The Denniston Rose

by Jenny Pattrick

  ‘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.

  Con the Brake Tells Rose a Story

  ‘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 p
ay-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.

  The Miners’ Curse

  WHAT HAPPENED, ON that day of the picnic, as every mother’s son and every father’s daughter on the Hill knows but none will tell Rose, is this.

  Underground, miners work as pairs. It’s always the case. Josiah Scobie and his brother Arnold are a pair. He and Arnold have always worked as mates since boys. Mary Scobie doesn’t like it.

  ‘If there’s an accident you could lose two in the family,’ she says.

  ‘Or save both,’ is Josiah’s opinion. ‘We know to an inch where the other is and how the seam is cracking. I trust him.’

  The other brother, Frank, not so fussy about his mate, changes from time to time for variety.

  ‘I’ll end up knowing more jokes than me brothers. And meeting a few more sisters maybe!’ he laughs. Frank is the youngest of the brothers, and sunny natured where the others are serious. Frank can whistle to make you think a forest full of birds is on your doorstep, which brings tears to some eyes, up here on the Hill, where no bird sings. And he’s a good musician, like most of the Scobies.

  The day of the accident he’s working with stocky Peter Fogarty — not family but a good English miner. You’d never catch one of the English miners choosing one of the ‘volunteers’ as mate. Frank and Peter are joking about girls, or the lack of them, and laying plans to ride down the Incline next Saturday to see who might have arrived in Waimang. Frank is twenty-eight, a full ten years younger than his brother Josiah, but he can hew as fast, despite the chatter, and is known as a top miner. Each pair is working on a separate pillar of good hard coal, a distance apart but close enough to run for help if needed. There is a certain feeling of competition in the air as to which will get their pillar down first.

  To understand the accident it is necessary to picture the mine. Imagine, then, a thick slab of coal lying between layers of stone, as a wedge of meat lies between slices of bread in a sandwich. But in the case of the coal at Denniston the slab is vast — spread wider than a town and thicker than the height of a man, sometimes two men. This great slab of coal must be got out cleanly, without collapsing the rock roof in on the miners.

  So first you drive a bord — a tunnel about ten foot wide — to be your haulage line. In you go through the coal, extracting as you go, and putting up timber sets, one each side of the tunnel as props, and one across the top to support the roof. When you have gone a chain in, you cut across at right angles for a chain and then drive another bord in from outside. That’s your air supply. The flow of air is crucial in mining; you must have multiple shafts so fresh air can be drawn through.

  So. Now you go back to the main haulage line and extend it another chain, take another right-angle cut, then extend your air shaft to meet it. On you go, extending your two parallel shafts — one for haulage, one for air — cutting a cross-shaft every chain. As you go deeper in, you hang sacking curtains — brattices — over the entrances to your earlier cross-shafts, to block the air flow. This way, you drag the air further into the mine with you. Big blocks of coal, a chain square, remain between your bords. These are called pillars. Which is apt. They hold up the mighty weight of the rock roof, of the whole land above, which no puny timber sets could do.

  And so you go, more bords to north and south, more cross-shafts east and west, honeycombing your way through the vast seam of coal until a plan of it looks like New York City — or, if you like, Westport itself, which is laid out square and neat with hardly a bent road to soften the landscape.

  At the time of the accident Banbury mine is all tunnelled through, and the men are now working back from the outer
edges, in towards the haulage line, extracting the chain-square pillars of coal. Think of digging out two pretty large houses of solid coal. That would be your ‘pillar’. Many, many boxes of coal will be extracted from one pillar. This day both pairs of miners are in a good rhythm, sending boxes up regularly. Both pairs want to be the first to move on to a new pillar.

  Samuel, Josiah’s eldest son, sixteen tomorrow, is down in this section too, trucking for both pairs.

  ‘Heigh ho,’ he calls. ‘Hup hup!’ Though there is no need at all. Noggin the horse knows what to do with no word said, let alone any human to say one. Noggin would go back and forth all day from face to haulage line, trustworthy as a miner’s mate.

  Down comes Samuel through the mine with Noggin pulling a string of empties. Josiah leans on his shovel and smiles. Everyone smiles to see Samuel. He is not sunny natured like his Uncle Frank, nor thick-set like his father. Willowy and lithe, rather — pale skinned as a girl, and dreamy. Mary Scobie, his mother, would never admit to favourites among her six sons but the others notice an extra light in her eye when she watches Samuel. Sam is the one who will put her slippers by the range to warm, or fetch the clothes off the line when the rain comes.

  Samuel loves to work with the horses.

  ‘Look at Noggin!’ he shouts now to his dad. ‘He knows it’s Saturday! He can smell fresh air and sunlight; I swear he knows! See him snort?’

  Josiah laughs. ‘We all know it’s Saturday and Noggin picks it from us, perhaps. Come on, lad, get on with it! We need some space here.’

  Samuel unhooks the string of boxes and rolls four to Josiah and Arnold, the other four over to Frank and Peter Fogarty. Noggin plods back up the line without waiting for his master to tell him. He waits at the correct distance, while Samuel hooks the waiting full boxes together. Seven boxes. Arnold is just topping off the eighth. His big round banjo shovel slaps a last good slab aboard. He reaches for one of his tokens, hooks it on the box to show this coal should be tallied as his, and gives Samuel the nod. Arnold is not a talker.