The Ballad of Desmond Kale, page 26
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.
UP AT THE WOOL HALL there was commotion as one shearer and another found himself without a sheep when he let his shorn one go and looked around for the next to be brought along. The shearers were cantankerous, hot, overworked and rum-thirstily disinclined to go wandering out to the forcing pen and begin hoisting one over the rails and dragging it back losing time. They were paid for the count of what they shore, not for their time spent fetching. They were paid little enough considering the fortune in fleeces the reverend sir was rolling from their indispensable contribution.
Over at the house still tucking his shirt tails in, Stanton heard Warren bellowing for Titus. He knew straightaway that Titus was missing from his station, where he was needed to bring up the sheep. ‘Tap the glass, read the lightning, bring on the storm, by jolly,’ said the minister, coming as close to blasphemy as his temper ever allowed. It was often around Titus and his inability to be Christianised. There was no other explanation for the ruckus but Titus sowing disorder. It was a complication from the issue of sheets and Stanton’s absence from sheepwork for an hour upon them. But he was not going to whip himself — he that’d had his wife and got his ship all in a day. He was going to whip Titus.
Oh, and was it too much to ask of Titus to spend more than two hours following at any regular post? The reason he was present all morning working sheep, and part way into the afternoon, was that Stanton had been there to urge him cleave.
Stanton stayed controlled cool and detached at every moment of justice done. Rage was never part of his judicial means, no, not least as he pictured himself in the impromptu courts he held in settlers’ huts and in various convict barracks and some time even under a tree or in a rock shelter smoked by the fires of centuries. It was true what the governor said, he was detachedly able to throw a sentence out over his shoulder as he departed his courts. But to criticise that was the wrong insinuation over a correct situation. When he journeyed back to England it would be to take a picture of order with him.
But as Stanton paced around the back of the wool sheds rage came to him and he wanted to taste what it was without restraint. The feeling was of a rasping tongue craving the food of cannibals. He grew hotter inside himself and denser with certainty over his task. Was rage not a tool of action sharper than hooks, if wielded upon the nap of mortal boys with skilful intent? Now he was going to make his first great excellence of hands’ upon rage and make it openly, knowingly, and zestfully. It was a breathy feeling of sails filling with wind, bearing his destiny onwards and securing something distant by the close attention of the moment. Now he would come almost close to inner delight as a public lesson. It would be his second lustful outburst of the day, and the way he was feeling, might eclipse the other in its torrent of lava.
Stanton stalked past the Josephs’s bulky waggon, where Martha Joseph called and asked if there was something from her kitchen he would like to refresh himself. He made no reply, merely issued a garbled denunciation of black boys, but then doubled back and saw, looped on a peg of the waggon, Mick Tornley’s bull whip gone cold these past few days. Tornley paid no rent but lingered fattening his beasts on Stanton’s pasturage and having Stanton’s convict blacksmiths mend his metal wheel-rims in Laban Vale’s workshops. There was no question that reaching for Tornley’s whip was his right. ‘Needs warming up,’ Stanton rationalised, pulling the sweaty dark leather handle across the palm of his hand and admiring the diamond-weave leather plaiting of the make. Before even the long length of whip was looped round his elbow Stanton ran along his way coiling it into his fingers. The latter part of it dragged in the dirt following him like a hurrying worm.
‘There you are, come over,’ Stanton called softly on sighting Titus hiding behind a tree. The minister braced himself with a leg forward, a leg propping himself back, angled his shoulders, gasped breath, heaved, and spun the whip out, not very skilfully, but accurately enough, as proved by Titus jumping this way, then that, to escape its stinging tip. Stanton was aware of onlookers to the rear of him but was blind to their importance and deaf to their calls for mercy. The listeners he wanted were in missionary halls in London: there to boast of black converts. The word went quickly around, that the parson had gone a little loco.
The first strike encouraged Titus back to the far side of the tree where he thought he was safest but he was not allowing for the whip to pin him there. It was a paperbark tree from which Titus tore strips of bark as rags to mop tears in his frustration. The lash came from one side and then from the other looping across his back as Stanton advanced. The tip stung Titus’s cheek and drew blood. Stanton with a breathy growl stepped closer shortening the lash each step he took. It was interesting to observe that the lash’s thinningly tipped power touched more accurately each hop. The first voice he heard distinct from his own words babbling inside his head was Titus’s crying out, ‘I am sorry, Father, I am sorry, Father, forgive me.’
‘Which — father — is — that — hmm? — that you mean?’ Stanton cried out almost with joy to elevate the stakes of the battering. Being close now upon the sandy terrace around the tree he found Titus within the range of a mere few feet of weapon. He wished for an assistant to hand him an even shorter thong, appreciating the judicial craft of flogging better after this excursion along the dry part of the creekbed. It was hard for one man to do well with so many tangling coils.
‘It is you, my heavenly father,’ said Titus with confused sincerity, and a racking sob.
‘Know before whom thou doth stand,’ said Stanton, underscoring each word with a sharp short hit across Titus’s narrow shoulders with the stock of the whip. He was in a good position to vary the emphasis, and did so, but was suddenly jolted from balance by a succession of blows on his back.
From the relentless pattering of the attack on him, Stanton thought it was a tree branch being wielded on him, but it was small fists raining on him. ‘Horribilis crumpet,’ said a voice in his ear, rising to a scream as he shook himself, and a strange boy he recognised as his daughter fell to the ground from being draped round his shoulders, there to gather herself and stare at him red-eyed with fury kicking her arms and legs in the air like a suffering insect, and then to get up and run to Titus and throw her arms around him so that she was imposed between him and her father and the whip.
Stanton put his hand on her shoulder to peel her away from Titus like the shell from a crab but could not quite do so. She was far too skilled at clinging to that boy. Now Titus was making a confession, his cheek on the tree bark’s papery smoothness and his pewter eyes seeking Stanton’s beseechingly.
‘Lord bejesus save me from me sins, look down on me Lord bejesus, here where I lie, sorry, I’m too sorry, make me love you Lord bejesus, amen to God and the angels, doan whip me, Father, I’m hurtin enough. I’m saved now, I truly honestly am saved too.’
‘Is this call saying you don’t want to be hurt?’
‘It is,’ Titus began.
‘Say no,’ said Ivy against Titus’s ear. ‘Say it is cause you want to be saved.’
‘Cause I love Jesus,’ Titus nodded, diverting his poor arguments and Stanton relented, drew breath, and spat from his mouth a rubbery wad of spit.
His anger was not entirely appeased, but it was fed. He had a little more wisdom now than when he started, but not much. There was now a method to be followed, at least. Each day he would bring Titus forward a little more into faith and do it with the whip. This had not been properly tried as an effort. They would find themselves a private place and get down to it. He would acquire a short one and a very short one, riding crops, and carry the scourges with him and the Bible and have Titus point to passages and recite them. If it was the truth with pain it was doubly the truth, the goad of salvation.
‘Bring him to the house. Wear my coat,’ as most graciously, and with heartfelt consideration, and with a bout of steady breathing bringing himself back under control, Stanton removed the smock he wore for sheepwork and Ivy draped it over Titus’s shoulders. His poor shirt was spotted with blood but not very badly.
‘Hold my hand,’ said Ivy, with a sob, and Titus, with his shoulders twitching and hanging his head, groaning as if some sort of true dramatic tragedy had befallen him rather than what he deserved, went off alongside her and Stanton followed.
‘Titus is sorry,’ said Stanton with a nodding smile as he walked past each little group of onlookers. ‘Titus is very sorry for neglecting sheep. Back to your stations at once. Titus is very sorry indeed.’ This he told each and every one of them and looked them in the eye, native women, shearers, the Spaniard, the bond stockmen and Warren Inchcape looking over the sheep hurdles from a face as pale as dusted flour. The shearers hardly cared who was flayed as long as they were handed their sheep and not flogged themselves. They had an imperious power of skill but no warranties of safety from whips, except they had been told before coming to Laban Vale — now to their utmost surprise — that Parson Magistrate Stanton never flogged his own staff nor attended a flogging in person.
Warren Inchcape looked on blankly longer than the rest, and then broke off, heading back to his work. He was the staunchest boy imaginable and more like a function of nature than a movable emotional being. Stanton called to him: ‘Warren, take your tea break with the men. Sleep in the wool hall on the fleeces. I will come visit you there, and Warren?’
‘What?’
‘This is nothing and all to the good.’
‘There are still four hundred sheep waiting,’ said Warren, listing the tally, ‘and nearly all those will have to be brought back in the morning.’
‘So be it,’ said Stanton.
Why those two girls were dressed as boys was another matter. It would all be winkled out smelling of gross disobedience and cant. A small hint of it came:
‘Sir?’
It was Joe Josephs’s daughter with tears in her lovely eyes tugging at his sleeve.
‘Please do not punish Ivy,’ she said. ‘It is my fault. I honestly blame myself.’
‘Whatever for?’ said Stanton with a pale smile. ‘What have the two of you done that is wrong, except diminish your sex by wearing trousers?’
‘Tempted Titus,’ said Leah, lowering those eyes that were deep pools of anguish in her face.
‘Titus is a dish for temptation,’ said Stanton.
‘I writhed and wriggled, whistled and made bird calls, and drew him away from his work. I was bad.’
‘You? I don’t think so. You are a trembling innocent. Titus wouldn’t have come if Ivy hadn’t. You see, she is touched by the Devil and the reason you don’t see it is that Jews don’t have devils and hells to worry them. It all falls on Christians.’
THERE WAS A LOOK ON the girl’s face of something like double-faced truth. A fear so great it resembled loyalty, perhaps. Whatever, Stanton could certainly make use of it on this day of days for gathering in waverers.
‘Dear,’ he caught Leah Josephs by the arm near the garden wall, guiding her shoulder away from the house and pointing her towards her waggon home across the flat, where her parents awaited her, no doubt dismayed over the shenanigans and wanting to quit this place. ‘No harm shall come to you.’
‘Or to my father?’ the clever young girl came immediately to her point. The sheltering instinct and passionate adherence of her sex to principles based in feeling were things that Stanton understood.
