The Ballad of Desmond Kale (20 page)

NEXT TIME THE JOSEPHS WERE found, their party was picketed inside boundaries of Laban Vale, some miles from the parson's homestead, with orange sparks of a campfire flying up in the first dark. It was a week since the wedding. A plan had been made for Rankine and Meg to ride out and join them on their way. They would continue together from there as far as they could. But someone else arrived first.

 

The supper pots were all to one side when Patrick Lehane got down from his horse. Two of them had blankets spread on the ground and were smoking their pipes — Josephs father and son. They had muskets beside them which they only fingered lightly, when they saw it was just one man, and a white one. Either they had never heard of the eye of reason or did not believe in the eye as a threat; whichever way, no credit to them. Their horses stood in the trees hobbled and their bullocks were hobbled in the sand of a dry creek, pulling at whatever they could find of fodder and breathing sternly in the quiet as they munched noisy clusters of growth, staring their
wide dark horned heads through the reeds by the campfire's throw of light. The wife and two younger children had a lantern and were settled under the high floor of the dray, their legs crossed on a patterned rug unrolled on the ground. They stood out to acknowledge their visitor. The wife was dumpy as a beehive; the daughter, of an age to be eyed, with a strong figure and a fringe of black hair across a white forehead — and so Lehane consumed her with his stare until she damned his ogling by turning aside. The boy of about nine or ten had a head as big as a pumpkin, and Lehane wanted to kick it to smithereens, just for the heck of it. The good wife beamed out a welcome that Lehane would like to rub in her shining face. It was all too comfortable, too cheerfully loving and complete except for the bugs and moths bothering them, diving into their light and sizzling in the flame.

‘Who is it, Joe?' said the wife.

‘A passerby.'

‘Do you have any baccy?' said Lehane, thrusting a hand deep in a pocket as if he had coins there, stirring his fingers around conspicuously to be sure it was known he intended to pay.

‘I do have baccy,' said the trader, ‘as it happens, and plenty of it, but it is all high up and bundled, can't ye wait for it?'

‘Not if I want to keep on my way,' said Lehane.

Joe Josephs offered his own pouch then.

‘Take a good fist of niggerhead, and consider yourself in debt to Joe Josephs's friendship, sir. This here's my eldest boy, Arthur, and over by our house on six wheels is my Martha and the two younger ones, Leah and Solly. No doubt I shall learn to know you better, if you join our fire. So far I am wondering if you have a name at all. This gentleman soundly snoring is Mick Tornley, the bullocky.'

They looked across at the lumpy shadow on the dirt.

‘I have heard of Mick Tornley,' said Lehane, turning pale: Tornley stood for no nonsense, and he'd not counted him into the equation of a bail-up. So he'd better hurry.

‘Oh, and the next thing you are going to say,' said Joe Josephs, lowering his reedy voice, ‘at least from the warning look on your wise count'nance, is you know Mick Tornley will kill two or three bullocks at ten guineas a head in twelvemonth's driving unless he gets a sovereng every full moon, and I better have my geld ready because it is a wide country we are in.'

‘Something like that, matey,' said Lehane, reaching around to his backbone and releasing his pistol. ‘Now if you would all step forward, and get in a line, I shan't bother you long. You can get back to tormenting our saviour with your evil spells. I am Patrick Lehane, the eye of reason. I would ask the young lady to collect everything shining silver or gold. Go to your father's pockets, dear.'

Chinking coins were passed to Lehane. The girl limped back into line.

‘Five holey dollars, is that all? You shall have to move faster. What is wrong with you?'

‘She is lame,' said her little brother, which the girl did not like hearing.

‘Now would you answer me, Joe, where is your gold?'

‘Leah,' said Joe, ‘look in the trunk. You know the pearly one?'

‘I'll do it,' said Solly.

‘Run along and hurry,' agreed Lehane.

The boy went under the waggon and dropped from sight on the other side. They waited for him to reappear. Lehane levelled his pistol on Joe. There was an unnatural quietness everywhere.

‘Where is the boy?'

‘He is directly behind you, sir.'

Lehane felt a tickling at his waist, like a mouse escaping from his trousers. When he turned around it was to find the boy holding a cocked pistol pointing at his heart. The trader and the older son scooped up their firearms and Lehane was completely covered and done.

‘Thank you, Solly,' said the trader, as the bullocky stirred from his blankets, blinked awake, assessed the need and without a word too many set about finding greenhide straps to bind Lehane's wrists and ankles until morning.

‘What is my crime?' said Lehane. ‘I am only a victim of temptation, which is a very human thing.'

‘We shall let the parson magistrate decide on you,' said Joe.

‘Too bloody right,' said Mick Tornley. ‘And whatever else you've done can be flogged out of you, you thieving bastard.'

‘Have mercy,' whined Lehane. ‘I would rather face anyone than him.' Complaining, he seemed oddly satisfied though.

 

Parson Stanton was unaware how sincerely and passionately the governor was trying to find him a ship to England to get rid of him. If he'd known the effort being made he might not have wished as much to go, leaving matters to ripen in his absence to his hopeful advantage.

Writing to the governor over his stolen ram, Stanton said he was doing everything he could to cover the many evils in the removal of his prime stock, short of having his own shepherds arrested, tried, flogged, hung on the gallows tree and manacled, thrown on a ship, taken to Hell's Gate in Van Diemen's Land, wherefrom if they ever returned it would be as broken souls, in no way usefully productive. This he said in defence of his reputation as a charitable man.

Lifting his head from the ink-spattered page Stanton looked through his garden into a thin line of distant trees, out into the morning's boiling heat, great whack of summer, where a horseman was appointed to be met by him, week by week. When would he come? Where was Lehane with his promised information? It had been too many weeks and Stanton felt gulled. Why, the minister, through charity, would consider every unlikely story he was told and give to each its credibility before moving on to the next claimed event and the next, until he arrived at the truth finally, which he would know when he took Lehane by the throat and damnably throttled him. There would be the Devil's own tussle to come out when he came in.

Stanton struck out his letter and started again. It was not really the governor he wanted to address directly, it was the king. Only a voyage to England, it was decided, and a further grant of land would complete the justice pilgrimage begun with a few poor fat-tailed sheep and continued, now, between high ambition and undermining conspiracies of purebreds. Had a rural parson ever risen as far, only to be bothered by mute opposition? Sometimes it seemed to Stanton that Kale himself had elevated him by the very scathingness of his challenge; that he would have been nobody without Kale. And this only drove him more, to define himself crowningly.

Their voyage was the topic of the household when it wasn't the taken ram. Dolly wished to take Titus. Stanton intended they take Warren. So they would take them both, with Ivy, he declared; and the pair of them, husband and wife, smiled reconciled enjoying a picture of Titus swanning it in London with reports being sent back to the governor of the impression a black boy made on their lordships as a missionary example in cravat and split tails. The only picture Stanton
held against it (in private imagination) was of Titus being licked by the clunking cat wielded by Stanton himself — studs in the fronds like cherries. The black race could very well be dealt with — hounded, banished, if not converted — but as for the rest, Stanton would like to say to the king, when he gained his audience:

‘Your Majesty, you have made a prison colony of Botany Bay, but the very scoundrels it was founded to keep, do range its immensities with an expression in their heads, that it is the prisoners' country now, and by what rights do free men graze there?'

Somebody else was in the room. Ivy with her back to her father flattened her nose on the precious window glass, where fairy water splashed, hesitated and sped in beads, swelled and joined.

‘Why is Warren so sad?' she said.

Warren's dogs, maggoty half-bred biters, fell away from his knees and ankles. In the driving rain he was slicked with cold, his freckled skin white and his eyelids blinking water away from his lashes.

‘He is missing our ram, Young Matchless, and blaming himself all the time,' said Stanton.

Ivy turned from the window and asked her father, with the freedom of address allowed her, ‘Is Warren always to be such a drudge?'

Stanton sighed, set down his quill and shaped his hands into an attitude of prayer, resting his pink dimpled roughly shaved chin on his fingertips.

‘He is my apprentice, m'dear, that's the nature of the bond, not slavery or unwilling assignment but the arcane wizardry of sheepcraft. You should hear us at the shearing discussing points. Then you wouldn't call him sad — he raises his voice and shouts at me, laughs, all fired up with sheeply imagination, and we box each other over the ears with arguments, some of which he wins.'

‘I long to hear you at the shearing discussing points,' said the girl, not having the least idea what was meant, but always wanting to be out in the world doubling, quadrupling the experience she was allowed, enthusing and pleading to the limit of her need, and a fair distance beyond.

Her father argued:

‘If there be no rogues and villains always around in my fields that I am supporting, through love of God and no other reason, believe me, all prodding and swearing at each other, and with dark ideas in their heads, some one of them stealing my Young Matchless — for sheep murderers they are, barely restrained by fear of the cat, scoundrels wanting their tickets of leave via cunning, who wouldn't respect you, no, not at all with their dirty ways, and,' Stanton relented diplomatically, ‘if it was not always so dusty or wet, sweetest dumpling — I would have you over there in my men's yards in a flash.'

‘It is hardly ever wet. Some of the old men are the dearest things. They love me and if they ever lift anything, they know they'll get whipped. You are trying to confuse me, Papa,' said Ivy. ‘I wish you wouldn't so much.' She had impatience to know something she didn't — to experience whatever it was she could not — and hated his soft talking around her. But she was trying to confuse him as well, for when he was not present on the farm she went wherever she liked, even into the yards.

Stanton asked her to come and stand close to him. He fondled her fingers and tucked a loose strand of fiery hair behind her ear, then drew her to his side with lubberly warmth. It was their way together.

‘Are there any birds in the trees?' she eventually asked in the thin voice that assured him she was his.

In answer, he whistled the song of the thrush that was her calming enjoyment since infancy, a trick he had with his malleable, large lips, bringing them to a puckered aperture like a ring of dough. So much for the fearlessness of the wild colonial lass, Stanton thought to himself, who dreamed of riding a great black horse, uncontrollable except by her — a mere splinter in the saddle — driving at fallen tree trunks with as much spirit as she might kill a red-bellied black snake, or fight wildfire with gum-tree branches, or take a poker to a thief who might want to kiss her lips (as she only thought), before he swept the family candlesticks into a sack.

Ivy had a small eager face, pinched pretty like her mother's but brighter, fiercer — a thinnish-lipped version, her mouth slightly knurly through a birth difference to give her a look of natural scorn that was really quite a feature. Her mother considered her a handful of jumping jacks and hardly saw how the two of them were alike. Stanton himself had brought her into the world twice over, first by begetting her upon his wife and second by being the lone attendant in his wife's sea cabin when she was born, during their voyage through the roaring forties on their way to the colony. After her umbilical cord was cut, Stanton had nuzzled her little chump's face still bloody with mess — then a great wave came in through the skylight and half drowned them all. If the minister had not been holding her she would have washed out. Stanton still regarded her as a child, despite his wife's forthright information, recently announced, that she was now a young woman, having her time of the month arrived upon her in tears and defiance.

‘I will tell you what, we have almost finished building the wool hall to store the fleeces,' said her father, ‘and to lock up my rams. We are ready to dedicate the wool hall with songs and games, country dances. I have heard someone is coming through with a
waggonload of goods, we shall time it for then, and they might have something we like.'

‘If it is Joe Josephs and Martha and them, they will have ribbons and stuffs.'

‘They certainly will,' said her father. ‘I am expecting them any day. I'll send Warren to hurry them in.'

‘We'll dress up the walls and tables,' said Ivy, excited at the thought of Leah Josephs coming, the girl she longed most to see, with Leah's brother Arthur playing music on his fiddle.

‘Splendid,' said her father. ‘Remember the song for the shearing?'

‘You start it.'

‘Jog on, jog on, the footpath way,' sang Stanton, ‘and merrily hent the stile, a merry heart goes all the day, your sad heart tires in a mile.'

‘That is peculiar. You are peculiar, Papa, and you are too fat, you are —'