The Ballad of Desmond Kale (7 page)

TOM RANKINE KNEW ONLY ONE thing of Desmond Kale when they began in this: it was said by all that Kale was the inordinate man for a sheep, but was so tied down in chains, incorrigible with abuse, he was lost to men's ordinary ways. Whenever he stirred himself he was laid up with a flogging. Oh, and had a daughter — that handsomest damned washerwoman in the governor's laundry sheds. Yes, they had met. Yes, they had exchanged two words. And yes, just as soon as he found her, Rankine lost her in the very utterance of the two words spoken between them.

When his duties took Rankine into the gaolyard at Parramatta, all such matters were enlarged by intensified wonder.

Out of the prisoners crowded into the holding yard there was one who stood apart. A tense, measured manner attracted attention, in the man who hefted his chains, as if they were made of paper; and the slumbering, powerful gaze of a captive centurion was seen, as he turned his head and stared at Rankine.

‘Who is that man over there?' said Rankine, already guessing. He was told it was the Irishman — a singular sort of reply: because
of all the numbers present, Irish were in the predominance. Thus did Rankine gain his first lesson in the admiration of Desmond Kale, even from those who hated him.

There was no sunlight in the punishment cells. They were built half into the ground and smelled sourly of mould. Only in one room a narrow window admitted paltry light, and there Kale was returned after being counted.

Rankine took sight of Kale sitting in a corner of that rock-hewn cell with his chewed grey hair and sad, courageous features, his large-knuckled hands hanging between his knees, his head thrown back and singing.

‘It is something about the singing,' he decided, ‘that brings the guards running.'

‘He is not allowed it,' said the superintendent.

‘Let him go on with it.'

‘He is testing you, captain,' warned the superintendent.

‘Allow him,' said Rankine.

Doubtless the fellow would wrench Kale from his cell and take him along by the heels, back into the yard and deal him a few keen blows, if an officer was not present.

Light seemed to come on Kale as a marvellous privilege in the dank space.

‘It is said that if the Irishman ever cries out on the punishment block, it shall be the end of them all.'

‘That is interestingly thought,' said Rankine.

‘It is their kind of superstition, expressed with holy fervour, but don't they see — it gets Kale flogged more.'

This said with relish.

At the time Kale was between severe floggings, his hide a ploughland of punishments. Before he received his next lot of
lashes — following a brief spate of freedom — one man at least would make sure, from pity, it would be his last.

The encounter was barely a year after Rankine arrived in the colony with his bought commission and his Spanish sheep, when garrison duties held him in town and Moreno, out past Toongabbie, walked a wretched landscape watching their sheep do passingly well on stalks and sticks and stones. It was clear by then, that for all his excellence, Moreno might ruin the flock. The Spaniard pushed breeding ideas vainglorious to himself. They were sheep obtained in Spain in unsought violence and the answer against unsought violence came to Rankine as a recompense: it was to let Kale have the sheep and breed up their numbers. The justice would be in the freeing from justice of Kale, and the glorification of his freedom. It was to grant a life, where life was carelessly taken.

Rankine kept himself fairly sociable in town, among his fellow officers, listening to their rivalries about stock, not arguing their loud opinions back at them and rarely letting on he knew what was a lamb, a ewe, or a wether as distinct from a grub or a flea moving in the distance through the scanty trees around the edges of the settlement. It was not safety he craved in this subtle role, it was danger: truly hazardous fuel for interior justice. His instinct for risky dealing had brought him to the right place when he landed at Botany Bay and found, beyond the prison grid of barracks, stores, and stockades, a wideness of land vaster than oceans — and just about able to support sheep and an officer seeking a fortune in sheep if that officer was one who feinted, baulked, and dodged his way along. Except it had not been clear what to do, at the level of requital Rankine craved, with just a few hundred sheep, plus lambs, until the day he met Kale.

‘Take me to him,' he said.

Rankine was led down a set of damp stairs with padlocks closed and iron bolts rammed shut behind him. According to orders he was slated to relieve the under-commandant of the dungeon, but disputed those duties as beyond his obligation. He soon got out of them, too, for there was a manner Tom Rankine had, a charming, airy easiness — something to do with his extremely pale blue eyes, so startling in a poxy face, that always seemed to be playing on matters he was best allowed freedom to follow. Something to do with his closeness with the governor, too, it was said. Both had been in Spain — Wilkie with the 88th Foot, later 1st Battalion Connaught Rangers, dubbed by General Picton ‘The Devil's Own'. While that closeness was exaggerated, it could not be denied — you were a Sir Colin Wilkie favourite if you dined at government house one day a week, and Rankine sometimes went four. Because where else could you get blithering drunk on quite superior wines, and be witless with horseplay, and establish yourself? Where some others paid coin as a bribe, to get on, or equivalent value in rum in barrack room trade, Tom Rankine at least always started with engaged understanding, charm. It saved his pocket, and if you thought it would take him nowhere in a colony of getting and gaining you did not know Botany Bay well enough. His deepest need, though, was tuned like a lampwick in daylight. It was not plainly seen.

Of course, a man was the same man all through. Know him better and stubbornness, laziness, and self serving might emerge from behind those keen pale eyes, and a bundle of other qualities, good and bad. There was a stepbrother in Yorkshire kept a resentful record of the worst of him, the two brothers being estranged. Wool was the stepbrother's expert trade. He'd been left nothing in Rankine's father's will except six silver quaffing cups and a box of ivory dominoes. Rankine gained Oak Farm. He had everything,
you might think, yet his feeling of loss, after Spain, drove him to amends.

To nobody, not even himself, had Tom Rankine been able to say, ‘I am dying to be rescued.'

Instead, he sailed to Botany Bay and rescued Kale.

He stood at the bars until let in. The guards left them alone. After Rankine introduced himself Kale spat at his feet.

‘What is this all about?'

Moving his feet, as if a flea merely hopped over them, Rankine said: ‘It is about wool, Desmond Kale.'

Kale's sour expression did not change until Rankine pulled from his pocket a fistful of wool staples. He laid them out on the stones, under the best available light. Then he waited.

‘Are these any good?'

It was a long time before Kale answered, when he said, in a voice with the melody of his singing in it, and without any lilt of contempt:

‘They are an angelic sepulchre away from the penetration of shite.'

IT WAS BLAISE HENRY CRIBB'S genius to examine fleeces shipped to a Yorkshire sorting floor from four corners of the world and make more sense of them than could be explained in words or read from their careful measurements. Consignments came from England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales; from thistly Argentina, snowy Vermont, from regimented Saxony, from painted France, and from golden parched Spain and then increasingly from one place in grisly particular farther flung than the rest — where Cribb was obliged to admit wools flourished supreme.

But each time the prison colony was listed Cribb cursed:

‘Again?'

Botany Bay wools clipped tighter than concertinas (in ribbed dusty bundles) were slung from ships' holds, trolleyed to Thomas's wool hall and broken open at Cribb's convenience. He stood at a slatted table gathering their light tumbling splash. He interpreted milling needs between fisted samples, taking his time with thought, tapping his wide forehead with a pencil and wrapping his full, damp lips around its soft chewed end, or snapping a piece of chalk between his fingers, not to be disturbed — then strode along in the
light of cobwebbed glass speaking orders to clerks and carters, receivers and handlers, as sailing ships unloaded and mills were supplied a portion of their wants.

Cribb's profession was woolstapler, a word meaning sorcerer or something like it when you looked under his hat. There was an effect quite uncanny on Cribb's sensibilities, a confusing magic to his touch around wool. The woolstapler's craft was ordinarily enough explained as bridging between the breeder of wools and the manufacturer of them. The woolstapler purchased the fleece and occasionally sold it in the same state, but oftener assorted it: dividing it into different parcels, according to degree of fineness principally, or the possession of some property fitting for a particular commodity, say for the hatter, the clothier, the hosier, for the maker of men's suits and coats or for women's airier stuffs. Was it Cribb's feel — his hand, his eye — or was it his heart involved mainly? Or was it more his passionate buffeted anger around the matter of wools, his roused intelligence that both frightened, and impressed?

Blaise Cribb was a stocky man of stumpy commanding figure; he was aged thirty-nine. He was French born, English raised after the age of four, with a large head, penetrating dark eyes, full shapely mouth and chin — strong-nosed, unruly dark-haired, wide-shouldered with a contained gunpowder energy. His impatience, resentment, and ferocious curiosity marked him out as more demonstrably Continental than phlegmatically English. Cribb had the look of an exiled commander in waiting and roused interest accordingly — a harbinger of empire whose time was to come — though when
would
it come? Blaise Cribb was always slightly out of place among his own … and yet, when he came into sight, striding down into his home village, his coarse-weave navy great
coat sweeping the cobblestones, spattered with mud to the pockets, he seemed like the truest expression of what came best from that northern English farming soil, a disdainful servant of livestock's hard-worked perfection, where nothing worthwhile was gained without independent scorn. You would have to say — a Yorkshireman complete, despite his Frenchified start.

Cribb was raised in wool's greasy service from lambing days to the plate of boiled mutton with blue potatoes, representing a feastly goodbye to a life lived out, whether of ram or ewe, while a collie dog loyalled at his feet or gnawed at a bone and Cribb sank pots of dark beer in the Inn of the Four Bound Sheaves before rolling home insensible.

It rained on Cribb emotionally that he was a blot on the name Rankine as he returned on many black nights up a byway path, to his stepbrother's farm. Ugly Tom Rankine's farm, as Cribb only half accurately called it, seeing as how the captain had no working part in it, being thankfully abroad, and Cribb lessee at a peppercorn rental through overdone consideration on Rankine's part — how dare he condescend so!

Needing no lantern, Cribb was drawn by a glow in his brain, to stumble around drunk and fuming, getting up hate for the moss on stones that once was his delight to peel, in a study of patterns of lace and continents, with faces of men in the moon.

Oak Farm was where Blaise Cribb had galloped a shaggy pony, roamed with flocks enjoying a childhood more carefree than any he knew except Tom Rankine's who took his place and favour. Ignorant of love's calculations Cribb had loved that boy six years his junior, carried him on his shoulders, shown him willingness and strength unmitigated by guile, had gone to work early on behalf of them all and learned breeding lore from the man who knew as
much as anyone needed to know, his stepfather — the natural father of Ugly Tom, Sir Hugh Rankine.

A good acreage was promised — in a conversation Cribb never forgot, conducted with the stepfather at a high corner of a turnip field and a neighbour as witness — sworn indeed to be the youth Cribb's, upon old Sir Hugh's death; and later again, over a brimming glass, was pledged by the venerable liar to be where Cribb would raise his own boys (when he had them) under the moors and upon them, where they would learn something from their step-grandsire about flocks and heath, game and hawks, speckled fish, rich pastures and purplish turnips jumping from soil of dark crumbs scientifically rotated. So it had been intended, at least, if charity colours interpretation, but never does — through perfidy of will and testament. Something had gnawed in the old man's brain about the breeding of Cribb's own son being deficient.

Blaise Cribb in his early twenties had fathered a son on the distaff side, named Jonathan. The woman Cribb generated Jonathan upon, Peg Johnstone, was a deficient slut by country designation — seeing that all Johnstones were tinkers, thieves, and coin in the mouth jingling whores. It anyway justified theft of Cribb's inheritance as down the knife blade of desire came his legacy denied. He kept the boy for himself, since a baby — would not have him stolen by tinkers or anyone else. Nor did ardent uncaring Peggy's death soften Sir Hugh Rankine's antipathy. When Blaise Cribb, hostility alight, rampaged wilder, he was well cut out.

Cribb tried not thinking too much about his benefited stepbrother, Ugly Tom, but was not always fortunate in putting him out of mind. He spoke Rankine's name as odious when reeling drunk; tried to avoid putting himself in any situation where he might be
drawn into conversation about life in Botany Bay. But Cribb was born at a fated location — midway between Malmaison and Rambouillet, home to France's best wools — in the year of a glow in the sky, the time of a comet with a lanigerous or woolbearing tail. He was born to a studsman, Wade Cribb, and a woolcombing demoiselle, Yolande Rousillon, who, after the death of her husband (the natural father Cribb barely knew), went over the channel as Sir Hugh's mistress before her early death. In a passion of mourning her, Sir Hugh made Cribb his son. Then the squire married more equably, if more dully, and fathered Tom Rankine, whose charm finally broke an old man's promises, and whose core flock of Spanish sheep these some years later promised a breed unrivalled, in the climate of Botany Bay, while Cribb's apportionment in England all failed.

At the dockside Botany Bay spilled out its wools — not in great quantities, nor always consistently good, but quite stirring in potential. Something was going on there, you might say, like new stars being born into the darkest corner of the sky. Cribb was drawn back to these improving wools' traces wherever he turned.

The two breeders to watch, Cribb early decided, were ‘M. Stanton' and ‘D. Kale'. They were first seen some years ago as private exhibitors in two bundles of best samples, names on paste-board tags. The very best samples Cribb paid for, but did not put up for sale — keeping them in boxes to be taken out from time to time and looked at in best lights, laid long upon a table, and there parted and eyed, not in any wish for sensation unless as a technical mark of comparison — but always leaving Cribb with an extreme dampness of mouth, an intense physical sensation, an experience of singular lust, or its near relative, abomination.

So Cribb found himself thinking about Botany Bay and its
wools more times than he liked. Without wanting a bar of it, he became the authority on them, and was sought out.

A contemptible lot would stop him short, send him back to the tables where prentices and foremen gathered and Cribb's voice thickened with bitter sarcasm — damnable stones in the matted material to give an example, they set him going — wool having crossed the wide oceans carrying scrapes of sour earth, links of shattered chain dumped in, torrents of sand where a sheepwash had failed, carcass of native dog found as makeweight.

But the ‘M. Stantons' and the ‘D. Kales'? They were the harbingers. Luminous when washed, the Kale was hardly bigger than an otter's pelt. It was raised by Kale and trusted by him to Marsh, when the naturalist returned to England, after which there were plenty of ‘Stantons' but no more ‘Kales'.

Cribb and George Marsh met under notable circumstances. It had been the first but not the last time Cribb was asked to make guesses about the breeding of New South Wales sheep and found himself paraded before ancient gentlemen wearing the silks and velvets of an earlier day and obsessed over wool. It was during the October Stuffs Balls for the encouragement of woollen manufactures in Leeds. Rankine at that time was newly gone soldiering. Jeremy Bramley, as he was then, later to be Lord Bramley, knew a man who knew a man, and so on. That man was Sir Joseph Banks, instrumental in having the merino sheep introduced into England where it was fated to fail. But Cribb did not know that yet, the degree of its undoing to come: he badly wanted some — and Rankine would gift it from Spain eventually, as if to illustrate the adage, beware what you wish lest it smother you in blessings.

Bramley and Cribb went by coach more than a hundred miles to meet Banks and learned from Marsh that Sir Joseph was in bed
having a bad winter of gout and confinement. Bramley was at the beginning of his magnum opus,
The Shepherd's Sure Guide
, and was ushered in to Banks for the benefit of his wisdom. There was a great mess of papers in the house and Bramley was given the run of them for as long as he could spare. Cribb was taken by Marsh to a storeroom and shown the bundle of wools that afterwards remained his disturbance when it came to deciding if New South Wales wools were any good. The small Kale fleece was a copper-burnished salmon leaped from a sullen stream into one's very own hands and then finding for all the seeking to follow there were, save for the interesting Stantons, only dull small fish left to do their growing. The character of the breeder? A convict shepherd, Marsh said, ever to remain unpedigreed, perhaps, except a piece of information was related by the botanist and the name sprang out. The house of Kale: a destroyed family of Ireland known to be good with fine wool sheep but politically overwrought and exiled into shame and destruction.

From then on Cribb had something positive to report about colonial wools when asked, by saying there was boundless potential; but each year after his first evaluation he never saw as much improvement as he wanted. He looked for increased density and fineness, length of staple and brilliance. The Stanton lots, over the next few years, held to the initial standard with some variation. Stanton was the best supplier for what it was worth. Improvement here in staple, there in fineness, everywhere in length — except without leaping improvement overall. The glimmer, the shine, was missing. Of the wool of Kale, still no sighting to this very day.

Cribb's habit was to say, of the prison land: ‘There was never any place in the world where a sheep was so keenly sought after improving, with so little knowledge of the art in doing so.'

What Marsh had pictured for Cribb was a place of dry sticks
under a pitiless sun where there was feed and water only scantily available, but where sheep oddly thrived or rather pushed out fine wool from their barely living skeletons if they survived drought and being speared by savages.

 

Now Rankine was gone to New South Wales with three hundred of his King of Spain's thousand brought down the Sierra Morena and shipped from Cadiz to Hull. It was the bonanza of sheep duffing that enthused the British officer corps into a fashionable frenzy upon Wellington's victories. The seven hundred gifted to Cribb by Rankine's derelict largesse because of not thriving were no sort of gift at all, and Cribb, having accepted them, having wanted them, found himself wasting them and not entirely irrationally blaming Rankine. When Rankine sailed on the
Melanthus
he took with him his remainder sheep; his lugubrious manservant, Moreno; his Irish footservant, M'Carty; and a young woman of M'Carty's pleasure, Magee. There were letters since then, but no history of the sheep.

The matter of Botany Bay wools and Rankine's sheep at the heart of them burned and fizzed with Cribb. Remedy was the whisky flask, carried at all times and replenished from a square bottle kept in a brown leather bag. Drink gave Cribb the feeling of glorious universal components flying free of his will. Though it soured his stomach, reddened his nose, bared his gums, it made him godlike and careless. Mentally, when he chased what mattered — the object of his deepest rage, betrayal by his closest adopted kin — he was more like the campaigning soldier he despised: Rankine himself, so hot-blooded with aim that even his own death might be irrelevant to the purpose of putting matters right in the warring heavens.