The Colour

He was living desperate days. On his seventy-two-foot square plot, he had already sunk and slabbed seven shafts. Three of these had flooded and kept on filling with water, despite the painstakingly dug drainage bore-holes. In each one of the remaining four, Joseph had arrived at the blue-clay bottom and Will Sefton, nimble as a chimney-sweep, had gone down there to ‘scrape up the gold, Mister Blackstone’, gone down all eager and ready for each find, and then there had been no find at all, no trace of the colour, only bucketful after bucketful of the oily clay with its blue sheen, heavy and difficult to wash in the cradle.

Joseph thought of himself as a patient man. Hadn’t he built the Cob House out of handfuls of this same wretched dirt? Hadn’t he buried Beauty the cow in ground so hard it had broken his shovel? But now, he knew that patience wasn’t enough; he needed luck. He would find the gold if it was there; but supposing it wasn’t there?

The possibility that no gold existed anywhere on his claim created in Joseph Blackstone a dread so absolute it made his skin crawl. Each and every vision of his future assumed an alteration that could only be brought about by money. To return to a life no different from the one he had left when he boarded the Wallabi would be so painful, so terrifyingly unhappy, that Joseph now believed he would rather die here, on his thirty-shilling plot, and lie and rot in a blue-clay grave than suffer it.

For he saw very clearly, in the cold, wet light of the days he was living at Kokatahi, that without money, his farm on the Okuku flats would never amount to anything. Lilian would grow old, mending her china by the sooty range, and he would never manage to do the one thing that would please her at last. She would die despising him. And after that, he and Harriet might struggle on, but they would be for ever separate and secretive and cold, and hate would creep in and mark them with its eye and then they would be done for.

It was as though maggots were creeping up Joseph’s neck and into his hair. He sat up and let a cry escape from him as he reached up with a hand, to try to wrench away whatever was crawling there. But there was nothing: only the dread in his mind that he couldn’t overcome. He wanted to scream, as he had once screamed at birds or toys, at the three tigers in the circus ring. His longing to find gold was so intense, so unrelenting, that he considered getting up now, in the middle of the night, with the rain falling, and beginning work on a new shaft, just sinking it wherever he happened to find himself, with no regard to the lie of the terrain, and he imagined – even now, after the disappointments of seven barren shafts – that moment when, as the dawn arrived perhaps, there would be the first sighting of the colour and how his altered future would start spinning towards him.

But he lay down again and didn’t move. Disappointment was tiring him out. He thought with sympathetic tenderness of his father who, on the days when he didn’t have to visit any farm or be at the livestock market, with his ledger and his gavel, would often lay his head back in his favourite armchair and pull the white anti-macassar from the chair-back and crumple it in his hand until it half covered his face and fall into a fretful sleep from which he seemed not to want to wake.

Lilian complained about the crumpled anti-macassars. She clearly despised the use Roderick made of them. She said there was no earthly point in continuing to put anti-macassars on the chair-backs if he was going to do that to them.

And perhaps Lilian heard the pain in them, for the anti-macassars remained on the chairs, washed and ironed as frequently as was necessary, and Roderick Blackstone, before he met his death in a field of ostriches, continued to scrumple them up and pull them across his face whenever he felt in need of sleep to refresh his disappointed heart.

Joseph tried to settle himself into sleep now, but beyond the pattering of the rain he was listening for footsteps, hoping that Will might choose this night to return. Yet he knew that the hope was vain. Will Sefton had left him for the Scots’ camp. An arrangement which Joseph had begun to think of as permanent – permanent for as long as it took to find enough gold to alter his life – had dissolved suddenly in violence and humiliation.

They’d begun a week ago – Will’s complaints that he wasn’t being paid for his ‘services’. Joseph hadn’t considered the complaints important at first. He reminded Will that he fed him, sheltered him in the tent, had bought him the fishing rod, with which he amused himself catching fish and cooking them on little fires at the river’s edge. He’d believed that this was enough, that Will Sefton was ‘his’ now, for as long as this life at Kokatahi lasted, that they would wait it out together and labour together on the shafts and do what they did in the night whenever the urge took him (for Joseph admitted, now that he was in a world of men, that desire in men was like a hunger of the belly and had to be satisfied, and to moralise about this or that way of satisfying it could be left to pastors and to women) and then the colour would arrive and Joseph would be generous to the boy, as generous as his own plans allowed . . .

But then word came up the river that the Scots had struck gold. On still nights, Joseph and Will could hear the jubilant Glasgow miners singing and shouting. And Will would go out of the tent and stand under the sky, as though moonstruck, and listen.

Joseph and Will were standing side by side, resting from their work among the piles of mullock and the stacks of planking. Their crooked windlass creaked mockingly in the wind, like a clock beginning to tick for no reason.

Will tottered for a moment, then righted himself and faced Joseph defiantly. ‘What language do you want me to use, then, Mister Blackstone?’ he said. ‘Girls’ language? Did you ever find a girl to let you do what I let you? Tear my flesh, you do, and never pay me –’

‘Jealous, are you? Think I’m your darling, or something, Mister Blackstone? Told you when I first played my whistle, I was nobody’s darling and nobody is mine. Nobody on the stinking earth. I do this for the money, for the survival. But you, you have me digging in the ground night and day and slabbing and getting my feet frozen. But I don’t like this work, Mister Blackstone. This mining work makes me choke worse than your slime in my mouth. See my skin? Wasn’t it white and lovely when you first saw me and now I’m getting bruised and toughened and my hands are red and –’

Joseph hit Will again, this time across his ear, and the boy staggered and fell to his knees. With his heavy boots, Joseph wanted to kick him, kick him till he really hurt, but Will saw his intention and began to scrabble away from him through the mud. And seeing him cower like this, Joseph understood that he’d been wrong about Will staying with him and sharing his fate, wrong and naïve and pathetic. Will Sefton’s heart was as hard as flint. He’d known this all along, but now it was making him suffer much more than he’d expected.

So then Joseph, filled with dismay at the imminent loss of Will, approached him and tried to touch him and dissuade him from leaving. Will backed away from him, but Joseph followed, the two of them stumbling over the pitted earth. Joseph told Will he knew they would find gold soon on this claim ‘and then’, he said, ‘you can name your own price. Your own price.’

‘Oh yes,’ mocked Will. ‘Another fine promise! I’ve no use for promises any more. But the Scotsmen have the colour! They have it, Mister Blackstone, and now it will be mine: I have only to kiss their pricks –’

Joseph grabbed Will Sefton by the neck. Though the boy was strong, Joseph was stronger because all his arduous work in New Zealand had made him tough and lean. He twisted Will’s arm behind his back and the boy cried out, but Joseph paid no attention. He pulled Will to him, so close that he could feel his sternum against his chest and the hard pelvic bone and the gristle of his cock pressing against his, and tried to kiss his mouth, the mouth that was pink and pretty and reminded him of Rebecca Millward. But Will clamped his jaw shut and they stood there, locked together in pain and fury, neither of them yielding, and Joseph felt all his anger and sadness at Will’s parting turn to furious desire.

Keeping Will’s arm locked behind him, Joseph undid the boy’s belt and fumbled with his buttons and began to tug his trousers down. He now forced Will away from him, to kneel on the mud. They were in full daylight and only a few yards from them, sunlight glinted on the river as it rushed blithely on. Will attempted to stand, but stumbled over his trousers and now Joseph was kneeling behind him, unbuttoning his moleskins and bringing his own sex into his hand.

Will pushed himself up with his arms and spun round to face Joseph. He punched him hard in the belly, and Joseph doubled up and fell sideways, and all his breath seemed to leave his lungs and bile filled his mouth and everything around him – the rush of the river, the creaking of the windlass, the breathing of Will Sefton – was snatched suddenly away.

When he looked up he could see Will standing over him, as though preparing to punch him again. He blinked and spat. And now he saw that just beyond Will was another man. This man was as still and silent as a heron and Joseph knew at once that he had seen everything that had just happened. And he thought coldly: Whoever this man is, I am going to have to kill him.

Joseph tried to stand up. The man wasn’t looking at him, he was looking away, but with something like a smile on his face – a smile which was not quite a smile – and Joseph remembered that he’d seen this kind of look before, this Chinese look, on the deck of the Wallabi. And he felt that to be regarded like this, in this state of humiliation and pain, by some self-satisfied Celestial was worse – if anything could be worse – than what had just occurred.

The man said nothing, only lowered his head. At his feet sat two baskets of vegetables and Joseph realised now who he was: he was Scurvy Jenny, whom they had glimpsed once before from high up in the bush, the market gardener, Chen, who made a living selling garden produce to the diggers at Kaniere.

‘Wakey!’ shouted Joseph, when Chen didn’t answer. ‘What d’you want? Think you can blackmail me for what you’ve seen? Is that it? Think you can take my gold? Well, I’ve got no gold, Jenny. I’ve got nothing and you’ve seen nothing. Savvy?’

Joseph wanted to take the cabbage and hurl it at the man’s head. He wanted to drag his baskets to the river and send all the produce tumbling into the water. He tugged a shovel out of the heavy earth and brandished it like a weapon, all the while aware how foolish he was appearing.

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.

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.

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.

‘Whose chosen name means Brother of Righteousness

But whose deeds are of no account

Lesser than the deeds of a frog

Lesser than the deeds of a cockroach a spider a snail

Yes lesser than the deeds of a snail . . .’

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

He choked on the word ‘nothing’. He had lost count of the hours he’d toiled, the slabs he’d fixed, the load after load after load of dirt washed in his cradle. He couldn’t bring himself to admit out loud that all of this, every single second of it, had been in vain.

‘All gone, chum,’ said a young miner wearing what looked like an old bowler hat. ‘Not an inch of river left there. But they say the gold goes all the way up this line, right to where it narrows and becomes the Styx.’

These words were like a signal to all the others. They were tired, too, and the darkness was increasing all the time. They dumped their gear where they stood, just north of Joseph’s boundary, and set up tents and hammered them in and began lighting fires and pouring grog and generally making ready for their night. Some of them splashed into the river and began washing themselves. The water that lapped round their thin bodies still had a glimmer of light on it and Joseph watched them until that light was gone.