The Ballad of Desmond Kale (10 page)

WARREN INCHCAPE WAS ALONE in sheep yards one day, at Toongabbie where he'd spent much time since early boyhood as fetch and carry, pizzle wiper, shepherd and sheep shearer, dog feeder and mouse catcher. His mother had placed him young in the care of old Aaron Tait as a way of keeping him from orphan school, where fatherless children were sent and learned how to thieve and lie.

Heat lay over the settlement roofs, shingle and stringybark, rock shelter and hollow tree. Ticks rose in the dust as sheep scuffed through on yellow hooves, hard-cased insects urged to be swallowed on each intake of ovine breath, spindles of lick hanging down, leaves of ironbark trees rattling the tar-tipped wool of their backs. A shallow creek met their noses with a green porridge of slime, which they drank, or did not.

Warren was a thickset, muddy-eyed boy wearing a hat woven from the leaves of the cabbage tree, a loose shirt, and moleskin trousers originally several times too large, that had been supplied by his mother in preparation for a time of growth that had already started. His boots he kept supple with a little beeswax and mutton
suet rubbed over the soles and past where the stitches were. To save on wear, he went barefoot when he could, and spent some of each day pulling thorns and small sticks from the callus of his heel.

At his work Warren looked lazy, which was the wrong impression to have, as he was only at his ease, and waited for the animals to declare their next move ahead without too much forcing them on. As he waited he dragged a stick on the ground, disturbing a gravelly ant bed as if there was all day to stare at what ants did, by helping each other in a rushed nervous way, or turned his head with his body following as birds flew round the bowl of the sky. A sheep that wanted its own way more than others he watched sidelong to be sure it was the trouble-making one. Then it was moved to another flock, from which there was no argument of return. This was a mob that Aaron Tait kept on the creekbank, close by the huts, where he dived among them with a long slitting knife, and strung their guts in trees. Around Tait's yards there were always creeping flies and waggoners using a switch of gum leaves to keep flies off as they prodded the sinew and fat, to give them a bargaining point.

Because Tait liked plenty of meat on a big-framed sheep, there was no toleration of smaller breeds of the finer-woolled kind that were favourites in the colony among officers and the few free men who were about making money from wool. Tait thought wool a scabrous interference upon the hide of a four-square meal — wool being worth less than mutton in his trade. But Warren thought wool over because it was in front of his eyes all the time; he woke with his nose in its pillow of crimps; he scooped bundles from dead sheep when Tait allowed him dead fleeces to pluck; and when he was sad, Warren wormed his fingers through the deep staples of the better-coated ewes and dreamed his fingers had the freedom of their own wriggling to go wherever they liked, say through clouds
in the sky or under the earth like a womback badger or a bandicoot mole tunnelling.

A day he remembered: his father and grandfather walking together, a day blazed in memory when they tossed him in the air and he landed in mountains of wool … Since then Warren noticed wool's variety from sheep to sheep where other boys did not: to them they were animals to whack and despise. Warren made out in his own head what was carried from the ram to the ewe, or the ewe back to the ram lamb that was better or worse, depending on what was wanted in a breed. Just in the same way as Warren learned his words, by having a book he leafed through under a tree, in the furnace heat of day when the sheep stood with their heads packed in a circle — and went nowhere, they were so hot, and seemed to fan themselves by shuddering their fleeces — so wool became another way of his speech, and anyone who could speak it with him was his friend. The vanity that he was the one to decide about sheep grew in him thus and was one reason Aaron Tait said to his mother, ‘Let him go to Stanton whatever the cost to our pride,' which Meg Inchcape was agreeable to, through their risky blend of needs. The less she said to Warren about her reasons the better, she decided, at least until he was taken in. His tendency to attachment was strong, it could be fully relied upon.

Nobody else was moving about as Warren hipped ewes against rails and tipped heads back to look into mouths. If one got away he ambled towards it without hurry, taking hold with a cupped hand under its jaw, stilling its fright. The only other movement came from birds on a branch, pecking into their chest feathers and upraised wings for lice. He looked up and was captivated by them, because birds were a token of Warren's sentimental attachment, a sign to his longing heart.

The rest he remembered of his father was around birds: being held up to a stump of wood to see the dishwasher bird making semicircular motions, spreading its tail and making a loud noise, as if it were scrubbing a pot. He remembered the white cockatoo his father had, called Car'away, which he took with him to England, and then to Barbados where he went after that, and then back to England once more as far as his letters told — which was not too much as they contradicted each other in what they promised. Car'away was a bone-white bird with a sulphur crest that had raised in alarm like a shearing hook if anyone came near Warren, who lay on his back at the age of four or five and reached up with his fingers making a rough tearing noise against the direction of the feathers.

These birds that he watched here today were choughs. Black satin wings with white understrokes and red eyes, and almost as big as crows. He knew a chough was a kidnapper, waiting until a chick from another brood was a useful age, and taking it in its beak over to its other camp, where it was used to help raise their own young ones. That was a habit boys knew about, in a prison colony where every hand was upon the throat of another, and taking over men and beasts was the theme of duty and gain. But choughs were a family-living sort of a bird, all brothers and sisters together in noisy chattiness of flocks between six and ten. They had mud nests in the trees the size of pudding bowls, so well made they might have come from a potter's wheel, and when the birds flew off it was never in wild alarm, but with a sociable planing flight, those at the rear gliding over the ones at the front in a graceful curve, the abducted newcomers no different from the old hands.

A face appeared through the leaves as it had on other days,
almost to the hour, round and red under a wide white straw hat, a man in white trousers, white shirt, the trousers held up by a brown waistcloth, so that a resemblance to a round mushroom was complete. Warren spun around and caught Parson Stanton's eye.

‘Good day, sir.'

‘Hello to you, Warren Inchcape. Those are the sheep of a reprobate and a ragged bunch too.'

‘If you would let Mr Tait have Young Matchless, to put over his ewes, they'd be finer next spring.'

‘Well, he can have a ram,' said Stanton, ‘but not that one. What are you thinking? If you want to make him a parting gift come over to my place, and take a pick of my big-framed culls.'

Warren thanked him and supposed the old ones still had a bit of spunk in them.

‘You'd be right about that,' said Stanton.

There were matters Stanton wanted to understand lest the Trojan horse of offence was in Warren Inchcape.

‘What do you know of your father?'

‘Less than that,' said Warren, displaying the bare palm of his hand, streaked with dust. It was believed Warren's father was an officer who left the country without his regiment and returned to England, unable to face down Kale.

‘Is he in England?'

‘I don't know.'

‘But you resent him?'

‘I don't know.'

‘But you might love him?'

Warren wiped his hand on his trouser leg.

‘Warren?'

‘What?'

‘Concerning your grandfather — we must be candid about this, or never get on — do you bear me a grudge for sentencing Kale? For you must know, boy, I had Kale deservedly punished, and I think there has been no stealing since, from the Irish gangs. Do you feel much for Kale?'

Warren lowered a hurdle and allowed the ewes to fan out over a knobbly pasture of tree roots and weeds persistently growing in bare dirt.

‘You are the one that says Kale all the time.'

The sheep disliked straying far from the boy, Stanton noticed with a smile. He was a pied piper of lambs and a St Francis of the woollybutts, unless Stanton was very wrong.

‘Well, Warren, shall you live in my house?'

‘What does my mother say?' said Warren, wheedling a bit, just to remind himself, in his precocious independence, that he was fifteen years old, and had nothing to bargain except a mother's love.

‘You had best ask her.'

The answer came a few days later, as Stanton had prepared it, when Warren appeared at the farmhouse door with his belongings in a sack.

 

‘It is no longer needed to prove,' boasted Stanton at a religious gathering, in the whitewashed slab church of Saint Botolph's he called his poor temple, ‘that the children of concubines and rascals can rise above their parentage to the highest degree of attainment. It has been shown a few times, by an almost natural law — which only needs the application of Christian example for it to thrive.'

Another week passed and it felt like Warren had always been with them. At work among Stanton's sheep he was a plump attraction, dry-lipped, always rubbing his doughy nose and scratching himself under hungry ribs, always thinking a few steps ahead of the flock. When counting them out or standing in the yards to marshal them up he seemed to do nothing much, letting the sheep do their thinking, but when it mattered looked over his shoulder, leapt sideways, threw his arms wide like springs:

‘Hey, hoo, hurrup, get back, stay, worry them around, Squire!'

The words were addressed to a shaggy part-collie dog that was covered in blue sores on its hairless patches, that worked with its nose grovelling to the ground, pointing towards a leading sheep, meantime an eye rolling back in the direction of Warren. It was known that Desmond Kale never used a dog — not unusual, as great shepherds, there were, in the annals of depasturing who never used one at all. But Warren was opposite from that. His future was flocks in sheets and oceans of rippling movement by the number, so many sheep that the irregularities of the land would come up through their legs creating gullies and hollows of movement. He would need only to point, and raise an eyebrow, and the whole direction of the country would change. Thanks to dogs.

‘Where did you get such a glorious dog?' Stanton asked him.

‘From a boy at Emu Plains.'

A bell was rung to muster the convicts and it was agreed the afternoon tolling marked Warren's freedom if he could be spared each day. There was a tan waterhole in the creek where he kept a lump of soap in the cleft of a tree, and strung his clean shirt on a bush and shook it clear of dragonflies and caterpillars after bathing.
Hair wet and face washed clean, except for a trace of clay behind the ears, Warren showed flecks of green in the murky brown of his eyes, sandy lids apparently lashless, scrubbed skin giving him the look of a frog, a frog prince may be too, but not yet anyway that earthly prince that Stanton spoke about to his wife, as an argument of persuasion to get a prodigy hooked in his wool staples.

Warren at least had the wonderful certainty beardless boys have, that whatever they understand of the world is the best of wisdom. Stanton marvelled at his daily work and his lack of resentment.