A River Town

by Thomas Keneally

“All right, I don’t mind Habash any more.” But he minded Mamie.

  “Neither do I, as a matter of fact. Shall we say one Our Father and three Hails for the conversion of the infidel or for the repose of lost souls.” It was a joke about Habash.

  “Bugger the infidel,” said Tim.

  He wondered though what did Bandy Habash and his infidel father and brother do on their Saturdays in Forth Street, Kempsey, New South Wales? Facing the East. Sitting on mats. What did they say, so far from their home? To what torrents or rivers of sand did they compare the Macleay.

  On the Sunday morning of the picnic, at the early Mass, Father Bruggy happened to speak of the Holy Name and the common abuse of it on low tongues.

  “Ireland is a Catholic nation,” he said, “and possesses a strong sense of the Ten Commandments. But there are two vices the Irish immigrant brings to New South Wales. The one, drunkenness—which shall be the subject of another sermon. The other—the undue invocation of the name of Our Lord and of his Blessed Mother. My English brother, Father McCambridge, comments on the fact that the Holy Name is most under threat from those who most honour it, the Irish emigrant to these shores. Here, his looseness with the Divine Name combines exactly with a colonial looseness of expression in general. I must warn Irish newcomers of their tendency to contribute to the general laxness of colonial, Australian expression. I would urge men to join the Holy Name Sodality, whose purpose is to stamp out the misuse of the Divine Name …”

  Kitty was muttering at Tim. “Takes an Englishman to remind us of all this. Put the Holy Name up on a shelf and rent it out for day-to-day use!”

  Father Bruggy said that the Holy Name Sodality would meet at the end of Mass.

  “Devil you’ll join them!” Kitty told him. When she chose to obey priests she did it thoroughly. But she was discerning on the matter. Fortunately he lacked the inclination to stay behind.

  After Mass, Mother Imelda and the other nuns observed a short thanksgiving period—as did their boarders perforce—and then rose and genuflected and processed out of the church. Their boarders in trim clothes and shining faces, behind them. Little Lucy Rochester amongst the boarders with her clenched features and her glowing eyes. The reformed climber. The repentant imperiller.

  As already arranged, Mother Imelda brought Lucy to the Sheas. She nodded to Kitty and dragged Tim imperiously by the elbow a little way distant from the group. He could hear Annie say, “That’s Lucy, Mama. Lucy. She lives with the nuns.”

  “The child,” Imelda murmured to Tim, “has listened intently to everything, and Sister Philomena is astounded by her grasp of Christian Doctrine.”

  Tim groaned—perhaps aloud. He knew what would now be said. “She wishes to take instruction as a Catholic.”

  Tim flinched. He had a duty by Albert. “You’re sure, Mother, she isn’t just trying to please you?”

  “Mr. Shea, I have watched this occur with other children of Protestant parents. Give me some credit! I can sniff out what is genuine and what is merely opportune.”

  “Her father’s so recently dead, and he would not like this.”

  “If our faith means anything, Mr. Shea, it means he is now in possession of the real facts and is at peace.”

  “Well, as much as I trust your discernment, Mother … Perhaps she should wait a little while. That’s what I think.” Imelda staring him down. He shrugged, touched his hat. “I’ll talk to her on our picnic.”

  Mamie had filled a hamper, and it sat in the dray along with a basketful of ale and a number of blankets. Joe and Mamie, shadowed by Johnny, who for some reason liked Joe and was quiet in his presence, climbed into Joe’s uncle’s plain yellow farm cart. It too carried an ample basket of ale.

  Tim went and lifted Kitty up to the seat behind Pee Dee. Lucy and Annie were already in the dray, talking. Yet so hard as ever to hear what Lucy said!

  All around, the carts of other communicants of St. Joseph’s Kempsey were pulling away from the church. Young men on ponies raced each other like young men of any communion at any time. Men with pipes in their hands who waited outside Kelty’s—Kelty’s opened up to certain Romans after Mass on Sundays, despite the licensing laws—took off their hats and waved to Tim. Did they also think he’d written the Australis letters and provoked bitter Billy Thurmond to his Patriotic Fund motion?

  In Elbow Street in West, they encountered an astounding and ominous sight. The postmaster was out in the spare block beside the Post Office. With an axe, he was chopping through the timber uprights of the closed shooting gallery. The postmaster a madeyed Scot named MacAllen, and he paused and wiped his brow and nodded to Tim. “The Shire won’t take action. I’ve complained and complained about lads shooting away to all hours of the evening. Armenian bugger who runs the place is only squatting on this land anyhow.”

  “Fair enough,” called Tim. Though secretly he was a little surprised by this kind of lawlessness in an official. MacAllen said, “My wife sits up worrying about the children and the Sydney plague, and all we can hear is bang, bang, bang!”

  “Very trying,” called Kitty, turning her short body with difficulty towards the postmaster, but then covering a laugh with her lace-gloved hand.

  “Better to agree with a man with an axe,” she muttered to Tim.

  As the postmaster applied himself again, the sheet of corrugated iron which had roofed the gallery fell like thunder. The postmaster stepped back and was pleased.

  They rolled on, convinced that this might be a good day to be away from the town.

  At the Central punt in Smith Street, Bandy was waiting for them, smiling. On the same grey he’d been riding the day of Albert Rochester’s tragedy, and the night of the illicit ride.

  “Good morning, Sheas and Miss Kenna and Mr. O’Neill. Prayers completed, the day now belongs to a totally decent picnic!”

  Tim looked to the cart behind, because he was curious to see how Mamie reacted to this fulsome sentiment of Bandy’s. She was rolling her eyes at O’Neill and laughing. Yet it did not seem to be in total mockery.

  Annie touched Tim’s arm from the back of the cart where she sat on a pile of rugs with the white-frocked Lucy. “Bandy Habash is funny,” she sagely told him.

  The exhilaration of being on the deck of a punt, all in a party, observing the thickness of fertile soil in the banks, the splendid mountains too bluely distant to show their burnt trunks.

  They landed in East, Bandy leading his biddable grey and at the same time hauling Pee Dee by the bit, while Tim hallo-ed and urged. The road followed for a little way the path he and Bandy had taken to the plague camp. But went past the turnoff for a mile before itself veering back to the coast, becoming a sandy, claggy track. Ahead, between them and the sea, lay a huge mountain, Dulcangui. Covered with grey-green trees and displaying gnarls of sandstone, it rose up out of the low ground like a threat. When they reached the rise, the road now became a cutting through the mountain’s rock. Kitty took over the reins of the Shea wagon. Tim and Lucy got down to walk. Bandy himself dismounted from the grey after making a number of experimental canters up and down the stony slope. Then he put Annie in the saddle, a place that seemed to please her very much, and began to lead the way up Dulcangui.

  “Watch out for snakes!” cried Tim. For he did not want the grey shying with Annie in its saddle.

  To make the ascent, Tim walked level with Pee Dee’s neck, grabbing him by the harness to hold him to the mountain. After Pee Dee had shaken his head the required number of times to satisfy the Horse Union’s idea of bloody-mindedness in a beast, he allowed Kitty at the reins to gee him up the first section of road. Rocks and saplings designed for impaling lay all the way down the murderous slope which fell away from the side of the track.

  Mamie strode past Tim and Lucy, her neat knees ploughing away beneath the fabric of her white dress. A bit of an athlete, this one. She went ahead and walked and talked with Annie and Habash, while Joe O’Neill, alone except for Johnny and at the rear, learned to urge his uncle’s
cart up this severe track.

  In country like this, the Patriotic Fund seemed barely a dent on human contentment. Yet Tim could hear Pee Dee snorting, the bugger. Just to make things interesting. Kitty tugged at him with her now-bare, red little hands and uttered both soothing and threatening non-words to get him over the hill.

  Lucy beside him. The little would-be Papist. How horrified the Primitive Methodists would be.

  “Well, you want to be a convert, do you?” he asked the child.

  “Yes.” She walked with the gait of a grown woman.

  “You wouldn’t do that just to please the nuns, eh? You can’t please them. I know it because I’m their grocer.”

  He could tell by her up-tilted gaze that she knew it too. They were hungry goddesses.

  “You’ll have to remember,” said Tim, “that your little brother at Mrs. Sutter’s won’t be with you in this.”

  Typical of her, she said nothing.

  “Well, do you think he’d mind?”

  “He’s too young,” she told him. “This is a business for me.”

  “Why do you want to do it though?”

  “I want to have God. But I want the angels too.”

  “Wouldn’t the other people let you have angels?”

  “I want the Blessed Mother too.”

  “You are an ambitious little woman, aren’t you?”

  “I want a Blessed Mother.”

  A reasonable and pitiable desire in an orphan, he thought. He took one of the lollies he was keeping for the children out of his pocket and slipped it into her hand.

  “I’ll tell you this. Don’t do it too easily. And don’t do it to please anyone. Because you’re stuck with it for life then and people think the worse of you. Suspect you of all sorts of things they don’t suspect you of if you stayed Primitive Methodist.”

  “I know. But.”

  “But. But you have the angels and the saints?”

  “Yes,” said Lucy. “There’s lots of them.”

  “Some people consider that a problem.”

  Kitty on the reins and Tim at the halter dragged Pee Dee and the cart around a last wall of rock, and now this was the top. A vast glitter of sea could be seen from up here. Its line broken only by Crescent Head’s two famous headlands—the Little Nobby and the Big.

  Down again towards the paperback swamps which lay between Dulcangui and the ocean. Bandy let Lucy lead the grey and came back to help control Pee Dee. Pee Dee fussy on the stony down-slope. Mamie climbed up beside Kitty and took a hand at the reins. You could hear the bottles jiggling in their baskets. Before they got to the bottom, two in the hamper on Joe O’Neill’s cart exploded.

  Meanwhile, Lucy and Johnny, who had abandoned poor Joe for the greater excitement of the vanguard, between them led the grey down onto the corduroy road across the swamp to the sea. In the grey’s saddle, Annie still sat. Entering into a fair imitation of her kingdom.

  The picnic place finally chosen was on a sward above the surf at the bottom of the Little Nobby. They could look out over the sea and then across a small saltwater creek to the twelve miles of Front Beach, and Mamie was enthused by this vigorous bright sight and was soon knee-deep in the creek with the children. Johnny, shirt off, began splashing round as he did in the river, but his strokes were interrupted by the shallowness of the creek and the playful current. Tim waded in too, his trousers rolled up. Standing still you could see mullet swim by. Annie, Johnny, Lucy kept trying to catch them in their hands.

  Ashore Kitty lay on her back on a rug and under a parasol, pointing the unborn Shea child straight at the arc of blue sky. Near her, Joe O’Neill began smoking reflectively and plunking his banjo. The tune “Bold Phelim Brady” was raggedly released into the air. His boots were still on. Perhaps he had an inlander’s fear of the water. When Tim waded ashore, Joe and he began opening beer with flourishes. After the rough trip, the stuff fizzed out of the necks of the bottles.

  “Porter, Mrs. Shea?” asked Joe, putting a long glass of frothy stout in Kitty’s outreaching hand.

  “Oh, dear,” sighed Kitty. “As lovely as you’ll get.”

  Meanwhile Bandy took the saddle off his grey’s back. Steam rose gently from the crushed, damp hair. Tim was surprised to see Bandy take his shirt and pants off too, so that now he wore only a singlet and his long, white linen breeches. The singlet was low-cut and revealed in part a smooth, brown, hairless chest. Arms not like the arms of men from Europe. Both smaller and yet more sinewy. He jumped on the grey’s back and urged it gently into the creek. It went placidly, standing to its belly in the water, seeming content amongst the little waves. Bandy turning to throw a salute to the shallows where Mamie and the children were prancing and yelling and trying to grab mullet.

  Lucy now with her skirts tucked in her knickers looked more a child and less of a witness than he’d ever seen. Though sometimes she would cup up a palm full of saltwater and study it.

  Having crossed the creek, Bandy put the grey into a gallop on the firm sand below the tidemark along Front Beach. All this looked splendid to Tim, half-naked Bandy leaned down to the grey mane, the lovely mare shattering its own reflection in the wet sand, and thundering away.

  Whereas Pee Dee was up along the slope, turned out of the traces and eating grass as if he’d never go back to work again.

  “You bugger, you’re for the knackers,” Tim casually called to Pee Dee, who disdained to stop devouring the hillside.

  At last, for love’s sake, Joe O’Neill took his big boots off and rolled his trousers and went and stood in the rim of the creek. Kitty must have been able to see this from her lying position. “Look out for them sharks, Joe,” she murmured.

  They ate a drowsy lunch—sardines and cornbeef, beer and ginger beer. Chewing heartily, Mamie looked across to the larger headland, smooth and green and momentous. It took up a whole quarter of the sky.

  “We’ll be climbing that big feller there?”

  He could see the children’s eyes flick towards the Big Nobby. Not a question that it invited you!

  “You and Joe can go up there after lunch,” said Tim. It was the right sort of physical feature for courting. It demanded that hands be reached to each other. But he didn’t want mad Johnny up there.

  “What can you see from the top?”

  “The whole coastline of New South Wales,” said Kitty dreamily. “At a total sweep. And the air. A lens, you see. The air like a bloody telescope.”

  “Can we go, papa?” asked Johnny bolt upright like a jack rabbit, on his knees. More than ready for high places again, the little ruffian.

  “I’ll take you over the creek to the beach,” said Tim. “Mr. Habash might take his grey again and you can ride. But not gallop, son, not gallop. I know you.”

  “But can’t the children come?” asked Mamie. It was as if she did not want to be left alone with Joe. “We can all keep an eye. You’ll be good won’t you, Lucy?”

  Lucy looked up at her levelly. “I learned my lesson,” said Lucy in a way which implied canings and made everyone laugh.

  Something entirely convincing about Lucy swayed Tim, as did the size of the day. He remembered too the gradual, accommodating lines of the Big Nobby.

  “Then I’ll go too,” said Tim. “I’ll keep an eagle eye out. And you, Bandy. You come too if you would, and watch these little blackguards.”

  He felt sorry for Joe, the corner of whose mouth conveyed disappointment. Mamie was a bugger of a tease.

  “But first the tea,” said Bandy. He had made a fire a little way down on the creek. He now went and fetched the excellent tea he had brewed. Mamie stood up and asked to see into the billy he was carrying.

  “There’s tree leaves in that tea,” she complained.

  “That’s gum leaves,” said Tim. “Australians make their tea with gum leaves thrown in. When there’s a tree handy.”

  So, it struck him now: Bandy was by habit an Australian.

  They drank plenty of this tea to ready themselves for their
thirsty climb. When they were finished, Tim wanting to get up there and down and have it over, they left Kitty lying on a blanket in scant shadow, with her parasol leaned across her face to give double shade. A strong sea breeze cooled her and played with the tassels of the parasol.

  On the flanks on the great whale-like Big Nobby, whorls of tussocky grass made the climb easy. You stepped from one knot of grass to another. Step by step, like climbing a pyramid. Johnny kept racing ahead and looking down like a gazelle from some nest of grass. But Lucy mounted the headland beside Tim, whose hand was held by Annie. So they rose up the green slope quite easily, Joe O’Neill chattering away, to the domed top of the thing.

  Bandy seemed to take care to be up there first, not it appeared for rivalry’s sake but as if he too wanted to prevent any madness in Johnny. As Tim and Annie rose higher on the great headland, they began to pick up the welcome southerly on their brows. Tim finished the climb with Annie on his back, since the child did not believe in wearing herself out. All the others were waiting on top for them, looking south, Mamie exclaiming at what could be seen. Joe had a wrestle-hold on Johnny, and Johnny struggled in it, laughing. Lucy stood soberly there like one of the adult party.

  Arriving and dropping Annie so that she could take up her normal august posture, Tim saw Back Beach and its wild surf stretching away to Point Plummer, Racecourse Beach, etc, etc. You could have seen Port Macquarie except that the day’s haze blurred the scene about twenty miles south.

  “Now you don’t see a sight like that,” said Mamie, “anywhere on the Cork or Kerry coast.”

  “Because it’s always wrapped in mist there,” murmured Joe.

  From here it could be seen that the headland on which they stood had two tops, this one and another further to the south. In between, a green saddle with grass and little thickets of native shrubs. Beneath the saddle a partially seen great rock wall fell into the sea, which grew plum-coloured in the shadow of the black stone. You could hear and partly see the ocean raging down there, making caves. Of course there was no way, having got here, the party would choose not to walk on into the saddle towards the other, lower dome. Finding a way past the spiky banksias, and so to the Big Nobby’s second summit. From there they would, of course, be able to look from safety directly down into the turmoil of rock and sea below.