The Denniston Rose by Jenny Pattrick

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