A River Town

by Thomas Keneally

  At the bar with the travel-dazed constable, Tim ordered two schooners which pale Mrs. Kelty poured, and he and Hanney took them to a table rather than stand at the bar. In one draft, Hanney drank half the schooner down.

  “Oh, that’s fine,” he said at the end of the process, his eyes misting with the delight.

  In the meantime, Tim found he’d rashly uttered aloud what was meant to be a private surmise. “You haven’t shown the girl to my wife, have you?”

  Tim had never asked Kitty straight out. He would have been ashamed to give her a hint of the grasp Missy had on him.

  “I don’t show it to respectable women,” said Hanney. “They would not have had contact with her after all. Except the Mulroney woman.”

  “But women may have spoken with her.”

  Hanney laughed, and wiped his long, doggy face. “Are you a bush lawyer or something, Tim? Let me tell you, whoever I’m looking for as witness is a fellow with a standing prick and no conscience.”

  “You show it to the black gins though.”

  “Well, it’s a good warning for them.”

  Holy hell. Did the Police Commissioner in Sydney know the random and illogical way Hanney was carrying out his orders? Should he be told?

  The policeman drank down the rest of his pot. Tim had barely sipped of the sour, heavy brew from kegs shipped up aboard Burrawong. He liked rum better than ale anyhow.

  “I’m getting another,” said Hanney. “You?”

  Tim said no, he would hold what he had for a while. He noticed that when Mrs. Kelty refilled Hanney’s pot, there was no exchange of cash. Hanney did not expect to pay; Mrs. Kelty to receive payment. His transaction however, or lack of transaction, changed him. He came back with a strange, frank gleam on his face, and sat down. Tim no longer felt as safe with him. What sort of fellow, forced to travel to Comara in awesome heat, missed out on trying to solve his puzzle by showing Missy’s features to women?

  Hanney drank again and then stared at Tim from beneath a lowered brow.

  “Look, you’re very interested in this, aren’t you? Strikes me you’ve got a load of interest in this Missy. I have to wonder. Why do you keep quizzing me? A man no sooner back from Comara …”

  “I have a normal desire to see the poor child finished with.”

  “A normal desire, eh?”

  Tim felt now an unwelcome panic in his blood. How fast a uniform would turn on a person! How it divided man from man.

  Deciding not to take a step back, Tim said, “Bugger it, constable. I claim to have no more pity than other fellers. But the girl’s face struck me very hard.”

  “Enough to buy a constable a bloody ale,” commented Hanney pretty much to himself. “I’ve never known anyone to take so much interest. Upriver, you show Missy and they hold their heads on the side and say no, and that’s the end, she’s forgotten, the little slut. But not you, Tim. It’s the big interest of your bloody life.”

  By now the new tack had enlivened Hanney. Tim wondered how he’d not noticed before how large the man’s hands were. Shall I be able to break such a grasp?

  “You have something to tell me, Paddy?”

  “My name’s not bloody Paddy. I was Tim when I bought you a drink.”

  The constable raised his chin and drained his glass the second time. He had a good, defiant swallow. He put the nearly finished schooner down.

  “And you can buy me a drink a second time, Tim.”

  Tim said, “But then I’m going to leave. Back to the store. My wife …”

  “Do you think I am a leper?”

  “Not on the strength of a few jars. But you’ve already started to rave.”

  Men at the bar were frankly turning around now to sneer at the argument between the policeman with his poor capacity for liquor and the grocer from Central.

  “If I took you in for some long questioning on the matter … do you think that would do your business any good?”

  “You know it wouldn’t.”

  “Well, I won’t yet anyhow. I’m too buggered.”

  A blowfly distracted Hanney by swimming noisily in a little pond of ale on the table. Hanney’s gaze got stuck on that area of standing liquor, and the insect’s agitated desire to stupefy and drown itself there.

  “You know, you’re a tall feller to be married to such a short woman,” he said, still watching the fly. “I’d say you’ve probably got other women. Taller girls. Missy was taller.”

  “As a matter of fact, I don’t have any interest in other women.”

  Almost true. Mrs. Malcolm an exception. An Australian incarnation of Tennyson’s heavenly girls.

  He said, “She has a lovely face;

  God in his mercy give her grace,

  The Lady of Shallot.”

  “Get me that beer though,” said Hanney. He did not seem capable now of raising his eyes from the small lake of spilled beer and the fly. Tim took both pots up to the bar. He put down a two shilling piece in front of Mrs. Kelty and said nothing.

  “Mad bastard,” she said without moving her lips.

  “Me or the copper?” muttered Tim. No one could hear that. “Make mine a smaller one.”

  She nodded minutely, her stewed-looking brow. She was used to muttered arrangements. Kelty himself lay in the cool cellar most of the day, asleep amongst all the fermentation. Where had liquor got its reputation from, its name for joviality? Tim felt a genuine but enlarged dread taking the beer back to big Hanney, who had managed now to loll back and take thought about the ceiling. His white breeches and black boots seemed to take up a lot of space between the few tables.

  “Truth is I’m like you, you hapless bastard,” Hanney said. He sat forward, applied himself and drank some more, but his mouth was sour when it rose again from the rim of the glass. He drank far too fast, but Tim wasn’t going to tell him that.

  He covered his eyes with both great hands which could just as easily have taken hold of Tim and forced him into custody. Tim could hear him groaning from behind the fingers. It was a short little session of gasps, and it ended soon.

  “Aaah,” said the constable, clearing his hands away from his face now. “No decent sleep, that’s the problem.”

  In fact he stretched his arms straight across the table and laid his head on them and got ready to sleep.

  “Dear God,” said Tim. “We must get you home.”

  “Home’s not home,” Hanney murmured.

  This was said not necessarily for Tim’s instruction.

  The drinkers at the bar, and Mrs. Kelty herself, laughed to see the grocer trying to help the constable to his feet.

  “Put the bastard in charge, Tim,” one of the men called. “Charge him with all the bloody heifers gone missing!”

  It was a relief to push Hanney outside, let down the tailboard of the cart, sit the constable on the tray, jump up yourself, haul him along so that he lay flat. Bugger, his hat was still inside. Tim jumped down and walked in again and took it from the table, and that made the drinkers double up with hilarity. Tim and the hat, Victoria’s laughed-at crown on the front of it.

  “Your hat,” said Tim outside again, putting it in beside prone Constable Hanney.

  Then tether the weary police horse to the tailboard. No mockery echoed out here, in this silent, stolid air.

  Now they started off for Hanney’s house in Cochrane Street. Slow, slow. No quick pace likely. They waded through swamps of light towards Central but turned left then. And there in Kemp Street, Habash’s wagon parked. Habash labouring out of a house carrying three bolts of linen he’d taken in there for some wife’s consideration. Habash stood still with his eyes lit.

  “Mr. Shea,” he called tentatively.

  Tim shook the reins. Pee Dee increased his pace a little. Gracious of the bugger!

  Habash of course saw the prone constable in the back.

  “But what are you doing, Mr. Shea?”

  “Taking Constable Hanney home. He grew sick upriver.”

  “Ever the man of mer
cy, old chap,” Habash yelled after him. “You see. Ever the man!”

  “Go to buggery!” Tim called.

  They rounded the corner of Cochrane and he pulled up outside the right house. A dreary little weatherboard place, with a low-slung verandah, the designated house for New South Wales constables of police.

  Missy’s unreliable constable. Missy’s berserk officer of peace. Who showed her to some, protected her from others. Ease him down and prop him up and take the side gate. Then there could be at the front door no problem or scene observable from the street. Let it be backyard drama, if there had to be a drama. Backyard smells—shit and creosote from the jakes, a sourness from the refuse pile, a fragrance of split wood from the pyramidal woodheap.

  Tim didn’t have to knock. Large Mrs. Hanney appeared at the door and advanced down the steps. She had delicate shoulders, spacious hips, and wore the broiled complexion which suited the season and which all citizens were wearing. Macleay fashions.

  “Oh God!” she said. “Did you give him drink?”

  Laden with the constable’s enormous weight, Tim could barely get an answer together before she said, “Every damned fool knows he can’t take drink. Hell and damnation, who are you? You’re that grocer, aren’t you?”

  “I met your husband on the edge of town. Coming back from Comara. Pretty down, missus. Pretty thirsty.”

  “Everyone knows it!” she accused Tim again.

  “Missus, I didn’t know. It’s not written up in Chambers’ Encyclopedia.”

  She had picked up a broom from inside the door. It was possible she intended an attack.

  “No, but it’s written on his forehead, isn’t it? You can all bloody tell. He’s a butt. Sergeant Fry sends him around with a head in a bottle. Damned great laugh! And you get him drunk pretty cheaply and drop him back so I have to tidy up his misery.”

  “Madame, I’m not in a plot with anyone. I don’t know Sergeant Fry. Could I lay your husband down somewhere?”

  Mrs. Hanney squeezed her eyes shut and raised her face, complaining to the eaves.

  “I have no life. I have no damned life. All right. Bring him in.”

  But at least she put the broom down. It proved nearly impossible to get big Hanney up the steps. Mrs. Hanney had to help in the end. Struggling with the bulky policeman, Tim wondered would either of them have it in for him over this. Want his head. Forevermore.

  Six

  ON SUNDAYS when Tim had her home for dinner, Lucy Rochester ate it with the rest of them in the silence Tim required. The same silence which had been ordained by his father at table in Glenlara, a townland of Newmarket, County Cork, in Munster of the kings and the Kingdom of Ireland. A fellow of standards. Dear Jerry Shea.

  But it seemed that behind the august silence of Sunday dinner, Lucy kept an extra, secretive silence of her own. He would have liked her to say she liked life in boarding school, or even to weep and beg him to get her out. She seemed cautious to give him neither one version nor the other.

  Comfort could be taken from observing little Annie, who examined gristle in her fingers exactly like a scientist making up a picture in his head of a whole beast out of one of the fragments. Silence suited Annie’s style. Early in courtship he’d told Kitty he preferred silent tables, their ceremony. That was fine by her though it hadn’t been the way things were done at Red Kenna’s. She’d travelled fourteen thousand miles on the White Star Line from Red’s disordered board to the Shea Sunday table in the Macleay. Jeremiah Shea’s little triumph at the limits of the Empire was the silence maintained here in the shop residence.

  A penny chocolate for all hands at the end of the meal. By these normal exercises he kept at length an idea which plagued him by night: that he should perhaps for Missy’s sake press sergeants and commissioners to put her into the hands of someone of greater strength of spirit than Constable Hanney.

  He greased the axle on Sunday afternoons, a soothing Sabbath task. Meanwhile the river drew the children. He kept an eye on them. They would be no more than poor bloody little leaves on the surface of its powerful charm. One time, looking up, he saw Lucy and Annie and Johnny all together in a rowing boat. How had the little buggers managed that? A silent plan carried out between them. Lucy on one oar, Johnny on the other, an uneven match. Tim heard Annie begin shrilling with fright or pleasure, you couldn’t tell which. Saw the boat swirling in a lazy current, downriver towards the great black pylons of the still largely imaginary, unbuilt bridge.

  “Bring that bloody thing back in here!” Tim yelled.

  The girls would float in their pinafores. Flapping their hands. But it would be Lucy who would come to shore, and Annie’s sedate spirit that would be likely to sink.

  Kitty was lax about the river, philosophic, leaving the children to luck. To the Angel of God. My guardian dear, to whom God’s care commits me here, ever this day be up to my side to light and guard, to rule and guide. Amen. A more regular kick in the ass for Johnny was certainly called for, yet his puzzled, animal watchfulness turned away wrath.

  The children got the oars working together and brought the boat back to the river bank. Lucy piggy-backing Annie ashore.

  And after Lucy had been taken back to the care of the Mercy nuns, Annie says, when she’s in her night dress and he is about to read to her from her Funny Picture Book, “Lucy pulls the bung out from the boat.”

  “What?”

  “Lucy lets the water in the boat. That’s why I screamed Papa!”

  “Well, don’t you go into the boat with her.”

  He would discuss this with Kitty except she would take it as a final reason to limit Lucy to the boarding school and not let her into the house. Bung-pulling would go to warrant the lack of room for the orphan in the shop residence. Tim in the storeroom later in the week when the postmaster’s son turned up on a bicycle and rang the bell on the counter. Tim came out from making up the orders, from that lovely odour of kerosene and shortbread, candles and tea-leaves, and saw the peculiar envelope in the boy’s hand.

  “Is that a telegram there?” asked Tim. It evoked the first one he’d ever encountered, the one which said REGRET NOT ARRIVING BY SS PERSIC IN VIEW MARRIAGE OF SISTER STOP TRAVELLING NEXT MONTH BY SS RUNIC.

  “For Mrs. Kitty Shea,” said the boy.

  Characteristic: Kitty a casual client of the wonders of the age.

  “Would you sign my book?”

  Tim did. He found Kitty at the dining room table drinking tea with one hand and feeling her back with the other. Such a squat frame to take the full weight of maternity, to carry a reasonably tall fellow’s children.

  It struck him as he handed it over: Could it be something dismal about Red Kenna or her mother? But somehow he could not envisage even one of those wild children rushing into Doneraile to a telegraph office, instead of writing a more kindly letter. Rowdy at table, yes, yet they liked to talk and explain at length. So they would have thought of sea mail as the proper organ for sad, detailed news. He hoped he could swear to that.

  “Have you ever received a telegram before?” he asked as cheerily as he could. “You’ve got one today, Mrs. Kitty Shea.”

  She was eager at once. “Wouldn’t it astound you?” she murmured.

  When she had it in her hands and had opened and begun to read it, she broke out in laughter. Her laugh delightful to him; unless directed to someone like Bandy Habash, or joined in with the relentless chorus of her loud family.

  “Isn’t this Mamie to the nearest square inch? It’s from a ship at sea. Who’d think of sending a cable from a ship at sea? She must have been drinking.”

  Kitty stood up to read it. “ARRIVE MELBOURNE TUESDAY 10TH—Holy God, that’s just tomorrow! STAYING WITH MAGS PHELAN MIGRANT WOMENS HOSTEL ONE WEEK EMBARK SS IRIS TO SYDNEY ON TUESDAY 18 EXCITED SISTERLY LOVE—MAMIE.”

  When she’d finished reading, Kitty’s breath escaped her. “Oh huh!” She sat down at the table, and began to laugh again. “Of all the people you’d pick as likely to send cables from a s
hip at sea!”

  He smiled too, but was thinking with a new clarity, my God another one of them. One more robust woman to feed. As long as the two Kenna boys didn’t decide to come. Powerful, little mottled men with gappy smiles. Devout drinkers like their father. Although the bush, the reaches of Euroka and Toorooka, would in the end absorb their rowdiness.

  He heard Kitty still laughing. “You’ve got to watch that Mamie. Go through you for a short cut!”

  The fact was Mamie already ashore and laughing in Melbourne. The Kenna girls bracketing the great east coast of the continent of Australia with their hectic laughter. It was to be hoped she didn’t laugh too much with some unreliable fellow.

  Tim himself had never seen Mrs. Malcolm’s great gold city of Melbourne, except from a distance. He’d had to stay aboard his ship with influenza. Had walked the low foreshores of Fremantle, the ones that made you wonder what you’d let yourself in for. But not Melbourne. Melbourne had this august, distant aura in his mind.

  He’d landed in Sydney still fevered and hoped for clerk’s work, but the clerks were out of work here too. So it was the truth: hard times all over the globe. He’d been a little surprised at that. He hadn’t got out of the hard times latitudes. At the Migrant Settlement Office, they were advertising for carters for the Macleay.

  HAULIERS REQUIRED, MACLEAY VALLEY HAULAGE, KEMPSEY, NEW SOUTH WALES.

  Prime Wages in a Most Promising Locality.

  Sydney seemed a close, warm, seedy city of rough and casual manners—out of key with his normal way of doing business. But the tone … something in the tone of the place suited him. He would have stayed if the job had been there.

  He remembered liking the huge noisy pubs where you could be quiet and unknown, and make a shy friendship with another newcomer and share crumbs of information you had picked up from this landfall.

  These days Molly Kenna, the first arriving sister, reverted to form only in Kitty’s company. For example, Tim could hear Kenna laughter surging from the residence as he arrived at the storefront one afternoon after deliveries. He left Pee Dee tethered outside, still in the traces, meditating in his chaff bag, and came in through the store. It was women’s laughter he could hear. Kitty’s ringing in the midst of it.