The Ballad of Desmond Kale, page 17
At dawn, the alarm was raised by hutkeepers along a line of woods, east of the biggest river, to tell Parson Stanton quick fast and get him down there to look at the blood and entrails on the ground before the ants and flies ate them. It was the worst place troubled by warregal dogs. Only the feed was good at that time of year, which was why sheep were shepherded there.
Stanton came riding up with Warren behind him, on his busy important pony, and Titus on foot. Titus was followed by the old man, Mr Moon. Titus and Mr Moon walked along, the rest of them following, the old black man scanning the tracks of the marauding invaders of sheep and sometimes laughing with a bare parting of his gums, as if it was all too easy for him — making Stanton grumble — while pulling his opossum-fur cloak tighter around his shoulders, sometimes frowning and making a sucking whoosh out of his mouth. There were scattered guts and blood to be seen, a gullet was looped on a branch, kidneys were under a bush like a pair of blue jewels, but whether it was the ram that was missing or just a poor sacrificial ewe destroyed for deception was beyond telling, unless somebody found a torn handful of wool to examine, and then Stanton’s eyes would light up at the find. Then he would know if it was Young Matchless’s torn fleece scattered on the ground or strung on a bush, revealed by its fine, dense staples welded on a supple hide from where any wild dog might have taken it, like a ripped piece of upholstery from a sag-bellied chair. But there was no wool anywhere of the sort. No wool meant no dogs. No dogs meant the ram alive somewhere in the hands of his enemies.
The words the old man spoke ran evenly coming from nowhere and going nowhere except into Titus’s ear and out the other side.
‘What is he saying? Confound him,’ said Stanton. ‘Speak up, Titus, like a good Christian boy and tell me straight — what is the old debbil saying about my ram last night, murder and mayhem, or as I verily believe, a piece of plotting that I shall flog to discover.’
Stanton swung accusingly round on his shepherd and raised an arm like the judgement unanswerable of Yahweh. Clumpsy M’Carty lowered his head contritely, and said, ‘It was the warregals what done it, coming in awful quiet on their padded feet’ — which Titus underlined by speaking for the old man:
‘Mr Moon sees one big doggy come down, he stands about there and looks around, big red tongue licking his chops for a decent supper, warregal goes round teasing quiet as he can. He flies in and takes one by the froat. Wait a minute now. He says two of them now, they carry the sheepy between them.’
‘Dogs could not do that, for it would take men to carry that wonderful sheep, he weighs a hundred pounds bare shorn. You are all a bunch of liars.’
They stared at him expressionless.
‘Liars from birth.’
Towards dark Titus led Warren back to the place where the ram disappeared.
‘Clumpsy was here,’ said Titus.
‘Clumpsy was here when it happened?’ said Warren, talking in a low whisper, feeling his legs shake, beginning to understand that the convict stockmen of Stanton’s were not just former thieves all sitting around smoking their pipes in rum-drinking befuddlement, cured of bad deeds done before they were lagged, but were Stanton’s present thieves messing his paddocks between them, nothing in their bent natures cured. Was there never to be any peace in the world?
‘Lookit, pop your eyes out,’ said Titus. ‘See where our Clumpsy come round this way, a long way, from way over in the trees with a warregal dog.’
‘So there really was a dog who made the attack, like Mr Moon says?’
Warren was pleased to think so, anyway.
‘No, like I says,’ corrected Titus, giving Warren a cuff on the ear, ‘Clumpsy brung one to make it look good. Keeps it on a rope with a broken leg at his hutkeeper’s hut. That bad man puts the sheep on his back, pluddy heavy, here’s where he hoists it up off the ground, here’s where somebody gib him a push.’
‘Two of them now? Who is the other one?’ said Warren, the drama of the night pictured in a few worn scratches in the ground, a scuffle of twigs, the imprint of what it took to lift Stanton’s good ram, the dust a little more weighted and unweighted in places.
Titus roved his head from side to side and looked over the ground, not directly under his feet but always a perch or a pole ahead, where the light glinted more on irregular bumps and stirrings of dry sticks. He was just as good as Mr Moon at this.
‘That is where that first sheep come in,’ he pointed, ‘the dead one, they want to make it look good, so the parson don’t flog, and don’t they want to have good fun! They tie a sheepy’s front legs together and then his back legs, and they stretch him on his back, and they rip up his belly. They scoop up the guts and they tear them guts from the carcase, and with the other hand they stir the blood that comes from the belly. So they makes a good story to gammon the parson, and a big ram for breedin and nothin is wasted. Didden I tell you, that breedin is the best sport, Warrie inch-long boy. They want him for his quick jump.’
Warren squatted on the ground, his stomach hurting from the bad excitement of the day, and asked Titus what he didn’t want to know:
‘Titus, who is the other one, that gives the sheep a lift onto Clumpsy’s back?’
‘That is the pox face,’ said Titus, scratching the dust with his bare toe, and glancing curiously at Warren, who turned quite pale at the information. ‘I asked that old fella, Mr Moon — he’s my uncle — why he wrinkles his nose too much. He’s smellim sweet-meats when we come down inter the hollow.’
‘What are you talking about?’ said Warren, afraid.
‘The pink sugar, the white sugar, that was all mixed up in the sheep shit for him. You seen that old man wrinkle his nostrils and smile? You seen him! You seen him bendin over double and lookin down? Talkin about bush honey? But he never meant bush honey, Warrie, he meant them sugar treats, it was the smell of them sugar treats hangin about in the air or in someone’s pocket tuck. They ain’t faint smells to old Mr Moon who can stink a little lizard pissin no bigger than your inch-long-nail prick while he’s up on a gallopin horse.’
Warren went over to the least-disturbed piece of ground. He took a stick and with scratching fury drew a circle around a soft footprint, and called Titus over to look.
‘Is this his boot with his mark on him?’
Almost immediately as Titus looked, Warren started scuffing the bootmarks out.
And Titus nodded:
‘He’s the one they’s goin to hang, Warrie.’
JOHN J. THARPE, DROVER AND packhorse driver, formerly of Cavan, transported for sheep stealing and having long avoided the noose, found himself back practising his original pilfering craft at the direction of Desmond Kale, through the graces of an English officer whom he barely knew, and heartily mistrusted on the evidence of his nation laying waste to Ireland. But the check on Tharpe’s mistrust was that password of their dealing: salt.
‘The young fellow with the salt has an answer,’ Ugly Tom Rankine had said, and so pulled Tharpe in for his stint of exclusive droving at the behest of Desmond Kale.
After the ram taking, Tharpe made his rendezvous with Young Matchless at a pit where the ram was tethered well back in the woods awaiting his next ownership — horned as a spiral staircase and stamping his jointed forefeet with pettiness to be gone. Tharpe took him up with care, and some difficulty, holding the big animal in a canvas sack tied at the neck, bolstered with a bedroll, its belly draped over his packhorse’s back (hoisted there by a rope thrown across the branch of a tree), its hind parts only occasionally hiking out. Thus, he got away from the parson’s lands as fast as he could.
Tharpe had deeply set bruised-blue eye sockets, a beaked nose, high-crested hair the sheen of Dublin stout. On his lead horse he crouched forward, his long legs dangling and his packhorse coming along behind. They proceeded all day fairly quiet, making frequent stops while Tharpe walked the ram about on a lead, then put him back in his bag again — they were finding a routine — but towards evening the ram became disturbed. When it kicked one too many times the packhorse broke free and jollied ahead of Tharpe, which was how it came through a rough camp, a mile farther on, scattering Patrick Lehane’s fire and all his cooking pots, giving Lehane the sight of a bucking horse with a bagged sheep as jockey.
Ten minutes later, when Tharpe appeared in pursuit, the campfire’s owner was nowhere to be seen — but Lehane saw Tharpe well enough, from his hiding place in a cave mouth: Tharpe’s horse scuffing soda bread from the coals and landing it in a hundred ashy pieces some distance in Lehane’s direction.
‘If that is not John J. Tharpe transporting a stolen sheep to the likes of an outlaw,’ said Lehane, ‘I am an elf in green satin.’
Patrick Lehane stayed huddled away until dark. He well knew that during the paddy’s rebellion, Tharpe had stabbed an informer, leaving him out in the bush for the meat ants and warregal dogs to consider. Call it political need, Lehane called it joyful murder, branding Tharpe as a man who carried a filleting knife in a hairy goatskin sheath and sharpened for pleasure any time. Lehane might be next, seeing as how old resentments smouldered. It would not matter to the condition of Tharpe’s immortal soul if he circled back and finished him. One murder was good as a dozen for a man pledged to hell. The eye of reason spent the night imagining ram bleats as a sign of Tharpe camped close, creeping about on his toothpick legs. For two nights afterwards Lehane slept in several hollows of familiar ground, like a womback did, then in sandstone overhangs until he was certain the immediate interest was gone from him.
It was another two weeks of idling in his camp until his black friends appeared after a stint of wandering. Lehane was only too glad to see them — Billy, Mary, Pegleg and Crouch, and several else of them, strangers who came and went from other bands.
Their naked shadows appeared first between sandstone outcrops and then their dusty bodies appeared through the gaps as they came on talking and laughing. From them Lehane learned of this and that. They’d been visiting their wise old man of the creekbanks, Mun’mow, who told them about a ram (horns spiralled) being taken one night from the flogging parson. So this confirmed it — Mun’mow it was who’d been brought to the parson’s sheep hurdles at first light soon after it happened, to study the disturbed earth and read the sheepy signs of which Lehane for one had no doubt: it was the parson’s ram on Tharpe’s horseback — being taken to the outlaw, Kale. Lehane could already see the pearly sweat on the parson’s face when he told him.
Getting on with their tale Lehane’s blacks gusted with laughter and staggered around in dumbshow. They plucked their cheeks with their fingernails, to denote a poxy face; they threw ash in their scalps, to show grey hair; and they minced around with a high-stepping gait to mimic an officer of redcoats — a pox-faced, grey-bristle-headed captain of rangers they called Tumbankin.
‘Now I have a name, just as the parson wanted,’ said Lehane, catching his horse. ‘I have two names, certainly — the great deceiver’s and his moiderous sidekick’s. I shall make my way to Parramatta via Stanton’s Laban Vale, give him the intelligence, accept my flogger’s pardon, and live out my days as a respectable tame paddy with my pardon as good as the pope’s own absolution, carried in my pocket to show anyone who doubts, for he promised it in writing.’
Playing a tin whistle through trees beside a purling upland river, John J. Tharpe swayed along hopeful looking for Kale.
Except for signs blazed on trees he easily believed he was lost. He came out where pale tussocks grew, some as big as sheep lying down with their heads lolling in dewy grass. The white ram — now walking tame — disappeared into the mist until Tharpe found him lumpy against cloud banks. Tharpe waited then in a prettier place, the duck mole reach, he gathered it was, from descriptions Rankine gave, sheoak-shaded if he had the locale right; and lit a fire to warm himself. The ram he kept tied up for its misdeeds, lying on its side snorting snot.
‘It is a good enough place for a shebeen,’ decided Tharpe, uncorking his whisky, ‘to be called the duck mole’s retreat or the fat lamb’s rest even better — J.J. Tharpe, licensee. Here’s to ye, my lad!’
The silence echoed his name. When his droving days were done he’d be a tavern keeper. There’d be people out here by then. They would be after following Kale.
Tharpe climbed the eastern hill to watch the sunset and enjoy the throw of the land. ‘It is all open grazing to the far west, bestowed by God as far as the eye can see, and awaiting occupation by the deserving poor.’
Tharpe had opinions on who they were, however. Not who you might think, but a gentlemanly sort of Irish poor. It was the gentleman in Kale appealed to him, not the rebel. The whole of the closer country back near Parramatta was busy with convict settlers felling trees and hefting dry rocks and knowing nothing of farming but quite pleased with their grants of forty to two hundred and eighty acres and unwisely believing they would get rich scratching in seeds. It was a vast and puerile labour they were about, converting Botany Bay into a semblance of fields where seasons failed by rote, cockatoos descended by the fives of thousands, and whatever stood up green was knocked down by kangaroos. Tharpe was contemptuous of any sort of farming getting on. There was no life for a sheep in his judgement of a country unless the landscape had cloud shadows dappling its hugeness and men had freedom to come and go where a good drover served them. He believed Kale knew the same. Small settlers were little better than beasts of the field. Their huts were bark strips and their digging sticks were made of wood. They stole each other’s steel axes to cut wood for the axe handles their neighbours stole back from them. Ants and moths ate their hoard of seed. If they had a cow it was milked until it bled, and they beat its bones until it died.
So far as Tharpe had come there was a silence of axes in the forests, an absence of beans and corn wilting in the sun, it was all pushing forward and parting branches. The way was returned to the wheezing of a tender-hooved ram and the crickety noisy bigness of the woods, where lengths of dry bark dangled from the forks of white gum trees, hanging down to the ground like madwoman’s hair.
When Kale joined him, next morning, there was no warning crackle of sticks. But a presence before the fact of him.
Tharpe looked around. There he was, Kale, bulky on his pony, the king of all serious nonsense: his lower lip protruding like a sulky boy’s, his eyes soggy like an understanding idiot’s, his long silver hair tied back in a queue like the prince of tides’. Tharpe doffed his hat and before he knew it, bowed from the waist. Kale carried a tight bundle of wool on a packhorse and rode with the girleen of Botany Bay, Biddy Magee, sitting close up behind him on his speckled grey pony, her arms around his waist, her rosy cheek resting on his shoulder.
‘Kale, a very good day, and to you, missy, the same.’
After looking over the ram and expressing fascination on its good points — horns, nose, mouth, teeth, neck, rump, belly, and all its better points of wool, for which he claimed credit through Young Matchless’s well-chosen forebear, Old Matchless — Kale began in with a complaint. Kale had been known to shear a sheep himself but disliked it, he said. That bastard Payolo Moreno was the expert bladesman but hadn’t returned up country as promised, to get the wool off. Kale carped about why as he explained his riddles of wool to Tharpe, that he’d shorn himself, and they’d spilled rippled to his feet like brass shavings. It was not the full total he wished for, but a good enough sample at 150 pounds approx. From its hidden core of greatness, when it reached the other side, it would strike up amazement enough. It would be seen as a fine answer to resentment.
‘It shall resound honour to the fallen house of Kale,’ said Tharpe.
‘It shall be known as mine if it gets into the right hands,’ agreed Kale.
Then Tharpe said doubtfully:
‘Sent under your name would be a glorious touch. But will the traps allow it to leave Sydney, marked Kale?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘What am I to do? Ship it marked Rankine, a redcoat’s consignment, when he’s underhand thick with Desmond Kale? Is Rankine to be trusted with ye, Kale?’
‘Look, without Tom Rankine I’d be rattling my dags in a dungeon, disbelieving in hope, festering. You are my right arm and he is my left, John Tharpe. Put your name to the bundle — J.J. Tharpe.
‘Were you seen coming out?’ said Biddy.
‘The packhorse was,’ said Tharpe. ‘It was the scrag, Lehane. The horse went through his camp and ruined his supper. He’d have seen the ram, at least, if he didn’t see meself following soon after. He ran away. He’s a snake.’
‘Don’t mention snakes,’ said Biddy.
‘Are you frightened of snakes, Biddy?’
‘I pretty much am, Mr Tharpe.’
‘You mustn’t be now.’
Tharpe had little time for women, except to resentfully take one when needed. They were a race of which he adored few but his sainted mother, yet was jealous of Kale in this. Biddy was put to commonplace use, supremely young and raised from her blanket each morning fresh as cream curds and pretty as a lambkin, with a laughing spirit and a good kindly question as to everyone’s well being, including that of Tharpe.
Kale showed him the woolpack.
‘To make sure the wool gets through without meddling I have composed a bundle of two divisions. Top drawer is old ram’s wool but before you get much deeper, there’s skin of a slain womback.’
‘Phew! There’s something in there all right.’
Kale went to the ram and faced him, countering that sheep’s wary head buttings with head lowerings of his own. Kale made a swift movement in behind the horns, upending the ram and asking Biddy to fetch him his blades. Working slowly, almost tediously, he shore Young Matchless and thrust the parcel of warm fleece into the very centre of the malodorous bundle.
Tharpe strapped the woolpack on his second horse. ‘The main thing,’ said Kale, ‘is to cozen the parson if he gets his hands on it before any gets shipped to England. He’ll be outwitted when it gets there. If you are showing round samples, here are some portions, make free.’
