The Ballad of Desmond Kale (16 page)

‘WHEN I WAS VERY SMALL,' said Meg, ‘my mother had bad luck and she suffered terribly. She was a nurserymaid in a gentleman's family and was able to have me there in the day if I made no fuss.'

‘Where was it?' said Rankine.

‘At Emu Plains barracks, but I barely remember where it was, nor how cruel, except it was my place and I was happy, and my mother was with me all the time. Sometimes she would be struck on the back, or slapped in the face, if she paid me too much attention; for my love, she was punished by her masters! Hard choices pressed her down. She dressed in clean rags but was declared by her mistress to have plenty of clothes of her own, and was given only a gown by her and received neither wages nor clothes in all the time we were there.'

‘Where was your father, Kale?' said Rankine.

‘Where was my father, Kale? Away with sheep, was what I was told, although whether he was, or in irons, for his politics and pride you might guess.'

‘I would guess in irons.'

‘We had plenty to eat and drink and were strictly kept to the house, except at night, when I was taken from the nursery and put into a room where the other maids were. I slept with my mother. She was vexed and angered at her treatment. Never suppose that a servant is merely a chattel without heart of feeling nor brains to think.'

‘Never again,' Rankine, abashed, took his cue, and certainly meant it.

‘There was a freewoman kept in the house. She had a bed and a bedstead and my mother's bed was kept on the floor. It was only the floor and I woke each morning with soil in my mouth, from breathing it in. The freewoman had sheets but we had none. My mother was proud, she made a decision about who she was to obey, and set it down as a principle with herself. She matched her pride to my father's proud temper. She was English born, from Dorset. When our master's mother-in-law came to stay, and gave orders, she refused to obey her. There were no charges of misconduct preferred against her but she was returned to the service of the Crown.'

‘That was bad,' said Rankine.

‘I should say so!'

Meg thought he wasn't listening or paying attention, but it was something else. In the same room as her, Rankine had the uncertain feeling of missing her, still longing for her. When their eyes connected the part of her that stirred him most was absent, ungraspable, or always only hers. He was in love with her immortal and ephemeral life and also with her bodily self down to imagining her entwined with an officer betrayer — father of Warren — who in his fancy was a goat, lacking every refinement.

‘Are you listening to me, at all, Tom Rankine?'

‘I am. Your mother was returned to the service of the Crown. That must have been bad luck, seeing as how some of the people we know are assigned to their husbands or vice versa, making for cosy arrangements.'

‘She was lucky at least,' said Meg, ‘that she was not taken and put into chains quite yet, like my father whenever he opened his mouth. For we came down here just across from where we are now. See, where the smoke is going up, where that charcoal heap lies.' Rankine peered out through the doorway. ‘They who we came to are still there and worn into themselves with toil. The mistress a prisoner holding no indulgence and the master a blacksmith. There was another child there, a boy my age, he died poor thing. My mother in that situation might do as she liked, and that was her undoing as she was allowed to drink and go to the public house, and stayed out all night if she pleased. Where was my father at the time, you would still like to ask? Now he was in that cell block where you found him, fomenting rebellion, now in another, lying in chains. This was after the paddy's rebellion and he was lucky he was not hung. Or unfortunate he was not hung, considering his suffering and the way heaven is always painted better. He loved my mother extremely but this was the end of them. If my mother asked for anything in her situation she was told they were too poor to give it to her, telling her she could get it for herself provided she did not trouble them.'

‘What did that mean?'

‘What that means I am too ashamed to tell you although you might guess, and anyway I was too young to understand when she — when she sold — all right, I shall say it — when she sold herself. Mother Hauser was her broken-down maid when she was there in a place of prostitution.'

Rankine waited as the pies cooled in their dish and Meg gathered herself and continued:

‘She remained in the situation six months and then fled. What for her was a miserable escape, for me was a wonderful time. We lay on the riverbank and made shapes out of clouds, collected wildflowers in our arms … and like the blacks we slept in a hollow tree and a very fine house it proved.

‘My father was assigned at the time word of our plight reached him, and he was prevented from coming away.

‘Now to the worst part. The man who ordered it over my mother's objections — to have her beautiful hair shorn off — was his master.'

‘It was the
parson
who put her back down?' said Rankine.

Meg said that he was the one. ‘But if I let my hatred rule, there will be no victory and no benefit to Warren or ability for Warren to become better than those who brought him into this world.'

When she made this strong statement, worthy of a reigning queen, Rankine squeezed around the table, leaned to her and put his arms closely around her. She turned awkwardly from him, not wanting a lover's embrace, which was an unfair judgement on him, to say the least. For at the moment his desire was progressed past self-interested ways even at the level where it was instinctive, an occurrence that charmed his idea of himself immeasurably, though it could not last possibly past another few minutes.

‘It was not only my mother that day,' said Meg, getting busy with the teapot, a bit flustered, ‘but a huge congregation of unhappy women in the prison yard. One of them was Mother Hauser here, taken along as a companion in suffering. They collected a heap of stones, and when the minister and the gaolers entered the area they threw the stones as fast as they possibly could
at the whole of them. My mother screamed the most violently. She swore that no one should cut off her hair, and she was screaming, swearing, and jumping about the place bereft of her reason. When the minister approached her, to calm her, and so control her, she took a pair of scissors in her hand and commenced cutting off her own hair. Then she ran wilder. Coming before the windows of the dispensary she thrust her fist through three panes of glass in a row. With a bucket she broke some more panes of glass and the bottom sash of the window frame.'

‘The minister avenged himself over Desmond Kale,' said Rankine, ‘his shepherd gone to the bad, by defeating Kale's wife, your mother?'

‘Something in Kale was unconsumed. After she died and her grave was only tended by me, and a storm came down from the top of the gully and washed away all the stones — when Kale was released and wanted a rake to tidy it up, he went out of his way to find one and bring it over to Parramatta and do the job.'

‘It is going to be finished,' said Rankine, taking Meg's hand. ‘It has already well begun.'

‘How can you say “well begun”? My fierce mother impoverished, abused, imprisoned, insane, ill, dead — unrestfully dead in a pauper's graveyard, a gravel pit.' Her grip tightened in Rankine's hand. He felt the sharpness of her fingernails cutting before she let him go. ‘My outrageous father proud, blaming, striding it out wearing a tuft of hogget's wool in his ears, his thoughts bent by men using him. Who are they, anyhow? Does anybody know?'

‘Nobody seems to know,' said Rankine truthfully, though only up to a point.

“‘Well begun”?'

‘You don't know me.'

RANKINE TIPPED BACK HIS HEAD on the slab wall and looked at her. ‘You don't know
me
,' he repeated. Meg looked slightly up at him from the other side of the table, in the chinked tan light of her one-roomed house.

‘I don't know
you
?' she said. ‘I would say I don't. Something gets in the way every time we meet. Do you always look at the world through a fringe of lashes? Quivering, almost shut like half-lowered blinds. What's going on behind them?'

Rankine took a slow breath and decided.

‘Sometimes it's tears,' he admitted; then, in no great hurry, he confessed it all — the escape in the forest, the trusting of Kale, the Spanish thousand of blood-money sheep reduced to two hundred and gifted to Kale, made three hundred with increase of lambs; the unwanted rams, the stone gullies where the sheep went up, the jump they made down, the wool flying in shreds and the prized sheep driven, then how driven they were until the duck mole reach was taken and a fair way beyond was achieved by Kale, where he now lingered, the sheep roughly grazing.

‘Dear God save us and Mary too,' said Meg, her hand over her mouth.

Rankine's revelation included vignettes to soften the hardships: pale peaceful forests and birdsong, clearings with smoke twisting up, sleepy afternoons in the saddle. Telling it to Meg, he made rough country into a series of rooms — places of fanciful safety leaving out mention of thorns, insect stingers, sunstroke, thirst, leaving out trackers, troopers, search parties with swords, guns, iron rings, and men bearing oiled and knotted whips. He omitted signs of native bands, clutching their bundles of spears. He omitted the endless turnings around and going backwardses, as Biddy Magee called them, nor did he raise topics of brown snakes, black snakes, tiger snakes, typical of sandy-bottomed country as they sought a straight way on. He omitted mention of Biddy Magee herself, as a morsel for Kale's delight. He did not leave out, however, the murmurous suspicions lapping him higher and closer each day in Parramatta.

At the end of it Meg stood up and stepped back, using as much force to get clear of him, in the small space available, as she had used in leaning over him — her mouth corners tense white, her eyes flickering around him unsettled, alarmed, and quite defenselessly afraid:

‘I had no idea.'

‘You've heard none of it?' said Rankine.

‘Not a whisper.'

‘You've not heard a song in chorus, in Irish, mentioning Kale?'

After all the rumours, it seemed fairly likely she had.

‘Nay, I hate that tongue. When I hear it, I go deaf. The same happens with harping on Kale, the way some do.'

Rankine, having harped on Kale, wondered where he stood. As far as it looked, still badly.

‘Don't tell me any more,' said Meg. ‘The knowledge is far too dangerous.'

She stepped outside and searched up and down the road. ‘So this is the end of it,' thought Rankine, and stood to go. Then, as he ducked under the low ceiling, he cracked his head on a crosspiece. He moved his fingers wonderingly from his scalp to the brim of his hat, and Mother Hauser looked at the ceiling as if to thank it for being so strong.

When Meg came back inside she asked the old mother for a drink of water, a dish to wash her face and arms, and for a piece of scrubbing cloth. Rankine awaited his dismissal. It did not come. The expression on Meg's face was changed, the fear was gone as though when she went outside she saw something there that removed her fear.

She nipped her fingernail in the distrait way he'd seen her doing, that so moved him as she loped along.

‘I saw a crow, a dog, and a dust devil. That's all. I was expecting Warren all this time.'

She gazed at him from eyes that were softer, considering.

For there was Tom Rankine in front of her. All changed in front of her. She had never known defiance so real, so certain of its right. A captain of rangers with close-cropped steely grey hair, pale lingering eyes, an adventurer's half smile and a twisty curl at the corner of his mouth — he was defiance brought into the light of day, not defiance ground away futile in a prison cell, its hair shorn off, holding fistfuls of broken glass, bleeding across its back, or fifty lashes one day, fifty the next.

‘Oh, dear me,' said Meg. She laughed briefly, amazedly, letting out something long kept in. Rankine was the answer to a question she seemed to have been asking herself, without knowing it, before her heart was ready.

Then, with apparent carelessness, she leaned forward and reached to her shins and bunched her skirts in her hands, paused
and looked at Rankine over her shoulder, her hair falling loose like a thundercloud.

Rankine's voice ran dry. ‘Look at you, Meg.'

In Rankine's eyes, she was acting bold — the same as in his fancies, except making it somehow dislikeable towards him, or at least unnoticing. It was quite as if he were not in the room at all. Or in some totally opposite way, just there for one purpose, which was for him to have her when she was ready and be done with it. But he could not have her yet, she seemed to warn.

‘She has no modesty for her own protection,' decided Rankine of the daughter of Patsy Inchcape and of Desmond Kale, that pair whose love was split, compromised, ruined, but never quite utterly defeated. How could she not help being strange, he thought; it was her guaranty of freedom in a prison place; and for that reason, and some others, how could he not help loving her?

Meg brought her calico dress up over her head with a harsh rustling sound and passed it to her servant. Standing bare before Rankine she bathed herself in all her beauty and worn lines, her tawny breasts purple-tipped, her strong thighs shining as she washed herself, he did not know why so candidly, with such apparently absent-minded impunity, except it was truthful to her, and in that vision his love was stamped.

As was hers, in his watching, if only he knew it. But more cautiously, less expectantly, more unconsciously timed. Watching her Rankine certainly had the feeling of being in a dream. He was compelled by strangeness the way a dream compelled. As in a dream, no action of his would deflect her from what she decided. This in time would prove her greatness to him.

When Meg was done, dressed in a clean plain shift, she swept up her hair. With dexterous twists she tied a bandana, from which
a few dark curls escaped. She held out her hand to Tom Rankine. ‘Here is a ribbon,' she said. Her hands were rough-scaled from washing-sodas, scented from wool oils, lanolins that she used to improve their smoothness. He loved her for the imperfection and the used quality of her life.

Not understanding it, he just stood there. Then he tied that crimson ribbon around her neck with trembling fingers.

‘If we are seen together,' she said, ‘it might save you.'

‘I don't understand,' he persisted.

‘Christ, Tom, they won't see past me.'

Past me to Kale
.

They emerged into the fresh daylight and walked the dusty road to the same creek hollow where Rankine had taken Warren. They sat on the same white low-hanging branch of the gum tree that was called the croppies' parliament. Initials were carved inside love hearts, slogans were scored with nails and scratched out.

‘People are watching,' said Meg.

He understood better. They were to be a couple in the eyes of the village now. It was decided putting an arm around her, pulling her from the waist towards him. She lifted her face to him, as some fellow officers and their ladies walked past in the near distance: and Rankine lost no time getting her kissed. Busily public and practical, unexpected, agreeable and novel it was, involving soft lips and someone's biting, nipping manner — that soon had a flame in it, a torching shock of love, which they were just both gasping from, before falling to it a second time, when they fell off the tree backwards, landing in the dust.

(Word came back to Tom Rankine within a day, as good as a governor's signed reprieve, stating that Ugly Tom Rankine's name was confederated to Desmond Kale's for the single and very
obvious reason of Kale's splendiferous daughter being his lover. By this means gossip concerning an officer traitor took a holiday, giving run to gossip of the roistering kind, of an officer struck to the cods by a washerwoman's flaunty pouch. The governor was seen rubbing his crotch and making the sign of the index finger poking through the rounded finger and thumb of the other hand: ‘Tom Rankine is in rut,' he said at his men's table. So the imminent danger to Rankine withdrew, as Meg understood it would, except may be — as the governor went on to say — there was danger to Rankine's pride, for Mistress Inchcape was known to be restive and untameable.)

On the ground she reared over him, her hands on his shoulders pushing his back to the gravel. ‘This will be good,' thought Rankine, ‘so very, very beautiful and good.' The sun was sharp through the gum leaves overhead as he made out the tent of her hair colliding around him. ‘This will be very good,' he thought, lifting his head to find her lips as she found his again: but was mistaken.

A tear splashed on him. ‘Meg?'

He sat up beside her.

The next moment he was awash with her tears, salted and streaked by them, as he touched her face, drew her hair back, and she sobbed into his shoulder, and he offered his best handkerchief (last laundered by Biddy Magee) in which Meg buried her face.

‘Why?' came her muffled question. ‘Only tell me why.'

Rankine answered from back in the dirt somewhere, with as much of his why as he knew, as much of his why as he understood, which was not very much.