The Ballad of Desmond Kale (18 page)

JOHN J. THARPE, DROVER AND packhorse driver, formerly of Cavan, transported for sheep stealing and having long avoided the noose, found himself back practising his original pilfering craft at the direction of Desmond Kale, through the graces of an English officer whom he barely knew, and heartily mistrusted on the evidence of his nation laying waste to Ireland. But the check on Tharpe's mistrust was that password of their dealing: salt.

‘
The young fellow with the salt has an answer
,' Ugly Tom Rankine had said, and so pulled Tharpe in for his stint of exclusive droving at the behest of Desmond Kale.

After the ram taking, Tharpe made his rendezvous with Young Matchless at a pit where the ram was tethered well back in the woods awaiting his next ownership — horned as a spiral staircase and stamping his jointed forefeet with pettiness to be gone. Tharpe took him up with care, and some difficulty, holding the big animal in a canvas sack tied at the neck, bolstered with a bedroll, its belly draped over his packhorse's back (hoisted there by a rope thrown across the branch of a tree), its hind parts only occasionally hiking
out. Thus, he got away from the parson's lands as fast as he could.

Tharpe had deeply set bruised-blue eye sockets, a beaked nose, high-crested hair the sheen of Dublin stout. On his lead horse he crouched forward, his long legs dangling and his packhorse coming along behind. They proceeded all day fairly quiet, making frequent stops while Tharpe walked the ram about on a lead, then put him back in his bag again — they were finding a routine — but towards evening the ram became disturbed. When it kicked one too many times the packhorse broke free and jollied ahead of Tharpe, which was how it came through a rough camp, a mile farther on, scattering Patrick Lehane's fire and all his cooking pots, giving Lehane the sight of a bucking horse with a bagged sheep as jockey.

Ten minutes later, when Tharpe appeared in pursuit, the campfire's owner was nowhere to be seen — but Lehane saw Tharpe well enough, from his hiding place in a cave mouth: Tharpe's horse scuffing soda bread from the coals and landing it in a hundred ashy pieces some distance in Lehane's direction.

‘If that is not John J. Tharpe transporting a stolen sheep to the likes of an outlaw,' said Lehane, ‘I am an elf in green satin.'

Patrick Lehane stayed huddled away until dark. He well knew that during the paddy's rebellion, Tharpe had stabbed an informer, leaving him out in the bush for the meat ants and warregal dogs to consider. Call it political need, Lehane called it joyful murder, branding Tharpe as a man who carried a filleting knife in a hairy goatskin sheath and sharpened for pleasure any time. Lehane might be next, seeing as how old resentments smouldered. It would not matter to the condition of Tharpe's immortal soul if he circled back and finished him. One murder was good as a dozen for a man pledged to hell. The eye of reason spent the night imagining ram bleats as a sign of Tharpe camped close, creeping about on his
toothpick legs. For two nights afterwards Lehane slept in several hollows of familiar ground, like a womback did, then in sandstone overhangs until he was certain the immediate interest was gone from him.

 

It was another two weeks of idling in his camp until his black friends appeared after a stint of wandering. Lehane was only too glad to see them — Billy, Mary, Pegleg and Crouch, and several else of them, strangers who came and went from other bands.

Their naked shadows appeared first between sandstone outcrops and then their dusty bodies appeared through the gaps as they came on talking and laughing. From them Lehane learned of this and that. They'd been visiting their wise old man of the creekbanks, Mun'mow, who told them about a ram (horns spiralled) being taken one night from the flogging parson. So this confirmed it — Mun'mow it was who'd been brought to the parson's sheep hurdles at first light soon after it happened, to study the disturbed earth and read the sheepy signs of which Lehane for one had no doubt: it was the parson's ram on Tharpe's horseback — being taken to the outlaw, Kale. Lehane could already see the pearly sweat on the parson's face when he told him.

Getting on with their tale Lehane's blacks gusted with laughter and staggered around in dumbshow. They plucked their cheeks with their fingernails, to denote a poxy face; they threw ash in their scalps, to show grey hair; and they minced around with a high-stepping gait to mimic an officer of redcoats — a pox-faced, grey-bristle-headed captain of rangers they called Tumbankin.

‘Now I have a name, just as the parson wanted,' said Lehane, catching his horse. ‘I have two names, certainly — the great
deceiver's and his moiderous sidekick's. I shall make my way to Parramatta via Stanton's Laban Vale, give him the intelligence, accept my flogger's pardon, and live out my days as a respectable tame paddy with my pardon as good as the pope's own absolution, carried in my pocket to show anyone who doubts, for he promised it in writing.'

 

Playing a tin whistle through trees beside a purling upland river, John J. Tharpe swayed along hopeful looking for Kale.

Except for signs blazed on trees he easily believed he was lost. He came out where pale tussocks grew, some as big as sheep lying down with their heads lolling in dewy grass. The white ram — now walking tame — disappeared into the mist until Tharpe found him lumpy against cloud banks. Tharpe waited then in a prettier place, the duck mole reach, he gathered it was, from descriptions Rankine gave, sheoak-shaded if he had the locale right; and lit a fire to warm himself. The ram he kept tied up for its misdeeds, lying on its side snorting snot.

‘It is a good enough place for a shebeen,' decided Tharpe, uncorking his whisky, ‘to be called the duck mole's retreat or the fat lamb's rest even better — J.J. Tharpe, licensee. Here's to ye, my lad!'

The silence echoed his name. When his droving days were done he'd be a tavern keeper. There'd be people out here by then. They would be after following Kale.

Tharpe climbed the eastern hill to watch the sunset and enjoy the throw of the land. ‘It is all open grazing to the far west, bestowed by God as far as the eye can see, and awaiting occupation by the deserving poor.'

Tharpe had opinions on who they were, however. Not who you might think, but a gentlemanly sort of Irish poor. It was the gentleman in Kale appealed to him, not the rebel. The whole of the closer country back near Parramatta was busy with convict settlers felling trees and hefting dry rocks and knowing nothing of farming but quite pleased with their grants of forty to two hundred and eighty acres and unwisely believing they would get rich scratching in seeds. It was a vast and puerile labour they were about, converting Botany Bay into a semblance of fields where seasons failed by rote, cockatoos descended by the fives of thousands, and whatever stood up green was knocked down by kangaroos. Tharpe was contemptuous of any sort of farming getting on. There was no life for a sheep in his judgement of a country unless the landscape had cloud shadows dappling its hugeness and men had freedom to come and go where a good drover served them. He believed Kale knew the same. Small settlers were little better than beasts of the field. Their huts were bark strips and their digging sticks were made of wood. They stole each other's steel axes to cut wood for the axe handles their neighbours stole back from them. Ants and moths ate their hoard of seed. If they had a cow it was milked until it bled, and they beat its bones until it died.

So far as Tharpe had come there was a silence of axes in the forests, an absence of beans and corn wilting in the sun, it was all pushing forward and parting branches. The way was returned to the wheezing of a tender-hooved ram and the crickety noisy bigness of the woods, where lengths of dry bark dangled from the forks of white gum trees, hanging down to the ground like madwoman's hair.

When Kale joined him, next morning, there was no warning crackle of sticks. But a presence before the fact of him.

Tharpe looked around. There he was, Kale, bulky on his pony, the king of all serious nonsense: his lower lip protruding like a sulky boy's, his eyes soggy like an understanding idiot's, his long silver hair tied back in a queue like the prince of tides'. Tharpe doffed his hat and before he knew it, bowed from the waist. Kale carried a tight bundle of wool on a packhorse and rode with the girleen of Botany Bay, Biddy Magee, sitting close up behind him on his speckled grey pony, her arms around his waist, her rosy cheek resting on his shoulder.

‘Kale, a very good day, and to you, missy, the same.'

After looking over the ram and expressing fascination on its good points — horns, nose, mouth, teeth, neck, rump, belly, and all its better points of wool, for which he claimed credit through Young Matchless's well-chosen forebear, Old Matchless — Kale began in with a complaint. Kale had been known to shear a sheep himself but disliked it, he said. That bastard Payolo Moreno was the expert bladesman but hadn't returned up country as promised, to get the wool off. Kale carped about why as he explained his riddles of wool to Tharpe, that he'd shorn himself, and they'd spilled rippled to his feet like brass shavings. It was not the full total he wished for, but a good enough sample at 150 pounds approx. From its hidden core of greatness, when it reached the other side, it would strike up amazement enough. It would be seen as a fine answer to resentment.

‘It shall resound honour to the fallen house of Kale,' said Tharpe.

‘It shall be known as mine if it gets into the right hands,' agreed Kale.

Then Tharpe said doubtfully:

‘Sent under your name would be a glorious touch. But will the traps allow it to leave Sydney, marked Kale?'

‘I don't think so.'

‘What am I to do? Ship it marked Rankine, a redcoat's consignment, when he's underhand thick with Desmond Kale? Is Rankine to be trusted with ye, Kale?'

‘Look, without Tom Rankine I'd be rattling my dags in a dungeon, disbelieving in hope, festering. You are my right arm and he is my left, John Tharpe. Put your name to the bundle — J.J. Tharpe.

‘Were you seen coming out?' said Biddy.

‘The packhorse was,' said Tharpe. ‘It was the scrag, Lehane. The horse went through his camp and ruined his supper. He'd have seen the ram, at least, if he didn't see meself following soon after. He ran away. He's a snake.'

‘Don't mention snakes,' said Biddy.

‘Are you frightened of snakes, Biddy?'

‘I pretty much am, Mr Tharpe.'

‘You mustn't be now.'

Tharpe had little time for women, except to resentfully take one when needed. They were a race of which he adored few but his sainted mother, yet was jealous of Kale in this. Biddy was put to commonplace use, supremely young and raised from her blanket each morning fresh as cream curds and pretty as a lambkin, with a laughing spirit and a good kindly question as to everyone's well being, including that of Tharpe.

Kale showed him the woolpack.

‘To make sure the wool gets through without meddling I have composed a bundle of two divisions. Top drawer is old ram's wool but before you get much deeper, there's skin of a slain womback.'

‘Phew! There's something in there all right.'

Kale went to the ram and faced him, countering that sheep's wary head buttings with head lowerings of his own. Kale made a
swift movement in behind the horns, upending the ram and asking Biddy to fetch him his blades. Working slowly, almost tediously, he shore Young Matchless and thrust the parcel of warm fleece into the very centre of the malodorous bundle.

Tharpe strapped the woolpack on his second horse. ‘The main thing,' said Kale, ‘is to cozen the parson if he gets his hands on it before any gets shipped to England. He'll be outwitted when it gets there. If you are showing round samples, here are some portions, make free.'

Kale pulled fistfuls of loose wool from a sack.

‘What is it?'

‘Dead ram's wool, not a bad sort, but inferior to the ewe. It is common currency in the colony and might have been bred by anyone, except may be for the reddish brown tinge it carries, favoured by simmering Spaniards.'

‘Kale was a gentleman in Ireland,' said Tharpe, turning back to Biddy. ‘Don't let it be forgotten. When he is settled I shall personally bring him a barrow load of St Patrick's turf that's been delivered in Sydney from Ireland as a proof against snakes. I can see Kale now, settled in his house away over the country, perfectly content, thanks to me and the turf I have in mind sowing down around him. His turf and his great ram grazing till kingdom come.'

WHEN THARPE RETURNED TO PARRAMATTA he complained to Rankine how it was all too arduously done — that Kale had the parson's ram in his keeping and was putting him over his ewes by now; but that he, Tharpe, never wanted to undertake such a crazed hot scratchy ride again with a ram in a sack. He told about stumbling on a bush camp, scattering pots, pans and ashes. ‘If I catch Lehane I'll skewer him,' he said. ‘There'll be none of that,' said Rankine. But Tharpe's sleek black hair was awry and his eye sockets pitted in dust. His horse had cuts in its flanks and limped from a stone bruise. He would do whatever he chose when he came to it.

‘Did Kale give you wool?'

‘He did,' said Tharpe, pulling samples Kale gave him from his pockets. ‘It's a greasy stuff, but he makes a lot of it. I'd do it again for Kale. There's a bundle he wants consigned to England under a third party's name — me own, since you're asking. When I get the report I'll let you know.'

‘Very well,' said Rankine, having worked out with Kale that neither of them was to be named in shipments but the wool was to get
there somehow. ‘Mark it for Thomas's Mill in Yorkshire.' Notwithstanding this arrangement Rankine resented Tharpe's possessiveness.

‘What a great slap of country it is,' said Tharpe. ‘All right when you get there. I have a whim to be settled down that way, when it's brought closer by people who'd like a drink and some company. The duck mole reach is a pretty enough place, but it's awfully lonely so far, till the word gets out.'

Rankine said nothing, only thought, ‘I'll be down there before anyone.'

 

This was the week when Rankine took delivery of a three-roomed canvas house in a style new to the colony of New South Wales.

He rode out seeking Joe Josephs, to ask more space in his load for the cartage of prepared uprights and patent slotted boards. They were shipped from a manufacturer of portable houses in Bristol — a compact apparatus of crossbars, brass screws, bolts and hinges to be collected from a riverside landing stage. A lightning rod with a barbed point was supplied. Bundles of canvas forming roof and walls were conveyed from Sydney Town. The equipment was to be home as Rankine and Meg forayed out, slow as they liked, supposing they fended off blacks, found a way across gorges, cleared tracks through fallen trees and made their way towards Kale and his ram-bucking pastures. One month here, two months there until they were beyond the duck mole reach, settled in. It was how Rankine pictured it to Meg, always in the same cadences, making light of vast troubles and not even asking if she wanted it, he was so convinced of the expedition in himself.

Rankine had ordered the tent house before he left England. He wasn't so aware then of a resource of trees for the taking —
saplings for uprights, bark for roofing, shingles falling free to the axe blade prolific as morning sunlight on gum tips. Yet he considered it would please Meg to have something better than a roughly hewn shelter. There was even a design of porch.

The first difficulty of the matter was in locating Joe somewhere on the Cumberland Plain, the second in getting Meg happier being commanded over a matter of porched canvas cottages than she liked.

Leave was requested from Rankine's colonel of rangers; a note sent to the governor. Rankine's openly expressed intention countered suspicion but he played a trembling hand.
I am decided on a piece of country in the problematic south
. (‘That phrase has a ring,' said Wilkie, approving Rankine's petition while pressing a finger to his temple and making a few cloudy resolutions around his friend.)

Because Rankine was decided on Meg's part in the arrangements before she knew about them, she bridled at his air of ownership. Of a sudden this tent house and her place in it were all Rankine could talk about in a colony of rock shelters, drab huts and miserable hovels. ‘How clever we are to carry a house on our backs, like the South Seas turtle,' he said. But Meg was not as persuaded as he wanted her to be.

He's tyrannical, was her summation.

She's not grateful, was Rankine's opinion.

Meg rode out with Rankine on several days. Rankine was set on getting her used to the mode of travel after too much time in town. ‘Feeling out the country,' Rankine called it, chasing after Joe to get his consignment loaded and to satisfy possible government agents with open intent. Meg had never travelled much past the boundaries of Parramatta before. It was her
terra incognita
, the Cumberland Plain, all dust devils and heat mirages — those blank
erupting distances whence Warren emerged, on his sturdy pony, when he came to call. The farthest she'd been across the dry forested sheep-ridden expanse was Emu Plains barracks, on the biggest river, and that was in her blighted infancy, when she was hauled along in the dust by her unhappy mother.

So far then it proved a not very successful introduction to a better life in a disgruntled week. Meg was new to a horse. The hot dry distances tried her. But more, there was the fretting about something not right between her and Rankine. More than the tent house bothered her. It was their struggle of wills over the next elevation of their love — this before their first excitements of love were even rolled in silk.

Rankine had no doubts, since his dream of Meg's gaze, that he loved Meg unto his death, but he was rubbed raw with questions over these next steps now. He wanted her in his bed, close as could be. Why wasn't she ready?

Meg was guarded since being broken to an oversupply of promises from men of rule. She was stubborn with her needs of protection with the next risky man, no matter that she loved him best. ‘One step at a time,' said the same warning finger to Rankine's lips that had promised, so beautifully, ‘if he loved her'. The two were badly out of tune with each other despite smilingly looking into each other's eyes as they rode side by side, or lying pressed in each other's arms on a horse blanket when they stopped for tea, suffering ant bites and prickle burrs for the sake of renewing their first supremely matched understanding. ‘If it was ever understanding, at all,' muttered Rankine, his mouth twisted quite unlikeable when he got up, and turning his back to Meg hitching his crotch where his prong was stuck in the warp of his trousers.

Trees showed in a dense blurred line along creekbanks but thinned on approach to a bark-strewn shadelessness. If a stranger appeared Meg was convinced they were being followed. She was not to lose this nervousness in her life with Tom Rankine for a good long time.

It was mid-December and full summer upon them. Creeks proved dry when they came to them, wearing a chain of muddy ponds. Rankine took mistaken directions, missed the trader where he was supposed to be set up, and rather than several nights' sleeping under the stars (in preparation for their longer journey south) it was an exhausted saddle-sore Meg and a petulantly disappointed Rankine who returned to Parramatta on each of successive days without Rankine's arrangements being properly worked out, and Cupid's darts all dented.

The following week Meg begged off coming on yet another ride. She gave her reasons, while between them her deepest resistance remained unspoken.

Rankine asked what was wrong with himself. He'd been an assured lover in his previous amours (where, he acknowledged, something less than prophecy was at stake). Now, he feared, he was in danger of getting cast in the role of
sympathique
— a helpful weakling in love. Old Mother Hauser did not let up from regarding him derisively as an officer and a man. She cleaned his house of dust, mopped, scrubbed, laundered and cooked as Meg efficiently directed — but to what end, Rankine began to wonder, as she stoked a fire under Meg's bath, and scuttled around cadging scented soaps from Stanton's boy Titus. Was the tremendous foretelling of their love just another of the illustrious pranks attraction played, in bringing a man to his knees? Like the day she'd flaunted her nakedness and slowly, ceremoniously washed: what did that
mean, when the visionary element left him with just the vision, except to leave him coarse with wanting? They were regarded as a hot collation, the pair of them, by gossips from the governor down, but don't whisper this too loud around Parramatta: Meg Inchcape had not yet shared Tom Rankine's bed in any one of the salacious variations gossips thrust in. To Rankine, at least, it was getting too puzzling why. It had saved him with the governor but he could possibly die of this. Unrequited lust was the yoke of a man's duration in the suffering of civilised forms. Here Rankine was, scrubbing a beautiful woman's back and adoring the damn tendrils of lovely hair slicked to her sunburned neck, while she pleasurably sighed, and after rubbing her hair blazingly dry in proximity to her lips, was given another scorching kiss to get along with, replete with a sensation of ‘enough'.

There was an explanation of her baulked consent. What it was, was not yet quite clear to Tom Rankine. It would have to be torn out of him — that he might recognise it, instead of denying it. Knowing Meg awaited some further sign from him, he could not just take her in the rough (his preferred style of satisfaction). She had a way of taking charge, ever so gently but skilled, over a man born to command. Though confirmed consent had never been a question with the likes of Biddy Magee, Rankine was in irons when it came to touching Meg. It was the power of someone with nothing but beauty and pride.

Hadn't he held her in his arms and counted aloud the thousand ways he loved her? Let her show her proofs. He would happily count ten thousand more and still not exhaust ways of loving her.

Rankine did not see what was being signalled in front of him. He buffeted around his cottage like the rutter the governor said. All right. How to get on with this and slake himself to a pulp? It was
in his power to show a sign, though God knew what — he'd only show it if he knew it. Meg had formerly used plenty of guile to get on, in her life of bare-bone survival, not excluding the granting of sexual favours to previous officers and one known explorer, deceased: why now was it up to him somehow to take the step, to bring her further along where she wanted? Wasn't he enough? She suffered convict inferiority, and was proud not showing it. What else?

He was not too aware that his class position was written all over him, that in his easy charm was always the command to kneel. Why, think: even Kale the intractable obeyed when he called on him, in that rock-hewn cell. But not Meg. She was half Kale pride, half Inchcape wildness. One half bewildered the other. While their love was profound, may be, a history was yet to be written of two in one.

But their needs were to be fused before they knew it, in a throw of cards.