The Ballad of Desmond Kale (49 page)

HAVING THE WHOLE WIDE SEA to themselves for the second time in their short lives they could barely contain their wonder at the reversal of fortune. When they were marooned drifting they'd dreamed of such a boat. Waves slapped the underside of her as she carried them along. One of them worked the tiller while the other stood high as he could holding onto a shroud and shading a hand across his eyes.

‘Is anyone followin, yet?'

‘I can't see nobody. Don't mean they ain't there.'

The little boat seemed almost to shout aloud that she was in better-deserved hands than she was with a bunch of dirty sealers, and so she'd hurry them along. Why, she was a tighter and more responsive bundle of salvation than two such mortal souls ever deserved. They might even see reason in keeping her and making her theirs if they ever found land! They'd sail her up rivers and pirate their way along in full charge, doing what was needed to get back their choices so lately stolen away. When they reached dry land they might even try out a few lessons they'd learned as ones who suffered but wouldn't no more. One sure thing was, that when
it came down to trust, it would be hard to give it to anyone, except each other.

In the bottom of the boat they found waterproof canvases stowed for shelter of the coming night, jugs of water, lucifer matches, salt meat, hunks of bread, hard cheese, and a flagon of rum all stowed ready for an island camp that was never going to happen for a company of rogues. They were good sailors, though, it had to be said, who got their boat so ready for strangers. In this blowy change of wind, it was found that because of the sail layout being so conveniently prepared by those who might by other chance have knocked them on the head, things went very well indeed. When the mizzen was sheeted on hard, then the boat lay comfortably hoved to, head to wind, while the pair of them enjoyed a respite and looked each other over with such unaccustomed smiles on their faces, as they'd been trying out since they left the island. Pepperpots and the Admiral. Was
that
who they were?

They blinked, to find it was safe to say otherwise, when only the wind, and a few seabirds were listening.

‘Titus Stanton, is that you, matey, sitting on your arse bones?'

‘Warrie inch-long boy, with your balls so black and blue. I thought you bin done with sailin all over the world, mate.'

‘Not till we get safe over, I ain't. Till then we have a ship. She's a good one and all.'

‘An she is.'

From the direction of the seal island a leaning pillar of smoke came in their direction. It was easy to guess that all the grass must have been set on fire to scare men out in the contest between them.

‘I'm smellin smoke,' said Titus, with a look of pleasure on his beloved mug. ‘When we get to land, I'm thinkin, a fire is what we want, to warm us.'

‘It won't be tonight, mate,' said Warren. He stood in the stern and scanned the northern horizon. ‘I don't see no land signs and there weren't none this morning, neither, when I looked.'

‘When'll it be, cap'n?'

‘That, God knows.'

They were shivering cold and wet, but after they wiped their faces with a rag and took swills of rum they were warmer. Warren attended the helm and swung her back into making way, with the wind on the port side, hugging the tiller under his armpit — keeping her up to the wind. If he'd learned anything at all in the time he'd been flung away from his truest life, it was about finding direction. He believed, more or less, that they were heading nor-nor' east. There wasn't any compass to prove the guess, but in the sea they were in they were obliged to hold her a direction as best they could — just in case they sailed clear past New Holland and back into the Pacific Ocean again. What a trick that would be. Never again to know their land, and the only taste of it given, a sandy hollow with dead seals on one side and a womback in the middle.

Holding the white ball of the sun at his left shoulder Warren kept trying and thought about ways to keep safe in the night. This gale that was driving them was getting stronger. It was coming on faster than they liked. As they crossed the waves Titus crouched sheltered in the bow. He sang a song, a droning melody Warren hadn't heard in a good long time, except it meant he was happy.

And safe. So safe now that in his mind he started to go back and must have arrived on his home dirt already. It was allowed by their circumstances, allowed in feelings long banned from their hearts.

‘Remember that Mr Moon, Warrie, that old man belongin to Laban Bale? It's his song I'm singin, y'know.'

‘Mr Moon,' said Warren. ‘A course I remember Mr Moon. He that studied the ground for prints, when the parson's ram was took — I recollect he mumbled a lot, an if the parson had of listened to half what he said, he coulda had Ugly Tom Rankine by the nuts sooner than later.'

‘That same one, Mr Moon, is the one. Him that was called Mun'mow,' nodded Titus.

‘Mun'mow? Get along. Mun'mow was my father's servant, in the good old days. My father's servant went to England with him. It is in all them papers, that old Governor Wilkie is getting for me, that are sure to make me right.'

‘Well, but it's all the same fella, Warrie — Mun'mow was too pluddy hard for white men to say. England, he said it was no good for black fellas.'

‘You never told me.'

‘You never askit me, Brother.'

Titus arranged himself under the canvas, pulled his knees up to his chin, and prepared himself for sleep. But it was too early for sleep. Before sleep was allowed, Warren gave a warning: ‘Let's get his tub tidied and see what's needed for dark.'

Warren's memories of how they'd dropped nearly all their belongings in the water were his worst recollections of their crazed time adrift. Things went straight to the bottom if they weren't held.

Warren got Titus busy, and the two of them stowed all the loose goods back under the whaleboat's hatches. When it was all put away they had a great feed of bread and pork to get them through the night. Then as a last precaution, they lashed a rope around the waist of each of them, and tethered themselves to the sides, in case they were washed over.

So it was all right for many, many hours of flying along with the tiller lashed to a steady course. The gale dropped to a strong wind, and the sea instead of being choppy eased to long swells. The wind dropped even more and things were most comfortable under the tilting stars, except it was shivering cold. Everything Warren had learned from boats he put to use, and the most he learned for this night's sailing was from a captain named Maule, a captain named Ashcraft, and an old slave boatman, Peres.

From the time they left the island to the time the Cross swung over, in a clear windswept sky not far from dawn, Warren estimated it was seventeen or eighteen hours of swift sailing they had done. He was anxious for dawn in case they made land, though having no idea how far land might be — an hour away or a day away or a week's hard sailing away? How could he know?

It must have been about four in the morning when Warren was wide awake, cold and wet, but filled with elation that the night was almost through, when their boat slid down a wave, hit something — it was surely a whale — pitchpoled, which was to say, turned completely over and landed in the sea upside down.

Warren was thrown into the water on one side of the hull, Titus on the other. They went under and came up, floundered, gasped, went under and came up again. Then they found some sort of grip although where they found it they were later unable to remember, except to wonder that whatever they needed to lay hands on seemed to be at the ready in the dark. They scrambled from opposite sides of the hull to find themselves roped, still, and sitting on the boat's narrow keel, which, they found — all in the same instant — gave enough weight to start righting her! The masts came up level in the water with the sails like a stingrays floating under the surface. Warren had no idea what was to happen next, when the whole boat
shuddered and righted, low but standing upright! and spilling Titus down on the side he'd appeared from, and Warren under the other, without either of them having exchanged a word except loud curses and coughs of sea water.

THE GUNWALES OF THE WHALEBOAT were even with the sea and the entire inside of the boat awash. The other lucky shot was that the wind fell away almost completely though there was still a long swell. From the distance came the low pounding drum of surf, and they were in for it; they clung to the sides of the boat listening; and then they climbed back in, or rather floated over the sides back in, and untied their waist ropes in starlight to find all lines everywhere tangled like a nest of snakes. Warren splashed around cutting lines and bringing the sails down. They had not lost very much, considering they still had their oars, when Titus gave a cry:

‘Lookit tiss!'

Warren turned around and saw Titus holding their bucket, which was tied by a line. There was no need to tell an old shipmate to start bailing her out as furiously as he could. It was warming work and they went to it until the first daylight.

By then they had her buoyant again, though sloppy with water, riding low, and could see, by standing and holding to the mast, how colour changed and light crept across the horizon. What seemed a
pile of dark sky changed into high hills, ridges and gullies and shadowed folds all timbered and coming down to a seacoast of yellow sand and white misty breakers. And there was smoke. Everywhere there was smoke. This was their sought land, surely, and if they ever doubted it, a white cockatoo came over the sea and flapped above their heads before turning back towards land again to greet the morning there.

‘Car'away,' said Titus.

Warren shed some tears.

Each time a high wave lifted them they looked around on the sight of land pouring from east to west, coming up from the vague distance and going off into vague distance again. The curve of beaches before them, one after the other running along a fair way.

Grabbing the oars, taking a side each and nosing the boat clumsily stern to the swell, they did not register anything more of it in their busy wet work except the bang of wood on wood, the roar and hiss of waves too close to them. Waves curved, swelled, went silently flat with foam and eddies, and then collapsed away under them. The boat surged nose down, shipping water, but held. They had no doubt of it as they sang out to each other in excitement. ‘Heave away, haul away home …'

It was not in their control to be brought where they wanted to be. But brought there finally they were.

 

Now they came in sideways, crossing the bar, struggling with oars in a chop where a gap of water appeared in front of them instead of the beach. Waves creamed on both sides towards them with the speed of bolting horses and the boat was caught in their collision, shuddered and was part knocked down. Somehow she came
upright again. Aided by tide, wind, and shouted curses, she rose on a crest, hesitated and then fell headlong down, hissingly gaining speed — and was shot in from the sea at last.

After much confusion they found themselves floating on a salty lake. It was sheltered and they could hear bird calls.

An eddy took them close to the inside shore. They gaped and breathed coarsely like two dying fish thrown in the boat. The water was the colour of tea. It had leaves and twigs in it and these they parted as they made way. Behind them, as behind a wall, the surf they had come through continued to sound. It could not touch them while the tide of it still carried them. Exhausted they allowed the tide to do what it must. They lay in their boat's sides and gazed at the banks where they saw wallabies grazing under paperbark trees and if they had wanted a fish, they could have trawled with their fingers for mullet and snapper, as easy as could be.

She nosed into a bank and they scrambled ashore on grass. The land rocked worse than the sea, or so it felt. Warren tied a line around a tree root and Titus gathered wood at once for a fire. He made two fires with flints they had in oilskin, and cleared a space between them where he would sleep. They discovered a fireplace of stones, with broken clay pipes and bones of fish. There were no footprints or signs of occupation, no tracks of men. There was just an old piece of rope, charred at one end, and a broken bottle showing that glass was worked on a rock and, may be, spear points made from it. That made them look around and wonder.

At dusk Titus went around with bunches of leaves and swept the sand clean for the distance of a good few yards away from the fires. It was a grove of sheoaks where they chose their camp. The wind sifted through their needles with a low-pitched moan familiar to each of them as the sound of the creek at Laban Vale, that so-often
dry creek with its trees and sand, where Titus was flogged up and down.

That night they ate fish cooked in the coals, drank more of their rum, smoked their pipes, and went to bed on the ground with their bellies full and no thoughts for the future. They were wrapped in the blanket of the earth and their nostrils were crammed with the smells and sensations they remembered from when they were boys. Although, where were sheep, Warren asked, in this country, now they were back? — their bleating cries as much a part of the air as bird calls, their reek of dust, their habit of breaking down the undergrowth that made any place formerly untouched left changed by them. May be if the trees parted a bit more and they went inland a bit more they would come to a more open country. May be there would be travelling flocks, and people scattered along, in huts and inns, with smoke drifting up from their chimneys (such as the parson used to imagine would be Warren's). They could begin to ask word of a party of traders, Jews of London, the father a ginger-bearded fence, his jug-built wife a forger, their two sons, one musical, the other a mere boy but a horse rider, and their lovely crippled daughter, did she still live? Oh, and a silent man named Mick Tornley with bullocks and stores (silent except when he swore at his teams) — and Warren would ask if they still had travelling with them a woman, tall and long-stepping, Mrs Rankine. And what news of Captain Tom, taken by the traps, and of a man named Desmond Kale? Were Kale's deeds still sung?

The sighing of the wind in the trees asked these questions.

In the morning they saw the sea on one side and steep hills on the other as a barricade.

Titus showed Warren a worried look: ‘They come in our camp in the night,' he said, after finding a toeprint in the sand, a disturbed
twig. He was despondent. He killed a brown snake, skinned it, and spilled its belly contents in the grass. Then he grilled the snake in the ashes and felt better.

There was a map Warren had seen of New Holland's east coast, and although it was about as complete, in resemblance, as a few half-digested lizards cut from the belly of a snake and laid out in a line on a plank, the known parts separated from the unknown parts by wormy gaps, it reminded him that if Van Diemen's Land was at their backs, then this coastline they were thrown onto ran north, and north again until it met Port Jackson where Sydney was, and where the river led up to Parramatta and so on out. It was the best hope they had — to sail north — except getting back on the sea was not a very strong attraction.

Then the whole problem of getting their boat out through the bar was made simpler when Titus came running through the trees yelling that people were massing at the end of their spit of land; they spoke a bad language and held their spears meaning bad business, and before Warren was even able to throw his gear in the boat, Titus was ahead of him, untying the tether, jumping in waist deep, and pushing their whaleboat off.

How they broached the bar going out was in one part reliant on catching the outgoing last of the tide, which they managed to do with a small sail tugging them upright. But the main part of what drove them on was the cry of strangers against them and, at the last, a spear hurled with such penetrating accuracy that if it wasn't for a puff of wind veering them, they would have been struck hard in the timbers. It only showed they weren't the first comers to this haven, otherwise they might have been greeted in some quieter fashion. Whoever had been through that bar before them — explorers, sealers, or soldiers laying claim — hadn't been liked: and may be had died.

The weather remained fair with a burst of hard southerlies as they put themselves to the task of sailing back to the only civilisation they knew, where there were sheep, redcoats and men breaking stones. It was found always a little ahead of where they were at the end of each day. They went, it must have been, two hundred miles, before they began to ask, as a new promontory loomed up, ‘Is that the South Head where the signal light was, where Captain Maule flagged goodbye?' No, it was not, for as each headland emerged from its haze, it was never inhabited nor as precipitous high as the ones at Sydney's Port Jackson, with its crumbled broken cliffs.

Finding sheltered coves they slept on beaches, or up rivers when they found them. They saw few people, except for their fires in the hills, and sometimes on the shore, where they avoided them by sailing on. The sun beat down in their faces. It was an endlessly unfolding country upon their left arm and its rival the sea on the right. They were not always able to find an estuary, but when they did, it was jumping with fish, and a few times they repeated their performance in crossing a bar.

 

As they came farther north Titus remembered more of his languages, or so it seemed to Warren when they came upon people again — a man and his wife gathering cockles and a grumpy man with warrior scars who showed them where to find drinking water, in reedy springs, and tried to take their fishing gear away from them. When they sat down with him, some intelligence was gleaned. Noisy, he was called by whites. They learned from Noisy of white men who wandered this country lost out of their wits
wearing the broad arrow and the canary jacket, some still carrying around their irons cause they couldn't get out of them. These men were afraid of blacks beyond reason. They would rather go back to barracks and be flogged and hung than deal with them after their first encounters. It never surprised them to be speared or have their bodies eaten by meat ants on a gravel mound. If they had no weapons they ran away and slept shivering under rock overhangs or in hollow trees, petrified as cowards. If they had arms, they used them.

Then there was a man Noisy told them about who wasn't an escaped convict at all. The black rogue described him in mime, prancing around the fire until Warren and Titus got the splits laughing. It was done with such respect. It was like another man appeared before them in the firelight, a white man made out of a black man's admiration. He had a deformed left ear, a limp, and he came down from the high country with bullocks and horses and wandered up and down between the coastal swamps, his bullocks speared as they were caught in the swamps and feasted upon by big parties at cooking fires, and bullock fat running down their chests until their bellies were too fat to touch.