The Denniston Rose (6 page)

‘Shut the door,’ says her mother, and then she sees the eggs. ‘Someone is on a fuss today. They must know it’s your birthday.’

Rose stands and looks at her mother.

‘What now?’ says her mother.

‘You’re smiling.’

‘Well, the hens are coming in to lay and the sun is shining,’ says her mother, ‘and I have a secret worth three golden eggs.’

‘Tell me!’

‘You have your fancy friends and I have my secrets. Now, let us make some soft little pikelets. Hungry as a horse I am, and no doubt you too, madam five-year-old!’ And she smiles again, so Rose thinks the picnic might be different this time and sings a make-up song about eggs and pikelets while her mother takes the frying pan and lays it on the fire. She rubs a little lard into it, then pours batter in three lovely round pools onto the smoking iron. When bubbles rise in the creamy batter she flips them over with a knife. The cooked side is brown and smooth as skin.

‘Bring a fresh tea-towel, quick, quick!’ says her mother, and when Rose has unfolded it her mother flips the pikelets, one two three, into the cloth, and pours three more rounds and three more until there are fifteen pikelets in the cloth.

‘Where did you learn to count like that?’ says her mother, and Rose says she doesn’t know and then counts up to fifty-four.

‘That’s enough of counting, you are wearing my ears to stumps!’ says her mother. ‘Count yourself into your coat, or the day will be gone before any picnic is begun.’

They put the tea-towel of pikelets and a jar of jam, a knife and an apple into the basket and button their coats. Eva Storm wraps a blanket around her neck like a giant scarf, and off they go on their picnic.

They walk past the tree-trunk house but Mrs C. Rasmussen’s rocking chair on the porch is empty, and they walk up past the Bins with all its clattering and thumping, and skip quickly across the railway lines in case a wagon is coming. Rose waves to Uncle Con the Brake, and Rose’s mother shouts ‘Cooee! Cooee!’ so that all the
men look at her, but Con is busy and doesn’t notice. They walk up Dickson Street past Hanrattys’ and Rose waves to Mrs Hanratty, who is hanging washing in the yard. Mrs Hanratty doesn’t see them either.

‘We are going on a picnic,’ shouts Rose to Mrs Hanratty’s back.

‘No need to tell all the world,’ says her mother.

They walk up above the skipway and watch the boxes of coal coming and going. Rose counts all the wagons full of coal going past on their way to the Bins and all the empty ones going back to the mines, the same way they are walking. She counts twenty of each, exactly equal, and tells her mother how the coal gets tipped out at the Bins and how Mr Carmichael counts all the wagons of coal and writes them all in a book and adds them all up at the bottom of the page.

‘For pity’s sake,’ says her mother, ‘give my ears a rest and enjoy the sunshine.’ And Rose looks at her mother and sees she is half smiling, so tells her some more things: her names for all the hens (Annabella and Clementine and Queen Victoria and Lady Alice and the rooster, Prince Charming), and a song Mrs C. Rasmussen knows about sailing home to Ireland. Then her mother waits, looking away and standing black like a fencepost, while Rose walks behind a bush to do her business because there is no toilet anywhere.

‘Will the picnic be soon?’ asks Rose.

‘Very soon, because this fat old body will go no further,’ says her mother, puffing and blowing. ‘Oh, my dear God, Rosie, this lump of a baby is a curse. I will be glad to take my own good shape again. Keep an eye sharp, now, for your father.’

Jimmy is working these days around the Banbury mine.

‘Dogsbody work,’ her father grumbles. ‘Whatever lowly graft a one-armed man can do.’ But he has promised to slip away and meet them on the plateau above the entrance for Rose’s picnic. ‘To tell the truth, girlie,’ says Jimmy, ‘the job is out of pity and I am little use
anyway. They will only be glad if I am away for a bit, and they don’t have to look out for me.’

Below them is the black entrance to the mine. The boxes on the moving skipway rattle in and out on their little railway lines. Here comes Jimmy Cork, scuttling up the slope, looking back to see if anyone has noticed. He is humming and smiling and nods at her in a secret way.

‘Well now, birthday girl, we are making progress with our plans,’ he whispers. ‘I think I have found a way! But that is our little secret, eh?’

‘Do you mean the gold?’ whispers Rose.

Jimmy nods and winks and does a little dance.

‘Someone is in a good mood,’ says her mother, unwrapping the pikelets and spreading the blanket they have brought. Jimmy comes up behind her, puts his one good arm around her and gives her huge belly a good squeeze. Rose’s mother shrieks, but it is really a laugh. Jimmy beats on the lump of the baby like a drum and sings:

Quick as a flash, he snatches a pikelet and stuffs it in his mouth. Rose and her mother shout and chase him around the rocks and lumpy moss, all of them laughing and shouting, until Jimmy is caught and marched back to the blanket.

‘There are five each and you have only four left,’ says Rose, pulling her father’s beard until the tears roll down his face.

‘Oho! And so I have bred a mathematical genius then,’ says Jimmy. ‘Well, it is no surprise, given her father’s intelligence, and if
you have half your mother’s looks you will take the world by storm!’

It is the best time Rose can remember.

‘Jimmy, you will not lose your job, now, stealing away like this?’ says Rose’s mother, and Jimmy laughs.

‘See now, Angel, this job is only a stop-gap till we find our feet, which may be sooner rather than later. My job today,’ and he spits on the ground, ‘is to wander around like some poor lost soul with a lamp, testing the air. The inspector has complained of the air once more and the manager is trying to fob him off with a full-time, one-armed air tester. He knows he should cut another air shaft but he’s too mean to waste the money. Oh yes, the miners laugh to see me wander around. And grumble if I get in their way. Those sour-faced Scobies! Twice already they have made it damned clear they are better off without me. Well, let them laugh. I know a thing or two.’ Here Jimmy winks at Rose. ‘Jesus, I hate those stuck-up English miners and their opinionated sons.’

‘Jimmy, Jimmy,’ says Rose’s mother, ‘do not spoil a good day with your moaning. You have a job and it is the child’s birthday.’

‘And the hens have started laying,’ says Rose, ‘and I found three eggs — two from Lady Alice and one from Queen Victoria — and we have made these fifteen pikelets in the frying pan and so here we are on a picnic!’

He father laughs. ‘What a torrent! Quick, let us stop her mouth with a pikelet before we are drowned in words.’

Her mother and her father are both hungry so they eat five pikelets each, and all the jam and a quarter of an apple each, and her mother gives the last quarter to Rose’s father.

He wipes his orange beard with his hand, then rubs his hand on the grass.

‘Those were the best pikelets I’ve ever tasted.’

‘What’s put you in such a good mood?’ says Rose’s mother.

‘Well, those pikelets, naturally,’ says Jimmy, but he winks at Rose.

Rose’s mother shifts to find a more comfortable place. ‘Lack of drink more like,’ she says.

‘Ah, don’t start now, it is the child’s birthday.’ Jimmy sighs, and Rose thinks that perhaps the picnic is going to end badly after all.

‘Rosie, Rosie,’ says Jimmy, ‘what a life we’ve landed you in.’

Her mother says nothing, but looks away.

Then Jimmy puts one finger into a small pocket in his waistcoat and hooks out a tiny bag made of leather, with a string to pull it shut.

‘Hold out your hand,’ he says, and Rose holds it out. He pulls open the drawstring and shakes a little warm thing into her palm. It is flat like a piece of paper and red-gold like the yolk of an egg. It is heavy for such a small thing and its edges are smooth as if it were a drop of water splashed on the ground and then gone solid.

‘Is it gold?’ she says.

‘It is. Happy birthday, girlie.’

‘Is it for me?’

‘Why not?’

‘Jimmy,’ says her mother.

Her father says, ‘There is no need to look like that, it is the only piece I have, which I carry for luck. She might as well have it, though she will need more than one flake of the colour to see her through this world.’

Rose closes her hand around the warm gold and looks at her mother.

‘Jimmy Cork!’ says her mother, flinging her arms wide and beginning to shout. ‘I know you, you would not give away your last flake. You are hiding something from me, and Jesus spare you if I find you are cheating on me!’

‘Cheating?’ says Jimmy, ‘Who is cheating who? Tell me that! I have sharp enough eyes and ears for what they are saying. And where is your evidence, woman? Do you see me a rich man? Calm down, for God’s sake, or they will hear in the mine and think it is a cave-in. I have given a small piece of treasure to my daughter, who is dying for some. And anyway it is only a few pennyweight.’

Rose asks her mother if she can keep the gold and her mother looks away out over the flat land and the little humpy bushes with sun shining on the leaves, and she folds her hands in her lap where she is sitting on the rug and says nothing.

‘Can I keep it?’ asks Rose again.

‘Keep it, keep it,’ shouts her mother. ‘And we will see about the rest later — count on it, Jimmy!’

Jimmy winks and smiles at Rose, and she hugs him, and kisses the bristly beard.

‘Ah now, Angel,’ says Jimmy. ‘This fresh air puts me in the mood, and why not when the world is smiling? Rosie, my little girlie, go down to the mine entrance and watch the boxes come out, while I talk to your mother.’

‘Can I have the bag too?’

Her father gives her the little bag and she drops her first treasure into it. Rose pulls the string tight and slips the loop over her wrist. She tucks the bag with the gold flake glowing inside into the palm of her hand and holds tight.

‘Go on, off you go,’ says her mother, so Rose runs over to the tunnel entrance with the bag soft like a little mouse in her hand.

The tunnel is dark and exciting like one of Con the Brake’s stories. Big logs of wood make a square opening as if for a giant’s house, but there is no door. Train rails go right into the mine, into the dark, and two heavy chains are rattling along above the rails, coming and going and never stopping. Rose hears a rumble and
stands back to watch an empty wagon, pulled by the chain, disappear into the mine. Then there is another rumble from inside the mine and she looks in, but it is dark. A grey shape is coming and she screams and laughs as the full one comes out all by itself, heaped with shining black coal, out into the sunlight, and away it goes, rolling steady and proud towards the Bins.

Rose watches while two more full boxes roll out from the darkness, and then she climbs up so she can see her mother and father. They are lying down in the sun. She wants to go back and jump in one of the empty boxes, ride it way into the mine, but her mother calls her.

Her mother is standing up now, dusting her coat down and doing up the buttons. She folds the tea-towel and puts it in the basket and Rose knows the picnic is over.

‘Say goodbye to your father,’ says her mother. ‘We will go home and cook something nice for his tea.’ Rose climbs the rock that her father is leaning on and shouts to show how tall she is, then jumps off onto the rug.

‘Will I have a birthday cake for my tea, like Michael?’ she asks.

‘For pity’s sake, isn’t pikelets enough?’ But her mother is smiling. ‘We’ll see what those hens have been up to.’

‘See you later, girlie,’ says Jimmy. ‘Have you got that treasure safe now?’

He stays to smoke a pipe in the sun before going down to the mine and they walk away. When Rose looks back he is still there with a thin white line of smoke above his head and when she looks back again she can’t see him.

‘That gold is worth something,’ says her mother, after they have been walking some time. ‘Give it to me and I’ll keep it safe.’

But Rose shows her mother how the string is around her wrist and the bag snug in her hand.

‘Well, don’t let your father see where you keep it,’ says her mother, and Rose says she won’t.

They walk along over the flat bony land, past bare rock and low bushes lying flat so the wind won’t blow them out of the thin soil, and all the time the rope-road is rumbling just below them with the wagons, empty or full, going back and forth, a little faster than they are walking but not much.

Then the rope-road stops. Rose knows it only stops when terrible things happen in the mine. She tells her mother some of the terrible things.

‘What a chatter!’ says her mother. ‘Wherever do you hear these things?’

Rose laughs and tells her mother about all the houses in Denniston and who lives where and other things and her mother, who is walking slowly now and limping a little, says nothing. Rose puts the hand that is not holding the gold into her mother’s rough, dry hand.

‘This is my best birthday so far,’ she says.

Her mother lets Rose’s hand rest where it is. Her snort is half laugh, half cry. ‘The choice is not overwhelming,’ she says.

Rose’s best day so far. Jimmy Cork’s worst. Evangeline Strauss, alias Eva Storm, alias Angel, considers all days to have rich potential, which is perhaps just as well.

‘LISTEN, THEN,’ SAYS Con the Brake. ‘What happened with Jimmy from County Cork was this.

‘He was there almost from the start. Just turned up one day when we were cutting scrub for the Incline. I myself had arrived only a week. There was quite a gang of us, mostly Maoris from the pa, you know? Big fellas who could swing an axe almost as good as me. You’d think they’d make good miners, eh? But no, underground on a cold plateau is not their idea of a sensible life.’

‘You are telling Rose about her father,’ says Bella, ‘not the entire history of the Incline.’

‘I’m giving the flavour, woman. Every good story must have the taste in the mouth, you know? Well, here we are swinging our axes in the sun when this scarecrow walks down-river out of the bush. God knows how long he been up there, you know? Prospecting, of
course, like most of us. Out of luck and hungry, nothing in his swag but a blanket and a billy. Shouts to the Maoris in their own tongue, rolling it out, and they answering and laughing and slapping young Jimmy on the shoulder like they was best mates. That was your daddy, Rose, in those days. A true adventurer.

‘Well, he sits with us at smoko. Draws on a pipe as if it were a drowning man’s first breath of air. Says he ran out of everything a week ago. Been living on black tea with no sugar. But there he was, lively as a flea on a sunny morning. Whistles some cheerful ditty that has us all grinning. Who knows where he really come from — he’s no more Irish than me by his voice, but he says County Cork and God help the man asks questions up here.

‘So the boss give him a job and he sets to, ready enough when there is food in his belly, you know? And cheerful. Had a girl further south, or so he said. A raging beauty to hear Jimmy talk, with hair brighter than the sun. That would be your mother, Rose, he was describing. A Venus she was, in Jimmy’s version.’

Con clears his throat and lands the gob, sizzle! in the fire. He seems to lose his drift.

‘Go on, man!’ says Bella, tapping the chair, click click, with her knitting needles. ‘So the woman was a raging beauty, we have got that point.’

‘Jimmy said it, not me.’

‘So you say. And?’

‘Well, Jimmy says he’s going to make his fortune and take them both back to Ireland. Or sometimes it was Australia. Jimmy was a dreamer.

‘You’d never think it now, but in those days Jimmy Cork would tell a good yarn — had some wild ones from the goldfields further south. He’d been up the Hokitika and the Totara but always seemed to follow a duffer, always too late for the paying gold, you know?
The fever was in him, though — his eyes would shine just talking about the colour — and I knew he’d walk off the job as soon as he had enough cash to buy a bit of tucker.

‘Well, so it was. One fine morning we see him splashing up river again, full swag over his shoulder, new shovel tied atop, whistling good as the birds. He reckon he could smell gold up there, though we always told him coal’s the pay-dirt here, man; this is black country. Mind you, gold was here, Rose. God knows we’d all looked for the colour enough times on our day off, you know, and the odd bitty would shine up at us from the stream. Enough to keep you looking; not enough to pay bills.

‘Well, he’s gone only couple weeks, maybe less. This time he comes out, his eyes are dark and the man is coiled tight as a spring. Oho! I think, this man has found the colour — you could read it on him a mile off — but he say not one word. All the men joke him, tease, you know: “Show us the true stuff, man or have you got a bag of fool’s gold, eh?” But that Jimmy say nothing. He’s a changed fellow, you know — silent. He gets back to work and he cuts scrub like the devil, earns the bonus every week. We all reckon Jimmy hit it big up-river and is earning the cash to stake a claim. Set up his own mine, maybe.

‘Well, it stands to reason he won’t tell us nosy bastards; we’d be up there like a shot ourselves.

‘So anyway, we work. We have the Incline almost ready to go. Company manager shouting every day to start her up. Banbury Mine, she’s already producing good coal, see. But it all stuck up on the Hill, no way to get down. The men are bringing the coal out in sacks, piling them up, waiting for the engineers to give the all-clear on the Incline. One more week and the accident might not happen. Your father’s accident. Poor bugger.’

‘You have a child in the room,’ says Mrs Rasmussen.

‘Rose hears worse up here, woman, she must learn our ways. Well now. He works too hard, you see, Rose, loses his sharp mind, I guess. One minute he’s helping to shove a heavy sleeper in place, the next he’s gone — foot must’ve slipped. Head over heel he goes, down the steepest part, with the sleeper rolling down after him. By God, it was a terrible sight, that heavy timber rolling down, faster and faster. Of course it catches Jimmy just short of the trestle bridge, just where Colin Grover get killed, you know, same spot almost.

‘So that’s how his arm got the way it is. We come flying down the Incline, lucky someone else doesn’t fall. You can see, when we lift the sleeper off, that man is never going to lift no timber again. If he live at all. One leg is bent back, make you sick to look at. His right arm the bone shows through, sharp as glass and the blood pumping. Jimmy Cork was lucky a train was at the railhead. Or unlucky, some would say. Better perhaps if he had gone.’

‘Conrad!’ says Mrs Rasmussen, reminding him who his audience is.

‘Sorry, Rose, but you know how it is. Well, they take him down to Westport and we think that’s the last we see of him. The Hill is no place for a one-arm man with a crook leg, you’d have to be mad. But then Jimmy was mad, that’s the truth of it. Next we hear that he’s alive and learning to walk again, with a crutch. And that he’s desperate keen to get back on the Hill.’

‘Why?’ says Rose. ‘Why did he want to come here again?’

‘Well, sweetheart, it’s hard to say … Denniston can get into your blood.’

‘Denniston!’ snorts Mrs C. Rasmussen. ‘Only thing in that man’s blood is alcohol. And the gold. He came here to be near his gold, man!’

‘True, woman, true. This woman, Rose, can see a man’s heart laid out like a map. He came to be near his gold. What I reckon,
now, is this. That man maybe he find good pay-gold in some high place — rocky, you know? There’s no way, you see, he can get to it without two good arms and good strong legs. Up over the rocks and bluffs. No way. You see the way that man walk? Good enough straight along, but when he drinks that old bent knee gives on Jimmy. I see it many times.’

‘That’s just drunk, man,’ says Mrs C. ‘Drink turning the joint to water.’

‘It is not. I saw him sober, fall from tripping on a bitty rock in the path. He go down like a sack. Get up quick, embarrassed. That bent knee got no strength, I reckon.’

‘Well, you would be the expert on drunk and sober.’

‘I would, woman. So. Jimmy is stuck, can’t get to his gold. If it’s there at all in any quantity, which I doubt. A nugget or two maybe, but a mine? I doubt.’

‘Was I born then?’ asks Rose.

‘Let me see now, ’79. Yes, Rose, you would be two or three.’

‘Well, where was I?’

‘A good question, which you will have to ask your mother, for none of us at Denniston knows the answer.’

‘You were down Hokitika way, with your mother,’ says Bella Rasmussen, but shakes her head when Con raises his eyebrows. ‘Finish your story, man. It’s time this little one was in bed.’

‘I am trying, goodness knows. The Company man — not Mr McConnochie, Rose, Mr Dickson, it was then, a decent man — he say to Eddie, “Give the poor fellow a job if he can get up the Incline. Something to put bread in his mouth. The Company owes him.” You’d wish all bosses were like that, eh?

‘So he come back. It was the same day, exactly, I brought Mrs Rasmussen here up to the Hill. Two weeks I been off work, travelling south to find where she got to …’

‘Conrad Rasmussen, that is not a story for Rose.’

‘Well, it is a happier one, which you will hear another day, Rose. It is entirely proper for your ears and why not? But this is Jimmy’s story, your father’s story. True.’

‘And I will tell it,’ says Mrs Rasmussen, ‘before the child falls asleep. We brought him up the Incline, Rose, between us — no easy job. It was a silent ride, I remember. Even then he cast a shadow. But you couldn’t help feeling pity. Lost his good right arm. Perhaps he thought, then, that one day his leg would carry him properly. Hanrattys’ offered the poor fellow a bed but he would take no help. Asked for the little tent over by the cave at the Camp. Wanted to be on his own, he said.’

‘But he is a changed man, Rose,’ says Con the Brake. ‘Where are the songs now? The whistling like a bird? The stories? All gone. The man is like a black well where the water is stagnant and sour. The pain, maybe, or the frustration has changed the man. If the gold is so important to him, why don’t he share the knowledge? Willy Huff was a good friend of Jimmy’s. Willy could have partnered him. The fellow that got blown down into the gully, you know …’

‘Conrad!’

‘Yes, yes, woman. How can I tell a story without the background? I tell you, Rose, gold may be a colour to melt your heart on a summer’s day, but it can turn a man blacker than a storm at sea. And so it was with Jimmy Cork. He just want to sit all day, his eyes watching, watching up-river. Bitter, he is, that luck has turned against him. So withered inside, you know, he can’t talk to a friend or ask for help.

‘So that’s why your father take to the drink. Ease the pain. The arm pain and the lost fortune.’

‘But what about Scobies?’ says Rose.

There is a silence while Con the Brake looks into the fire and Mrs C. Rasmussen takes up an iron poker, wrought with a sailing ship on the handle, and stirs the red coals to bring them to life.

‘Ah well,’ says Con the Brake at last, ‘I wasn’t there, sweetheart.’

‘Did my father kill a Scobie?’

‘It was an accident. So I hear.’

‘But why, then?’

‘Why what, sweetheart?’

‘If it was an accident, why do they shout at us?’

‘Well now,’ rumbles Con the Brake, looking to his wife for help. ‘Those English miners are careful men, Rose. They don’t believe in accidents.’

Rose thinks about this. ‘Why not?’

Mrs C. Rasmussen sighs. ‘Now that is the end of your story, Rose. This man will walk you over to your home.’

Rose trots out into the dark readily enough, one small hand engulfed in Con’s warm paw. Bella Rasmussen’s heart breaks, though, to see her go.