A River Town

by Thomas Keneally

  “But I ask you! Why land me, a poor bloody grocer, with this stuff?”

  Bandy was abashed. Beyond the theatrical manners, a true bewilderment could be seen. He lowered his head and shook it.

  “I was alarmed by what I saw on approaching the place of the accident, Mr. Shea. I would have found it hard to approach such horrifying affairs. Yet I witnessed the heroism of your movements, sir, the decisiveness you showed. This alone made it possible for me to draw near.”

  “Bugger it! You were the one who did the real work.”

  “Oh, Mr. Tim, my dear chap. We both behaved well to be honest, though I yield first place to you. But do you think Mr. Malcolm would want to write to the Royal Humane Society about a Punjabi hawker? About the courage of a Muslim? To be the first amongst the brave in the Valley of the Macleay? The world would not be interested in my bravery. They want true British grit.”

  “Well, Mr. Bandy, I’m an Irishman.”

  “Same thing in my book. They are willing to see British grit in your face, you see. We were brave together, Mr. Shea, in the face of the tragedy. But my part could not be pushed forward, so I was more than happy to push forward your part. I know about these things. I don’t complain. But I do know that if you are honoured as you deserve, I am partially honoured too. In your shadow, as they say, old chap.”

  Tim could do little more at first than wave his head from side to side. “What sort of plan is this? What bloody sort? A prank? Poking mullock at Ernie and the Turf Club? And me as the bait!”

  “No, no, no, no! I am above all an admirer of yours, Mr. Shea, and wish your family well. When I had heard of you from Mrs. Burke at Pee Dee, your sister by marriage, for some reason I thought, I want that good man as a friend in town. And now, as an honoured friend.”

  Now that it was all explained Tim in fact felt quite awed by the scale of Bandy’s intentions. His relentless and always denied desire to race his grey at the Warwick Course. So he raced his grey up and down empty streets, a sort of audition for greater things. Showing the indifferent vicinity how worthy his grey was, while the Turf Club committee picnicked on Terara.

  Tim had a lurking and undeclared sympathy for such deranged schemes. This one so lunatic, and Bandy deserved to be thumped for it. But it was its scope that slowed you down. Made you understand: this is a really serious little bugger!

  Tim said, “I came here to be an ordinary citizen. I’ve seen heroes and don’t like them.”

  His Uncle Johnny of Glenlara transported to Western Australia more than thirty years back for being a Fenian organiser in Cork. Did no one good. Made his mother prematurely aged so that the young Tim had to be silent in her presence.

  “I came here to be an ordinary citizen,” Tim repeated. “This is all a vanity on Ernie Malcolm’s part.”

  Bandy murmured, “Mr. Shea, you cannot expect me, can you, to go to Mr. Malcolm now and tell him I was mistaken. I was not mistaken. You deserve to be considered a true man. Again, Mrs. Burke tells me you are a giver of alms and feed half the valley. I as your friend would like you to be publicly acclaimed.”

  Since all this smelt of excess, Tim—in protest and not without fear—took hold of the lapel of Bandy’s coat.

  “Listen, you’re using the wrong bloody methods, my dear Indian friend. I am not here to be the sort of feller that suits you. I have a hard time enough being the sort of feller that suits me.”

  “But I know, Mr. Shea, that what I’ve done doesn’t displease your charming wife.”

  “What do you know about Kitty?”

  “I came to the store two nights past. I saw Mrs. Shea. She said to me that it was grand for you to be praised like this, and thanked me for bringing it to the notice of the public. Look for wisdom to the women. For they know all our faces, don’t they? The face of the hero. The face of the coward as well. The face of the brute and the face of the beloved.”

  So how to work up a consuming rage when even now, with Bandy intruding on the question of Kitty, he had to strain to achieve it. What he really felt was fear. Fear of being dragged down and marred by this little hawker’s efforts to exalt him.

  Tim felt the burden of this defeat. No one could be dissuaded from the fable of brave Shea. And the man so artful. He had the approaches to this lie of his ratified by all parties except Tim, and covered from every angle. Habash couldn’t be defeated by an average good talking-to and a flick in the ear.

  “Don’t discount that I can take you to court,” Tim impotently told the hawker. “I can talk to the solicitor Sheridan about this, and I bloody will. I’ll leave it at that for now. We don’t have anything more to say from this point.”

  But he felt he’d fallen into the overstating trap, and his summing-up had already erred by being too long. He turned away sharply and walked back to Pee Dee, deliberately using an urgent gait that suggested he might punch the horse. He heard Bandy murmur something. It sounded like, “I am already part of your family.” Yet it could just be Mohammedan incantations or curses. He decided to ignore it, but within five yards of Pee Dee he adopted a less menacing stance—for Pee Dee might have taken the excuse to rear in the traces if he hadn’t softened his approach—and waited there by his dray, his back to the hawker, his face to the river, until Bandy drew level and passed him. He watched the faded green and yellow paint on the pressed-tin walls of Bandy’s wagon.

  S. B. HABASH AND SONS—MATERIALS AND REMEDIES

  Licensed Hawkers

  People on the lonely farms, with little else to swear by, swearing by the Habash herbal remedies. As always, people preferred to be poisoned in hope than to live sanely and know the strict limits of the world.

  “Remember,” Tim cried after him, but it sounded a fairly limp command.

  Five

  THOUGH IT HAD no railway, the Macleay Valley was full of railway sleeper cutters. The railways were far away, had reached the Hunter River a hundred and fifty miles south, but not further. The country between the Hunter and the Macleay was so mountainous, so full of terrifying grades, that only those who profoundly feared the sea or were profoundly attracted to steam engines travelled down there by a succession of coaches to the distant steel tracks on the Hunter.

  So for the moment it was a matter of ironic reflection that the right trees for railway sleepers grew here. Burrawong frequently went to Sydney loaded with them, as with maize and pigs. People who got visionary would look out south across the great, green face of the Macleay and say, “The railway will one day arrive and let me tell you it’ll make this bloody place.” One of the sleeper cutters was a Kerry man called Curran, who came in at intervals to buy plug tobacco.

  “Jesus, Tim!” he’d say, raving away. “They’re catching it now! They’re catching more than we ever threw their way. Those Boer boys are throwing more the way of the bloody English than they ever saw before this, on any battlefield. It’s one thing to fight and beat niggers. Another to face up to white men with decent rifles.”

  It was a glorious thing to see fellers like Curran work with their string and pencil and adze, turning a mere log or branch into an exactly shaped oblong, fit and beautiful enough to hold up the rails on which the enormity of locomotive engines progressed. A man like Curran was all grace at work. Clean cuts, and great florid, generous motions.

  “Modder River, eh? Majersfontein! The punishment they’ve been looking for all this century they’re getting now, the bloody Saxons!”

  “A lot of Scotties though,” Tim reminded him. “A lot of Paddies too!”

  “I say more fool them,” Curran cried, his eyes alight.

  “Lads looking for a wage, you know,” said Tim. “A fellow could imagine himself in the ranks if it weren’t for emigration.”

  Tim also imagined Curran, in his shack on the mudflats, haranguing his wife and her brood. A primitive Wolfe Tone of the bush. Looking in the Argus and the Chronicle, in the Freeman’s Journal, for clues to the Empire’s death.

  Curran’s propositions of vengeance had a certain da
rk appeal to Tim. But the old trouble was—as people of any mental discrimination at all knew—that the price was always paid by the wrong people. Not one course was deducted from the table of the rulers. They moaned and bleated, but their wine was still in its bottle, and their gloved servants still brought the plate. Curran, full of native wit, kept himself determinedly innocent enough to believe in the fairy story of thorough vengeance.

  With an air of gloating, Curran went off with his tobacco. He received no regular deliveries of supplies from Tim. The Offhand also received no regular deliveries of groceries, and bought things as he needed them. He ate only occasionally and when he remembered to, breakfast at Mottee’s Greek cafe, dinners at the Commercial. Soap for his toilet and tea for his painful mornings, however, he got at T. Shea.

  Breathlessness could overcome the Offhand and he might need to hitch his lean thigh onto a stool which had come from Swallow and Ariel, Biscuit Makers, with the first large order Tim had made eight years ago.

  While in this posture one day he said, “This meeting to form our battalion the Empire so badly needs.”

  “Yes, I read about it.”

  “General Roberts will say, Who is that battalion we gallantly slaughtered in the past ten minutes? And his aides will say, They’re the Macleay Mounted Farters, milord. And General Roberts will say, If only we had more of that calibre! Where in the name of God did you say they’re from?”

  Tim laughed, relishing the Offhand nearly as fully in the flesh as in print.

  “That’s a fable if you like,” said Tim. “That’s M. M. Chance’s fable.”

  “Absolutely right,” groaned the Offhand.

  The consumption he’d suffered as a young man and theological student still had at least a second mortgage on his flesh.

  “This meeting of Baylor’s and M. M. Chance’s then. In the flatulent minds of some, anti-war and pro-Boer are the same thing of course. So I wonder might it not be politic for you to attend that meeting? You need donate nothing to the Patriotic Fund, but you could treat the question with solemnity. No one would resent your saying nothing—they all have enough inflated concepts of their own to fill up a good evening.”

  Tim didn’t like the idea. Having been forced into heroic mould against his wishes, he was now advised by the Offhand it was good business to show himself off in the guise of a devout Briton.

  “And I suppose to end the evening I would have to listen to Dr. Erson singing ‘Soldiers of the Queen.’ ” That seemed the final item he would not be able to bear. Dr. Erson’s loyal tenor.

  “Not too big a price, Tim. Yes, ‘Soldiers of the Queen’ with rich Scottish vigour. But you will also hear me speak. The benefits, you see!”

  Some of Curran’s hot, heedless anger sizzled in him.

  “I can’t be bullied by Baylor or Chance into standing up for some belief I don’t have. As far as I’m concerned, the Boers are entitled to manage their own affairs in Transvaal without intrusion. And there are men in the House of Commons itself who agree with me, especially the Liberals. Imagine if the French landed here now and muscled into New South Wales. There’d be Froggy versions of M. M. Chance back in country towns in France approving of it all and making their bloody loyal lists. I won’t waste an evening on this, Offhand. They can go to buggery!”

  The Offhand looked away and up at the rafters of the shop. He seemed to be scared out of his irony.

  “Well, of course, the depth of your feeling … and a pungent argument you put forward … one which accords with my own. I don’t ask you to act against your principles. I ask you to trip them up in theirs. They are fair enough democratic men in most matters, but in this area of jingoism … well, they seem to believe all the Monarch thinks of is them, here, on the banks of the Macleay. Never mind. You’ll read about the whole pompous affair in the Chronicle. Dealt with according to the lesser Muse of whimsy, the only Muse to give yours truly the time of any day.”

  The Offhand grinned, nearly wistful, and got down from his stool, gathering himself for a return to his newspaper. Whereas Tim had the eternal deliveries to do, which were the office of the grocer. The counterpart of milking the cows.

  As he crested the top of River Street in West, Constable Hanney was blurred by heat haze. He came from the direction of the upriver settlements, and in the afternoon humidity he and his horse made no show of liveliness.

  The dead hour of the afternoon, quarter to three, and every westward blind in River Street drawn against a sun still evilly high above lavender-coloured mountains to the west. Women who came to the back doors to take Tim’s orders, made up to their request, looked stewed and wiped their upper lips with handkerchiefs and asked Tim when it would end, this calm, deadly heat.

  Now, at the sight of Hanney, it seemed to Tim that Missy was instantly back with him, standing sideways at Mrs. Catton’s front fence. Her features were more sharply defined in apparition than were Kitty’s and Winnie Malcolm’s in memory.

  “Quiet for Jesus’s sake!” said Tim. He made himself appear busy by moving butterboxes around in the back of the dray.

  When Hanney drew nearer and clearer, out of the haze, Tim saw that his navy collar was undone. He wore an old pair of white breeches tucked into his boots, and a white pith helmet on his head. The breeches had streaks of reddish dust on them. Work at the washing tub for Mrs. Hanney. He rode a big-bellied police mount, and that implied he had been to the remoter parts, up the Armidale Road, where the hard mountain terraces of the track to New England did lots of damage to carriage work.

  Tim finished with the cart and now waited as he had recently waited for Bandy, though this time waving one arm slowly and without the tension of threat. Hanney hardly had to rein in to make the police horse stop.

  “Comara, that’s where,” said Hanney out of stubbled jaw and in answer to the question Tim didn’t need to ask. “I’ve been on patrol all the way to bloody Comara.”

  “Holy God,” said Tim. Comara more than fifty rough miles up the Macleay. Tim looked at the nearer of the policeman’s big saddlebags. Was she there, enduring her hard journey? And still unnamed?

  Hanney said, “Christ, I’m fed up, Tim!” His big rectangular face was pink, and there was a coating of sweat or prickly heat under his chin, and down the V of his unbuttoned shirt. Poor big lump.

  Tim said, “You’d think there aren’t many that could possibly know her at a place like Comara.”

  “You’d be surprised. Some of the pastoralists’ sons … never fully buttoned up! Some of the pastoralists for that matter … It was thought, too, that maybe she came down the road from Armidale by coach. If someone said, Yes, we saw her stop here then I could send her to Armidale. The blokes up there could have the pleasure …”

  He scratched his under-chin and looked so piteous.

  “Are you able to drink a beer while in the Queen’s uniform?” asked Tim on a mad impulse. Once he’d uttered the idea, he remembered how Hanney had been unsteady from brandy on the holiday when Bert Rochester died.

  “No bugger would mind after the journey I’ve had. I drank my last beer in Willawarrin last night. Dismal little town.”

  “I’m at the end of deliveries. I could shout you.”

  “You’re a bloody white man, Shea. Make it fast as you can.”

  Yet they were a mile from the nearest pub.

  “My shout then,” said Tim.

  “Thank you, son!”

  It was strange though to be exercising the muscles of male joviality. Promising to shout. There was a small social cost in being seen drinking with a policeman. Cattle theft was a regular enterprise of the frequenters of some Kempsey pubs, and they did not like policemen in the bar. But he would not be back there to hear the regulars cry, “Drinking with a trap, Tim?”

  Tim went to his cart and turned Pee Dee and it about in River Street’s torpid dust. The tired policeman travelled at his side down the hill. Hope no bugger thinks I’ve been arrested! But the ill-shaven policeman, with his big rectangular face i
n shadow and hung at an angle which had nothing to do with authority, looked himself under arrest.

  The constable said, “I’ve even been to the blacks’ camps at Greenhill and Burnt Bridge. When I took out the flask, the black gins screamed pretty awful and threw up handfuls of dust in the air. An off-chance, of course, them knowing her. But I’ve always found them very honest in that regard. They don’t like to lie about the dead, the dusky brethren.”

  “I reckon they know the dead have too much bloody power,” said Tim.

  “Jesus! Especially in the form I have to present things.”

  The way he shook his head, he looked more defeated than a officer of public order ever should. He showed Missy to black women. Did he show her to any white ones? Kitty hadn’t seen her, Tim was pretty sure.

  There was a bakery at the bottom of River Street, and they rode through the pool of fragrance it made as the road turned, copying the bend in the river. Now they were in aptly named Elbow Street, the long low verandah of Kelty’s Hotel could be seen beyond Bryant’s store. It had a reputation as a rough house but no noise escaped today from beneath its low eaves. Everything in sight spoke of eternal life and fixity. Tim was in a mood to like the idea of the world having stopped under the day’s fierce hand. The sun never to go down. The river, set like a pudding in its banks, never to rise. The bread always fragrant. The award for false bravery never given. But then … Missy never named or delivered!

  Some cream and butter haulage carts and a scatter of horses were tethered in the street, very still as if to prove the day’s point. Tim let the dismounted Constable Hanney go down the steps to Kelty’s low-slung verandah and so pass into the dark, fuggy warmth of Kelty’s public bar. As the policeman walked he rolled his spine to get the saddle soreness out. A few of the men in the public bar looked up at the strange company that had entered. Tim heard one of them murmur, “Come in, why don’t you bloody well?” Another muttered, “Commercial, bugger it!”

  The Commercial in Central was better suited for talk between a constable and a grocer.