The Denniston Rose (24 page)

GOLD, MY FRIENDS, is a commodity we all of us have followed for a good part of our lives. For my part I was born into it. Born in a tent with the rattle of the box and the swish of the pan in my ears. Cut my teeth on my papa’s shovel. Oh, those roaring days! The search, the shout of joy, the bitter disappointment, the free spending! You know as well as me. So it will surprise you to know that at this very moment in my story all that sly and golden thrill slipped away out of my body like grog from a cracked cup. That cursed Billy Genesis was the root and source of my loss, who caused me to turn my back on any prospects of gold.

In Billy the lust for the colour was black as night. An ugly thing to see, turning all nearby a dirty shade too. Tied as I was to him, I lost all stomach for the project. With poor Jimmy Cork the lust had been all romance and dreams — stupid, yes; tiresome, yes; but not
ugly. Something to lift your heart now and then on a dark night. But Billy sold his soul, I swear. And tried with all his evil strength to drag me down too.

So. Here is how it went. His plan was to use the strike, the days the mine closed, to further the search. My opinion, my sharper judgement, was not sought. I shouted at him that the area in question was closed off: a dead Scobie haunting it and a living Scobie’s curse lying in wait. He laughed.

‘The curse is laid on Jimmy, not me, and I am stronger than any English miner’s curse.’

Fool, fool, but the man was driven. I suspect he found a few grains more in Jimmy’s pool on the cliff, which kept the fires going. But he wouldn’t admit such. No sharing with that black bastard. Yes, so I made a mistake, I admit. How was I to know the change that swelled like something putrid inside Billy Genesis?

Twice during the strike he had entered the mine on some pretext but the horses were not kept anywhere near the section in question, and twice Billy had found himself face to face with an irate scab who’d lost his silly way in the maze.

Now Billy seizes me by my hair and draws me close. ‘Tomorrow the mine closes. You will stand guard for me while I search.’

‘I will not,’ says I through clenched teeth.

He knocks me flat. ‘You will if I carry you.’

‘Then carry me and be damned!’ I shout. ‘That will be a fine and secret start to your mission!’

The man was an idiot, no?

He knocks me flat again.

In the end I go, if only to prevent further beating. At this time I am working hard on Con the Brake and what man would sigh and moan over black eyes and broken teeth?

Billy leaves me at the small opening of an air shaft down to an
unused part of the mine. It would be close to right above Jimmy’s golden rock pool, he reckons. I did not trust Billy’s reckoning one jot. He used up what small portion of brain he had memorising the Bible. Well, he squeezes in, and I hand down the lantern and the little pick. I am left alone, holding one end of a ball of string, which he will use to retrace his steps. I tell you, I would not go down that gaping maw for a sack of gold. The day is fine and clear, the wind keen, but all around I can feel darkness rise from the rocks and the twisted little bushes like the direst of storms brewing and boiling up on this very spot to teach us a lesson.

I sit there shaking. Which to fear most — the miners’ curse or Billy’s fists? I decide on fists, which at least are there to see and to avoid. So I tie the string to a branch shaped like a witch’s claw, and run for it.

But imagine this! Three steps down over the wild plateau — no more — I hear a dreadful rumbling like the voices of all the Scobie men growling and droning. I am flung to the ground howling in fear. Under me all is heaving and swaying and gnawing very horridly. Over it all I swear I can hear the high keening cry of that young Scobie boy, entombed still, his soul restless and thirsting for blood, and another wild scream that could have been poor Jimmy in the flames. Oh, it was your worst nightmare!

A simple earthquake, you’ll say. So indeed. So maybe! But why at that time, I ask you? Why that place? There are matters here beyond natural explanation. None of your narrowed rational eyes and twitching mouths will persuade me otherwise.

When the land has settled and my feet will carry me I’m up and off that weird rocky place and down to the Camp, one shoe gone and hair in a wild tangle of fright. Billy Genesis can shift for himself. Or not, for all I care.

So. All night, with Billy still not home, I sit by the fire, fearful
of what ghosts might visit me if I sleep. Every moment I expect fresh quakes; a chasm opening at my feet with the hands of the dead reaching for me. Also there was Billy. If he never returned, what then? Questions would be asked. ‘Where is the blacksmith?’ If he
did
return he would be like to kill me for leaving him up there alone.

You can understand how unfair all this was. I who had no part in Scobie deaths was attracting the curse. I could feel it working its way through me from the inside out like a boil coming to the surface. Once that night I lost all reason and ran barefoot to the Incline thinking to ride a wagon down — to escape, leaving all behind. But I had forgot it was closed. The only way I could think to end it all was to stay outside till I froze to death, but the cold got the better of me and I returned to the stove.

Well, this was bad but you cannot get Eva Storm down entirely. My friends, I am a hard nut to crack. Am I not here around this fire, flesh still on my bones, stories aplenty in my head?

That hell-hole of a man Billy Genesis was not dead in the mine, but escaped. How, he never told. My lucky night — he came home by way of Red Minifie’s so by the time he was ready to warm my cold flesh with his raw fist the drink had sapped his strength. Nothing for me but a few bruised ribs before he fell down senseless. I sat there by the stove, Billy snoring on the floor, and looked at the poor sodden fool. No more, I thought: no more of this madness.

So. In time the spirit rises: weary, damaged, but ready again to fight for a place in the world. By morning there was a plan of sorts in my mind. No more prospecting. No more motherlode. My sole drive was to separate Con the Brake from his precious Bella and to bring him down off the Hill with me to a warmer life. A difficult task, you think? Impossible when the man has a comfortable home and a good job? Well consider this. Big Snow — or Con the Brake
if you like — was a lovely wild man. Oh, I fancied him more every day I set eyes on him! He loved his Bella, yes, but that slabby fellow was a rover like me. You could still smell ship’s tar and sea salt and bracken from lonely highlands on the man. In his blood. He had to move or die. You would see him shake his head sometimes, lift his nose and smell the air, those blue eyes seeing nothing of the coal-damp world around him. Distant places were calling him. I knew it. I
knew
it.

The sticking point was that Con was also a decent man. No fellow with the wanderlust should ever be born decent; it will not sit with comfort on the shoulders, ha ha! So. To catch the decent man — to lead him in the direction his nose wishes to follow — my Rose is the bait. This decent man will leave his wife to protect his daughter, is my plan. Then, away and on the road, he will know where his true heart lies.

My friends, the plan worked better and more terrible than I hoped.

TWO MONTHS INTO the strike Eddie Carmichael had managed to recruit forty new men — only three trained for underground, and even those had worked only tiny goldmining operations, nothing remotely resembling the underground city that spread under the Hill. Eddie started up one section of Coalbrookdale mine with the recruits, he himself acting as deputy. The coal came out in a trickle. Con and the others at the Bins had work one day in three, bringing coal down the Incline and into the waiting train below. A week after Coalbrookdale started up, four of the new men walked off, just as Mary Scobie had predicted. Their shoulders ached, their backs were ruined, working in the dark all day was unnatural, they missed their families. Eddie pleaded and raged but one by one the men hopped behind a descending wagon and left for the coast.

Down in Westport, Mr McConnochie was not displeased at the lack of miners.

‘Leave it, Eddie,’ he said. ‘Orders are always slack in the summer. We can save money if the workforce is light. The strikers will cave in before the winter orders are rolling, mark my words.’

Eddie, grey from overwork, worn out by all the arguments, was not so optimistic.

‘They are leaving already for work in other mines. You are running a fine line, Mr McConnochie.’

‘I am, and that is business, Eddie. Now leave me to it.’

These days Mary Scobie, that tireless dragon, visited the Brake Head twice a week. People learned to skip quickly into a doorway or slide away down a side lane when they saw her black figure striding down from the skipway and into town. If caught, you were bailed up for a donation or a pledge of support, or even food from your own table.

On each visit she clanged up the steps to Eddie Carmichael’s office and clanged down again. Goodness know what they discussed, but Eddie, poor bugger, always had a hangdog look after she left.

And the letters Mary Scobie wrote! Eddie was postmaster as well as mine manager. His chatty little sparrow of a wife, Mrs Carmichael — Ivy to her small circle of friends — sorted the letters each morning on the breakfast table. The outgoing mail went down the Incline either in the coat pocket of one of the maintenance men, who rode down the stones on their shovels, checking for debris on the rails, or in Eddie’s satchel when he was summoned yet again to Westport.

‘They should charge her extra,’ says Ivy Carmichael, in full flight, to Mr Dimcock the draper.

‘Charge who?’ asks Totty, come in to inspect the new consignment of cloth.

‘That Mrs Scobie. The mail she sends! You’d think
she
was running a business, not my Mr Carmichael. How much is the Welsh flannel?’

‘One and threepence the yard, Mrs Carmichael.’

‘Daylight robbery. And the folk she sends out to! Three times to the Premier. That old goat Larnarch, Minister of Mines, gets one every week. Several to some subversive organisation in Australia.’

Totty fingers the flannel. It is fine and warm. Mr Dimcock watches her. These days he is anxious to make a sale.

‘I’ll take two yards,’ she says, ‘and five of your best black alpaca.’

‘Two won’t get you anywhere, Mrs Hanratty. Take five while I have it.’

‘Three, then. The new little one must be warm this winter.’ She sits on the high stool sighing with pleasure to take the weight off her feet. Everyone is silent a moment, to honour the last little one, buried so recently.

Ivy takes breath again. ‘She’s writing to someone in Brunner mine too, down at Grey. Oh, she’s a stirrer, that one.’

‘Well, she believes in the cause, I suppose …’

‘Believes in herself, I’d say. Have you noticed the change in her? Mrs Important? I’ll have three of the flannel too, Mr Dimcock. When you’re ready. Oh yes, Mrs Scobie would run the world single-handed if you gave her the chance. She bails up my Mr Carmichael and says the most cruel things.
And
it’s all for nothing.’ Ivy lowers her voice. ‘Twenty letters a day go out, and not one in reply. Not one. She is all puff. I tell you, no one out there takes one blind bit of notice. They’ll lose the strike, mark my words. Thank you, Mr Dimcock. Put it on my bill.’

Mr Dimcock clears his throat. ‘Ah … Perhaps this time …’

His embarrassed question is stopped in its tracks by Mrs Carmichael’s frown.

‘My husband always pays at the end of the month,’ she says. ‘Good day to you, Totty.’

When she is gone and the air in the store has settled, Totty asks, ‘Is it that bad?’

‘It is,’ says little Mr Dimcock, his hands smoothing the Welsh flannel and folding it back onto the bolt.

‘Give me my bill now then,’ says Totty, ‘and I will see that Tom pays tonight. We must all hang on if we can.’

THREE more months passed. The Company limped on. Complaints arrived on Eddie’s desk — about the quality of the coal hewed, the amount of slack and rock in it. The Miners’ Society committeemen were up and down the Track like yo-yos. There was an article in the
Westport Times
about a meeting Mr Scobie addressed in Westport, and another saying he was a troublemaker, stirring up discontent in other West Coast mines.

Once the committee brought Mr H.P. Jimson, a famous unionist from Wellington, up the Track and there was a public meeting in the Volunteer Brigade Hall.

‘Amalgamation is the word, lads!’ shouted the important man. ‘We must join with our Australian brothers. I see the Amalgamated Miners’ Association spreading the world! Who could withstand us? No, my good fellows, hold firm to your principles. You are making history here! Workers throughout the colony are behind you.
I
am behind you!’

He brought no money with him, though. Josiah watched the miners trail out of the hall. They would not meet his eye. These were no longer fighting men. The rhetoric of the important man had not raised their spirits one notch. Stolid Tommy Jowett, whose section of Coalbrookdale mine was being worked by unskilled labour, stood at the back of the hall, waiting for a word.

‘I’m off in the morning, Josiah,’ he said. ‘That’s it for me.’

‘Now, now, lad,’ said Mr Jimson, puffing up like a blow-fish, his florid jowls shaking with conviction. ‘The battle is near won — you cannot desert the ship now.’

Tommy seemed not to hear the outsider’s bluster. He spoke directly to Josiah.

‘I’ve stood by the committee, Josiah, and we had just cause, but I can no longer swim upstream. Nor my seven lads from Coalbrookdale. We’ll be gone by morning. There is work at Koranui, so I hear.’

The unionist shot a stubby finger into Tommy’s waistcoat. ‘Now look here, man. The union has worked tirelessly on your behalf this five months. Strength in unity! Unity, man!’

Tommy ignored him. ‘We had word today that the Company is evicting us, Josiah. All of us in Company houses must be out by Friday. They want the room for more bloody scab labour.’

‘Ah, the devils,’ growled Josiah, hanging his head like a cornered dog. ‘That’s a low blow.’ Scobies owned their own home but most of his friends were still under Company roofs.

‘We cannot hold out, Josiah. Not without a roof.’

Mary Scobie, finished in the kitchen, came stumping across the floor, her cane striking the bare boards, black bosom leading the attack.

‘Tommy Jowett, you’re not giving in now! You can stay with us. All the family.’

Tommy’s eyes fixed to a spot a few inches from Josiah’s boots. Like most of the miners he was uncomfortable with this woman who came to men’s political meetings, who listened and argued instead of staying in the kitchen with the teacups.

‘Thank you, Mrs Scobie, but you cannot house thirty households. They are clearing the lot. We’ve given it our best shot, Josiah,
but we are not made of granite, like this damned plateau. We cannot survive the winter without food or shelter.’

Josiah opened his mouth to argue but Mary Scobie was ahead of him. ‘Cannot you see that the Company are desperate? Why else are they evicting you, if not to break the strike? Winter means big orders. They cannot fill the orders without skilled labour. Stay, stay, Tommy, we are almost there!’

The man from Wellington cleared his throat. All the men were embarrassed. Tommy Jowett looked briefly at Josiah, turned and walked out. In the doorway he raised one hand briefly, without looking back, and was gone.

While her husband walked the guest speaker back to Hanrattys’, Mary sat alone in the hall. An onlooker may have seen a neat and proper wife, waiting quietly for her husband. She sat near the back of the hall on a folding wooden chair, her feet neatly together, the heirloom necklace of black jet gleaming faintly against the black pintucks of her good bombazine. A plain steel hatpin skewered her flat black hat at a perfect horizontal, safe against all movement or weather. The black wool coat, brought from England and still as good as the day it arrived, lay folded on her knee, ready for the long walk home. But Mary’s thoughts were galloping helter-skelter like pit ponies on their day above ground. She knew her forthright manner embarrassed the men; knew and cared not a jot. Perhaps an addiction had set in — a kind of drunkenness. Mary Scobie wouldn’t describe it like that — in her whole life alcohol had never passed her lips — but, having tasted the joys of organising, cajoling, speaking out, of driving an issue forward against opposition, Mary Scobie would never again relinquish the pleasure. Winning the strike mattered more than any sidelong glances. A win could set Josiah (and herself) on the first step away from the Hill. But more than that: just conducting the fight against entrenched
and hide-bound male opponents was a new and heady seduction. Unknown to her, temperance and suffrage, issues made to order for her delight, were waiting in the wings.

Josiah said nothing on the long walk home. He walked behind his wife, fidgeting at the pace, dying to stride out, to converse comfortably with one of the other miners. But by the time he reached Burnett’s Face his irritation had disappeared, leaving only depression.

‘We’ve lost, Mary,’ he says, scraping muddy boots on the iron bar at the door and reaching for her boots that he might do the same for her. ‘Most of the men are in Company houses. They will have to leave the plateau.’

Mary shakes out her coat and hangs it to dry on the door, stirs the embers in the coal range, moves the kettle to the hottest part. She crackles with energy.

‘Let them go, Josiah, let them go. Koranui is close by. We need the money, God knows. They can come running back soon enough, when we win the strike.’

‘Ah, win: I don’t know.’

‘What has happened to you, Josiah?’

‘Tommy’s a leader. If he goes … And think, Mary, those ruffians from the Camp, living in here, at Burnett’s Face. There will be fights.’

‘Aye, and that’ll be bad for orders.’

‘The community is divided enough as it is. I’ve been responsible for nothing but the destruction of our new town.’

‘Josiah!’ Mary bangs down the teapot for emphasis, and follows it with ringing teacups. ‘You have not failed. You have nearly won.’

‘The men are losing faith. I should not have tried so soon. We were not ready.’

‘Let them wait two more weeks. No more. I know. In my bones
I know it, Josiah. The pressure of winter coal orders will win our cause. You know it too. The coal creeps out of Coalbrookdale in spoonfuls.
I
could hew faster than those fumble-fingered recruits. The Company will give way, I know it!’

Josiah sips on tea, weak and sugarless, as Mary has served it for a fortnight, in order to provide tonight’s meeting with a proper supper. There are no scones or cake to comfort his growling depression.

‘The committee cannot conduct a strike without the men, Mother,’ he says. But something about his wife’s fierceness makes him smile.

Mary crashes into a chair beside him, takes his seamed worker’s hands in hers, kneading them like dough. Strength pours out of her.

‘My dear.’ She hasn’t used an endearment in months. ‘My dear, I believe you
could
conduct a strike on your own. More than that. Look at that useless what’s-his-name from Wellington. If that’s the workers’ hope, let us despair right now.’

Josiah tries to keep a stern demeanour. ‘In Wellington he has a fine reputation for results …’

‘He could not persuade a fly to land on sugar! All the way down here he comes, rides up the Incline like Moses to the promised land, and then orates as if he’s telling the women’s knitting circle a new recipe!’

Josiah laughs out loud. ‘Well, I must admit he was a bit daft.’

‘Daft! Josiah, what good can he be doing up north? You could drive him into the ground in three sentences. You can nail an audience: have them roaring for blood or weeping for injustice, listening for an hour, forgetting to re-light their pipes.
You
, Josiah, should be up in Wellington arguing the workers’ rights, not that wad of wet wool, gorging himself right now on Hanrattys’ best beef!’

‘I am a miner, not a politician, my dear, and not even a miner these last months.’

‘Then miners must be politicians. You are needed in Parliament, Josiah!’

Mary Scobie’s will hammers behind her words. The house vibrates with it. Young Brennan, woken by the sheer force of the conversation, stands unobserved in the doorway, sleepy in his nightshirt, his mother’s words ringing like bells in his ears. He sees his father stand, lift his mother by her shoulders, and hold her at arm’s length. His father seems puzzled by her, as if she is a strange new creature, observed for the first time. But the boy also notices that his father is rapt, hypnotised almost, taking into himself, through his connected arms, a new source of power.

The atmosphere in the kitchen is somehow disturbing, too rich; it excludes him. Brennan turns and pads back to the bedroom where he tucks in with his already stacked brothers.

He thinks of Rose, who has been more herself again these last weeks, readier to talk and play, but who came to school today with a flaming and swollen ear and a bruise all down her neck.