The Ballad of Desmond Kale, page 15
‘Won’t you please come in?’ she said, when this odd intimacy was over, lifting aside the canvas flap, on the outer side of which old Mother Hauser had recently kept Rankine shifting from one foot to the other for a full ten minutes while he was sure Meg fumed inside, for whatever reasons of state.
‘Into your house?’ he masked disbelief.
‘Humble as it is, you are welcome.’
The earth floor was brushed clean and a busy contingent of blowflies circled looking for scraps from table or shelf to lay their eggs upon, but were unlikely to find some. There was a shape on the floor like a bundle of rags: a little old figurine unfolded from there, nut-brown faced and sparrow-hawk featured. She crouched, feeding sticks to the fire. ‘Mother Hauser sleeps in the wood box against my shack wall and keeps out intruders, as a rule,’ said Meg.
The smell of baking made Rankine hope that his welcome was going to get better. It looked as though their cordiality was going to meet a celebration, at least, an idea only slightly dented when Meg said she was expecting Warren, all this was for him.
‘Sit down,’ she invited, as she prepared the kettle and set about making tea and finding a precious pat of butter that was melting in the fire’s heat.
In the fireplace the diminutive crone deftly swung a pot crane holding a hot-water fountain, a griddle, a camp oven and all of them cooking away, while at the same time she worked, with bare toes on the handles, a set of bellows to bring up the flame just right.
There was a coarse rug on the corn-husk mattress that served as both couch and bed. There Rankine sat, his hands on his knees, his back straight. Folded on the top of that rug was the same piece of cloth embroidered with mirrors and a scrap of silk material that had caused Parson Stanton to decide that Meg Inchcape was pretty much a damned clever whore.
Rankine, by contrast, and to his eternal merit — if time would allow tell — saw everything around him as wifely in a manner of ways, womanly and great-hearted, settled and showing devotion to the smallest of threadbare domestic touches of the household arts … When Meg Inchcape pledged herself to him, that would be, and stopped disturbing his dreams. The moment he set eyes on her again, he was drunk with her again.
While he gathered his thoughts and sorted his impressions, another part of his mind raced along preparing his answers. Before his mind was ready, though, his tongue wagged:
‘Biddy Magee was raised in a sod house,’ he said expansively, ‘where any place above a bed of earth was fit for a king. She was amazed when she came to my cottage, to find a bed of straw, a chair, and a table made available to her — in her own quarters — as well as cooking pots and always a tub of best potatoes.’
‘What are you trying to say to me, captain?’
‘That Biddy had her own little cubby out the back of my house, she had somewhere of her own and possibly as comfortable as your own little nook, Mother Hauser, do you hear?’
‘She is deaf,’ said Meg, setting a place for two at her table. ‘Probably lucky for you.’
‘Why?’
‘Your dalliance with a maidservant has been known around the settlement for twelve months at least, and people don’t even bother telling me this any more — that my greatly persistent soldier admirer, who tried to run me down with a horse, and brought me flowers all through it, and sugary sweets, was double dealing with a nineteen-year-old girl, although some would admit she is pretty enough.’
‘That is over,’ said Rankine, humbled, cut, shrinking and dropping his head.
He watched as Mother Hauser took the lid from the cast-iron oven and with a wooden spoon lifted an arrangement of small pies onto a plate.
Meg leaned with her elbows on the table, not six inches from Rankine’s face. He caught her living breath and felt the fullness of her existence in the warmth rising up from between her freckled breasts. ‘You have given your maidservant her leave?’
‘She is gone,’ he agreed while looking around, not wanting to say where.
‘It is what I heard, but wanted to hear you say it.’
Meg poured his tea into a cracked blue cup and they smiled pleasantly at each other, except Meg’s lips had something more serious coming upon them.
‘WHEN I WAS VERY SMALL,’ said Meg, ‘my mother had bad luck and she suffered terribly. She was a nurserymaid in a gentleman’s family and was able to have me there in the day if I made no fuss.’
‘Where was it?’ said Rankine.
‘At Emu Plains barracks, but I barely remember where it was, nor how cruel, except it was my place and I was happy, and my mother was with me all the time. Sometimes she would be struck on the back, or slapped in the face, if she paid me too much attention; for my love, she was punished by her masters! Hard choices pressed her down. She dressed in clean rags but was declared by her mistress to have plenty of clothes of her own, and was given only a gown by her and received neither wages nor clothes in all the time we were there.’
‘Where was your father, Kale?’ said Rankine.
‘Where was my father, Kale? Away with sheep, was what I was told, although whether he was, or in irons, for his politics and pride you might guess.’
‘I would guess in irons.’
‘We had plenty to eat and drink and were strictly kept to the house, except at night, when I was taken from the nursery and put into a room where the other maids were. I slept with my mother. She was vexed and angered at her treatment. Never suppose that a servant is merely a chattel without heart of feeling nor brains to think.’
‘Never again,’ Rankine, abashed, took his cue, and certainly meant it.
‘There was a freewoman kept in the house. She had a bed and a bedstead and my mother’s bed was kept on the floor. It was only the floor and I woke each morning with soil in my mouth, from breathing it in. The freewoman had sheets but we had none. My mother was proud, she made a decision about who she was to obey, and set it down as a principle with herself. She matched her pride to my father’s proud temper. She was English born, from Dorset. When our master’s mother-in-law came to stay, and gave orders, she refused to obey her. There were no charges of misconduct preferred against her but she was returned to the service of the Crown.’
‘That was bad,’ said Rankine.
‘I should say so!’
Meg thought he wasn’t listening or paying attention, but it was something else. In the same room as her, Rankine had the uncertain feeling of missing her, still longing for her. When their eyes connected the part of her that stirred him most was absent, ungraspable, or always only hers. He was in love with her immortal and ephemeral life and also with her bodily self down to imagining her entwined with an officer betrayer — father of Warren — who in his fancy was a goat, lacking every refinement.
‘Are you listening to me, at all, Tom Rankine?’
‘I am. Your mother was returned to the service of the Crown. That must have been bad luck, seeing as how some of the people we know are assigned to their husbands or vice versa, making for cosy arrangements.’
‘She was lucky at least,’ said Meg, ‘that she was not taken and put into chains quite yet, like my father whenever he opened his mouth. For we came down here just across from where we are now. See, where the smoke is going up, where that charcoal heap lies.’ Rankine peered out through the doorway. ‘They who we came to are still there and worn into themselves with toil. The mistress a prisoner holding no indulgence and the master a blacksmith. There was another child there, a boy my age, he died poor thing. My mother in that situation might do as she liked, and that was her undoing as she was allowed to drink and go to the public house, and stayed out all night if she pleased. Where was my father at the time, you would still like to ask? Now he was in that cell block where you found him, fomenting rebellion, now in another, lying in chains. This was after the paddy’s rebellion and he was lucky he was not hung. Or unfortunate he was not hung, considering his suffering and the way heaven is always painted better. He loved my mother extremely but this was the end of them. If my mother asked for anything in her situation she was told they were too poor to give it to her, telling her she could get it for herself provided she did not trouble them.’
‘What did that mean?’
‘What that means I am too ashamed to tell you although you might guess, and anyway I was too young to understand when she — when she sold — all right, I shall say it — when she sold herself. Mother Hauser was her broken-down maid when she was there in a place of prostitution.’
Rankine waited as the pies cooled in their dish and Meg gathered herself and continued:
‘She remained in the situation six months and then fled. What for her was a miserable escape, for me was a wonderful time. We lay on the riverbank and made shapes out of clouds, collected wildflowers in our arms … and like the blacks we slept in a hollow tree and a very fine house it proved.
‘My father was assigned at the time word of our plight reached him, and he was prevented from coming away.
‘Now to the worst part. The man who ordered it over my mother’s objections — to have her beautiful hair shorn off — was his master.’
‘It was the parson who put her back down?’ said Rankine.
Meg said that he was the one. ‘But if I let my hatred rule, there will be no victory and no benefit to Warren or ability for Warren to become better than those who brought him into this world.’
When she made this strong statement, worthy of a reigning queen, Rankine squeezed around the table, leaned to her and put his arms closely around her. She turned awkwardly from him, not wanting a lover’s embrace, which was an unfair judgement on him, to say the least. For at the moment his desire was progressed past self-interested ways even at the level where it was instinctive, an occurrence that charmed his idea of himself immeasurably, though it could not last possibly past another few minutes.
‘It was not only my mother that day,’ said Meg, getting busy with the teapot, a bit flustered, ‘but a huge congregation of unhappy women in the prison yard. One of them was Mother Hauser here, taken along as a companion in suffering. They collected a heap of stones, and when the minister and the gaolers entered the area they threw the stones as fast as they possibly could at the whole of them. My mother screamed the most violently. She swore that no one should cut off her hair, and she was screaming, swearing, and jumping about the place bereft of her reason. When the minister approached her, to calm her, and so control her, she took a pair of scissors in her hand and commenced cutting off her own hair. Then she ran wilder. Coming before the windows of the dispensary she thrust her fist through three panes of glass in a row. With a bucket she broke some more panes of glass and the bottom sash of the window frame.’
‘The minister avenged himself over Desmond Kale,’ said Rankine, ‘his shepherd gone to the bad, by defeating Kale’s wife, your mother?’
‘Something in Kale was unconsumed. After she died and her grave was only tended by me, and a storm came down from the top of the gully and washed away all the stones — when Kale was released and wanted a rake to tidy it up, he went out of his way to find one and bring it over to Parramatta and do the job.’
‘It is going to be finished,’ said Rankine, taking Meg’s hand. ‘It has already well begun.’
‘How can you say “well begun”? My fierce mother impoverished, abused, imprisoned, insane, ill, dead — unrestfully dead in a pauper’s graveyard, a gravel pit.’ Her grip tightened in Rankine’s hand. He felt the sharpness of her fingernails cutting before she let him go. ‘My outrageous father proud, blaming, striding it out wearing a tuft of hogget’s wool in his ears, his thoughts bent by men using him. Who are they, anyhow? Does anybody know?’
‘Nobody seems to know,’ said Rankine truthfully, though only up to a point.
“‘Well begun”?’
‘You don’t know me.’
RANKINE TIPPED BACK HIS HEAD on the slab wall and looked at her. ‘You don’t know me,’ he repeated. Meg looked slightly up at him from the other side of the table, in the chinked tan light of her one-roomed house.
‘I don’t know you?’ she said. ‘I would say I don’t. Something gets in the way every time we meet. Do you always look at the world through a fringe of lashes? Quivering, almost shut like half-lowered blinds. What’s going on behind them?’
Rankine took a slow breath and decided.
‘Sometimes it’s tears,’ he admitted; then, in no great hurry, he confessed it all — the escape in the forest, the trusting of Kale, the Spanish thousand of blood-money sheep reduced to two hundred and gifted to Kale, made three hundred with increase of lambs; the unwanted rams, the stone gullies where the sheep went up, the jump they made down, the wool flying in shreds and the prized sheep driven, then how driven they were until the duck mole reach was taken and a fair way beyond was achieved by Kale, where he now lingered, the sheep roughly grazing.
‘Dear God save us and Mary too,’ said Meg, her hand over her mouth.
Rankine’s revelation included vignettes to soften the hardships: pale peaceful forests and birdsong, clearings with smoke twisting up, sleepy afternoons in the saddle. Telling it to Meg, he made rough country into a series of rooms — places of fanciful safety leaving out mention of thorns, insect stingers, sunstroke, thirst, leaving out trackers, troopers, search parties with swords, guns, iron rings, and men bearing oiled and knotted whips. He omitted signs of native bands, clutching their bundles of spears. He omitted the endless turnings around and going backwardses, as Biddy Magee called them, nor did he raise topics of brown snakes, black snakes, tiger snakes, typical of sandy-bottomed country as they sought a straight way on. He omitted mention of Biddy Magee herself, as a morsel for Kale’s delight. He did not leave out, however, the murmurous suspicions lapping him higher and closer each day in Parramatta.
At the end of it Meg stood up and stepped back, using as much force to get clear of him, in the small space available, as she had used in leaning over him — her mouth corners tense white, her eyes flickering around him unsettled, alarmed, and quite defenselessly afraid:
‘I had no idea.’
‘You’ve heard none of it?’ said Rankine.
‘Not a whisper.’
‘You’ve not heard a song in chorus, in Irish, mentioning Kale?’
After all the rumours, it seemed fairly likely she had.
‘Nay, I hate that tongue. When I hear it, I go deaf. The same happens with harping on Kale, the way some do.’
Rankine, having harped on Kale, wondered where he stood. As far as it looked, still badly.
‘Don’t tell me any more,’ said Meg. ‘The knowledge is far too dangerous.’
She stepped outside and searched up and down the road. ‘So this is the end of it,’ thought Rankine, and stood to go. Then, as he ducked under the low ceiling, he cracked his head on a crosspiece. He moved his fingers wonderingly from his scalp to the brim of his hat, and Mother Hauser looked at the ceiling as if to thank it for being so strong.
When Meg came back inside she asked the old mother for a drink of water, a dish to wash her face and arms, and for a piece of scrubbing cloth. Rankine awaited his dismissal. It did not come. The expression on Meg’s face was changed, the fear was gone as though when she went outside she saw something there that removed her fear.
She nipped her fingernail in the distrait way he’d seen her doing, that so moved him as she loped along.
‘I saw a crow, a dog, and a dust devil. That’s all. I was expecting Warren all this time.’
She gazed at him from eyes that were softer, considering.
For there was Tom Rankine in front of her. All changed in front of her. She had never known defiance so real, so certain of its right. A captain of rangers with close-cropped steely grey hair, pale lingering eyes, an adventurer’s half smile and a twisty curl at the corner of his mouth — he was defiance brought into the light of day, not defiance ground away futile in a prison cell, its hair shorn off, holding fistfuls of broken glass, bleeding across its back, or fifty lashes one day, fifty the next.
‘Oh, dear me,’ said Meg. She laughed briefly, amazedly, letting out something long kept in. Rankine was the answer to a question she seemed to have been asking herself, without knowing it, before her heart was ready.
Then, with apparent carelessness, she leaned forward and reached to her shins and bunched her skirts in her hands, paused and looked at Rankine over her shoulder, her hair falling loose like a thundercloud.
Rankine’s voice ran dry. ‘Look at you, Meg.’
In Rankine’s eyes, she was acting bold — the same as in his fancies, except making it somehow dislikeable towards him, or at least unnoticing. It was quite as if he were not in the room at all. Or in some totally opposite way, just there for one purpose, which was for him to have her when she was ready and be done with it. But he could not have her yet, she seemed to warn.
‘She has no modesty for her own protection,’ decided Rankine of the daughter of Patsy Inchcape and of Desmond Kale, that pair whose love was split, compromised, ruined, but never quite utterly defeated. How could she not help being strange, he thought; it was her guaranty of freedom in a prison place; and for that reason, and some others, how could he not help loving her?
Meg brought her calico dress up over her head with a harsh rustling sound and passed it to her servant. Standing bare before Rankine she bathed herself in all her beauty and worn lines, her tawny breasts purple-tipped, her strong thighs shining as she washed herself, he did not know why so candidly, with such apparently absent-minded impunity, except it was truthful to her, and in that vision his love was stamped.
As was hers, in his watching, if only he knew it. But more cautiously, less expectantly, more unconsciously timed. Watching her Rankine certainly had the feeling of being in a dream. He was compelled by strangeness the way a dream compelled. As in a dream, no action of his would deflect her from what she decided. This in time would prove her greatness to him.
