A River Town

by Thomas Keneally

  “All awards for bravery are in abeyance,” he said.

  Then he rushed out.

  To hear his social credit cancelled in that way! Tim clutched the counter and groaned. He was in severe trouble now in his chosen place in New South Wales. A damaged son, an absent wife, a significant client, an exemplary fine. Apparitions to be dealt with by night. He was no longer the happy immigrant. The world had pretty thoroughly found him out on the Macleay.

  And yet just one more dusk and Kitty and Mamie would board Burrawong in Darling Harbour, in the port of Sydney. They would drink stout beforehand in some hotel in Sussex Street and catch a cab down to the boat. Burrawong the humble, old iron midwife of all their arrivals and returns. Burrawong might plough up the coast in record time for all a man knew. Might put in by midnight Thursday.

  Sitting by Johnny’s bed, Tim felt the wheels of night turn so minutely. He imagined the dark, slow weight of time seeping into the split in Johnny’s scalp. All to the good, all to the good! He kept a wet cloth on the boy’s brow. Coolness a known aid against convulsions. Beyond the window, the last light was on the river, which seemed set and inert in its dark green silty mass.

  Across the room Annie slept a dignified, unfevered, steadfast sleep.

  “England,” he read for consolation in the Chronicle, “pays seventy million pounds a year for Australian butter. The three criteria of good butter, as applied by judges at Agricultural and Horticultural Shows through the civilised world, are flavour, aroma and grain. Lack of farm hygiene and contaminated containers are the great enemy of these three vaunted qualities …”

  The night air pressing on Johnny’s much-praised Celtic scalp was soft and warm and gracious. “Bless it,” said Tim. “Bless it!”

  At the window however, Missy bowed in, pale-eyed. Tim looked at her not with a sense of terror but with something more familiar.

  “Out to sea,” she said genially, though he wondered was it a threat.

  He felt the room itself reach down into a trough, like a hearty old steamer taking on the first complexity of the open Pacific beyond the New Entrance. Like an echo of the sea, a spray of air broke over him. The square, unseaworthy room whirled, and again he saw Burrawong by day, in the blue Pacific with the two distant Kenna sisters, the known and unknown one, Kitty and Mamie, grinning at the rails. As the room bucked, Annie and Johnny kept solidly to their cots. Anchored. He saw a sky of stars, but then the window took a swing down and caught Red Kenna’s loud fire-lit kitchen. “Well, you don’t expect me to take the bugger too seriously,” called Red to him.

  Shudder. Another wave taking the room. Albert Rochester galloped through Glenrock up a hill. Serious but intact, carnation in lapel, on his way to Mrs. Sutter. Johnny ran with strange Lucy into some surf as three agile rats came over the windowsill, but then couldn’t be seen. Missy re-entered from the hallway and passed by Johnny’s bed. A normal tread. She hadn’t come to point any doomy finger. When the room pitched, she fell in her black dress from the window.

  All stopped rolling. Tim stood up in relief and Johnny snorted.

  “Dear God,” said Tim, sitting down and picking up the Chronicle, which had fallen to the floor from all the room’s gyrations.

  “Oh, Kitty,” he pleaded.

  While his son swam down to profounder sleep.

  Tim woke on the floor of the children’s room in the silken first light. The children slept heroically. Give them a medal, Mr. Malcolm, you old bastard.

  He remained stiffly where he was and could soon hear energetic hammering from somewhere outside.

  Oh he knew! They’d started again the daily work of putting down the planking over the pylons of the bridge. It had happened suddenly after all the work of sinking columns, and now less than seventy yards from his door, the bridge had taken on a surprising reality, making its first small but conclusive flight above the river. Perhaps three dozen men in flannel shirts and big hats hammering and bolting the carriageway to the pylons and joists. Drills and auger bits spun beneath their hands. This was civilisation, and you could foresee the completed physical bridge now from what they had done. East and Central and West being made one by a lot of scrawny men with hammers. The community would come to take this convenient arrangement as a given, putting down its weight with confidence.

  He went and got some tea and took it to the storefront to watch the labourers in the high middle distance. Out in Belgrave Street a number of boys appeared, running up with news-sheets in their hands. A Chronicle special, Tim could see. No bigger than a poster for a concert. Tim went to the door, opened it, and bought one. He took it back off the street and into the shade of the store to read.

  The news-sheet said, PLAGUE OUTBREAK IN SYDNEY.

  An epidemic of bubonic plague, Tim read, the terrible Black Death of the Middle Ages, broken out in the port of Sydney. Believed the disease has made its way into the town through infected rats arriving on freighters from a number of Chinese ports … the United States vessel Mindanao aboard which the first victim, a seaman, perished ten days ago in Sydney Harbour …

  “Dear God almighty!” murmured Tim to the now awakened street, to the industrious bridge-builders on whose labours he had so recently been congratulating himself and society. Kitty had found infallibly the time and place of greatest peril. Sweat flooding all his pores here in the shade—some sort of sympathetic fever. He was powerless before the lavish distance which lay between Kitty and him.

  The news-sheet then alarmed him further by claiming to know who was the first Sydney victim. A Mr. Gleason, licensee of the Hunter River Inn in Sussex Street. He had taken ill the previous Thursday, and he and seventeen contacts had been sealed up in the inn. Two members of the Benson-Howard wedding party in the Rocks on Saturday afternoon, a young man of seventeen years and another of nineteen, took sick before midnight and were dead of the most sudden and violent form of plague—pneumonic plague—before the end of church on Sunday. The entire wedding party had been moved to the quarantine station. A woman in Darling Harbour who had sickened on Sunday had been sealed up in her house with nine contacts, and a young wife from a boarding house on Margaret Street with eleven contacts had been taken sick.

  A British plague expert, Dr. Hugh Mortonson, who had helped combat an outbreak in Calcutta two years before, had been sent for, and Dr. Silver, a Brisbane expert on tropical diseases, had made a long statement about oxygen and the plague. “Oxygen is a deadly foe of the plague …” Fumigating teams were being sent into houses in the Rocks … and rats bearing signs of the plague, though few in number, had been found in areas of Darling Harbour. The fur of rats suffering from plague turned grey and then fell out … Onset of pneumonic plague was very sudden, beginning with the normal signs of a cold or fever and progressing through extreme temperatures and great difficulty in breathing to an utter collapse of the system …

  Another collapse of the system. In streets where Kitty walked with Mamie, congratulating her on her Australian landfall!

  Inside to the dining room to finish reading of the disaster. Spreading the sheet on Kitty’s table. The North Coast Steamship Navigation Company had announced that all its vessels would be fumigated before departure from Sydney. Captains of the steamship company’s vessels had been instructed to co-operate fully with the local requirements of the sanitation inspectors of the North Coast settlements serviced by those vessels … Burrawong upon arrival at the New Entrance would have its passengers and freight transferred to droghers for the eventual journey down-river. Hence direct contact between Burrawong and Kempsey itself would cease.

  It had already been decided by the Macleay Shire sanitation officials that passengers arriving from Sydney would be put ashore near the Pilot Station and detained there for a week.

  Looking out over Trial Bay and waiting to see if they had plague or not!

  With all this information spread on the table before him, Tim could not avoid the crazed suspicion that wilfully Kitty had put herself in the way of such giant dangers f
rom the East! Rather, the North for Australians. The feared, the deadly Asiatic North. Cockpit of every strangeness and disease.

  He took the news-sheet one further step, out through the residence and into the back garden where Annie, awakened by now but still in a night dress, was watching a weary Ellen Burke drinking tea. He handed the sheet to Ellen, who could see at once that it stood for something weightier than their squabble over Habash.

  “I don’t know what this means,” said Tim.

  Yet surely Kitty would come back. There was enough oxygen in her even for Dr. Silver of Brisbane.

  Before Johnny’s dizziness fully went, but while he was still reflective, Tim asked Ellen Burke to dress him up, including putting a little pair of oxfords on his feet, which would show he had caring parents. Then, given he was delivering his gratis supplies to Imelda, he took the bandaged Johnny with him on the cart.

  Imelda didn’t blink, of course. In the big front parlour where bishops had tea—His Lordship lording it—Imelda said thrippence a week as if Tim was a stranger, and hadn’t just delivered the next week’s food and sandsoap round the back.

  Tim sent Johnny outside to wait in the wagon. “And don’t touch the horse!”

  When the boy left, Tim said, “I wanted to know about Lucy. What kind of pupil is she?”

  “She’s in the better half,” said Imelda. “And her work is very tidy.”

  “She does not talk much to me. Does she talk much here?”

  “No. Yet that is always valuable in a student.”

  Yes, he could have said. And something strange as buggery too. Lucy’s silences were not like Johnny’s. They were silences crammed with something pressing to be uttered.

  “Does she get herself into danger, Mother? Do you find her climbing things, say.”

  “You know we don’t let the girls climb or jump off heights. That is what parents are paying the convent for. As well, of course, as communicating the Faith.”

  “When she meets up with my son, they both tend to climb things. You may have read they fell together from Terara. They must set each other off.” He could too readily imagine Imelda giving Johnny what-for with a cane for this. So he said, “When they climb things together, you get the clear idea Lucy’s not being led. She’s a stronger soul altogether than Johnny. But you’d never guess it. Looking at her when she’s sitting down drinking tea. I think you could tell the nuns to keep them apart.”

  Imelda nodded, her head concedingly on its side. Was her scalp shaven under that great black hood? What a sight that would make!

  A great joy for Tim to make these little arrangements today, the day Burrawong would be fumigated in Sydney Harbour, Kitty and her sister would be coming aboard laughing once the fumes cleared, the last of the odour twitching at their nostrils.

  The fifteen quid writ awaited him and he had another week to pay. Society looked sideways at him. Missy remained in Hanney limbo from which the Commissioner in Sydney must now be giving orders that she be rescued and at least put into the hands of Sergeant Fry. Altogether, given the present cast of the world, it was soothing to be able to arrange a thing or two. To tell the nuns not to let Johnny and Lucy go together on ledges.

  Ten

  IT WAS KNOWN that Dr. Erson and the Macleay Shire Sanitation Officer Mr. D. Stevens had visited the quarantine camp, which the citizens of Kempsey had begun to call “the plague camp,” and had reported all quarantined passengers in good condition. The camp conditions were comfortable, they claimed—and Tim now tended to believe Erson’s announcements—and passengers’ clothing had all been boiled up in camp coppers. Even suits had not been exempt, since lives were at stake. Dr. Erson and Mr. Stevens had worn white masks during the inspection.

  As Dr. Erson told the Chronicle, the physicians of the Macleay were one in believing, as progressive opinion did, that the disease was caused by the bites of fleas and transmitted by the exhalations of sufferers. After the quarantine period, however, which was hoped to be no longer than ten days if the plague did not manifest itself amongst Burrawong’s passengers, the passengers could all be approached without fear and without white masks. The plague, said Erson with his Saxon or Scots good reason, was not a matter of superstition but of sensible behaviour.

  After a week of quarantine, during which no bad news came upriver to town, Tim was beginning to feel grudging reliance on Dr. Erson’s hopeful manner. He stood by his counter and congratulated himself on every passed hour of commerce.

  One afternoon, wearing a clean, starched white shirt and a neat grey coat and pants which just the same had plenty of the dust of the Macleay’s roads impacted into the weave, Bandy Habash crossed the diagonal from the Post Office to T. Shea and then actually entered the store, his thin hand held delicately high to encourage peace.

  “I know what you have told me, Mr. Shea. But I happen to have some items close to your heart.”

  His hand still held up, with the other he took a wadded document out of the left bottom pocket of his jacket.

  “These letters have been aired,” he assured Tim and—by displaying them also in the direction of Belgrave Street—anyone unseen who happened to be a witness. Such well-modulated motions, running like silk. His voice was like silk lain over a woman’s shoulders.

  “The quarantine period is only seven days in true terms. It seems the passengers are all well with that period expired. This is from Mrs. Kitty.”

  “You’ve seen her?” Tim asked.

  The man was everywhere, and had forestalled him again.

  “I was able to trade with people from the plague camp on the South West Rocks Road.”

  “I suppose you sell them all sorts of herbal rubbish.”

  “I sold some jasmine and camomile tea. But not much. The people are in excellent health and not anticipating an outbreak.”

  Tim took the pages from Bandy and felt the slight shock of risk which they possessed. He would not open them in front of the Punjabi. But he could envisage Red Kenna’s daughters loudly trading with Bandy at the green wagon parked on a sandy road amongst paperbarks.

  Kitty: “What do you have for the awful tedium of sitting in the bush, Mr. Habash? And something for my sister please, so she can get one of the big old blokes upriver crazy for her!”

  “Wait by the door there,” Tim told Bandy. He might need to send a reply to Kitty.

  Tim took the letter into the storeroom to read it. Safe in the hempen sweet perfume of the sugar bags, which despite everything was a fragrance associated with riches! He sat on a bag of sago and delicately unwrapped the pages.

  Dearest husband,

  What a turnup, would you say. Mamie and self in the utter pink. Mamie calls it an adventure to tell the Kennas about this camping on the banks of Australian rivers! Are the little ones asking? Their mama is just delayed a little time bringing up their new Aunt. I have grown bigger in the ten days, Tim. Will you want a new woman? Ha! Dr. Erson and Sanitation Clerk met the ship and told the captain to take all maskings and facings and lumbers down so that ship could be totally searched for the dead rats. A job bigger than the pyramids say the wits. We were in meantime shipped ashore on a drogher where tents were set up and groceries provided. Some I hope to God from T. Shea—General Store, but suspect it’s the Masons again and that Good Templar crowd looking after their own, so it’s probably Bryant’s tea and damper we’re getting by on. All our luggage is with us, and if yourself were too would be happy to live on here though insects pretty thick and men bringing in brown snakes every ten minutes, the loathsome things. Johnny would scare the venom out of them I imagine.

  Two days time Dr. Erson will come back to see if rats found onboard carried the plague. Mamie and self inspected clothes closely and no fleas on us.

  Blessed Mother watch over you and keep you safe from smart merchants like Mrs. Malcolm. Blessed Mother keep Johnny from jumping into things.

  Know you don’t like Mr. Habash. But who else to take a note? So give him fair play.

  XXXX Kitty


  He emerged from the storeroom, half-ashamed to face Habash. His desire to see Kitty might be discernible. Bandy seemed to read him anyhow, and nodded.

  “I have two fine horses. The grey you remember. My gelding as well. I do not want to make unwelcome offers, though.”

  “You’re going again?”

  “If you are, Mr. Shea.”

  So easy to see the fellow as an ally now, and Tim barely resisted it.

  “I could not go till dusk. And I would need to leave Miss Burke here with the children.”

  Bandy screwed up his eyes and took thought. “It is a safe township,” he said. “They would be secure. However, yet again I do not wish to have my gestures mistaken for butting in.”

  The little bugger had him on toast.

  Tim said, “I could rent horses, but that would be all over town. And Pee Dee … in spite of his bloodlines … he’s not the horse for a fifty-mile round-trip.”

  “That’s clear to everyone,” said Bandy.

  “I will pay you for a horse.”

  “Please, sir.”

  “No, I’ll pay.”

  “I intended to go anyhow. I have business. Packages to deliver.”

  “Wait then, will you?” he asked. Politeness. He might as well try that, since the hawker seemed to flourish on hostility.

  Tim went to see Ellen Burke in the kitchen at the back of the house. He weighed the hard light in her eye as she listened, frowning a little. “… and tell people I’ll deliver tomorrow afternoon.”

  “But how can you after more than twenty miles there and twenty back? You’ll rest here and I’ll make deliveries.”

  “No,” he said. “No. I’ll put in my normal day.”

  She looked away across the room, to the wall on which molten light within the oven was reflecting. She was the sort of robust girl who very much liked to think of herself as a possible cartwoman.