The Making of Martin Sparrow

by Peter Cochrane

  ‘I can smell it now, like hogwash, sour as the devil’s piss,’ said Cuff.

  ‘Hmmm.’

  ‘He’s small fry Alister . . . why do we bother?’

  ‘These brews pickle your brain.’

  ‘Mostly they take you to paradise, least for the afternoon.’

  ‘My charge is to keep settlers off the government account, off the store.’

  ‘Grog’s the most tradable thing there is other’n wheat. It’s illicit grog keeps them off the damn government.’

  Cuff knew he was right. About half the colony was dependent on the government for food and sundry necessities – the military and their families, the felons, the civil establishment and their dependants, the clergy, the orphans and so on. The rest farmed, mostly, and the farmers were dependent on the government store, better known as the commissariat, to take their surplus grain, poultry and pork. They got credit at the store, to barter for whatever was in stock, but others turned their surplus grain to bang-head, for bang-head was a ready currency – labour took payment in bang-head and farmers like Harp happily drank it themselves.

  ‘We cannot have grain going for grog whilst indigence abounds,’ said Mackie.

  Cuff pointed upstream. ‘This damn still most likely paid for the reaping, and you want to shut him down. The grog won’t put him on the store, you will.’

  ‘It is not one clandestine still, it is dozens and more. They divert grain from the store, boost the price of bread; these stills take bread from the very mouths of the poor who sink to potato loaf or crowdie or hasty pudding or otherwise eat dirt.’

  ‘Alright alright,’ said Cuff.

  They sat quietly for a time. Mackie looked square into Cuff’s countenance, nodding, as if he’d just confirmed what he already knew: ‘Seems we’re at not so much a rupture as an impasse,’ he said softly.

  Cuff, as ever, was not inclined to leave off. ‘You don’t ever doubt these stupid laws, the sad mis’able people we hunt down?’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘Yes you do, save ambition prevails over doubt, that’s what happens. This old man, why not just warn him off?’

  ‘I don’t give cherries to pigs nor instruction to fools.’

  ‘You’re meeting your quota, that’s all you’re doin’. You feather your nest like everybody else.’

  ‘No one sets me a quota.’

  ‘You sets you a quota and you reap the rewards, being high in His Excellency’s favour.’

  There was good reason for that favour, and Cuff knew it. As a mere boy, seventeen, Mackie had been convicted for theft of cloth at Jedburgh Sessions and transported to the other side of the world. He was sent to the government farm at Toongabbie and there, amidst a great shortage of honesty, reliability and numeracy, he was put in charge of the men’s provisions. He kept a meticulous accounts book, rid the stores of peculation and pilfering and further distinguished himself as scribe to the illiterate. He was appointed to the constabulary a year later.

  His Kirk education was deemed a great asset and figured in further promotion. He was ordered to make a survey of the grain harvest around Parramatta and, when he was pardoned in 1798, he moved to the Hawkesbury River settlement, taking with him the duty of grain assessor for the district, along with a government grant of 100 acres. He was then promoted to chief constable and distinguished himself in that post, ably assisted by his two constables. But Cuff and Sprodd were not driven, as Mackie was driven, by fierce ambition. They were not really driven by ambition at all, a distinction that made for lively if sometimes fractious conversation.

  Cuff was inclined to press Mackie a little further on the subject of his elevated standing. ‘You are the only expiree with a lease in the government precinct, you have a licence to sell spirits in that precinct, you have the lease on the toll bridge on South Creek, you have the store contract for salt and otherwise your damn acreage is government grant.’

  ‘And upon that acreage I grow my own wheat.’

  ‘You never go near that acreage, Heydon does it all.’

  ‘He’s my overseer! ’

  ‘I rest my case. The absentee landlord,’ said Cuff.

  ‘I sense the futility of this conversation,’ said Mackie.

  Cuff sensed that too, though he found it difficult to see why futility should get in the way of a good argument. But this time around he’d had enough. ‘I’ll just step away, break wind, don’t say I got no manners.’

  They pressed on.

  The breeze was up and they could now smell the mash, full strength. ‘Whoever’s makin’ that batch ain’t afraid of old Wolgan,’ said Cuff.

  ‘I’m afraid of him,’ said Mackie.

  ‘Branch Jack is dead.’

  ‘You kill the son, best kill the father too.’

  ‘Not for want of trying.’

  The wheat had come ripe two seasons back, summer 1805, the harvest about to begin, when Branch Jack and his mob took to raiding farms up and down sixty miles of river flats. They raided farmhouses for food and clothes and weapons; others they burnt down with seeming indifference as to contents. They speared men and women and left them to die. Some they brained with clubs, others they mutilated with small axes. They stole pigs and maimed oxen and showered grain boats with stones and spears hurled from cliff tops north of the Branch. They made sport of sheep and goats, setting their otherwise useless dogs on them, and chased down shepherds. They moved on wheat fields with firebrands and burnt out crops and later they came for the ripe corn and carried off the loot in sugar bags and flour sacks. Hardly any farm escaped pillage, violence or some form of menace.

  ‘They brought ruin on themselves,’ said Mackie.

  ‘Retribution, swift and pitiless!’ said Cuff as if reading a proclamation.

  ‘There was pity.’

  ‘I never seen any.’

  ‘They got the concession, from the Branch to the sea.’

  ‘No one I know, north of the Branch, is going to share that river with the savages,’ said Cuff.

  ‘I hope you’re wrong.’

  ‘It’s the most futile concession I ever heard, the governor’s a sentimental old fool.’

  ‘We’re back to futility.’

  ‘Yes. Let’s go.’

  They walked on, into a light headwind, the breeze pungent with the scent of damp bark and leaf rot underfoot, now and then a whiff of the mash washing into their nostrils. Mackie pressed hard on his chest and took a deep breath. The effort made him convulse and he brought up phlegm and spat into his hand, studied the viscous gob, flicked it away and wiped his palm on his trousers.

  ‘You alright?’ said Cuff.

  Mackie nodded and they moved on.

  8

  Next day Sparrow was slow to rise. He dithered a while, then got himself up and pulled on his boots and walked his patch, dragging his feet from the sucking mud, his footprints puddling in his wake. He squatted in the corn field and peeled back mud-ridden husks and saw the mould and the borers at work and otherwise the damage done by the ruinous foraging of the wildfowl. He sat on a tree stump and took note of the stumps all about, like bulbous sores on the skin of the land.

  Hunger moved him. He rescued a few cobs and went back to his hut and ate them raw. He sat himself on a stump stool, chewing on the corn and staring at the patterns in the quarter grain on the rear wall, the light from the doorway playing upon the ripples and burls, the colour and the movement quite pretty.

  Sometime about midafternoon he found his corn crib in the bulrushes on Cattai Creek, not far from the confluence with the river. The crib was a ruin of frame timbers and planking with hardly a shingle to be seen. He was contemplating the wreckage when he heard the voice of the Woody boy, the doctor’s son, the one they called Jug. ‘Hello, Mr Sparrow,’ he called, and looking up Sparrow saw the boy give a wave, a mooring line in one hand, his little boat on the end of the line.

  Sparrow waved back. He watched the boy secure the line and he wondered if the boy might help him rescue the cr
ib, what was left of it. He was in two minds, for he did not really want to talk to anyone and if young Jug was to help him he would surely have to offer him something, a cup of tea, a modicum of hospitality. That meant talk.

  The boy was eager to help. He hurried along the edge of the creek, the sticky ground unable to slow him.

  Together, they pulled bits of frame and planking and some of the footings from the bulrushes and carried them in relay to the back of Sparrow’s hut and stacked them loosely. When they’d finished Sparrow said, ‘You want some tea?’ He was studying the boy. Reckoned him fifteen or sixteen; tall, big ears, a mess of yellow hair like winnowed straw.

  ‘No thank you, I better get home. Me and my brother, we gotta fix the roof on the hen-house, it’s half gone,’ he said, looking at the sky.

  ‘You get flooded?’

  ‘We got soaked but the run-off’s good, further up,’ said Jug, pointing up the Cattai.

  ‘Take some corn, may as well.’

  The boy surveyed the sorry corn field. He did not want to be impolite. ‘Papa says good neighbours never take pay.’

  ‘It’s not pay, it’s just . . .’

  ‘No thank you.’ The boy was about to leave but he hesitated. ‘I would like to catch some eels, I believe you know how to weave the traps.’

  ‘I don’t catch eels, I don’t much like them.’

  ‘Oh I’ll catch them. I just need help with the traps.’

  Sparrow reckoned he was in something of a trap himself, for the boy had been helpful, never was anything but helpful. ‘Alright. Sometime soon but not today. Today I’m a bit . . . flat.’

  ‘Tomorrow?’

  The boy was not about to relent.

  ‘You help me tomorrow, help me to clean up and I’ll teach you.’

  ‘I can do that. I’ll help you tomorrow; mend the corn crib too, if you want.’

  Sparrow watched him go.

  How long had it been since he’d woven a wicker trap? He reckoned maybe ten or so years. And with that his thoughts turned to Biddie Happ. Why his thoughts went from eels to Biddie Happ he did not know for the two subjects were entirely contrary, like darkness and light. She was light. She was everything he ever wanted. She was even more come-hither than Misty Knapp, in Sparrow’s opinion.

  He could not help but think of the way she peeped from behind that sweep of hair. He could barely sit still at the very thought of those ample hips shaping like moon-pale baker’s dough as she sat her bare arse down on her bed at Bet Pepper’s.

  At the back of his hut he began to sort through the wreckage of the corn crib, but he was not the slightest bit interested in the work. ‘Gotta go see Biddie,’ he said.

  9

  They crossed an offshoot, ankle-deep in the flow, climbed a spur and followed the line of a ridge, which was the line of the creek, westward.

  Cuff was first to spot the smoke rising from the canopy ahead. They shifted quietly along the ridge, keeping to the bare stone and staying shy of the brow until Harp was close; heard him scuffing about below.

  They inched towards the brow and found themselves looking down upon his freckled and scabby pate; saw him pause and look about. There was a big teakettle on a small fire, an iron pot on a chopping block, the Cape pony hobbled close by, black as soot. A possum lay dead near the fire, the hind leg bloodied, still in the hare trap that ruined its day.

  They backed off, stepping quietly on the stone, and walked on until they found an easy way down to the creek so as to come at Harp from upstream. They paused when the still came into view, a crude contraption under a rough-cut frame roofed with bark slabs: a large pot on a stone furnace with a cap bolted onto the pot and sealed with a whiteish plaster of some kind; a pipe from the top of the cap to the condenser, a coil of copper tubing in a five-gallon barrel, a brass cock at the base.

  Harp carried the teakettle to the mash barrels by a cleft in the sandstone scarp. He began to pour. The Cape pony cocked its ears and turned its head as the constables stepped up the bank, skirting the still. ‘Mr Sneezby,’ said Mackie.

  The old man had not seen a soul since the onset of the flood, when Griffin Pinney had passed through. His first instinct was to grab his musket but all he could see were the clay jugs at the foot of the scarp and a splay-bottomed stick, upright by the mash bins. He could not remember where he put the musket. Then he remembered it was broke. ‘I retain a severe attachment to my solitude and do not welcome surprises,’ he said.

  He was relieved, now, to see Cuff alongside Mackie, for Cuff was an agreeable presence on most occasions and would doubtless leaven the aggravation on this one.

  ‘We gathered that when we stood, enchanted, at the foot of your gibbet,’ said Cuff.

  Harp’s ancient red coat was threadbare and his chest was a mess of grey hair and the gut splayed over the rope tie on his fustian trousers was considerable. His hands and face were ridged and ribbed like old bark, and his cheeks were a latticework of veins and there was a brutal wound from the middle of his forehead to the bridge of his nose, all the way to the socket of his eye, the work of a small axe, a ripe scar. His features seemed baked and shrivelled. He was altogether a vegetable presence.

  Harp tapped high on the bridge of his nose. ‘That black devil, he’s the one did this,’ he said. ‘Knocked the eyes out of my head, someone put ’em back, don’t know who, maybe it was me. Now I see crooked, I know that much.’

  Cuff set himself down on a stump. ‘Caught you off guard.’

  ‘He caught me worn-out is what he did. I’d buried what was left of poor old Spider Thornycroft and got myself home, my back in spasm and my senses stricken . . . I just had to put a swift end to my despair.’

  ‘How’d you do that?’

  ‘I drank a bucket of bang-head; left myself near helpless to the moonlight treachery of those devils.’

  Harp’s story was familiar to the river people, having featured in the Sydney Gazette and thereafter spread about, and richer for the spreading. Supposedly it was him who found Spider Thornycroft with a spear in his gut, right through, pinned to the ground, the poor man half eaten by the pet hog called Pig. According to Harp the hog had fled, thus saving itself from the savages but then, upon a suitable occasion, had returned to sup on Spider’s corpse, lingered for a time, got lonely, or bored, and thus retired to the bush for good. He’d since become a considerable predator on the upper reaches of the creek, so it was said.

  Harp was probing at the scar between his eyes. ‘The entire ordeal’s fresh as the morning in my mind and I’ll defy any man to say I shot that savage in cold blood, he was on my porch! That was hot blood or nothin’s hot blood and you can tell that to whoever you like, just don’t go sayin’ old Harp don’t know the difference between hot blood and cold blood.’

  ‘We won’t do that Harp, never let it be said we’d do such a thing to a good man would we, Alister ?’ said Cuff.

  ‘You are found in the act of distilling spirits,’ said Mackie. He was examining the copper piping in the barrel, the worm, an artful spiral, the work of a skilled smithy.

  ‘Where the pig-fuck is the treason in a man making the best of his own grain by means of his own industry?’ said Harp.

  ‘These engines are pregnant with every possible mischief,’ said Mackie.

  ‘This engine is a potent motivator, paid the reaping. I am no longer able to do the reaping in case you haven’t noticed! My felon won’t work but for bang-head. The labour’s got it all over us, you know that.’

  Mackie did not answer.

  ‘I buy it off them officers and I’m skint entire, that what you want?’ said Harp.

  ‘He’s right,’ said Cuff, ‘they pay in bushels of wheat for a few gallons and what starts in trade ends in hock.’ He popped the cork on one of Harp’s gallon jugs and took a swig. ‘Poooo, scorpion juice, pure fire,’ he said.

  ‘Why, then, are you drinking it?’ said Mackie.

  ‘I dram therefore I am,’ said Cuff.

  Harp smacked his th
igh and chuckled.

  ‘Where is he, your felon?’ said Mackie.

  ‘He went with Griffin come the flood, I think.’

  ‘Griffin should have took Thelma when he could,’ said Cuff.

  ‘Turns out she’s got delicate feet, they blister up something terrible, can’t walk a mile,’ said Harp.

  ‘It is my duty to seize or destroy the illicit apparatus in this lair of yours,’ said Mackie.

  ‘You’ll ruin me.’

  ‘The clandestine use of grain and sugar in times of great scarcity . . .’

  ‘I have no grain but for liquor, don’t he understand?’ Harp said to Cuff. ‘They won’t take my grain at the store, you know how it works Mr Cuff, they got their favourites, the officers.’ His voice had lifted to a miserable, pleading whine. ‘That’s how it works, the military’s a damn cabal.’

  Cuff reckoned Harp Sneezby was right. The small farmers had no guarantee the commissariat store would take their grain. Favourites got preference and, anyway, once the store had the grain it needed to feed the vice-regal establishment, the felons, the soldiers and their dependants, why, then the store closed. The idea of punishing Harp seemed entirely stupid: ‘Harp, you have to understand, the chief constable answers to a higher power with a view to your wellbeing and to the wholesome restoration of us all. He ain’t God but he’s on a par with the angels,’ he said.

  ‘My wellbeing you say?’

  ‘Your rescue from the clutches of evil.’

  Mackie growled. ‘Private stills are attended with dire consequences, to wit violence, lethargy, blindness, indigence, say nothing of the fatal dysenteries, outright poison.’

  ‘You’re wasting your breath, Harp,’ said Cuff. ‘Might as well attack the devil with an icicle.’

  Mackie had dismantled the condenser. He held the coil of copper piping in hands, treating the apparatus to careful inspection. ‘Who made this worm?’

  ‘Curse the hide on your bones.’