Bring Larks and Heroes

by Thomas Keneally

  ‘Are you sick, Mrs Blythe?’ he said. He out-flanked a commode to get closer. ‘Mrs Blythe, do you want me to get a glass of water? Will I fetch the girl?’

  ‘No,’ she said. What a small, back-broken negative it was!

  At last she opened her eyes.

  ‘It’s gone now,’ she said. ‘Pain is with me more and more.’

  ‘That’s a terrible thing,’ said Byrne.

  ‘I have been lamed with ulcers since Rio. It is small enough tribute to pay to our Saviour’s cross. Yet I sometimes find it nearly beyond me.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Byrne gently. In his day, he had paid a deal of tribute himself. Unwillingly, certainly. But he felt entitled to give quiet assent to the pious. He felt entitled even to ask.

  ‘Do you use a poultice on your troubles, Mrs Blythe?’

  He wondered fleetingly if he had presumed. So did Mrs Blythe wonder; fleetingly.

  ‘I have used starch, but it is in short supply. I have even used flour and mustard, in shorter supply still. Kaolin is very soothing, although I gave myself a terrible burn applying kaolin before it was well cooled.’

  ‘You want a drawing poultice, Mrs Blythe. You don’t mind me saying so, do you?’

  ‘No. I don’t at all. Tell me.’

  ‘I had an aunt and her leg was one dripping sore, Mrs Blythe. She used every cure she could think of, even faith and relics. But it wasn’t God’s will. Then a land-agent from Waterford was passing, and told her to take the giblets from one of the slightly bigger birds, a shrike or kestrel say. You stew the giblets just for a while, not very long, and then you cake them in soft soap to stop them sticking or going bad, and you wrap them in a hot cloth. She put this poultice on, my aunt did, and praised the God of heaven, because she could feel it working on her trouble. Today she walks this earth as straight as any soldier.’

  ‘Giblets?’ said Mrs Blythe.

  ‘Yes, Madam.’

  ‘It sounds likely.’

  ‘It does indeed.’

  ‘Where can I get giblets?’

  ‘I could be certain to get you some out of magpie, or out of a gull. They mightn’t be table-birds, but there’s virtue in their giblets.’

  ‘You could get me some, yes, you could indeed.’

  Mrs Blythe seemed to be growing robust in her chair. The prospect had flushed her.

  Three days later, Byrne, beginning to despair, caught a gull by casting a weighted fishing line on the edge of the bay. The hook was baited with a piece of beef, and all the swift young gulls competed for it as it swung in its slow arc through the air. Byrne retrieved the beef out of the gullet and ate the inedible bird; but the giblets were for Mrs Blythe’s trouble.

  The poultice did so well that Byrne was asked to the Commissary’s place a number of times in May and early winter, and was delighted to have such a powerful invalid for a friend.

  13

  Off would go Captain Allen, at least once a fortnight, hunting down squalour in the corners of his company’s huts, investigating excesses of vermin in this or that soldier’s bed-roll. His was the only company for which barracks had not been built, and he felt that some obscure point was proved if there were fewer of his men ailing than were ailing in other companies. He was a specialist in proving obscure points, if not in explaining them.

  His adjutant always escorted him at such times. So, too, at a distance, did Halloran. On the west of the hutments was a claypit, and here one day, waiting at his distance for the officers to finish in one of the huts, he failed at first to see a little bald man called Quinn emerging at the top of the diggings, five yards from him.

  ‘Hoy Corporal,’ he heard, ‘hoy Corporal sir!’

  Halloran saw a little brick-coloured man picking at the earth with his mattock. His brown eyes somehow managed to see from under his bald, servile brows.

  ‘My name’s Quinn, sir. I bribed the overseer.’

  Halloran laughed. ‘Good work. Should be more men like you.’

  ‘So that I could move up here and see you.’

  ‘See me? I’m not worth a bribe.’

  ‘I need your advice. I won’t go to any officers and gentlemen for it, I’ve had a bellyful of them. I need to get advice from one of my own. They tell me you’re a man worth knowing.’

  ‘I don’t think there’s any such person, the God above us excepted,’ said Halloran.

  ‘I see,’ said Quinn negligently. He hadn’t bribed the overseer and climbed up the pit to talk theology. ‘I can’t see you in the Marine lines, and I can’t see you here for more than a minute. But perhaps you could see your mercy’s way clear to talk with me one afternoon. If it could be today, I’d know how true were the exalted things they say about you.’

  Halloran began to laugh again. But the sinewy shoulders and the sweating scalp bent over the mattock with such fear. He restrained himself.

  ‘Do you know the Government dry store? Near the shipyards?’

  The little man looked up, clownish in his delight at the two of them knowing the same place.

  ‘There at half-past two?’ Halloran suggested.

  ‘Almighty God of mercy,’ said Quinn, and began to call down wild benedictions on Phelim’s head, ending in the devout hope that he might become father of a great race.

  Halloran laughed.

  ‘Amen to that. You don’t come by being father of a great race without a bit of fun.’

  Quinn giggled too. It was gratifying to see him, suffused with his undisclosed hopes, work his way back down into the pit.

  Quinn told Halloran that it had been nearly seven years since he’d been sentenced in Cavan. He had come to the colony with less than a year of his sentence to serve, and now his time would be up in early May. Whomever he spoke to about it, they all looked blank.

  When they had brought him aboard the Catania at Cove, he had already served five years in Cavan county jail. There had been some trouble at a market-town called Kilshandra. Two cottages had been set alight, the women of the households screaming for their bridal beds and heirlooms. Five milch cows had been led into the fire-light and their bellies piked open.

  Quinn himself, so he told Halloran, had not arrived in the town with his bacon until the next day. He’d been unlucky enough to take a drink with two of the guilty men; a squadron of dragoons came to the town; etc., etc.

  ‘I find it hard to talk to my masters,’ he said.

  Halloran believed it. For Quinn was the type whose brows are honed to a fine edge by decades of cap-doffing to the agent and the priest.

  But despite the long habits of serfdom, on being indentured for transportation, he told his story to every available official, both from the harbour and from the Catania: to the harbour-master and officers marine and mercantile, to the commissary officials, the surgeon and Navy agent. So many of them listened. So many of them curled their mouths at the folly of sending a man into the furthest exile for a matter of mere months. So many of them promised to have words about him with so many knights, commodores, magistrates, members, shipyard secretaries, militia generals, benevolent ladies and bishops.

  Despite this hierarchy of concern, Catania sailed. The next day, allowed out of the hold, he looked to the quarter-deck, that the gentlemen there might see him and remember what a blunder had been made in him. Yet they seemed to be immune to that or any blunder. Three midshipmen were playing with a sextant and the sky. One of them was probably dipping the great sun into the sea and bouncing it skywards again, as you can with the sextant. The other two laughed.

  As final word to the impregnable decisions of the great, there was an armed Marine at the bottom of the companion-way.

  It was a story normal enough by the queer standards of Irish justice, nor would Quinn have had the courage to tell it, even to a Corporal, if it had been a lie. Since
it would do no harm, Halloran framed a petition for Quinn.

  It ran, ‘Peter Quinn, felon, of Howden’s gang at the claypit, respectfully requests to draw His Excellency’s attention to the fact, viz., that on May 5th next, it will be a full seven years since the aforesaid Quinn was condemned to that term of transportation by the Chief Magistrate in Cavan, Sir Ambrose Preston. Quinn begs His Excellency’s indulgence for bringing this matter to His Excellency’s attention, but assures him that he does so with good intention, and on account of the peculiarity of his case, viz., that he was landed in this country more than six years after sentence was passed on him. With every good wish for His Excellency’s continued health and prosperity, this petition is signed by . . .’

  Halloran read out the finished letter, and Quinn hugged himself at its sound.

  ‘That’s a mystery of elegance,’ he said. ‘That’s poetry.’

  ‘No,’ said Halloran, ‘it’s not poetry. It’s just the sort of letter they get every day at Government House. Just the same, it surely has a good chance of success.’

  Yet Quinn, who had never heard such a letter before, was not to be dissuaded from hoping exorbitantly in it. He smiled and his eye-brows went crooked, and for some seconds it was possible to see the Quinn who went to market a quarter of a century back, on the look out for the main chance, whether it wore a bottle or a bombazine shawl.

  Yet no answer came from Government House for a month, and Quinn reverted to his thin, subjugated baldness.

  On May 4th, about eleven o’clock in the morning, a Marine, well-turned out and patently one of the Government House guard, arrived at the claypit to take Quinn to His Excellency. There was no time for any long savouring of hope as Quinn scrabbled out of the pit. The decision was about to fall on him like a mountain.

  Two furlongs downhill, two furlongs up, the Marine, whose funeral it was not, strolled behind him. He saw Quinn chafing his hands together, trying to erase the frightened veins on the tops of his hands.

  ‘Chilblains, mate?’ he called.

  He had the poisonous laugh of a man who will take his terror the day it comes. Which wasn’t today.

  Throughout, Quinn had a sense of being chained up to the imminence of this clear, orange day; to the florid clouds and the wind shuffling in squat and leek-green forests. The warmth, the clouds, the wind, would all be recorded by an acquiescent officer at the Battery – the passable features of the day in what passed here for autumn. For Quinn, they were so many planks in a casket, narrowing him down to the little plot of time in which His Excellency’s word would be given, and himself knocked sprawling one way or another.

  Government House was something temporary, a solid pup of a house somehow primitive, like a child’s drawing of a merchant-class home. One leaf of a double main door stood open. It was panelled mahogany and had a brass lion’s snout with a ring through it. This half-open entrance was eloquent of something, of flustered sovereignty and occult paperwork and hasty final words. Yet however he might have found them, Quinn would always have suspected such paramount doors. For they ushered him into an area where he had never been without suffering for it. Before these doors, Quinn sensed with terror what parodies His Excellency and himself would be to each other.

  He was halted in the portico with its poor square, wooden columns, at the head of which some dredged-up village talent had carved Ionic capitals like the noses of Dorset rams. A sergeant came out to take control of Quinn with one of those great man-quartering halberds which are the right of sergeants.

  ‘Eff-rie, eff-rie,’ the sergeant had time to sing, and they were in the ante-room.

  Full of wind, some berried shrubs pecked the ante-room window. Sunlight had spilt all over the vital documents on one of the desks. The room had two of these low, foreign ones with turreted castles of pigeon-holes rising from them to signify the unwarranted pugnacity of servants of the government. Against the back wall stood a divan for people who didn’t work in claypits to await His Excellency’s pleasure on.

  Lieutenant Rowley, the aide, was speaking quietly to Long, the Governor’s Secretary. He moved then, back to his own embattled desk and called to Quinn. On the top-half of a sheet of virgin paper, he wrote down Quinn’s answers to certain questions. When finished, he tore the paper in two, sauntered to His Excellency’s door, knocked, and heard a permissive rumble.

  When Rowley had gone, Quinn was calmer. Because he had been able to answer some listless questions, he was further able to promise himself that he would not be put upon. He began to stand up like any man’s equal. But His Excellency’s door swung open too soon, with Rowley in the doorway on his gracious, bent legs.

  ‘Bring in the felon, Sergeant,’ Rowley begged.

  Ah, the felon was brought in with ceremony indeed, quick-marched in that his malice might be circumscribed, and halted on an unequivocal spot.

  The unequivocal spot was on the floor-boards in front of His Excellency’s Alexandria carpet. Quinn stared at the mystic, woven splashes and coils, living their own lives which were a shut door to him. He glanced at the window – lace curtains and a striped valance, hateful for their sunny pretensions. His eyes followed the walls around. Behind His Excellency, a number of delf plates hung from a picture rail. All were orange and had, in black, the outline of a ship and its name, and were hung there as a record of His Excellency’s years of service in ships of the line.

  The potentate himself sat worrying loose thread out of a frogged buttonhole on his coat. He eyed something on the desk, perhaps the half page biography of Quinn.

  ‘Perhaps you could help me with this matter, Mr Rowley,’ he muttered.

  Behind Quinn the door closed, very crisply and cleanly for a colonial door. Rowley advanced to the Governor’s right hand.

  ‘Quinn, is it?’ said His Excellency, not looking up.

  The sergeant prompted Quinn with his knee.

  ‘Yes, Your Honour.’

  ‘Your Excellency,’ said appalled Rowley.

  Quinn so amended.

  ‘You claim to have been sentenced seven years ago in Cavan. Seven years ago tomorrow.’ There was a certain reasonableness about His Excellency’s mottled, staggy cheeks.

  ‘Yes, Your Excellency. A seven years sentence.’ This is man-to-man stuff, thought Quinn. ‘Up tomorrow,’ he added, because he was at his ease.

  ‘So that you actually landed in this place with ten months to serve.’

  Choking, ‘Your Excellency,’ said Quinn in an affirmative tone.

  Then came a further good omen. The Governor turned to Rowley and said audibly, ‘Damn Dublin Castle!’

  He bowed his head again to Quinn’s details on the half-sheet of paper. He rolled them round his tongue and found them sour.

  ‘I have no reason to disbelieve you, Quinn,’ he said, opening his mouth like a carp and having a last blurred look down the lines of his cheeks to the paper on the desk. ‘Unfortunately though, I have no reason to believe you either.’

  Quinn nodded and swallowed, too heedlessly. Instantly, he wanted above all to escape from the house. The terror of officials lies in that they can be translucent beings, inhuman windows. With a little wisdom, they can so place themselves that centuries of kingships and Parliaments shine straight through them, flush onto poor creatures such as Quinn. To hell with the friendly cheeks! His Excellency was an official, and officials suffocated anyone they managed to trap down on paper.

  ‘All we have here, in this colony,’ the Governor explained, ‘is a record of your name, age, ship, date of sailing, skills and subsequent charges laid against you here – of which there are none, of course. You see, the convict indentures for the Catania have not yet arrived. There is no way of our knowing how long a term you were sentenced to, or the date of your sentencing. And, of course, I cannot release you after you’ve been a mere ten months in the colony. You realize that.’


  Beyond nodding, Quinn was ranting to himself. He realized that the Register of transports must be kept immaculate, so that no clerk in the Home Secretary’s would raise an eyelid at an unwarranted release of a felon.

  ‘My recommendation to you,’ said His Excellency, making gestures of amplitude, conjuring with the jagged edges of Quinn’s condition, ‘is that you continue with your excellent record until your indentures come.’

  A sincere man, a deadly sincere man, he frowned.

  ‘How long would that be likely to be, Your Excellency?’ Quinn managed to ask.

  ‘On the indications, Dublin Castle is very busy now with the echoes of this and that outbreak. It is impossible to answer your question, Quinn. There is no precedent. I mean, it has never happened before. But I don’t expect it will be long, and if you continue in your present docility and silence, you will be freed as soon as we know. I mention silence, because it would be a condition of your release that I should not have countrymen of yours coming to me with unfounded stories in emulation, imitation, of yours. You understand that?’

  Quinn, damning himself, nodded like a sycophant.

  His Excellency ferreted amongst papers. As far as he was concerned, he had reached the peroration of his words with Quinn.

  ‘Be a brave man now! Mr Rowley, perhaps you could write a note of this interview and remind me of Quinn’s case when the papers do arrive.’

  Rowley came to attention.

  ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘may I say that the felon has received more than justice at your hands.’

  Hem-licking bastard, thought Quinn, not aware that Rowley had uttered a very courtly denunciation of his master.

  But he was right in seeing that, with impeccable righteousness, they were burying him alive. If be brave, and Rowley, take a note were the final words, he could not live by them. Against the winter, he must have for warmth a few of the murkier tatters of hope.

  ‘Perhaps, Your Excellency,’ he began, ‘if what I say ends up in being the truth of the matter, you might ask the Provost-Marshal to fix up a passage home for me. Perhaps for a bit off the price. I haven’t had time to earn anything, you see.’