The Making of Martin Sparrow

by Peter Cochrane

  ‘Wrong,’ said Cuff. ‘It was the English what was meddlesome. All the Americans ever wanted was the old arrangements, run their own affairs, which they had done for the better part of a hundred years, maybe more I don’t know, so, let’s be clear about meddlesome, it was the English decided to get meddlesome.’

  ‘I thought we were talking about a pen-cil,’ said Sprodd.

  ‘We are that, and by the way it’s from Glasgow, not America. The Scots invented it ’cause they like words more than anyone and they like numbers even better, especially with a pound sign in front of them, ain’t that right Alister? ’

  Mackie did not shift his eyes from the Gazette, but the trade was entertained. They liked it when Cuff got going, spicing the conversation with a little dose of mockery. They liked to hear Cuff talk because he knew a lot about a lot of things, and they liked to hear his jokes and they especially liked it when he ribbed the chief constable and made him scowl.

  Cuff knew his audience wanted more. ‘Know how to wake up a Scotsman boys?’

  ‘No,’ said Sprodd, like it was urgent.

  ‘Wave a penny under his nose.’ Cuff clicked his fingers. ‘He’ll come round just like that.’

  ‘I met a man once,’ said Sam, ‘told me he bought his wife for a bottle of ale and a glass jar full of pennies.’

  ‘How big was the jar?’ said Nimrod Parsonage.

  ‘I did not inquire,’ said Sam.

  The conversation turned to variation in the magnitude of glass jars. Nimrod Parsonage said, ‘If it was one of them big jars it might have been a poor bargain, depending of course on the charms of the woman, the diligence of her affections and so on.’

  ‘That’s a lot of pennies, one of them big jars,’ said Crispin.

  ‘That is my point entirely. She’d want to be generous with her bounties.’

  Mackie crossed to Gudgeon’s table and sat himself down, pulled his chair close. ‘The custom is an agreed third party,’ he said.

  ‘We are going to auction,’ said Gudgeon.

  ‘It is customary for the parties to agree to the transaction. All parties to the exchange.’

  ‘That is not my custom.’ Gudgeon straightened in his chair, sat up tall.

  Mackie spoke softly. ‘This transaction will follow our custom as custom requires.’

  ‘No. The auction will decide.’

  ‘If you, and she, do not have an arrangement with a third party, then the girl must have a right of refusal and otherwise confirm publicly that she is agreeable to the exchange.’

  Gudgeon laughed. ‘You would defy the market.’

  ‘I will see the market bow to custom, as we know it in the old country and as we have it here.’

  ‘You will see stars, is what you’ll see, if you persist,’ said Gudgeon.

  Sam was listening, every word. He grabbed a cudgel from some nook beneath the counter and slammed it down. ‘You want stars Gudgeon, I’m your man,’ he said.

  She had rested much of the day and she was hungry all of a sudden.

  Atilio put together a plate, a slice of maize bread and a spread of lard, a boiled potato and a half mug of small beer and she wolfed it down like it was her first meal in days. She was sipping on the small beer when Mackie came in with the seal-fur pelt in hand. He set the pelt on the bench. ‘I have sent for a good man who needs a wife.’

  ‘Will I have a say?’

  ‘As custom requires you will have a say, and I will have the cure.’

  The girl smiled. ‘This too is business?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Mackie listened as the girl recounted the detail of the curing process. She looked drawn and tired but her memory was sharp, good on the particulars.

  ‘Are you certain about the wash?’ he said.

  ‘As to the mix, yes.’

  ‘Who else knows of the cure?’

  ‘Outside this tavern no one, Jonas saw to that.’

  Mackie rested his elbow on the table and ran his thumb along his jaw. ‘Soft soap and pearl ash?’

  ‘In that measure, yes, and the water as warm as your hand will stand and the soft fur perfectly retained in the combing out.’

  Mackie took a deep breath and the girl heard the gurgle in his chest. ‘I’ll see you right.’

  ‘Not a word to Jonas, please.’

  ‘Jonas has gone. He’s bound for Sydney Town on Guthrie’s ketch.’

  ‘He’ll do his business there, with the cure.’

  ‘No he will not.’ Mackie seemed entirely sure of himself.

  ‘No?’

  Mackie leaned forward and spoke softly. ‘No. He will not.’

  ‘I am not sorry.’

  ‘Nor I.’

  She nodded. ‘Will you see me clear of Gudgeon?’

  ‘Yes.’ Mackie handed the pelt to the girl as he stood to take his leave. ‘There’s not a hard bristle in it.’

  ‘I know, I cured it,’ she said.

  As Mackie departed Fish hurried in, slid into the chair opposite the girl.

  ‘Just so you know. He sent for Joe Franks at the Branch. Says Joe needs a wife,’ said Fish. ‘He’s a old man lives quiet on the Branch. Even the savages like him.’

  ‘Like him?’

  ‘So I hear.’

  ‘Would he share me round?’

  ‘Joe won’t treat you bad.’

  ‘Does he still have his teeth? I’ve had my fill of gummy tosspots coverin’ me.’

  Fish’s lips stopped moving. ‘Did they do you regular, that lot?’

  ‘You are a one for the particulars.’

  ‘Did they hurt you?’

  ‘They took me as occasionally as they took one another.’

  ‘Well, they better not do that here. As for Joe, he’s straight as a rule and he’s no tosspot neither, he’s sworn off it.’

  At that moment Gudgeon walked in.

  Fish abandoned the chair and stepped away.

  Atilio straightened up, put his fists on his hips. Fish thought of the old saying, you can have but one bull in the yard.

  Gudgeon picked up the seal fur and waggled the fur at the girl.

  ‘He gave that to me,’ she said. She snatched at the fur but Gudgeon was too quick.

  ‘I will have none of your fits and spasms on parade, you understand me?’

  ‘That is my pelt now.’

  ‘You turn up them eyes and wriggle round like a damn seal and I’ll skin you like a damn seal.’ He took her by the throat with one hand and pushed the pelt into her face so hard the girl could hardly breathe.

  Atilio crossed to the fireplace and picked up the fire tongs. He turned and cracked them down upon the sealer’s skull and Gudgeon sunk to the floor. Blood was leaking from his head.

  ‘You killed him,’ said Fish.

  ‘I don’t care,’ said Atilio.

  The cook dragged Gudgeon along the hallway and sat him down in the tavern. Nimrod Parsonage said, ‘He better not be dead, he won’t like that.’

  Sam sent Fish for the doctor and Cuff, in the interim, took charge of medical matters. He put a wad of brown cloth, soaking wet, on the bloody wound on Gudgeon’s skull and he lifted the man’s eyelid and saw nothing to indicate a stirring mind. Beads of water ran down Gudgeon’s forehead and some ran into the corner of his eyes and down his face and one bead ran all the way to the end of his nose and hung there, poised, but the big sealer did not stir.

  When the doctor arrived he addressed the entire assembly: ‘My boy’s missing, has anyone seen my boy?’

  ‘Boys will do that,’ said Cuff.

  ‘They will,’ said Sprodd.

  ‘Not this boy,’ said Woody. He lifted the wet cloth and looked at the wound. He lifted Gudgeon’s eyelid and stared into the blankness. He said nothing.

  He crossed to his regular table by the front window but he did not sit down. He leant forward, fists planted on the table, and he peered out the window, first left, then right, searching the square. ‘I need help,’ he said.

  ‘We’ll find him
,’ said Sprodd.

  ‘His little boat’s gone,’ said Woody.

  ‘We’ll find him, Thomas,’ said Cuff.

  ‘He was supposed to be fishing . . . with that n’er-do-well Sparrow.’

  ‘Sparrow wouldn’t hurt a fly,’ said Cuff. He joined the doctor at the window, hoping to see the boy, but what he saw was the Reverend Abbott in full flight heading for the tavern. ‘Uh oh, it’s the minister at a gallop.’

  When the Reverend Abbott barrelled through the doorway he was so distracted by the shocking news of the wife sale that he seemed not to notice the stupefied Gudgeon, nor the agitated doctor. He saw the harness and the plaited tether decorated with coloured ribbons on the arm of the barber’s chair. He crossed the tavern floor and picked up the tether and closed his fist upon it and shook that fist as if he was strangling a duck. ‘It’s true then, a woman is to be sold at market, auctioned off to the highest bidder in defiance of everything civilised and godly?’

  Fish had scurried up the stairs to get Mackie and the chief constable was now on the stairhead, silently rehearsing the essentials for the conversation to come. ‘The girl will have a right of refusal,’ he said as he made his way down.

  Gudgeon stirred, his eyes flickering. Abbott stared at him, briefly, but the wounded sealer was of no concern to the minister. ‘This rope would be better employed thrashing the parties to this transaction,’ he said, ‘the girl no exception if she is a willing cog.’ The great collar of fat on his neck was convulsing as if, like some nesting dove, he was about to regurgitate the macerations of his stomach.

  ‘That girl is caught between a rock and a hard place.’

  ‘There is no more wretched, no more gross a violation of decency than the sale of a woman at a beast market.’

  ‘The beasts are scarce just now,’ said Boggitt.

  ‘That’s true, it’s likely a poor turnout,’ said Cuff.

  ‘What is this but wickedness consorting with debauchery, a merger of unclean purpose, to sow adultery ever deeper into the warp and weft of our virtue – even unto its fringes, unto the very wilderness, under the guise of a scandalous perversion of the most solemn ritual occasion.’

  Sam spoke. ‘You bring any hutch rabbits, for market?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the minister.

  ‘That’s good, they’re good eatin’,’ said Sam.

  Abbott turned on Mackie. ‘This, constable, is a pagan thing, a proof if proof is required of the besotted ignorance and brutal feelings that preponderate in the absence of seemly society. A woman on a tether, led about and bartered like a prized cow before the leering assemblage. You must think again constable. This is an infamous transaction, akin to pugilism with nailed boots and metalled gloves or naked racing or carnival gluttony; beastly excess, outside the law of man and God, a violation, a rot in every footing in the house of holy wedlock.’

  Dr Woody was fit to burst. ‘You want no transaction at all? You want her abandoned, prey to every marauder from here to the wastelands? You want licence unvarnished by ritual, free of vows or obligation of any kind, is that what you want?’

  Abbott was about to reply but Mackie intervened. ‘Common law and custom admit of a man selling his wife if he so chooses.’

  ‘So does the Bible!’ said Sprodd, nodding.

  ‘For the good of both parties the transaction will take place in a public manner and the people hereabouts will know the husband, be she abused for no good reason,’ said Mackie.

  ‘Hereabouts! ’ said Abbott. ‘It is my firm belief this rustic habit is by and large confined to the picaresque occupations: bargees, timber getters, hunters, men of considerable mobility, no fixed abode, sealers and sailors, men whose hereabouts is mostly thereabouts. Such people have no care for obligation, they nomad like savages, their women snared in the most transient of arrangements, prey to the corporeal excess of the most debased of appetites. So, tell me constable, what good is hereabouts?’

  ‘She will have a written contract, a copy of her own, and the resident magistrate will hold a copy in perpetuity and the public as witness will be her vindication.’

  Woody smacked the table. ‘You would prefer we cast her to the wind, and the wolves?’

  Abbott would not be moved. ‘I would prefer her dead in the ground,’ he said. He took his leave.

  29

  When the tide finally turned it was dark. Peachey wandered off. ‘I’ll get some ballast,’ he said as he departed. He was away for what Sparrow thought was a long time. He came back weighed down with a sandstone slab and the pup at his heel, all muddied up again and stinky with the smell of the river’s putrilage.

  Sparrow dropped to his knees and the pup cantered to him, high stepping, his tongue lolling, his every movement suggesting complete happiness.

  Peachey put the sandstone slab on the mud. He was puffing hard, bent over, hands on knees. ‘That’s ten pounds of stone if it’s an ounce.’

  The pup licked at Sparrow’s fingers and tried to clamber onto his thighs, his coat all wet. Sparrow searched in his pocket and drew out some crumbs and the dog licked them up, seemingly ravenous.

  Then the dog put his nose to the ground and sniffed his way to the savaged boy, licking at the bloodied wounds. Sparrow leapt up and grabbed him and pulled him away.

  Peachey said: ‘You may as well let him do that. He’s gotta eat and we gotta trade.’

  Sparrow knew that Peachey was right. The pup was their legal tender, so to speak, in the mountains; he was the toll they would pay, that and the short-handled axe; and the handkerchiefs if it came to pass the savages wanted handkerchiefs. Giving up the pup was not a pleasant thought but Sparrow knew it might be necessary so he suffered the thought in uneasy company with his growing affection for the animal.

  He let go and the pup ambled straight for the dead boy. He began to lick at the boy’s entrails and then to eat them, gnashing hard. Sparrow could barely watch but he had to listen. Just once did he glance. He saw the pup had carried away a good yard of gut and he was devouring it the way a game dog might devour a snake, his long legs splayed, his snout to the ground, his whiskers soaked in blood.

  Sparrow watched the river, the sparkle of the starlight on the budding ebb. ‘We have to go.’

  He wished there was another way, but he could not think of one. It seemed a lot more decent to bury the remains of the boy somewhere along the banks of the river but that course was loaded up with peril as both dogs and floods were prone to lift a body from its resting place.

  So they took the boy or what was left of him and roped him to the sandstone slab and lifted their horrible cargo into the boat and pushed off, the boat going with the fresh tide, the farm country slipping by, silhouetted in the night light, first one reach then another, the tide doing most of the work, Sparrow holding the boat on a steady line, the pup short-tethered, Peachey rowing in bursts and resting in between.

  When they reached the stone country Sparrow secured the tiller and the two men stood gingerly and bent over and lifted the boy and the sandstone slab and Peachey counted ‘one, two, three’ and they dropped their heavy burden sideways into the water and it disappeared with hardly a ripple, like a pebble into treacle.

  The two men sat themselves down swiftly. They drifted for a time, not a word. Then Sparrow said what he had to say. ‘You never should have give him that dog.’

  ‘I give him the dog so he’d take us across.’

  ‘That was a lie.’

  ‘What are you, some kind o’ fuckin’ saint?’

  ‘We should say a prayer,’ said Sparrow.

  ‘Too late,’ said Peachey.

  Sparrow swivelled about and looked upriver to where they had dropped the boy into the water. He did not think it was too late to say a prayer. He put the tiller under his arm and put his palms together, the way you do in church. ‘He was a good boy, generous to a fault. Please God take him to your bosom. He did not deserve what happened. I wish he’d never brought me them fish, I wish he’d never come.’
<
br />   ‘You gunna say amen?’ said Peachey.

  ‘I pray God will forgive us. Amen.’

  Peachey heaved a sigh. ‘That’s a good prayer, Marty.’

  The ebb tide was running strong. The pup had tired of the excitement and he was bloated on his feed. He was dry-retching for a time, that awful sound. Then he was curled up against the ribbing, his forepaws in the keel wash. Sparrow was leaning on the tiller, thinking how the river was like the bull shark: it would swallow you up in a trice.

  They coursed along in silence, just the faint presence of a moon behind a fugitive cloud. They took turns to row but the ebb tide quickened and they were carried along at their ease.

  Reach after reach, watching for the camp site at Pig Creek helped to keep Sparrow’s mind off the dead boy, but his watch was not entirely effective in that regard. He saw eels skimming the riverbed, a frenzied gnawing at the boy’s tattered entrails, and his face. Then his wayward thoughts slipped back to the memory of the shark spearing out of the water and then they switched, like a coin flipped over, to the torso on the sandstone plate, and then to the moment when that horrible cargo slipped into the depths, and those eyes. He could not keep the awful memories at bay, no matter how hard he watched for Griffin Pinney’s camp. And now his thirst was back and there was naught but a trickle in the leaky costrel. He uncorked it and sucked hard on the mouthpiece, hardly enough to wet his tongue, which felt like the tongue of a cat. He dipped his hand in the river and drank from his palm, one briny mouthful, not much sense in that.

  Their progress had slowed, the tide waning. They gave thanks for the night sky, hardly a cloud. The stars lit the banks of the river just enough to pick out the Pig Creek outflow and the clearing Sparrow knew to be Pinney’s river camp. He tillered for the beach.

  They secured the boat to an old tree bent low by the flood, a vestige of the rooting still anchored in the ground.

  The camp site was strewn with driftwood. The pale grey carcass of an ox had slipped into the creek and the flowage now curled about the twisted frame. The dog paid the carcass no heed. He drank his fill from the creek, then he capered about, nose to the ground, fixed on some other scent.