The Ballad of Desmond Kale (34 page)

THERE WERE TIMES WHEN A good, courageous man of this earth was all animal arousal, a creature of idiotic fear, fleet of foot with a galloping pulsation in the kneecaps and a meaningless flailing of the arms. Clumpsy M'Carty crossed the wide farm flat squawking like a pullet and praying to Mother Mary for assurance that all the wet warm liquid flowing below his waist wasn't blood.

‘The bastid has stabbed me,' Clumpsy told himself as he slowed, creeping along the edge of shadows, farming his fingers down the inside front of his clammy crotch. Blood was thinned down to pissifaction and he was a pismire complete with a trickle of shite on his scalded thighs.

‘Halloo, M'Carty!' said a voice he supposed with a start was Moreno's come back again. The disembodied call came from the dark in front of him, where Moreno might have got round to torment him.

‘Yaiss?' Clumpsy replied in childish humility, because having met the Devil, there were possibly angels as deceiving in this place. ‘Yaiss? — please?' His hands looked black when he held them out
in front of him, searching in the dark, but not black black as they should be from blood in the dark. So he wasn't stabbed after all, it seemed.

‘This way, man.'

There were two fires, one burning low red and another, brighter, kept up with sticks, away off the far end of the bullock waggon where the traders Josephs had their camp. People were still up, moving around, getting ready to shift at daylight. Would that Clumpsy could dissolve into them as he'd wanted into a sheep, Clumpsy a shape shifter and fairy hiker of the marshes and skylined ridges if only this cursed country allowed the mythologies in.

‘Clumpsy!'

It was Rankine, then. He stood at the end of the waggon wearing a pale shirt and dark trousers, no ghost of the imagination at all but the handsome captain of rangers. Rankine held up a corner of dog blanket, inviting a motion, and, thought Clumpsy, forget that rancorous Spaniard and his hornswoggling ways, here was a challenge to dive upon better than any the foreigner knew when fighting bulls or driving spikes to within a quarter inch of a man's brains — a suspended dark space or cubby fitted out with blankets and smelling of safety and dog.

Clumpsy was aware that he was in the middle of a camp of strangers both ends and one side of the waggon. They were all favoured visitors to the minister's ground, and here was Clumpsy M'Carty most favoured among them. Wasn't that something?

‘Hush but you are a good man, Ugly Tom Rankine.'

Deeper into the underspace without a word or a question Clumpsy went, jerking his ankles to get his forward parts wedged in tighter. It was a released convict's private prepared cabin between the axles under the long chassis of the waggon — between
the two ends curved up like a boat. Heaven could wait. A caterpillar had no better berth in a cocoon of silken web. There was a slung blanket. Rolls of tarpaulin. Coils of rope. ‘I shall be sailing on the morning tide,' thought Clumpsy, ‘with instead of water under my feet there'll be sticks and dry leaves to look at.' When he was wriggled full length and tight, nose poking through a slit, eyes peering around, he was little inclined to ask the whys and where-fores. Not a breath was he capable of escaping from himself loaded with common sense: only in babbling gratitude could he express himself here. May be tomorrer he'd talk it over, when they were well away from accursed Laban Vale and the reach of the minister.

Rankine brought the dogs over to smell Clumpsy so as not to be alarmed when they tried leaping into their cots and found a man inside them. Clumpsy the hedgerow attorney whispered: ‘I am rehearsing me arguments, faster than I can get me breath, on the subject of where I stand with the prayst fellow, and feel I'm pretty right. See, I'm not even an absconder now as I've been set free by the parson's own man, Senhor Paul Lorenze. Am I makin sense?'

‘You might be freer sooner than you think,' said Rankine, in a voice so soothing it would soon have Clumpsy nodding off like the rum-guzzling baby he was. ‘I have paid Mick Tornley with a promise of your labour, and sworn your innocence to Joe Josephs over the freeing of Kale. But that is not the best part, Clumpsy.'

‘As to my freedom it couldn't come better.'

‘As to your freedom I'll swear to the governor you are innocent, and I'll request you back in my service, as my assigned convict servant.'

‘Like you did with our Biddy Magee,' said Clumpsy with a wicked grin.

‘Just so. Stay put till it's done.'

‘I have been transmogrified. Heavens be praised and I promise you won't be sorry. It will be a great story to tell the boys, if it has a good ending.'

‘Sleep through into morning, don't make a noise.'

‘Only me bladder'll be a bucket of straw.'

‘Use the gaps of the hammock if you must. Stay tight until I call you, then you'll be safe. By the time Stanton learns you've been assigned it will be too late, as a ship, the
Edinburgh Castle
, will be sailing in through the heads of Port Jackson any day now, and they'll be on it with their wool and crossing the Pacific Ocean and rounding the Horn before we even get to the duck mole reach and unload our gear.'

‘Now there's a name oughter have capitals,' said Clumpsy, falling asleep to the idea of a ballad recital at a bright campfire — a story in which a famous convict escapes, an officer of rangers is outlawed, a woman decides on love, a boy is given trust by the one with wool round his wrist, a black boy is treated like shite by the same old devil, and the days roll into each other under the throbbing ball of the sun over the height of a sturdy waggon hauled by fourteen bullocks and carrying a band of hopefuls in the direction of Desmond Kale.

 

It was late, very late, when everything was done. In the shining darkness of that country, it was luminous past midnight. The stillness over the dry creekbed was remarkable. It had an effect on the minds of sleepers and on the attention of those still awake greater than offered within reason. For it was said the creek had an underground river following its way below. Crickets, small movements of air twittering the branches. The clatter of a leaf descending could
be heard. The call of a nightbird came clear as fracturing glass. The creek was alive with life you could and couldn't see. In the night there was the power of prophecy: things would get better, because feel how beautifully soft they already were, rich below.

Meg Inchcape turned the planes of her face to the sky and almost sang with love. It was like strewing flowers this feeling of excitement she had, beginning her voyage into an unknown country as mysterious as could be.

It was late, very late when Rankine came past the end of the waggon with starshine in his hair and she knew he'd finished putting their camp visitor at his ease. Blankets were spread on the ground, made easier by a sack of clean straw pounded flat, laid underneath, with more blankets piled over and a canvas flicked over the top to protect against dew.

Meg muffled shrieks of laughter as Rankine showed her how to get her legs into a stockman's bedroll without bringing any sand in with her, as he promised there were no bugs and crawlies in with them for he'd taken particular care to brush them out. Close bound to each other's warmth, they were ready for the few hours that remained of the night. But not so ready for sleep, as they were ready for each other, seeking the hungry touch. Meg found herself looking into Rankine's face lit by starlight, cupping that willing pocked visage between her long fingers. He returned her gaze and then they were in each other's arms for love. This was not pleasure-seeking of the kind they lately knew how to take, it was more an hour of their lives assenting to a promise that was already made, they knew not how. It told they could live through their separations when they came. That promise, unspoken, was prophecy, deep felt, and it went along under them like that river. The shadows of trees could be seen with the starlight shining through the narrow leaves
and around the ends of boughs where the leaves hung in bunches. The clay earth was alive in the deep night's breathing. The harder tested of their two was going to be Rankine — he that swapped advantage for hardship. She would remember that in the morning, and the morning after.

Before first light Rankine left the camp for Parramatta, whispering that if he was not returned by the time camp broke, she was to stay with the Josephs until he caught up. With a stroke of Meg's cheek, and a tender look, he was gone.

 

With sheep in the morning, Warren came to say goodbye. He brought the two hundred culls from Stanton, herded now by Joe Josephs's boys and their sister, who would lose a few, and find a few, before they grew much older.

‘Ma?'

It was too much for Meg, this farewell as she clung to Warren. He broke off. Came back. They looked at each other in the dust. Meg's heart was great with love for him, but she broke from their kisses and holdings-on, and separated finger from finger, bidding adieu, for reasons of the life yet to come for both of them, with their backs turned to each other, travelling to either end of the world.

 

At noon Clumpsy was still with them, slung in his unlikely cradle and pissily reeking. Behind were the sheep and the boys hup-hupping them along.

Tramping at the side of the oxen was their bullocky, Mick, a lover of jam and pickles, a man whose brain was a stone inside a tin dish rattling and striking; whose concentration of person had
the benefit of rhythm derived from a natural gait. Each flick of his whip was matched to a loud oath. When the bullocks heard Mick cursing they twitched their nerve ends, strained their haunches, lowered their narrowly muscled shoulders and shook them of flies, getting on their way.

Mick and the Josephs and you might almost believe the wary bullocks themselves kept their eyes open for Patrick Lehane, that cur lucky enough to find freedom in the swing door of a cage but undoubtedly stupid enough to squander its benefits under his messy feet when he next got the chance. Just let him try.

Mick coiled the whip that was tired from chasing a black boy, wielded by a parson, allowing his bullocks to carry on whipless as they chose. Its painful effect they remembered in their bones as well as any black boy was able. Oaths on plain beasts saved on lash, and if only a ballad could do the same for a person it would be brilliant, please God. There was a singing from under the waggon seemed to hope so.

Except where was Rankine now? Gone from the breakfast fire, gone from their inland direction, and all Meg Inchcape could say the next morning (when he was still not back) — Meg rising from her tangled blankets to join a company of knees seeking a little warmth from a blaze of sticks — was that she expected he would be along again quite soon.

Yet as the days grew perceptibly shorter and they progressed on their way, he did not return. The party of travellers poked on without him, turning around peering back through the wan trees expecting his horse would be seen coming soon through in a haze of sheep dust. Only like Desmond Kale, but in the other direction, Rankine was gone from their world of understanding and quite as if he'd never been there in it at all.

Meg gathered water, cooked bread in a fire of myrtle ash, sheltered under applewood trees in a thunderstorm, and every day walked up the nearest hill to look back the way they'd come.

There was never anyone appearing through the trees.

A MUMMIFIED ANIMAL OF THE marsupial race, with ground teeth pulled back in a smirk, mocked from a bundle of wool. It stank from a bed of shrivelled blackness, showing shreds of pelt, glued bristles in a frame of ribs. It was about the size of a small pig, deflated.

Blaise Cribb poked it over with a cane and cursed. From the other side of the globe he was taunted by criminal filth.

‘Consigner: J.J. Tharpe', he noted, and went to the side door of the wool store where he gagged, before coming back to see what was under it.

These were the worst days when Cribb felt his life was fairly well wasted at forty except he was not quite finished with wool.

He would take a brief look at a bundle now, and a better look tomorrow, when there was more light. Stuffing samples in his pockets, he left for the Inn of the Four Bound Sheaves, and quite soon, Cribb was drunk and reeling.

Out of a long, narrow pocket appeared a bone flute made from the shank of a goat, carved in Sicily, which Cribb played to rouse the melancholy of his soul and to charm his listeners as they drank.
It was a plaintive high-pitched instrument. He seemed happier tonight, it was noticed. Light on his small feet.

Later there was a drunken argument with his friend Dud Hardcastle, the village schoolmaster, a forthright rational man which Cribb wasn't, quite, despite the absolute demands of his trade, because he reserved a particle of the universe for unaccountable mystery. Mentally there he retreated into what Hardcastle called a spiritual bag of tricks and did so the harder his friend pushed with atheism, paganism, Jacobinism, or whatever inspired him fitfully — with a fair swerve of Wordsworthian nature-adoration and advocacy of walking cures thrown in.

As a radical materialist and promoter of unfettered love, Dud Hardcastle was a supremely happily married man and regular as a Methodist in all respects of his life except when giving out opinions. If Cribb could not advance his return arguments with logic — and there he regularly failed, being morosely inarticulate with emotional states too large for him — he drew up his fists. At this, Hardcastle surrendered for the sake of companionship. A blow bounced off anyway — look at Cribb tonight, fat-pocketed on every side.

Hardcastle asked for a closer look at what he carried, and they touched foreheads either side of a lantern while Cribb spread his material out. The medium of devotion was imperishable gossamer spun from the skin of an edible quadruped, and if Hardcastle rashly cursed its enchantment, thinking to appease Cribb when
he
cursed it back and forth, beware.

They went outside into the windblown cloudy night and began their long walk home, discoursing on the way.

Hardcastle loved Cribb and believed he would be a happier man if married. But in affairs of the heart pessimism had spoiled Cribb
for a settled life. Disinheritance proved he would never have a decent roof over his head, he argued, showing to the world he was incapable of offering any bride a place worth her hand. Of course, the piteousness of a circumstance suited Cribb very well. Only adventures would do, and of a passionate concentration until success was assured, and then Cribb showed a side of himself that could only be called vague, indecisive, unreliable; most unlike him at all (except it was). Avoiding breach of promise suits, he did so merely by the chance that his determined fickleness was played out with married women.

Hardcastle said that when he met the love of his life he would be felled, split, cast to the winds and destroyed completely — quite deserving every particle of his humiliation and despair. Cribb said he'd already met her, and her name was Dolly Pringle. Hardcastle knew the old story of that bold young woman and her conversion to better ways. Everything was remembered in wool that Cribb had ever done, binding his entanglements in love crosswise into the material of his vocation. His son, Johnny, was now a raw eighteen and a woolstapler's boy in his own right and puzzled by love of a father and obedient to a father's soul, not so much to his father's expectations, as they seemed to bypass Johnny and called somewhere wider. Cribb might say he was finished but that was a lie to Johnny and lived out every time Cribb gave an offhand instruction to the boy and cuffed him around the scone for making a fool of himself, which Johnny gladly did, to have his closeness guaranteed by hot attention. While Cribb worried his personal fate, Johnny awaited the fuller declaration of their alliance and a freedom they would one day enjoy together as Cribb & Son, Wool Brokers — north of England's foremost, may be? In this Johnny was like Cribb himself, when younger, who had shown such loyalty and hope, to
his stepfather, and to his trade, whereas Cribb gave no sign that he saw any resemblance in Johnny and cursed him for his tinker blood which apart from dark good looks meant mostly an easy friendliness and a compliant smile, that made him over-trusting rather than sly as tinkers were known to be.

Cribb was not well from all the standing, eating, drinking, fine discriminating and exact disputing that made up his day. He was a man who after a great deal of riding through rural parishes sorting and buying wool found himself too much under the one great roof as his expertise grew in demand and reputation. It was a couple of years since he last rode to hounds, or joined Hardcastle on a walking tour of the high tops, each with a book of verse in his coat pocket. There was no time for anything more than the getting of coin through the offer of quality and profiting on quantity. Congestions of dirt and fatty oils brought from afar thickened Cribb's lungs. Come winter a cough clawed behind his ribs, persistent as a rat in warehouse rafters. Blood flecked his handkerchief after too much strain, vexing his son who stayed at the farm with him, when he could, hard by the waterfall — in that damp unhappy purloined place at the edge of the moors. Whether the cough meant worse than Johnny dared guess no doctor was consulted by Cribb to confirm. Johnny was given a bloodshot stare (as if Cribb's eyes were doused in vinegar), a wincing challenge to be gone, and Johnny gained the feeling it was a failure of manhood in him even to throw a blanket over Cribb when he snored drunk in his snow-melting coat. But he loved Cribb and would go past his father's expressed opinion to have him warm and did so.

 

Next day it was still there waiting: bin 871:D of colonial wools, with its dead marsupial badger rolled inside the mummy case of
fleece, with its stink as pungent as any Cribb had ever broke open.

He cursed the desecration and muttered the name of the fool who seemed to think his bags would be sorted anonymously and never traced back by letter or reputation some fourteen thousand miles. ‘J.J. Tharpe, hard by the duckmole rch.' But when he unfolded the outer binding there was a surprise within, fuller than the few fistfuls he'd plucked the night before, in dimmer light. A bundle of fleeces that were fragrant and soft. Two styles in all.

He wrote in his report:

‘Superior softness of texture … Clean of thorns and wire grasses … Comparatively very peculiar qualities, a softness and silkiness …'— words of description carrying a sense of superb character cherished by his chief buyers, Addison and Roper of Bradford, if they could only get their hands on some, which they would not succeed in doing, as there was just this one tantalising bundle to hand in the whole of Britain.

Though after a moment, Cribb, while holding his breath, dangling the fleece at arm's length into a better light, corrected that conclusion.

For J.J. Tharpe's exceptional pearly bundle, which Cribb now spread on a window ledge, like a piece of washing to air of its too close companion, set him thinking.

It was the direct relation of the one that came into his hands a few years past, of that he was sure, the fleece marked ‘Kale' he'd retained hoping for better days from the prison colony and its flocks. It was stored in a sack on the farm and soon he'd go and have a look at it, whether it rained starless cold and sleet or snowed or what. And more to the point, mixed in it was prime Spanish wool, improved from a style of wool that went to the colony on the backs of Rankine's Spaniards.

Hardly surprising, then, that Cribb excused himself from duty and went down the back of a high stone wall and clambered down a slippery stone stairway to the chilly mud flats where it was his oblivious habit to stand when he wanted a pull of drink. Once he could see for clear miles over banks to the hills, but no longer. As mills produced clean woollen goods in quantity of incessant tons it followed that lewd chimneys grew from their honest walls, spreading smuts among gorse flowers, sooting the buttercups of springtime fields, staining the golden harvest moon with their filth, and blackening the snow in winter. Their outspills were a congestion on the breathing earth and here, downstream of a woolscour on banks of a muddy river, grew burrs, woody weeds and saplings strange to see in England. A few years ago Cribb walked these banks with George Marsh, who made Cribb smile by likening the stray Botany Bay seeds to jewels in a sad beauty's hair (fair England's) — a washed fleece's cargo of winged seed and sprocketed burr heads plentiful and stubborn, growing a world away from their origins.

Cribb took bread and cheese from his pocket, and when his stomach was ready lined he fed his spirits down into himself in a whisky braid.

 

It was not widely known that Lord Bramley was the important money behind Thomas's Wool Brokers. A few years ago Thomases married into the Lloyds of Caermarthenshire, a continuing line of lawyers, horseflesh fanciers, and money spenders, and when it came to sheep they liked the mountain sheep of their Welsh land-holdings best, for no better reason than that particular sheep's character of almost unmanageable wildness was their family
emblem. As to interest they had in Thomas's, it diminished as their gambling debts increased. So it was that these days Lord Bramley ruled the company tables.

Bramley put a chapter on New South Wales in
The Shepherd's Sure Guide
:

 

The first sheep carried there had large heads, Roman noses and slouch ears; they were extremely narrow in the chest; they had plain and narrow shoulders; very high curved backs, a coarse, hairy fleece, and tremendously long legs. From such animals emanated all the improved flocks now in the country.

 

But even then, Cribb was receiving a few bundles of fairly good Saxon merinos and interesting bundles of Spaniard merinos only part crossed, such as the Stanton and Kale.

Now some of Cribb's reluctance to overenthuse was malice towards his stepbrother. Nothing over-superlative must be said of New South Wales if Rankine thrived there. But here, in the ‘Tharpe', was proof that a combined Spanish flock, its wool analysed by Cribb once in England, now again after its growth in Botany Bay, had a part in an advanced miracle, call it glory, served up under the
nom de laine
‘Tharpe' of a cryptic locale, ‘duckmole rch'.

The evidence made Cribb tremble and burn to a point of his guts unappeasable by whisky, which in no way stopped him downing more. For he deduced — as no other man was able, through the quantities of threads revealing their sources to eye and touch — that his stepbrother Rankine was behind the stinking shroud and in partnership with the palpable man of beauty. That Kale still lived and worked sheep for their betterment was certain to Cribb as the
evidence would be to a saint having kissed the hem of a garment finding it wept fresh blood. Two parcels had been sandwiched together by the one hand. The wool said it all.

 

No great gifts of imagination were valued by mill owners and landholders in Cribb's part of the East Riding. They liked practical inventions such as the infernally tireless combing machine, which only needed the attendance of an overlooker and ten children, and combed a pack of two hundred and forty pounds of wool in twelve hours to get a job done that was worked by whole villages before-times. Application and skill were praised, and the keeping of trust and accurate books in the language of counting and gaining. These requirements Cribb supplied while his genius was called forth anyway, in prophecies of supreme and useless understanding, about equal to poetry, as he plunged his hands into rolls of fleece, drew them apart with a high controlled throw and noted with a narrowed glance from beneath wild eyebrows their quality and importance displayed on his slatted table.

Lord Bramley, for his part — where he circulated at the level of parliamentary committees and royal societies — was remarkable in never needing to take notes on anything much, because he remembered all details of breeding experiments and measurement tables to the extent that he amiably agreed to have his brain pickled after death, to allow science to describe what amounted to perfection in that regard; although that same brain had not prevented his getting a few pointers in
The Shepherd's Sure Guide
wrong, by writing down what he was told. Lately his fingers were stained from printer's ink as he carried around scrolls of proofs in his pockets, to work on putting his sheep man's bible into its eleventh edition.

On New South Wales, he now corrected:

 

The colony seems to be an exception to the fundamental principle of the paramount influence of blood. My friend Mr Blaise Cribb urges this on me, from his study of fibres. In the first years these sheep were, in a manner, changed; the hair was comparatively gone, and a fleece of wool, of no great but improving fineness, succeeded
.

 

Cribb might sneer understatement, but his lines of life sweated the truth. A very beautiful fabric called the merinos was specialised in Bradford from Saxon wools. It was extensively used in the neighbouring town of Leeds, where Cribb went one day to have his opinions examined by Lord Bramley. Imagine his surprise when Bramley told him pack his trunks, and get ready for a voyage of enterprise to New South Wales.

Imagine Bramley's surprise (as a man getting his own way) when Cribb said:

‘No.'