The Ballad of Desmond Kale (14 page)

WHAT WAS TOM RANKINE TO do, he asked himself, without a Biddy Magee to clean his house, cook his salt pork stews and mutton roasts, polish his belt buckles and brass buttons, blanco his webbing, undo his scarlet uniform jacket with nimble fingers and strip him of his riding trousers when he came home too drunk to do his own fumbling?

If Desmond Kale was honestly to have her, how was it to fall out? Nothing was too much trouble nor too far removed for Biddy's willing compliance. That was decided. She was one of life's plucky ones, with a sweet warm kiss and a swathe of green leaf poultices and potheen remedies keeping her from trouble in case of expecting. But like a traded filly was she simply to be pitched in a stall and teased to another's want? When it came to the mark it proved impossible for Rankine to ask Biddy anything of the sort, impossible even to think it. As for Tom Rankine in himself — he in some ways loved her enough to resent the reach of casual permission, that he had once used to house her for his own. It was what he told himself, at least — to both his own two faces.

Rankine was jealous of Biddy's compliance even as he enjoyed it, yet all the time brooded over Meg. He even blamed Meg Inchcape in his imagination for the confabulation over Biddy, through telling himself that if she were warmer in response to his overtures, he would be finished with Biddy Magee weeks past.

Matters changed when Biddy came to him with a distressed problem, and he asked what the trouble was.

‘The man is ill,' she said.

‘And so?' he pretended to not quite understand.

‘He is sick to die.'

‘There you have me, Bid — who?'

‘The Irishman.'

‘Well, fancy that. Was it posted in the Sydney
Gazette
?'

‘It was in a song I heard.' She lowered her eyes.

‘A ballad?'

‘It was.'

‘Oh, Jesus,' said Rankine. ‘Has it gone as far?'

‘But can't I please go out there,' said Biddy, ‘to wherever it is, and nurse him back to health with some mashed turnips and broth?'

Rankine went around knocking over chairs and slamming doors. It was in a song she heard. It had gone as far. There had been a visit from Clumpsy M'Carty, witness in a case being heard in the township, Clumpsy being allowed by a Parramatta magistrate's largesse to wander an hour before being hauled back to Laban Vale. The pair of them, Clumpsy and Biddy, had gone swinging along the creekbank with their arms around each other. Rankine and Clumpsy had spoken — enough said to serve Kale's cause — but it seemed a good deal too much information about Kale moved through the Irishry independent of Rankine's caution.

‘I've never seen such a temper,' said Biddy. She began gathering up mint leaves, geranium flowers, nettles, and making up small packets of mustard, linseed meal, soda bicarbonate, special clay for poultices, cloths for hot foments, and busied herself filling precious small bottles with volatile oils, mild vinegars, and searching out, in the markets, a particular honey as grainy as gravel, that was favoured against the ravages of the cat, if smeared on thickly enough.

The fact of it was, that while Rankine wanted the duo of Kale and Moreno as tight as a knot if the plan was to work, the knot was now loosened too far. He thought of the knot that might hang him when the rest came in. In that event, his friend, the governor, autocrat by decree, would show him another side. Then Rankine thought, at least in the shadows of the scaffold Biddy writes her own ticket of leave. And things take their own course — once set in train.

In the course of that year Biddy had covered Rankine's absences by saying, ‘He is off on his duties' — which indeed saved him so far. It was the truth as she saw it. She had no idea of his adventures with Kale. When taking leave of his barracks' room colonel, Rankine only needed to say he was riding out for a week for it to be wisely nodded that he was doing the governor's will in some wriggly fashion — and no great particulars entered in the regimental record, if anyone did ask. The governor himself conversely believed, when Rankine was afield, that he was on regimental officers' business, which was all about gaining and getting, and good luck to him. Fortune could not be deserved by a nimbler buck than Ugly Tom, and if he did gain his bawbees without livestock, as he seemed set upon trying (having disposed of the Bengali fat-tails he arrived with) — more luck to him still. As a trained army surveyor, he would have a good eye for pegging out land.
Doubtless one day soon he would want his grant of acres, like the rest of them, asking Wilkie to petition the king.

That wise assumption could soon wear thin, however. For at their next dinner Sir Colin said, ‘There's a new ballad, Tom — see if you can't find an auld rogue to come in and sing it for his supper. I promise him a jug of blockade. The authentic peat juice. The glory of it is, nobody shall understand but me, and while the singer might tremble, he shan't be called on to pay.' Sir Colin Wilkie was a veritable folkways gatherer in this regard, just as it seemed Tom Rankine was, at his end of the equation, through his sheep and his live bodies tied to the improvement of sheep by every refractory sentiment.

 

A week later, it was a Monday morning, Rankine left Parramatta before first light, barefoot Biddy — with red colour in her cheeks and a parakeet feather in her hair — astride a fine prancing pony, and Rankine with his black mare and packhorse loaded heavy. Biddy was excited at going to meet up with a wild man. They went a long way round to the sou'-sou'-east, where small settlers were trickling along where the authorities hardly bothered them. In that rumpled low country Biddy was chirpy. It seemed to her so pleasant and so reassuringly populated, the Parramatta bush. ‘We are not in the deep bush yet,' Rankine cautioned her. Settlers were along dry creeks and up crumbling gullies where they planted a pear tree and built a clay chimney place, and kept a good few secrets, you can be sure, clutched to their hungry bones and behind their flogged, scarred old backs of old. They asked few questions of the officer and the Irish girl, only gave them their crumbs of earnest hospitality. One of them they met was John J. Tharpe with his team of packhorse geldings. Rankine had a word with Tharpe,
‘about a young man with salt', and was treated to Tharpe's acceptance — a promise to be led, come shearing time, wherever.

From a high ridge, in the far distance, they saw the sea. Then they turned inland to the south-west. Somewhere thereabouts was the cataract of Carrung Gurrung, that George Marsh had found and lost.

Biddy jumped down into Rankine's arms as soon as it was dark, and if there was any rustling sound in the night, she said, ‘Something wants to bite my brain!' and she buried herself in his blankets, scared of opossums and native cats and whatever else with teeth.

It was new country where they came the next day and nobody following them that far. But somehow Rankine missed finding the ridges like five fingers and the variety of trees, and so missed, farther up, the blazed trees with their axe marks grown over. Birds were scared up in flocks of raucous white cockatoos, and of funereal yellow-tailed black cockatoos, and dusty grey-pink galahs screeching a thousandfold across a sky of smoked glass and lightning-crazed dry hills. Goannas with tails patterned like chain mail clambered up tree trunks, just out of reach, and hefty wombacks grazed at evening, brown lumps of earth. ‘Look,' said Rankine, getting down from his horse: there was a lonesome anteater porcupine waddling through the bush and tossing up dried dead leaves. Biddy laughed and screamed at the hilarity of the little bloke. Rankine walked the fellow along for a while, soft as he could. Its dark quills were yellow tipped, its snout went into the ground like a leather punch taking food up from nests. When Rankine stood closer it baulked and churned digging into the hardest of ground, closing down its quills and tossing up lumps of loosened soil teeming with ants. Bigger trees showed treads axed by natives looking for honey combs but Rankine told Biddy, without being too sure of it himself, how there were few signs natives lived in the
territory still, or that anyone had passed through in a recent month of Sundays.

In this he was wrong. Because not far from where they stood was a camp, where a stalky figure stirred by a cold daytime fire, annoyed himself, then lay down again. His face was blackened by unwashed smoke, he was filthy, dirty tangle-haired — he was a white man. ‘Where are those bastids taken off?' Patrick Lehane said. ‘They promised me another wife, a young one. I could do with one of their boys, I'm that fecking voracious, you know.'

He placed an arm over his eyes to shade the sun, and missed seeing the riders not far off.

 

‘I don't like it,' said Biddy. ‘Where is Kale?'

Rankine said nothing. How could he tell her they were lost?

‘Anyway,' he continued to himself, ‘it is good having no blacks in a district when you bring in sheep. One has no wish to disturb anyone's hunting grounds, to have speared sheep on one's hands and the need to warn off natives with a firearm discharged in their direction. Pleased anyway to avoid killing a man to preserve a sheep.'

‘Listen, is it bleating?' said Biddy.

It wasn't. It was Lehane bellowing for his share of bush companionship. If he'd looked around, instead of just yelling, he might have found someone closer than he dreamed, and finished this whole thing off.

 

The sun rose late over high stony bluffs and set early into purple hills behind them. Down the centre of a valley after passing
through narrow walls a main stream took wide meanders and trickled, pooled, filtered away to nothing under dry mucus-covered stones and only reappeared a few hundred yards farther along if it had a good mind to. They doubled back and found another way.

It was a place Rankine liked for its soulful pity — an old riverbed to the west of the present one. It formed a semicircular wall that looked as if it had been pushed up by a giant earthworm and trees grew over it. Almost vertical bare earth showed between the trees, giving Rankine an impression of looking down from above and of floating over what mattered; a scrofulous scraped area like a red diseased scalp.

‘Are you all right?' Biddy yelled at him.

No, because the baked dry but flourishing bushes and desiccated stones banking the shallow watercourse reminded him of Spain. That was the pull of it. Spain and the trouble it caused, for which the prized flock of merinos was both blame and recompense. Talk about killing a man to preserve a sheep — no need to look around here — just look back to Spain and ask for the Spanish thousand.

And so they went up a ridge, side by side, dolefully.

Biddy was scratched by thorn bushes and burnt by the sun. Rankine realised as the trees thinned that it was possible to take a bearing, and that no more doubling back would be needed. Over in the hazy south-west he saw aligned the ridges like five fingers, and after another day's hard going they came to the first of them, and ascended. It was another three days of jumbled slow going, matched to Biddy's idling pace, before they attained the duck mole reach, where Biddy, bush-broken better, was captivated by a green ledge of grass shaded by sheoak needles. She bathed in the clear stream and dried her coppery hair in a spill of late winter sunlight.

‘Are we safe?' said Biddy.

‘We are.'

‘How come we are safe?'

‘It is all in the distances involved, too far for anyone to follow.'

‘We've had no trouble,' agreed Biddy with pride. ‘Hardly any at all, except where a hellish thicket gets in the way.'

‘Others are not as good as we are in pushing matter aside. They start off confident enough. They lose their puff, fall into ravines, double back, drop their compasses, go bush mad, and that has been the way since the colony was framed, when a line was drawn, and everyone stayed inside it. In the main, they still do. It is such a vast ocean of land, they cannot imagine it, and when they do try, do not get far.'

‘Are we the first to break out?'

‘More or less, in this direction. I believe we are.'

‘How come so?'

‘Because of the gentleman — Kale.'

‘I knew you would say that. I could live right here,' said Biddy, with her smile of irresistible bounce, and Rankine, who was drinking rum, sauntered over to where she sat on her blanket wearing very little after her bath except a coarse hemp undershirt against which her bare skin glowed. Carefully settling his pannikin in the grass, where it would be safe for him afterwards, he took Biddy's hand and held it down to her side, and pushed her a little roughly falling backwards across the blanket. She was ready for him and not too perturbed.

‘Dear little Biddy,' he said.

‘Why are you sad?' she touched his face.

‘Nay, I'm not, I want you.' He ran a hand up over her pale, plate-like breasts, while with his other hand unbuckled his trousers.

‘So here I am,' said Biddy, with her inviting giggle messed in
with her warmest kiss. Just as Rankine pushed her down harder, and she obliged him by deftly arranging her knees to his purpose, she said closely into his ear: ‘Hold me, won't you, don't ever disgrace me, Tom.'

He did not like her, ever, using his name, Tom. If he asked himself why, he would not like the answer. She was his servant, that was all, and at his service even as she spoke.

Not until afterwards, sitting alone and apart on a square rock, drinking his rum getting himself drunker than he wished, while Biddy sang and coaxed the fire under their gruel, did Rankine fully consider what she said. Disgrace her? How could he not?