Heart of Coal

by Jenny Pattrick

  Brennan watches her. She has no idea how provocative she is being, flapping her blouse and her skirt, the rosy, damp skin showing in several places. He would like to pull her to the ground this instant, but already has learned what a disaster this approach would be. Bella was right. A slow, gentle patience is the only way. He bites his lip, lowers the knapsack, sits beside her but at a small distance.

  ‘We’ll eat our buttie here in the shade, shall we?’ he says. ‘Where we can watch out to sea?’

  Rose flings herself down on a patch of moss.

  ‘Look down there, Bren! Isn’t that Janet on her porch? And look! The whole rope-road — the junction with Ironbridge. It’s like a map! Oh, Bren, there’s the log house! Hellooooo, Bella!’ Rose jumps up, windmills her arms and flings down again, laughing at her own fantasy.

  Brennan laughs with her but his eyes reach further, past the grimy plateau to the distant view: the Waimangaroa a meandering silver line in the dark green of the coastal strip; the clean straight line of surf and the endless stretch of hazy sea. We are so different, thinks Brennan, and for a moment he quails.

  ‘Rose …’ He watches the horizon still, not wanting her to see the uncertainty in his eyes.

  ‘Mmm?’ Rose is tearing open the pack of bread and bacon. She takes a huge mouthful. ‘Oh, heaven! Taste this, Bren!’

  ‘Rose, is this all right?’ He turns to look at her now. ‘I mean, us together?’

  Rose hears the weight in his voice and stops her chewing. She cocks her head to one side and looks at him with a small curious smile. ‘What — now this moment? Or are you talking about …’ Her arms fling wide again, ‘about life? About marriage?’

  Her tone is not mocking; she simply wants to know. Brennan leans back on one elbow, helpless with love. ‘Yes. Marriage. Are you happy, Rose? Is it all right?’

  Rose looks down at the picnic food. Brennan feels she is hiding her face from him. Then she takes up a wedge of bread and bacon and hands it to him. ‘Brennan,’ she says, and her smile is as warm and open as the blue sky above them, ‘it is all right. It is more. It is wonderful! You were right to bring me to Burnett’s Face. I will love it here, you’ll see. Oh, Bren, I have such plans … I love the little school. Janet says we can enlarge it now that I have come —’

  Brennan interrupts the bright flow. ‘That’s good, that’s good, Rose. But me? Am I all right? I don’t feel so … so … ’

  Rose swallows her laughter. In a flash her mood changes. Now all her attention is on him, her bright eyes driving at him. ‘Brennan Scobie.’ A tinge of anxiety overlays the lightness of the words. ‘You are right, yes! You are perfect. For me, you have made everything … oh, I don’t know … settle. Don’t you see it? Everyone says so. I feel it. You are making me happy, Bren, in a way …’ There is simple astonishment in the way she spreads her hands and looks down at them. ‘In an utterly new, wonderful … yes, my dear, serious Bren, you are right right right! Now eat your bread and no more doubts!’

  She smartly taps the buttie he holds, like a schoolmistress. He laughs with her, then dares to ask his question: ‘Why, then, do you shrink from my touch? Why, if you are happy, do you lie each night so wooden, until the … we …’ He can’t say the word. ‘Until it’s over?’

  Rose frowns. ‘Do I?’

  ‘It feels so to me. As if you hate it.’

  ‘No … No.’

  Rose does not seem embarrassed by his question. This amazing wife would talk about anything! Brennan is deeply relieved to see that she is thinking carefully. ‘Well,’ she says at last, ‘if you come at me suddenly, yes, I don’t like it. But Bren, that is just me! Some dogs, you know, shy away if you pat them, others lap it up. Does it matter? If you are too sudden, I don’t have time to translate …’ Her voice falters.

  ‘To translate? But what?’

  Rose laughs, puzzled herself. ‘Translate, yes. What a funny word to use! What do I mean?’ She shrugs, and again her smile is overlaid by anxiety. ‘Don’t ask me to explain myself, Bren. It never works.’

  She breaks off suddenly. ‘Do you hear that?’

  Brennan nods. From deep within the ground, below and to the left of them, comes a low growl, like the slow roll of drums at a funeral. The land beneath them shifts slightly, and settles. Rose takes Brennan’s hand in fright.

  ‘What is it? An earthquake?’

  Brennan smiles, proud to own the knowledge. ‘No, my love. It’s a “close”. The Ironbridge miners said they expected one yesterday that never fell. Here it is, doing the deed, while they are at home safe and sound.’ Brennan uses his free hand to show the expected collapse of the mine ceiling, after the coal has been excavated. ‘Listen — there it is again! The ceiling has come down on a section near us. He holds her hand lightly, giving her time. ‘This is the first time I’ve felt a close from above. The land is sighing and settling.’ He takes her other hand. ‘Like us.’ He looks down at her long fingers resting inside his broad hands and smiles. ‘Are you translating my hands?’

  But there is no settling for Rose and Brennan this day. They both jump to hear a much louder, much closer crack. The slope beneath them heaves and rises. The great beech tree above them groans, its splayed branches twitching and tossing in the still air as if a rogue wind has struck. Majestically, in slow motion, it tilts downhill.

  ‘Rose! This way!’ Brennan hurls her sideways, away from the toppling tree. Rocks are rolling past them and hurtling down the slope.

  ‘Rose! No!’ He sees she is running towards danger, and jumps to pull her back, but is too late.

  ‘Rose!’ he screams.

  A section of cleared hillside, no longer anchored by tree roots, and now shocked by the underground cave-in, separates from its parent rock with a crack that echoes back and forth off the valley walls. Miners, eating Sunday dinner inside their homes at Burnett’s Face, set down knives and forks and walk to their doors, puzzled. Janet and Arnold Scobie, standing together on their veranda, are in time to see a whole jutting landmark, the rock they call Adam’s Knob, sheer away and slide, slowly at first, and then with increasing noise and velocity, down past the dark entrance to Ironbridge, down over the barren spill from that mine, down towards the gorge below, where the Waimangaroa runs fast through the narrow gut. Janet cries out to see the rocks split again and again as they bound down, arcing out into the air, then plunging, arcing and plunging, like a giant, deadly game of leapfrog. As the dust settles and silence returns to Burnett’s Face, Janet can hear her own heart banging.

  ‘Will you look at that!’ says Arnold, shaking his grey head. ‘I told them they were cutting too close to Adam’s Knob.’

  ‘Brennan!’ Janet’s voice is a whisper.

  ‘Look, Dad!’ says Doldo in wonder. ‘The seam’s exposed! Can you see it black there on the face?’

  ‘Brennan …’ croaks Janet. ‘And Rose.’ She can hardly get the words out.

  BRENNAN is spread-eagled, face down, among the sprung roots of the giant beech. Earth and stones have caught in his clothing, his mouth is clogged, blood drips into his eyes from a cut somewhere, but as he moves arms and legs gingerly he feels no pain. He claws at his face, desperate to see. Then closes his eyes again at the horror. The tree in whose roots he is caught has fallen at the edge of the slip. It tilts over an abyss, held only by the few remaining grounded roots. In front of Brennan’s staring eyes is a sheer and dizzy drop. The rock face, raw and veined in bleeding colours, is slashed at a crazy angle by a shining seam of coal. The ferny patch where he and Rose sat a moment ago has gone, and so has the rocky outcrop beside it. This newly shaped land makes no sense to Brennan.

  The tree groans. Brennan feels tension twang like violin strings along the roots under his chest. Carefully he eases out from the tangle onto firm ground, then crouches on all fours, squinting against the sun to search the slope beyond the cut and the trees above. Please God that Rose managed to jump clear! Finally he dares to look below, to the shattered rock and twisted tree stumps piled at
the bottom of the slip. His eyes follow the tracks cut into the bush below by the great rocks and see the water in the gorge already gathering behind the half-blocked river. There is no sign of Rose.

  ‘Rose!’ he calls. His bellow echoes off the sheer wall below and comes back to him faintly …

  And then he sees her. She has not fallen, but might well go at any moment. Oh God, the vibration of his very call could have dislodged the place where she clings! On the far side of the rock face a small protuberance has caught a soft tangle of roots and ferns. It perches above a sheer chasm. As he watches, a clod breaks away and falls. Rose stands on that tiny patch. She faces the wall. Her arms reach up, almost to the lip of the rock face, and seem to be holding something. Or is she caught there, and already dead? Her white blouse, bright against the dark rock, is motionless, her arms stiff. She makes no sound.

  Brennan dares not call again. Keeping above and away from the edge, he scrambles around the landslide, then, judging the place right, crawls forward, hardly breathing for fear of what he might dislodge. The ground here seems solid but how can he know? Any movement could surely destroy her, and probably him too. For an anchor, Brennan hooks his knapsack over a small stump, twists one ankle into the strap. He eases forward on his stomach to look over the lip.

  There she is, directly below him, both hands gripping a small piece of root that protrudes from the rock face. All Brennan can see are those rigid hands and the bright mop of her hair. There is blood in it. Either she is unconscious or she has not yet noticed him. Gently he inches forward again, reaches down with both arms. When his hands close over hers, Rose jerks as if shot. He grips tighter.

  ‘Rose, I have you.’

  Rose looks up at him.

  Brennan cries out in fear at that look. Her expression is stripped bare of any warmth; there is no sign in her face of recognition, of hope or indeed of fear. He cannot read her. The stretched muscles, the splintered eyes bear no humanity.

  ‘Let go,’ she says.

  ‘Rose!’

  ‘Let go!’ It comes out as a snarl. ‘Let go!’

  Suddenly Rose releases her grip on the root. Brennan grunts as his arms take the full shock of her body’s weight. Has her toe-hold given way? There is no sound of falling debris. It seems, incredibly, that she has chosen to step away, to dangle there. Surely, surely she cannot have chosen this?

  He cannot budge this dead weight. ‘Rose! Help me!’ Brennan, in despair, strains upwards. Then his boots find the stump and he locks onto it, inching backward with the inert weight of his wife. He is cutting her arms dreadfully as they are hauled over the lip. She will neither help him nor struggle to be free. She simply hangs there.

  At last he has her safe. Brennan pulls her away from the edge. He sits among the stumps and bare rocks above Ironbridge mine and gathers her tight in his arms. She lies unresisting. He cradles her like a child. The deep hum that comes from him has neither tune nor rhythm; to Rose it is like the sound of the world turning.

  Slowly, slowly she comes back.

  Rose reaches one bleeding arm to hold him. She lets her head lie, warm, on his shoulder.

  ‘I was about to jump,’ she murmurs.

  Brennan rocks her.

  ‘I was ready to go.’

  Brennan can think of nothing to say.

  ‘It seemed,’ says Rose, ‘the right thing. A good thing. Oh, I wanted it, Bren!’

  Brennan rocks her.

  She sighs. ‘I can’t explain it.’

  Brennan licks the blood on her cheek. She licks him back. There are tears, at last, in her eyes. ‘Look at your poor head,’ she says.

  And a little later, ‘Thank you, Brennan.’

  Arnold and Doldo, armed with ropes and grappling irons, find them there and bring them down.

  A Rose of Many Hues

  TWO DAYS AFTER the landslide Janet is with Rose, tending her cuts. The little room in Brennan’s cottage is so dark Janet must light a candle to see what she is doing. She winces to see the stained bandages — the way they pull at the flesh as she removes them, but Rose holds steady as if the pain is felt by someone else.

  Janet drops the bloody bandages into a pail. She will boil these later. Now she bathes the wounds in a solution of carbolic and hot water — one teaspoon of the acid to a tumblerful of water. Rose takes note of the measure. She is knowledgeable herself but the English miners often have different remedies from those Bella uses, and Rose rarely loses a chance to learn.

  ‘What’s that, then?’ asks Rose as Janet dips clean linen in a steaming bowl and lays the hot cloth over the deepest cut.

  ‘Rose Scobie, would you ask questions on your way to hell? Most women would be feckin’ screaming their heads off! It is a fomentation of boroglyceride. To bring out the dirt lurking down there.’ Janet takes clean strips of linen and binds them tightly over the cuts.

  ‘There!’ she says. ‘You are a good healer. Now, I’ll put on the kettle. I want a word with you, young madam.’

  Rose lifts her arms gingerly and grins up at the bustling woman. Already she has taken to Janet, who is as energetic as Rose and as careless of convention. ‘This sounds serious. Am I in trouble with Burnett’s Face already?’

  ‘You are not. You are a great celebrity since the accident. But you may be in trouble with me!’ Janet spoons tea and brings cups to the table. Rose lets her preside in the new little room with its proper sink and its coal range and its raw, unvarnished wood. Her arms are more painful than she will say.

  Janet has never been one to circumvent an issue, or lead up to it with irrelevant platitudes. ‘Now then,’ she says the minute they are settled and warming cold fingers around hot mugs, ‘is there any truth in what Brennan says?’

  ‘About what?’

  Janet eyes her sternly. ‘You have worried him badly and in my book our Bren does not deserve suchlike.’

  Rose looks down at her arms and then back at Janet. For once there is uncertainty in her movement. ‘He told you how I let go?’

  ‘He did. And more.’

  ‘That I asked him to let me fall?’

  Janet’s words are fierce. ‘That you ordered him to let you go. That he had to drag those poor arms of yours over rocks while you made no attempt to save yourself. True?’

  For a moment it looks as if Rose will counter with a fury of her own. She glares at Janet, draws back those wide shoulders, lifts one wounded arm, palm up, as if offering some cogent argument. But the moment passes. Rose holds Janet’s gaze but speaks in a quieter voice. ‘True.’

  ‘Would you like to tell me why, then? Why in heaven, when you are newly wed to a good man who has crawled over broken glass to win you, and left a wealthy woman pining for him back in Christchurch —’

  ‘I never heard that!’

  ‘Well, now you have, Rose Scobie. And to be honest I am fair jumping with joy that he has chosen you. Or was until I get this nonsense about some driving will you have to destroy yourself plunging head first down some feckin’ landslide!’

  ‘Feet first,’ says Rose with a tentative grin.

  Janet will have none of it. ‘This is no laughing matter, Rose. Not I nor any a one of us here at the Face wants our Bren hurt.’

  Rose is stricken now. Tears start in her eyes. ‘Do they all know I wanted to let go?’

  ‘They do not. As far as I know, I am the only one. Brennan would not be proud to spread such a tale.’

  ‘Please …’ It is a word not often heard on Rose’s lips.

  Janet drives on. There is nothing sentimental about her hard words. ‘Do you want to kill yourself, then? Has Michael’s death sown a dark seed in yourself? A few hours of marriage and you are down a black hole?’ And when Rose remains silent, ‘Talk to me, then, my sweetheart, it is better out.’

  Rose beats a hand on the table and winces with the pain. She pushes back the chair to walk the room in her characteristic caged way. Over to the window where ferns drip not an inch from the pane then back to the table; two paces in the
other direction where the piano, Brennan’s wedding present to her, crowds against the back wall. Standing there with her back to Janet, she fiddles with the keys, producing an urgent jumble of notes that could well be the sound of her thoughts. Again she turns to pace the room.

  ‘Well, it is not something rational,’ she says, ‘or I would tell you straight. I try to explain it as a single mad moment with no meaning. An animal moment. The fear, the danger, the roaring rocks … all that cut something loose in me too.’ Rose comes to a halt beside the older woman. ‘No, that is not quite right. I remember an excitement. I felt … It would be so easy! For that flash of time I knew — I knew — everything would be solved if I let go.’

  Janet frowns. ‘What in heaven’s name would be solved?’

  ‘Exactly! It makes no sense, Janet. I am not proud to remember it. This is what I’m saying! Listen.’ Rose flings down in the chair again and cradles her tea. Her bright smile begs for Janet’s acceptance. ‘I am truly happy to be here with Bren. Already I love this grimy clanking town —’

  ‘Watch your words, Miss!’

  ‘ … and I promise to make him the best wife I can. I do not — not — want to die or any such nonsense. I want to teach here and get Bella a grandchild and play my beautiful new piano … and write new songs … Oh!’ She spreads her arms. ‘Let us forget that silly moment. Bury it down in the gorge with the fallen rocks. That was not me.’

  Janet smiles back, drawn to the great charm Brennan’s new wife exerts, but also wary. She is fascinated by this woman. Everything about her is so open, so raw. You can watch the thoughts racing. ‘It was you, my sweet, and you should take care with what lies inside you. And talk to Bren. He is wild with fear. But yes! Let us forget for now.’ She bundles the bloody linen into a clean flour bag and carries it to the door. ‘When those arms are better, I want to see if you can accompany my new song. It is a beauty just arrived from England.’

  Rose jumps up. ‘They are fine for playing now! Bring it over this minute and let us try it out.’