a little further and they began to see signs that some excavation had taken place here and been abandoned.
‘I’m not digging where some other perisher has tried and failed,’ announced Flinty. ‘If I’m going to fail, I’m going to fail in a new spot.’
John-boy and Pare went on walking. She could hear frogs gurgling in the reeds. She knew that eels, too, lived in this swamp, camouflaged amid the black limbs of the buried trees, and that the flesh of these eels was so dense and oily and nourishing, it was difficult to swallow, but that it could keep away hunger for a long time. And Pare thought she would try to snare eels and kill them with her shark-toothed knife.
Pare did not know what she was going to do. She had begun to hope that, if she led the men to where the gold was, she would somehow get her share. When she went to dig for eels, what was there to prevent her from searching for the colour in the ground and, if she found it, from hiding it in her bundle? And then eventually she would barter gold for greenstone, and she thought this might be easy because the only thing the pākehā longed for was gold.
She was weary of this long walk. She felt her feet begin to bleed again, but the blood left no trace and was absorbed into the mire and she was aware of how few traces her life would leave on the earth when she died, and that although she had walked from the pā near Kaiapoi to the Orchard Run more times than she could count, no footstep of hers would remain on the miles and miles of tussock, nor any imprint of her body in the toi-toi thicket.
We fly away, she thought: Even while we’re alive, we slowly fade, because for fewer and fewer of the living are we solid and important and bright. And so she realised that here lay the real reason for her long and arduous journey: Edwin Orchard was the one and only person for whom she was necessary.
She found the dead forest at dusk.
She saw white shadows flitting over it and believed them to be patupaiarehe, pale sprites who lived in the misty hills but who were insatiably curious about humans and coveted their treasures and were able to carve palaces and cradles out of greenstone. And she saw that the patupaiarehe were angry with her because, as yet, she had found nothing.
To try to protect herself from the patupaiarehe, Pare took out her phial of red ochre and smeared her forehead with this and neither of the men noticed because the light was almost gone.
But they, too, could smell the mushroom scent of the buried trees. Flinty took up his shovel and began digging down through the bog and sure enough he found them: arching limbs and stems, black as charcoal, hard as his own name, and he and John-boy stared at them and were struck dumb. Flinty swore.
John-boy said: ‘I’d like to show my mam this. I’d like to see her flabbergasted face.’
In the fading light, the men were eager to pitch a tent, but all the ground in this part of the Arahura Valley was wet-flat swamp and no surface was stable or solid, so Pare suggested that they stretch blankets from the trees, like hammocks, and sleep suspended here, where they would be dry. Flinty complained that he couldn’t sleep in a hammock, that he had to lie face down, with his nose pointing into the earth in order to get any rest ‘from the purgatory of consciousness’, but Pare told him that the Maori could sleep standing up if they sang a certain song to themselves and that she would teach him that song.
