The Ballad of Desmond Kale (3 page)

A WEEK AFTER KALE'S ESCAPE Parson Magistrate Stanton said to his wife, Dolly, of whom he pretended to be more afraid than he was of Irish convicts herding sheep in the bush and shaping daggers out of farming tools:

‘Say, my precious darling, if you were in the way of spreading yourself as I am, with plenty of livestock and no sons, might it not benefit a boy, a prince of the breed, to be taken on and encouraged?'

In serving his own interests the parson magistrate was able to speak to a moral purpose — ‘Whether it should benefit a boy' — and his wife had something the same way of thinking, but objected:

‘You forget we already have Titus.'

‘No, I am always thinking about Titus,' said Stanton, passing a hand across his face to brush away flies and express frustration, making a wish for new beginnings.

Titus was a boy they had rescued from a native camp when he was estimated eight years old, and sworn to raise in a civilised fashion as their own. The first of them to run sheep out their way, Aaron Tait, had worked Titus's parents as shepherds, and said they were king and queen of their tribe. Whether it was believably true,
Titus was allowed the distinction when spoken about. His parents were no longer living to testify what they were, except pitch black and scurrilous. Titus proved less a son, more a serving boy as he waited at table and otherwise amused guests, living in a hut at the back of the house while the rest of New South Wales looked on, Titus taming lizards, Titus spinning whistling tops, Titus making cat's cradles and throwing a native playstick that bounced on the ground and flew two hundred and fifty yards before it clunked to a stop. The Stantons made such great noisy show of being workers of Christian change that they took Titus with them wherever they went, usually to hold the horses, if he could be found.

Without Stanton being able to understand why, when Titus had all his advantages bestowed, the boy still went to his people who came up the creek begging sugar and flour; he remembered enough of their languages to keep their superstitions in his fickle heart; he lived in two worlds displeasingly to say, but each time deserting was welcomed back with a good scrubbing in the bathtub and a rule of Christian forbearance. Titus having recently turned an estimated fifteen it was doubtful if two women, mother and daughter, scrubbing him in a frothing tin tub was anything like a punishment but more a passionate delight to a wicked boy whose sense of shame never extended to wearing clothes, unless he decked himself out like a peacock.

Of course, there was a charitable motivation in the air all the time in the farmhouse parsonage and sheep yards. Travelling to Parramatta and Sydney, Dolly Stanton went around saving unwanted infants, those that weren't throttled and flung under the drain or in a sewer after unlawful birth to debauched convict women. She found wet nurses and planted babies in foundling care. They were given names to grow into, those of the Lord's disciples
for boys, for girls the names of the foremothers of the house of Israel.

The boy Stanton now proposed to advance, Warren Inchcape, was the grandson of the flogged Irishman; a boy needing decent rescue, Dolly agreed, and how could she not, except she did not think of Kale continuously as her husband did.

There was always a whole nest of snakes under everything. Desmond Kale was Stanton's first shepherd when he came to the colony. Given his chances, Kale had squandered them. Bitterness, dispute, rivalry and scorn were the issue. No thanks, no reciprocal gratitude, no concessions, none to pride. More times in prison than out, more times flogged than healed. To lower one person and keep him down, to raise another and keep him up was Stanton's notion. In the circumstances, he could not skin a Kale without clothing a Warren.

But he decided to wait until his wife's temper on the question improved. Too fast a move on Warren would seem like blatant hostage-taking — though who should suspect it when the boy was so brilliant with sheep, superlatively suited without argument, and justified on sheep grounds absolutely? Anyone would want him on that strength, and this was proved when Stanton went to Aaron Tait's rough farm at Toongabbie, just for the pleasure of watching stout Warren at work. How splendid he was with livestock … Of course, no guessing, it all came down from Kale.

While wishing Kale blank, Stanton was frustrated not doubling the sentence from a bob to a canary — fifty to one hundred lashes — ‘And flog him a tester each morning, until he confesses' — exactly to what, in the way of crime, it appeared only Stanton had the zeal, or the private information, to imagine. Something to do with sheep, you might guess, on every count. It was ten years since
their sheepwork together ended and they had turned their backs on each other, master and convict. Kale spent those years mostly in confinement; both men brooded on wool. Tarry on the outside, yolky cream within, the wool sheep carried on their backs was worth a life and a reputation. It grew through the week and on the Lord's Day, when work ceased, kept growing. In Stanton's dry paddocks it grew dense and rich. He accumulated mountains of the beautiful stuff, sending it to England, but always remembered, with a stab of hurt, that the tar-tipped surface was a cover for insolence, secrecy, crime and disorder.

The governor ordered a police tracker's report and said Stanton would have a copy of the report soon enough. In that first week he rode ninety-six miles, two return gallops to Parramatta from his sheep station, Laban Vale, to be told the report was not ready. He was not the only person in this matter wearing out saddle leather and crossing tracts of countryside in a hurry day and night. Sometimes the two men, Matthew Stanton and Tom Rankine, came close enough to kick gravel into each other's teeth from the hooves of their horses, close enough to eat from the same dish, drink from the same cup, warm their two faces to the same minted breath of the same beautiful woman, but only one of them, Ugly Tom Rankine, was aware of the other's startling nearness.

Here was all Stanton knew so far. After years of disobedience, defamatory insolence, and hard service in chain gangs, Kale had won provisional freedom. On strict parole, he could not restrain himself from committing a fresh provocation upon his former master and chief punisher. That Laban Vale was off-limits only inflamed him. On the day Kale stole the rake it was proved he made his way from Stanton's ram shed where tools were kept to a pauper's graveyard. There he was found raking the rubble of a
neglected grave and giving the impression of being a simple gravetender or humble mourner without guile. He was felled with a blow, dragged to the cells, and sent back to the stone quarries, from where he was in due course taken out and tied to a tree of gummy lumps and overgrown jagged limb-holes. Prisoners had their arms pulled around the trunk and their breasts squeezed against the trunk and so were denied the power to cringe. There Kale was flogged his due portion; from there made his escape according to exquisitely forged orders carried by a trooper answering to the name of Brown. Nothing else was known of him that day, except he marched a vicious mile, changed shape over a ridgeline and was gone. His face a shadow. His bootprints evaporations in the dirt.

Stanton was able to lay out the facts without putting himself too much at the centre of them as the one who went after Kale most ferociously: having him dragged before his bench; reclaiming his rake; having him sentenced before the taste of freedom ever swilled twice or thrice around his mouth. It was only when Stanton reached (in his thinking) those sheep, that a great cloud rose up impenetrable to investigation. Where had they gone?

One man was less helpful than Stanton wished while having the power to help absolutely: Sir Colin Wilkie.

It annoyed the governor to learn that Kale was flogged under a sentence that Stanton pronounced while quitting his court to get back to his sheep, throwing the number of lashes back over his shoulder as if half a hundred was the smallest of all numerals, a scratch.

‘Has the man lost the compassion and manners of a Christian minister, through passing vindictive sentences on the triangle and putting the welfare of flocks over the needs of Christians? Suppose
there's an extractive, not merely a punitive motive against Kale,' the governor said, ‘putting the sentence into the category of flogging for admissions — what is that called now?'

‘Judicial torture' it was called in the governor's camp — a libel of barely extreme malice from a man who called Stanton his ‘quondam friend parson incendiary' in a treacle of amused dislike.

Stanton blurted he would see the governor in court, and empty that Scotchman's pockets in damages, if he kept talking loose.

But whether flogging for admissions was a libel in fact was an obstacle to Stanton's opening his mouth any wider — because, for more than a year past, rumours had reached him of a tightly run superlative flock, small, but better than his own, being led through the wastelands by an unknown shepherd in the manner of the transhumants or migratory merinos of Spain. Here today, gone tomorrow, where they were grazed was the question. It was not on any good land. Their wool was said to thrive on hard ground like no other. They had now disappeared from reckoning. The only Botany Bay breeder with the gift of carrying great blood to rarer heights (if it was not Stanton himself) was the Irishman. But as if accursed Kale could have run sheep from a gaolyard or would cry into Stanton's ear the location of flocks and the progress of their breeding after a mere fifty stripes! — matters that Stanton would almost gladly flog any man to hear, bond or free, with no other crime involved needed as justification, there was wool on his mind so much.

Anyway, enough: couldn't it be seen that he didn't exactly ask questions of the flogged? For Stanton had a policy of never attending a flogging in person. If confessions were blabbed they were blabbed to him unsolicited, not from intention. It was from the motive of keeping the vengeance of the law cold in his chest, the
wrath of God in its proper place, beyond man's comprehension, that he only sometimes watched floggings from a distance as he rode past observing a proceeding — a cameo'd Lucifer in broad-arrow rags twisting before the arm of virtue, having evil strength mastered by greater clout.

What Stanton heard from that distance, more than the cries of the condemned, who appeared to have a sullen pact among themselves anyway never to bleat, if they could help it, were the sighs of the mob, their moans of sympathetic heart-wrenching so risen into a wave you would think they turned into fingers and plucked the cat from the flogger's hand.

Stanton hated the passionate stupidity of the mob but longed to forget himself and roar with them … Until one of them turned, seeing him sitting motionless on his white mare, under his round white hat, and threw out the curse of the Irish:

(It was a foul, purposeful, lewd piece of language made to scorch his ears.)

‘Stanton, you horribilis —'

‘What? Horribilis what?'

Better to spit bile between his horse's ears and ride on, leaving the curse unsplattered.

Kale was a stone, or a pebble, so called, an iron man in the parlance of convicts, with a back like terraced quartz. Rear view was the last angle seen of him, shambling through the forest flicking the tail of a government shirt. Although he bled copiously there was little slowing down of his escape. Blame was laid widely on convict plotters as yet unknown. Stanton knew better. It must have been an officer with sheep, he reasoned, who palmed Kale blacksmith's tools (those conjectured instruments remaining unfound); who organised an escort soldier, who slipped him the
escort service roster; who forged signatures on orders; a double-crossing duplicitous blatant rogue in the king's uniform — officers being the ones most forward in sheep and established enough in their raving confidence to scorn the danger of being hung.

He suggested it was officers to the governor, who said, ‘Which faction should I prefer, then?'

Stanton went through the roll of known breeders, trying to pin a name to the deed without success. His vainest rival was Major James Agnew, but neither guile nor cleverness marked Agnew whose boastful claim to genesis was in a few culled rams Stanton had leased him. From these he bred a perfect small animal whose wool became finer and finer until you would have to say, the view of the skin was preposterously good, but where was the fleece?

No. So many sheep used to cover a man's tracks and the whole lot swallowed into the wild was hardly an Agnew folly. It proved impossible to name names to the governor without stiffening Wilkie's regimental pride. ‘If Stanton thought that N.S. Wales rangers were involved he had better prepare his ground …' etc., etc.

That yellow-haired frowzy highlander, sensualist, whig, philosophical atheist insulting to Anglican forms by pretending Presbyterianism. What use was such a man in the maggoty dust baths and hot outer limits of the colony? General Sir Colin Wilkie went galloping home each afternoon to his rangers' dinners, no matter how far on kangaroo hunts he went towards the gates of the sandstone gorges where Kale was swallowed. At those dinners he ate, drank, recited verses in Gaelic with dubious Irish emancipists, put his hand up the skirts of maids, gossiped like a swamp frog, played cards till his eyes popped, and bloody-veined they were in the mornings.

Little help Stanton had from the law in conjuring up a gang. No help from the convict constabulary who were felons in uniform at best. When at last he received the government tracker's report, brought by express rider with the governor's dusty compliments, it contained little more than was already spoken about between himself and the governor.

Except Stanton saw that something was missing from the report. He read it through several times to be certain. Sure, before fully healing Kale had been tracked a good distance past Emu Plains — doubtless in a cloud of maggoty flies — setting off limping to some mythical China, heading into parts of New South Wales whence no white man had ever returned. Kale could not have been too badly striped to reach that far, Stanton reasoned, cutting his broad feet on razor-sharp rocks and curling his misshapen toes around boulders, scraping his broad forehead and shaggy wild hair on thorn bushes. It was said in the report that Kale took many sheep with him, but there was only a scatter of men's bones into the rampart of hills that stood to the west of occupied lands, where other like thinkers had perished. The sheep were gone up in smoke. Brought back was a shin bone, with a commotion over whether it was black, white or crossed, murdered or thankfully hacked or shot, eaten by cannibal Irish despots in a quarrelling band of escapees, and there was always the possibility of natural causes: heat stroke, lightning stroke, death by thirst.