A River Town

by Thomas Keneally

  He spoke exact English, every word presented as its own unit. It made Tim think of a conjuror, smilingly offering one card after another, but face up. They let too many kinds of different people into Australia for its own good.

  Habash swung his right arm to test his shoulder. “Oh God,” he said. “I was putting the grey mare through its paces, you know. I have a notorious weakness for speed and horse-flesh, Mr. Shea.”

  “I know,” said Tim, not yielding. “You’re on a good behaviour bond. Here you are bloody breaking it.”

  Habash made a noise with his teeth and lowered his head and swung it in an arc. This was some bloody fake act of contrition.

  “If I’d known you were there, sir … for I do know the sort of man you are. I have often camped on your sister-in-law’s property upriver.”

  Kitty’s younger sister, this was. Molly. She’d emigrated here just five years ago, come up the coast to her sister on SS Burrawong, that floating shame of the North Coast Steamship Navigation Company. Lots of very nice-looking, plump, sisterly hugging on the Central wharf. A half-pint like Kitty, actually skinnier than Kitty though, and with a little more restraint. Molly began her Australian career sleeping in the canvassed-off part of the back verandah, near the cookhouse.

  A man named Old Burke owned Pee Dee Station, where Tim’s own useless nag came from. Far up in the most beautiful reaches of the river. Old Burke rode in one day with his fourteen-year-old motherless daughter Ellen, and gave Molly Kenna a grocery order to fill out while he went and saw M. M. Chance, the stock and estate agent, and then to complain and drink with other farmers in the Commercial. His daughter was still shopping at Savage’s or drinking cordial at the Greeks’ cafe in Smith Street, pretending this was the big life, and Old Burke had come back into the store with a glow on and thought Molly was a pretty bright girl. What you needed to cheer up a grim homestead and the lonely seasons up at Pee Dee. Rich pasture there, but a bugger of a way up the Macleay!

  So now it turned out Habash carried his fabrics and his medical mixtures way up there to Molly.

  Tim liked Mrs. Molly Burke and usually said so. She was a natural democrat and put on no airs. And Jesus, what the people thought of her back in the Doneraile area when they found out—without understanding what sort of place New South Wales was—that she’d married thirty-one hundred and fifty acres!

  Tim said nothing now though. He wasn’t going to share his enthusiasms for his sister-in-law with the hawker.

  “What she says,” Habash continued, “is that you are generous to a fault. So how fortunate I am that it is you who blocked my path.”

  “Don’t expect the bloody advantage of me, Mr. Habab.”

  “Not Habab if I dare say so, sir. Habash. My father is Saffy Habash of Forth Street, and I am Saffy Bandy Habash, Bandy to acquaintances. You may know my father.”

  “An old feller. On a stick.”

  “Yes. On a stick.” Bandy let the wistfulness of that penetrate. “He is indeed our patriarch. Founded our business in the Macleay twenty years ago. Soon after my mother perished, and my father swallowed his grief and kept at work. Now my brother Mouma and myself have taken the load. Mouma does the settlements north to Macksville and south to Kundabung. I take the valley itself from Comara to the New Entrance. We are hawkers and sellers of medicines to every remote acre of the region. We are the servants of the valley and we rarely see each other. From Arakoon and the wives of the prison officers at Trial Bay to far-off Taylor’s Arm. And, of course, to your esteemed sister-in-law at Pee Dee Station.”

  “I’ve seen your wagons,” Tim conceded. “Moving about the place.”

  “As we all do, I get tired of plodding in a wagon, and I want to gallop like my ancestors in the Punjab, horsemen—if I dare say so—to rival the horsemen of the New South Wales contingent.”

  Habash’s grey was still drinking heartily from the trough outside Savage’s two-storey emporium. Habash, admiring it, didn’t move however to take its reins and stop it from gorging on the water. “I paid eleven pounds for it. Its dam is Finisterre, who won the cup at Port Macquarie.”

  Tim said, “You wrench the poor beast around a bit for such an expensive one. Why don’t you race it? That would get you out of having to use Belgrave Street as your bloody track.”

  “Sir, I was foolish enough to try racing it. But the Kempsey Race Committee pooh-bahs don’t wish to see races run by a hawker’s grey.”

  Tim experienced a second’s sympathy for this little Muslim. “The buggers are utter bloody pooh-bahs, you’re right about that.”

  “My father says not to waste money on such a thing. And I am an obedient child. That is in our tradition.”

  “It’s in every bugger’s tradition,” said Tim, sharply remembering old Jeremiah Shea, his father, left behind childless in another hemisphere. “You don’t have to come from east of Suez to have a tradition like that.”

  “But you do not have the honour to have your father with you here in New South Wales,” said Habash.

  “That’s exactly right. My father lives in a rainy place called Newmarket. It would take me only two months there and two months back and an expenditure of two hundred pounds to visit him and see if he’s aged. As the poor old feller must have. All his children are in New South Wales or in America. Nothing for them in Newmarket. A small tenant holding. Laughable land. No bloody dignity.”

  Habash shook his head and tested his shoulder again. “Life is hard for so many in such a lot of places.”

  Jeremiah Shea, a literate Irish farmer who rented fifteen acres from a man named Forester. He did part-time clerking in the town of Newcastle for the Board of Works. Knew his Latin but had nothing to give his children. That was for Jeremiah Shea, pater, the saddest thing. In hic valle lacrimarum. In this vale of tears.

  Speaking of Newmarket this way, idly in the Australian dust, revived Tim’s joy in having come here. The heat, the sky, the place: all tokens that he wouldn’t need to leave Johnny and Annie with dismal prospects.

  Behind Habash, like a phantom of the sort of orphaned hope Tim had been reflecting on, a small child in a torn white dress staggered around the corner by Worthington’s butchery. Her head twisted back for air, and a keening plea came from her lips. Tim ran to her and Habash collected his grey by the reins and followed. Her sharp little face was red, and she couldn’t understand or tolerate the silent town. Tim rushed up to her and asked her, “What? What, dear?”

  “Papa,” she told him, pointing north towards the farms in that direction. Her dress was all marred with red clay. “Papa and Hector. The sulky tipped.”

  Her face clenched up. Habash asked, “Where, miss?”

  The child said Glenrock near O’Riordan’s, and that was a mile and a half. Tim saw the light in Habash’s eye. The supreme license to gallop.

  “Come on, little miss,” Habash cried and fetched the grey and swung the small girl, who may have been ten but was slight for her age, onto the neck of the horse, arranging her sidesaddle, fixing her small hands around the pommel. His own delicate brown hands on the reins would encase her and keep her from falling.

  “Go,” said Tim. “I’ll be ten seconds behind.”

  He ran down the street and turned into the laneway beyond his store and so to the gate of the paddock where Pee Dee, a bay with white markings, was still grazing and trying to pretend Tim would make no demands. An old Macleay racehorse himself, Pee Dee, a gelding of promise but of erratic temperament. Tim bought him two years ago and had an obstinate affection for the brute. He served Tim and Kitty both as a dray horse and occasionally as a fairly stylish hack. Only four years old, but his previous owner Mr. Milner had given up on him early. Too chancy in behaviour to race. He took to the shafts of the cart with disdain and only after lots of assurance. But he didn’t make quite the same outstanding objection to being ridden. Especially if you did not go to the trouble of bridle and reins and all that leather. Tim took one of the stacked sugar bags from the back verandah, grabbed a rope
halter and mouthpiece from the shed, eased himself through the fence and approached Pee Dee with it all.

  “Here we go, boy.”

  He slung the sugar bag well forward on Pee Dee’s shoulders and worked the rope halter over his head. He led the unwilling and yet strangely tolerant horse to the gate and opened it. Then he took a handful of the beast’s mane with his left hand and clung as best he could to its withers with his right, and so hauled himself onto Pee Dee’s back, stomach first. Leaning low over the horse’s neck and with his arms extended a long way down the beast’s shoulders, he trotted Pee Dee out of the paddock and around the corner of the residence. Hitting Belgrave Street, Pee Dee fell into an apparently eager gait.

  “OK,” said Tim leaning forward. “We’ll show that bloody Asiatic something, eh.”

  In the street Habash was still waiting, wheeling his horse, impatient as a bloody chasseur of some kind.

  But it became apparent as they set out that Habash’s mare was quite clearly tired now from all the racing Bandy had given it, and Pee Dee went frolicking after her, and they rounded the corner by Worthington’s butchery in tight convoy. They galloped leftwards into Forth Street, past the gardens of cottages whose owners were absent, steamer-picnicking townspeople. Pee Dee ahead, as he’d so rarely been on the racecourse, and relishing it. A few dogs chased them. Looking back, Tim saw the little wizened child with the bloody leg and the torn dress leaning back confidingly into Habash. She may even have fallen asleep. Tim felt Pee Dee’s backbone cut into his groin like a blade.

  The Macleay River, renowned in its own shire, contained most of the town in a half circle. First, hilly West built up high above its steep-cut bank. Some of the better houses there, and—out beyond the last houses on the hard upriver road to Armidale—the Greenhill blacks’ reservation. Then low Central where the Sheas lived, convenient to wharfs but likely to flood. East then of course lay across the water from Central, reached by punt. Its own place, and not party to the dash Habash and Tim were now engaged on. They were making for the farmlands between West and Central, where the river had flowed earlier in its history and had left some fairly good soil for corn and cane-growing and for dairy cattle. Amongst the country fences and the milking sheds, Pee Dee drew enthusiastically clear of the grey. Mad and unpredictable bugger, he was! Showing the way up past Cochrane Street and over a low hill.

  Ahead then you could see something, a terrible mess, a sulky pitched sideways over the edge of the road. Tim had to fight an urge to yank on the reins for fear of nearing the catastrophe on his own and seeing unguessable things. But you could not manage such subtle changes anyhow on Pee Dee and, given the primitive rope halter and reins, it was now a case of bloody Pee Dee surging on, performing well only when it was least suitable.

  Thus he was first at the mess. “Oh merciful Jesus!” he said, jumping down, feeling light as a wafer, delivered of his heavy horse.

  Seated wailing on the edge of the road, picking up handfuls of gravel and throwing them towards the wreckage down the slope, was a little boy of perhaps four. His targets seemed to be three pigs grazing down there.

  Below lay an awfully wounded horse and the ruins of the sulky. One of the shafts had snapped and was stuck deep in the horse’s flank. The beast was writhing very weakly to work the stake loose. Impaled and lying on its side, it looked over its shoulder occasionally to get a glimpse of its injury. The hopeless wound did not invite close consideration and Tim did not give it any. A man in a suit lay on his back. He looked intact, even his clothes looked fresh, but O’Riordan’s three robust pigs were feeding on his head.

  Tim slid down the claggy embankment. He did not necessarily want to do it but had to, couldn’t leave it to Habash. White man’s bloody burden in a year already tainted with woman-slaughter.

  The poor bastard lay on rain-softened earth and even had a white flower in his buttonhole. Worn but clean white shirt, an eloquent, well-sewn button on the neck. No tie. A cow-cocky coming to town on the holiday. His head had been broken somehow, perhaps by the wheel, and the pigs had come in and eaten at his forehead and his nose. Cruel, cruel bloody world. Beheaded girls, defaced men. Jesus! The gravel thrown by the little boy had no impact at all upon the swine.

  Bandy Habash was now descending from his grey, and lifted the small girl down.

  Tim began kicking the pigs away. He wished he was armed to state his revulsion with more force. He lifted handfuls of shale to throw at them. But, squealing, they only retreated a certain distance, to see if his passionate objections would last. He felt the man’s wrist with his dusty hands. There seemed to be no life there but how could he tell? Tim’s hands were thickened by the rope reins and his brain clotted with the awfulness.

  He heard a huge exhaling, a hiss, a brief gallop of the sulky horse’s breath. Turning, he saw that Habash, bloodied knife in hand, had cut into the side of the horse’s neck and found some decisive vein. Habash stood back delicately to avoid dirtying his boots. From the road, Pee Dee objected loudly to the released smell of horse blood.

  “Yes,” Tim said to the hawker. “The right thing.”

  The poor horse continued to thrash his legs very feebly but for a few seconds only.

  Tim told the hawker, “Go and find one of the doctors.”

  Bandy Habash cleaned his knife by plunging it into soft earth. He sighed, “No, old chap. My horse is tired out. You must go with this poor fellow. I shall take the children to your residence, sir, following behind.”

  “How can I take him?” asked Tim. “His head such a bloody mess!”

  But he knew how already and ran up the muddy slope again to the road.

  “Papa, papa?” both the children were asking.

  “I’m going to get him, darlings,” said Tim. He took the sugar bag saddle from Pee Dee’s back and descended the slope again with it. He asked Habash to hold the man upright by the shoulders, and then he placed the sugar bag over his head. Together, Habash by the armpits and he by the ankles, they got the man up to the horse while the children wailed.

  “Now you know, Mr. Shea,” hissed Habash under the weight, “why we, like the Jews, think pigs unclean. Oh yes, unclean. Over the withers or over the rump?”

  “Oh, Jesus,” said Tim. “Give me your saddle at least, and I’ll carry him over the shoulders.”

  They put the man down for a while and found Pee Dee strangely tractable while the saddle was swapped and the girth adjusted. Kitty always said the horse was human. Then the man was lifted and balanced over Pee Dee’s very broad withers. The bag, despite the amounts of muck which affixed it in place, threatened to fall off his head. Habash produced string and tied it loosely around the man’s neck.

  “I don’t think he’ll smother, poor fellow,” said Tim, fighting the shudders.

  “Mr. Shea,” said Habash, straightening. “The man is quite dead. God has received his soul.”

  “Oh Jesus,” said Tim. “But we’ll see.”

  He could afford no more than a second to steel himself for sharing the horse with the man almost certainly gone. Then he got up decisively into the saddle. It felt unbalanced to have a fine saddle and rope reins, and between those two the lean man. But no delay to be permitted. He kicked Pee Dee’s flanks and made decent progress towards town. The man pressed back against his thighs like a living thing.

  What doctor? Dr. Erson was singing operetta on the Terara. Dr. Casement, he knew from a notice in the Argus, had taken Keogh’s coach to the beaches of Port Macquarie. Dr. Gabriel was perhaps at home across the river in East, and it would be a nightmare waiting for the punt to come across. It was therefore a matter of the district hospital.

  Pee Dee kept up a surprisingly brave canter towards town. You could go on the better roads through West, or more directly over the bush tracks towards the hospital. Through West was the supposedly civilised way, but there would be a few people around the shooting gallery beside the Post Office. Yahoos who couldn’t afford the boat fare or who thought such normal country divers
ions beneath them.

  “What do you have there, Tim?” they would call, and the damaged man deserved better, both softer and more urgent enquiries. The Armenian who ran the eyesore of a shooting gallery would grin out from under the shade of the awning and hand one of the would-be Macleay sharpshooters a rifle loaded with pellets.

  These sorts of possibilities steered Tim right, along the bush tracks across country to the hill above West Kempsey and the hospital.

  “Quick along,” Tim kept urging Pee Dee. He was a much better mount than he was a carthorse, the mad bugger.

  The path took him through humid, fly-ridden bush and past the Warwick racecourse the Race Club wouldn’t admit Habash to. Heat was pretty dense under these scraggy gumtrees. At last the Macleay could be seen ahead, broad and set low in a wide bed. The heedless river was a pathetic blue here.

  “Look, look,” said Tim to the jolting man. “Did you come to town for a holiday? Look, look, you poor feller.”

  Pee Dee, just to be unpredictable, still trotted briskly as they entered the hospital driveway and stopped by the large Morton Bay fig tree. Tim tethered him to the hospital railing. On the verandah, he noticed, a frail child in a nightdress sat in a big wicker chair. Beginning to weep, Tim eased the man down by the shoulders, the feet being the last heavily to flop off Pee Dee’s neck, but both boots staying on—for which Tim was somehow grateful. Tim laid the man in the shade of the verandah and ran inside. A pleasant-faced, full-breasted nurse saw him and cried, “Yes?”

  It was the long dusk. In the cookhouse at the back of the store, he lit the range and the heat it gave off reacted more pleasantly than you’d expect on the warmth trapped in the room. Sweating, he made tea and slabs of white bread and honey for the little girl who waited inside in the dining room and whose brother had fallen asleep on the sofa in the drawing room.

  This will be an awful year, he knew in spite of knowing better. The omens were so terrible. He shook his head, not wanting to think that way. Wanting to think like a modern fellow, not a bloody peasant. But this will be an awful year.