The Ballad of Desmond Kale (26 page)

THROUGH THE EXPERIENCE OF STANDING in water up to his waist and grabbing stubborn wet sheep, wrenching them upstream out of the muddy flow of the wash, and up onto a bank where they stood wet and dripping sadder than ever, Artie Josephs earned his remaining shillings and contracted catarrh. There was also a lumpy red rash that his mother fussed over with powders. Then there were the yolk boils.

Sheep after washing were like sheep lying dead in snow, everywhere white and lumpy wet, and none seeming to breathe as they lay down defeated awaiting their time to get up and be sweated, and then to be shorn. Poke them and prod them and nothing happened. They sloshed, buckets of guts. Turn your back and up they jumped alive oh.

Each night Artie moved his blanket to the men's fire and stretched himself out being entertained by the boasts and ballads of the men and warming his bones with a few chokes of rum which ran like lizards into his loins.

Lorenze watched from the other side of the fire. The green-eyed lunatic Moroney recited his words. A ballad could be put either for
or against, but nobody would ever find Kale and beat him with just a ballad. You needed a sheep to beat Kale. If you wanted a sheep to beat Kale just ask Paul Lorenze.

He was up on the whole rampage. His anger was right up under his ribcage. At night by the leaping flames behind Stanton's sheds he was next, and he drew deep breath and sang of sheep numbered in their millions. They were divided into flocks, each under the care of a mayoral. At the head of all mayorals was the mayoral-in-chief walking ahead, who directed the length and speed of their journey, others with dogs followed, they flanked the cavalcade, collected stragglers, kept off wolves who followed and migrated with the flocks. A surge of mild beasts crossed the sierras. How it translated from the Spanish:

Three of them understood what the rest only felt. From his mother, Artie had learned his Ladino, the dialect of Spain spoken by Jews. Lorenze's music was all low f's and g's. Clumpsy was the other one. He'd learned his pig Spanish in Spain and called it a pig
language spoken by pigs, and that was how he showed his hatred and fear of the pig man, Lorenze.

After sitting around the fire the boys moved to their hut in the Stantons' yard and Artie came too. He wrapped himself in his blanket and instead of staying on the dirt floor as he had been first invited he arranged himself top to tail on Warren's bed. Before sleep felled them the boys made yawning talk for as long as they could. Warren asked the same questions Stanton asked of the Josephs and the answers from Artie were as hopeful and vague as they were from his father:

‘If it don't rain, bogging the waggon, if my pa don't forget to gild our bullocky, Mick, on the night of every full moon, we shall grab the miles better than anyone before. They say it's the best country, but it's been ignored, on account of reports saying it was all tumbled and broken like smashed crockery, and getting along was like walking on rooftops. But we hear it's not true. There are river gorges to cross, where our waggon gets carried over, and rebuilt on the other side. But then we are free.'

‘You are a bold mob,' said Warren, thinking of the eyes of the one of them, Leah, towards whom his fledgling heart leaped adventuring. ‘You love the trackless wastes, and under your waggon is space for the most comfortable kind of humpy you could ever fit up.'

‘Until it rains,' agreed Artie. ‘Then we all gets out and digs trenches, and the next day can't go nowheres till it fines up and the ground dries. We hang our carpets in the wind like washing.'

‘When does it rain?' said Warren with sour sincerity, as this past year he remembered dry thunderstorms whipping licks of dust and raindrops trying to nail them down. When they were lucky the wet lasted a few hours — he went around with the corner of a sack peaked on his head, feeling admirable with his dogs.

‘What about wild savages, ain't you afeared?' said Titus, may be forgetting he was born one — or out of need not to be taken for one. There was a story out: that when the moon became as large as the sun wild blacks would commence a work of desolation, and kill all the whites before them. It was warned by Lehane in the puddle of darkness at the back of his cell. But it must be taken care of before it happened. Two had been shot for trampling a field of corn ripening to harvest. Titus trembled saying they were very bad men, and deserved to be shot. The whole countryside was back into peace before trouble even started, and if the slaughtered natives had walked around the corn instead of running over it they would have been saved. Warren saw Titus weep and knew those people were kin.

‘To be dealt with as they come,' said Artie with easy confidence. ‘My pa's met worse in back lanes of Cheapside, or, depending if you prefer, back lanes of Parramatta.' Then Artie remembered and gave Titus some consideration: ‘Them's wild convict savages he means, o'course, not your heathen blacks with spears and waddy dongers.'

 

Next morning two old men were told to go and dig a ditch for the operation on the rams' horns. Joe Josephs spat in the dust and muttered spells when he heard Stanton ordering the ditch be matched at one end by another ditch running across it and the two ditches together to make the shape of a cross.

With the word ‘cross' on his lips the parson sermonised, saying how the rams were being crucified for their horns by a Spaniard, and did Joe know that tribes of Spain were descended from Roman soldiers who travelled there straight after the birth of Christ? Quite possibly indeed the one who speared Christ on the cross, to be sure
he was dead, travelled then to Spain and raised sheep in his complacently misguided misbegotten pagan old age.

Instruction rained on Joe from the mouth of his friend. Was he never to be cured of this and that? But at least today it was Romans who crucified Christ, which Joe would remember and remind Stanton of, when next he blamed it otherwise.

Titus walked around picking up fleeces and bringing up sheep to the shearers. The three black women working on the floor sat to one side with ewes in their laps and the sheep sensed they would not be harmed, for they were floppy with approval of the service they were rendered by these gentle savages wearing calico dresses to cover their immodesty. Dolly Stanton supplied the garments at some expense and made them wear them before appearing before men. No sheep jumped up from their grasp and ran around scampering their hooves and slipping sideways until caught shivering, as they did with the men. Instead they slumbered like dozy babes. The women picked burrs and other foreign material from the wool, lanced cysts in feet and dressed sores in skin, and when they took up the shears they certainly proved themselves better shearers than the men, except for Lorenze, who was the master.

Stanton said these handy women, and their tatterdemalion males too misguided to work his sheep, had come in for his protection after the settlers on the biggest river had shot and chased some off. They were frightened people, although in the minister's opinion prone to exaggeration through a theatrical mistrust of white men and what they could do. As if to prove him correct, a deputation of whites reported that not nearly as many were killed as those that said too many were killed the day they were shot. Stanton said the blacks could stay on Laban Vale soil longer than the shearing if they accepted the steps of conversion, then they would truly have
nothing to fear for the rest of their days. But if they resisted the blessings of Christ he would lose his patience after the shearing and dismiss them.

Stanton turned back to his other task of worldly education. He told Artie Josephs he followed a plan of sorting everything into four parcels. He boasted of being alone the woolgrower in the colony bothering with the division of four in his consignments, and planned to follow his consignments all the way through to England, he and his family on the selfsame sailing ship as his wool. ‘As soon as the governor is pleased to consent to our passage,' he hedged.

They watched a shearer peeling a fleece with his blades. The first lot was picklock wool from the withers to the back; the next finest was from the belly to the quarters and thighs down to the stifle joint; then came the wool of the third quality from the head, throat, lower part of the neck, shoulders, and terminating at the elbow; finally there was the wool yielded by the legs, reaching from the stifle to a little below the hock. A small quantity of very inferior wool was taken from the tuft growing on the forehead and cheeks, also from the tail, and from the legs below the hocks. It was all bundled in for eventual pricing and sale at the best bargained rates on the other side of the world.

‘Here is a kind of sheep you will learn to look out for,' said Stanton, in the next and hopefully last part of his lesson, when they went outside and the minister selected a fatigued ewe from the unshorn number, pulling her around and holding her against a post while his hairy hands walked over every part and Artie and Joe watched.

‘She is a good Saxon merino, but I see you might be thinking not so good at all. But this is how they are. Some call them grown-out rats or miserable doggy sheep or drowned unrespectables but
I shall never decry what they carry on their backs. Thrust your fingers into the wool noting the fineness of the fleece and the blood in the skin like a pencil line when the fleece is parted. The wool lies closer and thicker over the body than in most other breeds. It is abundant in yolk and is covered with a dirty crust, often full of cracks. Black gold, it is called by the Spaniards, gum or jar by English farmers, and if you ask our Senyor Paul Lorenze over there, he will doubtless oblige you by agreeing it is wonderful stuff. But do not interrupt his shearing or he might slash you, he is such a rogue buccaneer.'

Stanton reached down fondly, lifted a leg as if to make the sheep curtsy, allowed its hoof to dangle while gripping the foreleg bone, and said:

‘The legs are long, yet small in the bone like yours, Artie Josephs — if you don't mind me saying so, you are a skinny-shanked piece of work. Yet they will take both you and she a long way. The breast and the back are narrow, the foreshoulders and bezooms are heavy, but too much weight is carried on the coarser parts to please me. I do not worry overly on that point, however, I only dislike these folds of skin coming pendulously down under the throat. They are like a gluttonous old king's dewlap who only eats to satisfy his greed. Not our present Majesty, I most hastily add. The merino has a voracious appetite which yields no adequate return of condition, and although they taste good, mutton farmers hate them for they have no aptitude to fatten.'

Stanton put the leg down and straightened his back with a small sound of ouch, then came around behind the sheep and straddled it without needing to widen his legs, as they were bowed ready for sheepwork from birth. This way he was able to display the front of
the sheep by holding up its head and without getting his hand fouled by sticky drivel. He spoke from between its ears that were almost buried in wool:

‘I am an Englishman in my prejudice against these folds under the throat which are difficult to shear and wasteful. We oppose the superstition that the folds are good, showing a tendency both to wool and a heavy fleece. I am with Lord Somerville on the matter — Lord Somerville being the greatest sheep man in England after Sir Joseph Banks — he says a throaty sheep is not good in its skin, with no hurry to fatten. It is one matter on which I disagree with our new friend, Lorenze.'

Stanton let the sheep go and dusted his hands. He wiped them down the seams of his grimy moleskin trousers. He spied Warren moving sheep up, and said to Artie:

‘Here is what makes me proud. Did you know, apropos of the scriptures, that the Church of God is called “adopted sons” in Galatians? Just a thought I have at the present. A passing thought.'

‘I don't know Glayshens,' said Artie.

There was a commotion of dog, boy and sheep galloping from under the fringe of trees along the creek, where the afternoon light was so harsh that even the nearby trees were drawn away tiredly into a haze of headachy distance.

‘Look at the young horned rams Warren is bringing in to the yards to have their horns cut. These are the pick of them, what's left after Young Matchless.'

Stanton and Artie ran over and grabbed a ram from either side. It bucked and made the horn threat jerk, twisted its neck, head shaking strongly and only when there was nowhere it could go, did it quiet itself down. This was a ram, by name of Slumberous, normally so naturally quiet that when Warren and Titus tried
getting it to play butting games they had to throw rotten fruit in its direction before it became enraged.

Stanton stroked the horns as a demonstration, first one and then the other, following the ridgy, yellowed matter down and up and around and down to a point. Slumberous was a handsome sheep. The shape of his horns was like a spiralled E in good penmanship standing out from the cheeks and nose and a matching E on the other side drawn by a perfectionist's nib. It seemed a shame to cut the horns off from their living beauty, but they caused grief for the rams in thickets and in their fights, and as the grazing closer to the homestead yards was eaten away the rams were taken farther out into a low corrugation of spiny hills where the green pick was good but the vegetation wild and grabby. Joe Josephs asked if he could have the horns when they were cut. Stanton conceded, ‘Save for one of the pairs, which I want to set over the doors of the wool hall to greet all comers.'