The Ballad of Desmond Kale (6 page)

It was there that Rankine had turned back, and the others gone on ahead. Now he went on ahead to find them.

THE DAY OF THE ESCAPE they had run the few miles west from Mundowey, forded the biggest river, bidding good day to indentured farm hands watching them pass. It was there Kale lifted the long-haired dog by the hind legs, declared it unwanted, and would slit its yelping throat, he said, unless it was cast from them. Those hardened convicts at a word from Kale trampled over their tracks as best they could with the help of such cows, pigs, and horses as they were providentially tending. A boy took the dog and said he would look after it. Moreno was downcast at losing his heart's treasure. ‘Or else he kills my dogs,' he said, explaining its fate to the dog itself, as he slobbered a kiss on its nostrils.

Kale directed them on. Rankine wore rags and took orders from Kale. He was the complete unknown, the willing accomplice incognito. When descriptions were made later he was not there among them.

On then to the western ramparts of broken, golden sandstone. Dry creeks smashed in tumbles of stone from an obscure plateau in a series of tangled gorges. After raking the sheep through thorn
bushes they entered a double-walled runway of rock, in storm seasons a torrent, as testified by large tree trunks stranded high on the sides of the gorge. They drove the sheep fast up and around, leaving few scatters of dung as they cantered along, heading into dry rock terraces. They held the sheep penned restless in a cleft while Kale picked out one, a ram, slaughtered it, and dragged the entrails in a continuing direction. Then at a precipice off to one side (for thus the country angled, in every way mad as imaginable), when one sheep leaped, all leaped — the remaining three hundred and four of them clean away into a pool of water the colour of strong tea. Down those sheep went in a cascade of angled bellies, jostling rumps and alarmed heads and hit the water already swimming. They clambered shivering wet to the bank and gathering their instincts, went along afterwards quieter than before.

It had proved worthwhile … the jump into oblivion … as Rankine learned when he saw the tracker's report a week later, and heard the governor declaring a trail gone cold at the ramparts and for sure Kale was perished. Except Rankine knew everything otherwise: they had angled back east, then south, crossed the biggest river twice where it was smaller; muddled through broken country; climbed that long, rough hillslope, and come on south through many slow days, and were safe from anyone's harm, as far as they knew.

 

It was near dark when Rankine arrived at a promontory of rock overlooking a sheltered valley. Three fires appeared in the shape of a triangle on the dusky valley floor where nothing so unlikely was predictable in nature. Rankine fired a pistol shot. A faint shot answered. In half an hour he was down there far below with Kale and Moreno, his horses watering in a clear shallow stream.

Kale wore a cape made from sheep skins sewn together and tied at the neck with a leather thong. Moreno hung back from the firelight awaiting his turn for the greeting. Kale came at Rankine with that commandingly dissatisfied impulse in his greeting as was first experienced in a damp unlikely dungeon.

‘Next time come sooner, Rankine, or I'll get tired of these capers.'

Rankine smiled, fairly exhausted, waiting for an encouraging word from a man who made no concessions. ‘We have done it safe,' he said. ‘It's all made to look invisible. After a hard long ride, anyway, I am here.'

Under his tattered grey hair Kale had a broad forehead, damp brown eyes, a flat nose and wide, deep-breathing nostrils; a long upper lip, plump lower lip slightly quivering with antagonistic humour: ‘We have done nothing yet that would even stir the dust of this country.'

Kale's jutting jaw was made to attract a punch, and Rankine was tempted. Others had given Kale a taste of his own proud medicine, leaving scars. But Kale had a saving grace withal, a wise engagement in that contradictory air of stubbornness. It created the spell of the Irishman and the only one resisting it hereabouts was Moreno.

The Spaniard looked a fright under his narrow-brimmed, high-crowned hidalgo's black hat. In honour of Rankine he put on a red waistcoat fringed with black piping and gold thread. It was crumpled and dirty as he was. His flat dirty face was framed in tangled sidewhiskers; his features were pinched, small raisin-eyed. He sent Rankine a look of oblique resentment, unmistakably dismayed.

But still, the two men embraced, holding each other tightly and gladly kissing so many times on alternate cheeks that Kale said:

‘It is to be a continental inamorato, then?'

They were doing their living from the inside out of Moreno's condemned rams. Rankine established his position by the fire, saddle and bedroll spread, and by the time he was ready there was food for him on a clean new dish. They started with a grill of intestines on a rack of sticks, lit by a tallow wick. As a side dish, Kale consumed the eyes — spearing them up from a mess of baked head. Those eyes broke in the mouth quite firm, without spraying their jelly over the teeth.

Still hungry after that first round they sat by the fire on skins eating foreleg shanks. Except for a heel of bread and cheese, Rankine had eaten nothing for two days. Moreno had a small skin that was almost pretty, with a waved, fine gloss that appeared like the richest watered tabby. ‘It is a fine skin,' said Kale, ‘but remember what I said, Payolo Moreno, your rams was no good, and the reason was their small size, and their colours with red in them.' Moreno sulked, warming himself on his prized Santiago's skin. They were down to the last ram out of five. There would be a lambing soon from the ewes mated before the escape, unwisely mated, as Kale so very needlessly said.

‘Baby lambs poached in ewes'milk will be on our bill of fare soon.'

Rankine broke out the spirits. They toasted their enterprise in beakers of brandy. ‘Here's to our honest start,' said Rankine. The brandy filled him with good cheer.

‘Are they on to us, mate?' said Kale. He grinned like a raving banshee. His years of official torture had battered him far from his long lost Irish gentleman's niceness of complexion, white scars puckering an eyebrow, distorting a corner of his mouth; in his speech was a roughened burr from being grabbed around the windpipe and half throttled, in a prison-yard thrashing.

Rankine told him they were so far safe — how the chase was put aside, from the governor's lists, though not, it seemed, from the flogging parson's.

‘Nay, I am glad to hear that,' said Kale. ‘As long as he fumes, you can follow his smoke like the black fellow who knows everything before it happens.'

Kale did not think about Stanton constantly, the way Stanton thought about Kale. But he judged their connection precisely, as along the blade of a knife, having no doubt that when the last trump sounded, he would be in Stanton's sights.

Before they were too settled round the fire Kale made his next demand of Rankine. He wanted the parson's big-framed ram, Young Matchless, for his own. ‘Work the animal free and walk him over,' he said, with a toss of his head. It was like a Sunday stroll was proposed, and Rankine out gathering the finest blooms. An earlier ram, Old Matchless, was originally bred by Kale, with many of the good points wanted in a sire. Kale had bred Old Matchless in happier times, but long since Stanton claimed the breed as his own. ‘It is well past time to claim the breed back,' said Kale. Young Matchless was Old Matchless's direct descendant. ‘A grandson of forceful impact, I want him for ourselves. It is the season for taking. We have the ewes for our purpose, and have the country spread before us.'

‘You have something wrong,' said Rankine, looking at the way Kale sat protecting his back.

He found Kale had lumps under his armpits the size of duck eggs, from his infected flogging wounds, which Rankine bathed and dressed. Moreno might have done it, and nursed Kale, for he had the stomach to oblige — but not the courtesy to offer.

Rankine wrapped himself in his blanket and lay on the dusty
ground. Drifting in and out of sleep, as they yarned, he told of a load of trade goods, of which his saddlebags held particulars, goods that were conceivably to be diverted as far as the duck mole reach on a waggon — specially if they could be brought forward by the trader who owned them, in the name of certain profits, without Parson Stanton getting any hint of where they were bound.

At the start of the midnight watch Moreno found himself kicked awake. He took his orders from Kale: banked fires against warregal dogs that came in the dark and threatened ewes from under the lowest bars of the hurdles and then skipped over the top. The dogs' disagreeable yodelling cries taunted Rankine, causing the hair on the back of his neck to stand up; but the dogs hardly warned of their approach when they began to mean business. Their golden coats and slit orange eyes were for their own appreciation alone, as were their small, sharp teeth bared in grinning refinements of hunger, and their musty, excitable smells.

In the morning the warregals' footprints were visible in the sand under trees where the last putrid meat was hung. They found that a ewe was taken. Surveying the torn, dead ewe Kale blamed Moreno for dozing on watch, which Moreno denied, and so Rankine stood between two men only sullenly tolerant of each other. Their mutual dislike troubled Rankine who was devoted to both equally and for opposite reasons. It was the superb dedication of the one and the independent scorn and ridiculous royal elegance of the other that kept them balanced in his affections, but not to each other face to face.

The head of the valley where the sheep liked to gather in a preferred sheep camp was decided as a place for a better sort of camp for all. Frost and morning mists flowed downhill and they were sheltered from the worst of the cold southerly winds, but not
the north-westerlies. Throughout that day and the next they built stone sleeping shelters from the wind, raised a wattle-stick palisade against dogs and thatched the shelters with boughs. Rankine had five days before he was expected at barracks. They constructed a sheepfold from rocks, gated it with hurdles, and years from now the stones would be discovered in the shape they gave them, and beyond their cooking fire would be unearthed the green broken necks and pebbled bottoms of the French brandy bottles they smashed when they emptied them. It would be wildly imagined how they must have roistered there for a good long time, but any walk up a joining ridge, and along to a jumbled peak, would have shown another sort of answer.

‘It is a whole province for us to get around,' said Kale, pulling his cloak tightly around him, as he pointed out features to Rankine in the knifing cold wind. The satiny blue sky was clean of cloud. The winter sun was brilliant. Fold after fold of ranges spread south and east. Only to the west was there a flattening effect, as of a plain, but so far away it was surely a mirage in the blown haze. ‘Here, it is greater than Kilkenny by a long straw, though not so green and plush, with duck mole reach on the northern limit making a depot, like you suggest, if a waggon is brought up. Each of them rocky ridges hides a valley, of which there are between six and twenty. A river goes through like a snake.'

‘Something like a paradise all up,' suggested Rankine. ‘Including the snake?'

‘A very steep paradise with wild dogs too, and though we have not sighted any natives, we have seen their fires.'

Looking down, they watched Moreno moving sheep over a low ridge for their day's grazing, leading them down into a valley bottom where meagre watercourses trickled through prickly under
growth but where the sheep would soon fan out, settle, and feed till their bellies dragged and spoiled the untouched kangaroo grasses for their own uses. Where it was precipitous going they never lost footing, although some bolted and rode down on their backsides tearing their rumps.

‘Not yet a full paradise,' said Kale, looking back over his shoulder as if Moreno might be listening, though he was at least half a mile away. ‘Attend to me, Rankine — if you get me the ram I want, Young Matchless, and the man I want, Clumpsy M'Carty, and bring me the girleen I want, Croppy Biddy Magee, it will be paradise enough until our shearing. He is a great man with the blades, your Moreno, and then I shall be happy to see the backside of his greasy arse.'

Rankine disliked giving Kale all his consideration without getting much more than some grumbles back. Kale sensed it, too, and stood leaning against a boulder, half turned away, half smiling. The more he asked of life, the more he thrived — though it never took away any suffering. This was incredible though.

‘You could at least express some astonishment, Kale, at what I have done.'

‘Oh, yes,' said Kale. ‘Spoken with proper exasperation. My astonishment's in the sheep you gave me —'

‘Not gave — gave over —'

‘We shall argue that expression when they build back up to a thousand, as I think we agreed. Wait on their wool, Rankine, the astonishment in their wool is all the answer, to your niggling ways. Send me a packhorse drover in a month's time and I'll send in some woolpacks of finest fleece. They can be sent to England, for an opinion on their grade. I believe they shall amaze the bowels of the woolstapler who grades them. As for a drover and carrier, there is
a good trusted one, John J. Tharpe, originally from Cavan. He knows how to dodge and weave.'

‘I note the instruction,' said Rankine. ‘But “niggling”? — I don't like that —'

‘You'll need Tharpe's whole team. Don't say Kale asked for them. But say the fellow with the salt has an answer.'

‘Whatever that means.'

‘Whatsoever indeed,' said Kale. And then began singing half under his breath, as they walked back down to the valley floor.