A River Town

by Thomas Keneally

Terara shuddered and set itself against the current, gentle though it was today. The old tub eked its way around the new curve the river had taken in ’92, when it had shown them all its easy, unanswerable force.

  Tim took off his coat and let the expansive surroundings influence him.

  Rich pastures on the western side. Euroka, where dairy farmers lived, rich and poor, with some of them taking occasional recourse to cattle-duffing. They thought they were remote from police scrutiny, those people, since the river had chosen to set a barrier between them and the law. Lavender mountains ran forever to the north behind those emerald mudflats.

  Aboard, young men were earnestly drinking now. Tim hoped they were the Singles batsmen blurring their sight. “I can hit drunk, balls other fellers can’t hit sober!” Marriage would educate them on what their limits were.

  “The willows,” said Kitty, pointing to the shoreline from her chair. “They are so lovely. No wonder the Chinamen put them on their plates.”

  Both to port and starboard river mullet leapt. “Fish leppin’ out of the rivers at you there,” an old man had told Tim before emigration. Old fool had never seen Australia, but had been right by either accident or vision. If his own father could see this—the spacious sky, the violet mountains, the potent river enriched with fertile silt—he’d be reconciled to the loss of children. Raucous little Red Kenna would be pleased to yield up three daughters to such a splendid place.

  The great hill of West Kempsey bore up. It looked so wooded that an uninformed traveller wouldn’t know there were houses and graves, a hospital and Greenhill blackfellers’ camp up there.

  “D’you know, we could be explorers,” said Kitty.

  He reached his hand to her shoulder. “You would be the first child-carrying explorer there was.”

  She laughed that quick chuckle.

  “Shea, you’ll find me telling people that you’ve got this sense of humour. But you don’t do it when others are around.”

  “I do it,” said Tim, “for Bandy Habash when I’m telling him to get to buggery!”

  “So, there you are. It takes love or anger.”

  She stood up urgently and grabbed his arm.

  “My God, Tim. What’s that little ruffian doing?”

  As Kitty had, he looked to the stern and was at once appalled. Johnny in his knee pants and Lucy Rochester in her muslin dress. Both barefoot, they had climbed up on the taffrail and were standing on the stern looking down into the river. You could see their bodies jolting with every shudder of Terara. They had this air of having decided to do it by spontaneous mental messages, without any words passing between them. All they had to keep them in place was a hand each attached to the flag pole which rose up the middle of the railing. They were staring down into the wonderful surf of Terara’s wake.

  “Get down from there!” he yelled, sounding predictable to himself and therefore negligible to the brats on the railing. Others were moving towards the children too, a couple of the young Singles team who made amused noises. It seemed to him that Lucy and Johnny jumped by common and wilful consent, but again without words. His son and Lucy were simply gone in an instant. The Singles cricketers screamed, “Children overboard!”

  Kitty stood behind Tim gasping and crying out in terror. Tim knew that the playful Singles were no use to him, nor overdressed Ernie. A simple and dreadful thing to act. Rushing aft, he climbed the taffrail and launched himself, sandshoes first, into the turbulence behind Terara, where the children could be seen bobbing and apparently enjoying themselves.

  He was no more than a social swimmer, he remembered on the way down. He’d have swum a few strokes at a beach in Capetown and another few in Ceylon. He’d swum sometimes in the creek at Crescent Head and, observing the style of Wooderson, in the river. Then during the great floods, small distances, down Belgrave Street, from the dinghy to a given rooftop say, from one hotel upstairs verandah to another, or to put a rope on an item of floating furniture. Assisting Wooderson who was the sublime, unbeatable swimmer. Now here he was going alone into the ferment of water behind Terara.

  Before Tim’s white shoes broke the tumbled surface, he confusedly saw Johnny swimming free of the wake with short choppy strokes. But Lucy on her back, her pinafore blossoming, flapping casually at the water with her hands.

  A shock to hit the river and go down into that dark, bubbling mess and get at once the tang of mud on your tongue and the pinching fullness of water in your nose. And so long under, yearning for the fall to cease, for the ascent to light. And who bloody said the ascent was to happen, who guaranteed he would rise? Was it physics or just occasional good luck that brought people up for a last look at a known world?

  Keep your mouth shut, you silly bugger.

  Dark water choked him. But he came up and while biting off his first breath found the recovered universe busy as blazes. Terara, more massive than he ever believed it to be, was turned abeam of him. He watched Jim Wooderson commence a lovely swallow dive from amidships. The captain shouting through a bullhorn. “All wait where you are! Help at hand! Help at hand!” Lifebuoys came arching through the air.

  Johnny swam towards Tim as he stayed upright, pedalling in the water, dragging himself along, using his arms as oars. Johnny, bush humourist as he was, began imitating him. Or perhaps it was honest filial imitation. Who had time to tell?

  “What are you at?” Tim asked the boy, and the boy actually scooped water up and pushed it towards Tim and had leisure to laugh.

  There was a rope within grabbing distance and they both grabbed it. Aboard, he could see even from water level, a crewman and some of the cricketers took energetic hold, and someone shouted, “Willing Hands!” The slight speed of the boat combined with the vigour of the men on the rope meant that Tim and Johnny were hauled through the water more speedily than Tim would have liked. The river had settled though, and Tim could see that Jim Wooderson had meanwhile swum to the girl, who still gave every sign of enjoying her floating exercises.

  “I’m going to give you something when we’re aboard!” Tim cried to his son. The captain was letting down a ladder, and the hauled rope brought Tim and Johnny to its base. Johnny leapt from the water and was up it, deft as something inhuman. As Tim pulled himself out of the river and up the rungs, leaving the water and becoming heavy, the full weight of his shock returned to him. He had to pause halfway up and then continue after deep breaths, but when he reached the top, a dozen hands pulled him over the steely rim of the ship, and two dozen others tried to. There was applause and whistles. “Don’t go hard on the boy, Tim!” people called.

  In the water, Jim Wooderson was dragging the girl along with great brave strokes of his big, fast-bowler arms. No nonsense from Lucy. She was coming quietly. Tim turned and reached out to cuff Johnny’s ear and someone put a beer in his hand. Yes, he thought, delightful. He drank. Wonderful. Kitty was there to cuff and shake the boy anyhow. Then she clung to Tim and looked up at him. There was such terror in her little peasant pan of a face.

  She said, “That bloody Lucy. What in the name of all holy is she about?”

  “I will find out,” said Tim softly in her ear.

  “Thank Christ I didn’t let her into the house!”

  After drinking, he no longer had the breath to tell her, “That might be why she did it.”

  On top of the bluff at Toorooka, some local cricketers had mown the grass and raised a bit of a tent. People had placed a chair solicitously for Mrs. Kitty Shea in the shade at the edge of the field. Fearful maybe that her shock might cause a premature birth. The children sat at her feet, Annie without having to be ordered to do it, Johnny and Lucy in their silt-stiff, drying picnic clothes. Under the severest orders of the entire company not to move.

  “Of course, I’ll bloody play,” Tim had to keep reassuring the group. Wooderson, wrapped in a fresh shirt and someone’s huge towel, was already twirling the bat in his hand, playing strokes at phantom balls. Since he was an utter tower of a fellow, no one asked him was he f
it to play.

  Tim himself wore a jacket and trousers. His shirt was drying, laid out on the grass. He’d lost a sandshoe to the river. A fresh pair from Savage’s. Three and sixpence worth. He would have to field and bat barefoot.

  He’d taken Lucy aside after they had landed at the bottom of the lane which led up to the cricket pitch. Young men, singing, carried the blanco-ed bag of cricket gear past them.

  “Tell me why you’d try to drown my son?”

  “No,” she said, looking calmly down the hill at the river. “No, I didn’t try it. He wanted to jump. I jumped with him.”

  “No, you’re older, miss. What did you tell him to get him up on the rail? You say nothing to me. What did you tell him?”

  “He went up there. I went up there too.”

  “Him first?”

  “Yes. It was being like the birds.”

  “I don’t believe you, that he went up before you.”

  “No,” she said. “Him first.”

  There was a small flexing of the mouth and her eyes filled, but only a moistening. No bawling from flinty little Lucy.

  “And you jumped? I saw that. You jumped exactly together. Why?”

  “Men screamed at us. That’s why we jumped.”

  God, men had screamed.

  “Mother Imelda might hear of this.”

  She said nothing.

  “Tell me straight,” he asked, pursuing old suspicions. “Are you happy at the nuns?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think I killed your father? I didn’t kill your father, you know. I carried him to hospital. He had already gone. Do you understand?”

  She looked straight back at him. No evasion in the eyes. She was the most astounding child, nor could she be reached.

  “Thank you for bringing me the condensed milk,” she said, her eyes creasing against the light. “It’s lovely in the tea.”

  “Well, any more fuss with water, and that’ll be the stony end of condensed milk. Will you for sweet Christ’s sake please tell me are you happy? Are you at peace?”

  He lay at the centre of a universe of women who generally went less than satisfied. Particularly this one. Particularly Missy. The others, kindlier stars, smiled on him.

  “I like it when you bring me chocolate too,” she said.

  “And the nuns let you keep it?”

  “Yes.”

  “And they don’t make you say the Hail Mary.”

  “Only if I want.”

  He put his hand on her shoulder. He could feel her tiny bones there.

  “So no one wishes you any harm. Don’t try to drown my son.”

  “No,” she said. “But he does it on his own too.”

  “I can scare him out of it. But don’t you betray me, Lucy.”

  “No,” she said. She still went on looking west. Towards the smokier reaches of the Macleay.

  In the centre of the mown sward, Wooderson and Curnow were tossing for the right to bat first, while the last of the Singles were breasting the hill carrying a keg jovially between them. Players in white flannel pants, held up by striped ties worn as belts, were pacing out a twenty-two-yard pitch in the middle of the mown space and then hammering in the three stumps and setting the bails atop them. This scene gave Tim a sense of event, and for the first time it struck him intimately that he would have within an hour or so to face some ferocious young bowler, defend his wicket and try to score runs.

  “Marrieds are batting,” cried Wooderson, strolling back towards the shade where Kitty and Mrs. Malcolm sat, though not exactly together. With them, all the docile children, including the temporarily docile Lucy and Johnny. Two tall young dairy farmers, each with a pad on his left leg and bat in hand, were stroking at imaginary balls. The Marrieds’ openers, blocking, sweeping, pushing away. Were these two boys really old enough to be married? Men were leaning over the scorer’s chair, wanting to see where Wooderson had put them in the batting order. Tim sauntered across. Someone said, “You’re fourth wicket down, Tim. Give your clothes time to dry out. Unless all the other buggers get ducks.”

  Everyone, the women too, concentrated on the tall, dark-haired young Aldavilla farmer who would open the bowling for the Singles. He stood near the stumps at the northern end of the paddock, swinging his giant arm in its big shoulder. You could see the machinery of all this shoulder-exercise working under his shirt. Curnow the bank clerk placed his fieldsmen wide of the wicket. In the spirit of the day, he expected lots of flaying of the ball, hoiks and hooks and spoonings-up. Slashes high and wide.

  The first ball from the fast bowler wasn’t hit at all. It went through to the wicket-keeper who fumbled with his gloves and managed to stop it. But the next ball, the young Married farmer hit straight down the wicket past the bowler, and the runs began. The cricket match was thus initiated, and everyone relaxed and began to talk and by and large ignore the progress of the game. Such was the strange rite of cricket.

  On his blanket, Tim sat like a child by Kitty’s chair. She put a hand on his shoulder. “Are you well, darling?” she asked.

  “Perfectly so,” he assured her.

  He wished the others would stop fussing, but he liked it in her, the plump hand on his shoulder by which she reassured herself of his substance.

  She gave out a little stutter of laughter. “Can’t that little ruffian swim though?” She nodded towards Johnny. “An utter water rat. In his bath, I look between his toes for the webs, you know.”

  She laughed. She’d really tickled herself with this image of her son as a water animal.

  He was going to tell her to watch the bony little girl while he was batting, but the picture of Lucy paddling backwards, buoyed by air trapped in her pinafore, rose and was all at once too pitiable to be spoken about.

  Kitty said, “Might as well get all the surprises over in one bundle. I’ve come to the conclusion—I’d like to go and meet Mamie in Sydney.”

  For a time he felt ambushed, but then he said, “In your state?”

  “I’m never stronger than when carrying,” she said. “I would be gone five days. Bring Mamie back with me on Burrawong, you see.”

  “Dear Jesus,’ he murmured. “It’s a rat tub, that Burrawong.” He could see Missy approaching her at the railing as, plump and defenceless, she faced both New Zealand and infinity. “You’d have to travel saloon, and we can’t afford it.”

  She said dreamily, “Well, we can only afford to send the children of strangers to bloody old Imelda. And who says saloon? Everyone sleeps on deck anyhow, this time of year.”

  “Sleeping on deck is fine if you’re seventeen and there’s no storm. What if you’re seasick up in that fo’c’sle with the rats and the drunks?”

  “Then I’ll know it’ll end in two and a half days. Two and a half days’ misery never hurt anyone.”

  “Forty-five bob return in saloon.”

  Kitty winked at him. “Oh, dear God, he’s suddenly got the gift to count money!”

  “Think, Kitty. In violent weather you could miscarry.”

  “Not this one! This one’s like Annie! Not like the water rat. This one sticks with Mama.”

  There was a yell from the field. One of the batsmen had failed to connect cleanly, and the ball had risen lazily and was falling slowly towards the hand of the Singles fielder at square leg. There was some hope that he may have drunk too much from the keg, but no, he held the ball secure and raised it above his head. Mr. Malcolm, who was acting as umpire at the bowler’s end, dramatically signalled out.

  The man in the straw hat who was doing the scoring cried out to the people who were sitting in the shade. “One wicket for fourteen. The rot has set in.”

  Tim had seen few of the recent runs scored. His mind had been taken up with images of the Burrawong out on the Pacific, with over-bright days at sea, stormy nights.

  “Ellen Burke will look to the children if you agree,” said Kitty. “It’s been arranged.”

  “Jesus, I thought all that tittering the other day
stood for something.”

  “She’s staying on in town. Old Burke’s in a mood to afford that now he’s won the case. You get on well enough with Ellen Burke, don’t you now?”

  “Will you be safe though? Those Walsh Bay wharves … Darling Harbour?”

  “Dear Lord, observe the wonder! His concern for his little wife!”

  She put her hand to his shoulder again. If they had not been in public, he would have kissed it for fear of losing it. Even though her gesture was purest irony.

  “Dear God,” he said, “it looks like I can’t hammer you in place.”

  Out in the field, another hopeful batsman was caught out swiping.

  “Here we go,” said Wooderson, the incoming batsman. He would hold the bowling attack. But what am I doing here, an Irishman playing an English game in so far off a place, listening to my wife propose the Burrawong?

  He saw Ernie Malcolm surrender his umpiring job to a farmer. Ernie advanced towards the keg, rubbing his dry lips. A confession of a sizable thirst. Very soon, Ernie—glass of ale in hand—came and squatted near Tim and Kitty. The accountant hunched by the storekeeper! If only this were business. Ernie took a long pull on the savagely needed glass of beer. To look at his pruney face made Tim understand how hot it was out on the field.

  “Tim,” said Ernie, panting. “I have to tell you that what I saw this morning confirms me in my opinion as much as what I heard before. As to your quality as a man. Your unquestioning response. Straight over the rail and into the river!”

  “For Jesus’ sake, Ernie, it was my son in the river.”

  “No hesitation, Tim.”

  Tim said helplessly, “It should not be counted in with the other matter. And as you saw, I might as well have stayed on deck. The boy had already saved himself. Treading water easier than me.”

  “I would anticipate,” said Ernie, dragging in another huge mouthful of ale and managing to get it down, “that you would say such a thing. When bravery is habitual, the hero cannot understand what other people see in it.”

  “That’s nonsense,” said Tim. Bugger clientele like Ernie!