The Ballad of Desmond Kale, page 9
WARREN INCHCAPE WAS ALONE in sheep yards one day, at Toongabbie where he’d spent much time since early boyhood as fetch and carry, pizzle wiper, shepherd and sheep shearer, dog feeder and mouse catcher. His mother had placed him young in the care of old Aaron Tait as a way of keeping him from orphan school, where fatherless children were sent and learned how to thieve and lie.
Heat lay over the settlement roofs, shingle and stringybark, rock shelter and hollow tree. Ticks rose in the dust as sheep scuffed through on yellow hooves, hard-cased insects urged to be swallowed on each intake of ovine breath, spindles of lick hanging down, leaves of ironbark trees rattling the tar-tipped wool of their backs. A shallow creek met their noses with a green porridge of slime, which they drank, or did not.
Warren was a thickset, muddy-eyed boy wearing a hat woven from the leaves of the cabbage tree, a loose shirt, and moleskin trousers originally several times too large, that had been supplied by his mother in preparation for a time of growth that had already started. His boots he kept supple with a little beeswax and mutton suet rubbed over the soles and past where the stitches were. To save on wear, he went barefoot when he could, and spent some of each day pulling thorns and small sticks from the callus of his heel.
At his work Warren looked lazy, which was the wrong impression to have, as he was only at his ease, and waited for the animals to declare their next move ahead without too much forcing them on. As he waited he dragged a stick on the ground, disturbing a gravelly ant bed as if there was all day to stare at what ants did, by helping each other in a rushed nervous way, or turned his head with his body following as birds flew round the bowl of the sky. A sheep that wanted its own way more than others he watched sidelong to be sure it was the trouble-making one. Then it was moved to another flock, from which there was no argument of return. This was a mob that Aaron Tait kept on the creekbank, close by the huts, where he dived among them with a long slitting knife, and strung their guts in trees. Around Tait’s yards there were always creeping flies and waggoners using a switch of gum leaves to keep flies off as they prodded the sinew and fat, to give them a bargaining point.
Because Tait liked plenty of meat on a big-framed sheep, there was no toleration of smaller breeds of the finer-woolled kind that were favourites in the colony among officers and the few free men who were about making money from wool. Tait thought wool a scabrous interference upon the hide of a four-square meal — wool being worth less than mutton in his trade. But Warren thought wool over because it was in front of his eyes all the time; he woke with his nose in its pillow of crimps; he scooped bundles from dead sheep when Tait allowed him dead fleeces to pluck; and when he was sad, Warren wormed his fingers through the deep staples of the better-coated ewes and dreamed his fingers had the freedom of their own wriggling to go wherever they liked, say through clouds in the sky or under the earth like a womback badger or a bandicoot mole tunnelling.
A day he remembered: his father and grandfather walking together, a day blazed in memory when they tossed him in the air and he landed in mountains of wool … Since then Warren noticed wool’s variety from sheep to sheep where other boys did not: to them they were animals to whack and despise. Warren made out in his own head what was carried from the ram to the ewe, or the ewe back to the ram lamb that was better or worse, depending on what was wanted in a breed. Just in the same way as Warren learned his words, by having a book he leafed through under a tree, in the furnace heat of day when the sheep stood with their heads packed in a circle — and went nowhere, they were so hot, and seemed to fan themselves by shuddering their fleeces — so wool became another way of his speech, and anyone who could speak it with him was his friend. The vanity that he was the one to decide about sheep grew in him thus and was one reason Aaron Tait said to his mother, ‘Let him go to Stanton whatever the cost to our pride,’ which Meg Inchcape was agreeable to, through their risky blend of needs. The less she said to Warren about her reasons the better, she decided, at least until he was taken in. His tendency to attachment was strong, it could be fully relied upon.
Nobody else was moving about as Warren hipped ewes against rails and tipped heads back to look into mouths. If one got away he ambled towards it without hurry, taking hold with a cupped hand under its jaw, stilling its fright. The only other movement came from birds on a branch, pecking into their chest feathers and upraised wings for lice. He looked up and was captivated by them, because birds were a token of Warren’s sentimental attachment, a sign to his longing heart.
The rest he remembered of his father was around birds: being held up to a stump of wood to see the dishwasher bird making semicircular motions, spreading its tail and making a loud noise, as if it were scrubbing a pot. He remembered the white cockatoo his father had, called Car’away, which he took with him to England, and then to Barbados where he went after that, and then back to England once more as far as his letters told — which was not too much as they contradicted each other in what they promised. Car’away was a bone-white bird with a sulphur crest that had raised in alarm like a shearing hook if anyone came near Warren, who lay on his back at the age of four or five and reached up with his fingers making a rough tearing noise against the direction of the feathers.
These birds that he watched here today were choughs. Black satin wings with white understrokes and red eyes, and almost as big as crows. He knew a chough was a kidnapper, waiting until a chick from another brood was a useful age, and taking it in its beak over to its other camp, where it was used to help raise their own young ones. That was a habit boys knew about, in a prison colony where every hand was upon the throat of another, and taking over men and beasts was the theme of duty and gain. But choughs were a family-living sort of a bird, all brothers and sisters together in noisy chattiness of flocks between six and ten. They had mud nests in the trees the size of pudding bowls, so well made they might have come from a potter’s wheel, and when the birds flew off it was never in wild alarm, but with a sociable planing flight, those at the rear gliding over the ones at the front in a graceful curve, the abducted newcomers no different from the old hands.
A face appeared through the leaves as it had on other days, almost to the hour, round and red under a wide white straw hat, a man in white trousers, white shirt, the trousers held up by a brown waistcloth, so that a resemblance to a round mushroom was complete. Warren spun around and caught Parson Stanton’s eye.
‘Good day, sir.’
‘Hello to you, Warren Inchcape. Those are the sheep of a reprobate and a ragged bunch too.’
‘If you would let Mr Tait have Young Matchless, to put over his ewes, they’d be finer next spring.’
‘Well, he can have a ram,’ said Stanton, ‘but not that one. What are you thinking? If you want to make him a parting gift come over to my place, and take a pick of my big-framed culls.’
Warren thanked him and supposed the old ones still had a bit of spunk in them.
‘You’d be right about that,’ said Stanton.
There were matters Stanton wanted to understand lest the Trojan horse of offence was in Warren Inchcape.
‘What do you know of your father?’
‘Less than that,’ said Warren, displaying the bare palm of his hand, streaked with dust. It was believed Warren’s father was an officer who left the country without his regiment and returned to England, unable to face down Kale.
‘Is he in England?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘But you resent him?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘But you might love him?’
Warren wiped his hand on his trouser leg.
‘Warren?’
‘What?’
‘Concerning your grandfather — we must be candid about this, or never get on — do you bear me a grudge for sentencing Kale? For you must know, boy, I had Kale deservedly punished, and I think there has been no stealing since, from the Irish gangs. Do you feel much for Kale?’
Warren lowered a hurdle and allowed the ewes to fan out over a knobbly pasture of tree roots and weeds persistently growing in bare dirt.
‘You are the one that says Kale all the time.’
The sheep disliked straying far from the boy, Stanton noticed with a smile. He was a pied piper of lambs and a St Francis of the woollybutts, unless Stanton was very wrong.
‘Well, Warren, shall you live in my house?’
‘What does my mother say?’ said Warren, wheedling a bit, just to remind himself, in his precocious independence, that he was fifteen years old, and had nothing to bargain except a mother’s love.
‘You had best ask her.’
The answer came a few days later, as Stanton had prepared it, when Warren appeared at the farmhouse door with his belongings in a sack.
‘It is no longer needed to prove,’ boasted Stanton at a religious gathering, in the whitewashed slab church of Saint Botolph’s he called his poor temple, ‘that the children of concubines and rascals can rise above their parentage to the highest degree of attainment. It has been shown a few times, by an almost natural law — which only needs the application of Christian example for it to thrive.’
Another week passed and it felt like Warren had always been with them. At work among Stanton’s sheep he was a plump attraction, dry-lipped, always rubbing his doughy nose and scratching himself under hungry ribs, always thinking a few steps ahead of the flock. When counting them out or standing in the yards to marshal them up he seemed to do nothing much, letting the sheep do their thinking, but when it mattered looked over his shoulder, leapt sideways, threw his arms wide like springs:
‘Hey, hoo, hurrup, get back, stay, worry them around, Squire!’
The words were addressed to a shaggy part-collie dog that was covered in blue sores on its hairless patches, that worked with its nose grovelling to the ground, pointing towards a leading sheep, meantime an eye rolling back in the direction of Warren. It was known that Desmond Kale never used a dog — not unusual, as great shepherds, there were, in the annals of depasturing who never used one at all. But Warren was opposite from that. His future was flocks in sheets and oceans of rippling movement by the number, so many sheep that the irregularities of the land would come up through their legs creating gullies and hollows of movement. He would need only to point, and raise an eyebrow, and the whole direction of the country would change. Thanks to dogs.
‘Where did you get such a glorious dog?’ Stanton asked him.
‘From a boy at Emu Plains.’
A bell was rung to muster the convicts and it was agreed the afternoon tolling marked Warren’s freedom if he could be spared each day. There was a tan waterhole in the creek where he kept a lump of soap in the cleft of a tree, and strung his clean shirt on a bush and shook it clear of dragonflies and caterpillars after bathing. Hair wet and face washed clean, except for a trace of clay behind the ears, Warren showed flecks of green in the murky brown of his eyes, sandy lids apparently lashless, scrubbed skin giving him the look of a frog, a frog prince may be too, but not yet anyway that earthly prince that Stanton spoke about to his wife, as an argument of persuasion to get a prodigy hooked in his wool staples.
Warren at least had the wonderful certainty beardless boys have, that whatever they understand of the world is the best of wisdom. Stanton marvelled at his daily work and his lack of resentment.
SEEING WARREN COMING OVER THE paddocks young Ivy Stanton called, ‘At last!’ She ran from the finished part of their house, jumped over beams of sawn timber, skipped twice in the air and took Warren by the arm and called him brother. Walking him around the garden with enthusiastic jerks of interest she pushed him past where builders laboured with a scowling stone-breaking gang making blocks for house enlargements and fitted flagstones for a covered way. ‘I have my sturdy boy,’ she seemed to throw, to the grown men who peeled her helpless with their eyes. A better sort of assigned convict — whom Ivy fondly greeted, for they were a better class of sinner as well, the forgers, defrauders, counterfeiters — tended those grapes, figs, and vegetables of every name that were the pride of her father, who had had the rare zeal to assign a patrol of gardeners to the task of picking off grubs and smashing locusts and shooting rainbow parrots with small shot. When it was dark, a nightwatchman went around scaring rat kangaroos and other marsupial pests that emerged from the ground, making free with supplies.
At the end of the garden wall Titus appeared with a bat, to try Warren at cricket, and Warren squared up to the ball, swinging out and lofting it high over the paddocks, where Titus went scampering with a whoop, his arm extended into the air as he ran backwards lifting his skinny knees high, and caught the ball neatly. ‘Out.’
They went inside among the mirrors and old furniture brought out from England in sailing ships. Ivy liked showing Warren everything good in the house, there being never any end to the treasure they had, and she liked whispering which servants were preferred by which others in lovemaking, and where he was to have his room when the house building was finished (at the end of the hall off the shady verandah, was the sworn stipulation for a brother, she said). Warren slid to a halt under the cuckoo clock and waited, listening to the muffled lurch of the cuckoo wanting to come out. He drew sharp breath timed to the movements of the small wooden bird with eyes like punch holes. Never in his life had he seen anything like it, and he loved that bird.
When they went in for dinner, table manners had to be grafted on Warren, though he had a few, Stanton saying he’d learnt them from his dearest mother, had he not? Gnawing on a bone and splashing into a bowl of gravy, he kept himself neat enough, except that he must never hold his spoon in a fist, but crook the handle across thumb and forefinger just so, said Dolly Stanton. Now he had two mothers, said Stanton, placing his hand on his wife’s wrist. ‘He is the luckiest boy in the world.’
At their meals, when he wasn’t being taught manners and watching how much he piled on his fork so it didn’t fall off, and resisting licking his knife with a curl of his fleshy tongue, which his born mother never minded, Warren stared at the painting the Stantons had over their fireplace. It was a battle piece with a drummer boy and men scaling a heap of rubble with the Union Jack lit by burning timber fallen from a ruined castle. It seemed to Warren that the cuckoo clock and this picture of the Spanish wars made being taken to the Stantons’ worthwhile just for the wonder they stirred, and when he added Ivy and the amusement she made from everything he almost cracked his cheeks grinning, and they most likely thought he was mad.
Though Warren had never met the captain, he was told by a convict in their barrack sheds, the old soldier, Clumpsy M’Carty, about the adventures Clumpsy and Ugly Tom had had in Spain — and it was like that picture showed, he said, with a lot more blood and guts.
One day, when Stanton asked Warren if he knew of any demons and rogues among the king’s rangers (‘boys being like to go dashing between soldiers’ legs on the parade ground, as do cavorting stray dogs, and both knowing good from bad by their smell’), Warren innocently answered: ‘I know of some bad sorts, but from all I’ve heard, Ugly Tom Rankine’s their prime candidate for a hanging.’
‘You are honest,’ said Stanton. ‘And from what I’ve heard he’s a dandy picnicker and a governor’s prime crawler, and would not know a lambkin from a duckling. No more substantial than that.’
Warren was quartered with Titus in the garden hut that was the original house where the Stantons had camped, all three of them when they came out from Parramatta, in the early days before Titus was added to their family to make a fourth.
It was small, dark, but quite a clean smart box, constructed from split slabs of the derrobarry ironbark tree, lathed, plastered and whitewashed. Warren’s bunk was down one side wall, a canvas stretcher between two stringybark rails, covered with a possum-skin rug. Titus’s bunk matched it on the other wall, with a table and a fireplace between, and a small room off to the side, low-ceilinged and narrow, that had once been Ivy Stanton’s nursery. It still had a wooden cradle in it, and a plaster doll with a lace cap, where Ivy had left off playing with it, since it lost its arms and nose.
While they made themselves ready for sleep, Titus would recline with the side of his head resting on one hand, leaving the other arm free to scratch himself on the back of his head as he listened to Warren, or to wave, palm flat, fingers spread wide in the air emphasising his exclamations of delight in the friendship he had going with Warren.
‘They put me in there with Ivy,’ Titus gestured to the little side room, ‘when I was a grub, they put us in one bed.’
‘I think they’s planning to do that when I come over to the big house,’ said Warren, ‘they love me so much. Parson Stanton, he’s goin to breed me up to her.’
‘You can be sure of that,’ said Titus, to scratchy laughter from the other dim bunk. ‘It is the Lord’s plan. Breedin is the best sport. She better be ready, cause which way you gunna do it? By the powder method like she thinks it’s done, that’s what she told me when we seen a hen and a rooster makin dust.’
‘I’ll do it in the good old way like a shearling ram tupping the gimmer hogs and ewe hogs hard as he can,’ said Warren in the argot of Aaron Tait who’d brought it from Yorkshire when he came over in chains, and imparted to Warren between sucks of his clay pipe. ‘Gettin a good look in and goin over the theaves and double-toothed tegs and up from that the two shears, the three shears, up to the six tooths till they bleat something bad and drop down dead, that’s how I’ll do that job of work for Stanton’s swell mob.’
