The Ballad of Desmond Kale (13 page)

‘Well proven,' said Rankine. ‘But if I find them, and when they're pinned down, shall you come and look them over, and tell me if they're any good, Warren my boy?'

Warren promised he would. He felt taller even than when he started the day. But why all the charm was explained away when they went their separate directions:

‘Give my warmest admiration to your sweet mother,' Captain Tom Rankine called back, when he was good way off.

THERE WAS A COMMOTION DOWN at the huts as a small boy came running to announce that Warren was seen at the end of their road.

Meg Inchcape stepped into the dust with a dishcloth twisted in her hands, keeping her eyes on Warren and his pony the last fifty yards. ‘Here's my proud boy,' she said to a neighbour, as above her head the dishcloth snapped into a flag of welcome and then dropped down and was bundled into her fingers again. Without offering any more greeting she stepped back inside the hut to her kitchen fire, and Warren might have wondered what was up with her, except there was always a reserve in their greetings that doubled their intensity, as the more wanted the occasion, the less likely they showed their emotions.

Two small underfed boys who thought Warren a great man came running up to his horse and fought each other for the privilege of leading the pony round the back until neither boy was much use to him, and they squabbled — one left squirming in the dust with a bloody nose and the other running home bellowing with a sore fist. Warren wondered what surprises his mother had for him — what
gift prepared, what favourite dish, what special tidings saved for the day, which even if they were trivial or stale tellings she would manage to relate with interest. He remembered he had a few red-flowering twigs in his pocket, and took them out before he went inside, arranging them into a dry sort of posy.

His eyes were unused to the interior shade after the bright sunlight as they embraced; she held him off, she whispered his name, she took him to her arms until his head was crushed against her breastbone and he said:

‘Ma,' in a small voice of objection.

Everything was set out on the table. He could see the trouble she'd taken with the help of old Mother Hauser who came in and gave Warren a pungent kiss on the mouth while he tried to avoid looking at the goitre on her neck. There was a dish of wet devil, made of slices of fried salt meat with a thick peppery gravy, which was put back on the fire where it bubbled.

As for his lateness, he blamed the tactics of an impetuous officer for delaying him. It meant the soup had gone cold and was reheated and burnt, as Meg had imagined he wasn't coming at all — that Stanton had gone back on his word, but if he had, what could she do about it? Warren saw how every time his mother turned back to him there were tears.

‘Old Stanton,' he said, ‘ain't all bad on his own home ground, it's only rogues in Parramatta get him worked up … What's wrong, Ma?'

‘Love tears,' she called them, whatever, they were about with her. There seemed more of them than ever before — the bright darts in her smile that came from every angle when she raised her head after kissing him, all over the cheeks and turning his face wet.

‘Ma, what is it, some person done you wrong? I'll run them through, I have a dagger,' and he showed her, the handle grip black with dried blood scented of animal deaths.

‘Put that away. It has been too many weeks since you went,' she said. ‘They've been two months, Warren.'

‘Shoulda I come sooner?' he said, thinking of those interesting weeks in a new place, when he never worried about getting away, but played as the speaker of Stanton's great part in the sheep yards.

She smiled and dabbed her cheeks. ‘I only wonder where my haunch of mutton is, that the parson promised you would bring over in a bag.'

‘I clean forgot to ask, and he never reminded me. He's like that unless you give him a kick, his plans and promises are too big for his pocket when it comes to putting his hand in.

‘They killed an old ewe, and the stockmen ate it yesterday, seeing they have a right to the culls or anything that's too sick to walk. On a Saturday afternoon, when they finish early at three, they are allowed to cook it up.'

‘You must be carrying some in your belly, along with that sugar you ate.' She patted where a dusting of confectionery crumbs remained, the discovery interesting her as she touched her fingertip on her tongue, in apparent recognition of the substance.

‘I eat better than them convict shepherds,' Warren boasted, ‘and go back for seconds whenever I like, out into a kitchen that's bigger than this whole house.'

Warren did not immediately name his delayer as Captain Rankine, because the greeting given by the officer for carrying to his mother worked against his affection for the uglified man, making him feel that he was only being used as a love messenger after all their talk about sheep. It was not the first time either with
an officer, that Warren had been used, as Meg was not the kind they just made a motion to if she shook their fancy. They mounted campaigns, being struck by her looks and mettle — and she would award victories according to how much they excited her enjoyment and laughter, and cut them off, or invite them back in, just as it pleased. Some of Warren's earliest years were spent crawling between their polished boots while Meg laughed outright. He wondered who it was now — there were always numbers of them around, officers or men, and if they annoyed him, there were some he liked very much, and all of them he granted had the best judgement for liking her. How could they not?

As he sat at the table and Meg served him, Warren talked himself up, wanting to prove to his mother that he was whooshing up in the world, all true to what she hoped by his move to Laban Vale.

‘You have no count of the information I keep about rams and ewes, all in a ledger that the parson reads down the columns one week at a time, right through to their first lambing and culls, and he ain't yet found fault.'

‘I am sure he could not, Warrie, even if he tried.'

There was some mood of sadness in her today that he wanted to dispel. He was a little put out that his arrival had not cheered her as much as it should, except when he spoke of the officer who waylaid him.

‘Our walls must look shabby to you,' Meg said, ‘after what you have in your grand establishment.'

‘Every single stick of furniture they bring up the river from Sydney, and rope onto a waggon and take out to their sheep station, twenty-four miles.'

‘And we poor women chase after it, feasting with our eyes.'

‘Nay, but my mind is here,' said Warren, ‘always at the last minute when I go to sleep.'

Meg reached over and touched Warren's hand. ‘Last thing at night's when I say my prayers for you, so that we are never really apart, Warrie.'

‘I am just sick of them hinting around Kale all the time, as if the worse he is, the better I am for everybody.'

Meg leaned back, removed a cloth cover from a plate of meat, and waved her hand across it to keep the flies away until Warren was ready make his choice of vittles.

‘Your mysterious interfering officer too, did he mention “that man”?'

‘No, Ma.'

‘The officer was “ugly”?' she said, with a faint smile. ‘And greased his favour by feeding you sugar candy and parting with a dose of prettying up, by saying he passed on his respects?'

‘Yes, Ma. Admiration,' he said.

Warren drained back the last of his soup without bothering with a spoon, and speared a piece of salt meat, chewing it trenchantly before asking:

‘Why ain't I ever to get angry about Kale being whipped?'

‘Can that wait until after your pudding?'

‘It always has to, and then you say there is too much for me to know, and we are a thousand puddings later. But I am started in the world, and we have a woolly-head black boy at our place, Titus, who whenever they talks about floggings the tears roll down his black cheeks, his heart is so sympathetic soft, and he asks me what them Stantons don't like talking about — not even their Ivy, who's quick — even though they's Christians down deep as the well goes.'

‘What is it your Titus asks, that they don't like saying?'

‘How can I have the cold soul to understand that my grandfather was flogged to the underskin and wished for dead by the man who loves me like a son.'

‘What is your answer to that?' said Meg, after a long silence, and now they went into the catechism of their lives, and even Warren, who would eat the horse and the whole pack team before he would say his belly was full, waited with the fat going glistening cold on his lips until they dealt with the recital.

‘I let them think what they likes. Or I say, “I'm not the one who goes on about Kale all the time, and why don't they shut their gobs.”'

‘I love you, Warren, but you must not cry, just yet. What is your next answer, that is always the one between you and me, and I asked you to remember it, though I think you've forgotten?'

‘I never have, because Desmond Kale was so hated, so beaten, so worked over, that it became too hard to bear and even my grandmother, Patsy Inchcape, was taken and had her hair shaved off, in the female factory, so that everyone would know she was depraved and disorderlied with Kale. The law went after Kale like a warregal bush dog, but we was lucky. We had over us a fear so strong, a hatred so deep, that we went into the ground like the anteating porcupine, or the womback showing its arse end up, with a slap of hairy armour plate, until nobody could harm us. Ma, I was born into this country a native, but I had no leather hide nor quills either.'

‘Love came out with you,' said Meg. ‘That was your great protection. Every bastard child in the colony is ransomed to charity, a cold dish that can only be warmed by guile. Lately, when Stanton's shadow came over us again — by sentencing Kale for that metal rake, which he stole to garden my mother's grave — praise be to blessed Anthony, patron saint of gravediggers and
herdsmen — I considered the resolution, that fear and hatred could build a shell of safety for their objects, even in the parsonage where they was fomented. That is now your position in life, until such a time as we are safe.'

‘Does that mean,' Warren dared, broaching the next step of their recital, which always risked her fury, ‘when my father returns to Botany Bay?'

THIS TIME INSTEAD OF THROWING plates Meg went to a small wooden box, that had once been a sea captain's letter case, and was left in her safekeeping by George Marsh, whose arrived letters she kept inside it, tight pressed under a brick of glassy quartz that Marsh had brought back from beyond the cataract of Carrung Gurrung, and presented to her like it was a diamond from the mountain of light.

‘I do not know what to say, or what to have you believe, but I have always given you the best picture I can, about your father's plan of coming back to Botany Bay under better circumstances than when he left.'

‘I have never waited for him, anyway,' said Warren. ‘Though I practised my alphabets writing him letters and drawing a likeness of five kookaburras roosting on a cold winter's night. His letters back was always overjoyed and promised me the world, under particulars that in the next mail we received was always changed, because he never made his promises the same way twice, just like he never told you there was already a Mrs Marsh, after he promised he loved you.'

‘Enough of that anyway,' Meg wiped away a tear. Over the whole time since Marsh sailed off she had kept him as a monument to fidelity inside herself. It had not prevented her from a few heated dalliances, hurried excursions in love — but when it came to irreversible pledges she had been immovable, and the reason was loyalty to Warren having a father at all, in a country where orphans and illegitimates were the order of the day. ‘Warren's father is a man of principle,' she maintained, giving nothing out, which was evidence to some he was an officer, if they believed in honour, and an argument to others he was an officer, if Meg was being ironical. Through this time her notion of George Marsh was more and more like a statue, inside of which the light of a candle could be seen moving around as if the man was in the edifice somewhere, crawling about on his patched knees, looking for a way out.

‘Well, I cannot remember last time he bothered to remember I was born at all,' said Warren

‘That is over,' said Meg.

‘Good for it,' said the boy.

Meg often asked herself: How regretful that a boy full of feeling, racked by loyalties and affectionate dreams, felt coldness towards the man who fathered him — found no excuses for Marsh's blithe lapses the way Meg herself did, over the whole seven years since Marsh upped and left, when what she always tried was to make him look good and paint the boy's memory in, unless she started throwing plates. Their relation to Marsh was the closest sealed secret of most of what they shared when they kissed goodnight or goodbye. And the reason first was Kale's — for if Kale had ever found Marsh took her at sixteen and was her user from then, under Kale's bonded nose, Marsh exulting in her bound silence, her half-prisoned but willing girl's yielding, there would have been murder
afoot. So she was always resolved to wait until Marsh was dead to tell Kale it was not an officer that had taken liberties with her in the dark of one night, but Kale's own nuggety master on their march to Aleppo Mere and into the Caemarthen Mountains, and not over one night either but through a whole year's count of assignations, until she came to term with a boy. The second reason was over the promise Marsh demanded of her himself, in all his dark-browed, homespun vanity, when they parted on the shores of Sydney Cove and he sailed off with his crates of specimens. ‘She was not to make light with the reputation of one who aspired to fame, and was legally married to Mrs Marsh' — and pressed blossom that she was, with a boy in her charge, she had long obeyed him.

Meg unfolded a letter from the box. ‘Now for the news I have been waiting to tell you when you had your day of rest, which I can hardly bear to speak out. I want you to study this piece of parchment, Warren, that has just come from England.'

‘Is it to brag how great he's come?' said Warren, sneering at the green pickle he was about to bite, as if appetite was the last thing he would offer a plain pickle, but would stoop to its need despite that reluctance, if only to spite that not quite gentleman, his father.

‘No, the opposite is true. He is dead.'

Warren waited for feeling to strike him.

‘Dead?' he repeated flatly, observing his improper reaction mirrored in his mother's eyes, but wanting to live in the frozen moment longer, where he would not have to feel anything. ‘What has he left me, because there was talk about that, and you thought it would save me.'

‘Small hopes that I had — won't you hold my hand, Warrie, and say a prayer that you're sorry?'

‘No,' he bargained. ‘Not yet, I won't. What is it, his clothes, hats, and boots?'

Warren looked hopeful.

‘If earthly possessions is what concerns you most, your inheritance is not finery at all — a few books and maps, they are in a chest held by an attorney in London, “that you may collect at any time according to your convenience,”' she read to him, through her tears, which had been flooding for every reason the whole afternoon.

‘That will be easy, then, I will do it when I get there,' said Warren, lifting his chin not quite as satirically as he sounded, in the light of what was hinted behind thick walls of the Stanton house about them taking themselves to the Yorkshire county seat they sprang from, and ever so humbly in the East Riding of that place, living it up there as returned improvers with their tales of flocks and victories won converting heathen Tituses.

‘He is buried in the churchyard of St George's, Hanover Square, near Connaught Place, with another Botany Bay traveller, Captain Flinders. God rest his busy soul.'

Meg folded the paper. Warren sat forward and looked at his mother, the things that were said sinking in. The list of vexations. The pall of sadness over them. His father's greatness in his father's own mind more important than any convict girl's happiness and her boy's well-being in the dust of New South Wales.

Warren felt more alive because Marsh was dead, that was the truth of it. Pretty much ready to burst his buttons. Here they were, working up their fortunes out from Parramatta, and Marsh lay rotting dead in London. They would not have to tread so carefully around Marsh's name any more; it would not be Kale who warned their sensitivities quite as much, on that point. They had waited, and made their lives better, while Marsh's that promised more had
slipped away. So Warren felt brave and pugnacious — the elation of the survivor; he was the ember become a flame that was the last heat of the dead man. Meg saw Marsh's tarnished vanity in Warren's muddy gold eyes. Finery. He was left some finery of penmanship and map marks. They must be valuable because the letter said they could only be collected in person, over the signature of one Warren Inchcape, boy, of Botany Bay. A precious thought from one gone, who'd remembered his son at the end.

Warren went to Meg's side, kicking his stool back, and stood holding her in a way that was more like she was holding him for the grief he was too stubborn to speak, and swaying as she told him while referring again to the document in her hand:

‘The worst thing is that his wife, poor Mrs Marsh, died before him, and there was nobody to bury him except this kindly old lawyer, Alexander Ritchie, who writes that George Marsh had no stock of worldly goods, but out of such as he had, his first desire was to provide for one he meant to take to him, when he was flushed with rewards from his patron. That is to tell you, Warrie, he was waiting on his master, Sir Joseph Banks, who was ill almost the whole time from when your father arrived in the colony. Did you know, that waiting for his benefaction for the space of many years, Georgie never had a single letter from Banks? He returned to England with all his collections, his maps, his loyal black servant, Mun'mow, his cockatoo, and the wool samples you remember, as each one he took, another was put to the side and saved for you to study when you were old enough to understand their names and uses.'

‘I was always old enough to understand their names and uses,' said Warren thickly, reluctant to credit anybody for his earliest bleatings around sheep unless it was Desmond Kale, and that name
he'd swallowed so long from habit, that even talking with his mother he let it pass by, like the full moon shrouded in storm-clouds, or a hearse under a black cloth containing a breathing corpse.

‘Please don't be cold, Warren. Your father Georgie Marsh was proud, and vain, but never was mean, and I honestly loved him with all my heart for his bold independence and passion of feeling. Also for his murky eyes which are qualities you have in you, when you look at me like that.'

Warren took the page of paper over to the light of the door, where he studied its details with the aid of his index finger running along each curlicued line and spelling out the words.

‘Now here is the parrot as well, which is mine too, it says, cold and alone without its feathers in London,
callow
, is the word they use, at age estimated twenty years — that same bird,' said Warren, amazed, ‘as used to cry out its own name, Cara'way.'

‘What is wrong with you, Warren?'

For in speaking the name, ‘Cara'way', Warren's voice caught in his throat. Choked there and burst his flood of tears.

When Warren's tears were done his mother put his head on her lap and stroked his dusty hair.

‘Remember him,' she soothed. ‘Remember the man your father.'

And it was definite that he did, because there on the day Marsh sailed, had he not carried him on his shoulders while the parrot sat on Marsh's right arm digging in its claws? It was a day when Warren rode above heads, smelling southern breezes and tar — a small boy torn from impressions while the next lot were forming like new clouds in the racing sky.

He was lifted down from Marsh's shoulders and placed on the stones of the street — left there with the bird staring at him from
its wet leather eyes while two men talked, Marsh and Desmond Kale. The stones were greasy and stank. Mud splashed in his face. The rows of Sydney Town houses looked down on him from above one another's roofs. The stones echoed the sound of boots, the iron wheels of carriers and the sound of Cara'way scratching his feathers and making music with his small chain that kept him captive, then throwing his head back and screeching, while his bright yellow crest rose alarmed.

Marsh washed Warren's muddy face in a horse trough, which made him pull back his lips. He did not like being touched even gently in the face, even by his mother. Up on those shoulders again — Marsh happy and singing while Kale took charge of the cockatoo.

‘You wore a green jacket with a spray of honeysuckles,' his mother said — and he was held out over water! — the sailing lighters loaded with planks of new sawn timber aiming straight at the docks, slapping up waves, veering away at the last moment as their sides met the wharf and sailors threw ropes.

Marsh was beckoned by Kale, Warren was carried between them: they climbed a flight of stairs above the dark decks of the wharves, in one of those sandstone buildings that Warren thought, once he saw them in sunlight, were built of butter blocks. His toes never touched the steps, one man clutching either hand. The bird ran before them. It was tied to a railing as they went in.

The place was the wool room of a merchant where Kale went around pulling tufts of fleece from bundles and Marsh behind him wrote their parcels on cards. They were for taking back to England and making an advertisement of them to Sir Joseph Banks and the manufacturers J. and W. Thompson of ‘Park Mill', Rawden, Yorkshire. It was all recorded in the slip case Warren was left, and which
he took out sometimes and studied by candlelight. The best and choicest parts were called the picklock, the next most excellent the prime. There were the choice, the super, the down, the head, and the downrights. Warren believed he always knew the main differences between wools because he was born to them. But knowledge had started there in that room, as very likely his memory of important existence had, the day George Marsh sailed off. Warren looked from one man to the other as if he had gone to sleep for the rest of his life with his dull-coloured eyes half open, his pale lashes blurring what he saw in a golden pile of bins as the two men moved from one to the next.

Nothing in the greatness of living would ever escape Warren from then on. A good grab of wool could be bunched into a staple hardly bigger than a fist. That same portion could be spun into a piece of cloth and cut to a pattern and worn. Combing wools weighed up on a scale, a pound's weight of fleece sold for two shillings while in Saxony the best weight of Saxon merino fleece was said to fetch six shillings more.

George Marsh took Warren and held him high with a deep laughing conviction of greatness, and threw him even higher in the air, catching him in a low swoop so easy that up he went again. Next they stepped away from under him, and he found himself falling through the air into a pile of wool, sinking down like a louse tumbling in the forest of a sheep's back.

That light of pearly fleeces was the light in the darkened room with the door held only half open. Kale reached in and smeared wool's greasy yolk under Warren's poky nose.