The Ballad of Desmond Kale (15 page)

‘MOVE EM ON, YE BASTIDS!'

It was Kale, striding down a gully behind his sheep. First get the sheep in, then make your salutations to those who'd battled nearly a whole week to reach your honour. Not to mention what else.

Rankine and Biddy jumped out of the way as the sheep came clattering towards them. It was as if the sheep, not the man, were the gladdest. The sheep went into their circle of stones and lay down peaceably from newly formed habit. Moreno and Kale tied the hurdles and checked the palisades against warregal dogs.

‘There has been no more depredation since you left,' Kale said to Rankine. ‘But there is too much grass getting eaten for too little result.'

‘Everywhere's green as it ever looked.'

‘You can't eat green. Not on its own, captain, without bulk sustenance combined. It is a scathing compliment to this country, that it is very responsive after rains. At the first lick of hot wind, she wilts. We are in late winter, soon to be spring, with summer fast
on her boil. Then it's a long dry penance, and the real character of the place comes over it.'

‘May be it's true of this valley, but what about the next one over, the six or seven of them you boasted a province, Kale, wider than Kilkenny?'

‘I said not as green.'

At the sheep camp they unloaded the supplies and hobbled the horses. Their horses needed rest but would not get very long.

Kale showed courtly good manners around Biddy, sending Rankine blithering glances as if he could not believe his prize.

Biddy, to Rankine's complacency, curtsied to the man when he asked her about the hardships of their ride.

‘Those hardships were pretty awful easy, Desmond Kale. Captain Rankine was good to me.'

When the civilities were done Biddy stayed at Rankine's side, shy and uncertain, wondering what next. Moreno went around the camp packing his gear ready for the morning. He was riding back with Rankine. Biddy sorted her medicines and Kale pulled up his shirt to show the progress of his sores. They were improved lower down, but under his left shoulder was a raw mess.

‘Does it hurt?'

‘It is painful,' admitted Kale. ‘It has been, too long.'

‘He doan tell me that,' said Moreno.

‘How are you, Payolo?' said Biddy.

‘Very appy, Missus Magee,' said Moreno. And he was. That was plain as his sonorous moon face, clean shaved and dashed with reeking toilet water. His hair was razor cut in a fringe fallen square across his forehead. His eyes were red.

Only one thing to mind, though — this from the master of caramelos, when he looked admiringly, but resentfully, at Rankine:

‘Please to remember that without Moreno there is no sheeps, no deception, no getaway.
Acuerdate que si mi no existirian las obejas, ni exito, ni escape
.' They talked out of earshot of the others. ‘No sheeps gods without me, either. There cannot be two gods with sheeps because each shepherd he markers his own creatures. It is the breedings principle. With you, Rankine, it is hunger for the daughter, Meg Inchcapes, draws you to Kales and love of fleeces. I marched Kales through the forest, I broke his chains for hims. Doan forget being put to death is more than a servant pledges a master unless in the infernos of wars.'

‘It's a sheep's war we're fighting,' said Rankine.

 

‘Do you like it here, Biddy?' said Kale.

‘I'm a bit frightened.'

‘There is no need.'

‘Well, I like it well enough,' said Biddy, with her hands warming to the fire as she looked about her. Was there ever a body farther flung from Ireland?

Kale lay on his side on a bed of brush. ‘You don't have to like it, dear. No, not at all. There is better for you somewhere, I smell it.'

‘She's game,' said Rankine, coming back to the fire. ‘Oh, but you are, Biddy.'

Rankine was not disposed to suffer any more baulking from her.

Biddy prepared a bread poultice and placed it over Kale's wound. ‘There, there,' she said.

‘Just this cool touch of your fingertips would cure me, Biddy Magee.'

‘Will you shoosh.'

The stone shelters had been improved. The largest was raftered with wattle posts and roofed with bark. It was a veritable cottage, except you had to crawl to get in.

Kale crawled in there, fumbled in a sack, and when he came out presented Biddy with a pair of skin slippers made in honour of her arrival.

‘These are wonderful warm,' said Biddy, touching them to her cheeks. She tried them on. Then she looked at Kale, and at Rankine, with a tight configured frown. ‘How did you know I'd come?' It might have been better all round, if Biddy had been stupid.

‘Our Kale is a queer one,' said Rankine, rather emphasised.

‘Aye, I'm a bit touched,' said Kale. ‘I had a great feeling in my bones, that you would come to me here. It is all right, dearie, don't you mind too much whatever you feel, as we are gathering up our flocks and making a ways off to somewhere better.'

They were eating their mutton stews and it took Rankine a minute to understand what Kale said.

‘Kale, did I hear you right? You can't think of leaving this place and risking even shorter rations when lambing is near as it is. The sheep must go on biting harder and so thrive their wool.'

‘Is that an order?' said Kale disdainfully. ‘Of course we stay for the lambing, and the shearing, whichever comes last, then it's best to pick up.'

‘Keep them here, Kale, in these valleys. Their wool goes the next step and shall densify as is noticed in rocky ground.'

‘Only possibly for the number we have,' admitted Kale, ‘but when they drop lambs they'll have dirt to eat and the valleys will be a wasteland. It shall be like the Arabs who can never get ahead because their flocks eat down the place of their encampment so
quick they are obliged to herd them onwards too often; very destructive to their flocks' improvement on account of the young ones too weak to follow.'

‘All right,' said Rankine, ‘but mightn't the valley make a good headquarters for a station even if you push on? A great advantage of the route is its secrecy against being followed by the traps. It is in all respects a deep hidden collection of canyons.'

‘We have our own commissioned captain of rangers with us, a veritable trap himself, as the best antidote against the bastids,' said Kale.

‘I am sorry, Kale. It's a dreadful ride this far. You cannot expect me to keep coming up — if you are God knows where.'

‘We are “God knows where” already. Here is the man advising all about sheep,' Kale turned to Biddy, took her hand and played with it in the firelight, addressing his sarcasm to Rankine all the while. ‘Here is the man leads the mob in Mundowey forest, risks his neck saving us, and brings us safely forth for the dream of their wools' government.'

‘I don't understand,' said Biddy.

‘Haven't ye been told it?' said Kale.

‘Told. What?'

She turned to Rankine.

‘Told what?'

‘You covered for me the whole time,' he said.

Then Biddy understood. All the household mystery of the past three months was clear to her in a word. She stared at Rankine. ‘It was to save the man?'

‘Payolo was the great one,' said Rankine.

‘Well, it is the greatest thing,' said Biddy.

‘You've been very discreet with her,' said Kale, raising his
pannikin of rum. ‘If things are as tight in Parramatta as ye pigeon pair, they'll never pin it at all.'

‘I gave her my trust. Without knowing why, she kept it.'

‘Nothing is changed,' said Biddy.

‘Something is changed,' Kale said roughly. ‘The reason, you see, poor Biddy, is that Rankine just wants us to stay here, delay, prevaricate, hold. He wants to bring Meg Inchcape down and build a hut from the stones and clay muds of the valley, roosting it with beams from the sheoak trees that grow on the stream banks and sift the wind through their sad needles.'

‘You are mad,' said Rankine.

Biddy covered her mouth with her hand, sick with a sudden rush of humiliation and outright disgrace. ‘Meg Inchcape?'

‘Aye, me daughter, the officers' sport,' said Kale. ‘For which I don't blame her weakness, only her pride, and them officers for their fatuous child-getting upon her.'

Biddy drew in against Kale and stared at Rankine.

‘That is the truth. They only play-act with feelings.'

Rankine had nothing to say now, except to condescendingly declare: ‘I love you Biddy, but if I love Meg it wasn't chosen by me.'

‘That's an easy lie.'

‘Biddy … Biddy …' He reached out.

‘Don't come near me.'

Kale said:

‘I have in mind an arid moor of salty grey-blue foliage waist-high rolling to the horizon where you might run a million million sheep this side of an admittedly imagined river. I shall flog meself down to the bone to gain there, now that I have the means, my stretch of freedom, good breeding livestock, Biddy to look after me
and hopefully a top breeding ram, Young Matchless, by all rights me own.'

‘What are you talking about, Kale?'

‘There is a place. It's past where I went with Marsh, while he stayed in a camp by some kind of bidgee river, botanised and bird-watched, drew maps and stirred the wallaby stew. I went a month's hard riding farther out for the gross whopping hell of it. Marsh was grandly pissed off when I returned. ‘There's a great place for you,' I said. It would have made his name, for you see, away out there it's a native contenong, whole kingdoms and divisions of em, thrashingly magnificent people. Tall men, fine-looking women, happy little children plump as Biddy Magee; and acres of a blue bush, which is no use to them but I brought some fronds of it back with me, and fed to a sheep, because of a feeling I had, about the salt it contained. The sheep ate every bit of it, and licked up the shreds. They did so thrive.'

 

In the night Rankine heard Biddy crying.

‘Biddy, come over here,' he said.

When she made no movement or reply he got up, and went to her blanket roll. He found her enfolded into a ball, tight as that anteater porcupine bunched into itself, and just as skilled at squeezing in closer when he touched her, and as prickly when she flinched. ‘Go away.'

In the morning she was nowhere to be seen. Rankine and Moreno were packed ready to go, with a light frost still on the ground. ‘Leave her be,' said Kale. ‘Have some mercy.'

Rankine went through the scrub surrounding their camp beating bushes with a long stick. He saw her ahead of him crouched, and
then running. He chased her in a wide circle until she ended back at the camp. When he called goodbye she was clinging to Kale, and that was how it was then, with Biddy Magee.

IT WAS SPRING OR WHAT passed for spring in that country — a thump of heat, a few rainstorms, howling westerly winds, colour crashing out of the mangled forests, wattle blossom shining heavy gold before turning gold brown, producing brittle seed pods that withered in the shape of twisted horns.

Convict gangs marched out and marched back in to Parramatta and Toongabbie. Stone cutting, wood cutting, road making, field ploughing, stump burning. The punishment rosters were filled to the craw of justice. On a gibbet, a hanged man swivelled in the wind and baked in the sun, a warning to nefarious meddlers to be wise to themselves. The governor ordered him stay up a while longer.

Rankine and Moreno rode back towards the settled district. The way was dusty and hot as they rode between trees, around boulders, into dislocated dry creeks and over such long miles of rough stony ground that their horses stepped tenderly sore.

When they saw a snake they killed it, beautiful creature that it was. There was something about a snake insisted on having itself skinned, the skin salted and kept wrapped damp in oilskin until such a time as it could be preserved in glycerine and pure alcohol.
It beat tanning with such soft living suppleness imparted that you looked for the fangs.

Moreno went off and found a shearing gang.

Back in Parramatta Rankine bound his letter case in the skin of a five-foot king brown. He took out this venomous satchel to draft demands of the governor, thinking of the hanged man, of Kale, and of what else, when he got the words and the thinking right:

 

Sir, As an officer in your service and as your chosen friend, who knows you are not a designing man likely to prey on the poverty of your charges, I ask what are you doing this term of yours to better so horrid a system as can be witnessed daily in the king's name where people die, some by the bayonet, some by the halter, some by the lash delivered by righteous hypocrites, some by hard labour and starvation or confinement in rotten cells for their principles.

 

The page was a mess of splintery nib strokes as Rankine bit his lip concentrating, drawing blood. Was he so serious a governmental dissenter to question authorised rule in a traceable letter, when words were a crime to men of law, more dangerous than snakes? Only in his mind, for now, and on that besplattered page, did he appeal to his friend General Wilkie, a hungry spirited man of close acquaintance who could never see a dog or a cat harmed without shedding a tear. The system was not made by Wilkie but was minded by him and didn't the one with clay in his hands have the power of shaping? With a feeling clearly defined in his emotions, along the lines of compulsion, of being drawn to yet another accomplished act, Rankine would one day deliver a bundle of these buckramed pages to the governor's desk, and the governor, amazed or otherwise at the man he thought of as so much
merrymaking champagne froth, would bring down his sword, or otherwise consider.

Already there was a feeling around the settlement that while Desmond Kale was far and away free as a bird, the one who'd sprung his catch might soon be snared. He might soon swing on that gibbet himself, shadowing over the seeds and weeds of the byway.

There were said to be agents watching; a narrowing-in of trust. At government house Sir Colin examined the epileptical blazing-eyed misfit James Moroney, who recited his piece in Irish. Moroney was vain of inspiration and presented his fragment as allegorical, bardworthy, lofty, apostolical, rippling his voice like a bagpipe chanter. Sir Colin found the almost mythical details of the narrative almost mythically elevating, but not quite, not quite … and decided there was something in the words needed looking into, as upon a real or imagined survey of inland parts. That libel Parson Stanton made on the officer corps — he remembered — claiming an officer was involved in the affair at Mundowey:

‘Mayn't there be something in it?'

For the ballad resplendently said:

 

A man went west in a vision, into the sunset flaring in the red tips of the gum trees — around his neck was slung a ram. Under each arm he carried a ewe. In his hair was a nest of purlambs and gimmerlambs. Between his teeth was a long stick hewn from the hardest known of Botany Bay woods, the hickory wattle, with a curved natural growing elbow for a crook. In a haversack of softest lambskin was carried a salted ham of mutton, a stub of sour sheep's cheese, a bottle of French brandy. From rock to rock the man leaped, confounding his pursuers. Oh, you can be sure how
the traps found a rattle of sheep shit across disturbed leaves, and a string of wool caught in the beak of a crow as they chased him. A piece of the wool was brought back and made into a thread that the Devil wore on his wrist. You can be sure the traps had a good mystifying time of it out there, where they turned around finally, and came back without him, blistered on lip and heel, scabs of their falls bleeding from their shaking knees and torn fingertips.

 

Sir Colin sent an invitation to Tom Rankine to come join him at his table. He was overdue there, missed. Rankine he considered well able to assist him in a matter. Easy mannered, plausible, Rankine was formerly of the survey corps in Craufurd's Spanish army, with a quick tongue and a fondness for inscrutable ditties. As far as was recently known, Rankine kept an Irish girl for his bed, and was fond of the race, as the governor himself was fond, within limits. ‘In recent times,' the governor asked his secretary, ‘who among my officers is seen — by their store records — to have drawn warrants on French brandy, a good scarce quantity of that high-grade spirit? And might not the same deceiver wear a twist of wool around his wrist, may be?'

The governor's letter lay on Rankine's dresser, asking his reasons for scorning the vice-regal table, and saying, if he did not show his face soon, Sir Colin would have him brought in wearing shackles. It was an affectionate jape, could be naught else, but caused Rankine to quake, and look to making amends.

 

Thickets of boronia and wattle blossom scented the air. Next day Tom Rankine brought Meg Inchcape native flowers picked from the wayside. He was back to his start with her, whatever he grandly
hoped. He was back to the ordinary civilities of love, without much expectancy. He'd not stopped loving her since his first vision of her. But greatness was not very bold, mightiness a mere grain of sand. Somebody wrote that somewhere. All came to dust and he told himself, yes, he was a monk, an ascetic, a mulligrub in the universal scheme of fame. He woke each morning with a thumping head, resolving, each morning, that although there were sorrows he needed to drown, it was not quite as thoroughly needed as drinking half the night. Biddy's absence made him pine for her touch but not a great deal. One night he cried into his pillow but only a little. When his dream of the thundering herd with the face of unearthly beauty tempted, he sat straight up in bed, wide awake.

The wildflowers grew on unlikely thorny shrubs with profusion of colour, knurled miniature blossoms of bacon and egg, fugitive crimsons and golds, hard as wire. They dried without losing any colour for weeks, or else came in vines frothing up trees with white or purple blooms that wilted almost before Rankine could rush them into Meg's hands and say look.

It was not the first time he'd brought her flowers, leaving them at her door, on some days piling them into the arms of the withered crone, Mother Hauser … Never before finding as he did this day that Meg herself stood at the door, and smiling.

‘Hello …' he said, a stone in his throat. ‘Allow me … I don't mean to disturb you …' It was not very well put. An officer did not always command.

‘It is our Captain Rankine! … Where is your leaping horse?' There was a knuckle of amusement above the bridge of Meg's nose that he rather liked, that lovely long nose being pronouncedly Romany.

Her glossy dark hair was thrown back from her forehead, tied
with a piece of string, her strong eyebrows smudged with flour, her cheeks freckled — he'd not known it — never been as close! — and were high-boned — wide, hazel eyes, slightly upturned, shining with energetic delight; lips hovering a half smile when she looked at him with a gaze so honestly strong it seemed to sense his truth better than he ever could — and upon the bare curve of her neck Rankine, given the chance, would swear a thousand fidelities.

‘For you,' he said, putting the blooms in her arms. He was candidly surprised that his persistence had some sort of result — that she stood there at all.

‘All mine?'

‘They seemed to belong to you, Meg Inchcape, at least, when I saw them, I thought of you — as I gathered them up. By the wayside.'

She held the bundle and ran her fingers through the top of them, like a mother caressing her child's hair, lightly but passionately.

‘They are beautiful ones.'

‘Watch out for thorns …'

With his finger and thumb he unpicked a stem from her sleeve. In the moment of the action he heard her breathing, saw the strong pulse in her neck, and felt the warmth of her breath on the back of his hand. There was definitely heard the harsh snick of each thorn breaking free.

‘Won't you please come in?' she said, when this odd intimacy was over, lifting aside the canvas flap, on the outer side of which old Mother Hauser had recently kept Rankine shifting from one foot to the other for a full ten minutes while he was sure Meg fumed inside, for whatever reasons of state.

‘Into your house?' he masked disbelief.

‘Humble as it is, you are welcome.'

The earth floor was brushed clean and a busy contingent of blowflies circled looking for scraps from table or shelf to lay their eggs upon, but were unlikely to find some. There was a shape on the floor like a bundle of rags: a little old figurine unfolded from there, nut-brown faced and sparrow-hawk featured. She crouched, feeding sticks to the fire. ‘Mother Hauser sleeps in the wood box against my shack wall and keeps out intruders, as a rule,' said Meg.

The smell of baking made Rankine hope that his welcome was going to get better. It looked as though their cordiality was going to meet a celebration, at least, an idea only slightly dented when Meg said she was expecting Warren, all this was for him.

‘Sit down,' she invited, as she prepared the kettle and set about making tea and finding a precious pat of butter that was melting in the fire's heat.

In the fireplace the diminutive crone deftly swung a pot crane holding a hot-water fountain, a griddle, a camp oven and all of them cooking away, while at the same time she worked, with bare toes on the handles, a set of bellows to bring up the flame just right.

There was a coarse rug on the corn-husk mattress that served as both couch and bed. There Rankine sat, his hands on his knees, his back straight. Folded on the top of that rug was the same piece of cloth embroidered with mirrors and a scrap of silk material that had caused Parson Stanton to decide that Meg Inchcape was pretty much a damned clever whore.

Rankine, by contrast, and to his eternal merit — if time would allow tell — saw everything around him as wifely in a manner of ways, womanly and great-hearted, settled and showing devotion to the smallest of threadbare domestic touches of the household arts … When Meg Inchcape pledged herself to him, that would be,
and stopped disturbing his dreams. The moment he set eyes on her again, he was drunk with her again.

While he gathered his thoughts and sorted his impressions, another part of his mind raced along preparing his answers. Before his mind was ready, though, his tongue wagged:

‘Biddy Magee was raised in a sod house,' he said expansively, ‘where any place above a bed of earth was fit for a king. She was amazed when she came to my cottage, to find a bed of straw, a chair, and a table made available to her — in her own quarters — as well as cooking pots and always a tub of best potatoes.'

‘What are you trying to say to me, captain?'

‘That Biddy had her own little cubby out the back of my house, she had somewhere of her own and possibly as comfortable as your own little nook, Mother Hauser, do you hear?'

‘She is deaf,' said Meg, setting a place for two at her table. ‘Probably lucky for you.'

‘Why?'

‘Your dalliance with a maidservant has been known around the settlement for twelve months at least, and people don't even bother telling me this any more — that my greatly persistent soldier admirer, who tried to run me down with a horse, and brought me flowers all through it, and sugary sweets, was double dealing with a nineteen-year-old girl, although some would admit she is pretty enough.'

‘That is over,' said Rankine, humbled, cut, shrinking and dropping his head.

He watched as Mother Hauser took the lid from the cast-iron oven and with a wooden spoon lifted an arrangement of small pies onto a plate.

Meg leaned with her elbows on the table, not six inches from Rankine's face. He caught her living breath and felt the fullness of
her existence in the warmth rising up from between her freckled breasts. ‘You have given your maidservant her leave?'

‘She is gone,' he agreed while looking around, not wanting to say where.

‘It is what I heard, but wanted to hear you say it.'

Meg poured his tea into a cracked blue cup and they smiled pleasantly at each other, except Meg's lips had something more serious coming upon them.