A River Town

by Thomas Keneally

  BY THOMAS KENEALLY

  Fiction

  The Place at Whitton

  The Fear

  Bring Larks and Heroes

  Three Cheers for the Paraclete

  The Survivor

  A Dutiful Daughter

  The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith

  Blood Red, Sister Rose

  Gossip from the Forest

  Season in Purgatory

  A Victim of the Aurora

  Passenger

  Confederates

  The Cut-Rate Kingdom

  Schindler’s List

  A Family Madness

  The Playmaker

  To Asmara

  Flying Hero Class

  Woman of the Inner Sea

  A River Town

  Nonfiction

  Outback

  Now and in Time to Come

  The Place Where Souls Are Born:

  A Journey to the Southwest

  For children

  Ned Kelly and the City of Bees

  PUBLISHED BY NAN A. TALESE

  an imprint of Doubleday

  a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

  1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036

  DOUBLEDAY is a trademark of Doubleday, a division of

  Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

  All of the characters in this book are fictitious,

  and any resemblance to actual persons, living or

  dead, is purely coincidental.

  First published in Great Britain by Hodder and Stoughton.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Keneally, Thomas.

  A river town / Thomas Keneally.—1st ed. in the U.S.A.

  p. cm.

  1. City and town life—Australia—Fiction. 2. Social classes—Australia—Fiction.

  3. Immigrants—Australia—Fiction. 4. Irish—Australia—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR9619.3.K46R58 1995

  823—dc20 94-48664

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80063-3

  Copyright © 1995 by Serpentine Publishing Co. Pty. Ltd.

  All Rights Reserved

  v3.1

  To the memory of my grandparents, who kept store in the Macleay Valley

  Terrors are turned upon me; my dignity hasteth away as the wind: and my welfare passeth away as a cloud.

  —The Book of Job

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  The Close

  About the Author

  ON A HOT MORNING in the New Year, a black police wagon went rolling along Kempsey’s Belgrave Street from the direction of West Kempsey. All of this in the valley of the Macleay on the lush and humid north coast of New South Wales. The wagon attracted a fair amount of notice from the passers-by and witnesses. Many shopowners and customers in fact came out onto the footpaths to watch this wagon be drawn by, and some of them waved mockingly at the dark, barred window of the thing. Tim Shea of T. Shea—General Store stayed behind his counter but looked out with as much fascination as anyone as the wagon passed, two constables on the driver’s seat, and Fry the sergeant of police riding behind.

  The prisoners inside the wagon were being taken to Central wharf for shipment aboard SS Burrawong to their trial in Sydney. They were the abortionist Mrs. Mulroney and her husband Merv, both of them about fifty years of age.

  Just before Christmas, Mrs. Mulroney had been visited by a young woman she did not know and who offered only a first name of convenience for the purpose of their transaction. Mrs. Mulroney fed the young woman some of the standard drugs of her trade, but the patient had at some stage, instead of miscarrying her unwanted baby, gone into convulsions and perished.

  Panicking, the Mulroneys had cleaned her body, packed her into a large bootbox, and driven her by night upriver to Sherwood, where they had added some stones to the box and released it into the river. The box had perversely floated through, and was found the next day wedged amongst logs on the river bank. It was traced almost immediately to Mrs. Mulroney.

  But she and her husband were obviously sincere in their inability to give the woman a meaningful name. A number of other citizens were similarly incapable of putting a name to her. She was said by the police to be no more than nineteen years old.

  To help in identification, the Commissioner of Police in Sydney, nearly three hundred miles south, authorised one of the Kempsey surgeons—in accordance with long police practice in such affairs—to separate the head from the rest of the body. The remains were then given burial on the edge of the cemetery in West Kempsey, but to assist the police, the head was preserved in a flask of alcohol.

  When the Mulroneys were shipped south, the flask remained to torment the dreams of some, and to shock and chasten even the hardened citizens of the Macleay.

  The age to some was otherwise hopeful. Hard times were said to be ending. Within a year the six former colonies of Australia would—to suit the new century—fall into line as a new federal Commonwealth. Commonwealth. A flowering, bountiful word.

  But on hearing of this police severing of the unhappy girl, some may have been seized by the superstition that a new spate of barbarities would be let loose.

  Despite and because of himself, Tim Shea was one of these.

  One

  ANNIVERSARY DAY today. The birthday of Australia, as the newspapers liked to say. Today everyone could suit himself and not fret much about the severed girl.

  What Tim Shea loved was to read newspapers in peace. He used his slight fever as an excuse for not going down with Kitty and the children to the New Entrance on the Agricultural and Horticultural Association’s chartered steamer for the day. SS Terara. It stuck entirely to the river, poor old Terara, unlike the sea-going Burrawong. It would creep down the broad, heat-struck reaches of the Macleay towards the sandbar marking off the deep green river from the Pacific’s blue glitter. The old tub would take that peculiar kind of riverine forever to get there too.

  It would drift, for example, up to the pier at the Smithtown Creamery to collect further picnickers, and then edge by Summer Island where dengue fever had been a force throughout the New Year. Mosquitoes from ashore there would certainly be able to outpace Terara. So keep the veiling down over your face, Kitty.

  Then after another two hours of mudflats and mangroves, Jerseyville.

  Kitty, his beloved stranger and spouse, could look at the pub at Jerseyville without nostalgia, though he never could. He’d come close once to getting the license to sell spirituous liquors there. The Jerseyville pub brought out the darker feelings so strong in his character. Whereas Kitty was not touched by nostalgia and regret. She could be imagined pointing to the pub and saying to the children, “That’s where Papa and I nearly lived. Then you would be a Jerseyville kid, Johnny. And you, little sister.”

  Last night, he’d taken some influenza mixture provided by Mr. Nance, the pharmacist of West. He was still too drowsy when Kitty bustled up to wake the children. And that was the thing, could he have faced it? Could he have faced the Empire Loyalist effusions of the Chairman of the A and H, Mr. M. M. Chance? The references to our beloved and gracious Majesty the Queen. God forbid anyone should cut into a picnic pie or open an ale bottle in New South Wales unless some old bugger like Chance consecrated the wh
ole bloody indulgence to Her Majesty.

  Yet Kitty would have no trouble with any of that. Watching with a smile while Miss Chance and Dr. Erson were persuaded to climb up on the coamings and recite or sing! Kitty could let their references to the perils Britain found herself in in Africa—of Australia’s duty in the face of those perils, of New South Wales’s responsibilities, and all the rest of it—slide off her. To her all that stuff was just like band music at a picnic. It didn’t make a dent in the sunlight. What were matters of private principle to him were matters of what came next to her. A happy, happy soul, that Kitty. Drank stout and farted as unabashedly as a farmhorse, in particular when with child. Melancholy didn’t claim her.

  He’d begun fretting in his sleep about the idea Constable Hanney would ride up soon with horrible remains in a bottle of ether or alcohol. And he knew his turn to countenance her was coming. But it could not happen today, when Hanney and his wife were on Terara with perhaps half the population. Excluding the ill like him, the dusky brethren of the native reservations at Burnt Bridge and Greenhill, and those shingle-cutters who could not afford the one and six for adult, the ninepence for child.

  He intended to take a folding camp stool into his back paddock. This was in fact part of the high river bank. One section of his property a yard with a shed for his delivery dray, the other a fenced pasture for his turbulent horse Pee Dee. He intended to sit in the yard under the peppertree shade, hear the river close by, read the Argus and the Chronicle, and take an idle interest in what Bryant’s and Savage’s were selling jam and soap for. And try to work up an opinion on whether the Chronicle was more democratic than the Argus or vice versa.

  Anyhow, some consideration of these questions in a camp chair in the shade. And he’d take a flask of rum. His aloneness in a town emptied of all the grander people. Very welcome. He’d take a blanket with him too, to lie on, in case the stupor of the day got the better of him.

  He sat down on the camp stool behind his residence and store. T. Shea—General Store. Situated in a corner. Where Belgrave Street ran up to the river and then turned at a right-angle to become the chief waterfront street, named after an earlier landholder called Smith. By looking down the lane beside his store and residence, he could take in the bend in the road, parts of bush-fashionable Smith, a section of nearly-as-fashionable Belgrave.

  Some black people wandered past his line of sight. Danggadi was the name of the main tribe here. All barefooted, these visitors to town, the men in bits of suits, one coat bright yellow. Where were they going on such a day, with all the shops closed? Talkative ghosts in a town so solidly defined that most of its population could bugger off on a steamer and return to find everything still in place. No dahlias ripped out by the roots, no windows broken.

  The river itself now. Another remaining inhabitant. It reached around a bend amongst willows people had planted here in the last half a century. Low yet still three times wider than old world rivers, and deep and richly green.

  Take a glimpse too at the mountains in the west richly blue, the underside of a mallard’s wing. So that was it. He’d appreciated his bright surroundings, the unembarrassed light and the blue hills and the deep, navigable Macleay river olive with mud, and the quiescent punt at Central wharf, and then the huge pylons sunk in the water for a coming bridge between Central and East.

  And now he could take a mouthful of the rum—ahh, the delicious too-muchness at the back of the throat, the shudder that out-shuddered fever—and then picked up the Argus. For though he respected the Chronicle, the Argus was very generous with its serial by A. A. Druitt, the Dickens of the end-of-century.

  The Honourable Delia Hobham was the spirited girl who had made three previous appearances in the serial in the Argus throughout January. She came from somewhere in the West Country of England, since A. A. Druitt made a meal out of what the peasants and servants said to her. “Auw, Miss Delia, there bain’t been no bakin’ powder fur cook to gi’ the pantry a freshenin’ wi’.” A. A. Druitt’s Miss Hobham lived in Hobham Hall with her mother and father, and every day she rode out amongst the villagers and tenant farmers, who called down blessings on her father’s head. Silly buggers!

  The father never seemed to turf any tenants off their land. That’s how you knew this was fiction. For the Allbrights at home, landowners of Newmarket in Duhallow, North Cork, took every chance to evict people for their own good and recommend them to emigrate to Massachusetts or Australia. But no one ever mentioned emigration from the Hobham estate. Too busy being grateful to bloody Squire Hobham. So the world was fine if you had a good squire and foul if you had a bad one. What about having none at all? This tale, however, was suitable old world pap to serve up in a place like Kempsey, New South Wales.

  The male Danggadi blacks had been followed by a string of women now, and children. Gluey ears and blighted eyes on the young ones. Searching for a bloody carnival in a carnival-less town. From looking at them a man got the momentary, mad, missionary urge to live amongst their humpies and pass away with them. Everyone said they were passing. Poor buggers!

  He watched them loping for a time down towards the butter factory near Central wharf.

  Out in Belgrave Street—broad because surveyed more than seventy years past by a British army officer from Port Macquarie—the younger Habash brother rode past at a mad pace on a grey. He was of a family of licensed hawkers and herbalists. He’d taken advantage of the empty town to get involved in such riding in the two chief commercial thoroughfares. The bloody little brown-complexioned hawker, in a broad felt hat and black waistcoat and trousers, leaning forward in the saddle. Where were the Habashes from? Somewhere east of bloody Suez for a start. India maybe.

  “Bloody slow down!” Tim cried, but not too loudly. Habash’s golden dust hung in the air, held up there by the day’s humidity.

  “Jesus,” Tim asked the Honourable Delia, who sat there on the page of the Argus, “where’s the bloody Nuisance Inspector?”

  On the Terara probably. Under the awnings. Within sight of Kitty who wore her gossamer veil let down over her pink little oval of a face. Annie his daughter sedate on the forehatch. Such a staid child all the time. Johnny of course wild as buggery at six and a half years, climbing things, threatening to hurl himself over the gunwales.

  Holy Christ, that bugger Habash was galloping back down Belgrave Street now! You could see him fleet through the neck of the laneway between T. Shea—General Store and E. Coleman—Bootmaker. Thundering back into the dust he’d already made.

  “Do you want me to knock you out of the bloody saddle?” Tim asked of the top branches of the peppertree.

  Britain’s griefs in Africa filled the papers. From them the New South Wales Mounted Rifles, recently embarked for Natal, had not yet had time to deliver the mother nation. However … on the masthead page of the Argus, he noticed, flipping backwards and forwards between the sweet, ridiculous drama of the Honourable Delia Hobham and the pages full of harder intelligence, Mr. Baylor, Treasurer of the Patriotic Fund, raised the idea of a Macleay Valley lancer regiment being recruited to send off. To sort out Britain’s African affairs. The Australians would pull the fat out of the fire.

  Tim reached out of his chair and picked up the Macleay Chronicle. Tim’s favourite the good old Offhand, editor and chief columnist. No one ever called him by his real name. Through his column he’d become Offhand to everyone. He’d have sent off one of the junior journalists to write of the Terara and would be drinking somewhere indoors today, somewhere dark and cool. Maybe with the skinny little widow, Mrs. Flitch, he visited in West.

  There was the Offhand on page nine. “The factors of the British Army in India, on their visit to the Macleay Valley last August, could find from a total of one hundred Macleay horses offered for their perusal only five that were suitable for active service. It would seem that only the most rigorous and widespread breeding programme would produce enough mounts here to save Macleay Valley volunteers from the disgrace of being infantry.” />
  One in the eye for Mr. Baylor with his plans for a public meeting to raise a regiment. Bloody good for you, son!

  Bloody hell, that Afghan or Punjabi hawker was flogging the grey back down Belgrave Street again. He’d been fined just six months back for thrashing some other poor piece of horsemeat down Kemp Street. Then fined again by the Macleay police magistrate for using raucous language with Mrs. Clair, standing on her front steps and accusing her of not paying for cloth he’d ordered especially.

  In heavy air, Tim folded his papers and laid them on his camp stool. Somewhere on earth a wind was blowing, and somewhere sleet cutting the faces of men and women. But here it was hard to believe that. The Macleay air at mid-summer was gravid, a first class paperweight. Tim got up and walked past the gate behind which his own eccentric and leaden-footed horse, Pee Dee, stood grazing and ignoring him, and out into Belgrave Street. Down by Worthington’s butchery, the hawker was recklessly yanking the grey around for another assault on Kempsey’s stolid atmosphere. He was lightly whacking the poor beast’s sides, but with such a smile that you thought he must believe the horse was enjoying all this as much as he was.

  Tim waited a while in the shade of his storefront. Only when Habash was well-launched did he step forward. Thinking in his dark way, Let the bugger run me down and see what the police magistrate makes of that!

  When Tim presented himself in the middle of the road, he saw Habash’s face filled with sudden and innocent alarm. Yes, Tim thought. Yes, I do find myself taking strange risks. He saw Habash reining the horse in crazily to avoid running him down. But the hawker must have put unequal weight on the bridle. The grey slipped and threw the young rider backwards into the street. Tim felt the thud of the falling hawker in his own teeth. Grateful the madness was over, the grey strolled into the shade of Savage’s Emporium, and began to drink from the trough there.

  Habash got up laughing and with his neat hands brushing brown dust from his black trousers.

  “Bad show eh? I thought everyone but the darkies was down the river.”