The Colour

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.

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 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.

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.

‘No,’ said Pare. But the English word ‘lullaby’, which she hadn’t heard for a number of years, reminded her of the days when she used to sing baby Edwin to sleep with Maori lullabies and his small fingers would reach up and clutch a hank of her dark hair and often he went to sleep still holding on to it and she would have to unclench his hands and lay his arms by his sides before tiptoeing out of his room. And she thought how frightening it was that her life had brought her here, to this swamp, all because, on a certain afternoon, she’d offended the spirit of Tane in the garden of Orchard House.

He began unfolding a blanket and his eyes scanned the straggly beech trees for a limb to hang it from. He wished he hadn’t mentioned his mam and her lullaby. It felt to him like a betrayal of a secret which had existed between her and him for more than twenty years and now it was let loose upon the mangling, love-denying world. ‘I want to hear Pare’s song,’ he said.

Cutting through the buried forest barely resembled mining. Sometimes, there was a long, vertical ooze of black mud between the trunks of the trees and this could be shovelled out and then something like a shaft would suddenly appear, going down towards a bottom which glittered like coal. But this bottom appeared unreachable. Flinty would crouch over these shafts, try to narrow his eyes, as though he were looking through a telescope, to discover what was hidden there. He had to admit, with the glimmer or sheen it sometimes showed, that these shafts looked auriferous and his mind began working on some cutting device, operated from above, to bring the coal to the surface and see what it contained.

He started on a series of drawings (made in a notebook so old and dirty that some of the pages were still stuck together with the rancid fish scales of Dover herrings), first of a simple borer to cut the shimmering rock and then of a narrow bucket, like a tin coffee pot on a long, rigid handle, to bring the chunks to the surface. In his mind’s eye, Flinty could see how these devices would work, and he showed them, not without pride, to John-boy.

‘Oh, a fine idea!’ laughed John-boy. ‘I suppose you see iron girders growing out of the reeds? I suppose you can feel the heat of a smelting furnace just over that rise?’

Flinty turned his back on John-boy, put his notebook away, and saw with a new and dispassionate eye the black tracery of the tree-tops their excavations had revealed.

He stared at this tracery and thought it like nothing he’d ever seen in fifty-four years. There was something about it which he found beautiful, something which made him proud of it, and he tried to understand what this was, but he couldn’t understand it. And he thought then that he had come to a place where he was lost: not lost in the way that he and John-boy had been lost in the dark of the Hurunui Gorge, but lost as to the meaning of things and he stood for a long time, looking at the forest coming out of the earth and wondering what it signified.

It was as though he expected Pare to explain this new existence to him. Whenever Flinty looked at her – the Maori woman whose life they had almost certainly saved – she seemed to him to be engaged on some task or other and she worked at these things as though she were in her own home, as though she’d done them a hundred times before. And yet what she was doing struck Flinty as extraordinary: she was plaiting reeds to make snares for weka; she was catching frogs with her hands; she was wading barefoot in the tea-coloured slime brandishing a knife, with which she killed eels as thick as a man’s arm; she was dragging a flat stone, on which to make her fires, half a mile from the Arahura River; she was killing rats by breaking their necks with one snap of her wrist.

Pare roasted whatever she caught and Flinty ate it and never asked what it was after the first few days because he felt himself getting stronger on the food Pare found and cooked. Bush food. Flinty thought about his body, which had lived for so long on the flotsam of the salt seas of the English Channel, ingesting mussels, clams, winkles, sea urchins, limpets and oysters, and never once sitting down to any real feast or banquet, nor even knowing what a banquet might consist of or how the table might be set for it; and he understood this much, among all that confused him: that he’d always been and always would be a creature on the edge of the known world, a scavenger, and a beachcomber, and that it was too late to alter this destiny now.

Yet one thing vexed him: that he was on the verge of growing old, that he was on the very beach of old age. And it was for this that he longed to discover gold, so that when old age finally arrived and he had to come in from the wild and find shelter, there that shelter would be.

He didn’t want this shelter to be grand because he hated grandness in all its manifestations. When he thought about Queen Victoria inhabiting all her varied and gigantic palaces, it made him want to plunge a knife into her milk-white breast. He decided that his place might be no more than a cabin. It might have a single door, painted blue. There would be no flowers along the path which led to the door, but only a garden of shingle and seaweed and stones.

John-boy had formulated few notions of what he would do with his gold. The only thing he knew for certain was that he would give money to his mother, Marie, so that she could live in a better house and indulge her fondness for bright clothes and perhaps, as a result of these things, find a man who would love her and stay with her.

All John-boy’s life, Marie Shannon had talked about his father, who had been blond as a Viking, ‘with a lovely fuzz on him, the colour of primroses’, and this astounded John-boy, as he grew up, that his mother could still remember with such delight a man who had betrayed her – a man who had never even known of his son’s existence. John-boy had told Marie often enough to forget him. She always replied that really she had forgotten him, ‘but now and then it’s his body that comes back to me and his eyes which were grey like the winter sea’.

And John-boy concluded that certain people resist being forgotten, as though being held in a lover’s memory might be all that kept them warm or sane or capable of any tender feeling, and that this Viking father, whose name had been Jed, was one of these. But it made him rage. Why should Marie forgive a betrayal so cruel? John-boy thought that if his father ever did return, he would make sure that he suffered to the end of his days.

She kept daubing herself with red ochre, until her pot of ochre was almost used up, but still the patupaiarehe came flickering and dancing round her like snow and sometimes stung her or flew into her eyes and kept on and on trying to steal the small piece of greenstone hanging round her neck.

They exhausted her. In sleep, she could hear them whining and buzzing, and so her nights began to be wretched and it became harder and harder to get out of her hammock when the dawn came.

Flinty and John-boy slept like the dead. Pare would struggle into the light of morning and stare at the canopy of trees emerging from the earth. She would listen to hear whether any of the patupaiarehe still lingered as the night receded, and try to flap them away if they did, and then she would stand and look at the two pākehā men suspended like larvae in their hammocks and wonder how or when they would find the colour they were dreaming of.

As each day passed, it became harder and harder for Pare to complete the tasks that kept them all alive. She would squat by the flat stone she’d dragged from the river, building and lighting her fires and boiling water for tea, but the hunt for weka and eels and the killing of rats now tired her to such an extent that she felt unable to raise her arm and for two days together she found nothing for them to eat.

Pare dragged herself back to the deep swamps. She gathered frogs into Flinty’s bucket. Rain fell on her and she could feel the coldness of it and the way it made the ochre run down her face and into her mouth. And she felt herself sliding back into her old sickness.

She sliced the heads off the frogs and roasted them in a hot fire. Flinty and John-boy ate them greedily, crunching their bones, like quail, and this mashing of the frogs’ bones seemed to Pare to be one of the most repulsive sounds she’d ever heard. She staggered away from the fire and vomited into the reeds.

She saw a black log floating there and felt the power in the log and remembered her old encounter with the taniwha who had seemed to ordain her vigil over Edwin Orchard. The log terrified her. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and spoke in a weak voice: ‘I’m doing all that I can,’ she said, ‘but everything depends first on the discovery of gold and we have found no gold at all . . .’

‘Help me!’ Pare wanted to cry out, but as she was about to speak she heard footsteps arriving at her back and turned to see John-boy, his cheek bulging with frog-meat, wading through the reeds towards her.

‘You must find gold . . .’ Pare said to John-boy in a distracted voice, but her words trailed away for, near her now, she saw the log upend itself and very slowly begin to sink. Pare felt John-boy’s hand on her shoulder. ‘It’s all right,’ he said gently. ‘It’s the swamp makes you sick. I’ll get fresh water from the river. You’ll be right soon enough.’

Good as their word, Flinty and John-boy trekked into some dense bush and retied the three hammocks under the canopy of trees. The rain clattered and dripped all around them. They tried to spread out the calico tents in the higher branches, as a ceiling of shelter, and they lifted Pare into her hammock and put her bundle under her head and covered her with her blanket.

She asked them, as the dusk came on, whether they could observe the sprites, like whining mosquitoes, discovering her new whereabouts and beginning to land on her hair and on the leaves that surrounded her.

But they thought she was delirious and never answered her, only held a billy-can to her mouth, to try to let the fresh water of the river rinse away what ever it was that had struck her down.

In the night, she heard them talking about her. Flinty said she’d led them to a duffer, that the Maoris, obsessed by greenstone, knew nothing when it came to gold, that the buried trees ‘might make a coal mine’, but that the colour would never be found there.

‘Kaniere,’ said Flinty. ‘Or Kokatahi. There was talk of a homeward bounder at Kokatahi. We’re wasting our time here. And time’s the one commodity I don’t have much of. If I don’t get gold, I’ll die like a dog in some lonely place.’

They were quiet after that and soon Pare heard them snoring. The rain kept on and the music of the rain in the bush almost lulled Pare to sleep, but the vexing patupaiarehe kept landing on her and searching out her bundle and stinging her ears and she could feel their maliciousness and knew that they were never going to let her rest.

Very slowly, she lifted her aching head and reached down and took the greenstone pendant over her head and into her hand, and laid it on her chest, on top of the blanket that covered her, and waited.

She closed her eyes. She knew the patupaiarehe never took anything when observed, but only when the human eye was turned away. She could feel the weight of the pendant steady and unmoving on her chest and then she fell into a heavy, dreamless sleep and when she woke, as light came filtering through the black beech, she reached out a hand and felt for the pendant and discovered that it was gone.

The loss of the greenstone pendant brought into Pare’s limbs a feeling of hollowness, as though the patupaiarehe had stolen the marrow from her bones. Now, she found that she could barely move.

She looked around to discover where the two men were. She could only see one hammock. Some time later John-boy, bringing her water, told her that Flinty Fairford had packed up and moved on.

She was aware, in the days which followed, of a presence near her from time to time and she sometimes called out the name ‘E’win’ and began asking: ‘E’win, are you there?’

No reply ever came, yet she couldn’t think who else it might be, couldn’t recognise the figure leaning over her, couldn’t have guessed that John-boy Shannon stayed to nurse her, stayed because he despised betrayal.

He did what he could. He’d nursed his mother through scarlet fever. He went back and forth to the river for fresh water. He laid cool rags on Pare’s forehead still stained with ochre. He brushed insects from her hair. He sang his old remembered lullaby:

He killed a water-bird and cooked it and mashed the flesh and tried to spoon it into Pare’s mouth, but couldn’t get a morsel of it into her. He talked to her about his mother, Marie, and her coloured dresses and the house he would build for her when he made his fortune.

Pare heard very little of this. She knew that she had one last, heartbreaking task and this was to remove herself from Edwin Orchard’s world. She knew that she was doomed, but she thought that if she could move far away from the solid landscape that enclosed Edwin and yet leave him behind within it, then there might be one death – her own – and not two.

So what remained of her willpower had to be concentrated into revisiting all the places she had ever visited in the pākehā world and removing every vestige of herself from them, every blade of grass still bent by her footstep, every lingering scent of her body in the air, every feeling of warmth on the surfaces of objects she’d touched.

This task didn’t seem very difficult at Orchard House, where she hadn’t set foot since the day of the furious wind. But when Pare arrived in her mind at the thicket of toi-toi grass, she found that, here, she could still see the imprint of her body on the grass. She tried to make the wiry grasses spring up again, to obliterate her own shape. But the harder she tried to leave this place and to eradicate all trace of herself, the deeper became the imprint of her body on the toi-toi.

She bent all her mind and will to the task of obliterating her mark, but the more desperately she strained to do this, the more sweetly did the earth call to her to let the imprint remain, and the toi-toi stems themselves whispered to her soul to remain and even the blue sky and the sun pressed down upon her, pressed down with such insistence that she had no choice but to stay and to be still, to lie down on the ground, fitting her body into the cleft it had made long ago, and close her eyes. And it was not long before she began to hear a familiar voice.

John-boy Shannon dug a deep hole among the buried trees and in it he laid Pare’s body, wrapped in her blanket and with her arms folded around her bundle. He marked her forehead with the last scrapings of the red ochre and then covered her with the wet, black earth.

The only things he took from her were her shark’s tooth knife and her paua shell. He felt that Pare wouldn’t have minded. He imagined that, with these objects, he would one day save his own life.