His little plan filled him with cheer but then he began to worry again. He worried his clothes were rags and he stank of sweat and grime. He worried he was ugly, pock-faced and poor. He worried an interlude with Biddie would come to nothing. He reckoned it was most unlikely Biddie would give him a sign such as he required to restore his sense of purpose in the world, for she would surely know he was no improver. She would know he was deep in hock and his patch was ruined. In all likelihood, she would not be gulled by his talk of renewal.
It occurred to Sparrow that he should have bolted with Mort Craggs when he had the chance. Mort most certainly had the mettle and they were at least acquaintances, back in Blackley, on the river Irk.
Sparrow came from a long line of eel catchers who had caught fat eels on the Irk as far back as the fourteenth century, perhaps even earlier than that, for eeling and the name Sparrow were mentioned together in the Domesday Book, apparently. That being his heritage, it followed that at the tender age of eight, nimble fingered, Sparrow was weaving or repairing the wicker traps his father set daily on the river, and by the time he was ten he was selling live eels from a bucket.
Carting a turbulent knot of live eels in a bucket of river water was arduous work for a skinny boy, skinny as a wading bird, so Sparrow quickly fell into the habit of calling first at a tavern called The Dirty Sack, where a notorious woman called Misty Knapp would usually take half the catch, thus half the weight, thus easing Sparrow’s burden and, also, on one occasion, providing Sparrow with an entertainment that awakened him, like a fire in his blood, to the charms of the female form. Misty would happily dance naked for small sums of money and for the general enhancement of the Sack and its proprietor, Mortimer Craggs.
It happened that Mort and Misty were engaged in a secondary trade, namely the fleecing of heavily sedated wayfarers of small coin and select adornments such as rings and pendants, the latter conveyed to an infamous receiving house on the outskirts of Manchester by means of a most clever concealment – the oily mud and murk at the bottom of a bucket of eels.
At the trial, 24th of July 1795, Mort was named as the instigator and architect of the scheme and he was sentenced to fourteen years hard labour in New South Wales, and Sparrow, whose face, mysteriously, was covered in scabs, was charged with receiving and disposing of the stolen goods, some in excess of five shillings in value. The magistrate noted the wily means by which Sparrow had shifted the loot. He seemed to be in no mood to cast the eye of pity upon the boy. However, the jurors took note of Sparrow’s youth, his scab-faced condition and his juvenile infatuation with the charms of Misty Knapp. They recommended a degree of clemency and he was sentenced to seven years servitude, also in New South Wales.
Misty’s fate was different. She was branded ‘a loose woman who stole from intoxicated pick-ups’, but she insisted she had received only presents, ‘coin and things to let them lie with me.’ She confessed her motives were both ‘voluptuous and mercenary’ and some of her behaviour – a reference to the dancing – lewd and immoral. But she insisted she was not a thief. She said she had never stolen a thing, ‘not a penny, not a trinket, not the merest gewgaw’ from the trade at The Dirty Sack, and before the court she implored the Almighty to strike her down if she was lying.
The Almighty duly complied and she dropped dead in the dock and promptly loosed her bowels and there they found an earring, a glint of gold in a loose stool, and all present could but wonder at the wondrous ways of the Lord.
5
Cuff and Sprodd carried Thelma to a wooded slope at the rear of the game hunter’s campsite at Pig Creek and Sprodd began work on a grave with the sand shovel from the sloop.
‘She was way better than the company that ruined her, I’ll say that much,’ said Cuff.
‘I thought she and Biddie made quite a nice pair,’ said Sprodd, pausing for rest.
‘Keep goin’ Dan, dig it deep.’
The westerly off the swampy ground reeked of putrilage, and something else. Mackie was sniffing at the breeze. ‘That’s mash, thick as tar,’ he said.
‘Harp Sneezby, has to be,’ said Sprodd.
‘Brewing his gut rot.’
‘Sad to say I know what’s next,’ said Cuff. Next they would be stalking westward, intent upon finding an illicit distilling enterprise somewhere on the higher reaches of Pig Creek.
‘Leave ol’ Harp to his devices I say,’ said Sprodd. ‘If the fiery poison don’t get him the savages will.’
Cuff was pleased to find Dan was, in this regard, his ally. ‘It’s no crime for a man to make the best hand of his industry, Alister. There’s no good sense in sniffin’ out mash.’
Sprodd was breathing in deep, his twig-thin lips pressed together. ‘That is sour enough to make a pig squeel.’
‘I seen a pig suppin’ on mash once,’ said Cuff.
‘What happened?’
‘Drank his fill, blew up. Guts came out his arse.’
Cuff had seen the pig undone by its gluttony on a small farm outside Boston, the town where he had come of age. His daddy was, in Cuff’s living memory, first a gunsmith, then a farmer, then for a while a deputy-commissary in the Virginia Regiment until it was disbanded in the early eighties and he took his family to Boston. For about nine years he ran a lively tavern, in which time Thaddeus became his indispensable assistant, managing the boisterous trade while protecting the virtue of his much younger half-sisters. He was wont to say it was that solemn duty which rendered him most tender in his disposition to all young women.
Cuff peered into the grave. ‘Best finish this,’ he said to Sprodd, ‘while the chief constable and his famous assistant, eminent among detectors, regulators, man-hunters and so on, venture into the woods in pursuit of a dangerous felon, in his prime at a hundred and four years of age, currently engaged in the devilish business of wasting not to want not . . . to say nothing of saving himself from the commercial snares of the military and their wily agents.’
‘The ill use of grain is a transgression that cannot be tolerated in the present scarcity. I quote from the government order,’ said Mackie.
‘You agree with every government order, that’s what butters your bread,’ said Cuff.
‘I butter my own bread.’
‘I’ll quote you what I know. I know that a bush distillery is the most reward for the least work round here. What’s more, you hire labour without grog, like as not they’ll pin you to the wall, the felons the same. It’s more than consolation, way more. It’s currency in these parts.’
‘No grog no work, that is the chorus,’ said Sprodd.
‘It’s more’n the chorus, it’s the entire refrain.’
‘Enough,’ said Mackie. He took up Cuff ’s musket and handed it to him. He looked at the sun and then at the ground where the small gathering hardly threw a shadow.
‘I’ll finish this,’ said Sprodd. He was happy not to be stalking a distiller in the fastness.
Cuff thought of one more argument: ‘Alister, if we go up this creek, how you plan to tally the losses further downriver?’
‘What’s left downriver is hardly worth the bother.’
Cuff knew that the chief constable was mostly right. The country downriver, beyond the Branch, became more steep and rugged with every nautical mile and the only place to farm was on the low-lying floor of the tributary valleys or the slim levees on the fringes, hemmed in by the sandstone scarps. The men who farmed these patches were those who would risk the deluge and the savages to have their solitude. They were few and far between.
‘There’s Joe at the Branch, Joe Franks,’ said Sprodd.
‘That’s right,’ said Cuff, ‘he’ll have something for the tally.’
‘We’ll get to Joe’s,’ said Mackie.
‘Not today we won’t,’ said Cuff.
Sprodd finished the dig and they planted the poor girl and took turns, all but Mackie, to shovel back the dirt. Cuff found some wretched flannel flowers covered in grit and picked them for a posy. He took off hi
s hat. They stood about, awkward.
‘Someone ought say somethin’,’ said Sprodd, so Cuff did.
‘She was a good girl, way better’n the trade that ill-used her, and I’ll not hear otherwise. Some will frown but I say she helped keep the peace as much as any damn constable, and that with some generosity, more’n most of us deserved. She died a terrible death, abandoned. We pray God she might find better company, and peace, in the ever after. Dust to dust and . . . so on.’
Sprodd was pleased. ‘I agree with all o’ that,’ he said.
They set a fire, ate some corn biscuits and made some tea in the quart pot. They wrapped their hot tin mugs in their sweat rags and blew off the steam and sipped at the tea as it cooled, hardly a word.
Mackie watched the incoming tide, the force of it swelling the river. He felt obliged, duty bound, to survey the devastation downstream and reckon the losses at least as far as the Branch. He thought Joe Franks the only decent man on the lower reaches. He was determined to both ruin this distillery and to check on Joe. ‘Take the sloop to Joe’s,’ he told Sprodd. ‘You can go on the ebb and we’ll meet you there.’
Cuff was annoyed. ‘See Dan, we’re like witch-finders, wherever we go we root out evil, even in the damn wilderness where it don’t matter a hoot.’
The stubble on Sprodd’s face was snow white and he was weathered and deep wrinkled and more weary than usual from the day’s exertions. He was not entirely happy with the arrangement but an afternoon’s repose was far preferable to trekking west in pursuit of a bush distillery. In his pouch he had twenty feet of horsehair line, some brand-new fish hooks, some pepper for seasoning and some Hai Seng tea. ‘Them perch just beggin’,’ he said.
‘We ought camp here with Dan, go at first light,’ said Cuff.
Mackie appeared most displeased by the suggestion but he, too, was tired and hungry, and he pictured the perch, sizzling in the pan. For once he did not press his case. ‘Alright,’ he said, much to Cuff’s surprise.
They pulled the sloop out of the shallows and made camp near the root ball of the old grey gum, well clear of the stinking ox and well clear of Thelma’s grave.
6
In addition to being ruined, materially speaking, and most melancholy about his prospects in all regards, Sparrow suffered from jaundice, or so he was advised by Dr Thomas Woody, who was the resident magistrate and apothecary to the farmers on the river in general and the village of Prominence in particular. Sparrow took this diagnosis to be true, for almost everyone commented at one time or another on the yellowy hue of his skin, and the terrible pains he sometimes suffered were entirely consistent with the malady described by the doctor.
It was therefore no surprise to Sparrow when he was laid low on his damp bed with stabbing pains in his abdomen. He lay there in great discomfort for quite a while, a shaft of blue-grey light upon his writhing frame, the smell of rot and sodden earth in his nostrils.
When the pain finally settled it was dark and he was alone, as ever, with thoughts of Biddie on his mind. Sparrow did not rise. He took the opportunity to think. Perhaps best, he thought, not to hurry to Bet Pepper’s establishment, for the cottages on the terrace row below the village would surely have been swamped in the deluge and, like the ruin on the bottoms, there would be a great deal of cleaning up to do. It was near to a certainty that Bet Pepper would conscript him into the clean-up and he was not about to be trapped in that way, for once trapped by Bet Pepper there would be no escape from a multitude of chores and he had more than enough cleaning up to do on his own patch. Better to wait a while, a timely pause, and go see Biddie when the bawdy house was once again fit for purpose.
Sparrow felt a great sense of relief at having thought that through so shrewdly. He tried to get up but he was too tired, so he just lay there, staring at the hole in the roof, that tiny patch of dark sky.
He did not relish the thought of having to go cap in hand to Mackie for seed and stores, nor did he welcome the coming dawn, when he would have to begin his own clean-up, rescue what was left of the corn, search for the ruins of the corn crib and set about bracing his hut and mending his roof and a hundred other chores about the place.
He wished Mort Craggs had told him more about the hideaway on the other side of the mountains. Sparrow had pressed for more information but Mort would not talk further on the subject of the big river, the village or the copper-coloured women on the other side. Instead he chose to talk about the fear and trepidation that possessed the colonial authorities, civil and military, as the word spread among the felons and the expirees.
‘Try to follow me here Martin,’ he said. ‘Our masters tell us there is naught but wretchedness and destruction awaiting those who abscond under the persuasion of a sanctuary on the other side of the mountain fastness. They insist upon the impossibility of a crossing, and the fantastical absurdity of a village over there, but let me tell you, this vested counsel has no foundation in practical knowledge or truth.
‘They know nothing of the wilderness, nor of what lies beyond. Their deceit is wickedly calculating and self-interested. They would have us succumb to their mischievous geography, their cruel and cramped little world, as if we was surrounded by a wall of iron bars all the way to the sky. They say we are like children, our minds fevered and our dreams preposterous. They would have us exiled on this alien shore, hemmed in by stone, our most reasoned imaginings pruned back to a stump and our vision framed narrow such that we might plod along like a blinkered carthorse.’ Mort paused. Took breath. ‘But we will not be blinkered nor deceived, will we Marty?’
‘No.’
‘You mean yes, as in yes we will not be deceived?’
‘Yes.’
‘We know they are nothing without our labour, yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘We know our boldness renders them sleepless of a night, mad with the fear, fear of themselves exiled without the means to survive, which is to say without us . . . yes?’
‘Yes!’
‘Thus their most urgent necessity is to disabuse us of all common sense and reason, to quash our well-founded speculations, to squish all hope knowing that hope is a rudder to all humanity. They tell us we’re a colony marooned, marooned they say, on a mere thumbnail on the coast, backs to the ocean and otherwise confined by impassable mountains and all manner of terrors therein and nothing beyond but more of the same.’
‘The big lie! ’ said Sparrow, the truth of it like a thunderbolt.
‘The big lie indeed! And they would have us surrender to it. They would put the frighteners in us; they would liquesce our bowels with talk of bloodsucking leeches and paralysing ticks, snakes and spiders, savages and cannibals . . . dragons and hydras; they would spin their tale of misery and despair for all who would venture forth; spin it like a web to catch us poor flies and stick us to their purpose; their purpose, Marty, not ours. Our purpose is otherwise, liberty, y’foller me?’
‘I ain’t no fly.’
‘Good. So you make up your mind swiftish, or we might just be gone, me and Shug.
‘Shug?’
‘They’re killin’ me, I cannot do another winter on that shovel, nor Shug neither.’
Next thing Sparrow heard Mort had disappeared, and Shug with him, and he worried he might have ruined any chance he ever had of escaping the drudgery of his patch, of shedding the shackles of hock to Mackie and easing the pain of his longing for Biddie. Perhaps he didn’t have the mettle after all. He wished he had not succumbed to the frighteners. He wished his bowels would not liquesce as they did, sometimes. He wished he’d seized upon hope and bolted with Mort and Shug, for hope is a rudder to all humanity, in that regard Mort was entirely right. He wondered if the copper-coloured women on the other side were like the Otahetians who, like Misty, would dance naked for a song and who, like Misty, were seasoned in the art of love, the diligence of their affections something to behold. There was hardly a day he didn’t think of Misty, dancing, and thoughts of Misty dancing led on to thought
s of Biddie Happ and when that happened all firm inclination to bolt with Mort Craggs tended to, well, to liquesce.
7
In the morning Sprodd clambered into the sloop and they pushed him into the deep and the ebb tide sucked him away, tacking into a gusty breeze, bound for Joe Frank’s patch on the Branch.
Mackie and Cuff followed the creek west, the ground flat and swampy for about half a mile. Higher up the creek fed rills that flowed like ribbing, through the woods, onto mild slopes where wheat or corn would surely sprout in abundance given half a chance. Some of these patches had been worked for a time and then abandoned for fear of the savages. Only the most resolute had persisted, a dogged few, but the horrible enormities of the previous year took a toll and they were all gone, all but Harper Sneezby, who some said was daft as a brush.
At Harp’s patch a black corpse hung from a sturdy bough, gutted, the cavity stuffed with grass, the skin on the man crusted and cracked from the punishment of the sun. River rats and crows had all but taken the face away and the feet had been ravaged by sundry wild things.
They searched Harp’s hut. The hut was a mess – an ancient straw mattress and a pelt quilt in the dirt; a wick soaked in bacon fat in a quart-tin lid; a small axe and some nails, fishing stuff, a jackknife, an old musket, a clay jug on its side with a handle missing; a tin cup and a spoon and an old chest with the hinges broken.
The coals in the fire were faintly warm. ‘He comes and goes,’ said Cuff.
Mackie surveyed the flats from the doorway. ‘He works this patch to ruin.’
‘Poor husbandry ain’t a crime.’
‘That’s a crime,’ said Mackie, pointing at the corpse.
‘That’s a warning,’ said Cuff.
He retrieved his musket and they set off, following the scent of the corn mash upstream, flanked by sheer stone and saplings hung with the silvery webs of orb spiders, pea flowers and yam daisies blooming in patchworks of sunlight and shade.
The Making of Martin Sparrow Page 3
