A River Town

by Thomas Keneally

  “So,” she said. “Some people are allowed to travel and talk with Mr. Habash then?”

  “This is a different case, miss,” Tim warned her.

  “Is that what it is?” she asked. She began feeding the fire with split wood. “I’ll be very pleased if when I am married seven years, a man will do a mad ride for me just to spend an hour.”

  From a seventeen-year-old, this was an astounding observation. Just the same, someone was sure to do it for Ellen, for her big bones and her ironic tongue.

  “You’re not going to bring us back the plague, are you?” she asked.

  “No. The seven days are more than up. There is, thank God, no plague out there.” He smiled at her. “Do you fight with my sister-in-law, Molly? I bet you fight like blazes.”

  “Sometimes. We’re like sisters, you see. Putting up with my father. I’ll make you a quart of stew to take to Kitty.”

  He would take some condensed milk too, in case the quarantine groceries didn’t cover that. Kitty liked condensed milk in her tea best of all. She had that in common with Lucy. She would acclaim condensed milk, breathing out through her broad lips.

  Back in the store, Tim and Bandy made their arrangements for after closing. “I shall be back with both horses,” Bandy promised formally.

  Johnny’s dawdling manner of returning home from school showed he fancied himself as a schoolboy and that Imelda was not a terror to him. It was to be hoped someone would be. His bandage was still in place, but it had ochre dust on it. His eyes looked clear, which was what counted. So don’t enquire into the history of his day.

  Annie, sipping her own tea, watched Tim narrowly with wide brown eyes.

  “Father,” she enquired, “are you going to leave us now?”

  At the stove, Ellen Burke covered her mouth with a hand.

  “I’m going to see Mama. Back tomorrow. Tell you what, I’ll leave that friend of mine with you.” He turned to his right and theatrically pushed towards her that phantom spirit which had attended him in North Cork and supposedly emigrated with him.

  “There,” he said. “Look after Annie, and answer all her questions.”

  The child said to the vacancy and to Tim, “I’ve got a question then. Will we have treacle duff?”

  “It happens I was going to make sago pudding,” said Ellen Burke. “But something or other told me treacle duff!”

  Bandy shamed him by bringing the horses the back way, not down Belgrave Street to the front of the shop, but by laneways across the hip of river bank behind the main thoroughfare. All to save Tim embarrassment. The grey mare, the bay gelding. Two horses neat as skiffs. Not bloated and gone slack with the Macleay’s easy grass. All the quiet energy Bandy put into keeping these horses up to the mark!

  Seeing him coming from a window, Tim ducked out of the back of the house to greet him. “You could have come the front,” he called.

  “That manner of proceeding leaves people knowing all our business, old chap,” said Bandy, touching his nose with the finger of a hand which still held the grey’s reins.

  A man could have asked him then, why tell the Chronicle about our bumbling rescue of Albert? But who could be so crude to a fellow who had delivered two such wonderful horses to your door?

  “Please, come into the kitchen for some tea. Talk to Ellen Burke and wait for me to pack a saddlebag.”

  Bandy put his head on the side and closed one eye. “It will be one or two in the morning before we reach the quarantine camp. If you wanted a rest first or …?”

  Tim decided to shave and even then found himself hoping that the town, closing for business now, seeing him and Bandy ride together to the river punt, wouldn’t use it as an excuse to say, “There he goes. Fine thing. One day extorting money from Mrs. Malcolm, doing business with the hawker the next.”

  “The trouble with you,” he told his mirror, the receptor of his discourse, “is that you’re stuck halfway between a madman and a cagey bugger.”

  Wrap the stew in a big cloth, then in a sealskin bag. Ignore its then resemblance to Hanney’s package. Chocolate and condensed milk and some Norwegian sardines. A copy of the Messenger of the Sacred Heart, which Kitty must have ordered at Mass one Sunday, and which had turned up two days after she left—took the lazy buggers at the post office that long to sort and deliver the mail which had come on Burrawong. Then he stood in the store, looking about him at the shelves. What else to take Red Kenna’s beloved daughter? He used the opportunity of the customerless store to readjust his breeches and privates for the punishing ride.

  At last, outside the back door with Pee Dee whickering at the two fine horses from his paddock, Tim drew himself up into his saddle on the gelding. Beside Bandy on the grey. Mounted bushmen. He ignored Pee Dee and he felt the leather creak, so well-oiled, so delicate, accommodating him as precisely as you could hope. Annie watched him from the back verandah like a chronicler, and Ellen Burke kept a good hold on bandaged Johnny. Tim blew kisses. “Now go inside with Ellen!”

  He rode out waving his hand. Then out of the lane into Smith Street. Beyond the part-built bridge, a crowd of end-of-day people were waiting for the punt to return from East. Old Billy Thurmond, the patriotic farmer, was there with his wagon and looked coldly up the embankment at arriving Tim, as if what he saw confirmed something. Maybe something he’d heard from Ernie Malcolm.

  Tim took off his hat. “Mr. Thurmond.” But the old man, model farmer, Pola Creek, merely fluttered his lips with a blast of air. You couldn’t tell whether it was contempt or hello.

  Tim murmured to Bandy, “Do you call at old Billy’s place?”

  “His big daughter buys cloth from me, and a remedy for costiveness.”

  “Pity Billy himself didn’t take some of it,” said Tim.

  The punt had left East and was eking its way back over darkening water. Some ducks and then a pelican made late, low flights over the surface, dragging a rumour of light behind them. Yet shadow also fell like a veil from the pelican’s big wings. Smelling of its peculiar, cranky old steam engine the punt came into Central wharf. A few wagons and tired-looking horsemen rode ashore. Tim and Bandy led their horses aboard, and the gelding travelled from embankment to punt so easily and without fuss that Tim was reminded of Dr. Erson’s question: “Will you shoot that cranky horse of yours?”

  Everyone on the Central side was able to crowd aboard, with walking passengers and Billy’s dray and the two horsemen, and old Hagan, the punt captain, and his son Boy Hagan, pulled levers and let the thing be swung away from shore, let the current take it and the cable hold it, balancing the drift against the thrust of the engine.

  “You’re going out selling herbals, are you?” Billy Thurmond called down the length of his wagon to Tim. Tim did not answer.

  Some fine enough houses in East, rising up Rudder’s Hill. At the end of the journey, Billy Thurmond urged his wagon ashore in East. Bandy and Tim tranquilly led their horses down the ramp, pleased to give Billy a head start, and then mounted and took the hill at an easy trot.

  “You keep these horses marvellously,” Tim called across to Bandy. He hoped he sat half as well as Bandy did, but doubted it.

  Bandy grinned softly, flicking his head sideways towards the river.

  “They are my total passion, old fellow,” he said.

  The signpost turning left at Rudder’s Hill said Gladstone. They swung their horses to it and saw before them the paperbark lowlands of Dock Flat and O’Sullivan’s Swamp. A brown, swampy darkness beginning to pool down there, pricked with the kerosene lamp of this and that cottage. Melancholy country, this. The river’s abandoned ground. The lonely lights looked as if they’d been set there by survivors of a flood. These were the houses of men who did not do one thing but many: they kept cows, they grew some cane and bananas, they burned charcoal, they cut shingles, and when they had done all that, were still landed with the question of how to feed a family.

  Soon, at an easy pace, he and Bandy were at the furtherest point to which he m
ade deliveries—the slopes of Red Hill, where better farms and orchards lay, where prosperous farmers could be found sitting at their tables reading the Argus with such a clear, scrupulous eye that you’d think they’d been here two hundred years. Some of the fanciest new ploughing, threshing, winnowing and seeding machines, coming up straight out of the catalogues of the Sydney manufacturers by way of Burrawong, were taken to Red Hill whose farmers considered themselves advanced. To Red Hill and Pola Creek too came the agricultural and horticultural journals of the world, and they were read and disseminated. Agriculture sat as science, not as hit-and-miss magic, atop Red Hill.

  A long way away to the north, beyond the mudflats and the river, was a perfect bar of golden light, and then violet all the way to the apex of the dusk. And on this side of things the road down to Pola Creek, and night a blue mist. This air, this air. The same air which dealt tenderly with him after his cricketing mistake, which pressed so knowingly on the seam in mad Johnny’s scone.

  The most wonderful thing to do, to ride recklessly to the supreme woman in a soft night.

  At the corner of a laneway amongst corn paddocks in Pola Creek a young woman in a black dress waited, bare-headed. Piled up hair. She daunted Tim. An echo of Missy? Or just waiting for some cow-cocky’s son who’d sent her a note? Seeing Tim and Bandy, she seemed abashed and turned and moved away through corn taller than she was.

  “The road downriver used to be so devilish bad when my father first brought us to the Macleay,” Bandy recounted, his voice sounding like a ballad. “You saw broken-down drays every mile, and men marked the particular mud holes with a cut-down sapling and a rag tied to it, to warn travellers away.”

  Austral Eden, wide, low, rich land, beside the track now. The river was somewhere near too. You could smell its muddiness, for all the world like the sweet drag of odour you got from a freshly opened two pound can of plum jam. Austral Eden. What a name! Southern heaven.

  But these little reflections swam like petals on the wide, hypnotic movement of Bandy’s well-kept horses.

  You could hear the river now too. By proxy at least. Drumming away in the throats of those huge emerald bullfrogs Kitty hated to find on the shouse seat. The closer you got to the great body of the river the more urgent the wings of night birds sounded. The moon came up and there were flying foxes in it, creaking their way across the mudflats towards somebody’s luscious orchard. Johnny liked to feed those buggers as they hung upside down from branches, bony and natty at the same time, dapper in their fur.

  Ah, the bloody river sweeps into sight now. Going to the sea for its salt. Broad between the canebrakes on this side, and the answering canebrakes on the Smithtown shore. Bandy’s grey snorted at the river for its size and the authority of its smell. “Shhhh,” said Bandy. Pacifying it with a small brown hand.

  By the bridge at Belmore River, a Macleay tributary, they let the horses drink, and Tim and Bandy swigged cold tea from a billycan and found that it was almost nine o’clock. He was being sucked in well and truly, he knew. Becoming this little brown man’s accomplice.

  Through the town of Gladstone, drenched by moonlight but unaware of itself. The Divine Presence resting in the big church Father McCambridge had built. The stained glass windows in memory of dairy farmers’ beloved spouses. Tim took his hat off for the wakeful divinity of the place, and said a prayer for no plague and Missy’s name. The divine mystery: why did Ernie not want to write a letter to cause a proper search? Why was it part of his civic intent to let the Missy question fade?

  Bandy had also taken off his hat. Sympathetically, Tim presumed. But his eyes were lustrous as a devotee’s in the moonlight.

  They waded Kinchela Creek and then, though the river was always a presence, they came upon it only sometimes. They found themselves now amongst melancholy paperbarks that smelled of nearby swamp. They were getting close, he knew. He was so joyous that sometimes he let himself loll in the saddle like a drunkard, slackening and bending his back. He indulged himself this way frequently, at times when Bandy had drawn ahead.

  Past the creek at Jerseyville, where the pub which had nearly been Tim’s was kept by the Whelans, Bandy by a sudden jerk of his elbows showed it was all right to break the horses into a canter. So fresh they still seemed. Lots of running coiled up in their great big hips.

  From the top of the last hill, they could see the camp, with plenty of fires still burning. It was set on the first low, dry piece of shore before the mangrove swamps of the Entrance, and beyond it in the river sat Burrawong, whose shape you could read dimly from the storm lantern hanging from the crosstree of its mast.

  They left their horses in a patch of lank grass amongst paperbarks, and walked in like two people engaged in approved business. Tim carried with him the twin mercies of the billycan of stew, the condensed milk, and the Messenger of the Sacred Heart.

  Paperbark trees, grey by day and stark white by night, smelled anciently and remotely sour. Whatever tragedy or fall they’d been involved in had happened in an unrecorded age. Therefrom they took this air: all debts paid, all tears long shed, all decay long concluded. Tim enlivened though by this very quality. Charmed by this bush which didn’t try to charm him.

  Some parts of the track he and Bandy had to scrape through briary shrubs. This may have been why Bandy had wanted them to leave the well-kept horses behind.

  From up the path Tim could hear a banjo plunking at midnight! Joined idly by a fiddle. Didn’t the buggers go to bed early for their health?

  “Here we are,” Bandy told him in a normal voice.

  The paperbarks eased away to right and left to make the New Entrance picnic grounds. Three rows of six or seven bell tents each. A big cooking stove standing in the open with its funnel, and a canvas bathhouse nearby. Light still shone inside the canvas of some tents—a magical look, a tent lit from inside itself. Further along, the men and women who were still up were clustered to the campfire, which was not needed for warmth but for the soul and to keep insects away. This small party were engaged in watching the flames die now. The banjo and the fiddle only a sad strain here and there. A last burst of showiness from their owners, the tag end of brighter, more deliberate stuff performed earlier in the night.

  Now Tim heard a familiar little yell of woman-laughter, cut back immediately out of consideration for those who might be sleeping in the tents. Dear God, this was inimitably Kitty’s. Kitty sitting up to all hours in the plague camp.

  Within the light of the near-dead fire two little women sat on camp stools, with men standing and lolling about them. The banjo player standing close to the women. He was the one who first saw Bandy and Tim coming.

  “Keeping you up, are we, gentlemen?” the banjo player asked. This bewildering night! The fellow was talking in a North Cork accent.

  Kitty stood up wobblingly. An empty, froth-lined stout glass stood by her chair. An approved, a respectable drink. So why did he resent her for drinking it amongst strangers?

  “Dear mother,” she cried, grabbing the arm of the other, like woman. “It’s Timmy!”

  Tim looked at his sister-in-law, Mamie, oval-faced, slim, with a bunched little amused mouth. She had been a bit of a child when Tim had first visited the Kennas.

  Kitty clung to him, her hard little head, the brownish-red bun of her hair, pulled up into a knot by some hairdresser in Sydney, socketed into the cavity where his shoulder met his chest. And even though there were strangers looking he bent to this red hair, inhaled its decent, vegetable, mothering smell, and kissed it.

  “Don’t catch any fleas now,” she told him.

  “I’ll only kiss the bits that aren’t plaguey,” he murmured.

  “Get my husband and his friend a drink!” Kitty insisted, and a young man who was English by his accent shook out the froth from a used glass and then filled it with warm stout and passed it into Tim’s free hand. It tasted divine. The Englishman found another glass, but Bandy called musically, “No thank you, sir.”

  “Water then?
”

  “Yes, water.”

  The young man picked up a water bag and half-delivered it to, half-threw it, jovially, at Bandy.

  “Catch there!”

  “There are no guards on this camp, eh?” Tim murmured.

  “It’s an utter joke,” Kitty told him. “Captain Reid collected all these rats on board two whole days ago, and not a one showed marks of plague.”

  “But were you worried?”

  “There are city streets roped off and houses sealed. But Sydney is still Sydney.” A soft malty burp fluttered her lips very slightly. “Now meet Mamie.”

  Mamie had risen in her white dress. Very compact. Jesus, what a dangerous smile, and underneath the smile, what? In the bone? He could spot something. Flightiness, a canny soul, a temper. There might be an interest in holding grudges as well.

  “Tim,” Mamie said warmly, in a rising tone. She came to him on the other side than the one where Kitty leaned. Brushed his cheeks softly. Again he remembered her somehow, as a partially distinct, largely indefinite part of the Kenna brood. She would have been about eleven, a bit sullen, likely to throw bread across the table. Now she was between kitchens. Red’s and the one she might have here in the end. A thing or two would be thrown about in that one as well.

  The fairly neatly turned out young banjo player followed every smallest move she made, Tim could see. Every trace of intent in her face. He certainly had hopes of being her future target.

  Mamie said, “Oh! Mr. Habash again.”

  Seemingly her old friend, Bandy stood a little way off from the reunion, touching his hat.

  “I didn’t expect to see you travelling with the hawker,” said Kitty, laughing at him.

  “I didn’t know there’d be bloody plague in Sydney when I had a fight with him,” muttered Tim. “History is a bugger when you are in it.”

  “This thing isn’t history. It’ll soon be over.” Kitty nodded to the banjo player. “Here’s Joey O’Neill who worked for the cooperage just over the Mitchelstown road. Three or so miles out from home, would you believe? We met him in Sydney and he’s going to be joining an uncle farming in Toorooka. Can you believe that one? My sisters went to a dance in Kanturk less than a year ago, and saw him there, and here he is on the Macleay. I think the world is certainly shrinking.”