Then she lay on the bed, face up, and she spread her legs for him and as ever Sparrow was dumbstruck by the strangeness of her beauty for it was hardly orthodox, that much he did know.
Biddie had a lovely head of thick red hair and quite good teeth, alabaster white skin with a faint speckling of freckles and a lusty pink flush in her cheeks. She had small, floppy breasts and nipples like tiny pink buttons and from there down it was like she was another woman, her stomach heavily wrinkled and her hips ample like the base of a pear, and a muff so mature and so thickly matted as to hide every detail.
‘Come on then, get aboard,’ she said. She didn’t much like Sparrow standing there looking at her. She smoothed the wash of hair that hid the birthmark. She had pale brown eyes, the colour of weak tea and every time she blinked Sparrow saw how the birthmark carried onto that one eyelid.
First time he was with her he almost said ‘you got a purple eyelid’ but he didn’t, he checked himself, luckily. That was one time he didn’t say the wrong thing and he was proud of it. He committed that visitation to memory for guidance in the future, firmly believing, at that point in time, that a better future might be within reach.
Sparrow wished his thoughts still but his thoughts would not be still, like snakes in a bag. Eels in a bucket. Biddie was not pleased. She sat up. She wacked his pizzle with the back of her hand. ‘Come on, get your wick in and get done,’ she said softly.
‘Why do you call it a wick?’
‘The fuel rises to the flame. I’m the flame, I get you done.’
She did that more than she knew. Many a time thoughts of Biddie had got him done on his own.
But this time, the last time ever, Sparrow did not want to get done, not in a hurry. He wanted to savour Biddie Happ. He wanted the doing done slow. He covered her and fumbled about and got himself underway.
Biddie turned her head and closed her eyes and patted at the hair that concealed the birthmark.
Sparrow moved her hand away and slid his fingers into that lush hair and pushed it back and he began to kiss the birthmark on Biddie Happ’s forehead. He reckoned Biddie would know for sure that he loved her if he kissed her birthmark and, if she knew he loved her, well then she might love him back and if she loved him back his life would surely be transformed in ways he could hardly imagine. He could work his patch, harvest a good crop of wheat, get credit at the store, pay his debts and never have to risk the savages.
‘Don’t do that,’ she said, but Sparrow did not stop. ‘Don’t you kiss me there,’ she said, but Sparrow kept on. He began to kiss her eyelid, the purple one. ‘Don’t do that,’ she said again and she punched him in the head with a closed fist, knuckles, and set her hair back to the way she liked it.
Sparrow was shocked. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘I don’t want you to kiss me there, not there . . . not anywhere.’
Sparrow wondered if she let Reuben Peskett kiss her there, or somewhere, or anywhere. He daren’t ask, lest she hit him again. The desire had departed his nethers entirely. He was limp as old rope.
Biddie could sense that. She worried she might have lost a customer. ‘Come on now,’ she said with a voice sweet as syrup, ‘you ratchet up that little cannon o’ yours and fire your best shot.’
But it was too late. She’d taken the starch right out of him.
That seemed to offend her too, which only made him unhappier. She was never going to come and live with him on his patch. He was certain she would go off with Reuben Peskett, who’d wallop her as ready as kiss her. Certain, too, that he’d made the best decision when he committed himself to Griffin Pinney. Better to go with Griffin than with Mort. Mort’s companion was dead and Mort might be dead too, whereas Griffin surely knew the way, and Griffin had a compact with the savages.
‘You shouldn’t try to be so nice,’ said Biddie. That puzzled Sparrow severely but something inside him prevented further inquiry into the mystery of niceness being so unwelcome in the vicinity of Biddie Happ.
‘Seems I’ve pricked your bubble. You might need a splint for that.’ She flicked her fingers in the vicinity of his pizzle and she gave him a big smile, hoping to restore the occasion to its purpose.
But it was too late. He tried to focus on his nethers. He tried to think it up. That wasn’t going to work and he knew it. ‘I’m going now,’ he said. He was thinking there might be some advantage in going at that moment. Biddie might reflect on her hard words and the fact that she punched him in the head. She might regret both words and punch. She might begin to understand there was nothing wrong with nice, that nice was a lot better than a black eye or a crooked nose or a fat lip.
‘Come back soon,’ she said, and she patted him on the arse, this time through his britches. Her voice was tender and this time Sparrow was sure he heard something special in her words. Perhaps he might come back one more time.
Outside he found Bet Pepper on the porch, settled in her chair. ‘She’s going to concubine with Peskett, I just know it,’ said Sparrow.
‘Sit yourself down and stop fixin’ on your own damn misery. I can tell you about misery if you really want to fix on misery, put you in the shade,’ said Bet.
Sparrow sat on a stump stool by the door. The two of them were silent for a little while, after which Bet heaved quite a sigh and scratched at her forehead like she was scratching up a pearl of wisdom. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘misery shared is misery tempered I suppose, you best get it out and I don’t mean your pizzle.’
There was such a tired I’ve heard it all before ring to Bet’s words that Sparrow felt somewhat unmanned. He felt his head heat up and his cheeks redden. He did not reply.
They could hear Biddie rummaging within.
‘She’s not my chattel, Marty. She may concubine with whom she pleases if she’s fool enough,’ said Bet, finally.
‘I know.’
‘It happens.’
Bet grunted as she shifted in her chair and glanced again at Sparrow’s strange eyes, those yellowy whites, and the faint pocking on the skin all about his face. She’d once asked him if it was the small pox and he said no and offered nothing more, so it was still a condition without a name.
She saw a small boat sail into view, a lateen-rigged dhow making its way upriver with a fluky nor’ easter in the sail.
On the perimeter of her vision Sparrow was something akin to a beetle. His sadness was the pathetic kind she had seen in many a smitten man. She shaped her hands around her eyes, the better to watch the dhow. ‘Marty, you fix on your own misery, what you gunna be?’
‘Miserable I suppose,’ he said.
Bet smacked her hands together. ‘Quod erat demonstrandum.’
Sparrow did not care to know what that meant. His thoughts were all ajumble, flitting from one thing to another, from birthmark to wick to flame, from worm to axe to dog to gaolhouse to gibbet to the poor hens, to the fastness and the village embosomed on the other side. To the women, dancing, and so on.
He sat there in a state of considerable bewilderment, his pictorial mind in a whirl.
He wished he hadn’t kissed Biddie on her birthmark. Somehow he should have found the enthusiasm to have another go in a somewhat more orthodox fashion. He wished he’d not made her angry, his own, lovelorn behaviour driving her into the arms of that damned old squaddie.
The helmsman on the dhow wore a dark blue knit cap, tight fitted on the brow but loose on top. ‘That’s Rupert Chaseling,’ said Bet. She studied the rigging. ‘That sail’s in bad tack.’
Chaseling was shouting at them as the dhow grounded by the duckboards at the foot of the switchback path. ‘I got Thyne here, butchered,’ he yelled.
Bet and Sparrow got to their feet. What appeared to be a body lay along the line of the keel, wrapped tight in blood-stained hessian.
Chaseling slumped onto the stern board and put his head in his hands, his fingertips on the fringe of the knit cap. He had a wad of wet cloth in one hand. He trailed it in the river and then he bunched it up, s
queezing, and held it to his nose.
Bet and Sparrow hurried down the path to the dhow.
‘I must o’ tacked a thousand times,’ said Chaseling, pulling at his chin plait.
Sparrow wondered why an Englishman would choose to wear his chin like a Chinaman but now was not the right time to ask. ‘Thyne?’ he said.
‘Thyne, yes, violated, massacred, done to death.’ Chaseling put the wet wad to his bleeding nose.
Sparrow stepped into the shallows and gripped the gunnel. He leant into the boat, close to the shape in the hessian. He thought he might faint if it moved. ‘Massacred?’
‘Go get the captain,’ said Chaseling, but Sparrow was not about to do that, nor Bet.
The two men took hold of the corpse and they carried the lumpy thing up the path to Dr Woody’s cottage. The doctor’s horse and gig were there, his boy Jug fixing the tether weight.
The doctor emerged as Henry Kettle arrived followed by Mackie and others drawn by the swift circulation of the news.
Inside there was hardly room to move. Someone bumped the sideboard and the specimen jars shuddered and clattered and the slender bookshelf swayed.
They laid the shrouded corpse on Dr Woody’s surgical bench.
Woody was struggling with the knots. Reuben Peskett got them undone and folded back the canvas from head to toe.
‘Jesus wept,’ said Kettle.
Thyne Kunkle was black and blue from the blows of the savages’ waddies. His scalp was cracked open, his battered face was covered in dried blood, and there was a brutal wound in the vicinity of his private parts, the irregular work of a small axe.
‘I thought them finished,’ said Woody.
‘Not quite,’ said Mackie.
‘I brung him as I found him, for all to see the barbarous inhumanity,’ said Chaseling.
‘They do not forget,’ said Mackie. The shock had passed and he was looking carefully at the axe wound in Thyne’s groin.
‘You would apologise for this monstrous savagery?’ said Kettle.
‘I would say vengeance, like thirst, is common to us all.’
The gathering understood the allusion to a most infamous episode when Kunkle had kept a black girl chained to a hollow tree on the lower Branch, for the occasional gratification of a sensuality most brutal and unmanly.
‘The honour of women has loosed the depravity of many a Briton,’ said Woody.
‘What do savages know of honour?’ said Kettle.
‘No less than Kunkle.’ The doctor pressed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and held up a magnifying glass and peered into the cavity in Kunkle’s skull.
‘You may depend, this will not pass with impunity,’ said Kettle.
Dr Woody ceased his examination of the brain matter and stood straight as he could. His back hurt. He shifted his weight, a hand on Sparrow’s shoulder. He saw his own boy, Jug, at the window, peering in.
‘I swear you’d pat a mangy dog,’ said Kettle.
Woody was weighing whether or not to pursue his difference with Kettle on the matter of the savages. He felt inclined to persist. ‘Why did they not kill Shug, you tell me that?’
‘How in God’s name would I know?’
‘Shug never done them harm, that’s why. I dare say their own sense of honour has an element of discrimination.’
‘They did not kill Shug because Caleb was there, that’s the truth of it. That’s the one and only reason, which makes you, sir, the embodiment of a most foolish liberality.’
‘Enough, gentlemen,’ said Mackie.
‘No damn expiree tells me enough. I’ll say when enough is enough,’ said Kettle.
Woody stepped between his friend and the captain. ‘We have a common cause here, let’s remember that,’ he said, but Kettle was not inclined to be mollified.
‘I do not approve of former felons rising to prominence in the constabulary. Makes of us a laughing stock,’ he said.
‘We know your thoughts on that matter, Henry,’ said Woody. He turned to Chaseling, hastening to unfix the tone. ‘Where is the widow Kunkle?’
‘I left her, babe’n all, with Joe Franks. I’d still be on the water . . .’
‘She’s in good hands then,’ said Woody.
‘Oh yes sir, he’s a good man Joe, but he’s mighty rickety,’ said Chaseling.
‘She’s in the hands of the man who caused this with his damn placation,’ said Kettle. ‘I tell you now, we turn them into porch monkeys they’ll be on the porch, every time you turn around.’
Woody had heard enough. He rapped the benchtop beside Kunkle’s battered skull. ‘This is a man who shot them the way you might shoot ducks on a pond and worse, a case you may recall,’ he said.
‘Not the point!’ said Kettle. ‘The point is fear and fear alone inhibits their natural-born inclination to depravity. Every violation argues a depravity of mind that renders the savage obnoxious to society, that much I know.’
‘Least we got one,’ said Sparrow. He had taken to a chair in the corner by the books and the specimen jars, the better to study Reuben Peskett on the sly.
Heads turned. ‘One what?’
‘A society!’
‘Martin, you are in way over your head,’ said Woody.
Sparrow had a book in his hand, the word Micrographia on the tattered spine. Woody took it from him. Put it back on the shelf. Mackie stepped close and spoke softly. ‘Yet again, on your arse, idling the hours,’ he said.
Kettle pointed at the corpse. ‘I want this old soldier avenged. The sooner they bend to our will the better for them and us.’
‘I’ll take a hunting party. I’ll make them bend,’ said Peskett.
‘They’ll be days up the Branch, such is their velocity,’ said Mackie.
Kettle took two pennies from his pocket and he placed them upon the blank dark eyes of the deceased. ‘You will not dissect this man.’
‘As you wish,’ said Dr Woody.
‘He is not some useless felon, some nameless cadaver to be carved up for your morbid curiosity. He is one of us, the corps, do I make myself clear?’
‘Well then he’s yours, take him, I don’t want him,’ said Woody.
21
Later that day soldiers under orders from Captain Kettle took the body of Thyne Kunkle for burial.
The doctor was disappointed not to have Thyne’s corpse to slice and probe, for Thyne’s skull was conveniently rent apart and Woody’s foremost interest in the anatomical sphere was the brain: ‘With the study of the brain we can unlock the secret places of Man’s mind,’ he would say, ‘and look into the living and breathing chapel of the deity.’
But Dr Woody was not long without a cadaver, for the very next day he acquired the detached head and the body of Shug McCafferty.
He laid Shug’s head in a chiseled recess in the benchtop and proceeded to saw off the calvaria, otherwise known as the skullcap. Then he set the head upright and began to examine the brain, probing with a chopstick and peering at the brain matter through a magnifying glass.
He was entirely focused when he heard someone tugging at the door and saw it was Agnes Archambault. Agnes had acquired her exotic surname when she married a French vigneron whom the governor had brought to New South Wales to teach vine growing to the colonists. Their assigned felon was Shug McCafferty, his labour to prepare and maintain the ground for the vines. But the venture was a disaster and Monsieur Archambault was returned to France with a bad report, while Agnes and Shug stayed on the failed farm and thereby hangs a tale – for Shug was well enough behaved when monsieur was on hand, but he was a different man when Agnes was alone.
‘I hear he’s here and if he’s here I want to see him, here and now.’ She was staring at Shug’s head and Shug, it seemed, was staring back.
‘Why?’ said Dr Woody, having noted the belligerent tone.
‘Because I have something to say to him.’
‘Agnes, he’s dead.’
‘Which is exactly why I am here.’ She wrapped her a
rms about herself and began to laugh heartily, staring at Shug’s head. She crossed the room and before the doctor could blink she took hold of Shug by the ears, lifted the head and slammed it down on the bench.
Dr Woody threw his hands in the air. ‘Agnes!’ He was fixed as a hinge post, shocked and appalled by this most unexpected behaviour.
Agnes held onto the ears and bent low and spoke to Shug’s dead face. ‘You will never misuse me again,’ she said in a whisper. Then she straightened and back-handed the head off the bench, her knuckles sounding on the bone.
Woody hurried after the head and picked it off the floor. He gathered his composure, and his authority. ‘Agnes. I am going to put this man’s skull back on my surgical bench and there it will stay, unmolested, and I will continue my examination, all the way down to the arterial anastomosis.’
‘I’ll tell you what you’ll find deep in there, you’ll find the dirty thoughts of a dirty man is what you’ll find.’
‘Agnes, don’t tell me what I will find.’
The woman seemed to have cooled. ‘I done what I came to do,’ she said.
‘It is a relief to hear that!’ said Woody.
Agnes was about to leave when an odd bod appeared at the door accompanied by a Cape mule that seemed intent upon stepping inside the cabin. Agnes guessed who it was and Woody knew for certain. ‘Hello Mr Catley,’ he said.
The man smacked the mule on the nose with the back of his hand and then he took the mule by the throat latch on the halter and bent forward and pressed his arse into the mule’s chest, compelling the creature to retreat. ‘This mule thinks we’re married. How are you, Thomas?’ said Catley.
Agnes had noticed the mule was decked out with a pack saddle and a rump harness laden with wicker baskets and panniers of canvas and leather. She knew this man by reputation and what she knew was entirely consistent with what was at the door – a stocky man, built strong, decked in a faded velvet vest with many little pockets over a voluminous white shirt, knee-length britches and thick leather sandals and between the britches and the sandals the most enormous calves she had ever seen. He carried an eyepiece on a lanyard around his neck and small pouches on pull strings hung from his belt and there was an everlasting in a buttonhole on his vest, tiny white petals.
The Making of Martin Sparrow Page 11
