The Ballad of Desmond Kale (24 page)

TOWARDS EVENING STANTON FETCHED AN armload of wool from a sack and went over to the Josephs's camp, passing a portion to Joe to study.

‘I think my son will be good on this,' said Joe hopefully, pulling a few strands apart. ‘We are as unlike as two can be from each other in the matter of brains.'

‘Leave it, Pa,' said Arthur, who was pinched cold after standing in the creek for hours, prodding sheep through, and wore a blanket around his shoulders despite the evening warmth.

Stanton performed what looked like a conjuror's trick, pulling a scroll of cardboard from an inside pocket and flattening it on a tree stump. He was watched by Joe and his son, and by the new man, Paul Lorenze. Last to join them was Warren, along with his parlous dog, who sat on his skinny haunches and gazed at Paul Lorenze expectantly, while Warren scratched him between the ears.

Holding the card down with an elbow Stanton stretched strands of wool along its length and tied their roots across the top with a band of thread. Above each example he pencilled a description.

‘There are but seven divisions in wool — the picklocks, the
primes, the choices, the supers, the downs, the heads and the downrights. We remember the seven deadly sins, they are all too easy to recall to our fingertips — why not the seven virtues of fleeces, and their God-given glories?'

‘It is all terribly hard,' said Joe.

‘I am listening,' said Arthur.

‘Please don't underestimate yourself, Joe. The principles of breeding are the same whether with sheep or oxen. You may know nothing about sheep, but cattle are more familiar, I believe?'

‘We looks at their backs all day,' allowed Joe. ‘Some days we gets down and walks beside them, and Artie plays the fiddle.'

‘Ask Mick Tornley for a few ideas as you roll out, or when you sit around your campfire yarning. When Mick is home from the track he selects and breeds oxen to have his replacements all bellowing by the time he circles back. The same rules apply to any species. He will tell you that the first rule is to breed from the best, but that rule has its limitations and restrictions. One man will scour the whole country to snatch the best ram, or to kidnap a few prize gimmers.'

Stanton could not help himself. As soon as he said ‘best ram' his belly rumbled, and he looked sidelong at Warren.

‘There is a sort who will select the most promising sire, thinking to insure better alliances for his flocks. He comes along the road one day and tries to weasel a ram out of my boy who will have nothing of it. He must have a set of mongrels, if he has sheep at all. Some distant impurity of breed manifests itself; some tendencies far back in the pedigree of the race awaiting correction — I have not seen that man's flock, but you can be sure they will show signs of indiscriminate and injudicious dabbling. Fat-tails, no better than a joke. Yes?'

The question stabbed. Joe was mystified and Warren quite afraid at the audacity of Stanton's speech. Since learning that Tom Rankine masterminded the ram theft he'd felt nothing but sullen fear. What was Stanton trying to say, in his taunting, sarcastic fashion — that he guessed what Warren knew? Was he trying to console him with the talk of a scrappy Rankine flock, or to alarm him with derision?

From another pocket Stanton took a handful of figs. They came from the far end of the homestead garden, where he was proudest of his trees. It was early summer and the first crop. Although they were bird-pecked a few survived, split, sticky with fruit jam cooked by the sun, flecked with strands of wool and dusty, but Stanton passed them around and they all made a feast of them.

‘Another man,' said Stanton, wiping his lips in two long damp sidestrokes and resuming his instruction, ‘who is better acquainted with the rules that regulate vitalism, takes a flock, and having selected the best, he takes only those which he knows to be of the same breed. Notice I say
knows
and say
takes
. There may not be any legal niceties involved, if this man is a particular one I have in mind.'

‘Is good fruits,' said Lorenze, with a short gasping laugh, a fig cupped in his hand and salivating over it, before scooping it into his mouth.

‘Nevertheless,' said Stanton, ‘he goes on steadily aiming at giving breadth to the animal and quality to its wool. Listen to me carefully now, Joe, as I am going to finish this passage with a
nevertheless
.'

‘I am all ears, like the flaming donkey that waggeth his ears to show that he knows it all.'

‘This other man knows that the sheep, in order to thrive, must have a large lymphatic system. He must have a capacious chest and
loins, and a frame on which to secrete fat, with lightness of offal. A man takes those qualities which show a tendency to pervade, in one uniform direction, the whole of the flock; and this he takes to mend his own.'

‘To mend his own,' echoed Joe, nodding with understanding of self advancement, at least.

‘By this means all are a little improved in the direction he requires; and all keeping alike in their general contour, there is a kind of permanency and uniformity in the main features of the improvement. In terms of wool it will be a staple with length, fineness and density. A simple enough formula, if you know how to look, but desperately perplexing otherwise. Am I making complete sense, Joe? Lift up your head and look.'

‘Give me your “nevertheless”,' said Joe.

‘The man I conjecture shall first have a flock of ewes the great quality of which I doubt exists in this country, but second he shall have my ram Young Matchless, and this is where I say my “nevertheless”.'

‘I think I am getting it now,' said Joe. ‘Your nevertheless is, that if there ain't the matching ewes, the breeding is a waste, and so it ain't your bloke and there won't be no wonder wools. But if there's wonder wools, it's him.'

‘Is good the red colours, just a leedle,' said Lorenze, throwing his arms out, apparently pointing to the dust behind the wool hall, thrown up at evening by sheep and so crimsoning the sun.

‘Away past where anyone has ever gone,' resumed Stanton, draping an arm around Joe's shoulder, and whispering lusciously into his ear, ‘there is my breed of man who puts himself above the rest by being vain about wool. He may use one of those names — “Smith”, “O'Keefe”, or whatever.'

The two men walked away from the others.

‘A man he is, who responds to a little speculation about breeding without being able to help himself.'

‘There he will have me stuffed.'

‘No, not at all, dear friend, just take hold of his swatch of wool when he presents his sample for trade. Look at it hard. Remember my lesson? Say you believe it is not of the best, even if you think it is, whatever it is in terms of breed he posits. Even if you don't know what you are talking about.'

‘You are askink me to lie?' Joe raised an ironical eyebrow.

‘Though you will enrage him, possibly, by your unfathomable shrewdness, there is no lie involved, on the grounds that improvement is the Lord's will, and though we have glimpsed perfection in our promise of heaven, and may do so every day in our meditations, there is always more better to be had down here out of Eden. I believe even the Old Testament says nothing less, and so we are surely agreed.'

‘Now you have found me out. That's my method, or should I say, reverend, was my method before I corrected the error of my friends and went straight as you find me in front of you now, in this here colony of forced improvers. You are saying, so to speak, the vanity of man is bottomless, if we only know how to make the appeal?'

‘Entirely.'

SHADE TREES HUNG OVER THE waggoners' camp near the creek but the camping place offered nowhere to bathe, as the creek was mostly dry and its few pools were made filthy after the sheepwash and the bullock wallow. The Josephs carted water to their camp from the well in the homestead garden. Stanton spoke of the Josephs as his guests, to Dolly, but on the quiet. To have them openly talked about as guests compromised his politics of keeping separation between free and convict and convict-emancipist stock. Yet he loved them as Warren did, now, and bettered his imagination deciding what measures to take against Lehane on behalf of their innocence.

Little from the traders' waggon was yet for sale — because the greater distance travelled, the higher percentage profits cut in — only tobacco and rum, both commanding a good price from those who were needy and deprived, which was pretty well all the profligate stockmen Stanton had under his rule but not always under his thumb.

Joe heard Stanton's voice carrying over the paddocks from the wool hall, where he berated his builders to finish their work.

The wool hall was made of wattle and daub, a one-floored slab-sided shed of small cathedral size — a colonial triumph, it was, and sure to be famous. A shuttered belltower was capped with tea-tree thatching. The wool hall sat on an open sweep of dust down from the house, above the banks of the intermittently ponding, sometimes flowing, flat-bedded sandy creek overhung with paperbark trees and old Yarros or bastard gums and Tarundeas or great black-butted gums so called. The hall had verandahs and covered walks, the walks being for sheep and joined to a slatted shearing floor and a set of post-and-rail stringybark yards — all built of materials that were cut, adzed and carried from not very far, leaving a low breakage of tree stumps looking ugly, where it was recently pretty near the picnickers' flat rock.

On the other side of the hall, downwind, the four thousand sheep that had been washed over three days were yarded for shearing with their fleeces shaken out bright, being rid of their dirt. It made a humid, downcast picture of lumpy weariness in white. Bunches of sheep were deliberately sweated standing close together and getting each other hot, losing the crustiness on their fleeces as their wool yolk melted. Lorenze decreed it was good for the skin to sweat and nearly as good as washing to get the wool soft for cutting. Stanton found himself deferring to Lorenze in his opinions. The two men built up respect through mutual understanding of what was good for a sheep. It was evident to Joe that the minister, while full of arguments reckoned as soundly constructed, worked almost completely out of his emotions and made passionate attachments as swiftly as he declared his hates.

Moving about the yards getting up sheep that wanted to lie down and die (but didn't), the reverend magistrate looked as bona fide crude as any true Botany Bay farmer ought — which was to say,
one who only crowed when it rained holey dollars. How he spoke like one, thought like one, and judged like one resounding his Yorkshire complaints over a recalcitrant half-paralysed leg-twitcher ewe, which was to say as well, he was unfeeling and coarsely joyous in a way that intrigued those who remembered he was a minister of God.

Joe came at him sideways with questions. Were there to be sheep in heaven?

‘Most likely so.'

Stanton's prophet was called ‘Door of Sheep', ‘Shepherd', ‘Lamb of God'. His own Church was called ‘Sheep', ‘Lamb's Wife', ‘Flock of God' and ‘Fold of Christ'. Sheep were Stanton's tie between this world and the next. The fields of heaven were soft and green, endlessly rolling and droning with honey bees and the belling of doves all mustered by angels … Joe did not like this picture, but liked the next one: perfection of earth as a sign of expectation, not of completion. It answered both to his trade and his prayers. But then the next one after that he hated — ‘We only need to remember it all
to be saved
.'

By a rough count there were hundreds of references to sheep in the Old Testament, said Stanton, and that was leaving out their keeping needs: the sheepcotes, sheepfolds, sheep gates, sheep markets, sheep masters, shepherds, wool and shearers that were all spoken about, including Laban, the first shearer, in Genesis, the first book.

So it all went back and back … Mutton and goat meat were the favoured meals of prophets; their nourishment was divine. Unless it was an ass's neck well seasoned and well roasted these boisterous biblical giants were like Stanton in taste, they liked a leg or shoulder of sucking lamb.

‘Joe?'

‘What, sir?'

‘It sometimes vexes me, in deciding how far I might have to go, to fight the Devil with the Devil's own devices. Must I wear the Devil's red clothes, drink his hot drinks, flash his forked tail?'

Stanton fondled the band of wool on his wrist.

Joe took hold of the threads. Peering close, he said he saw red in them.

‘You are getting your eye in,' said the minister.

 

The sheep were in the arena of ground kept untouched for the purpose of keeping their wool clean. No sooner was the shearing started than the forecourt of the hall was piled with rolled fleeces. All hands were called on to help. The floor was slippery with threads. Warren and Titus kept the sheep up — woe betide Titus if he slacked and there wasn't one ready. Clumpsy M'Carty carried the tar bucket. The shearers ferociously knelt over their sheep, blasphemously protective of their craft and slicing their blades through the wool and moving fast. They looked up from under dark sweaty brows but the Spaniard's demeanour was the most festering. When Clumpsy caught sight of him for the first time here (he'd been out in his mustering camp, and was only just come in with his mob), Lorenze slipped his shearing blades from their oiled kangaroo-skin pouch and held them under Clumpsy's nose.

‘Whoa,' said Clumpsy, reeling back, ‘who in the name of forking merriment is tiss?'

Dark eyes behind thick lashes met his and told him to silence.

He was not to say, unless he wanted trouble, that they knew each other well. There was no helping it, either. Any Spaniard was a bad
Spaniard since a man had his cods banged between stones, held, torn and crushed. So Clumpsy kept his distance, unless he wanted trouble. There were all those Spanioloes running around the hillsides in Spain, and they were in the business of changing sides.

There was sometimes a busy click in the air as the blades opened and shut and sometimes a whispering silence as the blades were held at a flat angle to the skin and pushed through like knives. Stanton noted who made cuts and would pay those shearers less. Clumpsy was busy around them stemming blood with his tar bucket. Lorenze made no cuts. There were three black women working on the floor and in the silences you could hear their giggling laughter. When the wool was cut smoothly along the pink skin it left serrations of tufts as the shears travelled without stopping in sweeping slices called blows. In the slatted shade of the wool hall they carved the wool into piles.