The Ballad of Desmond Kale (9 page)

THE RETURNING THOUGHT OF WHO that shepherd was tensioned Stanton's knees; and his horse, taking it as a signal, ticked along faster in a rapid stitching trot. ‘Kale was more contented then, a newly assigned fellow, green to the hard country, and I was busy as he was, weren't we two shepherds that thought, ‘There is no more behind, but such a day tomorrow as today”?'

As still, after many years, it remained that day in Stanton's mood, because he believed he wasn't a miserable man, except in the way life grew out and made difficulties until it seemed he had flogged Kale back into his life without resolving their differences. Accounts were to be arranged and profit taken, according to a belief long held (that had already made Stanton rich): ‘We cannot work unless we eat, and as the colony stands in need of everyone's help in getting meat and blankets, everyone should lend a helping hand towards the common support.'

Kale had worked flocks with superior natural understanding but hadn't a brain for getting himself quit of politics like others who walked the preferable path, and allied themselves with their betters,
finally getting a grant of land. Stanton had allowed Kale to run a few sheep of his own with his flocks but not to mix their breeds, and making clear God would like to be thanked for bounty if the right words could be found upon a fellow's lips. Kale however had rather a habit of silent judgement based on interpreting his bond with Stanton: regarding him as no gentleman although Kale himself wore rags. This interior bias that Kale preferred to his chance of salvation was veritably Irish, and more aggravating than a torrent of words in Stanton's face, because it made an argument and amplified an accusation without committal to the letter of speech. ‘Nothing said' was the clue to ‘something found wanting' in the object of the warped silence.

Desmond Kale had been born Irish, protestant Irish but no less a man of dreams was he, and a wafter of words especially when drunk. After being assigned to George Marsh, the jumped-up weaver, Kale threw in his lot with radical Fenian Catholics arrived in a boat to inflame his thinking with slogans of Ireland above all. What Kale's original sentence had been was lost in documents never sent with the convict fleet. It was either small beer or large, Kale's pride had no opinion. One heard that troopers had burned hayricks and sacked dairies of Kale family lands, had blown turrets from gatehouses and driven a poor young gentleman to live in caves and make raids with a vicious band from the hills. There seemed no limit to the elaboration of legends around Kale if you listened to the talk of how he was wronged.

A great matter of annoyance with Stanton was the squeezing out of the particular sin of which Kale was convicted in the Kilkenny courts. When he asked Kale when they knew each other better (in their earlier times) Kale only smirked, as if of their two, Stanton was the lesser, because he carried no stain of tragic experience, only the soap to wash it out.

So if there was another source to the flogging Stanton had ordered Kale over the rake stole from his ram sheds, it was that smirk and that silence. It implied manure of some superior sort being raked from a ram stall, for which a choice ten-shilling rake and a sharpening stone and a shearing hook that was also missing, but was not laid on Kale, would do just fine.

Oh but another thing one Sabbath day in an earlier year, when Stanton had done preaching: Desmond Kale came up to him and insulted him in a most daring manner. Spirits had loosened his tongue and cracked open the bitterness of his heart. ‘What a lamentable thing it is, that you cannot serve God, Matthew Stanton, and strive to be honest, with a twentieth part of the industry you exert and the trouble you take to recommend yourself to the Devil.'

At that time Kale was in a state of merrymaking almost constantly stoked. Stanton had taken charge of his sheep, the flock Kale had been allowed on his own (good doers they were: the ram Old Matchless a prize). The head constable, being present, Stanton asked to tackle Kale and take him before the magistrate, who was an officer of redcoats. Stanton immediately waited upon the magistrate and roared to him Kale's improper conduct, how riotous he had been among Stanton's flocks that day in taking down his trousers and making water on the ewes' backs, and singing Irish melodies instead of working. ‘Have the goodness to confine this man until sober,' protested Stanton, ‘to prevent any more disturbances on the Sabbath.' But the magistrate being in sympathy with the faction of rationalist officers (who had no love for the Irish, but hated righteousness more), instead of attending to Stanton's complaint, considered the complainant himself vexatious, treated Stanton in a manner unbecoming to a gentleman, and dismissed Kale in his state of intoxication.

Subsequent to this gross irritation, the Irish rebellion struck and was put down — men were walked to a gallows, others put in irons — but rebellions lasted in other ways, likewise their curses down the years. According to confessions the plotters had vowed the minister ‘was to be first'. This was the dexterous acid now on the lips of the crawler, Lehane. It was hard to forget someone intended sticking you through with a pike. Lehane in their confessional confirmed it was Kale who'd framed the proposition to his bold confrères, Kale who'd spread venom in the streets, always something about Kale touching to the sourest pith. When a governor earlier than the present one asked Stanton would he become a magistrate, even though a man of God, Stanton had gladly agreed — it was wrong to refuse the wish. A reasonable feeling it was joining civil to holy power, giving flex to a moral, as when Moses hefted the tablets, or Jesus of Nazareth cast the money lenders from the temple.

The first time Stanton was asked to say prayers with men who were to hang next morning, they shocked him by having no contrition, but he blessed God who had made him to differ, having called him from a world that lay in wickedness.

As to the warmth of Meg Inchcape's welcome, and the agreement he won, it did not occur to Stanton that she might be more than a little afraid of him, as a magistrate whose judgement ran through the settlement just a little way aside from him, scaring up wildlife, scarring backs, pursuing Desmond Kale to the limit of imagination, and arriving home whimsically whimpering to have his head scratched.

 

Back at the homestead Dolly Stanton was more than usually annoyed in the arrangement of domestic rule. Dolly had a fine
instinct of knowing when Stanton was pleased by another of her own sex. Titus — busy about his duties without his horse being rubbed down — had a pocketful of baby sugar possums which he employed to surprise guests at dusk, posting them above doors as the lamps were lit, sometimes scoring a hit when they flew into the soup. ‘If you do not return them to the forest,' his mistress said, ‘I shall drown them in a pail.'

In bed that night Stanton spoke inadvisably of Warren Inchcape as ‘our new boy', as ‘good as a son' — raw reminders of Dolly's failure to bear her husband a son, and signals of his authority. She gave off waves of injured feeling, and Matthew said, ‘All in all, I would say he is ours when we want him.' Her small, pretty face thickened with unshed tears when he turned to snuff the candle. It was an old hurt, and Stanton had to admit a reluctance on his part in taking her into his arms as joyfully as he might. To loosen a thread of her pleasure was to unravel a garment of resentments. In their lovemaking mainly and mostly (though not every time!) she merely registered what she was there to do, holding back on welcome while urging his attainment, the sooner to be fretting over it all. There was only ever the one child, their darling Ivy, now aged fourteen, a lively spirit to say the least.

Dolly grumbled:

‘Sheep and nothing but sheep, the meat on their bones, the wool on their backs, oh, and the tallow in their muscle too.'

‘They are the currency of the colony,' said her husband, in a tone of pious regret, rinsing around in his mind a lingering impression of Meg Inchcape as they had discussed their various matters in her bark hut. When he thought of her there, he thought less of Kale. Then he thought of Kale's sheep — and whoever's — represented in the threads Joe Josephs gave him, which he wore now twined
around his wrist and swore to wear, rain, hail, shine, and bath time, until Kale was found. He held his wrist to the light and fondled it. Keeping with Kale was not such a bad thing for those sheep if they thrived until he found them. How violently amusing to have Kale as his shepherd again.

After plumping his pillow and settling his head for sleep, Stanton went on thinking aloud: ‘How good it will be — a boy with a knack for living in the wild, an observant, persistent, native-born stockman bound to his master by ties of obligation cutting deeper than those usually applying to the occupation of colonial shepherd — a practice in which many men, and a few strange women of horrible independence, customarily go mad by tearing their clothes off and coupling with snakes.'

As for his wife's thoughts, it was past the diplomatic time to ask them.

DOLLY STANTON HAD NEVER THOUGHT she would travel much past the local parish markets of Horsforth, Yorkshire, to enlarge her interests. They were always so very strong enough where she was born. As a passionate young woman she experienced confusing fires in her emotions and allowed herself fair latitude of behaviour under hedgerows and when the moon was throbbing full. Mere resentments against cloddish boys, such as Warren Inchcape, or passions for smoky young Calibans, such as her Titus, seemed like side plays to her experience of deceptions, stratagems, and getting to where she wanted to be each day of a flouted existence.

At eighteen she was engaged to marry a soldier away fighting the French, a connection that freed her flirtatiously to bestow kisses without too much worrying about entanglements. Her reasoning was that as she was spoken for, she stood outside the usual result of a young woman compromising herself during a summer evening's games. Amid Horsforth hedgerows whether it went further than games, she would (as a minister's wife in later years) rather not say. What she took in private was kept in private, and
besides, what young girls liked gossiping about, it happened that the boys and men mostly kept secretive to their lived experience. And so she was not so much talked about in her small village of sharp tongues, except as a person of definite likes, a stubborn temper, and of a rebellious vanity that never allowed her to know when she was really beaten.

Dolly Pringle, as she then was, since a young girl had had an air of rightful indignation over her deserved luck. She felt distinctly ill-fitted to the low-doored cottage where she was raised, with its attic weaving loom and expectation that if she were to go upwards in life it would be by climbing the worn steps her mother had climbed, into the roof, to the spinning wheel under the attic window glass. Her father, a good, strong, simple man of unquestioning religious faith, was not ashamed to boast that he wore the clothes that had been manufactured by his wife and sister and daughters. But Dolly was like somebody in a story book who was described as unravelling at night all that she had woven in the day. It was expected she would marry her weaver, who might run twenty sheep, at best, in a stone-walled field of three or four acres when he returned from the continent of Europe a seasoned trooper.

Her persistent underhand admirer that summer was a short, square-built and large-headed young man named Blaise Henry Cribb. He travelled the district as woolstapler contracted to Thomas's Mill, of Rawden. His work required superior sense of touch and a quick eye as he divided fleeces into baskets with an accuracy that was never disputed. Cribb was above Dolly's station in life — of continental blood, through his French mother's line — and a friend of young Bramley, of Bramley Abbey. Cribb was passionately wanting Dolly and quite magnetic with his louring, furious-eyed certainty of getting his way. It was something to feel
the power of Cribb's demand, beckoning with his gaze that stayed with her when he left the woolstapler's corner of the barn and went outside calling for a drink of new milk. She brought it to him in a canister and watched his ribbony flushed gullet swallowing it down. There was never any question of Cribb rescuing her from her engagement, and truthfully to say, she never sought any such escape. It was being not free made her free to try twisting her shackles. It was the very condition of being spoken for that made her dalliance with Blaise Cribb possible: an amusing interlude with none of the edge of a dangerous affair, which it should have had in other circumstances. The idea that she might brand Cribb for life with her love did not occur to her. If it had, mightn't it have been amusing?

In the evenings the milkmaids went out, carrying wooden pails and low stools, looking for their ewes to milk wherever they found them in the fields. Sometimes they delayed until almost dark when the ploughboys finished pulling their stated number of back loads of thistles. These swains and hopefuls pursued them in this opportunity of near dark and it was cleverly Cribb who got in her way under the willows where she liked to find her sheep. It was better drained ground and she thought the crossed-over roots were as good as flagstones to settle her stool on. Cribb dragged any reluctant ewe from a corner and held it by the jowls, while Dolly, getting behind the sheep, took as much milk as she could in the few minutes needed. Afterwards they wandered the slow way back, where few others went, going under a bridge and Dolly always arriving at the dairy alone, lugging her full bucket and considered unapproachable in her brash defensive manner with grass stains on her milking apron where she was kicked by a ewe, and grass stains down her back where she wasn't.

Blaise Henry Cribb was an intense and rather impossibly lovable person, in Dolly's eyes, a little older but not very much wiser fellow whose sin of pursuing a tinker woman and leaving a son had angered his stepfather a great deal. That stepfather was often a subject of Cribb's puzzled conversations, to which Dolly only half listened. The person who interested her to the extent that she never forgot her name, was Cribb's mother, Madame Rousillon. That Frenchwoman who died leaving a half-French boy to grow up in England in the care of a yeoman farmer who married and fathered a natural son and preferred him to Cribb.

A man who persisted in getting what he wanted was Dolly's definition of attachment, explaining why, of all the young apprentices around, it was the one who'd gone for soldiering she first chose; then Cribb; and a year later, when her soldier boy was dead, and she was contrite and all opposite to her inclinations, she would then accept the bow-legged young minister's hand because, of Matthew Stanton it was said, there was no earthly limit to his determination, nor any heavenly one that showed itself either: and so she pledged him her life.

In doing so she believed what a jump she made in changing herself; but her years in the colony disproved it on reflection. It was her habit when nodding off to linger her thoughts on this. How the means of being one's self changed on the opposite side of the world but the essence was hungry for appeasement. Realising that the colony offered the greatest change of all — raising the socially unequal, despite its prison aims — only brought back stronger how there was something unfair in that prenuptial interlude with Blaise Cribb. Unfair to her and the emotions that stirred her still: for she was more equal to them now, and to him — the idea of him, not so much his reality, as she hardly ever wondered what life had brought
him, time and distance working their blank … except on this pillow when a memory of touch brought her turning into his strong arms — the fragrance of woollen oils that rose from his throat remembered as a mode of intoxication. Wool was an odour her husband brought to their bed, and then she thought, comparing their courtship antics in her feelings, how Blaise Cribb had a son even then, and Matthew Stanton never gave her one.

Of course, there was a limit to any running about in the open as the northern days shortened, elm leaves fell and the lanes clotted with gold, gusts of wind lifted rooks like scraps of charcoal in the sky, and rains came and the farmyards turned all sour in mud, white frost painted the hollows and clouds on the tops threatened snow. They turned their life indoors. They listened to the wind rattling the shutters and it was not always the wind, either, but sometimes it was Blaise Cribb wrapped in a dark coat, wearing a porringer hat pulled down to keep his ears warm, and carrying a bottle of whisky to warm himself as she would not. For she spurned Cribb that autumn of prayer meetings and hymn services, savouring the sweetness of doing so, quite as sweet, even, as the balm of forgiveness when she took herself to Christ, and wearing a white kirtle was welcomed as a minister's bride at the village altar.