The Colour (41 page)

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.

II

Ever since their arrival at the buried forest, when Pare had seen the patupaiarehe like ghosts flitting over the ground, they'd hardly left her alone.

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 p
ā
keh
ā
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.

‘I was getting strong,' Flinty complained. ‘Now, I'm half starved. If you want any reward, you have to keep us fed.'

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 . . .'

The log moved sluggishly in the swamp, bumping against a stand of rushes, then slowly turning, as the wind moved the water. No voice came from it.

‘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're ill,' he said, eating as he spoke. ‘Flinty and I are going to find a new place to tie the hammocks, with more shelter from the rain.'

‘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.

‘It may be too soon to say,' said John-boy.

Pare heard Flinty begin to cough. ‘Maybe,' he said. ‘But I'm not staying. This place will make us ill. I'm for packing and moving on.'

‘Where to?' asked John-boy.

‘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.'

‘We'll find it,' said John-boy. ‘We'll find it.'

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 thought she could hear the sprites began to sing with their desire for the precious greenstone.

‘Take it,' whispered Pare. ‘Take this. It is all I have.'

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.

III

Pare fell into a delirium. In her dreams, the wrath of Tane blackened the air.

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 p
ā
keh
ā
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.

‘Yes,' she replied. ‘I am here, E'win. I am here.'

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.

He felt, standing there all alone in the pouring rain, that he should sing or say something, so he sang the lullaby she'd taught him:

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.

The Fresh

I

Harriet began writing to her father, Henry Salt. She knew a long time would pass before she would be able to post the letter, but she wrote it just the same, because she wanted to talk to her father.