The Ballad of Desmond Kale (27 page)

The eye of Stanton's best Saxon ram (after Young Matchless) was almost feminine, softly dark and drawn back almondish. May be Slumberous liked to be groomed because he was already cozy for it; his nostrils were a V making a silver snot line down to his mouth, that wore, when it was closed with the lips tight sealed as a vacuum jar, a pert little ladyish smile.

‘Take your last look at how large, curved, drawn out in a spiral these horns are,' said Stanton stroking them over. ‘Tomorrow they will be cut off clean. The head is large but the forehead rather low. It is made for butting so watch out for Slumberous when we release him. My boys seem to think I don't know how they tease him into ram fights, but it is all fine boyish fun, and I let them do it, because it keeps up a ram's mettle. I don't mind they throw rotten fruit to get him teased. But don't tell my boys I am on to their tricks or
they'll say I'm a fond old fool. I am afraid here endeth my lesson because my wife is calling me from the house to attend to the small part left of my day. Have you a picture of the race of merino, Artie Josephs?'

‘I think I would know one anywhere,' said Artie.

DURING THE AFTERNOON A MESSENGER came to Laban Vale bringing a long-awaited letter from the governor. The man rode in from the east through the pall of dust raised in the sheep yards and after being fed a slab of corned meat and old potatoes, and drinking off a gallon of tea, he rode back in the same direction before Stanton knew he was there.

The letter was addressed to Parson Magistrate Matthew Stanton,
On His Majesty's Service
, but Dolly Stanton knew what was in the letter by the time her husband joined her.

The seal was seemingly intact although the folds where the letter opened were damp on a day that was dry and in no way humid. Stanton was charitable towards his wife's passionate curiosities and from the fluttery grin turning the corners of her dear mouth white it seemed they might have got their way with a ship. May be, thought Stanton, to be fully charitable at home, the post rider's horse sweated into the letter pouch and that was all. But may be too, Dolly had put a kettle on the stove and banished the servants from the kitchen to search for cobwebs and to track invasions of red ants in the rooms at the other end of the house, so that their
nests could be found and destroyed while she applied heat around the seal and forced the letter open.

Stanton talked a little about ants to tease Dolly with expectation of what she already knew, while she squirmed and twisted on her stool and waited perforce. Ants were her fixation since the new parts of the house were built and there were crowds of them pumping from every crack and crevice. They had mistakenly built on ant beds, although when they looked, ant beds were everywhere on Laban Vale with a tally of types numbering many dozens, and that was not even to begin on the termites, whose mounds were as big as shepherd's huts. Termites were secretive within the earth and able to eat a whole house from the inside without announcing their presence until the meal was complete down to the last woody snack; they could have a new house eaten at one end before its building was completed at the other. There were the red ants and the small black harmless-looking ants that leaped and stung like embers. There were those all jointed like a string of blisters and tiger-striped, with legs of busy wire. These did not bite so much as race into everything including one's underdrawers and sugar bins. There were the ones called bull ants needing no introduction, except their bite was hideous. Then there were the ones that gathered under the window ledges like an army of seething black pins in the last of the light on a hot afternoon and unfolded glassy wings, flying up into the house and dying into the lamps, burrowing into hair, entering mouths every time breath was drawn. One of these crawled into the letter now and laced all over the words while Stanton read them.

‘Well, well, well, and another well — we have it, our ship,' he said from the corner of his mouth, fielding a flying ant that bothered him. ‘The
Edinburgh Castle
, she is called, with enough
room in her holds for our entire wool clip and the product of a good few other sheep stations besides. This governor is not a bad sort of scoundrel hielander. I might almost be inclined to join him for an officers' dinner if he ever condescends to invite me, and my wife of course — darling, pretty Dolly?'

Something was going on with her. She was off her stool and falling on his front. Stanton knew his wife felt pleasure at the news, but suddenly, to his immense surprise, Dolly ground herself against him, and sobbed while embracing and kissing his throat with hot delight.

‘My dear, my darling, my woddly doodly bride,' said Stanton, a little amazed and taking a moment to get into her swing of enthusiasm. It was not too common, this picture she made in his arms. He wanted to savour it a while. A buzzing insect under the table performed a bitter complaint as Stanton remembered lines he disliked remembering at all, from a play he used to carry in his pocket, when he was a youth dabbling in romantic shepherding and more poetically minded, lines of which always came to him when lust's possibility of slaking was dangled before him after drought: how three crabbed months had soured themselves to death, ere he could make her open her white hand, and clap herself his love. Dolly's attentions went on grabbing, and despite Stanton having a sorry headache it was stirring to a high degree as he shifted the palm of his hand down her waist and around to her buttocks to explore bringing her hips in closer. When she sensed that her husband was aroused she went with swift consent to their cool darkened bedroom. Stanton briskly followed on naked feet, holding his boots in his arms. He informed the servants they would be napping. With the door wedged closed and the distant animal noises of the stockyards in their ears, they forgot who they were for
ten minutes. The cuckoo clock chimed but there was a surety their Warren Inchcape was elsewhere, occupied with the shearing, or he would hear them getting up their cry. When they were done with gratification they lay back, smiling in the half dark of the all too aware house, and imagined the cool breezes and excitements of their sailing ship putting about to pass between the heads of Port Jackson.

This
post coitum triste
moment of airy calm and maritime floating was disturbed when Stanton informed Dolly that he had found himself a sheepmaster to take the place of Warren Inchcape so that Warren could be brought along on their voyage.

‘It is harder to find a good free man in this colony than it is to pass a kangaroo through the eye of a fish bone, but I think I have found one. Nor is he Irish, either. It is our very own Senyor Lorenze.'

Stanton rolled from the marriage bed, stood upright and stretched his arms to the tips of his fingers and, cracking his knuckles one, two, and three, felt calmly satisfied as he climbed back into his work-stained trousers. He was fully in command of his wife after taking her to him for once. He was out of that bedroom door before she could expostulate his smugness.

‘Matthew?' she cried unheard, heaving herself back on the bed among the disturbed linen, stuffing her mouth with lace to be quiet about it. It was no good any more going over the same arguments with him. Oh, she was going to have to revise her thinking on the double-shifting stubborn deep qualities in that Christian man her husband. They drove her to weep and regret her extremes of gifted love at moments of high heaven. The same qualities were also the foundations of their prosperity. That is what she needed to remember too. Keep her mind on that and she might get what she
wanted without great fuss. Pray for it, indeed — harmonious success as perfect as their wool might be one day. There was no doubt that mixing with sheep and wool made people less Christian, not more, in this colony, and her husband was having to walk several narrow planks at the same time. What of the rules he was pledged to maintain when he kissed the Bible at his ordination? Vows that were so beautifully apt to their parts of England, that was the riddle — the moors and valleys of the East Riding, and the walks and byways of flat Cambridgeshire that they strolled with their evangelical friends and would do so again, under a soft sky that always seemed gently stirred by God's fingers. But there in dear old England all the soils were good, compared with the colony's, and upon the episcopal vine evangelical passion grew healthy. When it took hold it gripped without sliding too much. Not so much here because, as Matthew often said, God loves a green field, but in New South Wales there was a fair bit of rough and everything was dry sticks.

So if Dolly liked the luxury of fine linen and sea voyages as much as she admired her husband's rugged sermonising in the pulpits of the colony at fifty-two Sundays per year and Good Fridays and Christmases, she resolved she had better learn to shift with the winds of morality as he did, and sup with the Devil. He did it with his whips. She would do it with her silences. So she dried her tears and resolved. If Matthew wanted Warren on their passenger manifest, along with Titus, they would take them both, but she would make of the lumpen boy a meal of her own.

IVY STANTON CUT PAPER CONCERTINAS with scissors of Sheffield steel and made fabric flowers from scraps of hoarded cotton, in a household where every piece of serviceable stuff was used many times over, and even the tornest of rags had a price.

Late in the day when it was hazy, hot and dull, the two girls, Ivy and Leah Josephs, dressed themselves like boys in baggy shirts and trousers and went out into the paddocks to look for dry daisies, and found a good few. They meandered along the creek with twigs and dried gum leaves crackling underfoot. ‘Hurry up, Leah!' ‘I'm coming!' The sadness in Leah's eyes was some kind of accident of looks. Her voice was never sad at all, only soft, dreamy, and deeply feeling. The pain she felt in her lame left leg she never complained about. When she was tired she stopped and found something interesting to talk about until she was ready to go on again. Every step she took she dragged a toe, gave an ankle flick, and sailed forwards. Ivy had altogether whispered to Titus to come and find them, and after that, because they were dressed as boys, to lead them the back way, along a defile of the creek, around to the wool
hall. They would watch the shearing and help roll wool and be mistook for boys till dark.

When they had stowed their flowers and climbed up into the fork of a tree, Ivy pulling Leah up after her, the girls held hands and fancied each other's hair and competed to boast which of the two had the palest inside forearms. It was Ivy and not Leah. She was up on the bullocky's waggon so much, and out on a ribby horse tailing livestock under the burning sun, though she buttoned herself down to the wrists and had a big wide floppy hat tied tight under her chin so it wouldn't fly off.

‘We are up in the trees with the birds!' Ivy kept announcing. Every time she did so the birds flew off with a squawk. Leah felt a bit too hurriedly led by her younger friend into something she wondered about. But the feeling only brushed her as she went along with it. The sun blazed lower but slowly. In the heat, lengths of smooth bark cracked themselves from the trunks, started at the tops and slithered down rolling over with a clattering collapse on the ground. Scrolls and strips lay around like neck scarves made from terra cotta. There was life in everything, a dry breathing expanding sort of life where if something was too tight around a growing thing or person it was popped right off. It was what Leah always noticed, may be because she was lame. But could not believe she would always be lame because there was another way to be born out of this condition. There had to be — a way above restrictions, and that was the attraction of Ivy, who was definitely the most outbursting young girl of good family Leah Josephs had ever met. Ivy did not seem to consider that around her parents and the Christian Bible they thumped upon her, was a picket fence of rules to keep her in. She jumped it over, and the first place where she landed was in her mind, after which it was easy for her main
part to follow. Leah was the other way around — certainly her bodily self had no trouble jumping into her mind, and in there she was freer. But only in there. Of the two, Ivy was the luckier, though not the safer, through being equipped by good health to run wherever she wanted, and be two persons at once if she wanted to be, until something bigger than herself stopped her, which she had certainly not met with yet. This reminded Leah of what she didn't want to know, that one person was one person most likely for ever.

Across in the sand below them a snake flicked into sight and drew itself along weaving its thumbthick head from side to side. It was a black snake with coral-red undersides and was claimed by their glances to be nearly ten feet long. Both girls knew it was pretty near deadly but neither allowed their thrill of fear to take hold because they were not shriekers aloud. A snake was able to come anywhere, even up a tree and along a branch sinuously persistent. But they only said, ‘Hmm, a snake, it must be after a frog in the mud hole.' Most important around their calm reaction was their status as colonial-experience originals of an exceptional warp, with a sworn intent never to cry out betraying their brave disguise. It was certainly true, that Leah from horseback or up on the bullock waggon, and Ivy from a secret passion for climbing out along tree branches and entwining herself against forks with Titus, had both seen plenty of snakes without worry. In New South Wales you could walk all day and never see a snake but as soon as you got up on a horse or up in a tree you saw one. Nor was it just the red-bellied black ones that were poisonous, but the copperheads, the king browns, and the tiger snakes that were so deadly nobody lived longer than a few hours after being bitten by one. Except that few were bitten, only those who tormented them — such as a convict man who found one in a net on their fig trees, at the end of the last
year, and tried to take it by reaching his arm in. He died in their barracks' air sheds the same night. But even to be afraid of tigers was a show of feebleness. Leah said she wanted a tree python as a pet, to carry along in the waggon, and Ivy said Titus would easily get her one. But to watch out he didn't throw it on the fire, because he had a liking for snake meat steamed in hot coals.

‘You are lucky to have good brothers,' said Leah.

‘Good? You could call them that. Everything they are put to is work. My brother Titus is the most amusing. Everything with Titus is a game. Then there is Warren,' said Ivy with an honest stare from those cold clear eyes, set in her pale small animal face. ‘I like it when the rosehiller parrots peck bran from his lips, it leaves flecks of blood and he winces, but he stays still because I am watching. He is always trudging from one to another, dogs, cows, sheep, hens, guns, bluestone, turpentine, sheep tar, knife honing, kangaroo meat for dogs. He never slows down nor speeds up.'

‘He watched me,' thought Leah, remembering a strong stare in the moonlight which she answered with her own. She was sometimes watched by men with a such a strong look, there was something about her that drew them, but she felt with a boy, not a man, that she could ask him what he wanted and not just be answered with the gesture of the sort they gave round here that she could hardly interpret into detail, but quite understood, when men gave it.

‘My father loves him,' said Ivy, ‘and as far as it goes with him, which is a long way, he is kind to him.'

‘Your father …' began Leah, sounding it as a question.

‘How dare it if Leah says what she thinks,' thought Ivy. People were not wanted even to try, not even admired friends. If anyone was going to stand up against her father it was Ivy herself because
she alone was equal to the strength of him, through the love that bound them. That story of him holding her by one hand above the waves that crashed into their cabin and swirled around their necks, the day she was born — that story was vivid in her mind, it was a memory. She rolled herself over on the strong square palm of his hand, and bellowed the waves to retreat, and so saved him the day he saved her.

But it was all right because Leah could not even come close to saying what she thought. ‘If I did,' said Leah to herself, ‘it would be about Parson Stanton's power to strike fear. That almost merry, fussy, farmer missionary parson magistrate, with a round face like a dented pewter teapot, I have seen his reflection in the eyes of my dear father so fiercely threatening as to be always obeyed.'

Ivy peeled bark and took a sharp stick, and started scratching her name on the delicate greyish-green parchment of wet sappy tree surface revealed under her hand. ‘I wish Titus would hurry and come,' she said.

Leah saw Titus first. He loped along through the trees pretty certain of which great tree the girls were in. They had already climbed higher. When Titus saw the snake moving he slithered around it and then came on with a soft call of cooee. Ivy dropped her twig on his head and he swung himself up with nimble enthusiasm, laughing as he came level to Ivy's toes and then her fingers and then her eyes. He was so pleased to see her he took her hand in his and held it to his cheek. Leah did not know what to say, as Ivy squealed, ‘You're a snake! I'm a frog!' — or where to look, except it was lovely enough to witness if every thought she had about a white girl having her fingers nipped by a black boy was lovely. She'd had some thoughts sometimes, that almost were, in her speculations of everything in the world, possible: and ‘lissome' was a
word coming to mind as they played innocently enough. They were brother and sister. But then disgust was another feeling too — of a kind saying how could Ivy dare in front of me. How could she carry on ignoring me. Is it because I am lame?

Leah turned aside and wondered if she was going to need help to get down. She had made drawings in her journal of the year, which she kept of every day they travelled. She went back to observing detail. Titus with his shirt open to the waist, his handsome laughing smile, his tufty brown hair. With his trousers like his name, low on his hips, and higher than his ankles.

Ivy's chin rested on Titus's shoulder as she looked at Leah from behind his back. ‘My brother,' she said with exasperated pride.

Titus laughed, ‘Yes please!' as she scratched and pulled his hair.