The Ballad of Desmond Kale (33 page)

THE CONVICTS WERE LONG SINCE marched back to their barracks' room sheds and those that were shepherds sent away with their flocks before dark to find their night's sheep camps. Each of the bond men saved a snort of rum apiece for Clumpsy M'Carty in his cell with the cur Lehane wakeful in the diagonally opposite dark corner. They did it by tipping their portions into a common jug brought around by Galvin. It would allow Clumpsy enough to frazzle his brain through the night, and torment Lehane with a sip or two, if he chose.

Titus was the other one locked up now with his own hut doors bolted, a prisoner in all but name, still, and Warren told by the parson he should sleep in the woods that night lest Titus taint him with pity.

Some time past nine o'clock the wool-hall benedictions were given by Stanton. God declared all things good through the mouth of a minister finding texts fitted to his needs. The tallow wicks were doused. The owl that had taken up residence in the rafters looked out for mice. Last to leave, the strugglers were sent on their way, urged to their distant beds before their Sabbath began, though it
would take them some long while yet to get home and say their prayers as they lived by foot many miles and would milk their ewes past daylight.

Stanton and his wife with Meg and Warren following made their way by starshine to the homestead where the minister promised to show off the cuckoo clock to Meg before they snuffed their candles. Stanton made his preposterous offer of two hundred culls, to be delivered in the morning. Rankine had no choice but to accept them.

He then excused himself, saying he was going across the flat to the Josephs's camp to get their blanket rolls ready and make a place for Warren near them.

But he diverted from the intention as soon as he was clear of the others, after fetching two bottles of brandy from his saddlebags, and went to find the Spaniard, to test his honesty by putting him to a task.

He found the Spaniard drinking rum with the barracks' room sergeant in the office room of the barracks' sheds, and called him away on pretence of looking for a wandering horse that had lost its hobbles. The Spaniard followed close by his heels and out into the dark until they were a hundred yards under the night sky, where they could neither be seen nor heard, except to each other's peering presence, and only sensed by bats, the size of winged mice, that shadowed out from a hollow tree branch nearby, and sliced past their heads.

‘You can pull your fingers from your ears, Paolo Moreno. Open up to me, because if you don't tell me the truth I shall be heart-broken by you.'

The Spaniard shielded his forehead believing that all bats were blood suckers, and if these Botany Bay varieties weren't, as
Rankine always said, then he would not wait to have it proved by himself, thank you.

Rankine offered a slug of brandy, which the Spaniard accepted by wrenching the cork between his teeth. There was ever a blocky resistance in him needing loosening by drink to reach his deeper talk. Rankine could almost hear the hiss of brandy down his tongue.

‘Senhor Paul Lorenze, drink up. You looked green when I saw you through the slats. Did you get a jolt seeing me in the Devil's wool shed? I think you did.'

‘I thinks you did,' came the accusation flung back. ‘It must have been greens wools from Laban Vales sheep,' he said. ‘No goods diseases.'

The bottle passed back and forth. It took very little for Rankine to feel fired up, whereas Moreno had great capacity, a slower, smouldering intoxication. His sprees were days long and furtive.
Soledad completa
.

‘When are you coming back to shear our good white sheep? They'll be looking better since you saw them last, spread out over a high grassy country, dropping their lambs, many twins, a few triplets, in the shelter of granite rocks, some as big as houses, which nourish a light but fertile sand so the Irishman says.'

‘There is too much winds in the high lands.'

‘Sheep can always find a place to lie down, where the big rocks are. When winds comes from the south they find shelter on the other side. The land rises and falls to the far horizon, gets better, he tells me — from his times with Marsh — broad swamps of water-fowl and reeds between, and the best shelter among low spreading trees for their camps and sheepfolds. There is a bidgee sort of a river. The air is clear as glass, the sky deep blue, far stretching.
When you climb a hill you see the next bend of country mirrored in the sky. It is out there the blue bush grows.'

‘You forgets I was there. I saw nothings like it.'

‘This is farther along.'

‘
Y que?
You forgets they have brown wool in their ears when last I cares for them, some in the folds of their necks.'

‘That is true. But didn't we agree, there always has to be advancement, and when it comes to breeding, it cannot be done by councils.'

Rankine was well away on Kale.

‘Why does it matters I never comes back at all?' sulked Moreno. ‘The browns are culls you say let hims do culls,
pues, que sean todos blancos
, make them all whites, get rid of the browns, the
moreno
. You givens them away, me with them. Kales is a bad shearers, he use anothers mans blades, takes from the mister's sheds, no hang on to his owns, no treats them better.'

This droning whine Rankine knew very well, and chose to ignore. Moreno a few months back had risked his life for the very question.

‘I have told you before, my friend, my tactic is to follow the sheep, while my strategy is to find us the land. Kale is a great breeder and you are a great shepherd. Each one of us is needed for the other.'

‘What is Rankine's greatness agains?'

‘To play the fool and find us the land, to put my hand in my pocket for silver, to break bread, now with the governor, now with the parson, which neither you, nor Kale, is able to do, because how can you brandish influence?'

‘I cans,' simmered Moreno.

‘Kale is an outlaw, you are not English, you are not regimental.'

‘I passes for English, a trooper, when I walks hims free.'

‘And peerlessly bravely too. But it proves my point, Moreno. If it was left to just one, or even to two — an Irish rebel and a foreigner whose fortune is his dagger, his loyalty and his ancient north African name — how far would any one of us go? Kale would still be in irons. You would be buggering shepherd boys and goats in Estremadura still. That is to say, if you had not found yourself a gentleman by the name of Rankine. But do not try and take me by the end parts, Paolo Moreno, my very dear, my very dear old friend. I have told you this often enough, and you have trusted me well enough until we got them away from the forest.'

Moreno looked petulantly withdrawn.

‘Each time the land is any goods he says no, “travels on”, and you don't fights his opinions. You finds the place you wants, ducks moles reach, but you lets him decides it is wrong. All will be lost in unknowns country, sheeps disappears like water in the cracks, crows pecks their eyes out. You have courage under fire but against Kales nothing but weakness. I am fearless enough. I have breedings knowledge enough. While you have Biddy Magee there is no difference between us, but since you have that dream, with your brains in your testicles' bag, you are all for Kales and all for the sake of his daughter's fuck. That she refuses you.'

‘She refuses me nothing.'

‘To please her,' said Moreno, ‘you no longer takes from the priest Stantons, you take from me. I am still here on Labans Vales after the shearers vamoose. You wanna know why? The priest wants me over his flocks while he travels to Englands with his friend boys. I have said yes.'

‘Moreno, that is splendid,' said Rankine, who did not know why, but the arrangement relieved his conscience at the same time as it alarmed his interests.

‘May be it is my turns,' said Moreno, ‘I takes what you say I never can have, and lets me tells you, it is so easy to fix hims you would laugh to hear how easy.' Moreno stared at Rankine, challenging him, daring him under a roof of bright starlight to put him down from the step up he'd gained:

‘May be I learns from my master, Ugly Toms. The priest watches me, and so he trusters me. The governors watches you, and so he trusters you.'

Rankine examined the stalwart face of the Spaniard, studied its cracks and folds. The planes of a face like slabs of stone, steadfast in solitude. What a face it was, sculpted by living rough. Shaped by a country. The poor soils, bleached rocks and broken tree branches littering the place fed their way into it. Spain and now Botany Bay hammered in the features. Mulligrubs and brown moths sweeter than chestnuts spat from his iron pan. A curse on this country of thieving crows and shy marsupials: it grained itself into Moreno deeper than into Rankine, who sometimes thought that there was a year ahead of him, to which he put a date around five years hence, when he would return to Yorkshire a rich man and reclaim his green acres.

Moreno with his fists against the bottle tipped back his head. Rankine told him to keep it, the whole square flask, as there were a good few ounces left and here was another one — which he pulled from his pocket — to share with the sergeant of convicts, until the sergeant at least passed out although never Moreno, whose liver was made of iron.

‘It is not possible to serve two masters — it is difficult and a strain. Service is worked to breaking point between us, Moreno.'

‘It is all differents now,' agreed Moreno.

‘One more thing, I ask. It is to free Clumpsy M'Carty when Galvin is safely drunk.'

Rankine spelled it out to the Spaniard — ‘I promise it will go without trouble' — and the Spaniard pulled at his lower lip with his forefinger and thumb considering the question.

He made an idiot sound at the back of his throat.

So it was decided.

But walking back into the dark Moreno thought again. ‘Rankines is taken my sheeps away and Stantons gives almost as goods a sheeps in the care of me. It is all rights to do what Rankines wants but it is all rights to do what Stantons wants better. Rankines is dangerous crazy his ways and Stantons is dangerous crazy his ways. Stantons give me the wools. So. That is more better.' He would speak to Stanton.

Rankine made his way back to the Josephs's camp seeking Meg. He walked as a bridegroom, feeling his way in the dark, with a light hurried step.

THE WHIRRING INSIDE THE CLOCK began. The small doors rattled and threw themselves open with a backwards jerk. The noisy painted bird began its ten repetitive curtsies. Warren giggled, held his stomach, and Meg laughed with him. It was a wonderful gaiety her lightness of laughter had, but gaiety was the least of the merits the minister valued in her this late. His head whirled from the punch being mixed too strong and he wondered what sins of joyousness would plague him in his bed when he shuffled through his mind, looking for delights mixed with disgusts, sleep evading him.

‘Well, madam,' he said with a sigh. ‘Now to the question hanging, which I have granted you the power to decide. Are you allowing us Warren on our voyage?'

Meg surprised him with her answer.

‘What of his wages? Am I to lose what he brings me in, because you are taking him away?'

Dolly Stanton held her nightdress and sleeping cap over her arm and worked them against her stomach.

‘Even to ask!'

‘There was always an arrangement and his given word on the amount each year, which your husband swore, with no mention of any change in the pact.'

‘I shall now make you a new pact,' said Stanton, ‘a better one: that Warren shall have his money on all parts of the voyage as best I can manage, less those times when he is taken around, as when we do the sights of London and our travelling up and down to Yorkshire where he'll get more instruction in wool in a day than Botany Bay gives in a lifetime, and that is saying a great deal.'

‘How will he?' said Meg, and Dolly matched her in the same breath at the same time, as they chorused together in the minister's face: ‘How will he get his wages, when he won't be working?'

‘That is for me to calculate,' said Stanton, ‘but you both of you have my promise,' and he waited for their answer like a pasha playing to his harem getting two houris for the one desire guaranteed.

‘All right,' they said together.

So it was that Meg allowed her consent to the plan for Warren to sail away and not come back for two years; and so it was that Dolly Stanton had another lesson in swallowing her tongue.

Warren was pointed into the night air with his mother. She held his arm as they crossed the open ground. The Josephs's campfire guided them from afar. Meg felt lonely and confused, with a black gulf opening around her, and she longed for the assurance of Rankine's embrace.

 

When Stanton and Dolly were in their bedroom with the door closed, he said, before she could start her attack:

‘Listen to me, my wife, who knows nothing of sailing ships despite being brought to child on one, and that with the lone aid of
your husband. There is always a place on a seagoing vessel for a boy to work the galley or take his turn as a seaman for the whole passage through, paid for out of a captain's account. If you put more trust in your husband you might guess that taking the boys shall be more beneficial than you think. Have I got that into your head, or would you rather not have a carriage when we arrive in London, and a pair in hand?'

Dolly bowed her head, and agreed that she had married a clever man. She knelt at their bedside and said her prayers. At the thought of Titus being driven to scramble away up a mast in a wild storm she almost cried out. But having seen that high-cheekboned beauty Meg Inchcape in her house, leaning against her wall and looking up at her clock, with her sceptical gypsical eyes, and so resoundingly proud of her own distressed origins, and giggling at someone's better pride in a clock striking ten, Dolly was more decided than ever in dealing with the woman's son in her own way. The higher Titus went up his mast so please God the higher Warren went up his, until the heavier, less nimble boy lost his grip and fell into the waves that ran over him like lace tablecloths.

With his wife at prayer, Stanton withdrew from the room and went outside where he was unable to find where the slops buckets were, and so brought up his belly into the hollyhocks, which had been nurtured from treasured seed brought from England, and counted into the ground when Ivy was an infant. There, done: his meat and onions went into a lump on the ground where they would doubtless feed the soil if they were not to feed the minister himself any longer that night.

After washing his face, Stanton wriggled into his nightshirt and climbed into bed. While he rattled through his prayers as far as amen, his wife snored across from him, her thin nostrils flaring in the beam
of starlight coming through their curtains. Altogether it was a fairly good day. The strugglers were all impressed. Rankine was tormented. Stanton's standing with Meg Inchcape was raised. Rankine was roped pretty much where Stanton wanted him. Meg was soothed. And as there was to be no help from the law in the matter of Kale, and as Stanton was a law unto himself, here they both were — Stanton and Rankine — surely positioned exactly where Rankine himself wanted to be: at the nefarious service of Kale. It was a joining of forces on the almost spiritual plane, where nothing was proved, but all was connected. Tomorrow Stanton would go out and select a few hundred culls for Rankine to take with him.
Noblesse oblige
. The best of the culls would reach Kale and he'd make them better — they had another two or three lambs in them — until such a time as Stanton returned from England with Marsh's maps and the wherewithal to corner Kale on his pastures, his illegal flocks multiplied without Kale having the least idea of whose benefit he worked towards. It had a rhythm worthy of a ballad, the whole idea. There would be a new governor by then. Change benefited those on the side of the law. Distant country grew closer by the year.

It left Stanton with the question of Patrick Lehane, and his promise to the wronged Josephs to have Lehane corrected at law. It was late but no easy answers suggested themselves. Stanton bit his knuckles and spat small black chewed hairs from the tip of his tongue. Justice by morning. How to achieve?

But then a rap tapping was heard on his homestead's back door, and he jumped up annoyed, while Dolly slept on, to find he was saved. It was the Spaniard standing there; at once, it was plain in those sullen beast's eyes lit by orange candlelight how all Stanton's answers were come at once.

‘Dear fellow, Lorenze,' he began.

So the night went on. The Spaniard returned to the barracks' room sheds.

Moreno savoured his French brandy while Galvin let his run into his veins. The more Moreno watered his thin the more Galvin demanded his stronger. In his pocket Moreno had a milk cheese Stanton had given him, that he pared and fed Galvin who washed its pungency down with brandy each swallow.

‘I don't mind his cheeses at all,' said Galvin, inhaling the ammonia fumes. ‘They smell better than his prayers. It is what the ewe puts into the pail, when she squits her pebbles, that does it. I've seen the men skimming it off, with their fingers yolky and greasy from the wool, but not all of it, the black berries of sheep shit milling around. It all comes through and gives it bite. Very good, very nice, and what's left in that bottle, Senhor Lorenze?'

‘Is somes more,' said the Spaniard, tapping his pocket, where the second bottle hung ready to be unstoppered.

‘Good, grand, capital and all of us beautifully wasted,' Galvin said. ‘Them two in the clink, the minister cross-eyed from it, them puritanical strugglers drunk on their dreams, and now you and me sinking it down. I am only half sorry for Clumpsy M'Carty. There is a blessed lot of Irishmen who are for him.'

Galvin sang, smoked, drank and poisoned his liver blacker. ‘You know it becomes the Irishman to drown the shamrock when he can.'

As Galvin drew breath for a new chorus of hope, around midnight, he faltered, slid on over his table, and raised his eyes with the confused appeal of a felled ox. He saw nothing, felt nothing as he dropped. It took a good minute for the Spaniard to work the keys from his belt waist, and then he was round the other
end of the barracks' room sheds breathing the sugary oiliness of rum and the odour of piss and vomit that came through the hatch of the three-barred door.

‘Allo, M'Carty?' he whispered, unlocking one heart-shaped padlock after another until all three dangled loose.

Almost at once two shadows lifted from the floor and hoisted themselves up all stained in their canvas jackets. Clumpsy offered himself to Moreno first, open-chested with a plea: ‘Which is the better, the wind pipe, the belly, or the vascular organ Mr Paul fecking Lorenze with your Toledo blade?'

Moreno only partly understood the rattled words but well understood the obsequiousness of the fearful as he opened the door a little wider.

‘Come out!' It was addressed to both men, on behalf of two masters, but at first only Clumpsy responded.

Before Moreno could demonstrate himself friendlier than Clumpsy knew he was, the prisoner ducked under his arm, lurched past him — stopped only by Moreno's thrusting out a leg.

‘As one Caytholic to another, spare me till I make me peace,' said Clumpsy, thrown to his back where he rocked on the dirt, pushing air up at the looming Spaniard's knife. ‘Nor! Nor!' he said. ‘I won't tell Rankine it's you sucking the Deil's tiddy.'

‘Rankine warnts you,' hissed Moreno, despising last moments cowardly framed. He pricked M'Carty all over with his knife point, like a picador.

‘Aye, that would be heaven,' said Clumpsy, getting the first suggestion that Rankine had come for him, but hardly believing it. Thinking more that he was stabbed.

‘Over there by the creeks, see by the campfires, shut your mouths, and run.'

Moreno stood back heaving space between them as Clumpsy clambered to his feet, clapped his hands to his head, groaned and ran off.

Lehane came crawling out on all fours. He looked up at the Spaniard — an infatuated man with a trickle of saliva on dry lips and bloodhound pouches under his burning eyes.

‘I'm to go?'

‘It saves you,' said the Spaniard. Lehane kissed his boots, and stood up. Swaying off into the deep forgiving dark. Oh he would convert to a Protestant for this, he would. For this, he would go straight to the governor, and get his all right.