Mr Darwin's Shooter (4 page)

It was almost dark and Covington's supper would be on the table. Mrs Hewtson would be sure to whack him on the head with her wooden spoon when he came in. But he lingered and heard the boys say it would soon be time for them to get back to the place where they would spend the night. Though the boys were ready to go, John Phipps flourished his hat and placed it at his feet. A feeling hung about him like smoke. His black curls jiggled on his head like springs being constantly plucked by an invisible hand. He chuckled throatily, excitedly, with a promise in his voice. When speaking of his enemies—the mention of whose names caused his voice to tighten and rise in intensity, and the tip of his pointed Adam's apple to tremble—he made Covington feel that whoever John Phipps hated, then they were the ones Covington hated, too. Among them were ships' pursers, weevils, bishops, landlords, hoity clerks and all enemies of the poor and needy, and those who refused pilgrims their barns to sleep in. Also those who drove pilgrims from their natural estates, denying them the animals of the earth to grill in their fires.

‘You must hate all of England, then,' said Covington, ‘if that is the case.'

The sailor turned to Covington again, switching from ferocity to that look of quick good humour that Covington saw in him at their first coming across each other:

‘Are my enemies those who lie in sluggish water, and think their sluggish thoughts, and make mockery of heavenly desire by carnal mimicry?'

Covington dropped his chin, feeling whole as a child in the company of this man. ‘They are my
sins
, I confess it.'

‘Nay,' said the sailor, ruffling Covington's hair. ‘Some would call them sins, but I would not—since you own them so freely.' He turned to his boys. ‘What do you say, lads, shall we have him in our fleet?'

John Phipps's four adherents all said they would, but it was not their selection that counted, they added, it was the Admiral's word.

‘Well spoken. But I think the Admiral would have him in his fleet any day,' said Phipps. ‘He has goodwill for boys.'

‘Then heave-ho,' said the others, grabbing Covington by the shoulders and frog-marching him ahead of them down the road. With their meeting over they declared their starvation, and broke into a trot. Covington ran with the sailor and his boys through the dark, out on a muddy road past the town and into a barn where they made a fire of sticks. They strung lanterns on beams and roasted potatoes and turnips in the coals. Covington liked the way they did everything with a snap, a rush, and then stretched their legs out before them and smoked their fierce pipes, which they plugged with tobacco handed around in pinches by John Phipps. One of them produced a pullet from his cloak and made ready to despatch it to perdition, only to find John Phipps's cane across his neck. He asked where he had got the bird, and only allowed him to strangle it when satisfied it was from under a bush near a yeoman's farm. ‘I would have
you
plucked if it came from any deserving poor,' he said.

With firelight licking their pinched faces the boys told stories of where they were from. All but one belonged in Bedfordshire and neighbouring counties. Like Covington they had been ejected from their workplaces or else had
never known anything except wandering the roads. In the right season if they were lucky they dug potatoes, cut willows, and drove turkeys to market for the reward of a few grubby pence. Now they would take their chance on the sea. None of them except Able Seaman John Phipps had ever worked the sea, but it was their sworn intention to do so. Indeed, as Covington soon learned, such was the whole purpose of John Phipps's preaching—to take boys with him to the ships. It was to cultivate and escort to the naval yards of Britain a clutch of would-be sailors imbued with a parable of Christ which they would live-out in rough waters. For what was a Christian to do except bear witness to his fellow-man, and if driven to extremes bear it alone where there were no spectators, on the perilous deeps. There was no better test than that of a Christian's mettle. But Phipps was not in a mood to lead his boys to Portsmouth in a hurry and find them Christian commanders, of which he knew several. He first wanted to check they could read their scriptures, and show in their hearts a love of the unseen. Then they would be a power on the four seas, and return home with treasure beyond reckoning.

Covington did not know if he had a love of the unseen.

‘It was given to you by nature,' said Phipps.

‘What is it, though?'

‘It knows you. Pray stick by my side. You and Joey Middleton here, I think you are my prizes.'

Joey had a small, sad and eager face. He had the sniffles and a runny nose, and wiped his upper lip with the back of his hand. John Phipps gave him a woollen comforter from his deep pockets to wrap round his neck and keep himself warm. Joey was eleven years old but looked younger. He was the only one who knew ships, being a West Country boy from Devonport, where his father, he said, was a sailor with red hair. And his mother? She was in that town, too. But that is all he seemed to know, and John Phipps said that he had found him on a scow near Hull, curled up on
the deck as if he were chained there. A lean bosun and his wife had taken him in charge. They claimed he was their own, whipped him when they liked, and used him as their lackey or galley slave as they made their way around the coast. They had got so far from Joey's birthplace that he believed himself to be in another country altogether, where English was barely spoken. And he forgot that he was free, had no conception of prayer, and so was in a fair pickle when John Phipps stole him away and started breathing faith into his bones.

By the flame of a candle the Book was passed around. All stumbled over the words until it came Covington's and Joey's turns. The two outshone the rest in a reading of the Prodigal Son. It had a special meaning for Phipps, and they guessed he was estranged in the way of a prodigal himself. It was then everyone's bedtime and they heaped up the hay. John Phipps would not let Covington stay, but sent him home in the moonlight with a promise that he would call upon his father in the morning at the slaughteryard, and parley about Covington joining his boys.

True to his word John Phipps came there, and put his case.

‘If you mean my boy to be an evangelist, like yourself,' boomed Covington's Pa, rising to his full height wearing a leather apron, addressing Phipps and waving a willow-stick around (that he was using to beat horsehide, to loosen the hairs from it to make head-plasters), ‘then you have chosen the wrong boy. My Syms could no more persuade a sinner from off his path than that sparrow there,' he pointed with his wand, shooing a scrawny bird a few hops away, where it splashed through a cesspool composed of blood, chaff and urine. ‘He would as soon dirty himself in sin as cleanse himself in the rivers of Babylon—'

‘If you mean he doesn't know what sin is—'

‘Aye, I do mean that. He would willingly serve the devil for a pat on the head, and likewise raise Christ's hem from the dirt, e'en if it skunned his knees to the bone.'

‘I can see that in him,' said John Phipps. ‘It is why I want him in our crew.'

‘Yours is a daft ship, being on land without keel or rigging,' observed old Covington, with a barb of suspicion in his voice. ‘Are ye supported by any missionary society?'

‘Only what God provides.'

‘And your nose, from the sharp look of you.'

John Phipps smiled. ‘You shall have one less mouth to feed if he comes.'

‘That has occurred to me,' said the father drily, ‘since yesterday, when the Quentins lost their market in hides.'

‘I want to go,' said Covington.

‘It is to my sad advantage to let you go,' said Covington senior, ‘whether I like it or not.' He grabbed Covington and pulled him to him. ‘God love you, lad, as I do, and you'll meet no harm.' Then Covington went to Mrs Hewtson, and she grabbed him to her too, and said the same kind things to him. ‘What shall we do without you? Who will bring us such cheer?' Word meantime was sent to their preacher, the printer and bookbinder Mr Squiggley, to ask for information in the matter. He said that John Phipps was known thereabouts; he was a wanderer; he had formerly been a rogue; his father had disowned him; he had seen a better way; he was known for his eloquence with boys. So really there was not a bad word said about him except by those who feared his scorn. His temper was fierce, he was possessive when roused, and was the special hate of game-keepers, on whose land he trespassed in a lofty spirit of freedom. It was said that he set a pace with his fast legs like Alexander the Great in crossing England, and as a boy had sailed in the English fleet against Nick Frog, and so was branded young to the ways of the sea.

Mrs Hewtson stuffed a canvas satchel with rice pudding, cold mutton, cheese and bread. She handed Covington a bottle of mulberry wine which he slipped in his pocket. There was no more room left in his satchel. It was heavy, almost unbalancing him as he slung it around his back.

‘I am a packhorse,' he said.

‘You are a donkey,' jibed Mrs Hewtson, tugging his ears, putting her arms around him close. ‘John Phipps's donkey and he's got you cheap, my darling heart.' Covington gave her a hot, tearful kiss. She had been long enough in their house for Covington to have forgotten when she came. All
the busy, cosy, forgiving and playful times of his life were spent within a whistle of her arms and lit by the shine of her oven door. Nights of being squeezed around the hearth, scrapping and boasting in a parlour the size of a thimble.

After leaving Mrs Hewtson he went round to his brothers, one cuffing his ears, another pulling his hair, a third booting him in the backside or, as he worded it, ‘giving him instruction on how every fat must sit on his own bottom.'

It was his launching into the world, where he believed there was nothing to hurt him unless he procured it for himself—though he was a little pained by the ease and convenience with which his Pa and Mrs Hewtson now let him go. Just as he had been marked for a trader in his Pa's eyes, now in this turnaround he was marked for the sea.

‘When you get your ship,' boomed his Pa, ‘then I believe there will be no stopping you.' He turned to Mrs Hewtson, pinching her cheeks to cheer her up. ‘Why, my little butter-churn, our boy shall one day have his own ship to command—our boy shall be Nelson, Drake and Dampier, all three in one.' When Covington's Pa boomed praise he was heard for a mile around, and 'twas often said of him as a horse butcher, that he was a great hoarse as well.

It was the hottest time of the year, a month after Christmas at latitude thirty-five degrees south. All down the New South Wales coast columns of smoke rose from fires burning inland. The unchecked flames shot their smoke in the air forming anvil-heads of cinders. At night the fires burned low to the ground in a lurking, underhand fashion, bothered by sea-mists. Next day they flared tree-high again, greedy, fed by hot winds from the parched inland. The fires had the sniff of rage about them. The sea was the only barrier to their eating a man's face off. Sparks flew out over surf as tongues of flame advanced onto headlands. Ash fell in the water and darkened the white beaches.

At Tathra, in the far south of the colony, Mr Syms Covington embarked for the port of Sydney, as was his custom every six-month, on the schooner
Skate
from Twofold Bay. The voyage of two days was done in a haze of burning. Covington had a good stomach for the sea but was unable to sleep. He experienced cold sweats and a discomfort that pierced a sword to his belly. He stood on the deck of the
Skate
watching worms of fire in the hinterland and knowing there was something wrong with him that a swig of gripe water and a good hard belch would never fix. He crouched in a chair, pulling his knees tight against him, and then stood clinging to the rails. He lay down on the
deck and was no better. The captain prodded him with the toe of his shoe. His condition made him afraid. They sailed north, pitching and rolling. His battered, broken-nosed face turned square to the wind had the look of an old prize-fighter's coming up to a bout.

Entering the Heads of Port Jackson just after dawn, the captain found Covington utterly stricken. His eyes were open, watchful, but he uttered not a word. With sails slack and the schooner steady on the tide the sufferer was offloaded forthwith and rowed to a Dr MacCracken's cottage in an arm of the harbour at Watson's Bay.

 

As MacCracken first saw Covington he was the colour of a ripe plum, barrel-chested, massive in thigh and limb, and silent as the grave in his agony. Covington was then forty-two years of age. His impressive head rested on a folded coat. One fist was clenched, and when MacCracken prised it open he found a small cone-shaped shell with four valves at the top. It was a common barnacle and he threw it away.

‘Get him to the house. And hurry.'

Men carried Covington on planks to MacCracken's library and he prepared his knives. He learned that Covington had been ill for three days before embarking on the schooner, information that aided in his diagnosis, making five days of shocking discomfort over all. ‘Get sheets,' he yelled, ‘and spread them around the floor.' The last consideration in MacCracken's thoughts was the saving of a life, for he believed the man as good as dead with an appendicular abscess, but not last in his actions, you can be sure, which were swift and useful.

Covington parted his eyes a slit. Nothing else in him moved except his eyeballs, which followed MacCracken around the room. He observed that his saviour was a young man, lean-necked, tall, vital as a whip. He held his lancets
and scalpels to the light, and drew them across his thumbnail to test their sharpness.

MacCracken kept himself calm. He had no great love of surgery, indeed had only recently begun in that business and doubted his wisdom already. Yet his hands were steady and more to the point he knew that if such advertisements for his skill as this Covington had ample pockets, then so much the better. For MacCracken fancied soon to select himself a slice of that wide-open land of Australia where he could put a man to manage livestock, and so guarantee himself regular percentages without having to dirty his feet in dust. It was how fortunes were made here if you were wise enough, and better than gold. And so was Covington his godsend? You may be sure he was.

A pall of bushfire smoke rolled along the coast and suffused the harbour foreshores, entering the room where the patient lay and stinging the surgeon's eyes. Without delay MacCracken administered ether using a glass jar as an improvised ‘ether dome' (which he had seen demonstrated at Massachussetts General Hospital in Boston), and put Covington to the knife, delivering him of a free flow of pus with a rotten fecal odour.

Covington blinked awake and found himself among the living. But which lot of people and where?

‘Don,' he croaked, and reached out a crippled hand.

Where that ‘Don' came from MacCracken had no idea, though it declared a bond of vehement familiarity between them that was to last.

Say there was nothing between them at first except mistaken identity (who was this ‘Don' at all?), and then that a quality thickened in the air between them—like a lens they could use to know each other better—one man adamant in his being, that man being Covington; and the other, the younger, MacCracken, with his limp brown hair and bony nose, ready for wisdom without having a clue that he was. Over the many days of Covington's convalescence his life
hung in the balance, and all MacCracken could do was wash his wound in clean water and hope for its healing.

The first time Covington spoke, MacCracken learned he was deaf as a mountain. His cheeks needed a good hard pinching. ‘Wake up, old dodger!' But yelling did no good unless made hard against his ears.

‘I had a shell!' Covington shouted in the half-light.

‘I threw it away,' said MacCracken.

‘Where is my shell?'

‘
Gone! Vanished!
'

‘Mind the reef!' Covington shouted.

‘Mr Covington,' MacCracken held him by the shoulders, ‘
you are on dry land
.'

‘I had a shell!' (etcetera).

MacCracken flung wide the curtains. It was barely surprising that in his delirium Covington believed him self aboard a vessel, considering the fine chronometer MacCracken had on his wall and the proximity of sea-water breezes wafting through the window. There were books on tables and spilling from shelves, many with a nautical flavour, and in a corner alcove was a fine globe of the world of the sort favoured by ships' captains. MacCracken rented the house from the widow of one.

Covington narrowed his eyes and looked at his saviour with a cunning suspicion. MacCracken looked back at him lazily, now. He was an American on his way around the world from Boston, having come to rest in Australia after trying the gold rushes and exhausting his sense of adventure.

Covington began to struggle again. ‘Don?' he barked in his delirium. MacCracken wrestled him down.

‘The name is MacCracken. You are under my care.'

‘Don
Sia Di
?' Covington said, or so the name sounded to MacCracken's ears.

‘David D. MacCracken is the name. Just as I said.'

Covington wearied MacCracken with repetition of his
‘Don', which Covington had barked since coming out of the influence of ether, that majestical liquid with a dizzy-making odour with which the new-made surgeon had stilled Covington's struggles—and sometimes, for the interest of it, had enhanced his own senses and coloured his dreams by taking a sniff.

Finally MacCracken shouted against Covington's ear and his meaning won through. ‘I am your doctor! You are ill! Be satisfied!'—and Covington sank back in his pillows, making a dry chomping sound and rubbing his battered nose with the back of his hand, giving MacCracken the benefit of a gentle smile, which the younger man witnessed then for the first time, and it warmed his liking.

‘You're an American,' said Covington.

‘You thought I was someone else?' mimed MacCracken.

‘Aye.'

‘A Spaniard?' snorted MacCracken, snapping his fingers, clicking his heels, doing a fair tarantella in charade.

In time MacCracken would learn that the man Covington called him in his delirium was also nondescriptly brown-haired, also big-nosed, also obliging of manner, also absolutely unremarkable-seeming and doubting his first-chosen trade, and aged but thirty years the last time Covington saw him. No Spaniard, either, but a well-born Englishman, and around six feet tall and so inclined to stoop a little in his relation to others. His name was Charles Darwin but MacCracken was far from knowing that, and would have thought it unlikely even if told, Darwin being famous for his
Beagle's Voyage
, which MacCracken had read at the age of twelve, holding it somewhat responsible for nurturing a whim, that bore fruition, for science and travel.

‘I am sorry to give you this trouble,' Covington said, coming round in a cold sweat.

‘Not at all,' responded his saviour.

Under wiry eyebrows and a clifflike forehead
Covington's eyes followed MacCracken everywhere as he cleaned his instruments. Covington was a powerful presence in the dim light, the planes of his cheekbones and jaw offering a fine portrait. MacCracken was interested in his head. Lumpy, he would say. But interesting.

‘Your hatmaker,' he supposed, ‘finds his fortune in you, Mr Covington?'

That head's resemblance to a loaf of bread, where yeast pushed the crust in various stern directions, had often been remarked upon with Covington. His ears hung a little pendulously in his age. MacCracken, with a flippancy to his nature, muttered whatever he liked while in Covington's company, never expecting a reply unless he bothered with shouting. Covington's hair was thinning and black and, ‘I daresay dyed, old fellow?' said MacCracken, testing the emptiness of the air.

‘Blustery weather,' Covington replied.

Covington's facial purpling came from old scars. MacCracken used his magnifying glass. He deduced they were powder burns but Covington said nothing. Facial scarring was not the only mark on him. There were welts on his shoulders, embedded like sea-slugs, purple and slack. He guessed that Covington had once been severely flogged, and from turns of phrase Covington used (‘deaf as a mainmast' and ‘sparm fish' for whale), divined in Covington's distant past a ship, though whether a merchant ship, a convict ship, or a man-of-war he could not tell.

‘What ship? What navy? What crimes? What cruelties?'

Covington gave no answer.