The Making of Martin Sparrow

by Peter Cochrane

  ‘That is dreadful,’ said Sparrow.

  ‘Yes,’ said Bea.

  ‘They are the bearers of much treasured wisdom passed down through the ages and we are but children in their world,’ said Catley.

  ‘What do they call it?’ asked Bea.

  ‘Marryagong is their word for the funnel-web,’ said Catley. ‘I call it montes glabella robustus, the first and last of this designation is self-evident; as to glabella, that means hairless, for the distinguishing feature is the hairless carapace covering the cephalothorax. The fangs can penetrate leather or even fingernails, according to my learned colleague.’

  The girl was working Freddie’s balm into the scratches and leech wounds on her legs. She handed the balm to Sparrow and he did much the same.

  Mr Catley took the opportunity to scrutinise Bea Faa in the firelight as she watched Sparrow work the balm into his ankles. It saddened him to think of his failed connection with the widow Wise, for those interludes were blissfully warm for a time, until she tired of the coming and going at his convenience.

  Catley thought the girl a most lovely specimen. He could only assume that Griffin Pinney, true to form, had had his way with her. ‘Did he hurt you, Pinney?’ he said.

  The question hovered in the stillness. Bea appeared to be considering her words with some care.

  Sparrow noticed how Catley held the girl in his gaze, his eyes coursing over her, tracing her form. He could restrain himself no longer: ‘He did more’n hurt her, he rutted on her and I killed him for it.’

  The words spat out, Sparrow took a deep breath.

  ‘Well there’s an unlikely turn,’ said Catley. ‘A fact best confined to this small circle, I imagine. I cannot say I’m sorry.’

  ‘You won’t tell?’ said Sparrow.

  ‘I am a still tongue in a wise mouth, Mr Sparrow.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘That man was known for unvarnished brutality and something of a deficit in the sphere of chivalry. His fate is best consigned to a murky realm of obscurity. Anyway, I cannot abide waggling tongues, they’re worse than wicked hands, in my view.’

  Sparrow was quite unsure as to why he trusted Mr Catley, but he did. He felt sure the man would not blab. ‘I do hope you catch that duckbill,’ he said.

  ‘My objective, oddly, is not capture, not anymore,’ said Catley. He was hoping to return to the subject of Griffin Pinney without seeming hasty.

  ‘What then?’ said Bea.

  ‘I am to address the most burning question on the anatomical agenda.’

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘The Royal Society and Sir Joseph wish to be acquainted with the manner in which the duckbill genus breeds, its internal structure being so very similar to that of birds that I do not think it impossible that they should lay eggs, or at least hatch them in their bellies as snakes and some fish do. Thus capture would only confound my purpose for I must seek the lady duckbill in situ et in vivo. I must go in pursuit of her lurking places, her maternal lair to be precise, invade the hatcheries on the river, this river being, so I am advised, a duckbill paradise.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ said Moowut’tin.

  Catley scratched at his stubbly chin. ‘Thus, you might say, I have forsaken the flint-lock for the mat-tock,’ he said.

  Sparrow’s mind usually wandered when someone talked on in the way Mr Catley was talking on. This time was no exception. His mind had wandered, as it habitually did, into the my troubles department. He was troubled about many things, but two things in particular were agitating the glands and the ventricles in his cerebellum. First, Bea seemed intent upon going back to Joe’s patch and, second, he had no choice but to go forward. Thus it was that Mr Catley’s mention of ‘paradise’ brought him up sharp.

  ‘If they are like a bird inside, why are they not like a bird outside?’ said Bea.

  ‘That, Mistress Faa, is a commendable question. The answer is a piece of the puzzle we do not have but must have, for one can only conclude that, like all progress in science, understanding brings us closer to clarity as to God’s design.’

  Sparrow had no interest in this Sir Joseph, gentleman, nor in the insides or the outsides of birds. He was thinking about paradise. He remembered Griffin Pinney’s talk about a beautiful grassy woodland and a village embosomed in a grove of tall trees, and a majestic river that ran west, that and more. Now he had seen Mr Catley’s valley with his own eyes and it seemed to Sparrow that talk of a paradise to the west was entirely believable. He wanted to ask Mr Catley more about the other side but he thought best to be polite and wait for the man to finish, whenever that might be.

  ‘I have asked the natives how they copulate and they have answered like a duck,’ said Catley, ‘but they are generally ignorant as to how these creatures produce their young, save one astute fellow who assured me they go a long way underground and there they lay eggs. That, sadly, is of no consequence to the learned world, for I have to see it with my own eyes. What is more, the savage examining the afterbirth in an unearthed burrow would hardly understand the limits of his discovery, for the residue of shell cannot disclose whether hatching takes place within Mrs Duckbill or without, the eggs in the latter instance having been expelled intacto. In short I must find an expectant duckbill busy in her lair, hatching post birthing or birthing post hatching, thus to establish whether she is, respectively, oviparous or ovoviparous . . . that’s the Latin you understand.’

  ‘Is there a village, further along, westward?’ said Sparrow. He could wait no longer.

  ‘Pardon me?’ said Catley.

  ‘Do you know Mort Craggs?’

  ‘Only by reputation,’ said Catley.

  ‘He’s out here somewhere, might be on the other side.’

  Mr Catley gave Sparrow the strangest look. ‘You seek the village, freely, of your own will?’

  ‘There is one!’

  ‘I doubt the bucolic connotations of the word village would bear the weight of the hideaway I once stumbled upon, nor the headcount.’

  Sparrow was uncertain as to Mr Catley’s meaning. ‘I heard it’s a paradise, I heard it’s a little commonweal.’

  ‘If it’s a commonweal it’s a piratical commonweal, a lawless place, a terrible despotism where man is wolf to man, as complete in his savagery as any Indian you might encounter in Tierra del Fuego or . . . Ethiopia.’

  ‘Ethiopia!’

  Daniel passed Sparrow a piece of charred meat on the point of a stick. He did the same for Bea and the young dog gave up on Daniel and came and sat before them with begging eyes, the mongrel dog watching on.

  ‘Yes, Ethiopia, and there you’ll stay, enslaved till you drop, and this poor girl, a slave to their base passions with nothing in the way of a civilised code to restrain them, naught but a grotesque and indolent liberty qualified neither by decency nor compassion, a savagery to suit the likes of Griffin Pinney.’

  ‘I caught him unawares.’

  ‘Martin was brave,’ said Bea.

  ‘I suspect you’ve done our little world a favour,’ said Catley.

  The delights of the widow Wise seemed a lifetime gone, though they were gone but a season. Catley could but hope his colourful discourse on the horrors of the piratical commonweal would be sufficient to prevent these two from pressing on, westward or anywhere else. He hoped Bea Faa might stay a while but he had to bring a halt to his galloping ruminations, for they were running riot in his head. They had ventured as far as a shimmering vision of her inner thighs. He was certain now, being sufficiently aroused, that he would have some trouble getting to sleep.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Sparrow, to Bea. No one had ever called him brave before. He felt a little bit better. He felt a little shaft of colour resting, like a butterfly, upon his heart.

  45

  Mackie did not rise that day and he was feverish as the dusk began to fade. He would take no solids and only with the greatest effort did he raise up to sip at the warm tea that Cuff prepared for him. It pained him to swallow. He grima
ced as the tea went down and the motion brought on a coughing fit.

  When the coughing was done, Mackie got up. He shuffled about the cave, wrapped in his blanket, trying to get the cold out of his bones and the stiffness out of his joints. He took himself to the lip of the shelter and there he leant forward, hands on knees, coughing up the phlegm.

  Cuff watched on. ‘You move like a rickety old cat.’

  ‘All parts conspire against me.’

  ‘A will of its own, the corporeal body.’

  ‘A will most obstinate.’

  ‘More’s the pity.’

  Mackie’s lungs were crackling like kindling taking to the flame. He wanted to rest some more but rest was a cruel bargain: the more he lay prone the more his lungs filled with muck.

  He spat blood onto the thicket of fern fronds below the shelter. He watched as it mingled with dew drops and hung there, in the dim light, seeping onto the milky white petals of some flower, the stem anchored in the finest fracture of stone, the roots like the claws of a fine-boned water bird. Drips from the overhang pattering on the back of his neck.

  ‘Come and sit,’ said Cuff. ‘Dip some biscuit if you can, save on the jaw.’

  ‘I am not an invalid.’

  ‘You will be if you don’t take some solids.’

  Mackie took in the view below, knowing the light would soon be gone. The floodwaters from the storm had dropped away, laying bare the wreckage beneath the high-water mark. Trees uprooted, wedged in stone. Great wads of detritus pinioned in crack and crevice and matted shrubs and grasses in the unyielding scrub cover like witches shawls and ancient beards, the scene coated in the dull grey particulate of the wash-down.

  He went back to the fire and sat and sipped at his tea. He stirred the tea with a twig and watched the tiny leaves tumble about in the bottom of the mug, rising up and falling away, like everything. The fire smoke made him cough. He moved away, sat himself against the shelter wall; probed at the ulcers inside his mouth, felt a weighting in his core, like lead.

  ‘I’d like to know what they’re doin’ right now,’ said Cuff.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘That girl and that damn woodsman.’

  ‘And Sparrow.’

  ‘He might be dead, and the boy too.’

  Mackie waited for something more by way of explanation.

  ‘No place for a faint heart out here,’ said Cuff.

  ‘And the girl?’

  ‘She saw it through with them sealers; starch in the blood, like someone I know.’

  ‘If I had starch I’d be on my feet.’

  ‘What you got’s a infirmity; starch is another matter.’

  ‘Well starch is a great stiffener, you’d be the one knows about that.’

  ‘I cannot deny my capacity in that regard.’ Cuff chuckled, picked up the water bladder and shook it. ‘I’ll go for water. Probably slip and break my damn neck, all silt and putrilage down there.’

  ‘I’ll drink the tea.’

  ‘We’re goin’ back, you understand that?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mackie, but he could not imagine how, such was the lassitude in his frame.

  Cuff went for water, the gully mottled in starlight and shadow. He returned with his boots slaked with mud and his rear end soggy. He put the water bladder down and turned his arse to the fire and brushed the gritty wet with his hands.

  ‘It will be hard going, Alister, when we go.’

  The wind had picked up, whistling down the gorge. The eddies whipped the smoke around the shelter. The last light slipped away. Mackie sat with his lapel pressed to his ulcerated mouth, his body convulsing as he tried to smother the eruption in his lungs.

  Cuff watched, his resolve fortified by the scene. He was intent upon getting Mackie home. His thoughts were back at the ridge. He saw the doctor at his table in the Hive, devouring the Gazette, staring out the window; Sam probing his pelvic region and fiddling with that damn truss; Bet Pepper on her porch. He thought he’d like to spend more time with Bet. He had no objection to amplitude or maturity in a woman so long as she humped with enthusiasm and liked to talk in a leisurely fashion afterwards, and perhaps share the gossip and a pipe.

  It was a pleasant line of thought but it did not last. His mind shifted back to the doctor, whose situation was truly horrid. He wondered if they would ever know just what happened to Woody’s boy. The subject of disappearance hastened his thoughts yet again to another mystery. ‘What did Guthrie say to you, about Jonas Wick?’ he said.

  Mackie hesitated. ‘He said they played cards late in the night as they sailed down the coast, drank a lot of rum. He said Jonas went off to his cot. He said next morning he was gone. They searched the boat and he was gone.’

  ‘Overboard?’

  ‘I have nothing else to set at variance.’

  ‘The man’s a veteran sealer, the swell was moderate, so they say.’

  ‘He was sworn off the drink but he lapsed, paid the price.’

  ‘And the crew saw nothing?’

  ‘So it would seem,’ said Mackie.

  ‘The question is foul play,’ said Cuff.

  ‘The answer is lost overboard.’

  ‘That suits you.’

  ‘It does me no harm.’

  ‘I thought you might pair up with him, cure pelts and make a princely fortune. That’s what he thought.’

  ‘Well, you know what thought did.’

  ‘He thought he followed a wedding but it was a muck cart in the wheel ruts.’

  ‘He got it wrong is what he did.’

  ‘You had no intention of pairing with him.’

  ‘I’d pair first with the devil.’

  ‘The trade, then, is yours for the taking.’

  ‘The trade requires the sanction of the governor and a licence from the East India Company. I have neither sanction nor licence, nor shipshape vessel.’

  ‘You get one you might get the others.’

  Mackie nodded. ‘That is my hope.’

  ‘So, you do deal in hope.’

  ‘When there’s nothing else I am reminded it’s the mainspring of faith,’ said Mackie.

  ‘Faith! Only book you worship is that ledger,’ said Cuff. ‘I’ll tell you one thing: if you cannot keep your accounts on your thumbnail your life’s got out o’ hand.’

  ‘My accounts are the least of my worries.’

  Cuff ’s head waggled in that sardonic way, indicating he was listening to rubbish. ‘Since when!’

  ‘Since we have to face Thomas Woody and tell him we failed.’

  ‘We just have to hope the boy turns up.’

  ‘Such is the futility of so much we call hope.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘We agree!’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well there you are.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘There’s a miracle.’

  46

  They sat for a time, took turns to spoon the fatty slurry from the cookpot.

  Mr Catley seemed to be deep in thought, which he was. He picked up a stick. He scratched a few lines in the dirt by his feet.

  The fire threw out just enough warmth. Wisps of bark flared aglow on the heat, wafted into the canopy and faded into the blackness.

  Daniel had some yams in the coals, on the fringe of the fire, there with Catley’s onions. Occasionally he pushed them about with a long stick. When he spoke to Catley he did so in his own language and Mr Catley spoke back in kind. Bea and Sparrow could but sit and listen in wonderment.

  Catley took bones from the cookpot and fed one to each dog. The mongrel dog disappeared into the dark. The pup dropped down by the cookfire much to the pleasure of his audience. They watched the pup go to work, listened to the crunch of back teeth on bone.

  ‘You may stay a while, if you wish, long as might be convenient subject to your needs and wants, and so on,’ said Catley.

  ‘I cannot go back,’ said Sparrow.

  ‘Word of one G. Pinney’s fate need go no further.’

 
‘It’s not even that.’ Sparrow had sunk into a profound melancholy.

  ‘You can come to Joe’s patch, with me,’ said Bea. ‘And the pup too.’

  She liked the pup and she found Sparrow easy enough to tolerate and, no small thing, he had rescued her from Pinney. What’s more she had no idea of Joe’s condition, nor of his prospects. She might need Sparrow. She might need him along the way and she might need him once home. She thought him a pliable fellow, pliable by any measure she cared to contemplate, any measure she knew. He was a most unlikely champion but that, surely, was his greatest strength, for who would ever suspect. Go forage, Pinney had said, and he put that axe into Sparrow’s hand!

  Sparrow looked about. Night had settled in but it wasn’t that dark. The sky was bright now with countless stars. There was a faint breeze and the light played through the trees all the way to the grassy bottoms, from whence they could hear the sound of the river, running east. ‘Are you sure that’s the Branch?’ said Sparrow.

  ‘A rose by any other name,’ said Catley.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘It might be one of the headwaters that feed the Branch, I cannot yet say for sure. So much to see so little time.’

  Whether it was the Branch or not Sparrow wished he could stay here forever, with Bea Faa, and perhaps with Mr Catley and Daniel too. For Mr Catley was clearly a learned gentleman and Daniel seemed to be a most accommodating savage and his fierce demeanour could hardly be anything but helpful in a fix.

  Sparrow felt tears pool in the sink of his eyes. He felt one of the tears roll down his cheek.

  ‘My dear Mr Sparrow,’ said Catley.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Sparrow.

  Bea patted Sparrow’s arm.

  Catley smacked his palms softly onto his thighs, drumming his fingers. ‘Confession may not be absolution, Mr Sparrow, and far be it for me to give that to anybody, but it does lift a weight from the shoulders. Tears might be words the heart cannot say but words in this instance will, surely, be a balm to the troubled soul. Why not tell us, we shall do our best to help and we shall swear it go no further. Call it a pact.’