The Making of Martin Sparrow

by Peter Cochrane

  ‘I heard there’s a river of the first magnitude, runs west, and there’s fertile bottoms far as you can see, a most arresting spectacle,’ said Peachey.

  ‘What else you hear?’

  ‘He said he said, Seamus, he said, I could scarcely resolve to leave the eminence I stood upon, such was the grandness of the tracts below, and had it not been for the overpowering rays of the midday sun affecting my bowels, as they frequently do, I might still be there . . . transfixed in wonderment.’

  ‘Did he tell you there’s a village?’

  ‘He did. He says the bolters got a village; says it’s embosomed at the foot of the mountains.’

  ‘I heard that too.’

  It occurred to Sparrow that he and Peachey had been talking for quite some time. The imminent sun was lighting the timber on the forested rim to the east, the breeze turning dew-soaked leaves that sparkled in the light. Sparrow feared the boy might not come. If the boy did not come, they would have to steal a boat. That complicated the day beyond reckoning.

  ‘You know there’s women over there?’ said Peachey.

  ‘I know. Griffin says they fish in the shallows and they salt the fish and trade with the savages, they even hunt with them, and some of them, the women, live on islands in the river, it’s that big.’

  ‘Well butter my backside, is that what he said?’ said Peachey.

  ‘That’s what he said,’ said Sparrow, though he was not sure that Pinney had in fact said all that, exactly.

  Peachey appeared at first delighted at the thought of women in the fishing way, and then sad at the thought of something else. ‘First we gotta cross this damn river.’

  ‘I got a boat coming.’

  ‘I was hoping you’d say that.’

  ‘The Woody boy, his boat.’

  ‘What does he know?’

  ‘Nothing, ’cept we’re going fishing.’

  ‘Are we now.’

  ‘He’s a good boy, he must not be misused or hurt.’

  They settled at Sparrow’s little table, munching on the mouldy corn.

  ‘Why would I hurt that boy? Why, his father is the only decent magistrate we’ve ever had. Up to him and poor old Shug’d still be with us, albeit on the shovel in some damn washaway.’

  ‘A good man, yes.’

  ‘A tolerable apothecary.’

  ‘That too.’

  They heard the sound of boots scuffing in the dirt and there was a rapping on an upright and the boy’s voice: ‘Hello Mr Sparrow.’

  Jug Woody was wet to the shins from wading and he carried a small bag of scraps for bait. He looked at Peachey and his expression changed to puzzlement.

  ‘This is Mr Peachey, from the tavern by the bridge,’ said Sparrow.

  ‘You comin’ fishin’?’ said the boy.

  ‘We ain’t goin’ fishin’,’ said Peachey.

  Sparrow wished Peachey had not said that. He had thought the best line was that of least resistance so he planned to mislead the boy at least until they were midstream. ‘We want you to take us across the river,’ he confessed.

  ‘What’s in that pouch?’ said Peachey.

  ‘That’s the bait,’ said the boy. ‘I won’t leave it in the boat, damn crows.’ He saw the haversack on the table beside Sparrow’s salvaged leather costrel. ‘You ain’t about to bolt, are you?’

  ‘We just want to ramble a little bit,’ said Sparrow, ‘such is the beauty of these parts.’

  ‘I’ll take you across the creek, you can ramble there if you want,’ said the boy.

  ‘No point ramblin’ on the frontages, that just ain’t ramblin’. We seek the sublime,’ said Peachey.

  ‘I’m not allowed across the river, my brother neither.’

  Sparrow didn’t know what to say, but Peachey did. ‘You take us across that river we’ll let you have the pup.’

  The boy eyed the pup capering at Sparrow’s feet. ‘He’s hardly a pup anymore, he’s grown. Papa says the captain leaves them on the teats way too long, says that litter wore the old bitch right out.’

  ‘You can put things right, take him back to Kettle if you want,’ said Peachey. ‘He might give him to you, he’s a bit runty that pup.’

  ‘He might at that.’ Jug squatted down by the pup and began to pet him and talk to him and the dog licked his face and made the boy laugh.

  ‘So, you’ll take us across?’

  The boy hesitated. ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s another secret, you’ll have to keep it,’ said Sparrow.

  ‘Why is it a secret?’

  Sparrow was lost for an answer. Peachey said nothing.

  ‘How you goin’ta get back?’

  ‘We’ll ramble away till we see the trading scow, give old Guthrie a hoy,’ said Sparrow. His throat was awfully dry. A considerable thirst had snuck up on him. He drank from the leaky leather costrel. Then he took a gourd from the water bucket and filled the costrel once again.

  He felt bad, deceiving the boy. He had a few small coins in a biscuit jar, coins for which he had no further use since the savages had no interest in currency and exchange on the other side was likely all barter, and anyway, his haversack was heavy enough. He tipped up the jar and the coins came to hand and he took the boy’s hand and fed the coins into his palm and he tried to look him in the eye. ‘Not much but you can have them, for the rental.’

  ‘I’d rather you teach me to weave them wicker traps,’ said the boy.

  ‘That will have to wait,’ said Sparrow.

  They loaded into the little boat, dog and haversacks and fishing poles and bait pouch and all, and what was left of the ebb tide pulled them to the mouth of Cattai Creek and thence into the river and the boy rowed across the tide as they drifted downstream with Peachey and Sparrow on the back board and the dog perched on its hind legs, forepaws on the gunnel, watching the water as if transfixed in wonderment.

  Words came to Sparrow, from where he could not recall: in gallant trim the gilded vessel goes, youth on the prow and pleasure at the helm. He liked those words. There was more to that verse but the more was lost to his memory.

  There were baitfish jumping in the shallows and the dog was whining and stepping from one hind leg to the other as they reached midstream, the boy pulling hard. Sparrow was impressed. He seemed a lot stronger than first impressions had ever suggested. Peachey was impressed too. ‘A formidable oarsman, who’d have guessed,’ he said.

  The boy smiled.

  Not a one of them was ready for what happened. The baitfish stirred. An entire shoal took flight and shot like arrows into the deep, going with the tide, their flight so close to their vessel the dog could not contain himself. He leapt overboard and paddled in pursuit. Jug did not hesitate. ‘I’ll get him,’ he said and he lunged for the dog and tipped in. ‘Watch that boy,’ said Peachey and he pivoted with unforeseen agility and took to the oars, rowing hard while Sparrow watched the boy swimming in much the same fashion as the dog, as boy and dog washed downstream.

  ‘Please no!’ said Sparrow.

  ‘What?’ said Peachey.

  Sparrow had seen a dark fin surface and cut through the water towards the boy. Now the fin disappeared. He held his breath, his hand to his mouth. He had forgotten about the dog. The waters erupted as if blown by some volcanic force. The vertical mass of the bull shark hit the boy from below and lifted him clear up. They crashed down into a broil of pitted froth, and the spray came down upon them like rain. The bull shark was frenzied, tearing at the boy’s thigh. Sparrow saw torn cloth and shreds of pink and bloodied flesh. He saw the churning waters colour to mulberry, he saw the monster thrashing, and then he saw it no more.

  The bull shark disappeared into the depths, leaving the torso bobbing, the small agonised face, the lank blond hair afloat in the turbulence in a welter of blood and viscera. The waters settled and the ebb tide took the blood and guts away.

  Peachey had abandoned the oars. He saw the boy rocking ever so gently on the waters, as if cradled by some melancholy spirit wi
th naught but the agency to coddle and console. The boat drifted close, close enough for Peachey to grab the boy’s arm and his shredded shirt and pull the remains onto the gunnel and there they studied the ruin: the startled eyes, the lips in motion but not a word, the savaged innards, the right leg gone, torn from the socket.

  They could hear the quick breaths sucking for life and Peachey felt the boy shudder and then the breath was heard no more. The slender arm coloured to bone grey as the last of the blood departed the extremities. The boy was dead.

  ‘It just happened, it just . . .’ said Sparrow.

  ‘O’ course it happened . . . if it didn’t happen it wouldn’t a happened,’ said Peachey.

  ‘Oh dear Lord, what have we done?’

  ‘We have to bury him or someone will find him, washed up.’

  He had let the boy’s lower half, what was left of it, slip back into the water. He beckoned Sparrow to take the boy’s wrist but Sparrow recoiled. ‘I don’t want that,’ he said.

  ‘You take him this minute or you’ll hang or worse, they’ll hang you bound in chains,’ said Peachey.

  Sparrow reached out and took hold of the boy’s wrist. He felt shaky and weak and the boy, trailing in the water, seemed heavy as a blacksmith’s anvil, the fingers like some strange, fleshy succulent.

  Peachey was braking with the one oar and rowing with the other and then he was rowing hard for the west bank. ‘Fuck me but we need that dog,’ he said.

  Sparrow was staring at the water sloshing on the keel, trying not to look at the boy. He felt his eyes tear up. He was thinking about Biddie. He wished he’d never ever considered bolting for the other side even if there was a village, even if that village was embosomed in a beautiful spot by a big river at the foot of the mountains and the living entirely un-put-upon.

  He looked to the shore as the keel skimmed onto the mud. ‘This is Monty Bushell’s patch, we can’t bury him here.’

  Peachey looked about as if he was entirely surprised. ‘Monty Bushell?’

  ‘Yes, don’t you know downriver?’

  ‘I’m a damn taverner on South Creek, why would I know the river this far down.’

  ‘You’re not really a taverner. You’re a dependant, on the feme sole.’

  Peachey stared. ‘Make you happy that, say that, remind me?’

  ‘No, I just . . .’

  ‘Don’t talk about that.’

  Sparrow was silent for a while. Peachey seemed so angry. He wondered if Peachey thought he was to blame for the boy, which he knew was not fair. It just happened. ‘We cannot bury him here,’ he said.

  Peachey scanned the bank of the river. ‘One good thing.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We keep the boat. Take it all the way to Pig Creek, sink it there.’

  ‘And the boy?’

  ‘We have to find a big rock, Marty. Weight him down and bury him at sea, so to speak.’ He was pointing at the river.

  Sparrow did not reply. Peachey was a different being altogether in the absence of Winifred. In fact, in the absence of Winifred, it seemed to Sparrow that Peachey was just like Winifred. He wanted to blame Peachey for the entire disaster but the more he thought about it the more he was glad Peachey had come along. Else he might be sitting here in the mud with the remains of the boy, alone. But then he thought otherwise. Then he thought if Peachey had not come along he could not have promised the dog to the boy and then the boy might not have lunged for the dog and by now Jug would be safely on his way home. And poor Mrs Woody, doomed now to eke out her life in the weeping world, and the good doctor upon his rounds, miserable, a life sentence.

  Peachey was examining the boat. ‘The mooring rope will do the job, sure as hell we won’t need that.’

  Sparrow could hardly bear to look at the boy, but he did. The eyes were open, sightless, indifferent to the blue sky above; the gut exposed, the viscera trailing in the mud, the ravaged hip socket speckled with grit and gore.

  They hauled the boat and the boy into a patch of yard-high river reeds. They sheltered from the hot sun beneath the awry canopy of an old she-oak bent low by the flood, the root ball half torn from the ground. They watched, still and silent, as the dark-ribbed government ketch slipped by, the sails set near to square for the light southerly.

  ‘That was close, least somethin’ went right,’ said Peachey.

  ‘That’s Guthrie, Sydney bound,’ said Sparrow.

  ‘I know who the fuck it is.’

  ‘If this wind don’t pick up he’ll have to lay over.’

  ‘They lay over they might see us.’

  ‘Further down?’

  ‘Where else but further down!’

  Sparrow was unreservedly thirsty. He drank from the costrel, tipping it for the last of the contents. Peachey snatched it from him and finished off the dregs. ‘If you’d a waxed it proper it wouldn’t leak.’

  ‘I didn’t have wax to spare. I feel awful.’

  ‘You look awful.’

  Peachey lay down and turned on his side, his back to Sparrow. He fell asleep in no time at all, but Sparrow could not sleep. Every minute seemed like an hour and every hour seemed like a day, and so the time went by, and Sparrow lay there, looking up at the sky, watching the flood tide, fanning the flies and worrying about bull ants, leeches and snakes. Most of all he worried about the pup, for the pup was gone. He lay there listening to the sounds of the tide and the jumping fish and the birds, and watching the sea hawks circling into view, circling the fringes of the river, searching for meat.

  He worried more about snakes than he did about bull ants. Every rustle in the reedy grass stirred his blood. He scrutinised his surrounds with a regularity that kept him even wider awake than he might otherwise have been. Snakes were too much like eels.

  Sparrow felt the long, thin line of scab on the inside of his arm; recalled the crows in that coffin, the hen coop and the dead hens massed within. And Cuff’s advice. A wise man does not burn his bridges till he knows he can part the waters. He stared at the boy, pale as tripe, dead on the bank. And the waters, quietly flowing, indifferent to all time and all occasion. ‘I can’t part nothin’,’ he whispered.

  The sun was almost gone when the flood tide was peaking. Peachey awoke and sat with Sparrow and they watched the rose-petal pink of the twilight sky fade to grey. The cloud shadows on the silken flow turned from pink to black, every one of them shimmering into the shape of a shark fin, then running, like ink, into some other form, the shape of something else, some other monster from those murky depths.

  ‘I never heard of a bull shark this far up,’ said Sparrow.

  ‘Well, you know what they say about never,’ said Peachey.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s never till it happens.’

  ‘Didn’t know they was even true, I thought maybe they was a story for the children, keep ’em in the shallows.’

  ‘Like the duckbill, just a yarn?’

  ‘Oh but the duckbill is true, I seen the one Mr Catley hung up on the store porch one time. Hung it on a hog-hook.’

  ‘Noooo.’

  ‘Yes.’

  28

  Late in the afternoon the wagoner Dudley Boggitt walked into the Hive with two copies of the Sydney Gazette in his hand.

  ‘Hey ho, the wind and the rain, what news?’ said Cuff.

  The wagoner put his hands on the small of his back and arched himself. ‘The governor, the gout’s got him again; he’s a ruin, I’m a ruin.’

  ‘That ain’t news, that’s scuttlebutt,’ said Sam.

  ‘It’s suffering is what it is, brings tears to the poor man’s eyes,’ said Boggitt.

  ‘That’s just what we need, a blubberin’ governor,’ said Cuff.

  Boggitt arched his back once more and sat himself down. ‘As gout is to the patrician so rheumatism is the distemper of the coachman. Seems I’m destined to shake to death.’

  ‘You’re no coachman, that wagon’s no more than a rickety old dray,’ said Cuff.

  �
�Muggy as hell out there, where’s that damn nor’-easter when you need it,’ said Boggitt. He handed the newspapers to Mackie and Mackie laid them on the counter, smoothed them with his palm and set to reading the government orders beneath the masthead.

  ‘The weather’s like people, Dud, unreliable. Ain’t that right, Gudgeon?’ said Cuff.

  Gudgeon was chewing on a mouthful of Atilio’s flatbread layered with a preserve that was sufficiently sour to complement his mood. He did not reply.

  Enter Fish, with maize bread on a tray. Gudgeon glanced at Cuff and then took hold of Fish’s arm and pulled him close. ‘You tell that cook to keep to his pots and pans.’

  ‘What’s that mean?’ said Fish.

  ‘He wants to touch her he can buy her, tomorrow. You tell him.’

  ‘She’s been sick, he tended her needs.’

  ‘You tell him to leave her needs alone.’

  Sam intervened. ‘You best let go of Mr Fish right now.’

  ‘You button your lip,’ said Gudgeon. The Parsonage twins looked at Sam then at Gudgeon and they smiled, as one.

  Sam took hold of his truss straps and adjusted the padding on the bulge Dr Woody said was a hernia. He planted both palms on the counter. ‘Let him go.’

  Mackie flipped the Gazette to the shipping news on the back page.

  Gudgeon let go of Fish and Fish straightened up and fiddled with his collar. He stepped away, a safe distance. ‘He won’t touch her and he won’t buy her neither,’ he said.

  ‘Gudgeon, you’ll have your day but it ain’t today, it’s tomorrow,’ said Cuff. He was seated at the doctor’s regular table, by the window near the tavern door, writing a letter with a small wooden implement of some sort, an implement that required neither quill nor ink. He resumed his task.

  ‘What is that?’ said Fish.

  ‘I reckon it’s charcoal,’ said Dan Sprodd.

  ‘It’s a invention,’ said Sam.

  Cuff raised it up for all to see. ‘It’s a stick o’ graphite bound between two splints. It’s called a pen-cil and mark me boys, it’s the future. This one off a Nantucket whaler.’

  ‘Americans, ever meddlesome with our ways!’ said Fish.