The Ballad of Desmond Kale (4 page)

Here was the puzzle, then. While sheep were mentioned, wool was not. Wool from travelling sheep was immemorially gathered on bushes, unpicked from grass, wherever flocks shifted along. Where were wool's traces here? All blown away?

Stanton, in his mind, went after the faceless cohorts of Kale in a storm of gathering wool. Men betrayed, wool rewarded.

Stanton had an eye for wool. ‘Trust in God and breed like the Devil.' He estimated distances and places where to stick his nose, but only came up against cliffs and gorges in reports of where they had gone.

Rage and bafflement called for another head on this. And so Stanton cultivated a bush trader, a London Jew, whose crimes were forgery and the receipt of stolen goods in Whitechapel, who since transportation made himself known in the colony for selling merchandise up country from a lumbering waggon and rescuing his honesty from the dung heap.

ALTHOUGH DISCREET IN HIS TRADE Joe Josephs was a pliable source of information from many quarters gleaned. He was blessed with rampant curiosity, full of intense affections, ignorant in his wool buying when it came to the finer points — thus to be educated in wool by one who knew better. Joe was appreciative of Biblical arguments, which pleased Parson Stanton all right, the trader knowing his ancient texts better than any Christian teacher Stanton had learned from — his old Cambridge university professors spouting original Hebrew letters included. Old writings of
dalet
and
resh
were alphabets known to Joe, a Cockney criminal type as originally spawned. It was like he lived Biblical times as he made his observances on a Friday night and lay down in his camp of a Saturday morning smoking his clay pipe, doing little else to stir his skinny legs on his day of rest.

The minister had an intense motivation with the gingery-bearded Joe — an aim running through the veins of his worldliness back to the plug of his dark believing heart. It was to advance his wool, pursue Kale to the limit, and, in a smaller voice, ask Joe to drop his resistance to the Christian cross or throw him to the Devil.

There was a battle with Titus going on over the same subject. A good leather strapping was known in Yorkshire dialect as an anointing. Stanton brought anointings with him into his own house. After many anointings Titus went to Sunday school and learned his texts, but as to the sincerity of his catechism, Stanton had angry doubts. He felt he would never know the truth of that boy unless he split his ribcage open and held his heart to the light.

Stanton's branch of established religion, the evangelical, claimed that everything was possible to those who showed contrition and expressed a sense of mortal danger; though whether it would save them from the gallows tree or stay the flogger's hand was to bring the argument down from heaven a bit too far. When it came to Jews, they were stubborn as blacks resisting commands. It made Stanton justified in naming a hard God, ‘wrath resisting mercy' when he struck refusals.

Finer points of theology escaping Stanton's capacity of brain, he argued by letter to his evangelical friends in Cambridge. It took almost two years to rotate the meditations over the seas and back. Some of those evangelical friends were become known names of English preaching while Matthew Stanton, their hoop-legged old amigo, after leaving Cambridge without taking his degree, stubbornly missionised among the bluebottle flies and johnny cakes of the thieving sheep camps of Botany Bay.

Gratifyingly to say, his advisors (all archdeacons now, and bishops' chaplains) endorsed his opinions back to him, agreeing on his need to flog sinners and buy land and make profits for the sake of independence from interfering governors. They were most soothing in their assurance that although the strait gate was narrow he was fitting through. The parable of the talents, where a man was justified increasing his wealth, aptly applied where he was. When
he asked cunning Joe Josephs for a gloss on that, the fellow looked stoomped — and Stanton was pleased. For the parable was a story from the New Testament — a book that Joe would not accept even as a gift from a well-meaning friend to take with him on the waggon track, as a useful reminder of right from wrong if he ever felt the need to delve deeper into repentance after his life of crime.

 

It was two weeks after Kale's escape when Stanton rode into Joe Josephs's encampment near Parramatta, and after a sharp look around from under his floppy white hat, decided there were now a few more good reasons for seeking Joe's friendship than were already worked up between them.

It was late afternoon on a Friday, the sun about to set. Smoke from a cooking fire threaded into the trees and flattened among high spindly branches. Steam hissed from under the lid of an iron pot suspended by chains from a triangle of metal stakes. There was the smell of boiled fowl in the wintry air, spiced with green nettle.

As Stanton rode on into the compound a movement showed through the trees on the other side. It was a flush of rust-red greatcoat, a rider on a black horse, a man making off.

There was too much of that kind of flurry around Stanton since Kale was freed. Next time he roved, he would bring along an old black man, Mr Moon, who was able to lean down from the neck of a horse and waver his black nose along, reading bent grasses by the trackside and interpreting a wren's feather, knowing if it was disturbed by the passage of a rogue or not: to see better than Stanton ever could, anyway, in a gathering dusk.

The camp was a rough space of ground, grazed over by bullocks on a creekbank pugged by animal tracks. At the edge of paperbark
trees, close hobbled, were five working bullocks. They doddered forward into better light. There was a brown and white with lopped horns wearing a large bell, two brindle and white, one with cocked horns, and a strawberry junior with snail horns sounding a bull-frog bell when lowering its glossy head. The brand was an indistinct MT.

‘Those are Mick Tornley's bullocks,' thought Stanton, ‘who Joe is in league with and plainly; he is clever as mustard to get on with that man. Everything Joe touches is blessed by a quantity of profit, with a contrived innocence when bartering, which I quite admire.'

The time of day had an air of contrivance in it of another sort. Nature was a subtle arguer against certainty when shadows fell. Behind an old tree Stanton found the bullocky sitting on a fallen log mending a whip. Mick Tornley greeted him with a brown, toothless smile. Stanton remained on his horse and lifted his hat.

‘Good evening, there.'

‘Mister Stanton, you ave come round to see us rather late.'

‘Never too late for true friends, Mick, though aren't the days getting short as they can get, in this part of the world just now?'

‘It is gettin too dark to see,' agreed Mick.

‘Who was that horseman?'

‘A redcoat.'

‘So it was.'

There was no duplicity in the bullocky; more a sturdy feeling of limits. He made you doubt there was any wrongdoing within a fixed radius of himself — just regular business involved — which included this ground, those trees, and out as far as that departing rider lanky-legged in the saddle and making a clatter with something he carried. Mick was a man all at your service — or not, depending. You had to be one of the chosen with Mick, and Stanton believed he was.

Stanton strained his credulity to admit that a redcoat — any redcoat — had the right to do business with whomever he chose. It was quite possible to believe that whatever elaborate or nefarious business Joe Josephs was engaged in with officers, touched Mick Tornley only to the extent that it weighed on his waggon axles and decided on his bullocks' needs in fodder. He was square-necked, bushy black-bearded, with a thickly boned forehead as powerfully deep as a bull's brain plate. His cheeks were mahogany buffed from the winter sun. When he lifted his hat, his forehead, showing sweaty plastered hairs, was white as milk. Whatever went on in his head, he was quite devoid of curiosity about another person.

Mick stood with his legs planted wide coiling his whip. ‘If you don't mind, reverend, with your horse, get away.' Tornley stepped out then, into the little light remaining, slithered the whip through his fingers, raised his whip arm and shook out the plaited leather like a dusty snake, first merely upon the ground and then lifting it clean into the air where it looped back and forth, and in a final moment, cracked.

‘Good enough,' he assessed. ‘Tis better.'

Another crack, and stars appeared in the pale evening sky. Tornley's five bullocks, ambling closer, reacted to the sound, their heads swayed, they stamped their stocky forefeet. Then it was like Tornley created flashing points in the air — star points — over the head, along the flanks, there at the tail and down to the feet of an imagined sixth bullock. Stanton's hands sweated to take hold of the whip handle and create from it himself! Then on the other side of the clearing there appeared that sixth bullock, real as could be, pale, enormous, that raised its head and bellowed with tormented strength.

‘Ercules,' Tornley called it.

Stanton wanted to ask:

‘When are you leaving for the outlands, Mick?' ‘Who are Joe's trade goods for?' — but these were questions you did not ask a gentleman with bullocks.

A bullocky's wheels turned slow in a progress of lurching and leaning, straining and baulking, hardly to be described as progress at all. Yet the tracks of every bullock waggon ever hauling out from Parramatta remained deep cut in the ground years afterwards. It caused Stanton to consider coming on afterwards in the matter he was concerned with; not to rush but to follow and watch, as he was doing on the question of tempting the boy Warren Inchcape over to his service — to try not frightening up answers too much. It was how he worked his livestock — why not with men, for a change? Men left tracks of intention, they indicted themselves with their hearts.

Stanton dismounted and walked his mare around a stack, a hillock, of the most marvellous collection of valuable trade goods he had ever seen. His thoughts ran on:

‘Here in our colony! — formerly starved — where a two-pound of iron, shaped to a rake, is taken from a shed in risk of a man's neck; yet here, here in the open air, under a bare sky, is metal worth a thousand guineas, guarded by a mongrel dog to be bought with a bone, a pat on the head, or a tickle. Get behind me, you yeller mutt!'

The trade goods were spread on the ground by category, size and weight, ready for loading onto Tornley's six-wheeled waggon. Stanton saw in a glance, from as close as he could step without being savaged, sufficient items for the setting up of a stock camp or the foundations of a veritable sheep station as big as his own or bigger. Quite possibly Tornley and Joe had better information than Stanton could have dreamed: that not just was somebody out there
waiting for their supplies, but also their prime location was given. Allow Stanton a minute, and he would be able to calculate pretty exactly the number of head of sheep to be grazed by an ambitious settler from such a quantity of cast-iron pots, farming tools, boots, canvas buckets, sheep shears, tar tubs, tarpaulins, axes and big-toothed saws. It would be a fairly large clutch — around five thousand head! There was a quantity of corrosive sublimate, sulphur, bluestone, twine thread, gin, and also a trunk holding ‘household linnen', securely padlocked. Of sugar and flour there were several one-hundred-pound sacks. There might not be five thousand sheep or anything like that number spreading through the landscape awaiting these stores as yet, but that was the number being perfected, he estimated. By the time the goods were run out, and further supplies were needed, it would be … say two or three years' time and a good few lusty matings and well-rated lambings and so forth bringing the numbers up … and by the thousands, yet … because whoever the goods were going out to would not be in a hurry getting themselves back.

ON THE FAR SIDE OF the waggon, under a canvas fly, Stanton found Joe Josephs sitting on a square of carpet, wearing a battered top hat and a weskit of gold threads and blue buttons, his legs crossed and reciting prayers with his eyes rolled back in his head. Stanton waited respectfully until he was noticed, while supposing he was noticed from the moment he rode into Joe's camp, and even now in all probability from behind those intelligently elevated eyeballs … ‘It is Friday night,' he thought, ‘their Sabbath begins, the shadows are chilly blue, the sun is gone, and over in their home tent (now Stanton could see it, from where he stood) all's as it should be. The women have lit their candles …'

‘Amein,' said Joe, blinking up at his visitor.

‘Here we are again, my very good friend.'

Joe Josephs was aged around forty, narrow-faced, straggly red-bearded, with deeply set tired eyes and a Londoner's sooty pallor enduringly staining his weathered skin. Joe had a bird's nest of wiry hair, touched with drab grey fringes, that dangled to the front of his ears in two jouncing ringlets. His chest was concave, his back slightly humped. A character of energetic contemplation
burned in his eyes. When he unfolded himself from the ground, dusting his knees, doffed his top hat and stood fairly straight, he shone, you might say, shimmered, and you could see he was ready to get going, that he was a travelling man. He was forced by necessity to become a travelling man since being shipped to Botany Bay for the term of his natural life — and given few choices in working up a legitimate trade.

Joe walked ahead of Stanton taking long strides.

‘You have a lot of chattels here,' said Stanton.

‘Less than I did, since our governor took my best quart pots off of me. They all nested into each other, a proper bush man's kitchen.'

‘Was that a governor's man come over to nab them, the rider who left?'

‘And never paid me,' said Joe, ‘except in promises.'

‘Who was it?'

‘Captain Tom Rankine.'

‘Never heard of him. Rankine, you say?'

‘Ugly Tom Rankine they calls him, he is our governor's boon companion. Rode off with them quart pots swinging from his elbows. They have a nitpick on the creek tomorrow, the swells, and must have the best ironmongery.'

‘A picnic, you mean.'

‘I stand corrected,' said Joe, putting his hand to his head, and leering intelligently at the minister.

Stanton mentally consulted his list of officers, over which he stood poised ready to strike off names, or else to double underline them. He considered the name Rankine, then struck it off after asking:

‘Are any more of these items to be his — the camp ovens, the bluestone, the gin? Does Ugly Tom Rankine want them?'

‘If he does, he's not asked me.'

‘Who's are they to be, then, Joe?'

‘All are mine, still, at present,' said Joe. ‘They are my stock in trade, my inventory. They are not orders of anyone's in particular. They are available, my friend, first come first served to settlers in the bush. This here is a travelling store. When on the road, we make our house under one end of the waggon, Mick at the other. We shall get to your homestead by and by, but remember: the farrer out I travel, the greater the percentages I put on. One per cent each mile is a fairly good rule I am working up to my customers, a little less to my friends. So, before I gets too far out your way, cast your eyes over some pots and pans, gardening tools, dried peas by the loose weight, fish hooks, Batavian hatchets, flints, or if it's castor oil you wants … What is it you wants, now, less the twenty-four per cent I am entitled add for your twenty-four miles of road?'

‘I think you know.'

‘Not a new rake, is it?' said Joe.

‘I have my good one. It is repaired since Kale broke it.'

‘Mine are better made.'

‘I have no doubt of it.'

‘But as you mention that name, Kale,' said Joe.

‘Yes?'

‘Then I think — believe — it's a crystal ball you wants.'

‘So,' said Stanton, lowering his voice disappointedly. ‘You've heard nothing?'

‘Nothing. Or nothing much. But I do have something for us to look at, after we've eaten our supper.'

‘Must it wait?' said Stanton, taking Joe by the wrist and squeezing hard.

‘Ouch! Where is that woman?' said Joe. ‘Oi! Marfa! Give the man dinner!'

Inside the tent was a bench and a plain plank table. Stanton was told to put a hat on his head, and look foolish while Joe said a prayer over a cup of sweet wine. They munched on bread sprinkled with salt, to remind them of the bitterness of life.

At last their plates were wiped clean of chicken fat. The daughter, Leah, served them honeycakes, and the boy, Arthur, played the violin. A frenzied tune, then a sad one. The youngest boy, Solly, danced a sailor's dance on the dusty spot.

When all such rites were complete, Stanton took Joe by the elbow and steered him back outside. Joe threw sticks on the fire, making a blaze they could see by, brighter than a lamp, and keeping Stanton waiting no longer, withdrew from his pocket a staple of fleece.

‘Wool,' breathed Stanton, his eyes following every movement of the mellow, waxy material.

He experienced a kick in the chest. An unappeasable appetite for possession. He watched Joe twirling the swatch of fibres, and thought, what a marvel Joe was with that element dangling from his fingers. To the inexpert eye the material was no more than a dusty rag, while Stanton saw otherwise. It was a magical worm, a necklace, a cloudy icicle, a misty knife. It was fine sheep's wool, the essence of distinction over the tawdriness of daily shapes. And surely it led back to Desmond Kale more certainly than search parties of mounted troopers and knavish blacktrackers.

‘Aren't it pretty,' said Joe.

Stanton saw white sparks deflected down a tumble of greasy crimps as Joe layered it across his cupped hands, a gift.

‘My deepest thanks.'

‘You owe me nuffink, saving something I would like to ask of you, which is a few pointers, or lessons in wool, for me and my sons in telling good stuffs from bad. We have been badly misled in several consignments.'

‘The first principle is the greatest.'

‘Which is?'

‘The hook.'

‘I never heard of such a thing with sheep,' said Joe. ‘Except at the butcher's.'