The Ballad of Desmond Kale (11 page)

SEEING WARREN COMING OVER THE paddocks young Ivy Stanton called, ‘At last!' She ran from the finished part of their house, jumped over beams of sawn timber, skipped twice in the air and took Warren by the arm and called him brother. Walking him around the garden with enthusiastic jerks of interest she pushed him past where builders laboured with a scowling stone-breaking gang making blocks for house enlargements and fitted flagstones for a covered way. ‘I have my sturdy boy,' she seemed to throw, to the grown men who peeled her helpless with their eyes. A better sort of assigned convict — whom Ivy fondly greeted, for they were a better class of sinner as well, the forgers, defrauders, counterfeiters — tended those grapes, figs, and vegetables of every name that were the pride of her father, who had had the rare zeal to assign a patrol of gardeners to the task of picking off grubs and smashing locusts and shooting rainbow parrots with small shot. When it was dark, a nightwatchman went around scaring rat kangaroos and other marsupial pests that emerged from the ground, making free with supplies.

At the end of the garden wall Titus appeared with a bat, to try Warren at cricket, and Warren squared up to the ball, swinging out and lofting it high over the paddocks, where Titus went scampering with a whoop, his arm extended into the air as he ran backwards lifting his skinny knees high, and caught the ball neatly. ‘Out.'

They went inside among the mirrors and old furniture brought out from England in sailing ships. Ivy liked showing Warren everything good in the house, there being never any end to the treasure they had, and she liked whispering which servants were preferred by which others in lovemaking, and where he was to have his room when the house building was finished (at the end of the hall off the shady verandah, was the sworn stipulation for a brother, she said). Warren slid to a halt under the cuckoo clock and waited, listening to the muffled lurch of the cuckoo wanting to come out. He drew sharp breath timed to the movements of the small wooden bird with eyes like punch holes. Never in his life had he seen anything like it, and he loved that bird.

When they went in for dinner, table manners had to be grafted on Warren, though he had a few, Stanton saying he'd learnt them from his dearest mother, had he not? Gnawing on a bone and splashing into a bowl of gravy, he kept himself neat enough, except that he must never hold his spoon in a fist, but crook the handle across thumb and forefinger just so, said Dolly Stanton. Now he had two mothers, said Stanton, placing his hand on his wife's wrist. ‘He is the luckiest boy in the world.'

At their meals, when he wasn't being taught manners and watching how much he piled on his fork so it didn't fall off, and resisting licking his knife with a curl of his fleshy tongue, which
his born mother never minded, Warren stared at the painting the Stantons had over their fireplace. It was a battle piece with a drummer boy and men scaling a heap of rubble with the Union Jack lit by burning timber fallen from a ruined castle. It seemed to Warren that the cuckoo clock and this picture of the Spanish wars made being taken to the Stantons' worthwhile just for the wonder they stirred, and when he added Ivy and the amusement she made from everything he almost cracked his cheeks grinning, and they most likely thought he was mad.

Though Warren had never met the captain, he was told by a convict in their barrack sheds, the old soldier, Clumpsy M'Carty, about the adventures Clumpsy and Ugly Tom had had in Spain — and it was like that picture showed, he said, with a lot more blood and guts.

One day, when Stanton asked Warren if he knew of any demons and rogues among the king's rangers (‘boys being like to go dashing between soldiers' legs on the parade ground, as do cavorting stray dogs, and both knowing good from bad by their smell'), Warren innocently answered: ‘I know of some bad sorts, but from all I've heard, Ugly Tom Rankine's their prime candidate for a hanging.'

‘You are honest,' said Stanton. ‘And from what I've heard he's a dandy picnicker and a governor's prime crawler, and would not know a lambkin from a duckling. No more substantial than that.'

 

Warren was quartered with Titus in the garden hut that was the original house where the Stantons had camped, all three of them when they came out from Parramatta, in the early days before Titus was added to their family to make a fourth.

It was small, dark, but quite a clean smart box, constructed from split slabs of the derrobarry ironbark tree, lathed, plastered and whitewashed. Warren's bunk was down one side wall, a canvas stretcher between two stringybark rails, covered with a possum-skin rug. Titus's bunk matched it on the other wall, with a table and a fireplace between, and a small room off to the side, low-ceilinged and narrow, that had once been Ivy Stanton's nursery. It still had a wooden cradle in it, and a plaster doll with a lace cap, where Ivy had left off playing with it, since it lost its arms and nose.

While they made themselves ready for sleep, Titus would recline with the side of his head resting on one hand, leaving the other arm free to scratch himself on the back of his head as he listened to Warren, or to wave, palm flat, fingers spread wide in the air emphasising his exclamations of delight in the friendship he had going with Warren.

‘They put me in there with Ivy,' Titus gestured to the little side room, ‘when I was a grub, they put us in one bed.'

‘I think they's planning to do that when I come over to the big house,' said Warren, ‘they love me so much. Parson Stanton, he's goin to breed me up to her.'

‘You can be sure of that,' said Titus, to scratchy laughter from the other dim bunk. ‘It is the Lord's plan. Breedin is the best sport. She better be ready, cause which way you gunna do it? By the powder method like she thinks it's done, that's what she told me when we seen a hen and a rooster makin dust.'

‘I'll do it in the good old way like a shearling ram tupping the gimmer hogs and ewe hogs hard as he can,' said Warren in the argot of Aaron Tait who'd brought it from Yorkshire when he came over in chains, and imparted to Warren between sucks of his clay pipe. ‘Gettin a good look in and goin over the theaves and double-
toothed tegs and up from that the two shears, the three shears, up to the six tooths till they bleat something bad and drop down dead, that's how I'll do that job of work for Stanton's swell mob.'

‘That's how you'll gib it for sure, Warrie inch-long boy. Like some goanna up a tree, wavin its tail, you'll go inter her.'

Warren did not tell Titus how in the afternoons, when he was finished washing and changing his clothes, he stood at the edge of the trees along the creek and waited for a very long spell with his heart prisoned in his chest cavity tender as a captive bird. He saw Ivy in her sun hat coming along the garden wall, a freckled hand shaded over her eyes peering into the bright paddocks looking for movement. Warren launched himself from the trees of the creek so she would keep a hold of him with those eyes of hers that so mocked him, so stirred him up, and not go back inside again, nor round the back to charm Titus silly or tease the convict men. He ran, she ran, he wanted Ivy just to himself as the other half of their pigeon pair, all because of their few cheerful games around the garden, and because of being shown everything great in their house (which was all stale news to Titus, because he had grown up with it), and because of what Stanton said, that he was one of them now.

Sleep was in his eyes, a sandy grit. When Warren woke much later Titus was down on the hearth where they kept a log smouldering. He was hooked up on the beaten earth floor, knees under his chin, his nightshirt struggled off, his weskit in one place, his button trousers in another, both neatly folded the way an officer's valet would fold them.

Other nights it was Titus led the way in friendship talks, driving words like mobs over the rises and gullies to the places where the sheep of Parson Stanton sometimes led Warren on a good few days'
shepherding. Warren listened agreeably to Titus's low mumble, like running water over stones, with its many wandering diversions, Warren sitting with his arms folded around his knees, tickling a tuft of possum-fur rug into his nostrils, a habit from when he was a baby and used a cockatoo quill, in his quiver of satisfactions, which made him feel like a floating dust mote inside his own head, until he sneezed.

There was a forest where the trunks of trees glistened gobs of sap from their smooth bark, like blood from under armpits. One tree stood behind another, one tree to either side of them, more pale trees behind those taking up the clear spaces until it was like being in a room slabbed in timber trunks. Yet through that wall of wood a horse could gallop free. Or a waggon loaded with prisoners — yes, they said Kale had gone like that. Into the trees.

And if you stood stiff as a grasstree spear and waited, never cracking a twig under your foot, the first grey kangaroo would come up to the ridge, look around, twitch its ears, scratch its chest like a man with pleasurable intention, and then other ones would come up and they all would pass through the trees in a file between them, crouched low coming in, springing high going out of the grey berryergro box trees, until you ran out of numbers to count them. It was a place where fire came down the bank of the biggest river, rolling and pouring through the great trees, where the honey bees liked nesting, and the eaglehawk circled up, white palls of smoke driving bunches of sheep ahead, the mob being turned by fire and driven back home with burned twigs and ash in their wool.

 

One afternoon when Ivy was not to be seen, and the servants were all snoring loud in the afternoon heat, Warren crept down the hall
of the Stantons' house feeling himself tighten in the belly until the strike of the hour came on. It happened that a day couldn't go by without his coming to stand under the clock and experience the surprise. The spring in the cuckoo machinery unwinding tick by whir, he could feel it loosening inside himself until the burst of it would be the release of him and he would go rolling outside laughing and making the cuckoo noise up in the back of his throat. Meantime he stood coarsely breathing until the hour struck and the bird shot out. But soon he was aware of another rough breath in the house, closer than where the servants lolled with their fingers on the necks of bottles and on each other's waists and inside legs.

There had been an argument between Stanton and his wife. In those arguments it was always Mrs Stanton who won. It was expected they were riding to a neighbour's that afternoon, as she loved her horseflesh and wanted canters. But they were in their rooms, which were cool between thick walls of beaten earth, complaining about the boys they had, first Titus, then Warren! Mrs Stanton said in Warren's hearing, ‘How can he sleep in it, when he will be over there?' — which information Warren did not understand, except it was about the room saved for him in the part of the house they were still building. The language of her expression made no sense unless he was to remain a plain hut-dweller with Titus, though there was another and wilder idea, which lifted a stopper on his feelings. It came to him after the cuckoo chirped and he was outside rolling his belly around in the dry sticks, laughing. Namely that when they took their voyage to England, which they talked about completing as a family, when a ship was ready (if it ever would be, at the governor's leisure), they would take Warren with them. Their parents in the old country were getting on, and they wanted to bless them before they died. So there would be
nobody sleeping in the room that was still open to the stars, still to be roofed, ceilinged and plastered, and fitted with a bed, a boot box, and a mutton-oil lamp. Then indeed Mrs Dolly Stanton might truly have meant, How could he sleep in that room, when he would be over in the old country being taken about?

OVER IN STANTON'S SHEEP YARDS as the weeks went by, it was all the same with Stanton's fine sheep as it was with Tait's rough flocks. Halt, hydropic tumours, green wool rot, evils deformed and foul, hoarse coughs, Warren Inchcape found them out.

But Stanton, he learned, was reluctant to admit them, and quieted Warren down, keeping it as an arrangement between them, which argued that while Stanton's worst animals had a few rotten diseases, they were nothing as compared with the guts griping, dirty rotten livers, wheezing lungs and bladders full of imposthume that his rivals' sheep carried to him many miles across the dry hills of the Cumberland plain. The effect of this agreement, or conspiracy of truth, was not to turn Warren against his new master but to make him stand taller into the shape Stanton wanted him to fit. Warren did the foulest of jobs in good spirits, paring rotten hooves the stink of which beggared description, being suggestive of bad teeth decayed in the jaw, and of something worse, that Clumpsy M'Carty, their old soldier from the Spanish wars, told him, ‘after they won the battle of Ciudad Rodrigo', was like the stink of death.

Soon Warren could relate the pedigree of the Saxon rams without any prompting, and know by the turn of their faces one ewe from another, and describe their temperaments as mothers: lavish or neglectful, flighty or persistent.

The bond stockmen who were Stanton's sheep hands were sparing of effort, working the government stroke. A bunch of them were the same ones who after being flogged with Kale had now found themselves assigned to their flogger. They resented Warren only a little as the one playing up to the parson magistrate in all his talk about sheep. On the good side of their judgement they had an insane fondness for the boy. He was their crown prince of the crackling meadows and only needed a test to confirm his kinship to their legendary ways of thought. Of his descent from Kale, they knew every glorious and disappointed detail.

One day a decision was made: they broke a small rule of close confederacy and did so cannily, releasing what they whispered was a banded tale and told it to Warren, to see what reaction might come from Stanton if it alighted in his ear and came back to them like the turtle dove. It said blackarsed Titus took a wether, cut its throat and gave it to his black people who came along the creek and spoke to him in their heathen lingo. It would mean Titus would get a hiding and that was all right. But that tittletat bird might wait until it snowed at Christmas to harm Titus, because Warren Inchcape had the honour of the colonial born, which was to say, he was of that newborn race on the face of the earth of whom it was one of the worst reproaches to be a crawler.

None of the bond convicts dared talk about Kale within earshot of authority — their cuts were too deep and his escape too perilously insolent — but they trod a light measure around the name at other times in their enjoyment of the man who was free in the bush.

One of them, James Moroney, was a poet: a dazed, daft sort of youngish man with fair hair and cobalt eyes, who had been transported from Ireland for some figment of wrongdoing involving political priests, and who could never address a direct word to anyone without a susurrant stutter. It was Moroney who picked up from the empty air the first verses of a ballad, brought the words down to the surface of his furred tongue, and vibrated their repetitions in his narrow voice box. There was no stutter when he sang and the words went in low excitement among the stock hands, telling of where a man breaking his shackles might aim, of what he might do when he struck out making free with his livestock. Oh, he'd break through the sandstone ramparts, he would, and fly to where gorges opened to a stock route so fine. Inland pastures they would unroll greener than Kilkenny sheepwalks under his toes, according to the ballad that was spun by James Moroney, poet.

It was all in Irish, so Clumpsy M'Carty worded it and whispered the English back into Warren's ear.

 

One day Clumpsy, who had been a Kilkenny woolstapler's boy before he was in General Craufurd's army in Spain, spoke of the sheep husbandry of the Messrs Nowland of Kilkenny, who had six hundred pure merinos in their charge.

Clumpsy was a big, handsome, soft-faced man of about thirty-five, given to hot flushes and overpowering fevers that according to several accounts was owing to having his testicle glands crushed in a rock quarry by banditos in Spain, or in another explanation from having the soap of his ripest manhood creamed to excess by the powerful energies of one Croppy Biddy Magee.

Clumpsy said:

‘During the green Irish summer they were pastured, those six hundred fine white woollies, on a farm of gross natural herbage improved by grass seeds and clover. In the bleak heart of winter they were housed in the day during wet weather or allowed to forage in the snow. They were all under the charge of the one young man,' said Clumpsy with muted significance, looking around at his fellows — those scarred, disgruntled lags, each one sitting to his own stump of wood, which he was ferocious if anyone else took hold of, each with a clay pipe clenched in his gums, and a bushy beard extending over his coarse shirt front. ‘For certain, the one young man it was that you mean,' they said, keeping their eyes around but not upon Warren, which only emphasised it to Warren's mind, that information of a kind he resented receiving was being heaped upon him for purposes disliked by him. Although it was only five weeks since Kale was elevated to oblivion, the event had the feeling of something happening long ago. His own life was too exciting and heaped with too much experience in that time for him to celebrate, inconveniently, the vaunted honour of Desmond Kale.

‘At the sound of the horn all the sheep flocked around the young man if he stopped, and followed him if he moved along. Well, it was a grand sight, it was magic, but he had a little trick, and I'd recommend you play this one, Master Warren, if you can loot the briny. Salt was the medium by which this docility was chiefly produced.'

‘Salt? Given how?'

‘Trickled out of a hole in his pocket.'

‘What, in this whole great place, Laban Vale, I am to carry a bag big enough for Mr Stanton's thousands of head?'

‘All I know, young fella, is you would have to see how that one young man done it. Because he was the one.'

‘Without a doubt the one,' echoed the others, though without too much energy in the matter, as too much recent experience had beaten their spirits down, so that sometimes when Warren came upon one, he was more like a carcase of a man in the bits of throw-off clothing he wore that were little better than rags.

‘So I waits for a man with salt,' thought Warren, ‘and an attachment of trumpets made from a ram's horn melted straight, as Reverend Stanton says was made by the Hebrew priests, in a small fire of ashes in sand. Oh, my sainted aunt!'

‘On your feet,' said Clumpsy. ‘Here comes the croppies' friend. Are you busy, Mr Stanton?' he brayed up the last sentence, as the shadow of a horseman fell across his face.

‘What a question, Clumpsy M'Carty,' said Stanton as he was helped down from his mare. He was jovial with the Irishman, an entirely false state of affairs, as in principle the grinning caponed hypocrite was not to be tolerated.

‘I'm on the level, sir.'

‘There's nothing level in your cursed nature but direct villainy, soldier.'

‘Ah, reverend father, sir —'

‘Call me whatever you wish, whatever cultivates your respect,' said Stanton with jaunty disdain. ‘But “father” is an Anglican title on its own, without the “reverend” added in.'

‘You see, that's what we don't know,' said Clumpsy with egregious enthusiasm, ‘and have to ask you to find out. What does the Holy Writ say of dogs, are they much favoured?'

‘Dogs?'

Clumpsy winked sidelong. ‘Dogs' was code for a man who never used dogs, but called the sheep to him, and fanned them away, by other strategies of shepherding.

The question was quite delicious and Stanton was unable to carry on with being remote. He loved having answers and here, look, Warren had started going among the sheep, Warren and his dog, Squire, who had a trick of jumping the rails and running along them a few giddy paces before dropping down ahead of the flock.

‘Glory, what a sight!' Stanton enthused, puffing out his chest and dancing a little jig on his square feet as if he himself was the next for work, and sure would be if he wasn't so restrained on the leash of a Higher Master, who had better toil for him to do than rushing out showing up old lags.

‘That particular dog, for example,' insisted Clumpsy, ‘she's a great one of God's creatures, though with loads of gravel in the back, and cold palsies, bad as any sheep, when she's finished working and lies down fit to die.'

‘I am working on your answer, for you see, as far as I can recollect, there is nothing in the scriptures favourable to dogs at all.'

‘Oh, no, that cannot be true. I'd be very upset to find that out. That's in your protestant scriptures or in the other?'

‘There is only one word of God, and if you were educated in anything but bayonetry, pillage, tall tales and criminal horse coping, you'd know it.'

‘Sure, sure, so tell me.'

‘In former times it must be supposed, the dog was a common pest and destroyer, only good as a warning or guard against wild beasts. We have had the whole history of mankind since Eden to make our improvements, by the grace of God.'

‘How many years is that?'

‘Five thousand, four hundred and ninety-seven, I believe. Some say quadruple that number for an upper limit, by ill-informed calculation.'

‘Phew! That's a lot, so the doggy has come a long way.'

‘Man not so far,' said Stanton complacently.

‘Look at Warren, will you,' said Clumpsy.

The two men turned to the pleasure of watching a specialist born to the task so fittingly, that they were surely justified in thinking their interference a fault.

‘The sheep hear his voice,' said Stanton, ‘it is pleasant — there's no hurry in him — he works as if there are years ahead of him — which of course there are — and so, being patient, his work gets done much sooner — he is all in it — dreaming in it — playing in it, for he's still a boy —'

‘Aye, we should watch out for when his cods fatten, and all the agreeable bits of him go wild, and he's lookin out for a draught of wimmin to cool the fever without his knowin what it is, till he finds a trollop and nails her.'

There was sour, lost envy in the flabby man's words.

‘Clumpsy M'Carty,' said Stanton quietly, ‘if you don't bury that filth I'll strike you.'

‘I fergit meself,' the man dropped his head.

‘Stand aside from me. Get working cleaning the stalls, and by jolly when you bring the tools in be sure they are counted and locked away.'

Clumpsy M'Carty went off. It was suspected, but never could be proved, that he was in with Kale quite deep and was the one who tossed him the rake the day it was stolen — that thankless metal-toothed T that every day Kale wasn't found now acquired the lustre of a royal sceptre, the way men handled it, passing it one to another, begging for a turn. At least they got more work done — that was a benefit. But Stanton regretted having it repaired.

Dust and harrowing blasts of sunshine gave back the sight of Warren Inchcape bringing the sheep to their fold with the help of his parlous and devoted dog.

Without Clumpsy M'Carty to bother him, in this sight before him Stanton experienced an emotion akin to the satisfaction of seeing a paddock of fine pasture, just after rain, take care of future frets. Something like it was needed in a dry country. There was going to be fortune in this boy, and favours to bloodlines of tups going down generations.

That evening Stanton boasted to his wife: ‘I believe we made a superlative choice, already he's strong as an ox, reliable as sunrise, steady as a tree, and loves us both.'

 

Except it was not both who sent love back beaming the other way. Sad indeed it was to have to talk about it so soon, but Dolly Stanton was never one to keep her emotions hidden under a bushel, even on the Lord's Day. One of them loved Warren less. That was the score between them.

‘Warren's qualities have a big hint of contempt,' Dolly said, after observing his ease of manner on wandering into their house and listening to the cuckoo clock. ‘Free as a tom wrapping its tail around our bed legs, he is rather too presumed.'

‘He cannot presume what is offered him on a plate,' answered her husband, rather too priestly for her temper.

 

The next morning, Sunday, Stanton worked on getting his sweaty Geneva collar unstuck from around the wattles of his neck, where it set up a red itch the moment it touched him, and putting on his
cassock, under which he wore nothing, not even an undershirt, only a pair of white duck breeks cinched with a greenhide thong.

Dolly had a prideful habit of frankness. There was no escaping it. She reminded Stanton how she had kept mostly silent during the bargaining for Warren's services with Aaron Tait and back and forth to Meg Inchcape.

‘My husband shall do as he must, but that boy's presence under our roof remains a case of too much ease of acceptance, without a hint of humble pie — mongrel convict vigour being coddled where emigrant refinement' — which was to say her own breeding capacity — ‘has failed.'

‘Never again, please never again say that, my sweet piccalilli lemon,' said Stanton, in the aggravating way he had around terms of endearment, which seemed not fashioned for her feminine pleasure so much, as applicable either to a donkey baulking its harness or a pet cockatoo in a cage, if it shrieked too much.

Really, without anyone knowing what had come to pass, Dolly appointed herself Warren's enemy in the house. It was a check to Stanton's needs. Facing her husband square was a regular requirement in Dolly's life. But too often was tiresome, more from the energy expended in perspiration wearing him down than from lack of inspiration to bother.