The Making of Martin Sparrow

by Peter Cochrane

  ‘First sight of my patch I thought of paradise,’ said Joe, ‘cosseted away like a downy nest in a thicket. I sat on a big flat stone, made it my hearthstone; imagined a corn crop tall as young Caleb there.’

  Neither of them was ready for the shriek that came at that moment from Caleb. Bea had never heard a sound like it. He stood in the bow, waving, and Joe and the girl followed his line of sight to the west bank, a low, marshy point thick with reeds.

  The figures stood, three in a line, native to their element, shin-deep in the shallows, watching the boat as if transfixed, the two young men armed with barbed spears, the old man with a musket in the crook of his arm. They began to shout and wave. Caleb waved back and shouted some more.

  ‘Will you put him off?’ she asked. But already the savages were trekking into the timber, northbound, their lower legs stockinged with grey mud, their chatter ecstatic, the young men leaping and pirouetting through the underbrush, the old man scuttling along, keeping up as best he could.

  Caleb turned about. ‘My grandfather,’ he said.

  Bea was momentarily lost for words. ‘He is happy to see you,’ she said, finally.

  ‘He is my grandfather, thus he is happy to see me, yes.’

  ‘That’s ol’ Wolgan,’ said Joe.

  Bea was thinking back over the subjects traversed earlier in the journey. She had been cautious enough to make no comment on Caleb lest he have some small grasp of the language. Now it seemed his grasp stretched all the way to thus.

  ‘Caleb spent some years with the Reverend Hardwick in Parramatta, did you not, Caleb?’

  ‘That ol’ bugger,’ said Caleb.

  ‘Brought in by soldiers, orphaned . . . sometimes they salvage a handsome child.’

  Caleb chuckled. ‘A pretty one.’

  ‘And God help the rest,’ said Joe.

  ‘Do you know his grandfather?’ she asked.

  Joe nodded. ‘The boy is home, replenished, for that we ought find favour in their sight.’

  ‘My grandfather will return the gun, for goodwill.’

  ‘In that case we better have a cook up.’

  The wind had swung about and the flood tide was building. ‘We have to lay over,’ said Joe. He pointed to a sandy spit a way ahead.

  On beaching, Joe took hold of the mainsail boom and the gunnel and he tried to step out of the boat but his legs were liquid and his stiff arm on the gunnel failed to hold him. He fell sideways onto the sand and rolled onto his back.

  They helped him up. ‘I am naught but a ball of knots and spasms,’ he said.

  The girl watched the river, the tide at work, a vast ocean pushing the flow contrary to their needs.

  They stretched out on the warm sand and closed their eyes.

  Bea woke to Caleb’s singing. The sun was almost down, lost behind the serried timber on the ridge, tiers of blood-orange clouds.

  Caleb sat cross-legged, singing quietly, a lullaby perhaps. In his lap were a bunch of pale taproots, dripping wet. He began to eat one of these taproots with some enthusiasm. He leaned forward and his entire frame rose up, erect, as if lifted on some hydraulic principle.

  Joe shook his head. ‘I wish I could do that.’

  Caleb threw a taproot to the girl and he handed one to Joe.

  ‘As do I,’ said Bea. They laughed and Caleb smiled and repeated the manoeuvre in reverse, crossing his legs at the ankles and lowering himself to the sand with not the faintest shudder.

  ‘I call them bush parsnips,’ said Joe.

  ‘They are sweet,’ said Bea.

  ‘They are sweet,’ agreed Caleb, and he named a name that neither of them could repeat let alone remember.

  The air now was crisp and cool.

  Joe felt better. He got himself up and went on shaky legs, retrieved the water bladder from the boat and drank like he’d not drunk for days. ‘The heat, does me in.’ Then he handed the bladder to the girl and she realised she’d not had a drop since they departed the ridge and she too drank her fill.

  They departed as the slack tide surrendered to the ebb and they sailed on.

  They heard the sound of frogmouths and boobooks and night-birds unknown to them, and they heard the whoosh and smack of fish jumping in the shallows and the constant sound of the tide chafing the banks and far off a dog howling, and they saw river rats scurrying for cover and myriad shapes in the dark recesses of the forest and higher up they saw great bands of ancient sandstone, moonlit, cracked and fissured by the chisel work of ages.

  Some hours later they ploughed up the Branch with the habitual nor’-easterly in the sail, the bow cutting through the failing tide. The moon hovered over the black rim to the west and the stars marked the silken black flow of the Branch with a speckling of silver.

  At Joe’s patch the girl tillered the boat to the mooring by a big old she-oak and they helped Joe climb out. He sat himself down on the gunnel, smacked at his thighs, worked his fingers into his cramping flesh and muttered his displeasure.

  Bea recalled Joe’s words – a downy nest, cosseted away. Her most fearful notions were tempered by the starlit vision of the cabin and the byre on the slope beyond the flats, and by the scatter of yards and shelters, the old hut, and the sight of the vegetable garden and the peach orchard; the sense of something carved out by epic toil, a working farm in the embrace of wilderness.

  She looked down at Joe and she thought about what she’d learned. He did not drink for he was sworn off it, save for his peach cyder. His voice was gentle and his conversation welcome, being for the most part practical. He wanted her to read to him – she would do that with pleasure. As for his weariness in the form of his affliction, that she did not find burdensome at all, that she could see to advantage. I will not be ill-used, she had said. You can be sure of that, he’d replied.

  She could see a man barrelling towards them, followed by a goat. ‘That’s Freddie, he’s a fixture,’ said Joe and he put out his arm and the girl helped him to stand.

  Freddie circled around Caleb and scuttled past Bea as if she wasn’t there and he threw his arms around Joe Franks and buried his face in the old soldier’s shoulder. ‘Lucky I’m here,’ he said, ‘else you’d be sayin’ where’s ol’ Freddie.’

  ‘I’d know you were somewhere hereabouts,’ said Joe.

  ‘Ain’t goin’ nowhere, not me,’ said Freddie. He was tugging at the worn-out bit of linen that passed for his waistcoat and brushing down the slop cotton shirt beneath it.

  Joe folded back the oilcloth with some care and retrieved a sack of salt, pulling it upright against the gunnel. He beckoned Caleb. ‘Please,’ he said, and Caleb hefted the sack onto his shoulder and headed for Joe’s cabin. An ox tethered in the corn stubble lifted its head and watched him limp by.

  Joe watched Caleb until the boy was well on his way before hauling the oilcloth off the provisions. He peered into a corn sack and flashed a smile at Bea. ‘Pork belly in linen, cured.’ He folded the corn sack tight around the hefty lump of pork and pulled a half bushel sack of seed wheat upright on the gunnels. ‘Old Wolgan’s comin’ for the boy,’ he said.

  ‘Hide things!’ said Freddie.

  ‘Freddie, where’s Mrs Kunkle?’

  ‘Back on Thyne’s patch, Rupert come got her.’

  ‘Is she alright?’

  Freddie paused. Then he giggled. ‘They got in the byre, I could hear ’em humpin’ in the hay . . . I had a good listen.’

  ‘I’ll bet you did.’

  ‘They sure as hell weren’t missin’ poor ol’ Thyne.’

  ‘One way to mourn,’ said Joe, but his attention hardly strayed from the job at hand. ‘Get along now Freddie, put your fowls inside, put your axe and adze inside, lock the swine in the byre and get yourself to the tripod and we’ll set a fire.’

  ‘Big old stewin’ hen?’

  ‘As we do.’

  ‘Feed ’em and they go away,’ said Freddie, staring at Bea. ‘You the wife I s’pose?’

  ‘Her name is Beatrice, Bea,’ sai
d Joe.

  ‘I hope your intentions are honourable,’ said Freddie.

  ‘I believe they are,’ she said.

  ‘Mild temper and sobriety essential,’ said Freddie, parroting the words he remembered.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. The goat was butting gently at her knee.

  ‘Her name is Beauty,’ said Freddie.

  ‘Take a bag of wheaten flour while you’re at it,’ said Joe.

  ‘Wheaten flour, smell that bread.’ Freddie hefted the bag onto his shoulder like it was a feather.

  Joe took the bagged pork belly and the girl hefted the sack of seed wheat onto her shoulder and they followed the track that edged the field of corn stubble. They crossed a faintly perceptible flood line and moved on up the grade to the cabin on the western side of the tributary valley where the trees rose thick to the ridgeline.

  Bea stood in the doorway. A fireplace on a generous hearthstone, a table and a pair of chairs and stump stools; a keg; on the mantelshelf a button box, books and a bayonet set in a scabbard; butchering knives and meat hooks racked on the rear wall; a dividing curtain, pulled back; a bed in the recess, a seachest by the bed.

  Joe put the bagged pork belly on the stone. ‘No home without a hearth,’ he said.

  She saw the faint outline of his smile.

  Outside Caleb and Freddie were setting the fire.

  Joe took a meat hook and the bagged pork belly and sunk the hook through the cloth and the flesh and he knelt by the fireplace and reached up inside, a good arm’s length up the chimney, and hung the meat out of sight.

  She glanced outside at the scene by the cookfire. Caleb was seated on a stump stool, plucking the old boiler. She could hear the crackle of fat in the pan.

  ‘Will you kindly bring me a taper,’ said Joe.

  She went to the cookfire and picked out a taper and came back to Joe and he lit a fat candle on a sconce above the keg and the flame gave off a soft, mustard coloured light. Then he sunk a dipper into the cornmeal in an earthenware jar and put it in a wooden bowl, mixed in some water and spooned in a liberal quantity of salt and set to kneading dough for dumplings. ‘I am romancing their palates,’ he said.

  ‘Ah!’

  ‘I would hold my patch. Give me that and my wants are met.’

  ‘Will they come tonight?’

  ‘I believe they will. They’ll come for their young man.’

  34

  Next day, on the trudge to Harp’s distillery, they saw a bloody patch on the seat of Peachey’s britches. Harp reckoned it might be a big leech but there was no leech. When Peachey dropped his trousers they discovered he was bleeding from his arse. Worse still he had a bad case of the drizzles and he blamed the berries that Harp said would fix the pain, for the berries had not fixed the pain but had brought on terrible cramps and had loosed Peachey’s bowels, thus revealing the extent of the damage within.

  When they reached the clearing on the creek Harp found the distillery much as he’d left it: disabled, the apparatus strewn about by Alister Mackie.

  He tethered the pony and Peachey propped himself against the stone furnace. He called for water and Sparrow filled the leaky costrel in the creek and set the vessel by Peachey’s side.

  Harp worried Peachey might fade away, for the invalid was unable to hold onto his food. ‘You have to eat when you’re like this, when it’s pourin’ out the other end,’ he said, and he set about making a corn broth just as soon as he’d checked the mash barrels.

  He got the quart pot on the warm and sliced in the corn fresh off the cob, stirring a thick flour paste into the broth with a pinch of salt. ‘Just a pinch, help it go down.’ He dropped the corncobs in for good measure.

  Peachey watched him, grateful for the kindness but certain he could not hold down a watery soup. He felt weak, weak as poorhouse gruel. He could not think how he might brave the wilderness in his present condition.

  Harp sensed the failure of will in his midst. ‘You go back now, Seamus, you might be alright, no law against payin’ old Harp a visit.’

  The suggestion was a turn in the road that Sparrow had not foreseen. He waited for Peachey’s reply.

  ‘I ain’t goin’ back no matter what.’

  ‘Winifred is a feme sole,’ said Sparrow.

  ‘And she won’t give it up neither.’

  Harp scratched at his pate. ‘That is a outrage, front to back.’

  ‘I know,’ said Peachey.

  ‘He’s gunna renew his manhood in the teeth of the wilderness,’ said Sparrow.

  Harp was stirring the broth, waving the steam in the vicinity of his nostrils, taking in the aroma. ‘I knew one of them once,’ he said, ‘one of them femes soles.’

  ‘You did?’

  ‘I did yes. Her name was Lydia Izzy and so, of course, we called her Lizzy, most fondly. She was a came-free, like your Winifred, but she surrendered the agency of her property to her husband, dutifully, upon his emancipation, and she faithfully took up her God-given role as his dependant and mother to his children. She was a good woman.’

  ‘See, Winifred won’t do that,’ said Peachey. ‘I’ve tried but she won’t do it.’

  ‘You obviously haven’t tried hard enough,’ said Harp. ‘Now, if Griffin was here he’d give you some advice. He’d say Seamus, he’d say, you gotta get physical with that woman, you give her the birch is what he’d say. The full flail.’

  ‘What do you say?’ said Sparrow.

  ‘There’s little in this world that would stir me to violence against a woman, but property, that’s the line in the sand, that’s another matter, that’s tooth and claw, Mr Sparrow, tooth and claw!’

  ‘We can’t go back anyway,’ said Peachey.

  Harp had set a thick cloth on the rim of the quart pot and tipped it, the pot, so as to pour the corn broth into the mugs. ‘Why’s that?’ he said.

  ‘We killed the boy, the doctor’s boy.’ Peachey lay back and groaned as he pressed his palms on his ribs, testing his predicament.

  Sparrow was shocked to think Peachey would say this to Harp, who was an unsteady quantum at best and most likely a leaky vessel under any kind of pressure at all.

  ‘We did not kill him,’ Sparrow said. He felt obliged, at that point, to tell Harp the true story, the story of the pact struck with Jug Woody, of the little boat and the bull shark and the agony of those hours, laid over with the dead boy on the river bank, and then the very sad burial, the torso on that slab, slipping into the depths as they coursed downstream, hardly time for a prayer.

  ‘Lord, you gotta run now!’ said Harp when Sparrow was finished.

  ‘We know,’ said Sparrow.

  Peachey could but groan at the thought of having to tackle the country to the west with broken ribs and cramps and a bad bout of the drizzles. He sipped at the broth until it was gone, as did Harp and Sparrow. Then they passed round the bladder and drank bang-head, Harp declaring the spirits would surely kill the pain if nothing else would, and Peachey declaring he was ready to drink anything, even rat’s piss, to achieve that end.

  The dark had set in. Sparrow built up the fire and the clearing was bathed in a halo of light, camel coloured, the glow off the sandstone scarp.

  They stretched out on the ground, close to the fire, all three, and soon enough they fell asleep and they slept that uneasy sleep for which Harp’s bang-head was notorious, up and down the river.

  35

  Freddie heaped up a bed of red coals, thick for the heavy skillet, and he watched as Caleb plucked the boiler like an old hand.

  Bea cleavered the naked bird into good-sized chunks and fed them into the skillet. She cast the head into the coals and watched it shrivel and bubble as if manifesting some horrible disease. Then she sat herself down on a stump stool and poked around the contents of the skillet. The night chill had set in, she could feel it all around, and she was grateful to be close to the fire. The red-hot glow of sparks as they soared into the night sky.

  She could imagine Joe and Freddie on a warm night,
feasting on the out of doors, the twinkling heavens, the forest silhouetted against the sky, the two of them, quietly talking; long, comfortable silences, staring into the flames, perfectly alone, entirely at their ease.

  She spooned more lard into the skillet and watched the lard slide about and the chunks sizzle. Freddie poured in a lumpy liquid from a jar. ‘The unrivaled fat of the wild duck.’

  Caleb snaffled a sliver of half-cooked meat from the sizzle and tipped it from one palm to another and took it on his tongue and sucked in the cold air and began to chew. He walked away, beyond the reach of the firelight. He studied the forested ridge beyond the cabin.

  Bea swiveled about and stared into that same darkness. The cicadas in full song. The swine, penned away, muzzling into a swill. She scanned the ridgeline. She did not fail to see the two lithe figures as they came over the rim and then disappeared into the darkness of the timber.

  Caleb saw them too. He hollered with delight and went to meet them.

  Soon enough the boys stepped into the firelight. They were thin as wisps, the two of them, mostly knuckle and bone. They were naked, save for generous mantles of fur on their shoulders and belts of plaited fibres round their middles. They carried spears barbed with shark teeth, their hair dressed with the teeth of dogs, small bones and the claws of some crustacean.

  Joe stepped into the firelight. ‘Cook up!’ he said, and he shook hands with the two boys.

  ‘Cook up, yes,’ said Freddie. He tipped a quartered onion into the skillet and proceeded to liberally salt the meat.

  ‘Nice big bird,’ said Joe.

  ‘Good table bird,’ said Caleb.

  Joe returned to the cabin to ready the dumplings. He worked his hands into the sticky dough. He heard Freddie’s shout, the alarm in his voice, as Wolgan stepped into the cabin followed by Napoleon in his grey frockcoat.