The Ballad of Desmond Kale (2 page)

AFTER DESMOND KALE WAS FLOGGED for stealing a ten-shilling metal rake he was cut down from the punishment tree and commanded to walk the ten miles back to the prison stockade of Toongabbie. So famous was Kale's conceit in Botany Bay, he was ordered to walk in ankle irons, holding his chains in his fists.

Eight flogged men were given a ride in the stone quarries' waggon. Kale was given an escort soldier, kept under view. It was said he might die — it was hoped by some that he would — just through the effort of lurching along in the bright morning, restrained by bolt, ring, rivet and rusty chain. The man who awarded his fifty strokes of the cat, Parson Magistrate Stanton (who was not present at the flogging, on a pretext of standing aloof), was quite as likely to agree in the denying fullness of his heart: that Kale could leak his gore into the earth, that the flies could swallow him.

‘But fifty is nothing,' Kale was heard to say, spitting a tooth worked from the side of his jaw where it was cracked on a lump of tree during punishment. The back of his shirt flooded red while
the next part of Kale's joy was to struggle forward of the bullock waggon and keep pace with his escort soldier, who said nothing from the time he flitted up from behind a log at the side of the track where he seemed to have been sleeping in sticks and grass and dirt.

That escort man, Moreno (answering to the name of Brown), kept his face turned to the road before him, the hard black visor of a regimental cap pulled over his eyes, the chinstrap tight and distorting his dark mouth and opossum cheeks. He was a stranger to the punishment detail but his written orders were exactly correct and his surly manner authentically iniquitous: more salt in the wound to Kale.

Redcoated Moreno stepped out feeling anxiety as much as Kale's in getting away — that man whose every shuffle made the sound of chains, whose back was striped like the marsupial wolf's from rib to shoulder, whose eyes were murk attracting too much interest beyond the forest walls. Fifty was nothing but tomorrow Parson Magistrate Stanton was quite as likely to come on with another fifty under more indictments against Kale, from a list as long as his malice, and the next day and the day after it, more.

It was a sandy track they walked, through tortuous white-trunked gum trees and bracken ferns. Every half mile they dipped, cut and crossed a shallow stream where the men in the waggon falling behind cried out for a drink. Kale grinned, satisfied as the distance led increased: ‘Botany Bay aristocrats never cry out, but today they complain loud and long.'

There was no water in the stream six months of the year but this was mid-winter in New South Wales; it was June the ninth; the king's birthday: heat came in the middle of the day, the flogged men's thirst needed slaking, the purple blood they grew on their
backs needed washing away. It was a tribute to royal clemency to offer prisoners a ride in a stone waggon at all, a drink when they thirsted hard.

Where fires had been, the winter grass was thinly greened up, the fringes of grasstree spears shone, their black trunks silvered in the noon light. Water in the stream ran shallow over rust-coloured sand. One great old tree still burned, it was over a low ridge before them, smouldering down into itself. Towards that pillar of smoke Moreno led Kale.

The quarry waggon came on through ferns, lurching up clay cuttings carved by wheel tracks, the flogged men rocking like so many sacks of corn and crying out, always making their noises, eight howling faces dripping as the guards relented and bucketed water over them. Far off through the open forest with its scattered grey sentinel trees and drifting smoke they saw Kale and his escort go, in glimpses less frequent until their crossings of the meandering stream were complete and the supposed redcoat and the suffering convict too far ahead to see.

When they reached the burning tree Moreno stopped where the smoke hung thickest. Grunting over the low ridge in a turn of clumsy speed Kale came hurling his lungs after him. Moreno raised his hand palm flat and Kale piled into it with his heavy gait's momentum.

Here was the place where they had some minutes to do what was wanted against the irons.

Smoke came from knot holes, tongues of flame burned high in forks of the tree. A hammer and tongs and chisel waited under a charred bush. A mound of white ash in heat waves lay at their feet.

Kale took another step — Moreno squealed warning up his sinuses. Kale believed the Spaniard courageous but a donkey's
piece of work and told him stow his frenzy. Fire in this country of trees burned down roots, smouldered for weeks creating pits of glowing cinders into which a man might slide into hell very quick. It was awe piled on fear on danger that Moreno felt, of which they had both dared plenty. The moment of release was offered on wings of smoke, a few blows of steel on links already filed part through.

Kale crawled under the bush, fingering the tongs stowed according to the plot that was hatched with a third man waiting for them ahead. Kale took hold of the tongs' handles, raking them around in the ashes and grabbing the chisel. Moreno scrabbled for the hammer, raised it to his shoulder, ready to strike. All this metal filched and stashed was to save Kale condemned for stealing a metal rake: the weight of extra iron now plenty to hang them both, and that third man, too, if his aura of great advantage didn't save him.

Kale angled his shoulder, tongs upon the chisel:

‘Strike!'

And the Spaniard brought the sledge hammer down, but missed, the head of the hammer thudding into the sand. The next stroke grazed Kale's forehead with moving air and Kale shrank his position into a beggar's cower, his elbows angled to maintain hold on the tongs and keep the chisel from slipping on the chain links where it wavered from the exertion of being held. If Moreno missed again, Kale's skull would splinter.

With better-aimed strokes Moreno shattered the chains.

In that forest the sounds rang sharp as musket shots, but the guards were distracted by the men in the waggon wailing Irish songs. Even a crooning lullaby in that treacherous tongue was foul noise enough. The guards broke out whips, unloaded the men from the waggon and sent them forward on foot, where it was a matter
of importance between their convict souls to mess the track as much as they could in the clean winter light towards Parramatta.

Kale grinning across the broad strap of his jaw, throwing back his wild hair, drew Moreno after him, Kale wearing his ankle fetters split of their chains, until he came to a second known place and gave the signal to break off. They made their run over burnished kangaroo grass, one bent, the other bowed.

Across their tracks and around the ashy fire pit where the metal tools were dropped into the hell hole of the earth, the flogged men came drooling and messing the sand, for the sake of Desmond Kale and the life he wove into them.

After a half mile of bad going among rocks and confusing trees Kale stopped, lifted his head, stood still. Moreno whistled. A dog pricked its ears and came forward; a man appeared through the trees, a mob of sheep gathering at his back. It was Captain Tom Rankine of His Majesty's N.S. Wales rangers leading his horse coated in sheep dust and ash. There were always sheep crisscrossing the wastes of flatland forest. They would attract no suspicion driving a mob. This mob was Moreno's care, and the captain said:

‘Here are your sheep for you, Kale. Here are three hundred of them, and five rams.'

Kale shook his head with haggard humour as if to say he would look at the sheep first and if they were any good get out of his ankle irons later. He lurched around feeling ribs, looking into mouths. Rankine and Moreno peered anxiously over their shoulders in the direction of the forest tracks.

‘The rams are no good,' said Kale.

Moreno was astounded after the fandango of walking through the forest.

‘He is my rams, I breed hims.'

‘Very good, too,' said Rankine. ‘
Muy bien
.'

They called Rankine ‘Ugly Tom' for his handsome poxy face in which there was now a strained affection as he stared down his shepherd, Moreno. With short-cropped prematurely grey hair and dusty pale eyes, Ugly Tom Rankine had an air of decisiveness and good humour that made him trusted by men, and liked in his adventures. That there were limits to his tolerance on many questions was never quite apparent, until he acted.

The three men cupped hands to their ears and listened for the sound of waggon wheels creaking, bullocks lowing and flogged men singing their national songs. Even the sheep stopped bleating and held the moment of quiet, into which flew, from branch to branch, and then onto a sheep's saddle back, a small black fantailed bird with a white vest and feet like starved black twigs.

‘It is telling us we are safe,' said Rankine.

‘That is the Mundowey bird,' said Kale, ‘if you want to know what the first man that ever sighted it called it, and he said it was a forest friend.'

Moreno crossed himself for the shame of his dedication to Rankine and his needs. From a saddlebag Rankine took a bundle of clothes and threw them to the Spaniard. Moreno flicked off his cap, stripped himself free of his military jacket, shook himself out of the canvas trousers he wore. He clambered into his shepherd's rags, hopping around on one leg to get the other foot into the second leg. Last on was a grubby smock. Then he began his shepherding in a better mood of feeling.

Kale watched as the sheep broke from the trees in ones and twos and fours. The mob joined up and came funnelling down a length of track, throwing up sand and spreading it about. Kale counted the
number by raking his eyes over them and moving his lips in rapid counts of ten. They were small ewes of Spanish blood, two hundred originally shipped to the colony without attracting the attention of stockmen better known than Tom Rankine. Arriving with the sheep eighteen months ago on the
Melanthus
, from Hull via Calcutta, Rankine had been deceptive in describing them as Bengali mutton breeders on a manifest of shipments — though few could have told any difference: that they were prizes from war in Spain; their wool smitten gold under pancaked pizzle-stain and wasted sores; that they were the king of Spain's own breeders — Rankine taking them first on a barge up the Parramatta river, then across mud flats through mangroves, and finally on a slow drive into rough bush where, for most of a year, they wandered with Moreno, growing out their coats. Their gaunt and unthrifty forms increased in that time from the appearance of starving rats to something better. Their two hundred became three hundred through every second ewe boasting a surviving lamb. At their first shearing they proved remarkable as promised. They were Rankine's hoard of promise on yellow hooves and were made to do better under the hand of Desmond Kale.

‘The ewes are not half bad,' said Kale, ‘six for each lash,' and he winked a droopy eye — the milling animals parting either side of the trio while Rankine, in a rush of feeling, looked at Kale's back, his lumpy darkening shirt crusted with busy flies. It brought him to quick tears that he brushed away with a shirtsleeve.

Kale turned, caught Rankine's glance, and the officer's mouth resumed its usual lopsided insouciant look. Tom Rankine was reliable mostly where there was provocation and dare, which was, here to say, a compound of love and mercy. Kale was Rankine's wish that what was done irreparably wrong in another part of life
would be bettered by hopefulness in this one; that what was won in Spain by treachery would be improved in New South Wales. But no time for wishing — they'd better get on. It took another few minutes for the sheep to be bunched ready. Even then, Rankine was unfinished with feeling. For more than just sheep and repentance folded around Kale in the perilous matter they risked. No telling this to the convict — Rankine loved Kale's daughter, Meg Inchcape, whatever the threat to his skin and, what he cared for as much, his pride. But Rankine had only just begun a campaign of having her, of making his first moves upon the daughter in time with consorting with the father. He was further advanced with Kale than he was with her. With Meg Inchcape he was not even yet in danger. He was in love at first sight — and with Meg as a prophecy, you could almost say, to which he bent, idealising his life, though they had never spoken more than two brisk words to each other.

Kale did not know of any sort of connection. He'd fumed that Meg was ruined by an officer once, a matter he made difficulties about, without satisfaction. A regiment had no strategy on love, only its officers had tactics. Now by their look at each other you would think Kale and Rankine were merely stock dealing in this dangerous paradise past Toongabbie, where men worked in irons until they died foul deaths, or made escapes from the stone quarries of which this one was more finely calculated than most.

Kale got up on the horse behind Rankine and clasped him around the waist. Now he almost fainted. The dog working the sheep came into sight and brought the sheep around behind them, its tongue lolling conspicuously wet. Moreno tripped along on his small foreign feet. They moved off — the three men, the sheep and the dog through the white-trunked gum trees closing behind them.

A half hour later when the bullock waggon came through headed by the shuffling Irish, Desmond Kale was gone from the world of punishment, gone as if he had never suffered in it.