‘You do continue to wrong-foot my wildest expectations,’ said Cuff.
Sparrow thought best not to mention that Mort was asleep at the time. ‘He stole Dot and he misused her, most horribly.’
‘That’s true,’ said Dot.
‘I won’t stand for that, I just won’t,’ said Sparrow.
‘By God, a resolute man. The wilderness has worked its magic,’ said Cuff.
‘Not the wilderness,’ said Sparrow.
Amicus nuzzled at his hand and dropped down beside him, soft and warm.
He was tempted to tell them he had killed Peskett too and thus secured his young dog once and for all. The confession was on the tip of his tongue, but Sparrow said nothing further for there was already enough in the public realm, enough in the way of his known enormities, enough to hang him two or three times over.
‘I don’t know what you’ll find on the other side but here’s hoping some of the talk is true,’ said Cuff. His mind turned to practical matters. ‘If I could walk I’d recommend you take the mule.’
‘We don’t need the mule,’ said Bea.
‘No we do not.’ Sparrow was westward bound with Bea Faa and Amicus Amico. He wanted nothing more.
‘Well, there’s some things you can take. You can take poor old Dan’s fishing kit, the hooks, the line, take the pouch too. We can split the Chinese tea.’
‘There’s a river on the other side, I just know it,’ said Sparrow.
‘You find it you’ll be alright.’
‘We’ll find it.’ Sparrow was thinking of Mort Craggs’ cogitations on the matter.
‘You seem awful sure o’ yourself, Marty. That’s good.’
Sparrow was not so sure but he wanted to be sure, he wanted to talk up the likelihood as described by Mort. ‘Mr Flinders says there’s a river over there, a river of the first magnitude, a river with sinuosities three thousand miles long, I reckon he should know.’
‘Well, there’s a lot of preposterous reckoning about the other side but I have to say Mr Flinders is a most credible reckoner.’
‘Mr Flinders says it defies nature not to have a big river, like the Nile, land as big as this, bigger’n Egypt, I think.’
‘I grant the reasoning is sound but whether nature conforms to that reasoning in all times and all places, who knows.’
‘I reckon we’ll find a river.’
‘I reckon you will.’
In Cuff ’s opinion, there was nothing further to be gained by musing on the properties of the other side, nor on such fickle considerations as the savages known to inhabit the mountains to the west, Nabbinum’s mob.
‘A word to the wise,’ he said. ‘This river drops as fast as it comes up. When it drops the reaches settle and the levees come again into full view and they dry quick in the heat, good purchase underfoot. You keep to the shallows and the levees you can save yourself a lot of hard work and some peril. My advice is we live rough out of this here cave for a day or two and we’ll find the Branch way more placid and hospitable, upriver and down.’
‘We gotta eat,’ said Sparrow.
‘You can forage, can’t ya?’
‘Yes we can,’ said Bea.
Cuff was thinking further on the division of the meagre materials they had at hand. He was thinking of Dan’s boots. He did not want to see Dan interred without his boots but he knew that to be a sentiment the living could do without. ‘You best take his boots if they fit, boots awful scarce out here,’ he said.
‘Alright,’ said Sparrow.
‘One more thing.’
‘What?’
‘I’m advised, finally, the bull shark did kill that boy, is that right?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ll take your word on that, on one condition.’
‘Tell me.’
‘You sign over your patch to Dr Woody. It’s hardly compensation for his loss, but it’s something.’
‘That patch is deep in hock to Mr Mackie.’
‘It’s my expectation Mr Mackie would waive that debt in favour of Dr Woody, under the circumstances.’
‘I’ll do it then, I’ll sign.’
‘Good.’
Cuff took the warrant for Bea’s arrest from his haversack and the pen-cil from his vest pocket. On the back of the warrant he wrote the words whereby Sparrow ceded his thirty-acre patch, prime river bottoms, to the doctor and his family.
Sparrow studied the pen-cil as Cuff wrote. Then he took the strange implement and he scratched his signature alongside his printed name and Cuff signed at the bottom of the page as witness. ‘You’ve done the right thing, Marty,’ he said.
Sparrow felt no loss, for the patch was long gone from his life, and he was glad to leave it behind. Only the memory of the hens, just the hens, made him sad, for he had let them down. He had failed them and they had never failed him. The very thought stirred some strange instinct, some dormant resolve in his fibre – never to fail like that again, not Amicus, not Bea.
He watched as Cuff slipped the document into the bosom of his shirt and the implement into the vest pocket. ‘What is that, that stick?’
‘Why that’s a pen-cil,’ said Cuff.
‘Save on ink?’
‘Nothing is fixed in this world, Marty, not even the quill, and that’s been round since . . . since birds.’
Later that morning Sparrow and Bea loaded Dan back onto the mule and went searching for a patch of ground wherein to place his mortal remains. Downstream they found a cavity at the base of a sheer stone scarp, deep enough to accommodate Dan’s body.
They pushed him deep into the cavity, his remains wedged in the tapering stone.
‘You better take his boots,’ said Bea. She had put aside his hat.
Sparrow took the boots. He did not want to try them on, he just wanted to get done and go. They gathered rubble from roundabout and walled up the crypt with some care as to the fit of the stone. The exercise made Sparrow think fondly of the dry-stone wall at the front of the cave house. ‘Mr Catley’s habitation set a standard,’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘Did he blab on me, just like that?’
‘Yes, but he was ill, somewhat addled, not quite himself.’
‘I don’t care anyway. I’m not goin’ back.’
‘Nor I.’
The weather was clearing, the air heavy with damp, and they were sweating when the work was done.
The mule was nibbling at Sparrow’s heels, the dog sniffing at the assembled stone. They stood and paused, watching the wild river, a spectacle by any measure. ‘I’m no good at prayers,’ said Sparrow.
Bea Faa recalled a line from Cuff ’s speech when they buried Joe. The words seemed entirely right: ‘Mr Sprodd was a straight-goer, never known to practise the petty arts or the slippery ways.’
‘Straight, yes, straight as a rush, and never a bad word for anyone.’
‘He was good at fishing too. He’d say, them perch just beggin’.’
‘He would?
‘Yes.’
They threaded through the scrub, through bottlebrush and fern and a few dwarf myrtles, back to the cave.
They stayed three days in that cave, surviving on bush currants and milk caps, a few tubers and once on a big feed of cah-bro, a hatful that Bea dug out of a rotten log, but otherwise no meat.
The river dropped as Cuff said it would, though not as swiftly as it had risen, and not enough to trek the floor. So they stayed two days more and on that final day, the sky clear, the sun angling into the gorge, the air sticky as sap, on that day they conferenced, and agreed to go their separate ways.
They helped Cuff onto the mule, Dot with a good firm grip on the halter.
Sparrow was most relieved to see Cuff sit the mule with enough ease to suggest the plan might work. ‘Dot’s a good handler, she knows the mule,’ he said.
Cuff grimaced as he shifed his weight. He gestured south. ‘I’m in Dot’s hands, from one good woman to another. Guess I’m just blessed.’
‘T
hank you, Mr Cuff,’ said Sparrow. He was patting the mule high on the shoulder. Cuff lifted his hat to Sparrow and waved it about in something of a flourish.
‘Freddie will see you safe, when you get to Joe’s,’ said Bea.
‘I’m sure he will,’ said Cuff. ‘He’s like poor old Dan, constant in all weathers.’ He smiled at Bea and clucked his tongue. ‘Girl, you do wonders for that hat.’
‘I hope you make it,’ said Sparrow.
‘I’ll make it.’ Cuff untied the costrel, loosed it from the pack saddle and handed it to Sparrow. ‘You will need this more than me.’
‘Why?’
‘We got the river, me and Dot.’
‘We got the river too.’
‘Not all the way you don’t, not beyond the headwaters.’
Sparrow was reminded he had no idea what lay beyond the headwaters of the Branch.
‘I wish you both luck,’ said Cuff. ‘I hope it’s entirely pleasant over there. I hope they do a nice high tea.’
63
Sparrow and Bea watched as Dot led the freighted mule southwards through the trees. It occurred to Sparrow that prior to the flood both Peskett and Redenbach lay dead upon the sand not far downstream but now they would be gone, gathered to the deep or mere rubbish on the torrent. Dot and Cuff might find them, smashed up like Dan Sprodd. Or they might not find them at all and instead find Dan’s musket wedged in a tree, draped in the deathly grey of flood-borne shrubbery, the floodwaters a master of random arrangement.
They went back to the cave, packed the haversack and headed north along the slender path that had proved the undoing of Thaddeus Cuff.
On the next reach they dropped down to the river, for the river had truly settled to its quiet ways, the braided waters murmuring their way about wrack-strewn levees and long thin islands of sand, the crust baked dry in the sun.
At Mort’s gully they forded the tributary creek. Sparrow paused. ‘Mort’s up there,’ he said, but he was in no way inclined to go up that gully and survey his work. They walked on.
‘Do you ever dream of that bloody deed, that or the other?’ Bea asked.
‘Only when I’m awake,’ he said.
Further along the river parted ways on a mountainous spur, one way running straight on, the other hard to port, westward. They waded onto the westward course, sure in themselves that this was the Branch, for Mr Catley had confirmed the Branch ran through his valley and Mr Catley’s valley was westward, of that they had no doubt. A rose by any other name, he’d said.
For some days more they made their way west, their progress favoured by the firm sand on the shoulders of the long levees, their stomachs reconciled to a few foraged tubers, the ones Joe called bush parsnips, and now and then a feed of cah-bro.
They crossed ephemeral streams running from countless gullies, dark sanctuaries of coachwood and turpentine, anchor vine and fern. Where the banks were a tangle of ruin and altogether impassable they trekked knee-deep in the flow. In the heat of the day, the sun at its full height, they sat themselves in the shallows and they lay facedown in the cool runnage and drank in the water as it came to them. Amicus did much the same, occasionally rolling in the sand and then gambolling back to the shallows to snap at dragonflies and gallop after birds and rear and lunge at finches and miners as they swooped and skimmed.
On their fifth day they followed a beaten path at the foot of the flanking cliffs on the northern side of the river. They walked, enveloped in the deep shade, the far side of the river bathed in the low-angled rays of the sun, the valley basking in a luminous dusk, like the glow from a furnace. They did not see the lithe black figures watching them from cover.
They sat for a while. They walked on in the fading light, hoping to find a shelter for the night. They found not so much a cave as a shallow recess beneath an overhang where the sandstone wall was scalloped out, honeycombed by wind and seepage, the ceiling busy with nests and the air rich with the smell of feathers and bird dung. They sat, chins on knees, staring south across the valley, a faint hammock of moon, the dark closing in.
The next morning they waded across the river and came upon a yam patch on the southern bank. They picked some yams and crossed the valley floor and made their way up the timbered slope until they saw the cave house, cosseted in the trees below the cliff line, the setting deserted save for a wallaby that took flight and then stopped and turned and watched them with an admirable degree of coolness.
Sparrow saw Peskett’s tent, still there, much as it formerly was, a catch of rotting leaves and bat droppings in the torn and sagging canvas.
Amicus hurried to and fro, nose to the ground.
Bea pushed open the cave house door. She went in and looked around, the cool air gathered about. The arrangement of furnishings and oddments seemed unchanged, the wild figs and tubers hung like chimes, the swing lamp and the specimens all about, the funnel-web spider skewered on that long black pin, the pelt rug piled up in the snug niche at the rear, the old teapot on the windowsill.
Beneath the windowsill she found a heavy crock, the receptacle packed tight with square cuts of wild meat. She dipped her finger in the liquid, tasted a thick, pickled brine.
The upturned lid served as a plate for the square cuts she took to the fire, Sparrow stoking, the kindling taking the flame. He sniffed at the meat, nodding his approval.
‘There’s more,’ she said. ‘We can take some with us.’
She swivelled on her haunches and pondered the rude hut where Moowut’tin slept when he was working with Catley. She wondered why he came and went as he did, and why he was not with Catley on the Branch when the poor man fell victim to the duckbill.
Sparrow noted her gaze, her contemplative mood. ‘If ever we see them mountain blacks I do sincerely hope Moowut’tin is with them,’ he said.
They prepared a little feast to be followed by a cup of Dan Sprodd’s tea.
‘It is unseasonally warm,’ said Sparrow as they fed on the meat, side by side.
‘Not so much as to keep me outdoors.’
‘Me neither.’
‘You can have his bed,’ she said as she sat herself alongside him. ‘I’ll have the pelt rug.’
‘Alright.’ Sparrow said alright but he didn’t really mean alright. He’d have much preferred to share that bed with Bea. He called Amicus and the dog came swiftly and sat close, planting his rear end snug on Sparrow’s foot.
He thought of the men who would take the dog from him: Pinney, Peskett, Mort Craggs, and Henry Kettle, who was still alive. He glanced in the direction of Peskett’s ragged tent. He took hold of the dog at the scruff. ‘I’ll not share you with anyone,’ he said softly.
Bea put her arm around Sparrow. ‘Not even with me?’
‘Oh I’ll share him with you.’
‘We shall make of ourselves a formidable little party, the three of us.’
‘I think so, yes.’ Sparrow didn’t know what to think but he would hardly disagree. He could feel her arm around him, her fingers pressing on his shoulder. He wished they could sit like this forever, that and one or two other variations in the way of closeness.
In the morning they woke to a discord of creature sounds, frogs and cullawines and kookaburras, and yellow-tailed cockatoos in full flight. They set the fire and cooked a few more pieces of the pickled meat and they plucked baked yams from the coals and they made a pot of weak tea, rationing the meagre supply.
Sunlight filled the valley, the cliff line to the north a shimmer of ancient sediment massed in ripples of red and gold. They watched a mob of kangaroos bound westward along the river, the creatures swift and agile in country pocked with fallen timber and wombat holes.
A flock of small birds winged the valley, numberless in their mass. They sat stock still as a big goanna stalked the camp, and Sparrow held tight to Amicus as the creature went about his business.
Neither Sparrow nor Bea wanted to leave. Already they could feel the warmth in the air, another hot day. It was easy enough to succumb to
a certain lethargy and a measure of comfort in the shaded surrounds of the cave house, but neither Bea nor Sparrow was really clear as to why they lingered. They spoke of Catley.
‘He is sweet on you,’ said Sparrow. He wanted to know what Bea would say in reply.
‘He is married to that Sir Joseph fellow.’
Sparrow laughed at the thought. ‘He looks at you all the time.’
‘He is a most oniony man.’
Sparrow chuckled. He was pleased to have no connection at all with onions. ‘He will not betray us, nothwithstanding his lapse. I do believe that,’ he said.
‘I feel the more safe with you.’
That made Sparrow happy, though little pinpricks of doubt made him wonder if it could be true.
Bea had thought about her unlikely connection with Martin Sparrow for some time. She had weighed him up, so to speak. He was not pretty, nor strong, but his fortitude had surprised her and one thing she knew for a certainty: Sparrow had struck up a remarkable association with the small axe and he would defend her as best he could, just as he would defend Amicus Amico. His attachment to them had raised him up, made him better than he really was, or had been; made him resolute, made him anew. And one thing more – she did not fear him. That counted for something. That was a blessing.
They left Catley’s patch at dawn the following day. They kept to the sand as best they could, now and then the meander presenting them with a view of the sheer cliffs that flanked the northern side of the river, the sun playing on raw patches of freshly calved stone, their progress scrutinised by reptiles in the scrub, wading birds in the shallows and raptors in the sky.
They walked all day.
Late in the day they startled a wedge-tailed eagle feeding on a freshwater turtle. They watched the eagle soar into the air and circle high above, watching them in turn.
Bea killed the meat with Dan Sprodd’s fish knife. She cut away the shell and threw it clear and she fed the tiny head and the feet to the dog and the dog dropped down, gnawing at the leftovers, while Sparrow set a fire so they might cook their small meal on the coals.
They ate slowly, watching the eagle pick at the fleshy remains on the upturned shell. ‘I could shoot him,’ said Sparrow. But he did not want to ruin the quiet, nor the contentment he felt at that moment. He took Mort’s pistol from the haversack and studied its particularities.
The Making of Martin Sparrow Page 39
