Mr Darwin's Shooter Page 4

  True to his word John Phipps came there, and put his case.

  ‘If you mean my boy to be an evangelist, like yourself,’ boomed Covington’s Pa, rising to his full height wearing a leather apron, addressing Phipps and waving a willow-stick around (that he was using to beat horsehide, to loosen the hairs from it to make head-plasters), ‘then you have chosen the wrong boy. My Syms could no more persuade a sinner from off his path than that sparrow there,’ he pointed with his wand, shooing a scrawny bird a few hops away, where it splashed through a cesspool composed of blood, chaff and urine. ‘He would as soon dirty himself in sin as cleanse himself in the rivers of Babylon—’

  ‘If you mean he doesn’t know what sin is—’

  ‘Aye, I do mean that. He would willingly serve the devil for a pat on the head, and likewise raise Christ’s hem from the dirt, e’en if it skunned his knees to the bone.’

  ‘I can see that in him,’ said John Phipps. ‘It is why I want him in our crew.’

  ‘Yours is a daft ship, being on land without keel or rigging,’ observed old Covington, with a barb of suspicion in his voice. ‘Are ye supported by any missionary society?’

  ‘Only what God provides.’

  ‘And your nose, from the sharp look of you.’

  John Phipps smiled. ‘You shall have one less mouth to feed if he comes.’

  ‘That has occurred to me,’ said the father drily, ‘since yesterday, when the Quentins lost their market in hides.’

  ‘I want to go,’ said Covington.

  ‘It is to my sad advantage to let you go,’ said Covington senior, ‘whether I like it or not.’ He grabbed Covington and pulled him to him. ‘God love you, lad, as I do, and you’ll meet no harm.’ Then Covington went to Mrs Hewtson, and she grabbed him to her too, and said the same kind things to him. ‘What shall we do without you? Who will bring us such cheer?’ Word meantime was sent to their preacher, the printer and bookbinder Mr Squiggley, to ask for information in the matter. He said that John Phipps was known thereabouts; he was a wanderer; he had formerly been a rogue; his father had disowned him; he had seen a better way; he was known for his eloquence with boys. So really there was not a bad word said about him except by those who feared his scorn. His temper was fierce, he was possessive when roused, and was the special hate of game-keepers, on whose land he trespassed in a lofty spirit of freedom. It was said that he set a pace with his fast legs like Alexander the Great in crossing England, and as a boy had sailed in the English fleet against Nick Frog, and so was branded young to the ways of the sea.

  Mrs Hewtson stuffed a canvas satchel with rice pudding, cold mutton, cheese and bread. She handed Covington a bottle of mulberry wine which he slipped in his pocket. There was no more room left in his satchel. It was heavy, almost unbalancing him as he slung it around his back.

  ‘I am a packhorse,’ he said.

  ‘You are a donkey,’ jibed Mrs Hewtson, tugging his ears, putting her arms around him close. ‘John Phipps’s donkey and he’s got you cheap, my darling heart.’ Covington gave her a hot, tearful kiss. She had been long enough in their house for Covington to have forgotten when she came. All the busy, cosy, forgiving and playful times of his life were spent within a whistle of her arms and lit by the shine of her oven door. Nights of being squeezed around the hearth, scrapping and boasting in a parlour the size of a thimble.

  After leaving Mrs Hewtson he went round to his brothers, one cuffing his ears, another pulling his hair, a third booting him in the backside or, as he worded it, ‘giving him instruction on how every fat must sit on his own bottom.’

  It was his launching into the world, where he believed there was nothing to hurt him unless he procured it for himself—though he was a little pained by the ease and convenience with which his Pa and Mrs Hewtson now let him go. Just as he had been marked for a trader in his Pa’s eyes, now in this turnaround he was marked for the sea.

  ‘When you get your ship,’ boomed his Pa, ‘then I believe there will be no stopping you.’ He turned to Mrs Hewtson, pinching her cheeks to cheer her up. ‘Why, my little butter-churn, our boy shall one day have his own ship to command—our boy shall be Nelson, Drake and Dampier, all three in one.’ When Covington’s Pa boomed praise he was heard for a mile around, and ’twas often said of him as a horse butcher, that he was a great hoarse as well.

  It was the hottest time of the year, a month after Christmas at latitude thirty-five degrees south. All down the New South Wales coast columns of smoke rose from fires burning inland. The unchecked flames shot their smoke in the air forming anvil-heads of cinders. At night the fires burned low to the ground in a lurking, underhand fashion, bothered by sea-mists. Next day they flared tree-high again, greedy, fed by hot winds from the parched inland. The fires had the sniff of rage about them. The sea was the only barrier to their eating a man’s face off. Sparks flew out over surf as tongues of flame advanced onto headlands. Ash fell in the water and darkened the white beaches.

  At Tathra, in the far south of the colony, Mr Syms Covington embarked for the port of Sydney, as was his custom every six-month, on the schooner Skate from Twofold Bay. The voyage of two days was done in a haze of burning. Covington had a good stomach for the sea but was unable to sleep. He experienced cold sweats and a discomfort that pierced a sword to his belly. He stood on the deck of the Skate watching worms of fire in the hinterland and knowing there was something wrong with him that a swig of gripe water and a good hard belch would never fix. He crouched in a chair, pulling his knees tight against him, and then stood clinging to the rails. He lay down on the deck and was no better. The captain prodded him with the toe of his shoe. His condition made him afraid. They sailed north, pitching and rolling. His battered, broken-nosed face turned square to the wind had the look of an old prize-fighter’s coming up to a bout.

  Entering the Heads of Port Jackson just after dawn, the captain found Covington utterly stricken. His eyes were open, watchful, but he uttered not a word. With sails slack and the schooner steady on the tide the sufferer was offloaded forthwith and rowed to a Dr MacCracken’s cottage in an arm of the harbour at Watson’s Bay.

  As MacCracken first saw Covington he was the colour of a ripe plum, barrel-chested, massive in thigh and limb, and silent as the grave in his agony. Covington was then forty-two years of age. His impressive head rested on a folded coat. One fist was clenched, and when MacCracken prised it open he found a small cone-shaped shell with four valves at the top. It was a common barnacle and he threw it away.

  ‘Get him to the house. And hurry.’

  Men carried Covington on planks to MacCracken’s library and he prepared his knives. He learned that Covington had been ill for three days before embarking on the schooner, information that aided in his diagnosis, making five days of shocking discomfort over all. ‘Get sheets,’ he yelled, ‘and spread them around the floor.’ The last consideration in MacCracken’s thoughts was the saving of a life, for he believed the man as good as dead with an appendicular abscess, but not last in his actions, you can be sure, which were swift and useful.

  Covington parted his eyes a slit. Nothing else in him moved except his eyeballs, which followed MacCracken around the room. He observed that his saviour was a young man, lean-necked, tall, vital as a whip. He held his lancets and scalpels to the light, and drew them across his thumbnail to test their sharpness.

  MacCracken kept himself calm. He had no great love of surgery, indeed had only recently begun in that business and doubted his wisdom already. Yet his hands were steady and more to the point he knew that if such advertisements for his skill as this Covington had ample pockets, then so much the better. For MacCracken fancied soon to select himself a slice of that wide-open land of Australia where he could put a man to manage livestock, and so guarantee himself regular percentages without having to dirty his feet in dust. It was how fortunes were made here if you were wise enough, and better than gold. And so was Covington his godsend? You may be sure he was.

  A pall of bus
hfire smoke rolled along the coast and suffused the harbour foreshores, entering the room where the patient lay and stinging the surgeon’s eyes. Without delay MacCracken administered ether using a glass jar as an improvised ‘ether dome’ (which he had seen demonstrated at Massachussetts General Hospital in Boston), and put Covington to the knife, delivering him of a free flow of pus with a rotten fecal odour.

  Covington blinked awake and found himself among the living. But which lot of people and where?

  ‘Don,’ he croaked, and reached out a crippled hand.

  Where that ‘Don’ came from MacCracken had no idea, though it declared a bond of vehement familiarity between them that was to last.

  Say there was nothing between them at first except mistaken identity (who was this ‘Don’ at all?), and then that a quality thickened in the air between them—like a lens they could use to know each other better—one man adamant in his being, that man being Covington; and the other, the younger, MacCracken, with his limp brown hair and bony nose, ready for wisdom without having a clue that he was. Over the many days of Covington’s convalescence his life hung in the balance, and all MacCracken could do was wash his wound in clean water and hope for its healing.

  The first time Covington spoke, MacCracken learned he was deaf as a mountain. His cheeks needed a good hard pinching. ‘Wake up, old dodger!’ But yelling did no good unless made hard against his ears.

  ‘I had a shell!’ Covington shouted in the half-light.

  ‘I threw it away,’ said MacCracken.

  ‘Where is my shell?’

  ‘Gone! Vanished!’

  ‘Mind the reef!’ Covington shouted.

  ‘Mr Covington,’ MacCracken held him by the shoulders, ‘you are on dry land.’

  ‘I had a shell!’ (etcetera).

  MacCracken flung wide the curtains. It was barely surprising that in his delirium Covington believed him self aboard a vessel, considering the fine chronometer MacCracken had on his wall and the proximity of sea-water breezes wafting through the window. There were books on tables and spilling from shelves, many with a nautical flavour, and in a corner alcove was a fine globe of the world of the sort favoured by ships’ captains. MacCracken rented the house from the widow of one.

  Covington narrowed his eyes and looked at his saviour with a cunning suspicion. MacCracken looked back at him lazily, now. He was an American on his way around the world from Boston, having come to rest in Australia after trying the gold rushes and exhausting his sense of adventure.

  Covington began to struggle again. ‘Don?’ he barked in his delirium. MacCracken wrestled him down.

  ‘The name is MacCracken. You are under my care.’

  ‘Don Sia Di?’ Covington said, or so the name sounded to MacCracken’s ears.

  ‘David D. MacCracken is the name. Just as I said.’

  Covington wearied MacCracken with repetition of his ‘Don’, which Covington had barked since coming out of the influence of ether, that majestical liquid with a dizzy-making odour with which the new-made surgeon had stilled Covington’s struggles—and sometimes, for the interest of it, had enhanced his own senses and coloured his dreams by taking a sniff.

  Finally MacCracken shouted against Covington’s ear and his meaning won through. ‘I am your doctor! You are ill! Be satisfied!’—and Covington sank back in his pillows, making a dry chomping sound and rubbing his battered nose with the back of his hand, giving MacCracken the benefit of a gentle smile, which the younger man witnessed then for the first time, and it warmed his liking.

  ‘You’re an American,’ said Covington.

  ‘You thought I was someone else?’ mimed MacCracken.

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘A Spaniard?’ snorted MacCracken, snapping his fingers, clicking his heels, doing a fair tarantella in charade.

  In time MacCracken would learn that the man Covington called him in his delirium was also nondescriptly brown-haired, also big-nosed, also obliging of manner, also absolutely unremarkable-seeming and doubting his first-chosen trade, and aged but thirty years the last time Covington saw him. No Spaniard, either, but a well-born Englishman, and around six feet tall and so inclined to stoop a little in his relation to others. His name was Charles Darwin but MacCracken was far from knowing that, and would have thought it unlikely even if told, Darwin being famous for his Beagle’s Voyage, which MacCracken had read at the age of twelve, holding it somewhat responsible for nurturing a whim, that bore fruition, for science and travel.

  ‘I am sorry to give you this trouble,’ Covington said, coming round in a cold sweat.

  ‘Not at all,’ responded his saviour.

  Under wiry eyebrows and a clifflike forehead Covington’s eyes followed MacCracken everywhere as he cleaned his instruments. Covington was a powerful presence in the dim light, the planes of his cheekbones and jaw offering a fine portrait. MacCracken was interested in his head. Lumpy, he would say. But interesting.

  ‘Your hatmaker,’ he supposed, ‘finds his fortune in you, Mr Covington?’

  That head’s resemblance to a loaf of bread, where yeast pushed the crust in various stern directions, had often been remarked upon with Covington. His ears hung a little pendulously in his age. MacCracken, with a flippancy to his nature, muttered whatever he liked while in Covington’s company, never expecting a reply unless he bothered with shouting. Covington’s hair was thinning and black and, ‘I daresay dyed, old fellow?’ said MacCracken, testing the emptiness of the air.

  ‘Blustery weather,’ Covington replied.

  Covington’s facial purpling came from old scars. MacCracken used his magnifying glass. He deduced they were powder burns but Covington said nothing. Facial scarring was not the only mark on him. There were welts on his shoulders, embedded like sea-slugs, purple and slack. He guessed that Covington had once been severely flogged, and from turns of phrase Covington used (‘deaf as a mainmast’ and ‘sparm fish’ for whale), divined in Covington’s distant past a ship, though whether a merchant ship, a convict ship, or a man-of-war he could not tell.

  ‘What ship? What navy? What crimes? What cruelties?’

  Covington gave no answer.

  It was the nineteenth of February by MacCracken’s diary, and Covington had been with him twenty days.

  ‘I am weak,’ Covington rolled his eyes around. ‘Will you care for me, MacCracken?’

  ‘I am doing so already, crippled old dog,’ the young doctor murmured, conveying kindness by giving Covington’s arm a squeeze. It was not MacCracken’s intention to run a hospital for his cases, but with Covington he heard himself prattling: ‘Of course, yes, rely on me, sir, I shall make arrangements, etcetera,’—all condensed into one shouted word in his charge’s left ear (the better one): ‘Yes!’

  With an instrument sent from Boston by an old professor who still had hopes for him, MacCracken tackled Covington’s ears. Gobbets of wax blocked his view. After careful syringing he saw that both drums were scarred beyond recovery. It was as if firecrackers had popped inside them. Covington’s submission to his care was touching.

  ‘I went to an aurist about this,’ Covington tapped the side of his head, ‘and he said for a thousand pound he would cut me open and clip my ear-bones, and maybe I would hear better. Would I?’

  ‘Keep your thousand, grandfather.’

  Mr Covington dozed. MacCracken felt a protectiveness towards the old coot as for a gruff, well-meaning peasant with a crock of gold. A man who could spare a thousand like that would know of some prime investments. Trying another sort of examination MacCracken ran his fingers across Covington’s scalp. It was like playing on a bag of stones, and using instinct aided by phrenology (at which MacCracken prided himself, believing the craft to lie somewhere in the direction of a firm prediction), he sneaked a mental picture of Covington to verify his first impressions.

  The message MacCracken read through his fingers came to him in a few moments: a doglike fondness was no surprise; the potency of an old sire; powers of concentration and ch
allenge; a streak of resentment; the capacity to deal damage; a certain helpfulness; secretiveness.

  This last was no surprise.

  Covington came awake as MacCracken felt what he had once heard called the ‘band of hopefulness’. It was ridged across Covington’s dome, a veritable rainbow of potential joy, and not seeming to belong with the doleful stranger at all.

  ‘What are you doing? Are you “reading” me, MacCracken? I won’t have it!’—and he thrust his examiner’s arm aside. ‘You won’t use me?’

  ‘Dear Mr Covington!’

  ‘Bumpology. I spit on that art!’

  ‘Mr Covington!’ (louder in his ear).

  ‘Yoi?’

  ‘I—am—your—physician.’

  ‘You—are—my—meddler.’

  Though Covington gave a quick smile to cover his outburst, and MacCracken smiled with him, they both were astonished by the vehemence of the exchange.

  ‘Pardon me,’ Covington said. ‘I had a bad time with that business once. When I was jugged and bottled.’

  ‘You are pardoned, sir. When was that?’

  With the shimmering half-understanding the deaf have, that is also like a charm, Mr Covington scuttled back inside himself and secured MacCracken’s fascination with that ‘bad time’ and that ‘business’ by keeping his jaw firmly clamped. It must have had a good outcome, surely, thought MacCracken, because the rainbow ridge of hope said so. Either that or Covington’s fate had not yet run its course.

  Covington lay on a bed in MacCracken’s library and gazed at MacCracken’s books, read their spines and threw his host a sprat of information to chew. ‘I’ve come home, it seems,’ he said. ‘Home,’ giving the word a scornful edge. He named a few titles—Murray’s English Grammar, Mackintosh’s History of England, Byron’s HMS Blonde, and Darwin’s Voyage Round the World of HMS Beagle— saying he ‘owned those too’, which MacCracken thought, at the time, a pretty ripe boast for such an old carthorse.