The Ballad of Desmond Kale (5 page)

‘THE HOOK — IT IS THE means of taking hold,' said Stanton, ‘say between grasses, seeds, in the way they cling; among insects with their feelers, birds with their claws, fish with scales, man with his fingers, teeth, and his generative organs; God has decreed it among all with their scents and colours, down into in our cravings for attraction; and further in the affinity of thoughts as philosophies, in the mechanisms and mysteries of love, in the possibilities of accidents or otherwise deciding our fates. See this tiny filament or threadlet of wool?'

Stanton separated one out in the firelight.

‘Stop there,' said Joe. ‘It is more like a cobweb than an hook.'

‘It is all in the catch and the tangle. A thread of wool is made up of scales, the scales hook threads together making wools and worsteds. The hook is the great binder of wool's existence; the catch is its means; the tangle is a natural state.'

‘Tangles explains my life, at least,' said Joe. ‘But I still don't understand wools.'

‘It needs English mills to unravel it all. They are marvels at
straightening threads to make them usable, and they need the best raw wools, and we can find them for them, Joe.'

‘I'm not much helped.'

‘You will be if you come to my place directly, but without your outrageous percentages stacked on. I will show you more what I mean. I shall unpick your tangle and make you rich.'

Stanton smoothed the sample along the length of his forearm.

‘Where was it found?'

Joe could not say. His informants were out of their wits, he said, at the western limit of signs, at the tumbled sandstone ramparts on the far side of the biggest river. They found dead men's bones. They would have died themselves, except their tracker found a way. After a three-day return ride they came back where waggon tracks converged, and there they found Joe. A trooper, and his blacktracker, the two men bargained for gin and lapped it up like dogs did water. For which they paid in this handful of floss gathered from thorn bushes.

All they'd said was, that from where it was found, either all were perished — or they had maps to go on, to take them as far as China.

‘Maps?' said Stanton.

‘Except there ain't no maps, from what I have heard.'

‘Correct. None that anyone has ever laid eyes on, Joe. Remember that. You are wise to say so. It is a vast impoverished
terra incognita
out there.'

 

Stanton rode off into the night, found a dry sandy spot, wrapped himself in his blanket and went to sleep in the bushes. Joe's staple of wool burned warm under his vest and tickled his armpit with its presence.

In the middle of the night he woke, the dome of the heavens sparkling overhead, his nose very cold. Every star cluster was a shred of shining fleece hanging in the sky.

Later he heard a horseman approaching, and raised himself on an elbow. Two horses went past, one a saddle horse and the other a packhorse outlined against the stars. The rider sat forward in the saddle, huddled in a greatcoat. It was the bearing of a military campaigner. Nobody came after.

Just before dawn Stanton woke with dried gum leaves in his hair, crusted sleep in his eyes. There was dirt on the palms of his hands, ants in the folds of his shirt, a scorpion in his boots. When he knelt to pray he kept his eyes open wishing for the rider, his night's passing companion, to step forward from between the trees. That would happen soon enough, he decided: he was armed for that rider now by a weapon of wool.

It was his very man, he was certain, and only lacked a name, that greatcoated apparition. For there was no reason for an officer to be riding south into unoccupied lands except the suspicion that Kale and his cohorts awaited him. They were not perished, Stanton reasoned, or walking to China — as the ignorant contended — but through feasible possession of maps had possibly doubled back this side of the biggest river, and found a way on, in the direction of wastelands, swamps, rocky ridges, and reedy coarse uplands known since the beginnings of settlement as a scramble of frigid dessications not worth the trouble of exploring.

‘Not worth the trouble of exploring' — now there was a phrase that hooked in Stanton's brain.

These were, he remembered well, the words of a pestilential man who came to the colony some fourteen years ago, under letters of credence from Sir Joseph Banks. He was Stanton's fellow York
shireman George Marsh, a former blacksmith and weaver, who, by heeding herbal cures for sick horses, had come to studies of botany in a large way, in his home village by the moors, with a strong enough opinion of his self worth to gain a patron's appointment to Botany Bay.

George Marsh's influence had been strong in this particular: holding that while New South Wales rivalled North America in size, the only part worth cultivating was the circle of land out from Parramatta. The rest was only interesting to science, damnably rough and dry, realm of the hardscrabble black man and his bride. For many years until now it was truly sufficient land as it was, and Stanton himself had the pick of it (though he wanted more). Of the broken, tumbled sandstone country Marsh trekked, ringed to the north, ranged to the west, banked obscurely to the south, the best he claimed was that it was ‘like walking on rooftops'. Botany Bay accordingly was a pastoral prison, where sheep might safely graze inside those wider crumbled prison walls of New South Wales.

George Marsh had held the government post of naturalist, bird fancier, and explorer manqué for around five years before decamping back to England after completing his botanical collections and vain explorations. He had irritated Stanton extremely with his manners.

One day Marsh's cockatoo attacked Stanton's whippet, when all lived in disharmony at Parramatta, and the fellow had the arrogance to curse Stanton for keeping such an imbecile pencil-thin-headed dog. ‘If Marsh was a gentleman he would have been shot in a duel,' Stanton liked to say. Although married, Marsh had amours: it was said he left a child in the colony born to a convict Jezebel. Dolly was never able to find which one.

Then Kale, to crown Stanton's annoyance, finagled assignment as Marsh's servant for Marsh's great (but unsung) expedition to the south and south-west. They went with a native companion and guide, named Mun'mow. It was under a governor's mandate to allow Marsh to search for government cattle gone wild and bred up in the vicinity of Aleppo Mere, one of a bundle of names Marsh gave to untamed places that made them impossible for anyone to find later, and if they were found again, as these particular cattle swamps were (Stanton coveting them for his own grazing) the names were changed back to something more sensible.

But Marsh went far beyond those swamps, for certain knowledge — he was away two months. He came back fairly subdued, you might say, tired and starving. But smug. Vainglorious. His black-fellow, Mun'mow, he took along with him when he returned to England, with the hope of making a gentleman's valet of his attentiveness.

If Marsh had ever the decency to pass any discoveries around instead of holding them to his private self when he returned to England, he might have made profits. Stanton might have been his friend. If the heroics of settlement were ever to be written, Marsh's name might stand tall among them. Yet the most lasting consequence of Marsh's New South Wales life was the grinding suspicion that he'd gone many more hundreds of miles farther inland than claimed, and that Kale kept his secrets. So if there were maps, Kale knew about them, but of maps Kale had never spoken: a league of whips hadn't unscrolled maps out of him. Indeed about the one action Stanton liked of Marsh's was his declaration, over some matter of dispute, that Kale was an incalculable rogue, and had taken liberties disobeying decisions Marsh took on their meanderings, and had to be sent home.

When Stanton completed his ride to Laban Vale after his night in the bush, stumbling into his house stiff-jointed, dazed, but more than illuminated, it was still early frosty dawn. Dolly and their daughter, Ivy, and Titus their boy, and their convict servants, numbering five and twenty including bond stockmen and convict shepherds locked in the barrack rooms' sheds, were still asleep. Stanton bundled in beside Dolly, worked his arms around her, shivering from what he knew, from what the staple of wool would lead him to, if he trusted it, in its close readable wriggles. Let wool be his maps and damnation to maps on paper.

Dolly was aware he'd been gone all night, as he pressed closer for a warm touch of her. She trusted his absences, for when he slept in the bush, making his busy way through the wide country, it was to be getting on with his preaching and magistrating, his disputing over land and livestock. Bold enterprise made the two of them stronger.

There were plenty of reasons for being fearful, yet Stanton was never too afraid to lie down and nuzzle the stones. Let there be grunts, scratches, howls and shrieks alarming others. Night in this country was God's invitation to meet the Devil. Let escaped convict malcontents know that every shadowed log or lump of boulder might be their minister. Let their nights in the bush drive them mad with thinking of him. Likewise the native populations, till they found God.

UGLY TOM RANKINE WAS NO stranger to the game of riding out from Parramatta past the sleeping farms with their spike-collared guard dogs and man traps set for miscreants. But this was only Rankine's second time in full danger, counting the ride he made with Kale, Moreno, and the sheep, after the freeing of Kale.

There was a feeling of breaking free of oppression past Stanton's Laban Vale into the starry bigness of the south. There Rankine found he could breathe better, his heart calmer in his chest.

He rode with his packhorse on a short lead, setting a good pace. Saddlebags bulged with salt, sugar, tea, flour, small sacks of corrosive sublimate, sulphur, and bluestone — and strapped across that load were blankets, a precious axe, and a nest of metal canisters, each fitting one into another and promising a fine sort of camp kitchen to men owning nothing more to sup from than a tin beaker between them. That beaker they had fought over from the start: Kale said Moreno did spit in it; Moreno said Kale did piss in it, and down in his blanket roll, too, because he was a dirty drunk. To keep
Moreno happy there was a bag of confectionary ingredients, ground sugar, dried coconut, cochineal and concentrated flavours more treasured in a country of paltry gratifications than diamonds. With sugars and sheep's milk cheeses Moreno was the master of caramelos. He started out life as a starveling boy in a castle kitchen of Estremadura, where his mother was scullery maid, the pair of them scoffing fudges, toffees and jellies until his belly stuck out and she lost her teeth. There was also a canteen of rum Tom Rankine carried, and four bottles of French brandy. It was what Kale asked, at great expense, to be brought back for them, and whatever Kale wanted Rankine swore to provide — except, when Kale asked for a woman, Rankine was evasive.

‘Any one mainly?' he'd said — as the colony was a market of tradeable females and whores.

Kale answered with a name: Croppy Biddy Magee, asking if she was his way inclined; he thought she could be, ‘For I am thinking of the darling more than I might.'

It was a fair enough question, an honest desire, but an unreasonable hope. Tom Rankine was shaken by it. Not because Kale was fifty-three years old and Biddy Magee aged but nineteen. She was pretty enough for a king. Nor did he think about any difficulties for a young Irish woman living in the wild bush with an outlaw. Not if it was Kale.

Biddy Magee, camp follower, was passed round a circle of compliance since Clumpsy M'Carty saved her after the battle of Badajoz. No more than a girl, in grief at the loss of her protector, a grenadier; Clumpsy had found her with some other adventuring females in the same distressing condition. The sky was their canopy, the turf their pillow as they followed Wellington's army in Spain. They had travelled to England with Rankine and his
thousand sheep, and afterwards come on to Botany Bay. Biddy was Clumpsy's charge on the
Melanthus
on their voyage out. When Clumpsy was arrested for horse stealing Biddy went on trial with him. Both became convicts. If it were not for Biddy bewitching the judge advocate, they might have hung.

The thorn in it now was Biddy's present whereabouts, as assigned convict servant in Tom Rankine's domestic arrangements at Parramatta. It was foggy and frosty in the creek hollow where Rankine had his cottage. The floorboards and the bed boards creaked. With Biddy to warm his bones, Rankine had, at that time, and for the best part of a year, no reason for believing his life would change in the respect of love, for the excuse that Biddy's passion was easy, she was willingly warm enough — only a little gentling was required, and sometimes a drink of wine while they laughed and joked, and so very nicely glued to his ribs she was then, that nothing much else was wanted, he believed, on his side of the bed, nor hers, than his enjoyment and pleasure.

Then he had a directing dream. A herd of sheep passed him in a clatter of hooves and from out of their swirling dust a face of beauty and pure longing turned to him with a human gaze. He woke with his heart still going out, even while his arms went around Biddy, and while he stirred against her and they even found each other, he was lost to that other one, who was, he knew, Meg Inchcape.

He recalled when it started. How could he ever forget? A crowd of bond women went up a road to get back inside the walls of the female factory before dark. When they broke from each other, one remained outside and Tom Rankine followed her with his eyes. It was his first sight of her. Fixed in his memory was her free style of walking along a road, a barefooted beauty floating with a gypsy
woman's elastic step, her skirts swaying and her large breasts flouncing and her black hair flying out. He learned she was a free woman of convict blood, the famed recalcitrant Desmond Kale's daughter.

After his morning's dream Rankine went out looking for her in the real light of day. The part of his dream that was still ramping up his bones, thickening his blood with desire, roused the most extraordinarily brutal coarse desire unfettered by the idealism of his vision. It rubbed him against his breeches, that day, and he feared that if he didn't blister he would gratify himself on his horse with its skittering in the open road. Parramatta was not such a big town and it did not take very long until he came into sight of her. All he told himself was one word, ‘Everything' — that everything depended on reaching her, and after he reached her, on discovering her, knowing her, asking her; but what? Hand in marriage? Heat of raging bed? There was that moment in her dreamed gaze — as it found him, when it smokily enclosed him — when the future was revealed to him as an entire sphere.

Meg carried a laundry bundle on one shoulder, held by a bare browned arm, the other arm swinging free. It was like a club was wielded on Rankine from the inside of him at the sight of her. She went along a dusty street and he rode alongside her, bidding good day from a dry mouth, and touching his cap. She stopped and stared at him indifferently. She took a step back. A sadness or reverie in the angled solemnity of her expression pleased him. In a voice rather ordinarily inflected and flat, she said, ‘Where do you think you are going on that fine horse, trooper — forward, back front, or sideways? Let me go past. Have you no control of her?'

‘Madame, you must be joking,' he heard himself say. He chose to be slighted! And so saying heeled his mount into a rearing
cavalry stance, useful for decapitating Hindoos while wielding a cutlass, but otherwise open to question, and imaginably seeing his frightening horse reflected in her curved hazel eyes, its neck stretched, its teeth enormous, its front hooves raking the air and the whole entire tableau bespeaking idiocy out of proportion.

‘Go by, there is your passage, ma'am!'

The horse sank to its four feet and Rankine found himself being laughed at.

There was bold contempt in the way Meg tucked her hair back into her bonnet while bending her head and reaching one hand up behind her bare neck, somehow strokingly. Then the second look back. It showed she was interested. Or so he thought as their encounter settled. The way she put the little finger of her right hand to her teeth and nipped the fingernail, while balancing her washing so adroitly. She had long elegant feet, fine strong toes sifting the dust of the road. Her workaday habit and physical bearing was an example of the power of those with nothing. How much humble suffering had gone into her making? She foretold a great seriousness. Or a great continuing foolishness in him, whatever.

‘Madame …'

That word, the address of a vapid charmer, not useful on washer-women unless despicably intended.

Oh, but the connecting gesture: the way she turned on her heel and walked off. Loping you might say, loping and the image of her long-legged high-breasted walk multiplying into the thunder of the herd. The way her long black hair streamed behind and her catching eyes stirred around her. It affirmed her importance, her power as she shifted her washing bundle from the left to the right shoulder. The ordinary civilities of love defeated him. His face took on a saturnine demeanour.

What Rankine thought was, in the interval of a few deep breaths and giddy notions: ‘With this woman I shall spend the rest of my life. I shall forsake all others. Together we might do anything. Everything depends on reaching her, and after I reach her, on being raked from the throat to the belly stave.'

They went their separate directions.

And really as it ensued, she continued ignoring him: he was quite put out. Boxes of sugar candies he sent her (made by the master of caramelos) roused no response. When he saw her at the governor's washing lines she contrived to ignore him. He pursued his dangerous interest with Kale. For without his wool thriving Rankine had nothing to offer anyone, not even himself.

When he learned that Stanton was proposing to take over Meg's son, Warren Inchcape, as his tied apprentice, he was dumbfounded. When he learned that Meg, in a reversal of convict loyalties and trusted bonds, might negotiate conditions with Kale's flogger, he was dumbfounded more. When he realised he loved Meg regardless he was dumbfounded to the limit of his understanding.

 

Rankine rode on without stopping. In the night country it meant picking along slow, his horse stumbling and shying. It was something he'd done enough times in Spain in the interests of advantage, ridden all night, gone hungry until he was done.

Here there was danger of blacks; danger of getting lost; risk of straying from the only possible direction into ravines on the left and right; tumbling into dry riverbeds; going over cliffs. Fear of those who slept in the bush was another particular. Rankine damped that fear, his courage being all cultivated nonchalance. When he glanced groundwards in the radiant starlight and saw a
figure in a blanket roll in the early hours, a pale round face under a woollen cap, there and then gone — like the moon on the floor of earth, where it didn't belong — he was alarmed, and spurred his horse on. It was said that the minister, Stanton, went out after dark and lay with the Devil. Such blatant superstitions made the Irish affectionate, yet Rankine had seen him.

Even so: in Spain there was worse — treachery, banditry, insurrection, and disease. There was never this profound stillness, this feeling of benign immensity hanging from the stars down into the treetops. A pair of horse's ears framed a universe of breathing trees and low fires burning on the ridges. If harm should come, it would arrive in the midst of unbroken satisfaction. There was a white sandy path formed by wild cattle. It shone in the starlight mile after mile. Stars came up behind, stars wheeled down ahead, bleary in smoke.

Then it was pink misty morning, the birds of this country all screaming, cackling, scraping, piping, whistling. There was never such a show. Doves, cockatoos, parrots, finches. How Kale named them! listing what he called ‘that first man', George Marsh, the naturalist, had called them. In the misty gullies kangaroos stood watching in mobs of dozens as the horseman rode past. There was one remained longer, stocky as a man in a tight grey overcoat, with furred testicles hanging below.

By this hour Rankine was at the southerly boundary of occupied lands. He was at the farthest fling of Stanton's Laban Vale, broadly defined as all territory between where Rankine now stood — a smoky blue ridge visible from a hilltop near the minister's house — and a view from the same hilltop along in the other direction, towards far distant Parramatta. The western border was the biggest river, glimpsed metallically shining in a grey expanse; and rising from the far bank was the wrinkle-ridged, blind-canyoned, impass
able blue and smirched gold Caemarthens, as Marsh had named them, that had spat him out.

Rankine climbed into the fork of a tree, took his telescope and looked back. Implanted in the trunk he found a rusted spike with ridges of bark grown around it. An earlier governor, having in mind to clip Stanton's terrain, had sent out a few settlers this way. Within months they were Stanton's church deacons, making long rides to the Laban Vale chapel, St Botolph's, for Sunday observance. Soon they were in his employment, to make ends meet. When their potato crops failed, their isolation drove them spare and they walked off their farms despondent. Stanton called them his poor strugglers. Claiming their land back for grazing, he petitioned the governor for many thousands of acres more: if the governor would not give it to him, he would sail to London, he publicly declared, and get it from the king.

‘And I have met him, this great man,' mused Rankine, ‘lying in the dirt, scratching his cods, and my horse's hooves kicking pebbles in his face, as he lay there and not speaking.'

Rankine rode on, splashing into duck marshes, no way around them. He watched two emus stalk through a chewed grassland on the other side. For a time he was lost. Then some familiar ridges reached down. ‘Look for the ones like five fingers of a hand,' Kale had reminded, and Rankine was then able to follow particular kinds of tree, as Kale had instructed him, so far with the stringybarks, higher up with the boxes, all the rest of the way along into the ones called ash, then the woollybutts, growing wide apart enough for a bullock waggon to fit between comfortably, if it ever pushed through. Leaf tips glittered like mirrors in the winter light. Termite mounds, high as a horse, stood forward, looming like pale hoods of flagellants.

For many miles Rankine found himself travelling up what constituted a long, low hill, three days long, and to an estimated height of three thousand feet he went above sea level. The country was ever sandier, scrofulous, poor, but you might not think so from the varieties of hardy vegetation that grew there. Ferns, heath-flowers, and paper daisies growing in cold winter light, sometimes sheltered by large trees with an understorey of coarse, reedy grass, and hardy-foliaged types of shrubs that made no sort of feed for a horse. By the end of each day Rankine arrived where there was water. On the third day he watched for the signs of black smoke on a white tree, and of two saplings twisted into a hieroglyph where the first time they came along they located a blazed trail. (When Kale found that trail he knew he was right. It had been lying in the bush ten years growing over like a scar.) Here was the grassy flat by the clear stream that Kale remembered. It was named ‘the duck mole reach' by Marsh. Sheoak trees with fine needles. Clear running water with platypus bills breaking the surface like small black floating sticks. Three axe blows in an arrowhead shape pointing a way: ‘Go sixty degrees off the angle pointed for the true bearing.' These axe blows were grown into bark, and hard to find, but once found, most essential.