The Ballad of Desmond Kale (30 page)

A few more maladroit instances followed.

WHEN STANTON WAS DONE WITH building Titus into a more affectionate frame of opinion, he fanned his face with his hat, drank a mug of water, and felt pleased enough in the coming heat of the day to leave the shearing get on. He stepped clear of the yards and stood with the sun behind him gazing around the open spaces. Warren took a few steps up, wondering if they were all his orders or if there was something more to come. There was usually a word of dismissal at least, but Stanton looked over his shoulder and said, ‘They are taking their ease.' He meant the Josephs still waiting for justice over Lehane. He was not thinking about Lehane. The only part of him thinking about Lehane was the part denying he was thinking about Lehane at all.

Across at the Josephs's, smoke skeined up from a fire. There was not much movement, and a feeling of calm to be envied against the stir of the busy day's life.

‘Where is our help coming from, saith the Lord. Is it from our friends? I don't think so. Not today.'

‘They are not giving me Artie and Solly, their pa said so.'

‘That is almost understandable,' said Stanton. ‘It is their Sabbath
day, after all. So how shall we do it? You can push up the four hundred on your own, with your willing dog, but not hand each man his sheep. The shearers were muttering into their gruel when I met them earlier and I see them coming over now, they'll be here to start before long.'

‘The blacks, all husbands and wives are promised a sheep if they put in the morning bringing them up.'

‘Give them one of our old ladies, then.'

‘One is nothing, they are so thin.'

‘Then make it two. Be sure they are sheared first. The wool is tawdry, but every strand counts. Save my old Bessie from the knife when you make your choices, I have a whim to see how long that old lady lives, because I remember the parable of Nathan, in Second Samuel twelve.'

A weepy pride in stock was apt to come out.

‘There were two men in one city,' he said, ‘the one rich, the other poor. The rich man had exceeding many flocks and herds, but the poor man had nothing but one little ewe lamb, which he had bought and nourished up, and it grew together with him and with his children. It did eat of his own meat, and drank of his own cup, and lay in his bosom, and was unto him as a daughter.'

Stirred by his own sentiment, Stanton went up and broke open the door of the hut, throwing sunlight over Titus who lay on the floor with his knees up under his chin and softly snoring. It was past seven when he would normally be breakfasted but no attempt had been made to break out. The innocence of the thatchy-head boy touched Stanton, his useless dependence, his legs mere trembling grass stalks, and he stood watching Titus a full minute before the tangle of limbs stirred and the boy rolled back his eyes. ‘There you are, did you have dreams?'

‘Bad dreams,' said Titus, touching his lip, which was scabbed.

Last night Dolly had dressed his few cuts, which were in no way serious, with tincture of iodine, and then without too much argument, except in her eyes, she had given Titus over to him to be locked up.

‘Get up, Titus,' Stanton said. ‘Do not be afraid. You are feeling sad, I can see. But that is all right. Broken hearts soak up Christian consolation better. Hold this Bible and read the text I finger for you. Read it along with me. Come over into the light. You are limping. Are you sore?'

‘Only a bit.'

‘Are you sorry?'

‘I'm too sorry.'

‘Sit here beside me on the bench.'

Stanton liked teaching a lesson where a random text formed the inspiration for a moral and could be twisted into an explanation fitting the moment. Somehow it proved that God was everywhere, when it didn't prove that argument was endless. ‘Lord God, guide my inspiration as we turn to your word,' he said, plunging his finger in. He had never been stumped and did not expect to be baffled by so silent and deflated a debater as Titus.

The text Stanton touched and read aloud in the first verse ran:

 

Then saith Pilate unto him, Speakest thou not unto me? Knowest thou not that I have the power to crucify thee, and have power to release thee?

 

Before Stanton could draw breath, the reply ran quickly from Titus's mouth:

‘“Bejesus answered, you couldn have no power gainst me, cept it was gibben you from above dere, but he that delivered me unter it didden have no power at all.”'

Stanton had no energy left in his rage. Only his rage.

‘That is not exactly what it says, Titus.'

‘I am a no good pluddy reader,' said Titus. ‘I can't make it no better. Have we done for today? Am I good enough?'

‘No, you are not good enough,' said Stanton, mentally pledging his vow of the day before, to whip Titus repeatedly and hold him over the printed word and push his nose into the clean clear smell of the rice-paper pages of the authorised text until he loved that book as well as he loved his own ragamuffin neckerchiefs.

‘Look, Titus,' he took the boy's arm, and grabbing it between his palms twisted Titus's skin in opposite directions to make it burn. ‘You are a pest to me and a nuisance.'

‘This is hurtin.'

‘It is going to hurt all the time inside you until you love God,' said Stanton.

‘I lub God,' Titus spilled his tears, and Stanton, with a farewell jab, let him go. He remembered he liked bullying when he was a boy, though feeling ashamed of its easy victories over smaller fry. It was one of the confessions he made when he took holy orders. That he hit lesser boys. Now he had the feeling back with nobler justification.

When Titus's tears were dry they went to a better passage, in another chapter of the word:

‘“O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” Your turn.'

‘I tank God true bejesus Christ our Lord. So den with the mind I meself serve the law, but with the flesh the law of sin.'

‘That is you, Titus.'

‘It's me, I swear,' said Titus. ‘My flesh is tore with sin.'

‘You do not have the least idea of what you mean, but the
words flow through you, like the biggest river in flood, carrying understanding that glues like mud and debris of meaning. That is all I can hope for. Titus?'

‘Yes, Father?'

‘Run along and ask the cook for your breakfast. Then go down to the yards and help Warren and your black fellows bring up sheep. And Titus?'

‘Yep?'

‘No smoking your pipe, as I want your voice peerless clean for singing at our shearing celebration tonight.'

 

The ditch was dug in length and breadth about the size of a large male sheep, but only about six inches deep. Lorenze supervised preparations under authority granted by Stanton. He relished directing Clumpsy M'Carty with the spade. ‘Dig him as large as when he is stretched from his forelegs out to his backs legs pulled as long as a man's.' This instruction surprised Clumpsy about size, and he muttered over the amount of work being exaggerated for the sake of one operation of sheepwork. It was a shallow grave. Clumpsy stared around with warning in his eye, beckoning to Warren, wanting to whisper his worst misgivings about the new favourite (Warren being the only one he could trust) and fancying that after dark he himself might be fitted into this hole a still warm, tormented and very dead Irishman, if his silence was so important to Lorenze's security at Laban Vale.

‘What is it?' Warren said.

Clumpsy believed that Lorenze might kill him because he knew too much about him. But Lorenze was listening, watching, calculating, and Clumpsy, resting on his spade handle, ironically relented:

‘Your Spaniard is always kind and gentle with his flocks, ain't that true, Senhorato Lorenze, you are a contradictory sort of a race and don't go round castratin every ram lamb, you let em live out their life for the sake of getting more weight in the wool, and when you do have that little operation to do on the eggs, you don't use no knife, no siree, you are all tenderness as you go squeezin the scrotum and twistin the sphermatic vessels more kindly. Though I have heard of it done with stones on a man, it's like an appeal is made to you by the poor craythures, dear things, they beg for their lives, you understand their bleats better than anyone's words, and you deal out your pity.'

‘Forget the heggs. Come here this ends,' said the Spaniard. ‘Cut hims down and across.' He showed where the earth was to be dug. More people came down to watch and Clumpsy was made dumb by their presence.

The second ditch, slightly shallower, was worked across the top in the shape of the cross that bothered Joe Josephs so much when he and the parson had talked, although the shape did not hold Joe back from watching now. He was cured of resentments by forgiving his enemies their sins and his friends their ignorance in his morning prayers. He wore his top hat to protect him from the greater power of God, having made his meditations under a gum tree and anyway being of a consuming curious temperament, hating to miss out on anything interesting going on, just in case he was brought bad luck by not being in it.

The place was prepared at the side of the wool hall on bare earth. Joe was crowded either side by his two sons and his daughter. Solly with his head stuck through his father's spindly legs kept asking, ‘When does it start?'

‘When they do it. Stand back.'

‘DOES A SHEEP FEEL PAIN?' Leah said.

‘They feel like us, they don't like showing it, but it is soon over for them,' said Warren. ‘They are either strung up with their throats cut, or they are let go, and soon they are back on the grass just as happy as they ever was. Their life is pretty good.'

The answer did not seem to please Leah as much as he thought it should. ‘Thank you, Warren,' she said.

‘Leave Warren to his rams,' said Stanton.

He wanted Ivy to go back into the house and rest.

‘I'm not sick,' she said.

‘You are looking pale.'

‘It's just that I am feeling something, but not in my stummick,' she said.

Ivy took Leah's hand, clung to her, leaned on her. They sat on a log with their wide calico hats shading their complexions. They placed their hands inside their sleeves which they pulled well down, and seemed to burrow into themselves. Ivy resented her father with poisonous concentration of betrayal while Leah feared
Stanton yet retained a sense of what her power was. These were their separate interior thoughts when Stanton came over to them again, having worked out a plausible threat. Leah's father was with him and Stanton made it sound as if he and Joe were of one mind:

‘Well, Leah, I shall let you decide for Ivy's own good. Take her home for a rest as soon as you can, or she shan't be able to join us at four, when the bells ring the celebration.'

As Stanton met Leah's eye she lifted her chin provocatively.

‘If she allows me, sir.'

‘You must do as the parson says,' said Joe.

Loving her own father complete, Leah only somewhat pitied him for having his weaknesses and thanked herself for strengthening him, without his having any idea that his lame daughter was able to do it. Her difficulty was in believing there was any part of a living body where pain could not reach. There was a point where hard horn grew into flesh and feeling. It was like the cuticle of a nail.

‘Don't they feel it in close?' she asked Stanton, standing and stumbling a little as she always did when rising. Blood rushed into her worse leg with a sheeting tide of pain. Turning back to the sheep subject kept everyone concentrated on being understanding with each other because sheep were their attachment in common when they had nothing else lending to kindness. When a mob of sheep bleated it was like a hundred pleading hands.

Leah touched her temples, the seat of her most painful understanding, and made it clearer what she meant.

‘Warren says they hurt like we do, he's seen it in them. But they forget a lot sooner.'

‘It is reasonable to think so,' said Stanton. ‘They are given no sense of time, that is their consolation. We have a sense of time but
we get our consolation much higher, through the knowledge of mortality they are born to ignore. Our need of their contribution to us beautifully balances their condition. Certainly they are glorified, as well as put down.'

May be Leah did not realise how obviously it showed why she wanted to know. Just to watch her was to see her wince, when she thought nobody was looking. Her burden of pain was the paleness seen sometimes under her olive skin — flickers of white fear, tensioning of nerves. Pain was her closest companion with a character all of its own. It spoke to her of the world, but she loved the world. Otherwise she could not live.

Stanton placed a hand on Leah's head and gave a consoling chuckle. May be as a boy in a baby's smock he once asked the same sensitive questions. Now he was past feeling too much where it did not count.

He said that while bone and horn grew out of the same nerve ends, they spread in contrasting directions through the devices of nature. The blow would be struck where it would hurt no more than a fingernail being scissored.

So Ivy said, ‘Then why hold him down?'

‘It is not like you, darling, to dwell too much on finesse. You are more like your mother, with a touch of that understanding oppression, dare I say kindly cruelty needed for survival in this land. It must be the influence of your clever friend,' said Stanton quite openly nasty, as he told the Josephs: ‘Usually the girl has no compassion for animal feelings unless they are pets, certainly in any circumstance that I ever remember.'

So this was on Titus, and Ivy frowned. It was on Titus being trapped against a tree and whipped like a dog.

Stanton placed a sheep between his legs.

‘Come here, girlies. Feel it here, along these ridges,' he said. ‘Numb bone.'

They felt in among the greasy corrugations, but all they sensed was the fragility in the bumps of their own heads, as Stanton's voice peaked saying where the bone should be cut. He let the sheep go and demonstrated by pointing to the sides of his own forehead with his two index fingers like the horns of a devil.

‘Neither too close nor too far out. Mind, don't slip,' he warned his working men.

 

Neither of the mothers wanted to come and see. They were in the wool hall sweeping the floor and stringing up decorations now that the wool was bundled to one end, and the shearers had finished their work. They had little to say to each other, being only polite. Their husbands and children might have mutual advantages to enjoy to the level of friendship but not the wives. Dolly Stanton carried on a running commentary on their home voyage to England. There was a cottage with low doors, where May bush grew along a brook, an old dappled cow in a barn, there were apple and pear trees in a hollow squared in a stone wall, and white sheep spread along a hillside, not brown sheep dirty with dust as they had here.

‘Oo, England!' said Martha, seemingly going along with Dolly Stanton in her longing to see an old home, and the ancient couple that lived in it, spending their days weaving in an attic and going to church on Sundays.

Not that Martha ever had an old home to be called as such in the stews of Whitechapel, where they all lived in one room, three generations together until their parents died and some strangers
pushed in. Nothing to be called a home anywhere else fixed on land, either, except what satisfied her here — for these days she wanted for nothing more than she had on the move — a carpet, some cushions, tarpaulins, stools, and trunks of household treasures making a transportable kitchen that could be unpacked and readied in as short a time as it took to get a campfire blazing, which was never very long in a country with sticks and logs for the taking lying scattered around the bush everywhere.

There was a thrill in the heart of Martha Josephs that she would never have to go back there, to London. Never! Her sentence was for life transportation and she was an exile and thankfully so. The only part she missed was the sound of the bells. She too was born within the sound of St Mary-Le-Bow, in Cheapside. When the men fitted the bell into the tower of the wool hall they tried it out by ringing. It took her right back. When the tinny echo stopped she only laughed. ‘Enough of that, then, me lovelies.' Still, she responded as if enviously every time Dolly spoke a word and it was all she needed to say:

‘London! Home! Fancy! And all of you going?'

‘Yes,' from that wire-lipped, precise little ferret-like woman's mouth.

‘Hurrah, then, eh?'

‘Hurrah, yes, Mrs Josephs, hurrah.'

Martha returned to the waggon to prepare for the festivities that would be signalled by the ringing of the bell. As she came around behind the big tree she saw their camp in the sunlight deserted by them all. It was given over to the birds, a pair of wrens who swooped through the thin smoke of the campfire, and a team of swallows who darted in to wrench strings of fibre from the doormat Martha had in front of the waggon. Nests were everywhere, some
of feathers, some of twigs, some of mud, some of jute. Over by the creek there were other birds unseen but making their calls like tin whistles, like clarinets, like glassy bells. They were all piercing beautiful and strong, even the calls of birds no bigger than a baby's toe that lived in the thorn bushes. Gratitude overwhelmed this small, stout, energetic woman who was equal to her husband in the business of concealing and selling varieties of stolen goods, artful in the practice of forging signatures and altering letters of ownership on valuables lifted from safes.