A River Town

by Thomas Keneally

  A long way to the cemetery in West where the grave of Lucy’s and Hector’s mother was located. Tim chose not to be part of the procession for fear people would point to him as well as at the hearse and shame him by nodding in approval that he should be there. He crossed back to town on an earlier punt than the one the hearse caught and called instead into the store, did brief business, then made his own way to the grave, arriving as the hearse did.

  From here you could look across the river to the far mudflats of Euroka and Dongdingalong, where families maintained their hopeful ways growing maize and milking dairy cattle. And then the mountains, which sent a thundershower every summer afternoon, and from which those others of his customers dragged down the great stalks of cedar. Geography of the sweet world seen from a graveside. It looked a world sufficient to itself. Why did it need all its feverishness about Boers and Empire, the threat of Papism, the fear of the Jewish financiers who held the Queen’s son in their thrall? Why the bloody need to raise lancers or hussars or mounted rifles? Albert Rochester had joined the real regiment. The army that had the numbers.

  Mrs. Malcolm, Tennyson lover, looked down on Victor Daley, a Sydney poet Tim loved. Daley wrote an incomparable elegy to humankind. A sensible Australian name to it too. The Woman at the Wash Tub, old Victor’s best. He had learnt it by heart for the unlikely eventuality of having to recite. As he did now for funerary purposes to himself, while Carr’s men stumbled across the hill with Albert’s plain coffin.

  “I saw a line with banners,” Tim grumbled into his moustache,

  “Hung forth in proud array—

  The banner of old battles

  From Cain to Judgment Day.

  And they were stiff with slaughter

  And blood from hem to hem,

  And they were red with glory,

  And she was washing them …

  I rocked him in his cradle,

  I washed him for his tomb,

  I claim his soul and body,

  And I will share his doom.”

  In the approaching group, it was Lucy who seemed to be fitted more as the eternal washer, the cleaner-up of disaster. More than wary Mrs. Sutter, who looked cautious, shying clear of such a comprehensive role.

  Prayers had begun when a sulky pulled up and two people got down from it. Late comers for Albert. Ernie Malcolm and Mrs. Malcolm. Getting down from her seat, Winnie Malcolm looked unfamiliar, at odds with what he knew of her. She looked flushed and bleared. She was a being of air. Earth had now somehow entered her long, luscious bones.

  Ernie Malcolm guided her over uneven ground amongst the gravestones. The broken columns which were popular and one of Des Kerridge’s, the stonemason’s, standard items.

  And Kerridge did the things suitable for Tim’s clan too. Celtic crosses. They and broken columns covered most needs.

  How linked in Life and Death—

  The shamrock and the cross.

  Victor Daley again, Australian poet. The vanity of that. Of being Mrs. Malcolm’s grocer, secretly harbouring verses by the Bard of Enfield, that suburb in the west of Sydney which Daley honoured by living there. But the pleasure and savour of all this now overshadowed and reduced by the poor appearance of Winnie. Fair play, how bleared and uncertain she was. On the plainest level, that bloody public buffoon Ernie had privately upset her. Or something had. Didn’t Hanney say he wasn’t showing Missy to townswomen? Not that. Just loutish unworthy Ernie. Jesus Almighty Christ!

  The Malcolms stood behind a mound of grave dirt and were dressed very well for Albert’s funeral. He had a black tie around his stand-up collar, and she was in bombazine so lustrously black that it seemed to attract flies. Within the cloth her body like that of nuns and other goddesses would be pink with the heat. But she had always dressed formally. Her Melbourne origins.

  Ernie Malcolm nodded to Tim and then composed himself to listen to Mr. Fyser’s burial prayers.

  They were quickly done, and Hector’s hand was contained by Lucy’s as Albert made his eternal descent. Tim prayed his pagan Ave within sight of Mr. Fyser, an heretical utterance for the repose of Bert who, according to Fyser, was already in the Kingdom anyhow. As the coffin hit the bottom of the pit, Tim betrayed himself with the sign of the cross. Mr. Fyser observed him coolly. As an insult did it rank beside what the pigs had done?

  Mrs. Sutter now encouraged the two children forward, and Lucy, demonstrating for her brother what should be done, picked up a red clod and threw it in. Hector did it then, reaching over the hole with the dirt held between his thumb and forefinger. Farewell, chieftain and father. Fountain of kindnesses, maker of chastisements. In Mr. Fyser’s presence, the chance of an ecstatic reunion of the Rochesters at some redeemed date didn’t quite seem a starter.

  Mrs. Malcolm looked out at the children with ponderous and darkly plush reflection from beneath her lashes. She was still concerned with whatever grief had delayed Ernie and herself. No children of her own, though Ernie looked like a lusty bugger.

  Hector raised his arm and said aloud, “Heaven, heaven.” Lucy re-gathered his hand, pulling him back into the ranks of the Sutter children. Maybe to ensure there was still a place for him there. Tim himself couldn’t refrain from looking regularly at unquiet Mrs. Malcolm. Images of consoling her too readily came to mind.

  One Friday afternoon she had asked him where he had come from, and he had told her. And yourself, Mrs. Malcolm? he’d asked. Melbourne born-and-bred, she’d told him, with that robust pride which typified Melbourne people. “It’s a far more refined city than Sydney, isn’t it?” she enquired of him. “If you wanted a city to represent young Australia before the world, Melbourne would be the one, Mr. Shea, wouldn’t it? Sydney’s so rough at the edges. When you land at Darling Harbour, you take your life in your hands getting to the Hotel Australia. And a cab’s the only form of transport open to you. Even the tram conductors are rough and ready and likely to swear. And there’s far too much of the spirit of Sydney in the Macleay, isn’t there?”

  There were lots of Isn’t-its and Wouldn’t-its in Mrs. Malcolm’s charming discourse.

  “You know, I think it might be the humidity,” Tim suggested. “The closer you get to the tropics, the more irregular personal behaviour grows.”

  That was scientific fact as reported in all the papers. The Argus and Chronicle agreed on that one.

  “Yes,” she agreed. “Humidity is a great ally of barbarism.”

  “You agree with me all the way and in each bloody particular, Mr. Shea, don’t you?” Kitty later mocked. He needed to be grateful she found his conversations with Mrs. Malcolm more a cause for poking fun than the other, the jealous stuff.

  He found out a little more about Mrs. Malcolm at each visit. “It’s so pleasant to find a storekeeper who can carry a proper conversation, Mr. Shea,” she told him once, and he felt his face blaze with the compliment. And in the course of conversations, it came out that she was an only child and that her father had been an umbrella manufacturer and an alderman of Brighton Council, a municipality of the city of Melbourne. She had grown up in the shadow of a public-spirited man, and perhaps that was why she’d taken to Ernie.

  Her favourite poem, she said, was Tennyson’s grand In Memoriam.

  Ring out a slowly dying cause,

  And ancient forms of party strife:

  Ring in the nobler modes of life,

  With sweeter manners, purer laws …

  She looked down from the tenebral heights of In Memoriam at the efforts of the men Tim liked—Henry Lawson, the revolutionary of the Bulletin, and Victor Daley of both the Bulletin and the Freeman’s Journal. The greater of these being Victor.

  But today at Albert’s grave, her face bleared and all at once giving itself up to puffiness, she didn’t look like a Tennyson woman. It made you wonder, was she really well?

  The filling in began. One of the diggers was Causley, who’d had all his money invested in a cream-separating business. Everything lost when the small patented separating ma
chines every farmer could own had come in. Reduced now to restoring earth to Albert Rochester’s grave.

  By the cemetery gate Mr. Fyser bade Mrs. Sutter and the children good-bye. Constable Hanney waited by his sulky. Dear God, if Mrs. Malcolm hadn’t seen it, let him not spring that thing on her. She and Ernie had caught up with Tim now and she uttered a liquid, “Mr. Shea,” and passed on. Ernie himself stopped.

  “Well,” said Mr. Malcolm rubbing his jawline. “Some things even valour can’t attend to. I salute you though, Mr. Shea.”

  “For dear God’s sake, don’t do that,” said Tim.

  Tim couldn’t be too raw though in his methods of telling Malcolm to give away the idea of heroic rescue. Malcolm was a customer, even if he did have three months’ terms, and had normally to be spoken to gently. But this fiction of bravery had to be trampled on.

  “You might as well give Bandy a medal,” Tim said.

  Ernie began fanning himself with his hat. “Him? Sooner decorate the bloody Mahdi for killing General Gordon!”

  “Then reward neither of us.”

  “Imagine this, Tim. The opening of the bridge, Central to East. Imagine a line of men, women, even children, receiving medals and certificates for valour. Young Shaw who lifted a fallen tree from his uncle’s leg and carried him sixteen miles to rescue. Tessie Venables who rescued a grown youth from the surf at South West Rocks. Yourself. With yourself, Tim, we begin to get an array of appropriate acts of gallantry. I see you standing at the mouth of the bridge, at the mouth of a new century. Standing for our community.”

  You also see yourself, Tim might have said if he didn’t fear losing Malcolm as a customer, as commanding officer of the brave. You see your words reproduced in the Sydney Morning Herald. Mr. Malcolm, accountant, brave by association, and quoted verbatim.

  Ernie said, “I have been waiting some time for the third appropriate act to report to the main committee in Sydney. With proper respect, Tim, I can identify it when I see it. Mr. Habash tells me that you were endless in your attempts at resuscitation, even though poor Albert had become a thing of revulsion.”

  Ahead of them, in the street, Winnie Malcolm had baulked by the stirrup-step up to her sulky, as if the idea of the climb was too much to be faced. Then, shakily, she tried it. One of her less graceful ascents. If Malcolm hadn’t been a customer, he might have said, “Why don’t you be brave yourself and go and look after your wife?”

  “It is a time in the Empire’s history,” Malcolm—with something almost like desperation—confided in him, “when in each community an exemplar, a paladin, is very much looked for.” He rubbed some sweat into his upper lip. “I know you agree.”

  At least, Tim noticed, Hanney had untethered the police horse and sulky and trotted away on his sombre business.

  Tim put a restraining hand on Malcolm’s arm. That was what he had been driven to.

  “Please,” he said. “Please, Ernie. We are all being made a mockery of by that dark little jockey, Habash. Please.”

  Stepping back, Ernie looked up at the great sky.

  “Tim, what do we have in this world to go on except the accounts of witnesses? The British army itself …”

  “But they don’t listen to just one unreliable bugger of a hawker.”

  “Ah, you’re a bloody Jesuit, aren’t you, Tim? I spoke to the child too at the convent. And to the duty sister at the hospital up there.”

  “No, look! Any fool could carry a poor dead bastard to hospital. It wasn’t a rush to mercy, Ernie. He was past mercy.”

  Ernie laughed again. “I hope to Jesus you make a better speech than that when they give you the medal and make us in the Macleay famous.”

  Make Ernie famous, that meant.

  Now Mrs. Malcolm sat uncertain in the sulky, shoulder turned, considering her situation. As if Ernie could see what Tim was seeing he now remembered his wife. “Must go, Tim,” he said, making a chastened face.

  Mrs. Sutter walked up holding Hector’s hand and accompanied by Lucy. “Thank you for coming, Mr. Shea. I take it you’ll drop Lucy back at the convent.”

  “I have a business you know, Mrs. Sutter,” he said. Then for Lucy’s sake repented. It did not cause even a shadow on Lucy’s sharp little face. But for fatal tact he’d say, share the cost of her schooling, you miserable old jade! Or at least buy all your stores from me.

  “I have the care of five children,” she said. “I know you understand.”

  Her children by the late Mr. Sutter were playing loudly amongst the graves, clutching at broken columns, grazing their fingers in the apertures of Celtic crosses.

  “I suppose I must understand.” He cupped a hand around Lucy’s head. “My wife and I … I ought to tell you … are very fond of Lucy. She plays well with our children and gives us no problem.”

  “I’m very pleased.”

  Yet she seemed barely tolerant as Lucy and Hector made their farewells. Dawn milkings and hardships had consumed the childhoods of Albert’s boy and girl. They were like an aged sister caressing an aged brother.

  In his pocket he had a chocolate for Lucy, especially for the post-burial, to distract her from the knowledge of Mrs. Sutter’s disregard of her, and of his own neglect as well. The heat had softened it in its silver wrapping.

  He gave it to her as they sat on the board of the dray. “Keep it till the cool of evening, Lucy,” he told her. “It will get more solid then.”

  She said, “We have Benediction tonight.”

  “But you as a Protestant don’t need to go.”

  “I like it. Sometimes I see papa’s face there.”

  In the great gilt orb of the monstrance the priest lifted.

  Tim had some customers across the river, in East. People who’d fallen out with the storekeeper Corbett there, an argumentative Orangeman and high pricer. A number took the trouble to come across to Central in the punt, to buy from T. Shea—General Store. Or children would come over on Mondays or Tuesdays with their mothers’ requirements written on notes in their hands, spend a while playing with Johnny and Annie, tending to end up messing about in the river with Johnny, while Annie sat barefoot at the very edge, plying the rich silt with her fingers. He hoped Johnny wouldn’t put his customers’ children, who were often blackguards themselves, in any harm.

  “How’s old Corbett?” he would ask of the customers in East, and a number would say, “I hope the old bastard dies!”

  Naturally, to make the deliveries, Tim needed to coax Pee Dee onto the punt. If there were other conveyances and horses getting off, Pee Dee would often shy sideways, wilfully feigning fright. Pee Dee really didn’t like it when there were cattle aboard, or when pigs harried him, running between his legs. One day he was going to shy right over the embankment and cover the river banks in sugar, flour, baking soda, oatmeal, tapioca, tea and broken biscuit.

  People disembarking from East sometimes cried, “Why don’t you get rid of the old nag, Tim?” It was in a sense a sane question. “Pee Dee’s my bloody horse,” he answered. Part of T. Shea’s terms of trade. Sometimes louts cried that sentence back at him as he and Pee Dee clopped past making the deliveries.

  Recently Tim had taken to avoiding embarrassment by waiting with Pee Dee in the butter factory lane, not approaching the ramp to the punt until all the traffic from East had dispersed itself. Then led him down onto the punt apron, hoping he wouldn’t make a display. And so with the stutter of the steam engine, out into the current. No great sea journey, but in Tim’s mind the crossing of water always significant.

  Out there today Daley still with him. No apparent ghosts out here on the bright river, but Daley had the lines for the season of Albert’s tragedy:

  O dead men, long-outthrust

  From light and life and song—

  O kinsmen in the dust …

  The sunk pylons for the new Macleay bridge, which would make the punt unnecessary by the start of winter, rose from the green river like columns from a sunk civilisation.

  Some time lat
er that day, he was delivering in Rudder Street, East Kempsey, when he saw a covered hawker’s wagon swaying up the road out of the Dock Flat swamp. One of the Habashes. He reined Pee Dee in to the side and got down from the dray. He could see bloody Bandy at the reins of his green wagon all right. Coming back to town after palavering the poor women of Pola Creek.

  A bracing anger rose in Tim at the sight of that failed Punjabi jockey. He walked out and waited in the middle of the road. He raised his arms and couldn’t help calling out, “Get round me if you can, you little ruffian!”

  Bandy Habash waved joyously at this prospect of reunion. He drew up, and Tim walked to the side of the green wagon with its tin canopy and stared up at him.

  “I wanted to know … What in the bloody hell are you doing telling these lies about me?”

  Bandy put on a wonderful, melodramatic frown.

  “This stuff about Albert is all rubbish and flummery, and it makes me ashamed. What in God’s name were you doing going to Ernie bloody Malcolm?”

  “Mr. Shea, after our adventure I was simply full of admiration …”

  “What bloody for? Might as well admire a man for making the tea or emptying a jerry. You’ve made a bloody fool of me!”

  Tim kicked one of the wheels of the hawker’s wagon.

  “My dear old chap, may I get down and talk to you?”

  “What do you bloody well think? I’m looking for an explanation.”

  Bandy worked himself trimly out of his seat and fell gracefully to the road. Wholly and neatly in front of Tim.

  “I watched you in your movements, Mr. Shea. In all respects I thought they were the movements of a hero.”

  “I was not anything in my movements. I hung back. You were the person who fixed his horse!”

  “I was well-educated in the English language, Mr. Shea. I have read Scott, Dickens and Thackeray, in all of whom such sentiments as I expressed to Mr. Malcolm are common.”