A River Town

by Thomas Keneally

  “Yes, but I know that you directed the rescue,” she said.

  She didn’t know what a pitiable state Bert had been in. Bert in his ending needed the help of all parties.

  Tim said, “I brought his two children with me. Both of them are indoors with yours. The girl Lucy. More presence than a judge, that Lucy. And then the poor little boy.”

  He saw tall Mrs. Sutter, whose face poor de-faced Rochester had dwelt on, look away. He knew it was bad news. It astounded him the way women could set limits. The mothers and the motherers, and yet they always had definite ideas about what could be done with ease, and what the boundaries of content were.

  Mrs. Sutter inhaled and was gathering herself for an answer when three or four children burst from the back steps. A boy, three girls and the children with whom he was now as familiar as if they had emigrated with him. Lucy, Hector. The oldest Sutter boy had proposed some sort of roughhouse, some racing around. Lucy stood back, weighing what it meant. Sharp-featured and calm. What a daughter! She did not blunder into things like the boy Hector. Every course she took a chosen one.

  They all went shrilling off around the side of the house towards the front. Towards the Tradesmen’s Entrance. Lucy ran behind them, inspecting the Sutter yard as if she’d never seen it before.

  Mrs. Sutter took a pair of child’s bloomers out of a basket, pegged them to the line, but then seemed to need to hang on to them for a sort of support. She stared very hard at the wet fabric.

  “I’ll take the boy. But Bert wouldn’t have expected me to take the girl. She hates me. I’ve got no affection for her.”

  “Is there someone else then?” asked Tim. “Who can take her? I have a third child on its way, and then my sister-in-law is emigrating, due here on the Aberdeen Line …”

  “There’s no one else I can think of. I wondered would the nuns take her? Get somewhere with her? You know the nuns, don’t you? Wonderful music-teachers.”

  He waited for her to say she could help with the expense. He was damned if he would mention it and draw her grudgingly into some undertaking. She let go of the bloomers and stood up and looked at him directly.

  “She was the problem with Bert and me. She didn’t like me and did brutal things to the other children. Just to keep me in my place. She’s a brutal little thing.”

  “I hadn’t noticed that.”

  Mrs. Sutter looked away across her well-ordered backyard. Her garbage heap far off at the back fence. Her woodheap in order against the side fence. You could bet Bert had cut the wood and stacked it for her a week back, on some visit. The palpable benefits of marriage. Stacked wood, cut in regular sizes. A mound of kindling and a tidy little wall of split softwood. Tears appeared on Mrs. Sutter’s long lashes.

  “But for her I would have been widowed twice, I suppose. I can’t live with her. Take her to the nuns. She is a destroying little soul. You’d think they would extend their charity to her and do her some benefit. I’m sorry about all this when you’ve already been so good …”

  But however sorry she might be, Mrs. Sutter was implacable. She went on pegging her clothes.

  “It occurred to me though,” said Tim. “Whether you’d buy the farm.”

  “Oh no. No, there’s nothing for me in the farm. There’s something for the bank.”

  Five minutes later, out the front by Tim’s wagon, the two Rochester children were making a supervised farewell to each other.

  Hector cried, but Mrs. Sutter’s son and four girls began to distract him. Mrs. Sutter herself issued formal instructions from a distance. “Kiss good-bye to your sister now.”

  Tim began offering Lucy consideration. “I’ll bring you to see him on the weekends.”

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Sutter. “Perhaps for tea on Sundays.”

  Limited to such a small set of future reunions, Lucy gave her tear-stained brother an embrace more muscular than emotional. It was a hug which carried a sort of promise of return in it. Lucy climbed up into the cart without being asked to—she seemed to be too proud to face being directed as her brother had. Tim took the reins and turned Pee Dee’s head. Rolling downhill at last from Hector’s sadness, he could hear the widow and her children kindly turning young Hector’s attention to the Sutters’ aged dog.

  “Well,” Tim said, shaking Pee Dee into a trot. “Your brother has a good billet there, eh. For you we might need to see the nuns. It’s good there I hear. Girls the one age as you. In from the farms. Friends to make. And no milking. Mind you, the nuns do have a cow or two, and the boarders take it in turns to milk. But that’s not every morning, is it?”

  She said calmly, “I don’t mind milking. I have a poddy calf called Chuckles.” Her tough little hands were folded in her lap.

  “You understand … there might be others who have a claim on the farm.”

  She said nothing. Was she thinking of farms elsewhere that could be held on to?

  “My own boy, Johnny. I’m sending him to the nuns from May. Sooner if the little ruffian gets into trouble. The boarding students down there … they complain about food. Well, you’ll have no need to. I’ll make sure you’ve got ham and chocolate, and a regular supply of cocoa.”

  So these were items of the world’s trade to a doubting little orphaned heart. A full can of Fry’s Cocoa. She didn’t seem to take notice. Too busy tasting the world, gauging what it would do to her, doubtful of what he said to explain it to her.

  “The Sisters of Mercy,” he muttered, more for his own comfort than hers.

  “But I’ll need my clothes,” she told him suddenly.

  “Of course you will, of course.”

  “Hector will need his too. Mrs. Sutter’ll wash his, I suppose.”

  Tim turned Pee Dee’s head towards Glenrock.

  “Look,” lied Tim. “No one has anything against you.”

  He knew she saw through that.

  “I don’t have a thing against you. You’re a fine little woman. I wish there was room.”

  “Your place is very small,” she stated. Letting him off the hook. Putting him on it.

  Albert Rochester’s little farmhouse on a slope in Glenrock was the standard one they gave you a diagram of in A Guide for Immigrants and Settlers. It was supported not on piers of brick like Mrs. Sutter’s but on stumps of trees capped with a plate of zinc to defeat termites. It was unpainted, and the door had no lock. The inside walls, Tim found when he and Lucy entered, were not lined, but pasted over with old Heralds and Chronicles and Arguses. The energetic North Coast spiders had filled in every panel of the wall frames with misty web.

  There was a note on the scrubbed kitchen table which said,

  Every condolense will keep up milking til further arangements and final notice

  Jim Coleman

  Some shirts and underwear hanging from a string by the dead fire. They were Bert’s and the boy’s and a chemise of the girl’s. Let Mrs. Sutter, Bert’s near-wife, sort Bert’s stuff out. But the girl went over and took the chemise and folded it up and put it in a sugar bag which had till now lain on a chair. She took the bag into the other room, and he could see her through the open door putting other things in it. He noticed a picture of thin Bert and his pinched wife on the deal dresser at the end of the room. A wedding picture. Mrs. Rochester stood up to her wedding day wearing a hat, and the little hands she was to give Lucy were meekly folded in front of her. Blessed was she meek and hers was the kingdom of heaven these days, where, if what was taken as gospel had any value, she had got Bert back and was consoling him again.

  It was nearly out of his mouth to tell Lucy to take the photo. He was close to saying, “While you’re here you’ll want to …” But then he knew he’d be ashamed to see it in her hands, the reproach of her departed parents. It could be collected at another time. At the time of the final notice kindly Jim Coleman spoke of. If from anyone, the notice would probably come from the British Australia and New Zealand Bank. They would want to sell for certain. Mrs. Sutter had already said she wouldn’t buy
Bert’s hard little hillside. She needed something like a pub instead, to feed all her children.

  Tim talked the child into leaving Hector’s clothes for collection by Mrs. Sutter. The woman should come here for the task—that much was owed to Bert.

  He was pleased the girl was finished and they got out again and left Bert’s herds to the neighbour. She didn’t ask for the poddycalf. She knew that attachment was at an end. Chuckles belonged to the bank too.

  They followed the route back to town they had taken the day before, past the accident scene again. It had been all cleared away, the horse taken, the wreckage removed, the blood sunk numbly into a wet earth. The next flood would find it there. Bert would rise with the water. “We saw a man out there walking on the flood. His face shining.” That sort of thing commonly reported both in North Cork and the Macleay …

  At last around the corner into Belgrave Street, home of the living land of pubs and emporia, of Nance’s Chemist, of Philip Sheridan Solicitor, Joss Walker Tailor, Taylor’s Book Office, and Tibbett’s Ladies’ Wear. And modestly at the end, where Smith and Belgrave made a right-angle, in the blue and gold awning paint, his own store.

  Crossing from the Chronicle office to the Commercial Hotel for purposes the whole town knew of was the Offhand, a little ferrety bloke with an ironic face and a frightful pallor. He wore a grey suit and a stained collar. A blueness marked his jowls. Editor-in-chief of the Macleay Chronicle. Employed by the owner Hinton to pursue definite editorial policies. They were free trade and the Federation of the Australian colonies. Offhand confessed to being a former parson of the Diocese of Southwark. He poked fun at those who were always writing from New South Wales to the Queen or the Archbishop of Canterbury, warning them that Papist symbols and rituals were creeping into the liturgy of the Church of England in New South Wales. He’d never married, at least not in New South Wales; though he had a friend. Poor fellow a dipsomaniac. A good, democratic Englishman though.

  The democracy and irony endeared him to Tim, who reached now for the rim of his own hat to greet him.

  “Whoa Tim!” cried the Offhand, and Tim reined Pee Dee in successfully in the middle of Belgrave Street. The Offhand caught up to him with a shuffling walk.

  “Tim,” he said a second time.

  He had traces of a jaunty kind of cockney accent.

  “Just to say we are all in admiration of your bravery and compassion in re Rochester. One Mr. Bandy Habash has been in our office extolling your rescue, and your taking in one of the children. Is this young lady here one of Mr. Rochester’s?”

  “This one is Lucy,” said Tim. He was not at ease. He’d felt threatened by the Offhand’s exorbitant praise. “Habash did a first class job, too. He brought peace to the horse with the trace in its poor bloody entrails.”

  “Tuppence,” murmured Lucy.

  “What?”

  “Tuppence,” said Lucy. “Our horse Tuppence.”

  “Yes.”

  “Is young Lucy going to live at the store?” asked Offhand.

  “I’m going to see the nuns,” said Tim.

  “Then you’re a fine fellow,” said the Offhand. “Those nuns are expensive.”

  Tim didn’t want to be called that just then. Going to the nuns was callousness in his book, not fineness.

  The Offhand said, “Young Habash even told me that you beat his thoroughbred there …”

  What did Habash want? Enough reflected glory to get him in the bloody Turf Club?

  “His thoroughbred was knackered. Too much buggerising around in Smith Street …”

  “And you then carried the deceased on your own horse all the way to the Macleay District Hospital.”

  “Ditto,” said Tim, almost to himself. “His horse was knackered, for dear God’s sake.”

  The Offhand smiled and rubbed his jaw in a way which bespoke relentless thirst.

  “Mr. Malcolm of the Royal Humane Society is sufficiently impressed,” he said. “Mr. Habash has been to see him too.”

  “My God,” said Tim.

  The Offhand reached out and patted Pee Dee’s haunches as if the conversation were now nearly at its end.

  “If you want your valour or compassion cut back in any way, you’ve spoken to me too late, Tim. The tale as relayed by Habash and by Sister Raymond at the hospital is already set in print.”

  “Then why in God’s name didn’t you consult me?”

  The Offhand laughed. “The gallant Hibernian speaks. Dislike of public praise is the mark of true heroes, Tim.”

  “Any news though of that girl?” asked Tim, since that was about the only news that could matter. He had felt Missy pressing him, insisting through all his helpless dreams.

  “A bad thing to have lying around,” agreed Offhand. He wasn’t anguished, of course. Why should he be? All the bereavements of the world washed up through the cable laid under seas and over mountains and ended up grounded in the Chronicle’s pages. “Meanwhile I’m off for my morning tea.”

  The Offhand started on his way. That was the trouble with him: he was too quirky. People made more of his contrariness as a columnist than they did of his opinions.

  On top of that he had a three weeks overdue account at T. Shea—General Store. So he was lucky he hadn’t met Kitty.

  Dumpling Kitty in the store was seated in a chair behind the counter. Johnny was drawing with chalk on the blackbutt boards which made the floor.

  “Holy Christ, woman. I’ve told you not to let the boy do his art in the middle of the store.”

  Lucy Rochester looked at the boy, who raised his head and stared back blankly without malice and with keen interest. His son. He could turn out to be a great lop-eared Australian—few opinions, few ideas. If they weren’t careful with him.

  “Mrs. Sutter wasn’t disposed towards the girl?” asked Kitty.

  “She took the boy in.”

  Tim was partly shamed to be talking like this in front of Lucy Rochester, who stood there with her leg injury still wrapped in the neutral mercy of white rag.

  “Well, there’s no advantage to Mrs. Sutter any more,” asked Kitty fiercely, “is there?”

  He hated her tightened mouth at such times, as right as she might be. He hated her to carry her face in those lines. When he had had their wedding picture taken by Josh Hendy and sent a copy each of two different poses to his parents, his father had written back to him. “To hand, the photos of your admirable wife and yourself, and all the arbiters of beauty and elegance here around proclaimed her to be as supreme in excellence as could scarcely be described …” The poor old fellow had never met her, of course. She’d come to Tim, in answer to his letter of proposal, direct from Red Kenna’s hearth, and had never got round to visiting Newmarket during their courtship.

  And on the right day, smiling at Josh Hendy’s dicky bird in the camera, she justified the judgment of those North Cork arbiters. But she could turn off at will the generous gleam behind her eyes.

  “Johnny,” he told his son, “take Lucy out to the kitchen and show her where the lemonade is.” And to the girl, “You know how to slip the stopper off the lemonade do you, darling? Good.”

  Johnny wilfully did not hear and went on with his chalkwork.

  “Holy Christ, Johnny, will you do it!”

  Kitty put another tuck in her mouth and he heard her murmur, “So, of course, it’s the boy who has to pay for the world’s grief.”

  Johnny dropped his chalk and got up and flapped his arms like wings, a gesture Tim would remember at later dates.

  “Come on, come on,” he told the girl.

  “So how’s trade?” Tim asked when the children had gone.

  “Old Crashaw’s left an order. And Mrs. Malcolm was in.” She put on a fake ceremonial voice to say that. “I think she was disappointed not to find you here, you know. You’re her golden boy.”

  “What stupid talk!” he said.

  “She tells me you’re a hero. I told her in return that you weren’t game enough to face up to the nu
ns.”

  “Holy God! We would have had room for people like this girl at the pub, if you’d been prompter.”

  The old grievance. Kitty’d been booked to come to Sydney aboard the Persic, and he’d told the New South Wales Licensing Board that she would be in the Macleay in time to help him take up the Jerseyville Hotel. Then her oldest sister decided to be married and so Kitty chose to stay on at home until that event, changing her steamer booking to the Runic a month later. You had to be a married man to be a pub licensee in New South Wales. The license went to the married Whelans by default. Just for a Kenna marriage feast.

  “One day I’ll bloody kill you for saying that,” she told him. “I won’t take endless blame for the Jerseyville Hotel. What a bloody hole Jerseyville is anyhow. And what sort of publican would you have been? A mark for every sponger! I didn’t understand what I was doing when I changed the steamer. But I tell you it was a mercy. Someone was watching over us. Because you can hardly manage the supply of food and kerosene let alone grog. And the silly desire to keep your hands clean of lucre. Well, look at this!”

  She took from her pocket an account from a Sydney supply house, Staines and Gould. He could read their Gothic-printed name on the top.

  “You give three months’ terms to people and the Sydney houses want to be paid in two. This is our disaster, Tim. Not that I went to a wedding. Nor have a sister coming here. The fact that you have some mad scruple about asking people to pay you for what you’ve already supplied.”

  “Then I’ll ask people.”

  “You’d better do it or we’ll end in some bloody hole by the roadside!”

  “That only happens in Ireland,” he protested, and went through into the residence. In the dining room, the girl and Annie were drinking lemonade from large glasses. Lucy sat in a chair, and Annie had climbed up there and seated herself beside her, checking on her sideways, and then mimicking her posture exactly.

  “We must go now, Lucy,” he said, and the severity of the sentence startled both girl children. Johnny should be here to say good-bye but was missing somewhere, a bloody ragamuffin. Up a tree, or under the back of the residence, terrifying the wobbegong spiders.