Coal Flat
2
2
On the Saturday morning, the day after he had suspended, Rogers took the bus to Greymouth to see a, lawyer. Mike Cassidy was a bluff big-hearted son of the generation of Irishmen who were among the first to settle the West Coast, taking to sawmills when the gold rush finished, lingering on to prospect on small gold claims, moving to the river-mouth ports to work at clearing bush, house-building, road-laying, railway construction. The brash days of the Coast came and went with the gold rush, but their traditions stayed till well into the new century, dying about the time of the First World War. Yet, in the three river-mouth ports, there was still a small elderly society of people who remembered those days. You could thumb through their photos, younger, looking self-important with handle-bar moustaches and hair parted in the middle and brushed straight to the side, in the golden jubilee souvenir books issued by the borough councils; most of them were dead, or survived pottering in back gardens, sitting in collarless shirts and waistcoats by kitchen ranges, seldom seen on the streets. Newer generations hadn’t heard of them, and they on their side nursed suspicions that the young men of today were spineless and spunkless, till the All Blacks did well on an overseas tour, or a war came and perhaps a local lad got a V.C. and then they thought, ‘There’s life in the old Coast yet’. In their day they had been hard-drinking, hard-swearing, boastful Irishmen who said sir to no man; they were a society on their own, and the laws of the rest of the country didn’t necessarily apply on the Coast, particularly licensing laws. The Coast of those days produced some hard-headed fighting politicians, Dick Seddon, Harry Holland, Jimmy O’Brien and Paddy Webb—it didn’t matter whether you agreed with them or not, they talked straight from the shoulder, and when they got into a squabble they fought like men, and you thought, ‘Well, they are keeping the old Coast’s feather up.’ But those days lived only in the memories of older men, one of whom every few months would take his place in the obituary column and be driven his last mile to the cemetery by the beach, with a column of his descendants and a few old cronies and delegates from local bodies who felt that they ought to pay tribute to a foundation citizen. Between the two wars, the Coast came to be very much like any other part of the country. More bush was cut and burnt and brand-new little suburbs began to push out from the ports, where people hid discreetly behind hedges or curtains; suburbs with no pubs. And they were still going up, with low fences now, and even no fences, but still no pubs. Only out of the towns did the Coast tradition live and there it had changed. After the depression, gold dredges were floated; to the far south a beef cattle industry was growing. Immigrants from Britain had come to the mining towns; in the saw-milling towns people came and went and there was only a handful of old-timers. The Labour government, which owed so much to the frontier humanism of those early West Coast Irish labourers, completed the process. New roads were laid, the old ones widened, straightened and tar-sealed; small airfields were laid out on the flats of the river-mouth towns. There was more travel to end from Canterbury on the other side of the Alps: now you could get to Christchurch between tea and bedtime; thirty years before it took you two days by horse-coach. And the men who had given such an impetus to the Labour Government that had changed the face of the Coast waited to die, lamenting the old days when a man was a man and stood no nonsense from any jumped-up whipper-snapper behind a desk, and watched with both envy and regret this new society of shorter working hours, freer money, and boredom. There seemed to be more yes-men about, more bossy little office-boys with shiny cuffs and shiny arses; and when they spoke their mind, they noticed people looking at them as if they were making public exhibitions of themselves. Even the present M.P.—old Bernie O’Malley—seemed to spend most of his time in Wellington these days.
Mike Cassidy was well in his sixties but didn’t look it. He had a reputation of being a shrewd lawyer, for charging exorbitant fees to those who could afford it, and nominal ones to those who couldn’t. He had never taken part in politics, yet in his day he had defended unions in industrial disputes, or pleaded for them in arbitration courts, most of them successfully. But since the end of the war, since everyone had been denouncing every strike or dispute as communist-inspired, and old Jimmy Teague who had been priest for the last thirty years, had been sermonizing more frequently on atheistic communisn [sic: communism], Mike had refused industrial cases. After all, he was getting on and should take things easy. He had made his pile and had no need to earn; he only took on cases he was interested in now. Like the rest of the old-timers who mourned over the modern generation he set no better example when his acquiescence was required where refusal might subvert church and state, and (unlike the less prosperous of his generation, who dragged out their days in old clothes between the Old People’s Home at Karoro and visits to married daughters) he lived quietly now behind a low hedge and venetian blinds in a new two-storey house in big but hardly frequented grounds on the Joyce estate, which in his youth had been a a hillside covered with bush.
Rogers had phoned for an appointment. He knocked and a brusque voice called, ‘Come in!’ and he entered the little office lined with old statute-books and books of law which looked as if they were never opened. Cassidy didn’t get up, he sat back from his desk and told Rogers to sit in an arm-chair covered with plush, worn and greasy at the top. ‘Rogers is the name?’ Cassidy said. ‘You’re Harry Rogers’s boy then? Used to be on the railway?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Oh, I knew him well. I rode to Hokitika with him in the cab of his engine once! I bet he never told you that! We had a night out that night—an Orphans’ Club do.’ He put his elbows on the desk and pressed his hands together. ‘Yes, we had some good old times, Harry and the rest of the gang. Well, those days won’t come again. Old Harry’s out of it now. Probably happier where he is, and all. Where’s the rest of the family now?’
Rogers told him where his brothers and sisters lived, what they were doing. ‘I don’t see much of them,’ he said.
‘Pity!’ Cassidy said. ‘A man should keep in touch with his family. Would you want a cup of tea now?’
‘I don’t mind.’
‘I’ve got no girl here this morning. I’m my own office-girl. Mind you, I’ve always voted for Bernie O’Malley, and I don’t care who knows it, but I reckon sometimes his crowd take things too far. All this forty-hour week business. My office-girl doesn’t work Saturdays but I have to. I told him so last week too. Ah, he just grinned. He says, “Mike, you’re getting fat and prosperous. Your principles are going to fat!” I says, “What about you?” Yes, what about him? He’s right, though. Old people see things different… Well, God help me, I don’t want to be bothered fussing round with teapots and gas burners. Can you make the tea?’
‘If you like—’
‘No, no, don’t bother now. Not at all. Look now, here’s four bob, go to Tommy Barlow’s and get a couple of bottles of Monteith’s, and we’ll have a man’s drink.’
Rogers remembered the boycott. ‘I’d rather not drink,’ he said.
‘Now don’t be silly now. This is my shout. Be off with you for that beer and I’ll be giving thought to your case,’ He stood up and pushed Rogers out of the door. Rogers didn’t go to Barlow’s; he walked a few hundred yards farther on to the one pub in the town that was selling sixpenny beer. When he came back, Cassidy said:
‘Ah, it’s Speight’s now. Why is that?’
‘I went to the Central. They didn’t have Monteith’s.’
‘Ah, this bloody boycott. I keep forgetting about it. Well, old Harry would have stuck up for the boycott, so I can’t complain if you do. And Speight’s is just as good a drink, only it doesn’t travel well…. Now, tell me about this case.’ He found two glasses in a cupboard. They had to be washed of stale beer. Then he poured Rogers a glass.
Rogers flushed and began an account of the charge against him.
‘Now, let me see,’ Cassidy said. ‘Herlihy’s the boy’s name. Would that be Mike Herlihy’s boy? … Ah yes, he didn’t come to much good. He was training for a priest, you know. Well, he didn’t seem to have the vocation. So he gave it up and then he seemed to lose all his interest in life, you know. A failure. He took to the beer. I heard his marriage wasn’t a success. Strange fullah, Mike. He had promise as a lad. You’d ha’ thought he’d go anywhere then. I used to say to myself, “He’ll be a bishop yet, will old Mike”,’
Rogers completed his account.
‘Well, my boy, I reckon it won’t be difficult to clear you of that now. It’s a horrible thing they’ve accused you of. They haven’t even got a scrap of evidence. You know, I wonder what the policeman up there was doing anyway to bring it to the court at all. I daresay the magistrate would dismiss it, but it’ll be better if we get the whole thing cleared up, otherwise people’ll have their suspicions still. We’ll reserve our defence, that’s what we’ll do, and it’ll pass on to the Supreme Court to come up in the next sessions, that’s about a fortnight from now.’
‘I can leave it to you then?’ Rogers asked.
‘Don’t worry now. Everything will be all right. It’ll be one of the easiest cases I’ve had….
‘Thanks, Mr Cassidy, I’m grateful.’
‘Not at all, not at all now.’