The Ballad of Desmond Kale (36 page)

 

Dolly, only sometimes able to read her daughter's condition of mind, and not at all this furtive matter concerning her ‘condition'
per se
, was full of her own justifications of a similar headstrong nature.

Dolly, each day, had the carriage waiting that her husband supplied despite her not keeping her side of her bargain with him any longer, although to be precise about it, nor had he. For her word on all matters of mutual satisfaction was rendered void by the non-arrival in London of Titus. All she had promised, when they'd bargained at Laban Vale, was to stop opposing Warren's passage in return for Titus's coming. After that she believed she was free to work her means.

Dolly had an idea that was never to be. It was born of seeing a bluebell emerge from velvet green grass in a graveyard, and of wanting to throw herself down alongside it in shocking relief, like a person dying of thirst finding water, or a wanton her lover. Her idea to put to her husband was that she stay in England longer than he, with Ivy set to finish her schooling, while Matthew returned to the colony alone and she looked after their business this end. Whatever his objections might be (and they would be loud) they could be purchased, she considered, by picturing her return to the colony with the wildness in their daughter tamed and the girl quite eligibly married off in about four years' time. They would fairly certainly be comfortably rich in that number of seasons, the way things were growing with their wool, and while it was their devout shared belief, as Christians, that money was never to be sought as an end, it was always a good recommendation of higher virtues to have some in the bank.

AT THE START OF THEIR voyage, ten months ago, Dolly put an obstacle on her sleeping arrangements by declaring she would no more sleep on straw than fly to the moon. ‘A donkey's breakfast,' she said, was how their ship's mattress was made, proof against mildew from wet oak planks: two wide sacks filled with straw and dried seagrass, sewn up with sail twine. ‘I will not, I cannot, and I shan't,' was what she'd said, and a move was arranged by their obliging Captain Maule. In the cabins amidships the accommodation was dry and the mattresses stuffed with feathers where she bunked in with Ivy, while her husband agitated over his connubial rights — just where were they to be taken, how? — and picked on Titus more.

Alignments changed among the five of them. It was a revelation how Warren baffled her husband, of a sudden, since their voyage began. The sadness was that Titus paid for it on both sides, in a displacement of rebuke and none of it Titus's fault.

Dolly had always been pretty cool at cutting off heart passions in the name of the next practicality coming along. In the matter of Warren she'd always been open enough not wanting him on their
voyage and that didn't change. Was her husband then to be surprised at losing him? You would think so by Matthew's acting out the loss among street folk and beggars. He was convinced that the two boys (grown malicious in his imagination) had already made their way to the great capital. He'd got into the alarming habit of seeing them in every smudged face.

 

Dolly had left the final plotting of breaking free from Warren until Rio. There'd been no landfall since the Bay of Islands (their one port of call after Sydney) where she could have unloosed him sooner. If Warren
had
fallen overboard she would have been sorry. But the lumpen hair-sprouting boy had a distinctive sweat she could smell in a roaring forties gale and hardly bear. It was an amalgam of sheep grease extruding long after it had soaked in, of pickled cabbage, rancid pork, issue of sailor's grog, and a feeling of something else, to do with the muddiness of his eye. Discount the bullcalf-longing to jump upon anything that moved, that was betrayed by a hand in his trousers and his eyeballs rolled back when he thought nobody watched. There was the annoyance of his wantingness, of course, how could that be borne? The craving of sentimental deprivation, wantingness and something more that thickened the air. She did not know what it was for a long time. Whatever it was, it hardly touched her pity until he was gone. As for Ivy, all through the voyage she called Warren brother and used him to fetch and carry, otherwise was wrapped in Titus as her mother was and more. ‘Where is Warren?' she asked, idle as a kitten wanting her things picked up where she'd dropped them. The answer was coiling the ropes, picking through the rice for its weevils and grubs, feeding the pigs on deck in their smelly houses,
or climbing into the rigging as high as he could go. ‘Oh, be careful what you say — he's at the door!'

Warren had changed, but the worst of the change was that he'd only intensified his differences.

He talked much of his mother and called on Dolly trustingly when he twisted an ankle dropping to the deck from the ratlines under bosun's orders, and asked if he could lie in her bunk, because the sway of his hammock hurt him. She supposed that disgustingly yes he could! And when he fell below, shivering cold from his watch, he came to her and asked her to hold him, to warm his bones. He talked of wonders like the squid that landed in a sail; and repeated stories sailors told, of ghost ships and treasure. He seemed to need something from her that he couldn't ask, which she had not in herself to give. Something half seen. Something half heard. To do with her husband and the officer of rangers, Rankine.

Dolly swooned whenever Titus was whipped, and found a sailor was posted to keep the women below. She struggled on deck and screamed her fury, a madwoman protecting her imp as much as her husband was the madman beating him down. Yet they went to their prayers kneeling, a pigeon pair, while the timbers of the ship oozed wetness that dripped in their faces. ‘What have you done to Warren?'

‘I have no idea.'

 

Why to be honest, Dolly had wished Warren only as much harm as he needed to carry — say a small amount would be all right. At the very end, at Rio, she'd seen him make it safely to the shore, clamber to rocks, turn around and look back with a long stare and apparently a shaken fist before going in under the trees. Then she
wished him no harm whatever because he was gone from her life. Oh, but the loss of Titus wounded her spirit.

 

If Dolly had thought harder she would have realised that the something worse troubling Warren since their voyage began, and splitting him from her husband so unusually, had not been mere wantingness — more yearning for trust on the basis of information received. It would be some time before she found out — that the answer was terror! — terror aiding Warren to jump overboard when she urged him, and terror sacrificing his gift of coming to England …

It started with their anchoring near another ship — when word was passed like a poisoned cup between sailors cavorting on a beach eating boiled mussels and trading favours with savages. A ship's boy from the vessel
Allorah
(a boy of convict family, and full of clandestine knowledge) befriended Warren and told him what was known.

It was, that a captain of N.S. Wales rangers was arrested on Parson Magistrate Stanton's sheep station and taken in chains by constables to Parramatta and to Sydney, and given a flogging when his pleas were fallen on deaf ears and, after a secret trial in Sydney where the governor was called, was exiled to Van Diemen's Land.

But worse than that was told: because when the captain reached Van Diemen's Land as a prisoner aboard the
Allorah
the lieutenant governor of that island was handed a letter from the governor of New South Wales. Officers came out to the mooring in a cutter and showed the captain an example by taking him personally in charge. A heavy resentment was laid on him. It was to do with sheep. Nothing more was known than that. The captain was removed to a
second vessel, a prison boat that set off for Hell's Gates on the westerly end of the island, a hard-beating voyage into the teeth of westerly gales, reputedly taking weeks of foul sailing, though it was barely two hundred miles off.

Hell's Gates — everyone knew of Hell's Gates. Nobody could follow there or had so far escaped. It was a closed trap against the rampages of the southern oceans, whose waves rolled unstoppered round the planet until they thrust themselves at a narrow opening of land choked with a sand bar. Imagination was unable to exceed the penalties of the place. To survive the crossing to the dark waters of the harbour beyond Hell's Gates was perilous, and the saying was, that to give prayer for being saved in crossing that bar was to spend one's days in bitter despair of God for allowing your crossing at all.

Warren was sick to his stomach hearing of it. Though he'd had his differences with Rankine, that was all over now, and he thought of his mother. It seemed Stanton had turned around from all his affectionate chaffing and liking of Ugly Tom and had him took, without warning forthwith. Mistrust fell on Warren like the shadow of night in the middle of the day. No wonder he continually faced the wildest seas to find what other sorts of surprises he could go up against. His own master had shown his worst, tipped off the governor, and the governor had struck.

Every doubt Warren had over Stanton came back to him, the stronger for having been curbed, for a long time, in the name of sheep. Every accusation hurled at Stanton that Warren chose to ignore he now learned was under a scab of conscience and festering since they first met. He was the earth's last fool waking to rub sleep from his eyes on the last day, beguiled by sheep and the vanity of knowledge around them. In his mind he went back
through the sequence of events. What a deep silence must have fallen over Parramatta and its sources of information when Rankine was taken, and no wonder! Apparently nothing was wider known of the disappearance until the officer was bundled aboard the cabin boy's ship and taken roughly below. The
Allorah
had sailed for Van Diemen's Land that same night, taking her prisoner with her as she winked down the purple harbour and out under the Heads of Port Jackson at daylight. Silence then until the
Allorah
hove to — near the
Edinburgh Castle
! and the two crews had fraternised at that pretty musselbed bay a few miles from Cape Brett. Warren told himself the sequence over and over, until time and feeling were tangled.

It seemed the parson did not need to be told what he already knew. All his excitement was on missionary matters and the band of tattooed Christians established in the next bay along. After a few days they'd got under weigh with a supply of pigs and potatoes. Stanton was farewelled by the missionary and his natives with a ceremony of taking leave — after they pressed noses, some of them squatted on their haunches with tears rolling down their cheeks and were so terribly sorry farewelling the man who'd brought money for their little church and given them a few pounds of gunpowder for their muzzle loaders.

WARREN THEREAFTER SAT ON THE upturned ship's jolly boat with his fists grinding his eye sockets and his brain alert with sparks. The ocean rolled under them and the
Edinburgh Castle
slid backwards down waves, never getting very far, week by week straining into months as they put south until they saw icebergs and then sailed north seeking a safer course. Whenever the crew grumbled and wouldn't put their hammocks out on deck, to air the forecastle, and complained how their meat was too old, it shrank and they weren't getting their agreed weight at mealtimes, Captain Maule gave them their meat but stopped their grog for a few days, and so they were brought a bit more under his control. Warren and Titus groaned with the crew and sang shanties when the crew sang, cheered when they got their grog and together shared the life of the ocean. They learned they would not be putting in at Tahiti nor Valparaiso unless it was needed to fill their water casks, but sometimes when the weather was squally the rain poured down and they caught hundreds of gallons of water at a time and so kept plunging on. From his vantage point on deck, when he wasn't serving his watch, Warren
saw anyone coming and decided whether to avoid them by going around to the leeward side, almost awash. He calculated he was a great lump of deceived fool that the arrest of Rankine was old news when the
Edinburgh Castle
sailed. It meant Rankine's seizure was close to the date, may be the same day, that his mother and the Josephs left Laban Vale with Stanton's hearty blessings and two hundred gifted culls. Warren felt his opinion of the minister shrink into its newest shape, a hot burning lump of hate. All this time Stanton knew where Rankine was truthfully gone? In irons? Forsaken? Could it ever be asked?

No. Warren on his own could not ask, because he knew Rankine had fatally courted danger; and so waited disagreeably until Stanton let something out.

 

One day at breakfast Warren heard Stanton musing with his finger dipping into a cup of hot toddy, about all his years of sheep dealing. The listener was their Captain Maule eating his oatmeal, as Warren drew nearer the door and heard the name Van Diemen's Land.

‘Now there's a pleasant island pasture to benefit a sheep man with a breeding nose if one is plucked from the prison filth,' said Stanton.

‘Is that likely?' said Maule.

‘I have known one or two one half worthy. Unless they go to the Hell's Gates, where it's a whole lot harder to get free.'

‘A puir place for a sailor, there's a mean sort of a bar. I know there's a few low rocky islets, shoals more like, where they maroon their worst rebels, unshackle them, set them up and they live on kelp and pippies naked as the day they was born. It's cold, there, and it constantly rains. Men stand up to their waists in freezing water getting logs for the shipbuilding.'

‘They could do worse,' said Stanton and astonishingly so, and Warren, coming into the stateroom to collect the captain's chamber pot, which he did at this hour, lingered to hear what else would be said unguarded from those brown sugared lips.

‘It would be the same as a shipwreck, being so prisoned,' said Maule, a firm but affectionate tyrant in the estimation of his crew and all including Warren, ‘that I wouldn't like at all. The very thought makes me shudder, aye Warren? What is it noo?'

‘I have come for your pot.'

‘You are lucky it's empty, as I'm gummed up in the gizzards. Look in that cupboard and see, there's a jar of poultry bran, it should do the trick. Take it to the cook and see he makes me a gruel for my parritch. Inchcape's a good strong lad,' Maule turned back to Stanton, ‘a ship's lucky to have him. He's learning to be a seaman good as I hoped.'

‘Until the day we land.'

‘Isn't that our bargain,' agreed Maule.

‘If you ever chance a landfall at Van Diemen's Land, Mr Maule, some day in your weavings around the world in this nutshell of yours, you might do worse than take a Warren with you — he's a shepherd before he's a sailor, recall — there might be a profit in bringing off some stock from this shore or that. They would be worth many pounds a head in New South Wales. I give you that suggestion free of charge, sir.'

Warren went aft clutching hold of a mizzen stay; he rose and fell with the stern end, dunking himself in the cold ocean of a following sea as if he was hotter than any burning coal, and coming up wetter than a drowned bird, and crying tears of salt. It was where he went to sluice the captain's chamber pot dependent on winds and today felt dumping himself over would be lumpier.

But did not, and never would with the spirit that burned in him too fiercely. He'd developed, apart from whiskers and an itchy crotch, what the captain called a topsail yard voice. Anyone on a part of the ship could hear him call aye or nay. Thereafter avoiding Stanton, above decks with plenty of places to climb aloft with Titus, his chosen shipmate, he worked the duties assigned him far out on the yards and made conversation with albatrosses. It was said they were birds that circled the world a few times while a ship beat a slow passage one way. The birds of the world favoured Warren all his days. What did albatrosses see casting their eyes over the rocky wastes and islands of the world, when the tearful salt wind parted the feathers of their foreheads?

Warren imagined Ugly Tom and his gaolers — Rankine if lucky being given privileges to make him comfortable enough, as happened with gentlemen in bondage to their own class, even at prisons as cruel as Hell's Gate, according to what was said. But then he remembered how Rankine's stomach turned while he made cheerful conversation with his equals, how he went to lengths unmatched in the annals of Botany Bay to be sure somebody downtrodden was as comfortable as he himself. Then it seemed sure that a man in prison rags resembling Rankine would be dragged scraped bleeding from cuts of oyster shells, would be marooned on one of those rocky piles that made strong Captain Maule shudder but the minister stay thickly silent, unmoved, and change the subject back and forth to sheep.

Sheep, sheep, and sheep, thought Warren. He almost remembered them in the same way he remembered himself before he began his changes. As a reason for morning excitement and a reason to be proud at dusk, when all were brought in. A horned head would turn looking at him from monotonous eyes and he
would accept, from its alien gaze, some sort of tribute. Now he saw they were creatures with no reason to like him or anyone else. Their mistrust was complete. Their herding was about as liked as if a school of whales was caught in a net and dangled above the deck and milked of its fat. Dust choked them and they sneezed and coughed and made more dust with their trotting hooves. It was a fine dust composed of dried crystals of pissover and shredded sheep shit and sand. He was better off without them and wanted nothing more to do with them as he sniffed the salt air.

Below decks was the quarter where Warren knew his mentor was rarely likely to be present, his beloved teacher in morality and wools — that part of the ship where Ivy and her mother made nest with oak planks and featherdown mattresses as comfortable as heaven.

Down there Ivy had her kittens, her sewing boxes, and a small coal stove that was fed with a pair of metal tongs from fuel in a basket. She was never seasick and roamed the boat when everyone else was down spewing, getting into corners with Titus when she wasn't allowed. She and her mother and the captain's wife and ugly daughter made a four to compete in needlework as best they could in the smeared, smoky light of whale-oil lamps, with the rocking motions of the ship making them sleepy. Warren knew he wasn't welcome, but found a corner for himself out of the way, nonetheless, where he made his stolid invasion of overgrown limbs and loud breathing through his nose; but was sometimes asked if he would kindly thread a needle or hold a skein of wool while it was balled, or to go to the galley for some two-decker, as sea pie was called with a double layer of crust, that great favourite, and it was a good enough reward for an exile from bad feeling, was it not? They were fabricating dresses and costumes for themselves to
wear when they made their landfall in England. Underneath them while they improved on scraps of lace, chiffon, crepe and velvet — by cleverly sewing them into whole pieces — swam whales, sea sharks and giant stingrays to which they hardly gave a thought, except one time when there was a low thump throughout the ship and the captain sent down word: it was the head of a giant octopus nodding against them, and they all rushed up in time to half glimpse it sliding away. It stayed in their dreams and in Warren's made nightmares of long fingers crushing out life.

When he climbed the mainmast and looked into the sea it was clearer looking straight down. He saw, in rare calms, the shadows of those creatures sliding under them. Also sometimes when Warren looked down, there was another sort of shadow this time crossing the decks. A red-haired variety slipping under the jolly boat where the ship's tender was stowed inverted. That little shadow was more dangerous to safety, thought Warren, than a sea creature was: and he feared more for Titus than he did for Ivy crossing the decks. For those two, going in under the boat was a place like climbing the fork of a tree, except now it wasn't so much joy that lit their faces when they made their meetings, it was more like sullen need and stronger over them than any punishments forthcoming.

On Sundays Stanton performed divine service even when seasick to please the Lord. If he needed an excuse to whip Titus he found one, keeping a pocketbook where he added wrong deeds between one and ten. Upon reaching ten he broke out the whip and for the lower numbers there was an almost daily cuffing.