The Making of Martin Sparrow

by Peter Cochrane

  Cuff took a long look at the dead possum by the fire stones. ‘There’s a tasty critter for a salty stew,’ he said.

  ‘You get your own fuckin’ meat,’ said Harp, ‘come in here with this damn killjoy.’

  Cuff reckoned that was a fair comment. He was at ease now. He crooked his musket and walked to the mash barrels and peered into one. ‘How do you know the proper degree of fermentation?’

  Harp was scratching at his gut. ‘I know ’cause I know, an’ I don’t do poison.’

  ‘Well then, tell me.’

  ‘You put your ear on the barrel. Ripe and ready sounds like pork frying in a pan or rain on shingles maybe. Sweetest sound.’

  The pony pricked its ears, uneasy, head high.

  Mackie cocked his head windward and raised a hand for silence.

  ‘Not a sound from you, Harp,’ whispered Cuff. He levelled his musket and shoved the muzzle into Harp’s gut and the flesh folded around the muzzle like dough.

  They listened.

  ‘Who is it?’ said Mackie.

  ‘Could be ol’ Wolgan,’ said Harp.

  ‘I think not.’

  Cuff put a hand on Harp’s shoulder. ‘Git down in the dirt.’

  ‘I’ll never get up, my knees.’

  ‘Get down, and curb your tongue.’

  Harp folded himself over and bent at the knees, trying to squat, only to fall backwards with a grunt.

  Cuff and Mackie backed into the cleft by the mash bins. The sun had long passed over. The cleft was shaded and dark, the walls damp with seepage. The pony was treading the ground as Griffin Pinney stepped up the creek bank, musket in hand. His kangaroo dog followed, dripping wet, nose down searching for scent this way and that, quickly finding the possum.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ growled Pinney.

  He was a reed of a man, his hair loose and low on the back of his neck, a moth-eaten mantle on his shoulders in the fashion of the savages, and a bandolier across his chest. His trousers curled at his waist over a plaited belt, cinched tight, a hunting knife holstered at his hip alongside a small axe strung on a loop.

  Mackie stepped out of the cleft, pistol in hand. ‘The senior partner I presume?’ he said.

  Pinney was so shocked he dropped his gun and stepped back, his right foot sinking into the dead possum. His knee buckled and he fell on his arse. His dog sensed the mood and flew at Mackie. Cuff grabbed the splay-bottomed stick and rammed the splay into the side of the dog’s head and the animal went down, cut and splintered, and the deputy punched his heel hard down into the ribs and the dog yelped and then fell silent save for sucking for the breath knocked out of it.

  ‘You cruel my ol’ dog I cruel you,’ said Pinney.

  ‘Oh I cruelled him alright, that’s done, that’s history,’ said Cuff.

  The dog got its wind back and limped over to Pinney and the game hunter began to pick splinters out of its jowls and stroke the grey whiskers, and then he held the head still and stared at the damaged eye. He ran a palm across the dog’s ribs and the dog pulled away.

  ‘I will fix you,’ said Pinney.

  ‘Who knows the suffering ahead, for all of us,’ said Cuff.

  ‘You stoop to this, ruin a man’s independence,’ said Pinney. ‘You put a good man like Harp here at the mercy of the store, them vultures. Why they’d steal the sails off ’v their own windmill, you know that.’

  ‘You don’t even grow grain, you’re worse than the traders, you’re a parasite on a poor old pensioned-off soldier.’

  ‘I have no connection here save convivial banter in the course of my perambulations, Harp will tell you that,’ said Pinney.

  ‘I got no pension, I got my patch is all I got and now I’m supposed to share that with the savages, so I hear,’ said Harp.

  ‘You ain’t north of the Branch, Harp, so you don’t have to share a thing, less you want to,’ said Cuff.

  ‘Not likely,’ said Pinney.

  ‘As to the stewardship here?’ said Mackie.

  Harp did not speak for some time. He threw his head back so his misfitted eyes might look as best they could upon Griffin Pinney’s face. ‘Mr Pinney has no connection here save passer-by, and that irregular,’ he said.

  ‘He do that gibbet for you, gut that savage?’

  Harp thought hard on the question. ‘I did that gibbet an’ every damn right I had.’

  ‘Right?’

  ‘The governor’s say so.’

  ‘Gut a man and hang him up?’

  ‘Retribution must be summary, so they know what it’s for. No killing in cool blood, the governor’s very own words,’ said Harp.

  ‘Like a dog piss on your tick, you got to whip it there and then,’ said Pinney, patting the old hound.

  ‘I tell you now my blood was up, hot and bubbling,’ said Harp.

  ‘He did say that, the governor, I seen it in the Gazette,’ said Cuff.

  ‘No forswearing the printed word!’ said Pinney.

  ‘Mr Sneezby, my concern is this contraption, nothing else,’ said Mackie. ‘If you are the proprietor then I must take you to the magistrate.’

  Harp stood straight and puffed out his chest. ‘I have conferred with my Maker and I know it’s no crime to make the best I can of my own industry. What’s more this juice is indispensable to almost every expression of river intercourse.’

  ‘Harp, you didn’t do all this,’ said Cuff, gesturing at the apparatus and the barrels.

  Harp hesitated. ‘I am the sole proprietor.’

  ‘Then you are in more trouble than you deserve,’ said Mackie.

  ‘You’d hardly run a tavern off this,’ said Cuff, but Mackie ignored him.

  ‘That’s a point,’ said Harp. ‘Chief constable licensed in the way of spirits don’t seem right, goin’ about like a damn fox rootin’ out the competition . . . poor little chickens like me.’

  ‘You got a proprietary interest in this poor man’s elimination!’ said Pinney.

  ‘Your final word Mr Sneezby, I’ll have it now.’

  ‘It’s mine, the whole show.’

  Mackie stared hard at Pinney. The dog was now prone at the game hunter’s side, pawing at its jowls.

  ‘Where is your concubine?’

  ‘Thelma, she’s down there, the river camp.’

  ‘That she is.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She’s drowned.’

  ‘Drowned . . . dead?’

  ‘You left her to drown and she drowned, wedged up a tree, doubtless hoping for salvation,’ said Mackie.

  ‘Like a figurehead on a ship marked for doom!’ said Cuff.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Up that big ol’ tree, that was futile, see, ’cause the river was up, the flow was fierce and the tree keeled over, bent low, and she drowned, wedged there . . . you should have took her with you.’

  ‘She couldn’t walk a mile, no point,’ said Pinney. ‘Drowned you say. Damn.’

  Cuff wanted clarification. ‘So, come the mighty deluge you was safe and warm in some cave in the fastness, that right?’

  ‘I’m tellin’ you, she would not come!’

  ‘You made promises to her you never should.’

  ‘I didn’t promise her nothin’.’

  ‘That’s not what she told Betty Pepper.’

  ‘Well you’d know about Betty Pepper.’

  ‘I thought you were the Moses to part the mountains, walk her through the wilderness, live a life of plenty. Plenty of her if nothin’ else.’

  ‘My damn woman’s dead and here you mock me.’

  ‘You told her a lot o’ lies to keep her in the camp and keep your wick in, that’s what you did.’

  ‘I promised that woman nothing ’cept the pleasure of my company and I’ll fuck a dead pig if that’s a word of a lie.’

  Cuff waggled a finger at Pinney. ‘As we speak I picture you . . . deep in pork.’

  Pinney looked down at his mewling dog. ‘She really dead?’

  ‘We buried her yesterday,�
� said Mackie.

  ‘You can pick some flowers on your way down, put a posy there if you want, the blossom’s considerable in all this heat’n rain; lovely little pea flowers about, petals like butterflies,’ said Cuff.

  Harp had listened to this talk about floods and death and foolish fable and flowers, and it made him miserable. He was very old, he didn’t know exactly how old, and now he was caught red-handed, and the chief constable was about to smash his copper worm or seize it, and him too. ‘Why don’t you just kill me, I’d be better off dead.’

  ‘You have an unusually sunny notion of dead,’ said Cuff.

  ‘Well you tell me, what happens when we’re dead?’

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘That’s sunny enough for me.’

  They sent Pinney on his way with the wounded dog at his heel. The game hunter paused at the creek’s edge and stared into the dismantled condenser. Then he headed downstream and Cuff went to the water’s edge and watched him go, watched till man and dog melted into the patchwork of timber and stone further down. ‘Now we can uncoil,’ he said.

  Harp seemed to agree. He knelt by the chopping block and took the head off the possum with one blow, and he skinned the rest with a hunting knife and then he quartered the carcass and halved the quarters and they added in some bush parsnips and cooked up a stew in a slurry of ancient dregs in the iron pot.

  10

  Bet Pepper’s cottage was damp and grit-ridden from the windowsills down, a sea-green mould upon the footings. The cottage was flood prone but that didn’t trouble Bet. She liked where she was, off the switchback path between the river and the village on the ridge, close to hand for the comers and goers.

  Bet liked to sit on her porch, survey the river and the farmlands on the far side, and the woodlands beyond the farmlands, pretty, like a picture, and the low hills grading into the Branch country to the north-west, the mysterious fastness that spawned all manner of strange tales and kept them all wondering.

  What did trouble Bet was the fickleness of the trade, the men who made shallow promises to her girls and wooed them away. Thelma Rowntree was not the first to be persuaded to leave Bet’s employ and now she too had gone off, gone off with Griffin Pinney, and why any sane woman would go off with Griffin Pinney remained a mystery to Bet, for Pinney was a fearsome sight with a fearsome reputation.

  Bet suspected Griffin might have stolen her. Trussed her up in the dead of night and whisked her away with a nod and a wink to the night watch, and perhaps a bottle of something for good measure.

  Then again, Bet heard he filled her head with talk of a place on the other side of the mountains, a place where there was no peonage and no penury and no tyranny whatsoever; a place where the waters teemed and the ground was fecund and the game was so plentiful the savages were docile, polite even.

  Bet didn’t believe it. She didn’t believe any of that guff, flimflam, but she did know Pinney could spin a yarn and, if pressed, she would concede the other side of that sad coin – Thelma was dumb as a stump.

  Biddie Happ was Thelma’s replacement but Biddie was not cut from the same cloth. She was not at all inclined to talk bawdy or to sport her wares, nor did she have wares to sport, not such as to compare with Thelma Rowntree. Biddie was a plump girl with pear-shaped hips and a most distinctive birthmark, a big purple splash across her forehead and left eyelid, and she tried to hide it by pinning a swathe of her long red hair in just such a way.

  Bet Pepper concluded it was the birthmark that burdened Biddie with a certain reticence in public, though customers said her performance behind doors was more than adequate. That was music to Bet’s ears, that was all she wanted to hear, and soon enough she twigged that Biddie’s residence was more likely to endure because the squaddies and the expirees were not lining up to run off with her.

  Enter, Martin Sparrow.

  When Sparrow arrived he found Bet Pepper seated on the porch as usual, smoking tobacco in a corn husk trimmed to her requirements. She was watching the river traffic, Guthrie’s boy on the barge, small boats, the trading scow idle. She appeared to be in a state of contentment, save for the westering sun which compelled her to squint and shade her eyes.

  ‘You should’ve come sooner, I could’ve used you cleanin’ up,’ she said.

  ‘I been cleanin’ up my own patch all day, nothin’ but.’

  ‘You should get some help.’

  ‘I did, I got Jug Woody. We fixed the corn crib.’

  Sparrow sensed the bawdy house was empty. His first thought was Biddie might be in Parramatta where she had a sister, so she said, or she might be asleep; these girls kept strange hours. He was about to sit and talk to Bet, hoping to find out, when he heard the sounds of vigorous humping from within, so vigorous the cabin’s sodden framework was shaking and bits of thatching wafted down from the porch cover. One bit caught in Sparrow’s hair and hung lank on his cheek and made his eyelid flutter.

  He flicked it away and scratched at his cheek.

  ‘She’s busy,’ said Bet.

  Sparrow said nothing. He did not wish to display his severe disappointment. To hear Biddie at work at her trade filled him with wrath. The aggravation he felt was not helped by the noise from within, for the noise was Biddie, squealing and moaning most pleasurably. She had never squealed and moaned like that with him. She never made a sound when he covered her. She’d just lie there, occasionally give him a smile, and then she would pat at that sweep of hair, fix it just so, and then she would pat him on the arse and tell him not to be all day at it. ‘C’mon now, spend your penny,’ she’d say. Sparrow always wondered about that because the expenditure was in fact way more than a penny, whether in coin or kind.

  ‘Who’s in there?’

  ‘Marty, you don’t ask that.’

  ‘If I sit here long enough I’ll see anyway.’

  ‘You’ll be sittin’ in the dark I’ll tell you that now.’ Bet looked west, squinting, the sun squat on the mountain rim.

  ‘That long?’

  ‘He’s regular. He’s layin’ close siege to my girl.’

  Sparrow was shocked. His hope cracked into little pieces, went to powder like a parched leaf underfoot. ‘Tell me who it is?’

  ‘Don’t be pitiful.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘If I lose this girl to the military I’ll scream.’ Bet had turned her attention to the activity on the far side of the river where Guthrie’s boy had run the barge onto the mud, an oxcart waiting. She was pleased to have something to watch so she could at least half ignore Sparrow.

  ‘I have to know,’ he said.

  Bet spoke softly, almost a whisper: ‘It’s Reuben Peskett and there’s no stopping that man.’

  Sparrow was shocked. Reuben Peskett was a leathery veteran who had several times been demoted for ill-discipline yet each time rose again in the corps to his former rank of sergeant, following bloody exploits against the savages. He had fake front teeth, carved from a single piece of ox bone but so ill-fitted they jiggled when he talked, thus confounding the vanity that had inspired them in the first instance.

  Bet could see that Sparrow’s mind was flush with dark thoughts. ‘Don’t you give Reuben Peskett no trouble,’ she whispered.

  ‘Some beggars have all the damn luck,’ said Sparrow.

  ‘Luck might visit a fool but it won’t take tea with him,’ said Bet.

  ‘I can fix him,’ said Sparrow.

  ‘No you cannot,’ said Bet. ‘He’ll have your fat for soap and your guts for garters.’

  Sparrow knew Bet was right. He was a squirt, and Peskett, though not much bigger, had a fearsome reputation for violence once aroused. Otherwise, and worse still, he had a most confident air about him. Sparrow wished he could be confident like that around women, so he might pay court boldly, the way Reuben Peskett did. But women, most particularly the fetching ones, made Sparrow go to water. They reduced him to a muddy puddle.

  He was sure now that women could sense weakness in a man and they despise
d it, Bet no exception nor Biddie neither. If only he could be charming and not give a damn, like Peskett, or Cuff. But the more he cared the more it showed and that aroused not so much fondness as contempt. If he didn’t give a fig, Biddie would probably want him. But he did give a fig, and it showed, and now Biddie was squealing and moaning for an old veteran who couldn’t care less so long as he got his wick in.

  Sparrow was full of doubt, doubt about everything. He leaned towards Bet and spoke softly: ‘Is that her real name, Biddie Happ?’

  Bet’s face was momentarily contorted as she tried to make sense of the question. ‘Why would she have another name, you daft man? Her name is Biddie, Biddie Happ, affectionately known as Miss Happ, and she is a poor ratcatcher’s daughter from Diddlebury and that is no secret.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Sparrow.

  ‘That’s it,’ said Bet, ‘you’re always sorry, if you weren’t so damned sorry she might treat you different. Ain’t you noticed, Reuben Peskett’s never sorry. He’s got panache, might be rough round the edges but it’s panache all the same.’

  ‘What is panache?’

  ‘It’s not bein’ sorry is what it is.’

  Sparrow was now most seriously deflated. He looked at his hands. Could a woman ever love a yellowy man? He feared another visitation – the sharp pains in his right side were inclined to strike him without notice. He knew it wasn’t gas for he could fart all day and half the night and it did not make a penneth of difference. Dr Woody was probably right when he said it was jaundice but, sadly, putting a name to the ailment in no way lessened the discomfort nor did it compromise the wicked stealth of the disorder.

  He reckoned he best go. He did not want to suffer a visitation in the presence of Bet Pepper. If he took sick Bet might warn him off, but that hardly mattered this time around. The throb in his pizzle was long gone.

  He felt his throat clog up. He did not want to be there when Reuben Peskett stepped onto the porch, happy as a tick on a pig. Nor did he want to couple with Biddie Happ in the aftermath of Peskett’s sweaty exertions.

  ‘They got Shug, did you know that?’ said Bet.

  Sparrow was shocked. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Seems they went on the maraud, him and Mort. They killed Gordy and they took his pony, and various oddments, and they took the girl Dot too, the poor thing.’