Coal Flat
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Joe Taiha and Arty Nicholson didn’t get to Arahura till ten o’clock. They had clubbed in and bought an old second-hand sedan, a 1929 model A Ford, intending to sell it again after their whitebaiting trip. The back seat was loaded with stores and a pile of raincoats, gumboots, a tarpaulin and a crate of beer that they had been able to buy with an easy conscience now the boycott was lifted. Two whitebait nets on long poles were roped to the roof of the car. As they drove through Greymouth they sang at the top of their voices to attract attention. Arty had a wonderful sense of release and anticipation, getting away for the first time in his life from his home and the town where he was known, being his own boss. They pulled up outside Kahu’s parents’ place, a small unpainted house of four rooms.
The front door opened at the noise of the car pulling up and Kahu’s mother came out, a stout middle-aged woman in a bright red frock. She called out lazily in Maori. Joe said, ‘She wants us to come inside and have a feed. She’s got something ready for us.’
‘Where am I going to put it?’ Arty commented. ‘I’m full of beer. Hell, we don’t want to be too long. We’ve got to get there by the morning.’
‘We’ll be there in the morning,’ Joe said, but the way he said it Arty wasn’t sure that he believed it himself. He reckoned he’d have to keep hurrying him.
Kahu’s mother in the car-light was smiling an easy deep smile of welcome and Arty was embarrassed grinning back and nodding. Then Kahu came running out, bare legged in high-heeled shoes that made her unsteady, in a short cheap print frock and a cardigan. Arty couldn’t take his eyes off her; he reckoned that, except for the cardigan, that frock was all she was wearing.
‘Catch, Kahu,’ Joe said and threw her a box of a hundred cigarettes.
‘Oh, Joe, you’re good to me,’ Kahu said, and ran her fingers through his hair. Joe put his arm behind her and squeezed her arm.
‘Oh! you hurt!’ she squealed. ‘You stop it now!’ He released her and she ran inside laughing. ‘You bring your friend in,’ she called from the door. ‘Don’t you leave him standing there in the cold.’
Arty tried not to notice the untidiness and dirt in the kitchen, a couple of dead flies on the window-ledge, a dusty last summer’s flypaper still hanging with its victims, the sticky patches and a small pool of spilt milk on the oilcloth table-cover, a broken chair and a dog’s bone on the floor. He was half-expecting Joe to demur and apologize, as he would have done taking a stranger into his own home even if it wasn’t untidy. But Joe didn’t seem to notice it. Kahu’s mother found a dishcloth and wiped the table-cover.
‘We thought you’d be coming yesterday,’ she said. ‘We had the haangi ready.’
She friend some steak and onions in a pan whose outside was crusted with black. There was a plate of cold pork as well, cooked in the haangi the day before. She served the meals on plates that she wiped, unnecessarily, with her apron, All the same Arty hadn’t tasted better steak and onions. Kahu’s father was a stout, broad-faced man, who made generous and slightly pompous gestures inviting Arty to make himself at home; he worked in the butter factory at Hokitika. His father sat back in an armchair with loose stuffing by the range, a greying-headed thinnish man with his front teeth missing and the rest tobacco-stained, who looked and coughed as if he had tuberculosis. He had worked on the roads with a tar-sealing gang till the end of the war, though he must have been nearly seventy. His English was poor and he only used it when he talked to Arty. But Kahu objected to her mother talking Maori. ‘It’s bad manners,’ she said. ‘Mum talks English good, Arty. She’s too shy to let you know.’ ‘This made Mrs Torere cackle for a long time with laughter, though the old man said something sternly to her. She answered him in a tone of offence and then turned to Arty and laughed: ‘He reckons I don’t talk Maori too good either. Not good enough for him, anyway.’ There was a sixteen-year-old boy sitting watching, grinning but saying nothing, and three children came out, sleepy-eyed and stared at Arty, a girl of thirteen in her nightdress and two boys of ten and eight in pyjamas. Mrs Torere gave them smaller helpings of steak and they ate it with their fingers. After a few beers Arty was feeling indulgent and thinking what a tale he’d have to tell the boys when he got home again.
He was having a long yarn with Kahu’s father about pay in the mines and on the dredge and in the dairy factory, when Kahu’s mother interrupted.
‘Kahu got bad news, Joe,’ she said. ‘She’s got the sack.’
‘No!’ Kahu said. ‘I didn’t get the sack! I left the job, Mum, you should know that. I left the job.’
‘What for?’ Joe asked.
‘One of the guests at the hotel missed some money,’ Kahu said. ‘The landlady she reckons it’s one of us maids. We all look round at each other. They all look round at me. Oh yes, just ‘cause I’m the Maori girl there. I say, “How much did she lose? Two bob or five quid? How much? Maybe it’s not worth all this fuss?” And the landlady says, that’s a silly way to look at it. It’s the principle, she says. And then she looks at me as if she’s sure it’s me just ‘cause I said that. So I got in first, Joe. I told her, “You call me thief, I’m leaving.” And I walked out…. I bet it was that new girl always skiting about her boy friends and a different one every night. I bet she’s the thief. Oh no, they don’t look at that one. She’s not a Maori girl.’
‘Have you got another job?’ Joe asked.
‘I can get in the asylum as a maid,’ she said pouting.
‘You don’t work there,’ Joe said. ‘You’re not gonna work in that place. I don’t care even if you don’t work, you’re not to work there.’
‘You try the Woolworths,’ Mrs Torere said. ‘They often want girls.’
‘The Maori girl can’t get work in a shop,’ Kahu said. Mrs Torere rocked her shoulders and sighed. Mr Torere said, ‘Some of the people in the town are too bloody proud.’
‘I’m proud too. I’m gonna try another hotel,’ Kahu said. ‘You go down there an’ catch a lot of whitebait, Joe, so we can get married an’ I don’t have to worry any more about any job…. You got a girl, Arty?’
Arty grinned. Joe said, ‘Arty’s girl’s name is Winnie. She’s good looking too. She’s seventeen.’
‘When you gonna marry her?’ Kahu asked.
Arty shrugged. ‘Come off it. I’m not in a hurry yet.’
‘The Maori boy’s the best for the Maori girl,’ Kahu said. ‘The paakehaa waits too long to get married. The paakehaa girl runs around with three, four, maybe five men before she’ll marry anyone. Then she doesn’t care too much. The Maori girl marries the first boy, an’ she loves him the best. The Maori way’s the best way, eh?’
‘Haw!’ Arty said. ‘You want to see him eying all the sheilahs at the dances.’
But Kahu pouted and looked jealously at Joe. ‘Joe Taiha, you tell me the truth now! You run aroun’ with any other girl?’
Joe, as Arty’s host, was too polite to argue with him, as Arty would have done in similar circumstances. He answered Kahu in Maori. ‘You’re my only girl,’ he told her. ‘Arty’s just teasing. White people do that a lot.’ Kahu nodded, still resentful. Joe smiled. ‘No, she’s my only girl, Arty,’ he said quietly, and Arty was humbled. Teasing was a kind of universal language with which he had hoped to get on easy terms with them. Now he had to remember to be himself and not act the goat. The trouble was he couldn’t forget himself; it didn’t come easy for the white lad not to be self-conscious and pull a series of poses.
‘Joe not a boy to run aroun’, Kahu,’ Mrs Torere said. ‘I know that. Joe not a boy to tell you the lies.’
The father grunted and nodded solemnly; the grandfather looked stern and offended.
‘That’s right too,’ Kahu said. ‘Joe’s good to me all right.’
‘I was only kidding,’ Arty said limply.
In Maori Joe said to Kahu, ‘If a Maori said that to you about me I’d want to fight him. But not Arty. He didn’t mean it. He thinks it’s something to boast about to run around with a lot of girls. He thought he was praising me.’ Arty was embarrassed when they spoke Maori. Then in English Joe said, ‘Arty doesn’t run around with all the girls. Only Winnie. Winnie’s a good girl too. Just the girl for Arty.’
‘You bring her down to see us some day when you get back,’ Kahu said. ‘Eh, Mum? Can Arty bring his girl down to see us?’
Mrs Torere beamed and nodded vigorously. ‘She be welcome here,’ she said, ‘long as she’s not too proud to stay with the Maori.’
‘When we come back,’ Arty said gratefully in a voice that didn’t sound his own, ‘I’ll bring her down.’
‘Joe and I are getting married,’ Kahu said. ‘Joe’s nineteen, I’m eighteen. ‘That way we spend the best time of our life together.’ She smiled wistfully. ‘Yeah, long as Joe’s kind to me an’ the babies an’ he don’t run after other women, I don’t wish for anything better.’
They all drank beer and they sang to Joe’s guitar. The boy of sixteen was allowed to smoke and drink as well. Arty wanted to hurry Joe along but now felt too humble to start pushing his weight about. About one o’clock Mrs Torere said, ‘We won’t put the tent up tonight. You two sleep in here. The kids sleep on the floor tonight.’ The young girl went into her parents’ bed, and the two small boys took a couple of blankets and rolled under them on the floor. The light in the bedroom had no shade and the blind was stuck. Arty turned out the light and undressed in the dark. He was afraid that the sheets wouldn’t be clean but he put the thought out of his head. He waited for Joe to come to bed, but he dropped off to sleep, and when he awoke hours later, he put his foot out and found Joe still not there. He supposed he was with Kahu.
In the morning after a long talkative breakfast, they eventually got to the car. Now Mrs Torere brought out a kit of kuumaras, some pipis, and a half-kerosene tin of cooked mutton-birds preserved in fat. Arty wondered how they were going to carry everything. After a long noisy bout of farewells they got away again. This time Arty drove. They didn’t drink, and they didn’t talk much, but they smoked almost continuously, not having anything else to occupy their minds. It was a clear day and the sun was warm for August. It was thickly forested hill-country; on both sides of them the bush glistened, moist and fresh in the sun after recent rains. Tuis and bellbirds tolled continually, occasional fantails looped from twig to twig, and tomtits darted across the road. They were always climbing and turning, uphill, downhill, around bends, through cuttings, across bridges and up again. The farther south they went, the closer they approached the chain of clear white peaks to their left, the Alps. Joe seemed to take the country for granted, but Arty was as fascinated as if he was travelling in another country, though he wouldn’t have admitted it. They stopped at the bridge of the Little Wanganui River, and ate the bread and cold pork Kahu’s mother had given them, idly watching the river rushing fiercely down its several braided channels. They stopped again at a lagoon by Okarito Forks and threw stones in such a way that they skimmed the surface of the water. They did not stop at the Franz Josef glacier or at the Fox, because they belonged to the open road and the wilderness and they didn’t want to run into any citified tourists, gawking at rivers of ice and staying in soft hotels. After that there was hardly any settlement, only high hills and gullies, an occasional farm and sawmill on a flat, and a deserted public works camp. ‘We ought to stay here the night,’ Arty said.
‘No, we’ll go right on to the Paringa,’ Joe said. He opened beer bottles, and they guzzled straight from the bottles. Since there was no traffic Arty began to fool with the car, swerving from one side to the other, making out he was drunk. A few miles before the Paringa, he almost swerved right off the road when he heard a boy’s voice from the back seat say, ‘You stop that. If you’re drunk you shouldn’t be driving.’ He pulled up suddenly, and he and Joe turned round to stare at this boy who had emerged from the pile of oilskins. He was trembling and evidently had only spoken out of great provocation; his hands and mouth were greasy; he had evidently been eating their food too. As soon as they stopped, he dived out of the car into the bush.
‘Well, Jesus Christ, that’s the kid of Herlihy,’ Arty said. ‘He must ha’ stowed away with us.’
Joe followed him into the bush. Peter was urinating urgently against a ponga. ‘Why didn’t you tell us to stop?’ Joe said grinning. ‘You could have got out when we did.’
Peter eyed him distrustfully as if ready to run again. ‘You would have made me go back,’ he said.
‘What the hell are you doing in the car anyway?’ Arty said, coming to them. Peter didn’t answer.
‘Mum would have given you a feed last night, if you’d come out,’ Joe said.
‘Well, come on out of the bush,’ Arty said. ‘It’s senseless talking here.’
But Peter always kept a good five yards’ distance from them, his eyes keyed for danger. ‘Come on, son,’ Arty said impatiently, ‘we won’t cat you.’
Joe threw a cooked kuumara to him and Peter caught it.
‘Come on,’ Arty said contemptuously
‘Don’t frighten him,’ Joe said. ‘Leave him to me, Arty.’
He bent poised for a minute to put Peter on his guard, then he darted after him and Peter turned and ran for his life up the road. Joe caught him by a long patch of grass at the side of the road, he held him and tickled his ribs. Peter struggled fiercely. Joe tumbled over on his back and lifted Peter high, but he had to stand again to dodge Peter’s kicks. He threw him into the air and caught him, then put him on the ground face down and holding him by the wrists knelt over him. ‘Submit,’ Joe said half-playfully, ‘submit.’ Peter relaxed suddenly and began to cry. ‘Oh, what a sissy,’ Joe said. ‘Crying like a little baby.’ Arty stood watching, impatient and mystified.
Peter began to struggle again more fiercely. Joe released him and he got up, too breathless to run away again. Joe began to shadow-box, then to spar at him gently; Peter replied sullenly putting all his effort into his blows. ‘Oh, the champion!’ Joe said. ‘We’ll have you in the ring yet. Arty, who do you favour for the flyweight championship?—Taiha the Torpedo versus Mighty Mouse the Kid from Coal Flat. Put your money down, folks!’ They kept sparring, Joe balanced on his haunches like a Ukrainian dancer, Peter occasionally knocking him off his balance with savage nervous blows. Eventually Joe’s playfulness was contagious and Peter relaxed, a distrustful grin breaking through his hunted face. They carried on till they were breathless and Joe let a tap from Peter knock him on his back and lay there. Arty had caught on by now and counted loudly to ten, hoisting Peter’s arm and shouting, ‘The winner!’ Peter looked proud of himself, though still distrustful. Suddenly Joe leapt up to a crouch and told Peter to climb on. He raced Arty back to the car with Peter triumphant on his back.
‘Boy, I’m out of breath,’ Joe said. ‘Give us a beer, ref, and a smoke. Give the winner a smoke, too.’
Arty hesitated, then to cover his hesitation, gave Peter the cigarette he had lit for himself. ‘You’re among men now,’ Joe said to Peter. ‘You can smoke.’
Peter’s eyes glinted and he puffed deeply and expertly. ‘Don’t you go and make yourself sick,’ Arty said.
‘This isn’t the first time I’ve smoked,’ Peter said.
After a while Arty said, ‘What are we going to do about him?’ He looked at his watch, ‘Christ, it’s half-past three. We want to find somewhere to camp before it gets dark.’
‘There’s no hurry,’ Joe said. ‘We keep Maori time while we’re on this trip.’
‘What did you come with us for? How did you get in the car?’ Arty asked.
‘I sneaked in when no one was looking,’ Peter said. ‘I waited till Mum went up to Granma’s, an’ then I ran after her, she didn’t see me, an’ I saw your car outside your place an’ I hid. I didn’t know you were going to go away in it. I was too scared to come out when you got in it.’
‘Did you stay in it all night at Arahura last night?’ Joe asked.
‘Nuh,’ Peter said scornfully. ‘I scouted around. Look!’ he said, producing a dead hen from under the oilskins. ‘I killed this.’
‘What, you been killing Mum’s hens?’ Joe said, then grinned. ‘Not only the Maori joker’s the thief, eh, Arty? Some white boys are just as big thieves, eh?’
‘Why were you hiding?’ Arty asked.
‘Mum gave me a hiding,’ Peter said. ‘Dad was out. She reckoned I should ha’ told them it wasn’t true about Mr Rogers. She gave me the worst hiding I ever had. I set the house on fire.’
‘You what?’ Arty said.
Peter was on his guard again as if he’d said too much.
‘Did it burn down?’ Joe asked.
‘There was no fire when we left,’ Arty said.
‘I don’t know,’ Peter said. ‘I put some paper under the curtains in Mum’s room and lit a fire, and then I ran outside.’
‘It must have burnt,’ Arty said. ‘If his mother was out. It’s a wonder we didn’t see any smoke or glow.’
‘We were thinking about the trip,’ Joe said.
‘We’ll have to take you back,’ Arty said.
‘I’m not going back!’ Peter said. He looked desperate again.
‘Well, we can’t take you with us,’ Arty said. ‘Christ, they’ll be looking for you. They might think you were burnt in the fire.’
‘I don’t care,’ Peter said.
‘If we take him back we’ll have to call off the trip,’ Joe said.
‘We could take him back to the Fox or somewhere, give him to somebody else to look after, to hand over to the police.’
‘Don’t you!’ Peter said.
‘It’s too late to go back today,’ Joe said. ‘He better stay the night with us.’
‘We can’t have a bloody kid with us,’ Arty said. ‘We didn’t count on that—Christ! What if he starts wanting to go home after a day or two? Howling for his old woman?’
‘I don’t want to go home,’ Peter said.
‘Why?’ Joe said.
‘I don’t like my old woman. She gives me hidings. Dad didn’t stop her this time. He was out getting drunk. They’re going to send me back to the convent. I don’t want to go there.’
‘Why?’ Arty said.
‘’Cause I was there before. The nuns hit me. They’ll lock me up by myself.’
‘Bloody starved old bitches,’ Arty said.
‘What do you want to do?’ Joe asked.
‘I want to come with you.’
‘Why?’
‘You let me smoke. You don’t nag, nag, nag at me like all the bloody women do. Peter, do this, Peter, do that. Peter, you’re a wicked boy,’
‘You’ll soon get sick of smoking, son,’ Arty said. ‘We aren’t just gonna sit around smoking all day. We’ll be doing hard work. If you come with us you’d have to help. You’d have to work for your living.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘We’re going whitebaiting. We’re going to work all day to make some money. We get out of this car in a few miles and walk. We’ll have to walk for thirty-five miles through the bush, uphill half the way. You’d get tired and want to go back.’
‘I would not.’
‘There’ll be no entertainment. No pictures, no papers, no wireless, nothing. We might he there two months.’
‘Where’ll you live?’
‘In a hut by the bush by a creek.’
Peter’s eyes lit up with anticipation. ‘In a hut in the bush,’ he said. ‘That’ll be corker.’
‘I give up,’ Arty said. ‘I’m only encouraging him.’
‘It’s five miles from the nearest settlement,’ Joe said. ‘Every day we’ll have to carry the tins of whitebait five miles, then get them across the river on the ferry. You’ll be half-dead with work if you come with us.’
But Peter was only the keener to come. ‘We might get into trouble with the law,’ Arty said. ‘What if we have to pay out all our money in a hefty fine for taking him away?’
‘Oh, let him come,’ Joe said. ‘When I was a boy like him I’d have been keen too.’
They got to the Paringa bridge and slept the night in the car. In the morning they sorted things out, packed their fifty-pound packs. There would be blankets in the hut, and the cans for the whitebait they would fetch from the other end, at the Haast. They only had to carry clothes, oilskins and food, and they could get more stores from the Haast. Even so they could not manage the food Mrs Torere had given them: much of it they had already eaten, but they had to leave some of the remaining kuumaras, half of the muttonbirds, the cold pork, and Peter’s dead hen. They gave Peter the two whitebait nets to carry on his shoulder, and after shouting greeting to a man camped nearby, already dipping his net in the Paringa, they set off. The road stopped here, the bridge stood like a monument to a postponed enterprise, as if the bush and the wet had worn the engineers down, as if they had just packed up in the rain without a word and left the ferns to spore and the beech seedlings to strike, evacuating disputed territory. The road became a track and the track climbed. Every few hundred yards they came to shallow watercourses and they splashed through them in their gumboots. They were lucky it was so fine a day, that they weren’t slithering and sweating under dripping oilskins, getting their supplies wet. Even so, black clouds came tumbling in from the west and over the sun, and without warning it began to teem. The three of them huddled under a kingfern, while it thundered and struck lightning and the rain turned to big hailstones, and streams ran down the track. Then as suddenly as it had started it stopped, and all was quiet again except the dripping of the bush and the tuis starting up again, tolling across the gullies in the ranges, and other tuis taking up the call till the air was loud with their throatings and the memory of them. A fantail emerged and looped over the heads of the three who had stepped out again on to the track. Peter made a snatch at it as if to catch it. ‘Leave it,’ Joe said, puzzled that anyone should want to kill a fantail. ‘It’s mad,’ Peter said. ‘All things are mad— birds and animals.’
Farther on the track the two young men noticed that Peter was out of sight behind them. They stopped to wait for him. ‘I knew this’d happen,’ Arty said. ‘It’ll he like this all the bloody way. Waiting for him to catch up.’ After five minutes Peter ran into view, carrying the whitebait netting on its supplejack hoops, without the poles. ‘What did you do with the poles?’ Arty asked.
‘I left them. They were too heavy,’ Peter said. ‘We don’t need them. We can make new ones when we get there.’
The two men caught each other’s eyes and burst out laughing. ‘This little fellah’s a bit smarter than us,’ Joe said.
‘Well, by Christ, Taiha!’ Arty said, ‘The bloody experienced whitebaiter. And you didn’t even think of that! By God, you’ll never forget this.’ For the rest of the trip he would say things like, ‘Did you fill the water-bottle, Joe?’—‘Did you bring any firewood, Joe?’—‘What about that pot-plant for the front garden?’ But they treated Peter with a new admiration.
Red Flaherty laughed when he heard that one. After they had climbed forty feet over muck and a big fallen kaamahi tree, where a slip had blocked the track, the track came alongside the Moeraki River, spuming fierce and grey over boulders. Where it was free of boulders the water was bluish-grey and opaque from glacial flour. A bridge crossed it and at the other side of the bridge was a blue-painted hut with a sign ‘Blue Hotel’, named after the river locally known as the Blue. It was one of the several huts along the Haast track, built for the roadmen who kept the track clear of slips and tree-falls and the fast-growing vegetation, but more often used by deer-stalkers, trampers, occasional cattle-drovers, and horsemen going through to Central Otago. Red Flaherty, a deer-stalker, was in permanent occupation of this one; there were three beds in it, but the roadman used another hut next to it. It was wooden with a roof of corrugated iron, and an iron chimney standing like a postman’s whistle at one end. Red was an Australian who had spent his life avoiding cities; he had given up prospecting for gold farther north and moved into the Blue hut to stalk deer, living on the sale of skins and the bounty paid by the Government for the antlers of the deer, first introduced to the country for sport and since become a pest; they are the bark of trees and killed them, causing the soil to loosen under dead trees, so that the heavy rainfall brought on land-slips, washed away the soil, and flooded the rivers. He lived on venison, potatoes and onions, bacon and damper, cocoa and tea; and, except the venison, he had to pack them by horse, once a month, from Bruce Bay, twenty miles north. The walls of the hut were lined with pin-ups of seductive, disproportionately-legged women from Esquire, boxers and wrestlers from Truth and the Auckland Weekly News, and sentimental almanac pictures of kittens with wool, puppies, and a magazine reproduction of Whistler’s Mother. Red had just hooked up a damper to bake over the fire when the three walked into the hut.
He was eager to have company; he and the roadman didn’t always see eye to eye, though they never quarrelled openly. He wouldn’t let them eat their own supplies. Joe said they weren’t staying for more than half an hour, they wanted to make the Iron hut, eight miles farther on, the other side of the Maori Saddle. But they stayed over an hour while Red eagerly peeled potatoes and onions and sliced bacon for them. Joe left him a few kuumaras and a muttonbird, of the two he had taken out of the fat and wrapped in newspaper and stuffed into his pack. ‘You go down to the Paringa,’ he said. ‘The old crate isn’t locked. There’s more kuumara and muttonbirds. You can have all that’s there.’ Red said he would go down the next day; a change in tucker would be a bit of all-right. Peter was silent and fascinated, watching them, glad to be in this men’s world of the open-air and rough good-fellowship. He quietly took over the job of frying the bacon, swearing when fat sputtered on to him, and Joe said they would have to make him cook when they got there.
‘Who’s the boy?’ Red asked.
‘He’s Arty’s young brother,’ Joe said casually.
‘Aren’t you at school?’
‘It’s the school holidays now,’ Joe said. ‘He’ll go back before school starts.’
They left after a big lazy meal, but Red was wondering. Last night he’d heard on the wireless a police announcement about a missing boy. He hadn’t listened to the description but he did remember the boy was from Coal Flat; they said they had come from there. But it would be a month before he went for stores to Bruce Bay, so Red didn’t think more about it. He didn’t say anything to the roadman when he came back that night; he didn’t want the roadman to be getting the credit for his own suspicions.
The Maori Saddle was three miles’ unbroken winding climb. They reached the Iron hut before dark, and Peter chopped wood for the fire, while Joe reheated the muttonbird and made some soup to go with it. Next day they were at the Maori creek at midday, it was an easy walk downhill. They had to ford the river; it was swamp-fed and the water was the colour of beer; it was swift and deceptively smooth on the surface. The stones on the bottom were slippery, and they had to cross carefully. Arty, with the water up to the crutch of his trousers. carried Peter on his shoulders, and went back for his pack. He felt he was only holding his own against the current, and though the river was only thirty yards across, each time he landed a hundred yards downstream from his starting-point. Joe had tried to carry the two packs but after a few steps had to take one back.
The but where they were to live was a couple of hundred yards down the other bank of the Maori, standing on grassed sand and silt with a few trees about. There was smooth grass for a hundred yards towards the sea beach, then it rose to a dune, and on the other side was coarse gravel with the Tasman pounding on it. Along the coast the bush wasn’t so thick; the tree-level tapered down to about twenty feet, and the foliage ended evenly as if it had been trimmed by the winds from the sea; it was close and unbroken, like a protective covering. The floor was swampy and there were no fresh creeks for the five miles between the Maori and the Haast; there was no heavy timber, only scrub of maanuka, maahoe, kaamahi, coprosma, ponga ferns and some small beeches. The first thing Peter did was to take the tomahawk and cut three kaamahi saplings and trim them as poles for the nets. Arty fixed the netting on them, and Joe rang on a wall-telephone installed in the hut to the farmer at the mouth of the Haast, who operated a rowing-boat as a ferry across the river. He walked the five miles along the grass behind the beach to the rough stones and driftwood in the bed of the Haast. The farmer had already rowed across with the cans which had been flown from the canning factory in Dunedin to the airfield at Okuru, some miles farther south; Arty had written away and arranged this months ago, Any of the public works drivers on the road-building scheme on the other side of the river would take the full cans to Okuru. ‘How you gonna carry those tins up here every day?’ the farmer asked. ‘They’ll he damn heavy when they’re full.’
Joe shrugged. He hadn’t thought about that.
‘You young fullahs, you’re all the same today,’ the farmer said. He was a thin tall bent-shouldered old man with a long wispy moustache. ‘You never give thought to anything, always leap before you look.’
‘We’ll manage, I s’pose,’ Joe said.
‘Tell you what,’ the farmer said, ‘I’ve got an old milkcart over there. You have to push it by hand. Just a flat top with four sides on bike wheels. It won’t be so bad to push along the grass. You can have it for a couple of quid. If it’s still in running order when you leave I’ll give you a quid back for it.’
Joe crossed with him, thanked him and paid up. All the same, when he had crossed the Haast again, he could see that it would be difficult to take the cart across the stones of the bed. He cleared away driftwood to make a track, but he calculated that still they would have to carry the cans, two at a time, from the edge of the grass to the ferry-point, about four hundred yards. When he got back there was a meal cooking; Joe thought it pretty rough, but he allowed for Arty’s inexperience and said nothing. Peter was critical and Arty challenged him to cook the meal the next night. Joe and Arty inspected the two whitebait traps which were already in the hut; they had arranged to hire them from the farmer. They took them upstream to a ford where the remains of a wooden swing bridge, sprouting lichen, stood on both sides of the river. It had been damaged in a flood. They fixed the traps in position, banking them with logs and boulders, tying them with wire to trees on the bank. Then they scouted the river for good positions to net from.
The whitebait is a delicacy, eaten fresh or from a can. It is the young of a minnow, that lives in the upper reaches of rivers; the young is like a tiny white eel, almost transparent, almost boneless, two or three inches long. Every autumn the adult fish swim down to the tidal river-mouths to lay their eggs and extrude their milt in the swampy margins during a spring-tide. The eggs are left high and dry and hatch with the next spring-tide. The young swim to sea, but in the spring they return to head upriver in shoals. The West Coast rivers used to be full of them; but in the north the breeding-grounds have been trampled by cattle, and one of the rivers poisoned with cyanide from a gold mine, and only in South Westland were they now as plentiful as they had been in all rivers.
Joe and Arty had no competition on the Maori, and their traps were regularly full; and besides the traps, they used the nets; each dip of the net caught fifty or more. It was patient, satisfying work, standing alone in gumboots in the water, dipping the net, letting it lie, dragging downstream, lifting it out and back, dipping again, occasionally emptying the net; a slow, satisfying rhythm. Arty found it fine to work out of doors after three years in the mine. Peter found it tiring, but persisted, hoping to beat the men’s catches. When it rained, they would work in oilskins and sou’westers, getting an odd satisfaction from standing in heavy downpours—the rain wasn’t cold. It was good to know that they could knock off whenever they liked, or lie in their bunks on a wet morning if they wanted to.
Of an evening when the sky over the sea was gold with one of those brilliant West Coast sunsets, so soft and gold that you could stare right into the sun without dazzling, before it sank so quickly into the sea and the sky turned apricot with lemon flecks of cloud, Joe used to give Peter rides along the beach in the handcart. Then when the horizon had gone green and then slaty and the dusk was so thick that the sea seemed to glow in contrast, Joe would drive him as fast as he could through the dark towards the hut and release the handles so that Peter would squeal with fear and delight and tumble forwards or backwards on to the grass, and there was nothing left to do but have a smoke and go to the bunk.
Peter found it an ideal life, living primitively in a but in the wilds away from towns, away from women, with two easy-going young men who would let him swear and smoke, who would recognize his skill in chopping driftwood, making fires, cooking, climbing trees, and keeping the hut clean. No one told anybody to do anything, sweep the floor, put on a stew, catch a fish or an eel for dinner. Somebody did it, and for their time the system worked well. The experience was like Peter’s dream of his hut in the bush, away from the world, only there was no Alsatian, no man-traps, and he wasn’t alone.
The only trouble was their position. ‘Why didn’t we camp at the Paringa?’ Arty said, ‘We could have got the transport van to take the bait up to the Fox, then by service bus to Hokitika. Or on the other side of the Haast? There are roads there. We’d be near the airfield.’
‘The Paringa would have been all right,’ Joe said. ‘Other side of the Haast, there are too many other people at it. Some of the public works’ chaps working on the Haast Pass road, they knock off for a month or two like we did. We don’t want to have any rows with them about who’s got the right to some stand on the river.’
Their catches were limited by the number of cans they could carry on the handcart. They could have caught more, but there was no point in it. They were sick of eating it themselves, and preferred to catch fish and eels from the river for their own meals, or a pigeon from the bush. Joe knew how to cook them.
At one stage Arty was for moving to the Paringa. But Joe pointed out that Peter was happy there. ‘There’s no one to bother us here,’ he said. ‘Up there, sooner or later, people will be asking, “Who’s this kid? Why isn’t he at school?”’ Between them they developed a fatherly concern for the boy; Peter couldn’t understand why they would not let him take the cart to the Haast, as he wanted to. One day, after they had been there a month, he trailed Joe, skirting through the tall scrub at the edge of the grass and came out at him on the gravel by the ferry-point when Joe was handing the cans to the farmer. He was disappointed to see that Joe’s pleasure was dubious.
‘Who’s the boy?’ the farmer asked. ‘Where do you come from, son? What’s your name?’
‘Oh, he’s Peter Nicholson, Arty’s little brother,’ Joe said.
‘He’s not the kid that’s missing, is he? The one that the wireless was on about all the time three or four weeks back?’
‘Some kid missing, eh?’ Joe said.
‘Yeah, from up Coal Flat. Burned the house down and ran away. Don’ know whether they found him or not. Haven’t heard any more about it. They reckoned he must have fallen into the Grey River an’ got drowned. It’s not you, is it?’ he said with playful fierceness, lunging at Peter. Peter ran into the scrub, and came back cautiously.
‘I know that kid,’ he said. ‘I seen him playing by the river. I bet he fell in.’
‘What was his name?’ the farmer asked.
‘Peter Herlihy. He was mad. So was his old woman too.’
The farmer’s face went suddenly unexpressive, and he pushed off on his oars with a casual, ‘Hooray!’ He was wondering how Peter knew the name of the missing boy.
A week later the wall-phone in the hut rang; someone at the other end of the line was endlessly turning the handle. Arty answered it, mystified that anyone should call them up. It was the farmer from the Haast. ‘The police have been asking me about that bay you’ve got there,’ he said. ‘What’s his name?’
‘Peter Herlihy,’ Arty said.
‘I thought it was. Well, he’s got to go back home. The policeman will be coming for him tomorrow. Don’t let him get away.’
Arty grunted and hung up the receiver. Peter came in with a full can of whitebait he had caught in a few hours. Arty didn’t say anything but went up the track to meet Joe coming back with the handcart.
‘I didn’t think it could last this long,’ Joe said. ‘He won’t want to go.’
‘I reckon we ought to clear out with him, back the way we came.’
‘That’s no good. They’d catch us. That’d look as if we were running away.’
‘I’m not going to let him go back by himself. It’s a bugger having to go now. There’s still a couple of weeks’ run left for the bait.’
‘We’ll go back with him,’ Joe said. ‘We’ll be all packed up when the cop comes. It doesn’t matter about the bait. We made a few quid already. We’ll fill these cans and take them back tomorrow and give old Tom his cart back.’
‘But the cop’ll be coming that way.’
‘You mean Peter’s going to fly back?’
‘He’ll come back with us,’ Arty said.
Next day they packed and waited, once Joe had taken the cans and cart for the last time to the farmer. They had told Peter they were going back. He wasn’t eager but he was prepared to go anywhere with them. He was much calmer now and happier-looking than when they had met him; he was still impulsive, rough, occasionally spiteful when something he was handling wouldn’t go the way he wanted it, but his eyes were franker and healthier than they had ever been.
They were sitting waiting when Peter saw two men walking along the grass behind the beach. He jumped up excitedly and stared with his hand over his eyes. ‘I was scared one of them was a cop,’ he said, ‘’cause he’s got blue trousers. But you don’t have cops down here.’ The men wore trilby hats softened and shabby from many showers, sports jackets, and one of them wore his policeman’s trousers.
‘Sergeant Dickson from Hokirika, Constable Davies from Whataroa,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a warrant to take back this boy. Is his name Herlihy?’
‘It is the cops!’ Peter yelled and scuttled along the bank upstream. ‘Don’t let them get me, Arty!’
The constable ran heavily after him, but lost ground and came back looking sheepish. ‘Don’t let him get away,’ the sergeant flustered.
‘He’ll come back,’ Joe said. ‘Look, Sergeant, this boy’ll come back all right if he comes with us. But if you try to take him you’d have to put the handcuffs on him. I don’t envy you trying to carry him five miles along this beach. You haven’t even got a handcart to put him on.’
‘What was he doing down here with you all the time?’ the sergeant asked.
Arty and Joe explained how they had met him.
‘Didn’t you know we were looking for him? Didn’t you hear the wireless? Every policeman in the country has been looking for him.’
Joe widened his eyes to feign surprise. ‘We didn’t know,’ he said. ‘We haven’t got any wireless. There’s a telephone there. Old Tom could ha’ told us. He didn’t say anything about it.’
‘How did you find out he was here?’ Arty asked.
‘We had a couple of reports. Old Tom, and Red Flaherty from the Blue told the storekeeper at Bruce Bay. This kid’s a menace. He burnt his house down. He’s got to go before the Children’s Court.’
‘No kid’s a menace,’ Joe said. ‘You jus’ got to handle them the right way.’
‘Don’t make any mistake about this one.’
‘You ask Arty then. Arty—have we had any trouble with him?’
‘He’s been a bloody good kid, I don’t care what you say,’ Arty said. ‘Listen, Sergeant. He’ll come back with us. Give us a couple of days and we’ll land back at Coal Flat with him and hand him over to old Rae.’
The constable wasn’t used to much trouble in his district. He was so pally with his neighbours that it hurt him when now and again he had to act against them, even when he made a routine raid of the pub after hours. The sergeant, too, prided himself on knowing how to handle a situation tactfully. He would have liked to take their assurance that they would get Peter back home within a few days. But there had been so much publicity that he was afraid of a blister if anything went wrong.
‘It’s no good,’ he said. ‘It’s not allowed.’ After a good deal of argument they hit on a compromise. Arty would go with the sergeant and Peter and fly out. The constable would tramp with Joe to Paringa and ride back to Whataroa.
Joe went upstream and whistled for Peter who peered stealthily out of a maanuka clump. ‘Arty’ll go with you,’ Joe said. But Peter was doubtful and kept his distance from the policeman. Joe and Arty between them talked him round.
They saw Joe and the constable across the Maori, and they set off down the long strand of grass, Peter slipping back into his old familiar sullenness. He was like a soldier returning from leave to a camp he hates.