The Making of Martin Sparrow

by Peter Cochrane

  ‘Mort got away?’

  ‘Who knows! All we know is they got Shug, that savage found him, Caleb, saved him from a miserable demise and a lonely grave bereft of all Christian consolation.’

  ‘Caleb!’

  ‘The fabled Caleb, yes. Passed him over to Peskett in the foothills.’

  ‘Peskett, again!’

  ‘The very same, he’s everywhere,’ she said. ‘And now he’s brung in a bolter, so he’ll get the reward.’

  Sparrow stared at the cabin wall. ‘Shug just didn’t have the mettle,’ he said with some conviction.

  ‘That’d be right,’ said Bet.

  Sparrow felt himself sink into yet another slough of despond. He got to his feet, said he had to go, headed back up the switchback path aiming to cross the ridge and take the South Creek track to the vicinity of the bridge, there to spend time at Peachey’s Tap and, if possible, drown his sorrows.

  All thought of agricultural renewal was now gone. He let go his resolve with no more care than he would a fart. He marvelled how things he held almost firm in his head could dissolve, just like that. He’d commit to something with the best of intentions and for a brief time hold the vision, bright in his mind. Then something bad would happen and the vision was gone and he’d be there, sloughed, left with nothing, nothing but the desire to run away, his heart full of lead, which was exactly how he felt as he passed the pillory and the gibbet and walked on to the Tap.

  The pillory made him recall Mort’s ordeal, the day they locked him in that brutal thing and Peskett nailed his ears to the framework. The memory hurried him on.

  He found some diversion in the sight of the Tap, for the Tap from the ground up showed all the signs of good intentions fading in the course of a prolonged assemblage. The skilling at the back was made of neat-trimmed split log, but the cabin attached to the skilling was rough-cut palings in some parts and wickerwork bedaubed with clay in others, while the southern wall was made of sod with a stone fireplace and chimney. The trade had rallied to assist the Peacheys in the aftermath of the flood. They had righted the frame with bracing timbers lashed to deep-sunk ground pegs but there was still a distinct lean to the tavern. Like the trees all about, the structure had bent to the will of the fearsome floodwaters. The entire building looked like a loving creation from a child’s dream or a Jack tale.

  11

  The night was mild and the sky above Cuff was awash with stars. Harp could not get up so he stayed where he was, his legs twitching and jumping in some sort of agitation until he was deep asleep, whereupon he snored loud as a fog bell. Mackie was already dozing, having commandeered the dry canvas that Harp kept near the mash bins. Cuff made a pillow of his haversack.

  Hours later Harp woke up, worried about the Cape pony. ‘Need’s water,’ he said. Cuff loosened the hobbles and led the pony to the creek and fed him a few handfuls of corn mash and then he went back to the fire that was hardly more than a flicker, the flame guttering to ashes.

  He sat beside Harp, hungry still, eager for the scrapings of the possum stew. ‘Don’t mind eatin’ this cold,’ he said, as he dragged his spoon across the bottom of the pot.

  ‘You can have the leavings,’ he said, and he handed the pot to Harp. He cleaned his spoon in the dirt and squeezed the dirt off it as best he could with thumb and forefinger. He wiped the implement on his britches and returned it to the long, thin, fit-for-purpose pocket inside his vest, as if the tailor somehow knew that a man with a spoon would, sooner or later, acquire this particular garment.

  Harp worked the bottom of the cookpot with his stick and scooped out the leavings with his fingers, picking possum hair from his lips and then dipping back in. He picked out the possum head, which Cuff had shunned, and he dug away at the recesses of the skull. ‘He that wastes naught wants for naught,’ he said, and he clamped his lips upon the creature’s eye socket and sucked hard on the one and then the other.

  Cuff watched. He chose not to comment upon a homily that did not seem to have served Harp Sneezby all that well. He caught sight of a shooting star in the western sky, and spoke softly. ‘I’ve never seen anything so beautiful as the starry heavens off there. I do believe I can make out the Big Fishhook.’

  ‘Not even a woman?’ said Harp.

  ‘Say what?’

  ‘Nothing so beautiful, not even a woman?’

  Cuff took his time, and then he clucked his tongue and shook his head. ‘I can think of one or two women outshined the stars, beauty that almost hurts; beauty to make you cross a ocean or kill a man . . . or wish you was a damn tree.’

  ‘I never seen no woman like that.’

  ‘I don’t know if that makes you lucky or unlucky.’

  ‘I’m mostly unlucky.’

  ‘Well you got me for company, there’s a turn in your fortunes.’

  ‘Where’d you see these women?’

  ‘The one that haunts me still was quite possibly the mistake of my life, to let her go. I tell you Harp, she was most magnificently distributed in her parts.’

  ‘Why’d you let her go?’

  ‘I’m too tired to tell, ’cept . . . I’ll tell you she was Boston Spanish and something to behold, but I cannot say she was untroubled.’

  Harp spat, and waited for Cuff to continue.

  ‘When she was little she saw her daddy set her mama on fire, saw her mama burn. She was awful cautious about men, I’ll say that much.’

  They sat quietly, Cuff looking at the sky and Harp staring at the ground and Mackie apparently asleep, his breathing an irregular wheeze.

  Harp looked skyward yet again. He was reflecting on the conversation. ‘That woman in Boston, you cross the ocean after her?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘You find her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In the burial ground at Sydney Cove. Sad little grave.’

  Harp said nothing, waiting for more.

  ‘The sky’s like the mountains,’ said Cuff.

  ‘How so?’

  ‘It’s that impassable barrier between some supposedly splendid dominion and the world we know.’

  ‘She broke your heart, I can tell.’

  ‘She fled Boston, fled the yellow fever epidemic on a whaler bound for the South Seas. She picked the wrong bunch o’ fellers . . . That broke m’heart . . .’

  That was half the truth. The other half was the ruin of his entire family. The first fatalities in that morbidly hot summer were quickly followed by more; soon half the city was dead. He recalled how his sisters died, their skin an awful sickly colour and their vomit riddled with black clots of blood. Next his stepmother fell ill and his daddy took it upon himself to tend her day and night. One morning Cuff found her dead and his father delirious, pleading for water. When Cuff came back from the pump in the yard his father was already gone. The old man had come down the stairs tearing off his clothes and, naked, he’d crossed the street and hurled himself into the Charles River and drowned without a whimper. And with that, Cuff was free. He was free to go and he did.

  It was Harp’s insistent voice that rescued Cuff from dark memory: ‘Might be pure fire but my brew’s not poison. I am a gifted distiller and unashamed to say so.’

  ‘You want some?’

  ‘You want some?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Cuff got himself up and got hold of a gallon jug, about half full, and sat and shared it with Harp, the two of them taking turns to swig it down. ‘I could be dead and this’d bring me back to life, frolicsome as a kitten,’ said Harp.

  ‘It greets the palate like an old friend, it’s alright.’

  ‘Just alright?’

  ‘I’d say its maker knows none of the arts of adulteration. It’s harsh but pure.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Cuff.’

  ‘You’re welcome, Mr Sneezby, it’s a compliment way overdue.’

  ‘It’s got a fierce kick, I call it workhorse, keep a man going all day long, gets the reaping done, that and more. I sure hope m
y felon comes back.’

  ‘I’d call it forty feet.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Forty feet, then you fall over.’

  Harp chuckled. He turned his attention to Mackie, asleep on the canvas. ‘Sworn off it but he sells it to all and sundry and he pokes into every damn nook on the river lookin’ for poor little minnows like me?’

  ‘He’s good at what he does, sniffs out all manner of culpability.’

  ‘Some of us call him the governor’s dog.’

  ‘He’s no one’s dog, too canny. But he’s a loyal servant of the Crown and the Crown has been good to him.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Nowhere else in this world you can start off a felon and end up a chief constable with your own farm.’

  ‘And a damn tavern on the square.’

  ‘That too.’

  ‘I hear he bought a ship.’

  ‘He did. He got a ruin for a song, off a bankrupt.’

  ‘He’s like a vulture.’

  ‘He’s got a nose for opportunity, that’s all.’

  ‘Why’s he gotta take me in?’

  Cuff paused to think, tapping his fingers on his knees. ‘I’d say the man’s ruled by ambition, and that’s harnessed to duty and duty is the key to his elevation.’

  ‘Why’s he so damned tired? He’s half your age and more’n that mine.’

  ‘Bronchial eruptions lay him waste, now and then.’

  ‘My poor ol’ mother had a bronchial rattle. A rattle what took her off.’

  ‘A rattle will do that, take you off.’

  12

  When he stepped into Peachey’s Tap, Sparrow paused and looked about. He tried to pick out the faces in the russet gloom. The task was complicated by the dust motes that sparkled in soft glowing shafts of twilight arrowing through holes in the wasted daub. The dogs came and sniffed at him and found him acceptable and went back to their dusty wallow by the wall, there to sleep some more.

  ‘You look rung out,’ said Seamus Peachey.

  ‘I stagger from one calamity to another,’ said Sparrow. The lean of the building was not of great assistance to his temper, nor to his placement within the world, which seemed to have tilted five or ten degrees.

  ‘Marty my boy you need some bang-head,’ said Alfie Shivers, the felon now visible in the far corner. With him was Griffin Pinney whose face he could not see but whose bandolier was speckled in the light, a thousand particles of dust dancing on the tatty old leather.

  ‘I do need something, the sharper the better,’ said Sparrow. He walked to the counter where Seamus Peachey presided over the trade. Peachey was a weasel of a man, even Sparrow thought that. A weasel with a face of sharp, shadowed panes and hollowed out recessions, and broken teeth.

  ‘What calamity you stagger into this time?’ he asked.

  Sparrow slid his arse onto a stool by the counter. Several tin plates were stacked, one upon another, with a pile of poultry bones in the slushy leavings in the plate on top. He could smell the cooked meat. ‘I am deep in hock, and more to come.’

  ‘More?’ said Peachey.

  ‘I got to borrow for seed, I got to crop for the store, I got to have a surplus. Yes, more,’ said Sparrow.

  ‘That or the road!’

  ‘That or the road, yes, he’ll put me on the road.’

  ‘A road perchance . . . of your own choosing?’ Peachey winked at him.

  Sparrow was searching for a thread of hope in a moment of wretched gloom. He wondered if there might be a meaning here that he was meant to grasp. ‘Which road is that?’ he said.

  Peachey did not reply but Griffin Pinney muttered something to Alfie Shivers and the two of them chuckled and Sparrow reckoned they had to be chuckling at his expense.

  One of the dogs, Peachey’s game dog, the one called Tool, was twitching and whimpering, off in some dream world of blood and bone. Sparrow could smell the scrapings on the tin plate. ‘Slice o’ bread, I can mop that up, finish it off,’ he said.

  Alfie Shivers began to sing, almost as slow as he talked: ‘There’s a track no man may follow, there’s a track the toll to pay, there’s a track . . .’

  ‘A track through them mountains, is that what you want?’ said Griffin Pinney as he turned to Sparrow, adjusting the mantle on his shoulders.

  Every time Sparrow saw Griffin Pinney’s face he wished he could disappear down a hole. This time the game hunter had what seemed to be a poultry bone, a wing bone, through the cartilage in his nose and there were cream coloured tufts of hair that curled from the boreholes of that nose like some sort of filament of horn. Sparrow did not know quite what to say, the words just tumbled out. ‘Can you sleep with that in?’

  Alfie Shivers whacked his knee and buckled over with laughter. Pinney just stared.

  That made Sparrow even more nervous. ‘Is it a bone?’

  ‘Why don’t you come close and look.’

  ‘I’m just . . . sittin’ here.’

  ‘Not quite sitting, up an’ down like a fiddler’s arm,’ said Alfie.

  Pinney was turning the bone with his fingers the way a gentleman might turn a moustache in the course of a waxing. ‘It is an adornment. Makes me look pretty, would you not agree?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Alfie Shivers was fixed in a fit of the chuckles.

  Pinney removed the adornment and put it on the plate with the leavings. ‘You can crack it and suck on it if you want,’ he said.

  Sparrow felt a fool. ‘What I want, I want the track through the mountains.’ There, I said it.

  A surge of singular purpose had suddenly occupied his person. He wanted to escape the mean-hearted little world of the ridge and the river; to change his life, lift himself from the servitude of rig and furrow and the hovering menace of foreclosure. Most of all he wanted to get so far from Biddie Happ he’d have no choice but to forget her. He wished he had the mettle to woo the woman, to woo her with panache, but in that regard his hope was frayed as old rope for he didn’t have much in the way of mettle and he didn’t have any panache, none that he knew of, none that he could summon upon the occasion. And now it seemed Biddie had surrendered her carnal self to Reuben Peskett and that just about guaranteed she’d go off with him – him with the damn reward and the woman – and that was more than Sparrow could bear. He was not about to sit rotting like corn stubble in a fallow field. Given half a chance he would seek out the fabled haven. He might get killed on the way, killed in the wilderness, skewered by the savages, but he did not care.

  ‘I want the track to freedom,’ he said, trying to put a little boldness into his delivery.

  There was a long silence, save for the game dog called Tool scratching at fleas and Pinney’s old dog licking at his own pizzle.

  Pinney struck a thoughtful pose, scratching at his chin. ‘I’ll tell you something,’ he said to Sparrow, ‘you can hurl a mountain ’cross that river easier’n force the yoke o’ slavery onto me, now . . . how you fixed in that regard?’

  ‘Shhhhhh,’ said Peachey.

  ‘I’m fixed, I don’t want no yoke.’

  ‘You’ll have to pay the toll.’

  ‘Yup, ain’t cheap,’ said Alfie with a chuckle.

  ‘Whose toll?’ Sparrow was sure now they were toying with him.

  ‘Talk soft,’ whispered Peachey.

  ‘Why, the savages,’ said the game hunter. ‘How do you expect to get across that devil ridden wilderness otherwise?’

  ‘What do they want?’

  ‘You don’t get across cheap, and you don’t come back, ever.’

  ‘I won’t come back.’

  ‘You say a word, to anyone . . .’

  ‘I won’t say a word, not to one soul on this mortal earth I swear.’

  ‘It’s a considerable toll.’

  ‘Coin?’

  ‘Noooo, what’s a damn savage want with coin?’

  ‘Dumber’n a box o’ hair,’ said Alfie.

  Pinney was pulling at the pierced cartilage in his
nose. ‘What they want is a dog.’

  ‘A dog?’

  ‘A kangaroo dog, any old dog no good, they’s choosy beggars. They want a passable game dog, no less.’

  ‘I don’t have a dog.’

  ‘You don’t pay the toll you don’t get but halfway . . .’

  ‘And they won’t just kill you . . . they’ll eat your particulars,’ said Alfie.

  Seamus Peachey nodded: ‘It’s true, no dog and your particulars go in the cook pot, your liver too – they like liver them blacks, man liver.’

  Sparrow glanced at the dog, now at Alfie Shivers’ feet, and Peachey noticed. ‘That one wouldn’t know a kangaroo from a stick o’ burnt wood and don’t you forget it and he’ll take your arm off if I tell him to,’ said the taverner.

  ‘As for Tool,’ said Alfie, ‘our Seamus will gut the man steals Tool.’

  ‘That I will.’

  ‘I am not about to steal your dog, not the one nor the other!’ said Sparrow. He could feel sweat on his forehead, the clammy air stuck to him like chicken grease. He didn’t dare glance at Griffin Pinney’s game dog.

  ‘Shhh,’ said Peachey, ‘you’ll wake up Winnie, then we’re all back in the misery.’

  Sparrow wondered why he did not feel downcast, not having a dog to pay the savages. He thought it might be fear, for at that moment he could feel something like fear stirring in his bowels. Then he realised it wasn’t his bowels stirring but his belly, he was so hungry.

  For some reason the proximity of the poultry bones made Sparrow think of Biddie and thoughts of Biddie undermined his resolve to bolt, which was dreadfully confusing because he had resolved to bolt in no small part to scotch his yearnings for that woman, such yearnings being nothing but misery piled upon misery. But the dangers of the fastness were troublesome too. He could see them, the savages, those far-shadowing spears. He could feel their breath upon his cheek, see those brutal axes in their hands, the great bulbous head of resin that held wood to stone.

  Alfie Shivers took a swig from a big glass pickling jar, so big his stumpy little fingers could barely get a grip on it. ‘Cut yer name across me backbone, stretch me skin across yer drum,’ he sang and he winked at Sparrow and took another swig and passed the jar to Griffin Pinney who guzzled down the remainder like it was water, his Adam’s apple clicking over like a greasy gearwheel in a public clock. ‘Here’s to perdition for everyone but us,’ he said with a big smile.