The Denniston Rose (2 page)

IF ANY ONE moment in those dreadful two days might have dented Lenie Strauss’s indomitable will, this would be it — when she took the direction indicated by the hook-man, and floundered her way through rain, mud and goodness knows what stinking else towards some distant tent. A tent, he said! What use was a tent in all this wild weather? If she weren’t so cold she might have sat down and wept. In four years — five nearly — Jimmy could surely have done better than a tent. Something had gone wrong, as she’d suspected this past many years. Jimmy was all quick brain and loud mouth — not a grain of good sense to glue him together. If that man had been lying to her he would shortly have his neck wrung like a chicken.

Jimmy had first met Lenie Strauss four years earlier. Then she was known as Angel, but, by her own laughing admission, was a
reasonably tarnished member of the heavenly choir. Angel told Jimmy she was born in 1852, which was only two years short of the truth. In fact she was twenty-eight, born of German parents at the goldfields of Victoria, Australia. At age sixteen she had married a John Anchorage.

‘Nothing else to do,’ she would laugh, stamping her fine narrow feet and tossing her petticoats in the saloon called Angel’s Palace, which she ran in Hokitika. ‘A girl, sixteen, and every man in the goldfields after a piece of her! That John Anchorage was a good man with his fists. Protection I needed bad!’

Two years later Lenie Anchorage travelled with her husband and baby daughter to chilly Orepuki, South of Dunedin, New Zealand, where John’s friend James Kirkton promised good gold was to be found in the black iron sands. The colour was there all right, but the baby died, and not a month later John was murdered in an argument over claims.

‘So then,’ Lenie, who loved recounting her colourful past, would continue, ‘time to try my own hand at the colour. Haymaking in the sand is not so hard work, but my luck was only so-so. Then I meet that bastard Simon Lamb. You remember him, Gaffer — you were here then. Up we come, by some hell-hole boat that went down one year later, here to Hokitika in the high old times. Well — more low, truth was. That Simon dumps me flat to follow a duffer. Stupid feller. When he realises his mistake and comes crawling back for a bit of comfort — he feels the flat of my hand, no? By then I have my own saloon. Sitting pretty till some prune-faced lawman does me in. Jealous he was, and did me for spite.’

Here Angel would sigh and toss her mane of dark hair, till all her audience licked their lips, anticipating a taste of her. Some remembered her arrest for prostitution and ‘lewd behaviour’. Jailed,
with one month hard labour. Out she came and in a month had opened a new ‘guest house’. Oh, Angel Lamb had a grand energy for the high time! Arrested again she was, with more hard labour, but no lawman ever tamed her.

By 1878, when Jimmy Cork met her, she was older and, some said, more settled. Her saloon, Angel’s Palace on Revell Street, Hokitika, was well patronised. You could always have a good time at Angel’s. Jimmy, in particular, came back often for a good time. They were a spirited pair, she with her wild hair and wild ways, he with his knowledge and speechifying. He was not from County Cork as his nickname suggested, but (some said) from London. His fine singing voice and his flow of language earned him the reputation of an Irishman. Jimmy Cork would down you in an argument no matter what the topic, but always with good humour, mind.

‘Ah, Angel,’ he said one night, tickling her beautiful breasts with his ginger beard, ‘Hokitika is done for, my lovely, the colour has been stripped. The golden future is further north, I have it on good authority.’

He promised to send for her shortly when he had found a good stake.

No word for several months. By now, Angel is pregnant. Gossip lays the honour evenly to either Mr Arthur Byatt, the barber, or that giant of a fellow with a shock of blond hair working down at Gibsons Quay, but Angel plumps for Jimmy Cork. She sends him the news. Six months later, after her baby is born, Jimmy writes that he has made a great find, to keep it under her hat, and that he will send for her and the baby shortly. Nothing for six more months. Angel, never one for fidelity, gives up on Jimmy and goes for the big fellow at the wharves. (Arthur Byatt is already married.)

The final confrontation is famous. Angel has already been down to the wharves a couple of times to give Big Snow the news that he
is the lucky father. He has promptly sent her away. It seems Big Snow is lately patronising a different saloon, and a paternity suit will definitely not assist his hopes with that other sweet hostess. Angel must have been a bit desperate. She wasn’t usually one to barge in on someone else’s affair, but then Hokitika, as Jimmy had predicted, was on the down: gold-rushes a thing of the past and the population drifting away. Angel marches a third time down to the wharf, this time with the little girl — golden haired like Big Snow. When he ignores her she lets fly. All kinds of obscenities mouthed by those big red lips; the audience could make out only one word in ten. Bella, Big Snow’s ‘sweet hostess’, heard about it of course, but never made the connection to Rose till many a year later. She and Angel operated rival establishments, and naturally were not on speaking terms. If they had met, down there in Hokitika, matters on the Hill may have ended differently. But then again, perhaps not.

So Angel rages on. Shouts, screams, claws at Big Snow, accuses him of every sin under the sun. Quite a crowd gathers to watch. Big Snow, who has a temper himself, holds back for a while but finally lands a slap on her you can hear right down the Quay. Angel runs at him, catches him wrong-footed and pushes him into the drink.

A great shout of laughter from the crowd. Angel accepts the applause. Then amid growing consternation comes the realisation that Big Snow has not surfaced. Someone jumps in to search among the piles. No sign. The tide is on the run.

The theory is that Big Snow knocked his head on something, sank and was dragged out to sea.

Angel is not forgiven. Big Snow was popular. Before a charge of manslaughter or worse can be laid, Angel and child disappear.

Two years later a Lenie Strauss, with a little daughter, turns up at Addison’s Flat, near Westport, haymaking again on the ironsands there and asking after Jimmy Cork.

It’s not clear what caused her sudden flight up to Denniston. Obviously she had found out Jimmy’s whereabouts, but why the middle of the night? Rose remembers a fight — ‘worse than the usual’ — over a piece of bread. Another woman was involved, and accusations of theft were laid. It can be assumed that Lenie’s temper went over the top again and she struck the woman a blow too severe for even the goldfield community to ignore. Rose remembers her mother hastily throwing things together, and then a dreadful tramp through the rain, her mother shouting at her to keep up. They slept in a barn. At Westport they climbed into an empty coal wagon, and waited to be carried up the gorge towards Denniston. Lenie Strauss had no idea what kind of place she was coming to.

UP at Denniston, in the dark and the freezing rain, Lenie stumbles against a pile of something rotten. Her bundle drops into the mud. Somewhere behind in the dark the child is crying for her to wait. ‘Sweet Maria!’ screams Lenie into the equally furious air. ‘Help me! Some person help!’ She beats the bundle with both fists. ‘Is some person not here to help?’ She tosses her head in rage and her good hat is swept away into the dark. A mass of damp ropy hair lashes at her face, cutting swathes in the mask of coal dust.

For a moment Lenie breaks the tantrum to listen for results. The child has caught up now and is holding tight to her coat. ‘Where is the house?’ says Rose. ‘I’m cold.’ But before Lenie can resume her shouting they both hear the bang of a door, and see, against the looming wall of a cliff, that there is a row of huts and, from one, a lantern is advancing.

The owner of the lantern stumbles, curses, stumbles again but keeps coming. When his face appears in a circle of pale light, the child Rose backs off and hides behind her mother. The face is badly
scarred — a livid slash from hair-line to chin, and the skin along the jaw and down the neck puckered like lumpy porridge.

The face attempts a grin. ‘Well, well, my lucky night! The Lord has sent a visitation upon me! This way, lady, this way; it’s snug as a bug in my little hut, and who would want to be out in this bloody mess longer than she needed?’ Billy Genesis, one-time jail-bird, presently Company blacksmith and drunk as usual, shakes himself like a dog to shed the rain.

Lenie, a match for any man, drunk or sober, swings her bundle up into his arms. ‘Thank you, mister, but it’s Jimmy from County Cork I’m after. Please to take me.’ This is an order, not a request.

‘Jimmy, eh?’ says Billy, grinning and nodding, ‘Well, now, he’s a partner of mine in a manner of speaking; we share most things …’ (Lenie gives him a look) ‘… but I’ll not queer his pitch on his first night.’ He roars with laughter and is about to move in the direction of Jimmy’s when he notices the child. ‘Well, look what is here!’ he bellows, and raises a finger to point heavenwards. ‘“And God Almighty bless thee, and make thee fruitful and multiply thee that thou mayest be a multitude of people.” Genesis 28 verse 3.’

He lunges to scoop up the child, but Rose, slippery in her stiff coat, dodges away into the dark.

Lenie glowers. ‘Jimmy Cork’s!’ she shouts. Billy’s glazed eyes focus for a moment and begin to spark. This man can be dangerous too. Then he shrugs and moves ahead. The unsteady procession sets off past shacks and tents, then over a narrow track through all kinds of rubbish — iron, timber, coal-slack, welded together with stinking mud.

Rose wants to hold on to her mother’s coat but her arms are trapped inside the cape. Soon she sees the dim sweep of a tent roof, sucking and billowing in the wind; a black cliff sheer above it. The tent stands alone — nothing but dark storm on each side. There is
a wooden door in the tent and Rose stands in front of it, watching rivers of rain, caught in the lamplight, run over the rough surface and down onto the slab of stone below. Her mother is arguing again, shouting at the man to go away, leave her now, this is private. The man laughs and says he’s earned the right to stay and see the fun. Rose faces the door, humming to block the sound, and waits. The flapping tent looks like a dying sea-bird.

Billy Genesis suddenly puts down his lamp, grabs the raging woman in both arms and kisses her full on the mouth. Quickly as the drink will allow, which is not quick enough, he moves back then, away from a flailing slap. ‘Wake up, Jimmy!’ he shouts, rubbing his livid scar. ‘For the Lord has sent a pestilence upon you. “And the Lord sent thunder and hail, and the fire ran along upon the ground, and the Lord rained hail upon the land of Egypt.” Exodus 9, 23!’ Back he stumbles, laughing and shouting, his lantern making mad patterns in the storm, leaving the two alone in the dark.

Lenie pounds on the door. Rose waits beside her. Her mother knocks again and then pushes the door open. She calls out and steps into the house. Rose stands close behind her mother in the dark, straining to see.

The tent smells. The floor is wet. A man speaks and her mother answers. The man coughs. He coughs again and spits. He knocks something over and it rolls on the floor. Rose hopes he is trying to light a lamp. Her mother steps away into the dark but Rose waits by the door. She holds both hands under her cape to keep them safe.

Then there is a circle of light around a candle. Slowly a man’s face with a red beard and then the whole place with everything in it comes out of the dark. Rose stares. There is a cave here! Half of the room is a little cave and half is tent with a wooden floor. At one end of the tent part is a fireplace but the fire is out. Rose stays by the door, and watches. She tells herself this is a story — a real one —
and she is the princess in the cave. The man might turn out to be a wicked stepfather. She watches his face to see what he will do.

‘Holy Mary!’ says her mother. She drops her bundles and goes to stand over the man. ‘What’s happened to you?’ The man shakes his head back and forth, back and forth. Once he looks up at her and mutters something, then goes back to his shaking. Lenie groans. ‘Is every damned person in this hell-hole drunk? If not worse? Ah, Jimmy, Jimmy.’

But her voice is not as angry as usual.

‘Come and say hello to your father,’ says her mother. Rose bends down to untie her boots because they are muddy and she has been taught to leave them outside, but also because she is afraid of the man. ‘You can leave the boots on,’ says her mother, so she walks over to the man and stands in front of him. Her mother unties the string around her neck and lifts off the heavy cape and goes to hang it on a nail on the back of the door.

The man looks at her. Rose stares back. The wind hits the tent hard and it rocks. The man’s eyes are swimming, and then he puts his head down again and he cries.

‘Ah, Jesus,’ he says. ‘Ah, Jesus.’

Where one arm should be, there is a stump hanging from the shoulder and the skin looks angry. Rose reaches out to touch the skin where the arm ends. It feels soft and hot, like a puppy’s skin.

‘Hello,’ she says, and smiles hard.

‘Ah, Jesus,’ says Jimmy, without looking up to see the smile.

‘At least look at the child to see what you have made!’ shouts Lenie. She hangs her own hat and coat on the door, then puts the big bundle on the table and unties it. She spreads the layers of cloth carefully and takes from the middle a cardboard box. She lifts off the lid. Rose wants to see in.

‘Don’t touch!’ says her mother in a sharp voice. ‘They’re
precious.’ The box has eggs in it, each one wrapped in a piece of woollen cloth. One is broken and a sort of chicken is lying mixed up with the egg.

‘What is it?’ asks Rose, but Lenie just picks up the thing by one thin leg, opens the door and throws it outside.

Opposite the bed is a rough fireplace and chimney made from rusty iron. The chimney has a wooden frame and the canvas walls are attached to this. Rose’s mother takes the box over to the fireplace and puts her hand on the stones. Then she puts her hand in the fire itself and stirs the ashes till she’s made a nest. She puts the whole box right in the fire. Rose waits for it to burn up but it doesn’t. Lenie washes her hands in the bucket in the corner. She takes out a towel from the bundle and dips it in water too, and washes the mud off Rose’s legs and off her own legs, then wipes mud from the hem of her good coat hanging on the door.