The Denniston Rose (20 page)

BELLA RASMUSSEN’S PROBLEM was with the survivors: the three or four children on the Hill who contracted diphtheria and then recovered. Rose was one. Of course age was on her side; you’d expect recovery in a six-year-old, but Mrs Rasmussen was blind to reason. At the Camp there were two children, Rose and her Conrad the Sixth, who contracted diphtheria in the same week. Rose, uncared for, weakened from her burns, living in conditions that were at best unsanitary, at worst downright sinful, was on her feet in a fortnight, coughing and pale but alive. Conrad the Sixth, a healthy baby, fat from his mother’s plentiful and rich milk, cherished, cleaned and cuddled every hour of his short life, died two days after his first wheezing cough.

Totty and Tom Hanratty came to commiserate. Their own loss gave them a point of contact. But Mrs Rasmussen turned her head
away from the sight of Totty, bereaved like her but, unlike Bella, heavy with the next child. What woman at forty-one, with a history of miscarriage, could expect further children? How could the world or God or the gods deliver such a blow?

‘It is easy for you,’ says Bella in a voice heavy and ugly with tears. ‘You have Michael and Elizabeth still. You will have many more …’

Tom’s usual good nature takes a dive. The bristles of his glossy beard stand out in indignation. ‘Well, you are quite wrong there, Mrs C. The loss is the same, no matter how many others are left.’

‘How can it be?’ shrieks Mrs C. ‘I have no children left!’

Tom Hanratty ploughs doggedly on. ‘Our little Sarah was the sweetest-natured … Nothing could replace …’

But Totty, seeing her friend’s distress, lays a hand on her husband’s arm and shakes her head gently. ‘Leave it, Tom, she is too upset.’

‘Well, and so am I!’

‘This is not a competition for the most bereaved.’

‘Competition! I am trying to explain she is not alone.’

‘I
am
alone!’ shouts Mrs C. Rasmussen. She turns on Totty. ‘And where were the medicines that might have saved his life?’

‘Bella, diphtheria is difficult to cure.’

‘The carbolic acid? Where?’

‘Carbolic is a precaution, not a cure.’

‘The spirits of camphor that you promised? Your fine family in Westport promised?’

‘Bella, they are not easy to find.’

‘The miners’ children had camphor. You promised.’

‘Miners’ children died too, Bella.’

Mrs C. Rasmussen beats the air and howls. ‘You promised
camphor, Totty, and did not deliver. His death is on your head!’

‘Bella, I will put this pie in your kitchen,’ says Totty. Her dragging steps and pale face show better than any words how she feels. ‘And I will come again tomorrow if I can. You must eat.’

‘How can you talk of food? I would rather die!’ Mrs C. Rasmussen tears at her breasts. Damp patches of unclaimed milk spread over her smock. ‘Oh! Oh! Oh!’ she weeps.

Tom Hanratty, his own deep-seated grief belittled before this display of towering passion, frowns. ‘I’ll wait outside,’ he says.

THAT night people at the Camp and up at the Brake Head heard a great clumping explosion. They felt the ground beneath them rise and settle again. Miners sat up in bed imagining coal gas igniting in some deep mine. They reached for trousers, expecting the siren that would call them to attend the cave-in, to dig their friends out of the rubble. None came. After listening in the dark to the rain pouring down outside, the cold wind slicing around the corner of the hut, the men in the men’s quarters grumbled and scratched and settled down again. Someone would call them soon enough if they were needed.

Eddie Carmichael calmed Mrs Carmichael, who was inclined to nervous attacks, put on oilskins and plodded into the dark to investigate. Everything at the Bins was intact. He knew it wasn’t the mines. An explosion at the mines would have echoed in a distant, ominous way. What Eddie had heard was the sound of a small explosion at close quarters, but he could not imagine the cause. Nothing was moving in all the sprawling tangle of sheds and railway tracks except the wind and rain, and Eddie’s own cursing progress. In the end, wet and cold, he went back to bed.

A worker on early shift brought the news up from the Camp, and Eddie Carmichael, his face thunderous, stomped down to
investigate. He found a group of spectators and a defiant Con the Brake.

‘Where is your sense, Con?’ shouts Eddie. ‘You could have blown the whole place to kingdom come!’

‘Well I didn’t, man, so calm down,’ growls Con the Brake.

‘You know nothing about laying a charge!’

‘That’s true.’

‘You put in far too much!’

‘I got the job done.’

‘Look at that crater!’

‘I’ll fill it in.’

‘And who in the name of God authorised you to take powder?’

‘My wife, who is the highest authority I recognise in this damn world. Leave off, Eddie. I done it wrong, you know, but who cares now? It’s done.’

‘Con the Brake, if you weren’t such a fine brake-man, and if you hadn’t just lost your son and heir, I’d fire you on the spot.’

‘Well, Eddie Carmichael, you got me now. My son is buried on the Hill, so here I stay. And my wife. Till we two die. And then you can supervise the laying of a second charge.’

‘Amen,’ says Eddie Carmichael, and crosses himself like a good Catholic. ‘Mind you,’ he warns as a parting shot, ‘the authorities won’t like it. This is scarcely consecrated ground.’ The sweep of his arm takes in the ravaged Camp, the great slagheap, the mud and desolation. But in the end he claps Con a couple of times on the shoulder and walks back up to work.

Con the Brake must have worked all through the night in that wind and rain. Behind the log house was now a wide, shallow crater, torn out of the granite. Tumbled stones, their fresh-cut grey surfaces gleaming in the watery morning sun, lay in an irregular circle around the crater. In the middle of the depression was a
raised square plinth, built of granite stones, the same ones Con had blown out of the ground. The pieces interlocked cleanly: the top surface of the monument was smooth as a table. Set into that surface was a carved cradle, its wooden rockers clamped and held in place by the newly exploded, newly re-laid rocks of the plateau. The beautiful blond kahikitea of the carved and empty cradle steamed in the sun.

The people watched as Con the Brake brought out a wooden chair and set it at the lip of the crater. Then he brought out Mrs C. Rasmussen, his arm around her as if this great-hearted woman were fragile as glass. He sat her in the chair and stood beside her, one hand on the nape of her neck, both of them facing the monument to Conrad the Sixth, the only person ever buried on Denniston.

There they stayed all that day, one upright the other seated, side by side and silent, not acknowledging the people who brought small things to put on the monument or who simply stood and prayed. At sunset Con the Brake led his wife inside again. He made her eat some of Totty’s pie and then led her to bed, undressed her and lay all night with his arms around her, the warm milk that should have been sustaining his son leaking over his chest and running away into the mattress.

The next day Con the Brake was back at work. No one ever saw the scarlet jacket again, nor did he ever tell its story, though clearly there was something interesting to hear about such a garment.

Bella Rasmussen took longer to recover. She shunned all company, would not answer the door, even to Totty Hanratty. With Rose she was almost demented. For weeks she couldn’t bear to see her, would cry out and shoo the dismayed child away if she came skipping up the steps onto the porch. Rose would back off, puzzled, quieter and thinner than ever, but never cowed. Again and again she
returned to the porch, like a once-loved dog endlessly visiting the home of a dead owner. She would creep up quietly with a few flowers or a pretty stone, something she’d found; would place the gift on the doormat and then just sit there, undetected, sometimes for hours.

The life seemed to have gone out of Rose too.

YOU DON’T WISH death on anyone, but in some ways the bereavements up at Burnett’s Face were a relief to the Scobie family. For a few weeks Mary Scobie gave up her silent sitting in a dark room and was busy and bustling as befitted the wife of a leader of their community. When the first child, the youngest O’Shea, began fighting for breath, Granny Binney ordered a sheet soaked in carbolic to be hung in his doorway, and bade anyone who came and went in that room to wash in a light solution of carbolic. But still the disease spread. Diphtheria was common enough at Home, and you expected to lose the odd sickly baby, but here four children died in a matter of days, two of them only a few days old. That left but two children under five in the whole of Burnett’s Face: a heartbreak for everyone, not to mention the parents themselves. Mary, senior woman in Burnett’s Face, took her duties seriously. She visited each
bereaved family, warmed them with words of good sense, fed them with her funeral cake made with brown sugar and ginger, and left them calmer, accepting that though the Lord’s will is inscrutable at times, His purpose unreadable, yet a pattern would emerge in good time and all would eventually work towards the greater good.

Mary herself no longer believed this. She heard the well-worn words slide out from behind her teeth; saw the comfort they gave to weeping Elizabeth O’Shea and silly Lizzie Dowd, whose lack of common sense surely competed with the diphtheria as cause of death, and to the stunned Gormans, who lost both their children on the same day and would have to start a family all over again. Mary found pleasure of a kind in her skill, but to her the words were empty husks. Her imprisonment on the Hill, the distance from her home town, her parents, the house where she and three generations grew up — all these losses had scoured away at her faith. She no longer believed in God. In this devout community, her loss of faith could not be admitted. Mary carried it like a secret and shameful disease.

Years later, when she became a famous free-thinker and atheist, entertaining prime ministers and influential leaders in the capital, Denniston people nodded sagely and said you could see it coming in the way she behaved over Brennan and Rose, and the way she walked for miles, heaving her stiff and swollen legs from side to side, leaning on her cane of English walnut, walking alone over the contorted rocks of the plateau. Before ’85, though, people only noticed that Mary Scobie grew thinner in spirit as her physical body lost bulk.

There was a night, shortly after the diphtheria epidemic, when the bare bones of her misery were laid in front of the shocked family.

The five boys and their dad walked in the door from band practice. Chatting and laughing, humming the polka (not a hymn
for once) they had been playing, they discussed Uncle Arnold’s new wife, fifteen years younger than him and pretty as a rose.

A month ago, as soon as Uncle Arnold had finished building his new house, he’d taken a fortnight off work, made the long journey up to Nelson — as distant and exciting to his nephews as a trip to the other side of the world — and stood at the wharf as the clipper ship
Mary Brae
berthed. Aboard her were ‘thirty-seven women of good character’, come to be wives of any in need of one. Uncle Arnold had spotted the one he fancied as she and the thirty-six others, flanked by grim-faced chaperones, walked demurely down the plank between rows of staring men. At the soirée that night, arranged by the shipping company, Arnold in his best suit and boots had walked straight up to her, jostling aside a red-faced lad who could barely stammer out a how-d’ye-do, and another weed of a fellow, more persistent but ‘my miner’s shoulders soon got the better of him!’

Throughout the room shy young women were eyeing the colonial men, looking for a gentle manner, a wealthy aspect, a sign of good breeding. According to Arnold, Janet Dickie from Whitechapel, London, took a liking to him directly, charmed by his jokes and his forthright manner. He had glossed over some of the grimmer details of life on Denniston and by the end of the evening she had agreed to his proposal of marriage.

Two days later they were married along with twelve other couples, in the Nelson Methodist chapel, Janet being easy about which religion tied the knot. They were on the road to Denniston, bumping along in the Peach Brothers’ coach, by mid-afternoon, and spent their honeymoon night at Peach and Haycock’s Hostelry, Murchison.

Mary herself has not yet paid a visit to the new wife, a fact that has attracted much comment.

This particular evening, the Scobie boys rattle on about Janet’s easy-going ways, her laughter, her stories of teeming life on the London streets, for her father is a barrowman at Covent Garden markets.

‘She’s a right dolly, Mam,’ says Mathew, blowing out his cheeks and rolling his eyes. ‘Far too good for an old dodderer like Uncle Arnold.’

Josiah cuffs his son, but he’s laughing too. The music and the new family member have all the Scobie males alight.

‘She can ride too,’ says David. ‘She rode the pony all the way up — didn’t even get off at Hickey’s bend.’

‘Even Dad gets off at Hickey’s bend,’ says bright-eyed Brennan.

‘Uncle Arnold too,’ says Mathew. ‘He
falls
off at Hickey’s bend!’

They all laugh.

‘And she’s riding down the Track again come Saturday, right out to Waimang to visit a friend who came out with her!’

‘Uncle Arnold says she better be back by nightfall to cook his tea.’

The boys all laugh again.

Mary Scobie explodes.

‘And my six able-bodied men, who should be seven, cannot get me down off Denniston in three long years!’

Josiah smiles uneasily. ‘Come now, Mother, we would tie you down aboard a horse if you would let us …’

But Mary Scobie is away. ‘It is not a matter of bundling your lumpy wife up and down a track fit only for mountain goats. It is a matter of leaving entirely. Packing up before more Scobie lives drain away into this accursed soil!’

The men and boys stand in dismayed rows, ears pinned back before her tirade.

‘Look here!’ she shouts. Mary stumps over to the linen press and drags at the bottom drawer. Lying in it is a row of neatly folded pyjamas in assorted sizes. The men flinch. It is surely bad luck to acknowledge their presence.

‘Five pairs!’ says Mary. ‘Five, that have been six! What wife and mother should have to live her life with five pairs of pyjamas groaning and moaning in the bottom drawer, waiting for their corpses?’

Brennan starts crying. His mother rounds on him. ‘Aye, chick, cry while you can. The twins have their pairs back in the drawer and soon enough yours will be there too if your dad has his way. And I am to sit up here, trapped, is it? My lot is to sit on the Hill while the mines, and disease, and the wretched clawing damp pick off my family one by one? What man would bring a wife and children to this?’ Mary, dressed today, as every day, in black, as if ready for the next funeral, crashes down into her favourite chair and weeps.

The boys are mesmerised by the row of waiting pyjamas. They stare at the yawning drawer. Josiah’s black brows pull together as if on a drawstring. He takes a chair and, using the wooden legs as a lever, closes the drawer. What man would touch his own funeral clothes?

‘Go on back to bed,’ he says to the shocked boys. ‘Your mam is not well.’

Josiah sits frowning at the table. He rises to add coal to the fire, turns up the wick of the lamp and goes back to his waiting. Mary weeps. Josiah drums his fingers on the table. He will not comfort her.

At last Josiah sighs. ‘Mary, I have work to go to in the morning.’

‘Oh,’ weeps Mary.

‘This will not do.’

Mary is silent.

‘You, better than most, understand the life of a collier.’

‘Here it is different!’

‘Not so different.’

‘In every way! If the mine takes you, who will comfort
me
? There is no family. No old friends. I am alone here.’

‘There is Janet now.’

‘Janet!’ Mary spits the word, ‘A brash cockney girl who could be my daughter!’

Josiah says nothing for a moment. Then lays one palm flat on the table. It is a gesture of strength. He lays the other next to it. The two hands, black-haired, fingernails black-rimmed where the scrubbing brush has missed, press down into the wooden planks. Josiah is making a statement — I am a worker! These hands are my livelihood. Don’t mess with me!

Mary looks at him out of her lumpy, swollen face. Her husband’s hands, lying there, are almost a threat. She has never known him to threaten.

‘Mary!’ says Josiah. ‘I need your strength now, not your weakness.’

‘I do not choose …’

‘We are organising, Mary. At last we are taking the bosses on!’

Her husband’s skin is glossy with energy, the excitement of the battle. She watches him. She is outside and above all this, looking in at a small scene in a shoe-box. The little man in the shoe-box rants on about a Mutual Protection Society, rights of miners, holidays, standing firm, accepting hardship. The words emerge and disappear like bubbles.

Mary rises. She walks out the back door and into the night.

Hours later, cold and calm, she returns by the same door. Josiah is in bed. He pretends to be asleep but Mary knows he is watching
her undress. She feels his uncertainty but is not moved by it. With small sure movements she pulls on a clean nightgown, folds back the covers, climbs into bed and turns her face to the wall.

‘Goodnight,’ she says. Her voice is clear and cool, like a girl’s.