A River Town

by Thomas Keneally

  The Offhand held his arms out as if to invite applause, yet there was utter silence in the hall.

  “Come, sirs,” he cried. “Men languish for want of bandage and biscuit and bullet! I refer you to the figures for deaths from camp fever. A single set of de-lousing equipment carried to the front by wagon would itself save hundreds of lives. In that sense, one Macleay Valley haulier would be worth a battalion. Given our already-expressed debt to, our dependence upon Britain Our Mother, would we not wish to make the most effective contribution? Or would we prefer merely to make the one which suits our municipal vanity?”

  M. M. Chance said evenly, “Sir, Offhand, we are all used to your notorious sense of caprice.”

  Offhand however was being careful to show no sign of any caprice at all. “Mr. Chance, if you consider the skills which are invested daily in bringing down to Kempsey the large timber from Kookaburra, and likewise all the daily cleverness which goes into the delivery of cream to the dairy co-operatives, then I’m sure that like me you would be struck by a seamless admiration for the craft of haulage as exercised in the Macleay.”

  “I think we may be looking for a more directly martial expression,” Mr. Chance admitted.

  Tim’s long, thin moustache, falling in fronds over his lips due to recent growth, was a good veil to smile behind. And so he did smile. Bravo to blazes, Offhand!

  Meanwhile, old Thurmond’s patriarchal stance and the curious sense that his red-grey beard was on fire with the force of vision meant he was certain to be called on to thunder yet again. And Mr. Chance, to stop him from combusting on the spot, pointed to him

  “I’m dead against this Casual fellow’s proposal …” said Mr. Thurmond.

  Men hooted, and Billy corrected himself.

  “… All right, Offhand then. I don’t read his rag. But I think you are too kind to him by far, Mr. Chance. Damn him is what I say! Damn the power of his column! I stick by the mounted bushmen resolution which I seconded earlier, and I add to it a second wing, which I shall back with an immediate donation of five pounds.”

  He took a scarlet five pound note from his fob pocket, where he must have already placed it in readiness for this scene, and held it extended between his first two fingers for all the room to see …

  “I have long been of the opinion too readily dismissed by your committee that every member of this meeting be asked to take the following oath. That as a loyal subject of Her Majesty, I support without equivocation the aims of the British Empire in Southern Africa, including the extinction of all Boer pretensions of sovereignty in Transvaal and Orange Free State. So help me God.”

  “Is that a motion?” asked Mr. Chance, in whose nature good sense and not frenzy was so dominant, and who seemed shocked by Billy Thurmond’s fervour.

  “That is a motion, sir. It is a voluntary oath, but we know what to make of those who will not take it.”

  “Yes,” the farmer Borger called out in his urgent accent. “We’ll know that they’re honest men, careful about swearing oaths at the drop of a bloody hat!”

  A loud furore, ranging from whistles to groans to some applause! In a baritone voice Chance demanded and slowly got a little control back, and could at last speak. “Yours will need to be a separate motion, Mr. Thurmond. At the moment we are considering the matter of the Macleay contingent.”

  Tim understood he should have foreseen the direction of the meeting: That there would be a publicly observed vote. Those who did not raise their hands would be counted and listed by people like Billy. There a philo-Boer. There a disloyalist. There an Empire-hater. Bloody awful for a man’s business, such a perception. Yet how in hell’s name could you vote casually for the death of the young?

  Though he was willing to risk being poor for the sake of everyone thinking him openhanded, he didn’t want to risk it for the sake of politics.

  But when the motion was put, Tim sat with both hands planted on his knees. Make of it what you bloody want, old Billy. Chance counted the room and said, “A majority, I believe.” But not sweeping. Sir William Lyne would not be able to be told that the Macleay was unanimous in its militant intentions. Chance enclosed his jaw with his hand, and then took it away, his moustache flattened a little.

  The Offhand called, “I think many men would have committed themselves to the fray, Mr. Chance. But not necessarily others.”

  “Thank you, Offhand. Is that intended to be a comfort or a reproach?”

  The Offhand didn’t answer, but nodded ambiguously, approving of Mr. Chance’s subtlety. A great fellow, the Offhand. Crafty defender of small men, of complicated thought.

  Though now Billy Thurmond was enraged in a new way, far above his average level of rancour.

  “In view of this disgusting display, Mr. Chairman, I suggest that loyal members of the community be placed at the doors to administer the oath to the members of this meeting.”

  Borger yelled. “Men placed on doors? Haven’t you heard of habeas corpus, you silly old bugger?”

  Taking his hands from his knees, Tim applauded Borger. It was the first public display he had given, and he could feel the blood prickling its way along his arms and legs. For there was some rare gesture building in him. He was excited by such occasional rushes of courage, but loathed them too, the way they exposed him. He could never have been a willing rebel, for the reason that rebels put themselves willingly at the centre of the picture. All society’s glare and mistrust was turned on them.

  Yet Jesus, he was on his own feet, and Chance, out of a desperate desire for a new voice amongst all the repetitious ones, pointed to him.

  “Mr. Chance,” Tim resonated out of a throat which felt fragile to him. Bloody hell! Even Billy Thurmond was turned to him with something like a neutral face. “Mr. Chance, we were invited here for a discussion on suitable troops. We were not told that we had to have oaths administered to us. An oath is a solemn declaration, and ought to be reserved for the most serious civil occasions.”

  Where in the bloody hell was this speech coming from? His great-uncle John the rebel, in his days as a travelling drapery salesman, calling at Glenlara to punch him on the arm and say, “Are we up to the big life, Tim?” And that little nudge of the knuckle now emerging, after a quarter of a century underground, as a speech. “It seems to me that so serious a matter should have been notified to us in the public advice and advertisements.”

  Billy Thurmond talking still and waving his free hand dismissively. Did his maize grow so well because he harangued it? Did the cows yield their cream to get away from his cowshed lectures? Wouldn’t mind having the five quid which sat in Billy’s other hand. Two years board and tuition for Lucy Rochester with hard-handed Imelda.

  Faces were however turned approvingly to Tim. Grateful frowns above moustaches. There was something they found alien in Billy’s extreme proposal. The Uncle Johnny speech had seized up in Tim now, quenched by so much approval. By instinct he looked to the Offhand to finish it for him, and the Offhand casually responded, speaking while still seated. “I can imagine men, Mr. Chance, who supported the content of the oath, but not the air of social coercion which surrounds it.”

  Tim sat. Look at them. They are nodding. And not all of them readers of the Freeman’s Journal.

  On the platform, Ernie Malcolm admitted, “I can see the speaker’s point. In addition, there is a New South Wales Oaths Act we may contravene by recklessly requiring citizens to swear.”

  Billy Thurmond couldn’t disapprove of Ernie. Too much social standing there. But he said he wanted his loyal motion to be put on the agenda of the next meeting of the Patriotic Fund. One of Billy’s big sons seconded that.

  “Then you won’t get too much of a crowd here,” sang Borger.

  Offhand took the final and not quite logical word. “Let’s not forget,” he said poetically, “that our cream all comes in hygienic buckets. And our butter all is salted.”

  On the steps as they all left, Billy Thurmond accosted Offhand, Tim saw, and said, “Just look
at what our bloody cream will be like if Britannia no longer rules our waves, sonny! We will be mongrelised by Jews and Kanakas and Chinks. An enjoyable prospect, Mr. Scribbler?”

  The Offhand started chuckling at that.

  Ernie Malcolm touched Tim’s elbow in passing. “Shea,” he murmured. “In view of your origins and persuasions, it might be more politic not to say anything when zealots like Billy get going.”

  Ernie perhaps meant to be a friend, but there was coldness there as well. The civic merit Tim had got together through his big cricket innings with Wooderson had now somehow been cancelled.

  Tim cried out, “Ernie.” And Ernie turned and looked at him and returned close up, as if he really knew what Tim was going to say and didn’t want others to hear it.

  “Ernie, I’m not haunted by any of this. I’m haunted by that child in the bottle. The girl, you know. Missy.”

  Ernie stared as men jostled past.

  “Are you haunted too?” Tim asked. Across the lines of class and politics, Tim wanted to know, are we united in a brotherhood of concern? “Hanney is not doing a good job with this. If someone of your authority told the Commissioner …”

  No smiling valley till this is attended to, Tim meant to make clear. No valley of heroes. No safe bridge from this shore to the other.

  Ernie said, “What are you trying to say?”

  “I would write myself but what would my complaint be worth? Constable Hanney is not properly pursuing the question.”

  “Some would say,” said Ernie in a narrow voice, not playful at all, “it’s not worth pursuing. If it were important a sergeant of police would be put on the job. What does it matter? Best dropped.”

  One could imagine though. Missy. Adrift in fluid, nameless female. On a bench in some police museum. Far into a new century.

  “Aren’t you tormented too, Ernie? Isn’t every man tormented by this?”

  And there was a glimmer there, in Ernie’s face. Or it was more like a telltale lack of a glimmer. All night Ernie’d been playing the civic father, but it was Missy who secretly plagued him. That was a conclusion which now tempted Tim.

  “Don’t you go round uttering this bullshit. We are together in nothing, Shea. Don’t try dragging me down to your level, or I’ll show you what dragging down is.”

  He didn’t wait for Tim to explain himself. He went off fuming and definitely haunted, Tim knew. But certain of his power and so twice as dangerous.

  Eight

  FOR WHAT IT’S WORTH, select a nondescript page of ruled letter paper and a nondescript plain envelope such as any cow-cocky might employ. And begin, printing in large letters, using a different slant of the hand from that you normally employ.

  Dear Sir,

  It may be important for you to know that many citizens in the Macleay are concerned at the partial and intermittent way in which the search for the name of the unknown Female in the Mulroney case is being conducted. This may be due to the fact the enquiry has been entrusted to a very junior officer when perhaps a more senior one would pursue the matter in a better way. The Mulroney business distressed many citizens who wish to see the matter cleared up, and I urge you to treat it with continuing seriousness.

  A Citizen

  Once he’d taken this letter to the post office and dropped it into a box when no one was around, he felt he had done everything he could for Missy in both the temporal and spiritual realm.

  Now he found himself reading shipping reports more closely than was usual. There were so many bomboras and reefs off the New South Wales coast, and onto one of them the North Coast Steamship Navigation Company’s SS Burrawong might some foul night blunder with his spouse.

  An hour before sailing, when Tim was loading up the dray with Kitty’s trunk, Ellen Burke strolled across from old Mrs. Manion’s, a cousin of Old Burke’s, where she’d been staying since her father and stepmother left town. She carried an emu egg for Johnny and a knitted doll for Annie. She was well pleased with herself—this business of watching the Shea children had been her reason to remain on in Central. She had wanted to stay at the Commercial at her father’s expense, like her own woman. Like an actress on tour. Old Burke did not permit that.

  “Do you like stews, Uncle Tim?” she asked Tim, smiling up from her place at the table where the children made a fuss of her. She had dark hair and fine brown eyes and a big-framed build, which all put the banal question: was she a beautiful young woman, or was she what people called arresting?

  Kitty’s trunk still had things that were stuck on it in Cobh. Traces of her great exodus from the hearth of Red Kenna. An uneasy feeling to see it on the dray again, a place it hadn’t been in for the past seven or so years, since she arrived in the Macleay for good. Looking at it, he felt a baseless fear that perhaps a reverse migration might be on the cards. Why did she need such a big trunk? Half of it filled with food. She was going to sustain, build up and cosset her sister in the big port of Sydney, as well as having gifts for her relatives, the Rooneys of Randwick. That was another thing he knew only now to have been arranged. She had written to the Rooneys and got a reply. This had all been long-planned. A man should complain more.

  So strange to drive her down Smith Street, the children and young Ellen Burke excited in the back, though Annie was cautious like him about proceeding so merrily to the ship and yielding up Kitty as if it were a festive matter.

  Tim went aboard and paid one of the deckhands a shilling to help him get the trunk onto the deck. From the main deck he saw tall Captain Reid, whiskered like a parody of a coastal captain, leaning over the edge of the bridge. Tim and the sailor lifted the trunk, one on the front, one on the back.

  “Christ, mister,” said the deckhand. “The normal load of boulders!”

  “It’s the weight of absence,” Tim could have told him, but didn’t. Edging the great load aft past the crowd on deck, he knew that there would be no adequate or calm good-byes. Mr. Alfred Howe’s Travelling Variety were all—he was horrified to see—on board, returning to Sydney to pick up a train or ship to some other bush community. Some of the performers had yellow waistcoats, and others wore plaid, just like the Sydney swells, the pushers of the Rocks. The women had flouncey skirts and looked as if they’d been drinking to ready themselves for the voyage. Thank God he’d insisted on paying for the saloon. Kitty would have had to share steerage with smartalec commercial travellers, tumblers, and mandolin-players. And might have enjoyed it too much.

  By the time he and the deckhand got the trunk below decks, the space in her cabin seemed full of Annie, Ellen Burke, Johnny who was somehow barefoot again, and dear dumpling Kitty herself. The cabin white and panelled with Macleay cedar. A middle-aged man and woman in there too, along with the two bunks and the hinged washing basin and fairly spacious portholes through which the vivid Pacific Ocean would glitter. The man stood side-on, and the woman sat on the bunk she had already chosen, the one aft as it turned out.

  Both these people were well-dressed. He recognised them. Mr. and Mrs. Arnold from Sherwood upriver. Mrs. Arnold off to her niece’s wedding in Sydney, said Mr. Arnold, with an Old Burke haughtiness which said, “You wouldn’t get me leaving the Macleay for some flippant Sydney wedding.”

  What he said in fact was, “I hope those damn aerialists and jugglers don’t keep you ladies awake all night.”

  Later, deep in the night’s meat, Burrawong would need to pass over the Macleay bar at the New Entrance. In his temperamentally anxious mind, Tim could envisage a scene of disaster: the ship stuck there on the bar of sand which cramped the entry. The vessel then ground about by waves until beam-on to the crashing open sea. Seas fizzing over the decks. Mrs. Arnold and Kitty flying out of their bunks, colliding in the space between, struggling in darkness up a canting floor.

  Annie and Johnny experimentally worked the hinge to the sink in which their mother would wash tomorrow morning in open sea. Ellen got some marks with Tim by saying, “Come up with me on deck, you kids.” Of course, that left the old
Arnolds in place still. So he could only say the usual solicitous things said by husbands when overheard. “Well, you’ll be right here then?” If the thing named Burrawong twisted on the bar at the New Entrance, how could she be right? Her brown, lively, peasant eyes glimmered. For she was a traveller. He could tell she had by no means made her last journey.

  On impulse he whispered, “If anything evil happened to you, I’d be no good for anything at all. Who would I find to go to for instruction?”

  “Yes,” she grinned, very brisk. “You’d mistake the faces of girls in pictures, and there’d be no one to sort you out.”

  She winked at him. He kissed her, aiming for her forehead but, because she moved, getting her cheek. She stood calmly in his embrace and patted his upper arm.

  “You’re a good fellow,” she said.

  “Bloody good batsman,” he murmured, and they laughed together.

  A cockney steward came in and palavered all over Kitty and Mrs. Arnold. He and Kitty took to the corridor to get away from him.

  “There,” said Kitty pointing up and down the panelled passageway. “That doesn’t look too rat-infested, does it?”

  Out on deck, a clear night, no sign of storms. But the sea was a real meander away down the course of the Macleay. He would need to inspect the sky, to read its face, for some hours yet to know how the night would go.

  Ellen and the children down in the bows, watching a drunken acrobat do pretty well with somersaults. There was some sad hooting from the direction of the bridge and the cockney steward came around the deck ringing a bell. Kitty pushed Tim gently.

  “There you are. There you go now. You’ll find on the second shelf behind the counter a list of the three-month-old accounts. You need to say a word to a few of them.”

  “Remember me to your relatives in Randwick,” said Tim.