The Making of Martin Sparrow

by Peter Cochrane

  ‘And what of this Jessop?’

  ‘A bull seal had bit his arm and tore away the flesh and the wound was full of rot and stink and he was much diminished.’

  ‘And the others slept a deep sleep on promises and grog I suppose?’

  ‘They were fell upon, their throats cut, and come the dawn we departed.’

  ‘And Jessop?’

  ‘Wick left him, supposedly to suffer death alone, in that stinking hut.’

  ‘Pure villainy.’

  ‘That’s Jonas Wick.’

  ‘You know he had an accident?’

  ‘He did?’

  ‘He got no satisfaction from Alister so he took the ketch to Sydney and got drunk and fell overboard in the dark of night.’

  ‘He doesn’t take liquor.’

  Cuff did not hesitate. ‘Well then, there’s your answer. The man’s relapsed, his guts are in revolt and he’s heaving over the taffrail, his mind swimming, his balance awry, and the boat kicks and tips and over he goes. That’s it, mystery solved.’

  The girl smiled. ‘I will make cocoa,’ she said.

  ‘And cocoa will restore our faith in humanity!’ Cuff clucked his tongue and smiled that mischievous smile and that made Bea smile, faintly.

  They sipped on the cocoa and nibbled on Freddie’s hearth cakes and Cuff lit his pipe and they sat quietly with their memories of Joe.

  After a while Cuff’s pipe began to fade and with that his mind turned to hard matters, matters of pressing consequence. He tapped a finger on the warrant. ‘This paper obliges me to deliver you up to the senior magistrate in Parramatta, the Reverend Abbott no less.’

  ‘I have been bought and sold and passed around. I have been used hard. I have served Joe well.’

  ‘The warrant is a mockery to natural justice, I’ll say that much.’

  ‘And you would deliver me up?’

  ‘I want the truth as to the fate of the boy Jug, Jason. I believe our Mr Sparrow has spun a yarn to get himself off the hook, and seize his chance up the Branch.’

  She paused. She did not look away for she knew Cuff would read meaning into any form of evasion. ‘The boy is in a cave on the Branch, dead. A spider bit him.’

  ‘A funnel-web spider?’ Cuff leant back and folded his arms, studying the girl.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. The warrant had changed everything, even more so than Joe’s death. She was at one of those junctions where her own words might save her or condemn her to some horrid besetment – or the gibbet. She knew with this lie she might seize her own chance, perhaps with Sparrow and the pup for company. With this lie they might make for the other side, or a sanctuary deep in the wilderness.

  Cuff seemed to divine her thoughts. ‘I believe Mr Sparrow will bolt for the other side if he can.’

  The girl nodded.

  ‘And you will tell me Griffin Pinney just disappeared, that too. That right?’

  ‘He just went off. I don’t know where.’

  ‘Never came back?’

  ‘Never.’

  Cuff picked up a fugitive stick of kindling and tossed it into the fireplace. He was not inclined to deliver the girl into the hands of Abbott. ‘I doubt our chief constable wants his past resurrected before the magistrate at Parramatta, I know Abbott would delight in such an opportunity – put a fire beneath a pot of rumours and have them bubble to the top.’

  ‘What rumours?’

  ‘Rumour is Alister and your mother go back a long way. Rumour is he shares you with old Joe in flagrant defiance of a certain Biblical stricture; I know it’s not true, Alister’s about as carnal as a stick o’ wood, and poorly into the bargain.’

  ‘I have no wish to embarrass Mr Mackie.’

  ‘He’s got commerce on a pedestal, up there with his filial loyalty to the government.’

  ‘He got me free of Gudgeon.’

  ‘Free of Gudgeon but not exactly free.’

  ‘I’ll never be free.’

  ‘You believe this nonsense about the other side?’

  ‘I can hope. There’s no hope this side of the mountains, not now.’

  ‘You can find this cave? You know where it is?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You can show me, me and Dan?’

  She paused, pondering the question. ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘Alright then.’

  Next morning before the sun was up Freddie and Sprodd dug a grave by the peach orchard and they shrouded Joe in a wrap of tattered wagon sheet that once was a makeshift tent. They set him in the grave as the sun inched above the tree line to the east. Freddie tried to say something but he could not get beyond a few words. Bea Faa was intent upon silent contemplation and Sprodd could but shake his head and repeat the only words he seemed to know for the time being: ‘Poor old Joe,’ he said, over and over.

  Under the circumstances, Cuff took it upon himself to eulogise the departed. He took off his hat and stared into the bowl like he was trying to read meaning in the sweat stains. ‘As to the solemnities, I’ll say just this,’ he said. ‘Lord, we have sent thy way a good soul. Joe was a straight-goer, never known to practise the petty arts or the slippery ways. He made no parade of his virtues. He was untouched by the prejudice of rank and station. He was a kindly man, neither nitpicker nor stickler, and we’ll all miss his kindness. As to his affliction, he endured that like an ancient stoic and might have prevailed but for the craven behaviour that took his life. We here are plainly the worse for his loss. Amen.’

  There followed a silence that was quite awkward and even Cuff was lost for words until he found some more. ‘We trust that God in his wisdom is well disposed to this fine old man and in the meantime we move on, we get on with our business, that’s all we can do, all anyone can do, we just . . . move on.’

  Bea turned away and wiped tears from her eyes and they left Freddie to fashion a hardwood cross and finish the grave and they headed up the Branch in the company of their silent thoughts.

  The track shadowed the serpentine river into the stone country. They followed the course in the cover of grey gums and she-oaks dripping with dew, finches flitting from the brush, a kingfisher perched on high and ducks scattering on lustrous wings to settle once again upon the waters upstream as if drawing them on.

  They reached the fish traps and pressed on to the tidal limit and further along the ceremonial ground, where they sat down in the company of the weathered carvings incised upon the fringing trees.

  Cuff rested the Kunkle musket on his shoulder. ‘You know what’s up ahead, the horrible enormities?’

  ‘Yes, I’ve seen them,’ she said.

  54

  The soldiers and Sparrow had followed a beaten track through the timber for most of the day when Peskett led them up a rocky spur to a vantage where they saw the river ahead of them, a long stretch punctuated by shallow cascades, the banks thick with calved-off stone and spindly river gums aslant over the shallows. In the middle distance they spied a rock wallaby at the water’s edge, small birds swooping in its vicinity, darting after dragonflies.

  Peskett spoke softly. ‘You muzzle that dog and sit quiet,’ he said to Sparrow. He primed the gun, hardly a sound. He set off, going carefully down the spur.

  Sparrow and Redenbach settled in a copse of fern and woody pear. The soldier forever mopping at the wound in his chin. The dog sat, as directed, untroubled by the big collar that Peskett had fitted, indifferent to the drama at hand.

  It was almost dark when they heard the report of Peskett’s musket. Parrots scattered, screeching, and then the bush all about them fell silent. Redenbach chuckled. He bunched his bloody sweat rag into his fist. ‘Come on,’ he said.

  They made their way to the river’s edge. They tramped upstream, sand and shallows. Threads and filaments of the fresh kill carried on the flow, the guts brightly coloured, the dog snapping up what he could as they moved on, the river water spilling from his jowls. Redenbach chuckled some more. ‘Reuben don’t miss, I’ll say that much for the beggar.’

>   They found Peskett squatting in the shallows, washing the sand off the butchered hindquarters, freshly skinned, the rest of the carcass red and raw on the sand and the bloodied axe tossed clear.

  They built a fire on the sand and set the hindquarters in the coals and breathed in the fragrant smell of the charred flesh, turning the meat as required. Sparrow held Amicus tight, the dog whimpering with delight as the darkness closed on them. ‘You make him wait for the bone,’ said Peskett. ‘That or lose him to dissolution, like some people I know.’

  Sparrow held tight to the collar. Peskett was not finished. ‘I will return this dog much improved, that or the devil can have him. You understand me, Sparrow?’

  Sparrow nodded. A chill cut through him. He was reminded that he and Amicus Amico were soon to be parted, one way or another. He resolved, yet again, to seize his chance when he could. It occurred to Sparrow that all his life he had been afraid – and he was still afraid – but no longer was he caught full in the spell of fear. No longer its boneless object. The thought of Bea lifted his spirits. The plight of the dog put iron in his blood.

  They cut strips off the cooked meat and ate them piping hot. Before long they had devoured the better parts of a hindquarter and they finished, picking at the charred coating on the remains, like bears on the near side of winter.

  A black snake had supped on the juices of the bloody wallaby carcass and dallied there, snug in the early morning light, when Peskett brought down the butt end of the small axe on its head. A cloud of flies rose up. The tail thrashed fitfully and the body with it. Peskett smacked at the flies about his face.

  The activity stirred Redenbach and Sparrow. Amicus Amico circled, his instincts tempered by his wariness of Peskett, who took out his knife and speared the blade through the reptile at the nape. He lifted the snake, still thrashing, and held it high for the benefit of the lookers on. ‘That’s how I like ’em, hooked and kickin’.’

  The comment was not lost on Sparrow.

  Peskett dropped his catch on the sand and put his boot on the snake’s head and he wiped the blade on his britches and holstered it. One swift motion. He picked up the snake and cast it into the scrub on the fringe of the levee and it landed with its fore half in the scrub and the aft half on the sand.

  Sparrow went close, watched the snake twitching, the tail thrashing, half dead. In the grass he found an odd bit of flood-wrack, the leg off a rudely fashioned chair, the wood a pale, milky colour from long immersion in the river and the finished edges much battered and the square-cut tongue at one end much splintered and frayed.

  He looked upstream; saw an eagle glide over the river, the sun bright on the tipping wing, its shadow on the water, that mighty span. He saw a beaky nosed wading bird stepping in the shallows. He wondered where the chair might be, where the leg had begun its journey. The find gave him hope, but he was not sure there was good sense in that hope. He tossed the leg into the scrub.

  The dog was at his heel, sniffing at his boots. He put his hand to the raggedy coat, working his fingers into the nape. He felt his spirits lift by a measurable margin.

  Redenbach pushed a drawstring sack into Sparrow’s hands. ‘That’s the meat, don’t lose it,’ he said. They ate biscuit, drank from the river, and moved off, wading along the sandy stretch, the valley narrower now, the cliffs ever more sheer as their course shifted northward.

  That day and the next they trekked deep into the gorge. They kept to the sand levees and the shallows where they could, otherwise weaving and scrambling along the boulder strewn banks or clawing their way through dense scrub thick with mouldering flood-wrack.

  Late in the afternoon the play of colour on the cliffs began to fade. A mist settled in the timber ahead of them, tendrils curling like smoke to the failing light on the rim.

  They sat clear of the flow on a long, handsome stretch of sand that banked steep at the far end of the reach.

  They watched long-legged birds in the shallows and saw faintly the rippling circle of a duckbill. The creature gulped for air and disappeared in a muddied cloud of its own making, the ripples pulsing to the river’s edge.

  ‘Strangest thing,’ said Redenbach.

  ‘You seen one, head to tail?’ said Sparrow.

  ‘I seen one dead on a hook.’

  The shaded sand was wet with dew. Redenbach stood and brushed off his arse and turned about and scanned the timbered escarpment, his eyes searching for the mouth of a cave sufficient to shelter them warm and dry.

  They heard the savage shouts before they saw a soul, voices from somewhere, the sound ringing about the gorge. ‘Look alert,’ said Peskett. He took swiftly to priming his musket. Sparrow set his haversack on the sand. He seized Amicus by the collar, drew him close.

  At the far end of the reach a tall young savage stood motionless, near naked, spears in hand, his words entirely foreign to them.

  ‘That’s Caleb jabberin’ at us,’ said Redenbach.

  Peskett ceased his preparation and stared. ‘It ain’t us he’s jabberin’ at.’ He snapped the frizzen into place and cocked the hammer.

  ‘He’s Hardwick’s foundling,’ said Redenbach.

  ‘Not out here he’s not,’ said Peskett.

  Sparrow saw a glint of hope notwithstanding he knew hope could sometimes prolong a man’s torments. ‘He says grace at the table, Dr Woody’s table. He’s beholdable.’

  ‘What! ’ said Peskett.

  ‘He knows about goodwill,’ said Sparrow.

  ‘We can talk to him,’ said Redenbach.

  ‘You talk to him,’ said Peskett.

  Sparrow was wondering why Caleb was just standing there, still as a pond. He recalled what Griffin Pinney had said about old Wolgan’s mob: Trade fair, them savages are true to their word. He also said Caleb was honourable ; said he was a formidable interlocutor.

  He saw Peskett’s small axe in the sand. He pondered the abrupt silence. He pondered that word, goodwill. He wondered if there was much of it about. The creature sounds had ceased, a singular peace, the faint gurgle of the cascade upstream, naught but the sound of the river, the endless flow, ever to the sea.

  ‘He’s just standin’ there,’ said Peskett.

  ‘He’s givin’ me the gallops,’ said Redenbach.

  They did not see the spear that flew, hurled from the dense cover on the scarp above. Sparrow and Peskett heard the hiss and thud. They saw Redenbach sink to his knees, the spear planted obliquely at the juncture of the soldier’s neck and shoulder. The tip sliced through to the flesh of his breast.

  Somewhere above them they heard a fierce howl. Redenbach looked up. He could not speak. He raised a hand to the shaft of the spear, still quivering, and took hold of it. Then he fell forward, his face in the sand.

  Peskett trained the gun on the scrub at the top of the scarp but he saw no foe. He saw Caleb closing on him, slowly, that familiar limp. He took aim at Caleb and fired. The musket exploded. A piece of the stock sliced off the sergeant’s thumb and shrapnel tore into the palm of his hand.

  He dropped the gun. He went down on one knee, clutching at the wounds.

  Sparrow rose up, nimble as one of them. He took up Peskett’s small axe and stepped up to the bloodied sergeant and, two-handed, he brought the axe down on the back of his head, the blade cleaving the skull in two. His one thought: I’ll trust to the goodwill.

  Peskett crumpled to the ground and rolled, the heavens mirrored in his eyes. His false teeth dislodged and caught on his lower lip, the metal band half in his mouth and half out. Sparrow knelt beside him, close to his work. ‘You will never have my Amicus,’ he said. But it was too late for words, for Peskett was stone dead and his soul winged away to the mansions of light where judgement awaited.

  Sparrow was shaking. He felt faint, felt the tremor in his hand as he held tight to the axe. Atop the scarp he saw the shadowed form of the savage in the grey frockcoat, the one they called Napoleon, and on the sand he saw Caleb coming his way.

  Sparrow did not know whethe
r to hold on to the axe or to drop it. In that regard he was in a quandary. He called the dog. ‘Down,’ he said and the dog obeyed, but he could not stay down. He rose up and stood, watchful.

  As to the axe, Sparrow decided to offer the weapon to Caleb, helve first, and to offer up Redenbach’s axe as well. He wondered what else he might give in lieu of Amicus Amico.

  As Caleb approached the bloodied sands, Sparrow sensed Napoleon behind him.

  The warriors moved about, scouting the scene, talking to one another as if Sparrow was not there. Sparrow offered up the axe and Caleb took the axe and there was a brief exchange in that strange tongue, after which the grey coat bent low over Peskett, pushed and poked at the sergeant’s false teeth and finally took them from his mouth.

  He held them in the palm of his hand, studied them, turned them over, examined the tiny rivets that joined metal to bone, showed them to Caleb, and then he pocketed the strange booty in his coat.

  Caleb squatted down in front of Amicus Amico. He prodded the tip of a barbed spear into the animal’s brisket and the dog bristled and snarled and edged away, his flanks heaving in time with his quickened breath.

  ‘You can have all their stuff, if you want,’ said Sparrow. He did not know what he would do if they stole Amicus. ‘I hear the doctor fixed your wound, I truly hope the discomfort is long gone.’

  ‘It is gone.’

  ‘I hear you got to say grace, at the doctor’s table, that too.’

  ‘You are the yellowy man.’

  ‘Yes, more’s the pity. My jaundice takes a toll in the misery department. It can lay me awful low.’

  In the corner of his eye, Sparrow spied Napoleon helping himself to Redenbach’s axe. ‘Guess you got a hidey-hole somewhere, full o’ axes,’ he said. He was hoping Caleb might smile at his little joke, but Caleb did not smile.

  ‘Do you wish to meet with Mr Craggs?’ he said.

  Sparrow was briefly lost for words. ‘He’s here . . . Mort?’

  ‘Here,’ said Caleb. He waved his arm in a lazy arc across the northward scene.

  ‘I would most assuredly like to meet with him, yes.’