The Making of Martin Sparrow

by Peter Cochrane

  ‘Women?’

  ‘Olive skinned, well-favoured by nature and most pliable and yielding in all regards. Why we suffer the harpies we got here I’ll never know.’

  Sparrow gave out a deep sigh.

  Pinney took a hold of Sparrow at the back of his neck, his fingernails sharp in the flesh. His old dog was licking Sparrow’s hand. ‘Now, you’re sworn, you remember that or I’ll take your tongue off at the bone.’

  ‘I know.’

  Sparrow sat for a while, speechless, wondering where a man’s tongue did go at the back there. It troubled him to think that Griffin Pinney might know.

  The faint glow along the rim of the mountains was gone and the night sky was so full of stars there was hardly space for whatever it was the stars hung on to. Sparrow wished he could feel the brilliance of the heavens uplift him, give him true hope. But all he could feel was Griffin Pinney sitting alongside him, a man who gave off menace the way a pot gives off steam, a man who smelt like a rank carcass, a man to whom he was now bound in a bond of trust, a bond he dare not dishonour lest his throat be cut. There was, however, one compensating consideration: such a man might just get him across the mountains, safe and sound.

  ‘What about the other side, must be savages on the other side?’

  Pinney pressed hard on his forehead, like he was pressing up his thoughts. ‘What these despots call improper intercourse with the native peoples is in my own personal eye-to-eye experience a connection rooted in free and honest exchange, whether in the mountains or on the other side. I tell you these savages practice what I call a certain nobility,’ he said.

  ‘You mean they friendly?’

  ‘Of course they friendly, you treat ’em right they will extend to you more geniality and kindly intercourse than you’ll ever get in this scabby little garrison.’

  ‘It is that.’

  ‘Indeed, which is why I believe you can appreciate a sphere in which a master-less man is not a put-upon vagabond but a free agent, dignified and reputable in his singularity, safe and secure in a hospitable realm. Over there we got all the comforts o’ life without the harshness o’ labourin’ for them as we must on this side. There’s no bondage over there Marty, we share the common lands and the waters and the women, and they yield up to us all we want, we men.’

  ‘I’ll steal that dog.’

  ‘You do that and we’ll be on the other side before you can say fuck King George.’

  ‘I wouldn’t go that far.’

  ‘You already have Marty.’

  15

  At first light they readied to depart for the Branch. Cuff set a familiar tone. ‘The pale light of dawn, the cool of the morning, the stillness, the quiet . . . I do believe this interlude twixt sleep and toil is magical, unless you’re hung over, or tangled in some pointless reconnoitre up a damn creek,’ he said.

  Mackie straightened up. He looked at Cuff and almost smiled.

  ‘You agree with me, I know it, you just won’t say,’ said Cuff.

  Harp took the hobbles off the pony and led the way, a bladder full of bang-head strung on his shoulder.

  They followed the creek to the gully that ran to the Branch, a narrow defile shaded beneath the deep green vaulting of cabbage trees and tall ferns.

  Mackie carried the coil of copper piping called the worm, having put a ball through the pot and pushed it off the furnace and watched it tumble into the creek, thus visiting upon Harp an interlude of severe unhappiness.

  For almost an hour they tramped through the chill sandy shallows. Harp was silent all the way, searching for the best line for the pony and brooding on the damage Mackie had done and wondering how he would ever get the apparatus up and running again without the most vital bit of the machinery, the all-important copper worm.

  By the time he started to feel better the country was fast changing, as he knew it would. They came out of the gully and followed the creek onto a long stretch of cleared ground that ran to river flats and the waters of the Branch beyond. There was a cabin bathed in midmorning sun on the margin of the forested slope to the west, and there was a small peach orchard and a vegetable garden nearby. Pigs and fowls were fossicking next to a corn crib on log footings and there was a henhouse and a sizeable fold and a byre and alongside the byre there was a slab hut that looked to be derelict and beyond the hut, way beyond, they could just make out the government sloop, beached and roped to a mooring tree with Joe Franks’ twelve-footer alongside, but there was no sign of Sprodd, or Joe for that matter.

  ‘Here we are,’ said Harp as he tethered the black pony.

  ‘It’s a pretty place,’ said Cuff.

  ‘Pick o’ the patches.’

  ‘Awful lonely.’

  ‘Lonely’s what we like round here.’

  They saw the gangly form of Joe Franks coming up the valley to meet them, his gait most unsteady. The man called Freddie hustled along behind, an elderly composition akin to a barrel.

  When he reached the incoming party Joe sat on a log, a pained look on his face. He nodded hello to Mackie and Cuff. ‘That’s my limit,’ he said. ‘A furlong and I’m done.’

  ‘He’s not that bad,’ said Freddie.

  ‘That’s not like you Joe,’ said Cuff.

  ‘Well it’s like me now, don’t take much in the way of effort and I’m a ball of knots and spasms, only God knows why.’

  Joe took note of the spiral worm in the chief constable’s hand. He turned to Harp. ‘Busy as ever I see.’

  ‘You’re no good to me,’ said Harp.

  ‘That makes me no worse for a neighbour.’

  Mackie stepped up to Joe and shook his hand. ‘You’re not one for neighbours.’

  ‘True enough, Alister, but it’s good to see you.’

  ‘And you my friend.’ Mackie could not help but notice that Joe’s face was fixed in a permanent squint and his eyes, what he could see of them, were awfully bloodshot. ‘You and Harp make a pair,’ he said.

  ‘I doubt that, I am sworn off the grog,’ said Joe.

  ‘Since India,’ said Cuff.

  ‘One sorry lapse but otherwise yes.’

  ‘You look most unwell, you ought see Dr Woody,’ said Mackie.

  ‘Whatever it is I know I’m riddled with it. I doubt old Woody can help.’ Joe closed his eyes and worked a circular motion on his eyelids with thumb and forefinger. ‘They burn something terrible. Worst is I cannot read, a hard loss of an evening. I miss my Bunyan.’

  ‘The man’s a wreck, he best come with us,’ said Cuff.

  ‘No,’ said Joe.

  Mackie had known Joe Franks for the better part of ten years. He was a decorated army veteran of countless engagements in India, cashiered and exiled for killing a fellow soldier in a duel. He had requested the remote location upon arrival in New South Wales and the governor granted his request, noting on the documentation that the duel was a matter of honour and not in any way criminal in the ordinary sense of the word. The chosen location was described as a fertile patch on the Branch that Catley the botanist had noted on a sketch map and dubbed Mr Freddie Gitts residence, unaware that the surname was Giddes, spelt with two Ds, the E silent.

  Mackie recalled the occasion of Joe Franks’ first appearance at the ridge. He came with the wagoner, from Parramatta. He fraternised briefly with the soldiers and got terribly drunk and took exception to a soldier whipping a stray dog, a sergeant called Reuben Peskett. The outcome was a surprise to all present that day, for Peskett had a fearsome reputation, but that counted for nothing when Joe took to him with a pair of blacksmith tongs, knocked out his front teeth and battered him senseless.

  The ordeal hastened Joe’s determination to get away. He bought a twelve-footer from Guthrie, the shipwright, a little boat right off the slip, and with Guthrie’s help he fitted a mast and sail and took off downriver. He rowed up the Branch on a windless day, rapt in the solitude, the richness of the bottoms and the grandeur of the deep-cut sandstone country beyond.

  Mackie put his ha
nd on Joe’s shoulder and bent down and looked into the man’s bloodshot eyes. ‘I’ll talk to Dr Woody. We’ll send a tonic on Guthrie’s scow.’

  Word of the trading scow pleased Freddie. ‘Some of that candied ginger too,’ he said.

  ‘I see our sloop, I don’t see Sprodd,’ said Mackie.

  ‘They gone fishin’ at the traps,’ said Freddie.

  ‘They?’

  ‘He went with Caleb,’ said Joe. He stood up and steadied himself, a hand on Mackie’s shoulder. He waggled his legs, first one then the other. He headed for his cabin, his gait improved by his brief repose. Mackie stepped along with him and Cuff and Harp came on behind, musing on the delights of cooked fish.

  In the cabin, Joe and Mackie chose the chairs at the table and the others sat on stump stools, dipping corn biscuits into mugs of Hai Seng tea.

  Cuff examined the books on the mantelshelf, set between two squared off bits of sandstone – Dickson’s System of Agriculture, Fontana’s Venoms and Poisons and several other volumes including the pocket edition of Bunyan. His mind shifted to the fishing expedition. ‘Hope Dan’s alright, don’t want him skewered,’ he said.

  ‘He’s with Caleb, he’ll be fine,’ said Joe.

  ‘The gentleman savage, wrested from the wild whence he has returned!’

  ‘What they did, they took him fresh off the tit and gave him a warm bed, taught him the Bible inside out, taught him manners too, and for that he spat in their eye,’ said Freddie.

  ‘He went back to his people, Freddie, that’s what he did,’ said Joe.

  ‘We do that sometimes, we take a pretty one, a little black cherub,’ said Freddie, ‘but you cannot school the treachery from their black hearts.’

  ‘That’s not true,’ said Joe.

  The name Caleb was fabled at the river for he was old Wolgan’s grandson, having spent his earliest years with the Reverend Hardwick in Parramatta. He was clutched to his mother’s bosom when they shot her. The ball went through the bone in his little foot and pierced the mother’s gut. She died and the soldiers took the orphaned boy and gave him to the Hardwicks to raise and they did that, the reverend and his wife. They raised him until he could run and when he could run that’s what he did. He ran away and never came back.

  ‘You’ve made your peace with the savages I hear,’ said Mackie.

  ‘I’ve made a pact.’

  ‘What kind of a pact?’ said Cuff.

  ‘I happily surrender all the maize they want. They don’t care for the wheat but they do take my piglets at a whim. They lack an appreciation of animal husbandry.’

  ‘That don’t sound like much of a pact to me.’

  ‘It works, enough to keep us safe.’

  ‘They won’t chop off your nethers, that’s what you need to know,’ said Cuff.

  ‘They have a partiality for salted goods; I intend to nurture that, the better to husband my livestock,’ said Joe.

  Cuff laughed. ‘You give them maize and pork, salted?’

  ‘I barter my tenure in the soil from some of what I raise, whether corn or stock. That’s fair.’ Joe looked around the table, weighing up his little audience, wondering was anything further worth saying. ‘They are the true proprietors of the soil, have been since Genesis.’

  Cuff laughed some more. ‘Proprietors, a tribe o’ savages!’

  ‘They are not a tribe Thaddeus, not anymore, just a ragged remnant prone to desperate acts. I hope to soften their demise, keep my patch and my nethers.’ Joe smiled that warm smile and everyone knew he meant what he said.

  ‘For your sins?’ said Cuff.

  ‘Yes, for my sins, and more,’ said Joe.

  ‘What more?’ said Mackie.

  Joe came over thoughtful, like he was pondering whether or not to say whatever relevancies were as yet unsaid. ‘In my regimental lodge in Calcutta we had a motto: submissive to superiors, courteous to equals, kind and condescending to inferiors.’

  Cuff was first to respond. ‘That fine vision might cut across class and faction but it can hardly extend to savages.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I thought what you masons did was unite good men from throne to cottage, not throne to wigwam.’

  Freddie buckled over with laughter, ‘Wigwam, that’s good.’

  ‘I’m not inviting them to join a lodge,’ said Joe, a touch of sharpness in his words.

  Cuff picked the tone. ‘So you was a mason?’ He took a sly look at Mackie who sat, still as a stone, contemplating Joe Franks.

  ‘All too late I was, yes. All too late did I understand we have to be free from party or religious prejudices, unaffected by rank or occupation or even by colour . . . a new sociability, worldly in its embrace, that’s what drew me.’

  At last Mackie spoke. ‘Have you retained a connection with your lodge?’

  ‘I doubt any connection I might assert would be acknowledged.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘I shot our Worshipful Master in a duel,’ said Joe.

  ‘Was he a villain?’ said Cuff.

  ‘He was, yes.’

  ‘You shoot him dead?

  ‘I did. I put a ball through his eye.’

  ‘Well, good for you Joe. Nobody wants a villain runnin’ loose,’ said Cuff.

  ‘All I know is I get a terrible fright when they come in numbers,’ said Freddie.

  Warm gusts were coming through the doorway and dried out corn husks were carrying on the wind across the fallow ground to the east. Joe got himself up and went and got a clay jug and some mugs. ‘Peach cyder off the second crop.’

  ‘I will say this, Joe, you are firm planted upon the high ground of virtue,’ said Cuff.

  Harp was about to skol some bang-head but he paused. ‘I think you’re a damn fool,’ he said.

  Joe shook his head. ‘What they won’t take is the wheat, that is the blessing. A pure accident of ancestral preference. That makes for an accommodation.’

  ‘That’s no accident,’ said Cuff, ‘since they don’t farm and they don’t hardly cook. They like to pick up the ready things and walk on. I know the feeling every time I slide past a tray of toffees, which ain’t often.’

  Joe was silent, thoughtful. The company was waiting. Finally, he spoke. ‘They do not want our ways, it is that simple, gentlemen.’

  ‘I take my hat off to you Joe,’ said Cuff.

  ‘As do I,’ said Mackie.

  Joe was troubled by the compliment. He didn’t want anybody’s praise for what he was doing. His solution seemed to him so sensible and so completely necessary that he didn’t know what else he could do to survive, given the horrible enormities practised up and down the river by both black and white in recent times. ‘The maize travels and keeps. The savages’ particularity suits me fine. We’ve always got maize; it’s hardy, never fails. I grow it to share and I’m pleased to share it. I just can’t see it any other way. I have what I need, they take what they need; neither party left wanting.’

  ‘Alright, I surrender,’ said Cuff. He threw his hands in the air. He liked Joe. He had no desire to step on his tail.

  ‘Yours is a generosity over and above the terms of the governor’s concession, you know that?’ said Mackie.

  ‘The concession says we must share the fruits and the plenty of the river from the Branch to the sea. For my sins I am happy to do that.’

  ‘Crops is the fruit of your labour, Joe, it ain’t the fruit o’ the river. Just let them come and go, fish and hunt, nothin’ more,’ said Cuff.

  ‘We might see it that way but they never will, that’s the rub.’

  ‘You let them violate the sacred principles of private property you set a dangerous precedent, that’s what people will say.’

  ‘That’s what people do say,’ said Freddie. ‘Thyne says Joe’s gunna get us all killed.’

  ‘The true violator was the first man to fence in a piece of land or draw some imaginary line and say this is mine and the violators after him were the folk who liked the idea. What
then? Crimes, wars, unspeakable atrocities, that’s what then. Don’t you tell me about private property.’

  ‘You a Leveller or a Jacobin or just a damn silly Frenchman, which?’ said Cuff.

  ‘The fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody, least of all the miscreants on this part of the river, pardon me, Harp,’ said Joe.

  ‘That’s just a load of drivel, you’re talking drivel,’ said Harp.

  Joe was not finished: ‘If we all shared the river we’d have peace, there’d be no burning, no killing, none of that; from the Branch to the mouth we’re obliged to share the river, that’s what the governor says.’

  ‘Joe, you need to read the government order, it’s in the Gazette,’ said Cuff. ‘The order says downriver, from the Branch farms down, we got to let them fish and trap and hunt game, farm for yams and muscles and such, come and go, la la la, that’s all, that’s the order, that’s the concession. Subject to the sanctity of our crops we let them forage, that’s it!’ said Cuff.

  ‘I marvel they leave the clothes on your backs!’ said Harp.

  ‘They do not trouble us,’ said Joe.

  ‘They do when they turn up out o’ nowhere for breakfast. I come on with the drizzles every time,’ said Freddie.

  ‘They do us no harm is what I mean.’

  ‘As to their vices, there’s a hundred things a decent man can only hint at!’

  ‘And here we are, you and I, entirely unmolested.’

  ‘How often do they come?’ asked Cuff.

  ‘Old Wolgan is regular as the seasons, and he’s never alone,’ said Joe. ‘Sometimes he tells Caleb to bid me trim his beard . . . and I do. I set about him like a damn barber. Napoleon in Egypt could not be more unlikely.’

  ‘Napoleon was in Egypt,’ said Cuff.

  ‘That’s precisely what I mean,’ said Joe.

  ‘What’s he want with Egypt? They got nothin’ but sand,’ said Freddie.

  ‘They got dates, they got pomegranates, they got vipers . . .’ said Cuff.

  ‘Well, if they got vipers old Wolgan be in his element I reckon,’ said Freddie.

  ‘That old warrior has a presence, I will say that,’ said Mackie.

  Joe poured them another measure of peach cyder. ‘I think they look at me the way they look at a fruiting shrub or a perennial tuber. They know they can come and pick me any time and I’ll fruit again so long as they don’t chop me down or snap my taproot. So I don’t worry they’ll do me, not anymore; I worry about my sinews knotted up, my legs gone to custard and my tongue like a desert, and my eyes dry as a sun-struck bone, that’s what I worry about.’