The Ballad of Desmond Kale (28 page)

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.

‘Far from it. I am his protector,' said Stanton. Then he thought for a moment and said: ‘As Ivy's close friend you will make me stronger still, so better for all our interests. How can that be done? You shall write to her, sweetheart, she has so little care for books, but loves a gossipy letter very much, shall you make her your confidante?'

‘If you don't whip her.'

‘You have a bracing cheek and not just a faltering foot on you, my girl,' said Stanton. ‘Not whip her? That is something I doubt you should ask of a Christian, if he is father to the child. But you have asked me, and I will tell you, a beating will make no difference to that determined, wilful soul. So there you have my vow: no beatings.'

‘Then I shall keep my diary and will copy her pages every day.'

‘She will learn from that, at least,' concluded Stanton, giving the girl's shoulder a squeeze. ‘Now run along. We have had our argument and we have our agreement. Be sure you keep it or something bad will befall. I have not finished with Titus, but do not be alarmed on his account any more, I have put away my whips. Or shall do,' he added, realising that he still carried Mick Tornley's whip around his elbow.

‘Let me take it,' said the girl.

‘Hang it on the waggon peg.'

‘I know where it is,' she said.

 

Limping the wide flat ground between the garden wall and the waggon, aching in heart and hip and toe, Leah Josephs felt creeping disgust at the feel of the whip. If required to handle a snake she would do so, with composure and courage. But a whip? It offended her.

‘We are allies, that lame girl, her father, and I,' Stanton said to himself, as he went through the stone-wall gate and entered the back end of the garden. ‘Her letters will keep me in touch, as I will ask Ivy to read them out to me and show me their drawings. These letters will be a check on wily Joe, for one thing, but only one
resort of the several I have. Country cunning supports me. Do not put all your ewes to one ram.'

As Stanton went along under the trees he picked an armload of fruit and took it to the hut. Anything to avoid facing Ivy just yet, or his wife or Titus again or anyone irksome, nor anything to tire him when he was already drained weak to trembling from whipping and shouting and following along on his feet, through the heavy sand of the creek. Equal to seeing Titus at court with the king, done up in lace, he would like to see the back of that boy running into the bush. There was a fairly sure hope that Ivy, faced with the model of her English cousins — milkmaids, sheep herders, weavers, and hard-working woolstaplers all — would cast off her sharp colonial manners and come right. He would honestly rather wrestle with God and the angels than face Ivy again for a while. His texts and cajolings had little effect on the sense of rightness she gave out. He would join the Devil's camp before hurting another hair of her tossing head.

Over the great news of their finding a ship, he was holding back, although no doubt Dolly was spilling it around to soak up tears. The first one he wanted to tell was Warren. He so liked picturing the world through that boy's eyes as a way of getting away from himself that he looked forward to seeing the reaction on Warren's face.

Seating himself for a few minutes of calm on the bench outside Warren and Titus's hut, Stanton let the details of the voyage come on. The setting of sail, the farewelling of the pilot, the busy interest of shipboard life, the watch bells! A call at the Bay of Islands (where there were missionaries to be helped) and then the floating islands of the Pacific! Their lagoons and cannibals' grins at a boathook's length! The roaring forties and a skimming over the southern oceans like a leaf! The rounding of Cape Horn in peril!
The beat up the Atlantic via Rio! And then the Thames, and London! Most of all Stanton saw the two of them, stout man and stout boy, getting out in London and making their way through the crowds to Garraway's coffee house in Cornhill. Warren getting his land legs and wondering: Sir, what was there in a Change Alley coffee house apart from coffee? Oh, boy, wait until you see beyond this door. Wool. Displayed by the light of a guttering candle. Wool. The sale of wool occupying a crowded hour. All bids for wool to be in by the time the candle burned down to the next inch mark. The chosen bale knifed open and a fist of staple pulled out. The wondrously bright shine of perfection in which all this mess of today plays its part.

The fruit Stanton picked was all bird-pecked and some bad grubs looking out but that would be no worry to Titus. There was no cause for the boy to go hungry during the next part of his lesson when he was locked in the hut with the door bolted, and a bucket provided for personal needs. That was if Stanton could wrench him away from Dolly who was busy soothing him.

Let her take her time. Let Ivy go to bed and be asleep by the time Stanton looked at her again. Then Stanton would make an entrance to his house, take the boy by the bones of his neck from where he was coddled, lift him off his feet, ride him along and hurl him through the doorway of his hut so strong he'd fly over against the opposite wall but not to break it.

 

It was expected that celebrations of the shearing would be cancelled and the inauguration of the wool hall happen some other happier time, after the shambles of the afternoon left its wreckage of hopes.

But those who thought so did not know their minister as well as Matthew Stanton knew his olden-day pastorals and songs and dances of an earlier time. Nor did they realise that for every break Stanton made to the smooth skein of existence, there was a healing sap held in reserve to spread forgetfulness over his actions.

In his days as a Yorkshire sheep boy the shearing was a season of special rejoicing. Not in the sense of the bad old heathen pleasures of getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting — God preserve him from those that could be avoided within the bounds of his own propriety at shearing time. But celebrations of a sacred, even a sacrificial touch. They were not just permitted but required. Dances, but with a formal purpose of decorating thanks and making praise. Toasts of a sacramental nature making wise as well as glad the hearts of the labourers after their wool harvest. Let there be an amount of largesse thrown around, for did not Cecrops, founder of the kingdom of Athens about the time of Moses, ordain that the master of every family should after harvest make a feast for his servants, and eat together with those who had taken pains with him in pulling the fleeces off?

True, although the flaying of Titus seemed more like a prelude to the account given in Second Samuel:

 

And it came to pass that Absalom had sheep shearers in Baalhazor, and Absalom invited all the king's sons, and Absalom commanded his servants, saying, When Amnon's heart is merry with wine, then kill him.

 

It was only how Stanton felt. It was not what he would do. What he would do was something better. He would pull the knife back, and instead of dripping with blood it would shine with butter.

It was late when he went in to Ivy expecting she would be asleep. Dolly told him to go quietly as the girl showed signs of a fever. When Stanton shone a candle through the partly open door, illuminating Ivy's narrow face, she sat up in bed and yelled at him that she did not know him.

‘I would say her fever has taken hold,' he nodded to his wife.

 

One who expected the shearing celebrations to be cancelled was Warren, who after bedding himself down in the wool piles and looking at the stars through gaps in the roof, cried and felt woefully sorry for Titus going to play when there was work to be done, for going off when he knew Stanton watched him closer than he watched them all, and if there was going to be an example first it would always be made on Titus.

Warren had started the sore events himself by bellowing for Titus and drawing the parson out. Warren felt like wringing Titus's neck at the same time as he loved him and wished he could be free like him, just by answering his own heart whenever it called. But there was an urge in Warren to do what was asked of him, and help run the country over with sheep.

Warren was never so strong on misery at Laban Vale until tonight. He wished he had never been pushed in the way of it by his mother and Warren Tait, wished he had never heard of Parson Stanton and fine-woolled sheep although, at the same time, the sticky soothing odour of grease in the fleeces filled his nostrils and gladdened him into dozing.

When Warren woke again the stars had barely moved. Boards creaked and a lantern moved through the sheds.

‘Over here,' he called, and Stanton came and sank down beside him.

‘Look what I have for you, Warren.'

On the flat of Stanton's hand was a sheet of sticky paper holding striped sweets, bonbons and comfits. They glistened in the smoky light of the tallow lamp.

‘These are made by our newcomer, Paul Lorenze,' said Stanton, pointing them out with a square-tipped finger. ‘Which is it strikes your fancy? Take one.'

In the first suck Warren had of a bullseye, a rule came to him: that if a man was a Spaniard he was apparently a maker of confectionery as well as a master of sheep. All day Clumpsy M'Carty had sent looks at him trying to convey something about Lorenze, and this must have been what the leering, tongue poking-outs and implying by fingers all meant, telling him to watch Lorenze for an advantage. The advantage that Stanton himself now delivered on a sheet of tacky paper? Warren admired Lorenze for his strangeness and strength — the man was like a panther in the careful way he fascinated a sheep and then had her cover off quick as a cat mauled a bird.

‘Warren,' whispered Stanton. ‘London! There is a ship being loaded with wool. It will take us.'

‘All of us?'

‘Sitting on top of the wool and holding on to the yard arms.'

‘And Titus?' said Warren.

‘This is Titus's night for feeling sorry and you are not to go to the hut, forbidden, do you hear? Not even to hear him digging under the wainscot and weeping like a native mouse to burrow through dirt and scamper away. The difference between you and Titus is that I never have to make any promises around you, boy.
Your presence is guaranteed to me where you are wanted and that is a boon. After London we shall go up to Yorkshire and visit the mills that lie in narrow ravines and project their chimneys up into the moors. You will understand more by watching their noise in an hour than I can explain to you in a year about combing, carding, felting and all those other words we throw around to justify our yield.'

‘I told my mother I should be chosen to go there, and she only smiled.'

‘Dear fond mother that you have.'

Warren's eyes shone. ‘There is a bird without many feathers reckoned still alive, that I would like to bring back. Its name is Car'away.'

‘What are you talking about? That is only the native name of the bird,
Kakatoe galerita
, the white cockatoo. They belong in Botany Bay, not London.'

‘There is an old lawyer keeps my inheritance under lock and key, the bird on a perch, in London.'

‘What is this talk?'

‘My father had a cockatoo.'

‘George Marsh had a cockatoo, that attacked my whippets, when we all lived at Parramatta, when Ivy was a baby.'

Warren looked shiningly at the parson, preening himself and dusting sugar flour from his chest:

‘George Marsh was my father.'

‘Great heavens, Marsh your father, not an officer, as is held?'

‘No.'

‘I heard that he died. I am sorry.'

‘I am to have his finery.'

‘Where is it kept?'

‘In a cabinet.'

‘It won't be “finery”, Warren,' Stanton mildly scoffed. ‘It won't be coats with gold buttons, knee buckles and silk stockings and periwigs, don't get your hopes up, or rather your vanities, as I remember George Marsh as a rough plain man whose rigging was always ripped torn and muddied.'

‘It is “finery” of some sort,' said Warren, hating to have his father reduced by anyone but himself now that his life was getting larger inside him in death. ‘Say finery of the pen?'

‘That is a plausible use of the word, I suppose. Well go on. It is curious enough.'

‘Curlicues and wiggles. Drawn maps, copied documents, proper letters and printed books. Prob'ly a whole trunk full. So finery I say as I likes the word and will say it again.'

‘May be we can look at your finery together,' said Stanton, ‘when we get there' — not pushing the point too hard, but wild at the thought of looking into Marsh's dossier. ‘I am always interested in the discoveries of our early men.'

‘You can help me find my way,' said Warren, ‘as from what I've heard, London is a jumble of streets and lanes made for getting lost in.'

‘I think I've told you that. It will be my delight to guide you where I can, and you shall need me,' said Stanton eagerly.

‘You'll need
me
more than you think,' the boy crowed before throwing himself back into his nest of wool, and waving his writing finger in the air, ‘as it is all written up in the lawyer's hand, that without my going there, my inheritance can't be claimed by anyone.'