A River Town

by Thomas Keneally

  Three

  TWO DOZEN DELIVERIES to make now.

  Coming out of Mrs. Curran’s in River Street with the empty butter box he’d delivered goods in, he spotted old Dwyer on his horse, with the hessian saddlebags hung over its neck crammed with Chronicles. He saw women come to front fences and buy. And as he delivered goods further up the hill, he found that women smiled as they handed their money over for the delivered biscuits and treacle, sugar and tea. From the back doors, he saw the Chronicle was as often as not opened on their kitchen tables. One of his customers told him, “You’re a really decent chap, Mr. Shea.” Their cash had no reluctance to it today. None of them mentioned the scandalous prices of things. The few who asked for a week’s credit seemed ashamed to do it.

  One of life’s mysteries. That ordinary people paid well, and the bloody bush aristocrats with their Tradesman’s Entrances drained credit to its limit. Even Ernie and Winnie Malcolm who were so keen to nominate him for valour.

  Back at last to the junction of Belgrave and Smith, Pee Dee restive, himself yearning for black tea. He spotted his son Johnny swimming like a water rat around the pylons of the unbuilt bridge. The Argus and the Chronicle went to some lengths to explain to ratepayers that the most important work was the sinking of foundations, using a huge diving bell lowered by crane from a lighter. Men from Sydney who were used to that sort of work stood in that bubble of air at the bottom of the green river and worked the digging and dredging machinery and sank the pylons in place. These men took their butter and chops at Allen’s Boarding House in East, as if they were ordinary fellows engaged in ordinary work. Johnny hung round them if given a whisper of encouragement.

  Tim got down from the cart on the embankment just past the store, and held Pee Dee’s head and called for his son. “Come out now. Don’t be a town ruffian. Come out!”

  The child sat bolt upright in the water, like a bloody weasel. Then he swam to shore and found his shirt. The trousers he’d swum in were all discoloured with the river’s alluvium, the rich soil which it picked up upstream. Kitty didn’t seem to mind any of this, or the idea of a six-year-old swimming about in that massive river.

  “You aren’t cold?” he asked the boy.

  The boy said, “No.”

  Tim shook him by the shoulder. “You are to keep out of the river, sir. I’ll give you a bloody great whack.”

  “That’s right,” said the boy. He mimed a bloody great whack with one open hand against the other.

  “It won’t be as funny when it happens,” said Tim. “Go to the back of the house and dry. Don’t come into the store in that condition.”

  “Whatever you say,” said the boy.

  He didn’t sound like his parents. It was as if the sun had got inside his nose and throat and dried all the cords. His say sounded like sigh. This is what it is to be an emigrant. Your children won’t speak like you. He’d never thought of it till it happened.

  As a consolation, he took the boy by the hand and together they led Pee Dee and the cart around the back.

  When he came into the store, Kitty looked up from the Chronicle and smiled at him.

  “So you are a hero, darling Tim.”

  “You shouldn’t believe it. I collected over twenty-three shillings this morning.”

  “Just as well since we owe the wholesalers twenty-seven. This Bandy Habash is a good talker, isn’t he? Speaks so highly of you.”

  “I wonder where he thinks he gets the right from?”

  “Well,” she said, reaching for his upper arm. “You are what is reported, you are.”

  “Kitty, why don’t you get some strong tea and have a rest?”

  She was willing to do it. He cried after her, “I just tore that bloody rascal Johnny out of the river!”

  Going, she murmured, “That’s him. He isn’t frightened of a thing in the known world, the little bugger …”

  Now he was able to read the paper himself.

  GLENROCK TRAGEDY

  The Rochester accident was then detailed.

  “Mr. Timothy Shea, grocer of Belgrave Street, and Mr. Bandy Habash, hawker of West Kempsey, had been alerted to the accident by Lucy Rochester, and had galloped together to O’Riordan’s in Glenrock where they had found … Mr. Bandy Habash has since visited the offices of the Chronicle to praise the behaviour of Mr. Timothy Shea … carried the remains of the unfortunate Mr. Rochester on the back of his horse …”

  But it was the front. And Albert’s back visible all the way.

  “… to the Macleay District Hospital … took in the two unfortunate orphans until suitable places … Mr. Habash’s account of Mr. Shea’s attempts to revive the unfortunate Mr. Rochester have interested the Secretary of the Macleay Valley Branch of the Royal Humane Society, Mr. E. V. Malcolm, who has forwarded to Sydney a recommendation that Mr. Shea’s acts of courage and generosity be recognised by an award.”

  His client, Ernie Malcolm, carried on his fob watch chain the bright medallions of at least a dozen civic bodies: Patriotic Fund, Shipwreck Society, Empire Day Committee, Australian Wesleyan Missionary Society, the Australian National Defence League, the Free Trade Association, the New South Wales Typographical Association, the Christian Endeavour Union, the New South Wales Cricket Association. A correspondent of all of them, a convenor of meetings to assess public interest. On top of that an attender of Masonic meetings at the Good Templars. A life spent all in public, sometimes with lovely, tall, fine-drawn Winnie Malcolm beside him, but frequently not. A woman made for private adoration married to a fellow always on a rostrum or at a committee table.

  And cracked about bravery and the Humane Society. Inspector of courage and acts of mercy. He had talked in the past as if he saw the Macleay as some valley of pre-eminent valour. Where that impulse came from Tim couldn’t understand, since he seemed an ordinary fellow, a man designed for homely things. It frightened Tim to be Ernie’s target. It was a sign of the disorder he had sensed as Missy’s slaughterers were led to Central wharf.

  After Anniversary Day his dreams grew more arduous, more stubborn. Threw their shadow too into the light of morning. Constant presences: Albert for a bloody but ordinary start. But more, more present was Missy. She had so quietly burrowed into his head, like an Oriental bug one heard of in the Argus, which sent planters in Malaya screaming out into the jungle.

  A dream recurred set aboard the Burrawong—a very bright day, and threatening the way Australian brightness can be. An awful quantity of azure and ozone all around this boat which in different years had brought him and Kitty to the Macleay. Tim at the gunwale and the girl, Hanney’s Missy, indefinitely dressed in blackish clothes, approached him and pointed downwards into the water, where a very clearly perceived porpoise was rippling like silk in the water.

  She said, “The captain tells me it’s the slops they follow us for. But no. They prefer the company of humans.”

  She had some English country accent. That was not unexpected.

  Waking, he took account of all the men of the Macleay. Timber-getters and small farmers from far up the river. The sort of places where mountains began to squeeze the valley in. Fellows from Taylor’s Arm, Hickey’s Creek, from Nulla Nulla, Five Day, Stockyard, Kookaburra and Mount Banda Banda. They lived in slab huts. They cut railway sleepers for shipment to Sydney on Burrawong. They brought great thews of cedar to town on jinkers dragged by teams of bullocks. Or else their blackbutt planking, cut to provide the decking of the future Kempsey bridge. Perhaps only once every two or three months did these men come to town to meet a woman.

  A usual visit: they would park their drays on the river bank, turn in their orders for bacon, split peas, tea and sugar (and even sometimes soap), and then go to the Commercial or the Royal or Kelty’s and get drunk. Tim would fill their orders, place each one in the appropriate dray, and then late, late at night, when he and Kitty were asleep, the bachelor owners of the drays would come out, haranguing their own phantoms, would generally take the right vehicle, and head off up th
e river. Out of the dark streets into the sadder darkness of the bush. Sometimes they fell from the wagon and were found the next morning sleeping on some embankment as their horse cropped grass nearby. Sometimes they simply pitched themselves backwards into the tray of the wagon and slept with the reins in their hands. The sober horses knew the way to whatever far-off acreage these fellows were working.

  None of these men from the bush, owners of knowledgeable horses, could be imagined as the lover of Hanney’s fine-faced girl. Townsmen though. Some townsman then. Some townsman was it.

  One humbler townsman of his acquaintance came to the store at the hottest hour of the afternoon. Wooderson. With whom Tim had shared a dinghy in the great flood, when they were very young and husky.

  Wooderson said, “Tim, I read of your heroism. Bloody good!”

  The humid air filled up again with this silly, vaporous rumour from bloody Habash.

  “It’s all a put-up.”

  Big Wooderson laughed. He still worked as a haulier, was easy with life, uninflamed by ambitions. An Australian. Very suntanned and muscular, and his big hands were a map of small, hurtful accidents to do with loading and unloading wagons.

  “And I remembered anyhow, Tim, as I read it all. You were, I seem to remember, a first class rough batsman, a walloper. Hook shots I believe. Whack! There’s to be the Married versus Single Men Cricket game at Toorooka up the river. I’m the Marrieds’ captain. Clarrie Bertram’s got the damn meningitis. Would you join us at the wickets, son?”

  Tim growled, “Never respected that bloody English-gentleman game.”

  “I’ve heard that speech before,” said Wooderson, laughing. “There’s a throwing at the stumps contest at lunchtime. Bob to enter. Three quid first prize.”

  More than boarding school fees for a small orphan.

  Wooderson said, “You’ve got a bloody good eye, Tim. The Terara will take us up to Toorooka for the game.”

  “Quicker to bloody crawl there on hands and knee, wouldn’t it be?”

  “Yes, but a steamer trip! Nothing like it for novelty. Bring Kitty and the kids, Tim. Lovely day.”

  “I see that New South Wales has Victoria in great trouble at the Sydney Cricket Ground,” said Tim, finding the place in the Chronicle. New South Wales First Innings, 7–385, Victoria 8–187. Put the bloody Victorians in their place! Sydney people liked to do that.

  “Clyde’s done the damage,” Tim remarked further. “Took 6 wickets for 37 runs.”

  “Ah,” said Wooderson. “An English game eh, Tim? Except when New South Wales is dishing Victoria.”

  Tim grinned behind his moustache. “Go to buggery, Wooderson. But I will play for you if you really require it.”

  Wooderson was lucky to get him at the right hour. The secret truth was that the good fellowship was mere playing at fraternity. Were grocery stores and stock agencies and lawyers’ offices really run according to the laws of social cricket, where to lose your wicket in a comic runout could actually increase your social standing, if you took it well and joined in the laughter? Whereas to lose at commerce … another matter utterly.

  He would rather read the latest Victor Daley poem in the Bulletin under the peppertree than go out pretending to love the ten other cricketers on his side, and—over beer—the eleven opponents. The Singles. What a cracked concept to base teams on!

  All this solemnity he got from his own father Jeremiah, who’d always mistrusted over-easy sociability. Jerry Shea, small landholder of great style. Too educated for the purposes of a 15-acre farm and 7 pigs. Too literary to be a part-time clerk. He’d loved the English writers—Hood and Lamb and Hazlitt and Pope—and neglected his native Gaelic. He’d spent just one charity term with the Jesuits in Mallow and they’d talked him into betting definitely on English, as if that could give him the place he’d wanted in the world. It was another instance: no one connived at their own destruction the way the Irish did. And yet the newspapers cast them as totally dangerous to others. The thousands of the poor Paddy bastards who were perishing at Spionkopf and other Cape Colony and Natal battlefields weren’t dangerous to anyone any more. But they got little bloody credit for it.

  As he contemplated the impending cricket match at Toorooka with these thoughts, an astonishing realisation struck him. I am playing in Marrieds versus Singles from some mongrel of an idea that the girl’s lover might be a square leg or in the covers or at mid-wicket.

  Wooderson was watching him, looking amused.

  “Have you seen that blackguard Habash on your route?” Tim asked to distract himself. “The son. The younger one.”

  Wooderson grinned. “The one with the horses. The reckless rider?”

  “That’s the blackguard.”

  “He’s working out at Pola Creek, I believe.” Wooderson really started to laugh now. “I take it you want to thank him.”

  “Thank the bastard? It’s more murder.”

  Four

  TIM PUT HIS HAT on the back pew of the Primitive Methodist church in Euroka. A church utterly humble in its unadornment. He could see the appeals of humility, the Christianity of plainness.

  He pointed Lucy forward towards the coffin, and the pew where Mrs. Sutter sat with her four children and young Hector, who looked as brightly kept as the rest.

  “You go and sit with your brother,” Tim said.

  Pews, and a lectern. Plain frosted glass in the windows behind. No single aid to the remembrance of God. No stained glass, no statues, no intercessors. The plain act.

  A man wasn’t supposed to be here. Meant to get the permission of your parish priest, tra-lah, for the deaths and marriages of your heretical and dissenting neighbours. If he was damned for sitting in a back pew, then the clergy were welcome to heaven. Poor coughing Bruggy. Welcome to coughless paradise.

  But Jesus this was as bare as the South Pole when put beside the rich, coloured jungles of the Catholic piety he was bred in and Kitty savoured. All its beings, its saints more brilliant than a tiger and more potent. This little Methodist place was something different: on this ice you could be God’s Eskimo, in this desert God’s Arab. The vacancy spoke. Part of the deranged season was that he could imagine himself a Primitive Methodist, going for this cleanness, condemning the overdone other. Heretical thought. But there was a tendency in him to respect traditions more austere. If he were raised to it, this Euroka Methodist sort of thing would suit his character, his mistrust of stagey things. Whereas Kitty needed the forests of devotion, the scarlet martyrs, the bright blue intercessors.

  In this underdecorated, scoured air, Kitty’s scapulars to Saint Anthony and special devotion to Saint Blanche, the saint of goitres, a condition to which the Kenna family were susceptible, could look pagan as blazes.

  She could forget Saint Blanche anyhow, said Mr. Nance the chemist. There was plenty of iodine in the Macleay water. Tim didn’t know how it got there. Into the rain-fed tanks at backdoors. Did Nance and other benefactors go around pouring it into household water supplies? The river rich in it too. Go swimming and swallow one mouthful, and you swallowed most of the minerals and chemicals. That rich, broad, healthy, muddy river his son tried to live in.

  The Colemans from Glenrock in the second row, with their big bony hands which had kept Albert’s herd milked. An official from the Good Templars, Mr. Gittoes—Albert Rochester must have been a lodge member. All there to hold back the waters of eternity and oblivion from washing poor Albert’s face utterly away. What remained of it.

  Lucy had by now sat beside her brother, who’d tried to tell her something. Like a good convent school girl, she hushed him. She didn’t seem to want his domestic news. She pointed towards the coffin, fixed Hector’s attention on it. Not hard to do. The young child’s head did not move any more. All the churches had this one big mystery, free of charge, without debate. Death.

  Mr. Fyser the minister came up the aisle of the church, wearing a suit. No brocaded vestments, of course. He stopped and spoke to Mrs. Sutter. He shook his head a little. “
Expecting to marry you rather than bury Bert,” he could be heard saying.

  Then he went to the rostrum and read the “Our Father” and uttered his confidence that Albert Rochester had been saved. Well, that was different. Here in the plain Methodism of Euroka, the story was ended when it ended. Judgment had already been made, redemption already received. No five bob Masses for the dead. No writhing crowds of the imperfect in Purgatory to be relieved by prayer and sacrifice, by going without rum! A great deal of fuss saved. Except you had to ask what could Mr. Fyser, grey suit and little dicky collar, do if haunted by the face in Hanney’s bottle? Where was there something in this purity to combat the more luxuriant ghosts?

  “Albert Rochester,” Fyser told the mourners, “was a member of the brethren of this church. He was as sober and restrained in his habits as one could wish. Dead cruelly and at a younger age than he should have been. But look at the children, brother and sister, from Summer Island who were buried late last year. Wounded by prongs of the same rake, both succumbing to lockjaw. The young Queenslanders whose deaths were reported in yesterday’s Argus. Fighting the Boer in a far place. How can we face these mysteries? The ant looks up from his antheap and sees man and thinks, that must be God. But God is larger and larger by far, and his purposes larger and larger by far. Better to ask of a bucket that it contain the huge Pacific Ocean than to ask the human mind that it contain the extent of God’s purpose. To one single part of that purpose have we been made privy. Redemption. The consciousness of having been saved, as Albert Rochester opened himself to his Saviour and was numbered amongst the saved …”

  Tim felt a hand on his shoulder. A large one. Hanney was there, in uniform, expressing his reverence. For the corpse and—bloody hell—for Tim himself. Hanney murmured, “Did all you could, old feller.”

  Carr the undertaker’s men carried Albert Rochester out and placed him in the black lacquered hearse with its black plumes and two fat white horses. Albert had, of course, never travelled so plushly between Glenrock and town.