Mr Darwin's Shooter

by Roger McDonald

  The South American, Galapagos, Australian and sea-borne colour and high adventure of that voyage was a period of adventure and travel ‘far more thrilling’ (as Stephen Jay Gould has observed) than such a voyage might otherwise have been in itself, thanks to ‘the impact upon human history’ of the religious and scientific conclusions reached by Darwin incrementally, culminating in The Origin of Species. Covington was there with Darwin every inch of the way in the preparation phase, not just in the evidence-gathering part of the process, but—back in London, and crucial to the plot—when Darwin first put pen to paper (privately) expressing his theory.

  If a convention of the novel is a character from the sidelines, overlooked, underestimated, but a very present actor, sufferer, and eavesdropper, then I could hardly have found a better one to imagine myself into than Syms Covington.

  Roger McDonald

  Braidwood, NSW

  September 2008

  Footnote: I am grateful to Professor John Ludbrook for a generous letter drawing my attention to an error of fact relating to Covington’s operation for his illness when I have him arriving in Sydney in the early pages of the novel, suffering from what is evidently a burst appendix. I am pleased that I have the opportunity to make the correction with this printing, ten years after first publication, still having the fictional Dr MacCracken at an advanced point of his profession in 1860, but not so far forward that he would have been (by about twenty years) a world pioneer if his operation had been done the way I described it.

  The day was hot and dusty with scattered leaves of poplars lining a towpath. A boy went swimming in green canal water, rolling himself belly-over, gulping and thrashing in pleasure. He beat the slowly moving water with the flat of his hand and floating face-down blew noisy bubbles.

  Syms Covington was naked as a bulb, white and hairless except for a slicked-down tuft of red curls across the dome of his conspicuous head. At twelve years of age he was sturdy as a man and soon would become one, stretching in his bones until he reached a height of just six feet, and getting a strength across his shoulders and in his arms like a house beam squared from timber. Yet when Covington floated on his back between corridors of puffy summer clouds he felt small as a flea, and imagined he looked down on the earth. It made a field of blue for him to hop around in. He laughed and squeaked, never minding how cold the water was, and went swimming any time of year to win wagers or for the joy of it alone. Other times he took bread and cheese in a sack and wandered the fields. On summer nights he slept with a stone for his pillow like Jacob, waking in the moonlight and hearing a badger grunt and watching a hare strip bark from a sapling. He fought his fears on such nights and saw them come to nothing in the early light.

  When he reached the gates of the lock he could hear water trickling far below. It came from a dark door. There were times when Covington had swum below that door and thought of the weight of water above him. He knew the gates were held by iron bars, ratchets, cogs, and by oakwood planks. But all the same, what if the weight of water broke them? When he thought about that he saw himself on the surface of the water, shooting away like a leaf, and his illusion of floating in the sky vanished. Then he knew the feeling of being tested against eternal punishment and knowing he was loved.

  Upstream Covington began his play again, heading back to where two bundles of clothes awaited him on the bank, one bloodstained and filthy, the second lot as clean as hard scrubbing and hanging in the sun could make them. The canal became a river at that place, with willows trailing their branches and a water rat making a spline of ripples. It was a place to be cleansed of stains, except the boy had been in the water a good half hour and his forearms were still sticky with blood and flecks of fatty meat. He grabbed a handful of clay and scrubbed himself. He started singing. While he stood there, balancing in the mire, a man got up from under a tree near the lock-keeper’s cottage and walked along the towpath.

  The man wore a soft sailor’s cap with curly black hair poking from underneath, and a red waist-jacket leaving his ribs bare in the heat. He was past thirty years of age, short of stature, with a rounded black beard composed of tight corkscrew curls. His sunken eyes were feverish, his red lips parched, and when he swallowed a prominent Adam’s apple travelled up and down. He carried his belongings in a sailorman’s sack hung over his shoulder, and when he reached a narrow bridge that was barely more than a plank with a handrail, he shifted the sack to the other shoulder and walked the plank with an assertive and derisive gait, giving a few hard bounces along its length. From there he watched Covington amusing himself. Daubing and daydreaming the boy sang ‘Barley Mow’ in a sweet soprano as clear as any girl’s, and this was remarkable because the sailor, whose name was John Phipps, had been thinking the boy looked like a shaved pig, and in the purity of the outburst asked God’s forgiveness for such thoughts and said a prayer for the impressment of souls.

  All that Saturday afternoon Covington had helped his father and brothers, hauling horsemeat from a wagon sticky with flies and chopping it into portions on a market table. His Pa was a Bedford butcher wielding a long knife and bringing unwanted carthorses to their knees in a welter of blood and callous humour. After the markets the boy did the scrubbing-down with a stiff broom and a tub of soapy water. He had smiling narrow eyes, dusty blue in colour, high cheekbones and a wide generous mouth. His nose was aquiline, his nostrils slightly flared, and the bones of his forehead were like a shield. When asked why he laboured with no pay when he slaved all week, a clerk in a leather-merchant’s house, he brushed curls from his forehead and gave a shrug:

  ‘Say the broom makes a good sound hitting the bristles against the stone. Say I feel like I’m drumming and making music for ’un.’

  Covington’s brothers and Pa at the end of their Saturday labours sank pots of dark ale, giving themselves winking blades of foam up their cheekbones. They earned them, in the boy’s honest estimation.

  ‘My boy,’ said his Pa in return admiration, ‘is a true old-time Covington, the most willing soul that ever lived.’

  The steamy-breathed old man had bristly eyebrows flying back over his forehead, and prominent front teeth showing yellow and flat when he drew his lips back. Standing in his blood-brown boots he rocked back and forth as if hammered to the ground and twanging slightly with the force of his opinions.

  He liked to call his son over and hold his head back in a playful grip, trickling bitter ale into his mouth and down his chin. Their people, he liked to boast, were Bedford notables in the time of Oliver Cromwell and their line went back past 1199, when they owned half a virgate of land. ‘Of all the children of my bowels, Simon is the one that God has chosen to better his self, and lucky for us and ours.’ His brothers passed the boy the ale-pot in the same rough animal-play. After drinking it down companionably, and staggering around to make them laugh, Covington returned to his sweeping with a light head. The others stood in shabby doorways with their shirt collars open, their belts loosened and slippery leather laces dangling. They were ready to kick their boots off and go crawling in a corner when they were too drunk to stand. But it would be a good long while before they were felled. Something about the Covingtons recalled animals associated with primitive man. The barely domesticated. Those spirits to the end. Say bullocks with clear foreheads and curly scruffs of hair from the ancient cave paintings of Spain and France—they were found in their lifetime—or strong-necked ponies from the same smoky walls, ten or twenty or thirty thousand years ago, pale-eyed and bristly-maned in the dawn of the roping, the taming, and the hard use of innocence in the aims of civilisation. Covington would one day think so, anyway. They were dirty-fisted hard-working men given to their pipes, their ale, their loud opinions— likewise to their routines of sudden mayhem, sharp knives, rolled back horses’ eyes and clattering hooves. Being horse-butchers they were lower-placed than those who dealt with finished hides. But Covington never felt shame and pity for them, for while they were mired in blood they remembered they had souls, and Co
vington was of them truly—except that if he was to spend his whole life around them he would never find what he wanted.

  In the deepest part of himself he knew what that was, and it meant setting off on a journey. A story tingled his arms to the fingertips and shook his shanks down to his toes with anxiety and restlessness. It was the Pilgrim’s Progress that belonged to their town and countryside, telling of a sally away from Bedford in a great undertaking. It was all about walking and peering and finding, coming out from behind trees and passing down narrow rocky paths into darkness and light. It was all a great test for goodness of heart. Obstacles were to be met, most horrendous, and there were dangers of falling into an abyss. Black rivers were to be crossed. Vain and foolish strangers were to be put to rights.

  John Bunyan’s book was devotional reading in the house in Mill Lane from the time they were small. It cleansed them just to think of it. In Bedford and the nearby countryside you would think the very air breathed was old John Bunyan’s. The long, sky-wide quality of the light and the feel of the chalk and clay came from Bunyan’s pages. Likewise the water meadows and the winter floods, they all squelched and trickled with his words. Bunyan was preached without cease in their chapel and his language, whether imbued with ale or milkmaid’s curds, always had the taste of the countryside and its pleasures and pitfalls in it:

  The next was a dish of milk well-crumbed. But Gaius said, Let the boys have that, that they may grow thereby.

  None of them took it quite as Covington did, with the seriousness of a promise and a passion of loyalty in his bones. At the age he was he regretted how all the great wars had finished when he was too young to fight them. He wished that monster Napoleon who’d been imprisoned on St Helena Island had lived to old age and given him the chance to stand in arms against him, the way Christian in Bunyan’s pages had stood against Apollyon, who had scales like a fish, wings like a dragon, feet like a bear, and out of whose belly came fire and smoke. Death was not to be feared in such a spirit except in failure, and if Covington succeeded it would be a greatness overcoming all. He would be a boy hero like those at Trafalgar and stand on a splintering deck risking his life with every thump of a gun. Or he would advance with a bayonet, impaling native heads. He would rise in worth and join with the chosen of England—although, as John Bunyan put it, ‘not at the first, nor second, nor third, nor fourth, nor fifth, no nor at the sixth time neither’. Because if you had a strong pull in any path of life then obstacles came at you to greet you.

  His earliest memories were not of his mother nurturing him, but of a man with golden curls. His name was Christian. He had rosy cheeks and wore a raspberry-red jacket with gold buttons. The light shone through him by day, while at night his colours went dead as mud. On Sunday mornings he flew soaring over a stile and simultaneously looked back over his shoulder and met Covington’s gaze with the bottle-brown of a single eye. He made a beckoning gesture with a crooked finger: ‘Follow me.’ He was made from coloured glass in a window setting, but the boy didn’t know that, in his earliest conjecturing of the world, in which everything past the reach of his arms, whether a tree, a horse, a blackbird, or a river, had an existence equal to his own. Christian fairly gave off heat from his raiment when the sun shone through him. He was like one of Covington’s brothers dyed in red and always running away; and grand in the mood of his Pa and brothers when the boy liked them best, as they grinned and tossed him in the air, and caught him roughly. He wanted Covington to follow him to the Celestial City that shone from a cloud farther on. It could have been London, that city, for most had never been to London to know any difference; London, where the buildings were sculpted in gold and shone with celestial ice.

  Covington as a small boy felt happy inside the chapel where Christian strode in stained glass. Everything was newly made there, planed and nailed by sincere English carpenters and plastered by English artisans. It was done in the spirit of realness yet formed an other-world for Covingtons to take inside themselves, just as surely as if they had swallowed the mysteries of the Hindoo. A smell of freshness filled the boy’s nostrils. He sniffed the grass under Christian’s heels and heard the gurgling of a stream lined with buttercups, which Christian would leap next after he cleared the stile. That jump was said to be near Elstow, where Covington had often sat sucking a grass-stem and looking at clouds. He was able to hear the Elstow bullock low down in the next field as it challenged the smiling man; it made a grunting noise in the field—a sound that Covington made in the back of his throat, first being the bullock, then being himself butting the bullock in imagination and getting his first taste of joy from a fair fight.

  ‘Come along and be quick about it,’ Christian seemed to say, even before there were any words in Covington’s head or ability in his legs to jump along to a command. Fixed in his blood from that earliest time was a readiness to respond to a beckoning gesture; and later, when that gesture was not offered, to boldly seek it and be sure it was made.

  In the next part of memory Covington’s mother let go of him and the man reached down and pulled him up into the wall. The congregation sang a hymn:

  He that is down needs fear no fall,

  He that is low, no pride;

  He that is humble ever shall

  Have God to be his Guide.

  The sailor stood on the footbridge overlooking the canal and stared at Covington in the water. Whether he looked with interest or just gazed in that direction like a blackbird with quick, sharp, alert-headed movements was of little account to Covington, who didn’t like it at all. The sailor scratched his ribs under his red waist-jacket. He wore flared canvas trousers, and on his feet were wooden clogs. His hairy shins showed bare. The sun glittered on the water and blinded him. He put a hand to his round beard and bunched it in his fist, giving it a twirl. Though it was the dress of a sailor he wore, the canal was far inland from the sea.

  Who the man was Covington would learn when he saw him again in autumn, and remember him as if he had been planted in his brain and stored there to ripen. It would be cold by then and John Phipps would wear an overcoat and a cocked hat and call to a crowd under a lime tree with words to twist a rope around Covington’s heart and haul him up from being down:

  I am content with what I have,

  Little be it, or much:

  And Lord, contentment still I crave,

  Because thou savest such.

  That summer day, however, the man stared into the canal a long time; too long; and Covington made a blurting sound like a wet trumpet to accuse him of foul curiosity. When the man still stared, Covington grabbed himself between the legs and gave a tug and yelled, ‘I caught a fish, it’s a big ’un, look, see?’ Then Covington saw the man tiredly grin and heft his sack of belongings across his shoulder and screwing his eyes against the glare of the sun disappear from sight.

  The day emptied except for hens from the lock-keeper’s cottage giving themselves dust baths on the towpath. Covington climbed from the water unpeeling strings of green weed from himself, giving a shake like a dog, then mopping his chest with his clean shirt taken from his bundle that smelled faintly of beeswax from Mrs Hewtson’s understairs cupboard. He dressed and was cool, and was clean enough, too, but still carried the over-sweet fatty odour of the slaughteryard about with him. It would never go away for as long as he lived in his father’s house.

  Sunday meant chapel, where Covington sat next to Mrs Hewtson. She was his plump excitable stepmother, a fresh-faced widow and the best friend Covington ever had in the world. His real mother had died leaving him with a memory of sweetness and a green ribbon his father had placed in their Bible. Mrs Hewtson wore her best Sunday bonnet, which Covington told her was pretty, and she said he had better not say that to just any maid, or she would be jealous. She had rosy cheeks, humorous eyes, a teasing kindness and a great devotion in her heart. He played the fool and ground his knuckles into his forehead and dribbled spit from his hanging-open mouth onto the bare dusty boards between his boots. Mrs Hewtso
n nudged his knee and giggled, offering her bunched handkerchief to wipe his lips, and whispered, ‘Be serious about you, now.’ From a low, sinister angle Covington flashed his pale blue eyes at her, smiled and grunted, going at her with a small jerk of his head just like that bullock. She was very young.

  ‘Stop it,’ she squeaked, and the preacher, Mr William Squiggley, paused in his delivery, sending Covington a look of accusation: ‘What was the last thing I said, Simon Covington?’

  ‘You said that Abraham heard the voice of God and he took his son into the desert.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To cut his throat, that’s why.’

  ‘To make of him a sacrifice. And what happened next?’

  ‘You did not say what happened next.’

  ‘That is true,’ said the honest Squiggley, who was their printer and bookbinder in his weekday trade, and easy with bad debtors because they were all good Christians and true.

  Squiggley continued the story of Abraham and how there was a ram caught in a thicket, and how the life of the animal was taken for that of the boy about to be sacrificed in obedience to God. Covington lifted his eyes to the window-glass where he lived in his thoughts. His Pa dozed, dreaming of Mrs Hewtson’s bezooms that were like jellies in his palms when he woke in the mornings. The brothers, matched each to their future wives in adjoining pews, had the look of dozing horses. Their ears twitched when the preacher’s voice rose, and steadied when he prayed.

  Covington raised his hand to answer a question about the boy, Isaac, and how he must feel being released from having his throat cut. He did after all go forth and father the people of Israel, and nobody else seemed to know that. But the preacher wanted no more of him.