A River Town

by Thomas Keneally

  “Tim, you are a credit to your kind. It is a mark of the new country, where one citizen has as much at stake in the society as the next, that valour should gradually become universal. The point we want to emphasise as the Macleay is spanned later this year. And you have proven the point.”

  Tim had taken enough. His son in the river, his wife going to sea, and these further unwelcome accusations of gallantry.

  Ernie chose to laugh and to jostle Tim’s shoulder.

  “Well, you’re a remarkable fellow, Tim, and I see your gallantry in that vigorous Australian son of yours.”

  Then he grew pensive.

  “I’ve noted Wooderson’s bravery. There’s a fellow. He’ll be in my correspondence too.”

  Ask him about Missy, said an impulse in Tim. If he’s such a letter-writer. So public-spirited. A letter from him on accounting stationery, and the Commissioner would sit up.

  But he couldn’t manage it in time. Johnny and other boys ran past and distracted Ernie. He took Tim’s elbow and grew solemn. “Mrs. Malcolm and I cannot achieve any such reflection of ourselves. Problems, you see … This is why I like to think of myself as being related to the entire civis of the Macleay. And, of course, not only the valley. My organisations. These are some of the means by which a life of a childless man is fulfilled, Mr. Shea.”

  “And by umpiring cricket matches,” suggested Tim, for the sake of good humour.

  “That also,” Mr. Malcolm assented, and as he did so a third wicket fell to the Singles’ rangy fast bowler. Someone brought a cricket pad to Tim.

  “Better put that on, Tim.”

  Wooderson was out there at the moment. An athlete from his mother’s womb. He traipsed down the wicket to play their slower bowler on the full. Whack! The red pellet came singing like a wasp towards the wives, and there were cries of alarm and then clapping. The little red orb sizzled in amongst the picnic baskets but rolled away into long grass.

  “Stroke!” called Ernie Malcolm by way of applause. “How much now, scorer?”

  “Wooderson 47 not out, MacKenzie 29 not out. Three wickets for 123.”

  Ernie Malcolm whistled. “Fast scoring!”

  Tim hadn’t noticed most of Wooderson’s rapid earning of runs.

  But then MacKenzie slashed at square leg and Curnow caught him.

  “You’re in there, Tim.”

  Tim rose, barefoot, a pad on one leg.

  “There you go now, Tim,” Kitty whispered. How strange to advance towards the centre of the mown area. A sort of electric otherness to it, of being outside yourself. The kind of actor you were in your dreams of the theatre. Unsure of your lines. MacKenzie coming towards you yields up the bat, its handle clammy. “I went too much for the slash, Tim! Should have been more careful.”

  “Here he is!” yelled one of the inner fieldsmen joyfully, as if they expected Tim to be easy game. An edge to what the boy said too. Here comes a tyke, an Irishman, a Papist. No good at honest British games. But Tim decided to be jovial, a mere batsman and not a token of divine debate.

  “I want some mullygrubbers, thank you, boys!” he called, to show that he could face his fate with irony. “Right along the ground if you don’t mind.”

  His fellow batsman Wooderson came up to Tim’s end of the wicket. “If we can have twenty-five runs from you, then I think it’ll be dead easy. Get ’em well and truly pissed at lunchtime. They won’t see our bowlers on this pitch.”

  At the stumps, Tim went through the ritual he’d seen other men engage in at cricket matches, moving his bat about on the crease until the umpire at the bowler’s end assured him that it now covered his middle stump. He settled into a stance copied from cricketers’ pictures in the Sydney Mail. The big dairy farmer-cum-bowler thundered in, and the faces on the fielders became intent, their hands stretched out to take a catch. He thought he saw the ball coming and made a swipe, but there was no connection. The ball went through to the keeper. Some of the fieldsmen whistled to show how close it had been to the wicket. Tim hated that whistle, the idea of his coming victimhood that went with it.

  “Watch the bloody thing, Tim,” he told himself aloud.

  The big bugger running in again. But on to it this time. Whack! The vibration from the willow bat up into the arms. The ball rising up to the left of him and towards the river. Flying down past mid-bloody-glorious-wicket! Wooderson has already begun running, and Tim starts too. They are co-conspirators as in the flood of ’92.

  One of the men who whistled when I missed the last ball is chasing like buggery after it. Yes, turn and run again. Wooderson is. Bloody bindi-eye sticking in my bare foot. Damn the thing. Cast not your seed on barren ground for the tares and thistles will rise up and cripple the Jesus out of you!

  The over ended, and he had time to stand by his wicket and feel like a man in possession. What must Kitty think of him? Diving in the river before ten o’clock. Defending his stumps at noon. A gentleman batsman, three not out.

  He bent and picked the bindi-eye out of his foot. A small irritant. He hoped that his son the river rat was watching. This was how you behaved. You were nonchalant between threats.

  The other bowler now, not as tall as the dairy farmer, came in and bowled to Wooderson, who gave the ball a little nudge into the covers, and the two of them ran one—another bloody bindi-eye in the pad of his foot. Tim facing the bowler again. Medium speed. Oh, he span the ball, but that was all right. Tim could not read fast bowling, but he could read a spinning ball. Again the beautiful contact. In the arms, the sweet echo of a full-bladed hit.

  The ball had disappeared around the back of the wicket—to the field position they called deep fine leg. Square leg umpire was signalling four runs. This makes me a bloody citizen, Tim thought. He and Wooderson didn’t even have to move. Dear God, he had the sudden eminence of a man now seven not out. Batting amongst the furtherest English. The English of New South Wales. Batting at their best game. Seven not out!

  Next ball he didn’t hit clean. It dribbled off the bat. But Wooderson thought they should run, and so he and Tim were running. One run. And the pressure off him.

  Wooderson in command of the bowler, and the bowler seemed to know it and bowl in a defeated way. Way out across the mown grass the red ball flew. One hop, two hops. Into the wilderness. Four more runs. Applaud at your end by knocking the palm of your left hand casually with the bat held in your right.

  Another Wooderson slice then. A run in it. The tares and bindi-eyes were a distant rumour in his flesh. He and Wooderson casually crossed in mid-pitch and changed ends. The cavalry of cricket. The mounted bloody bushmen.

  A fat young man, Tim noticed, had begun supplying glasses of beer to the outer fringe of fielders. Accepting the amber glasses, the fielders laughed, but each had to put his glass down as Tim knocked the ball off through square leg again. Set the bloody Singles running with froth on their mouths to cut off the ball. A poor throw-back from a beer-blurred Single. He and Wooderson ran three. “Seeing them, Tim!” Wooderson called to him in commendation as they passed each other in the middle of the wicket.

  The sun had started to burn his scalp through his flannel hat. The Macleay partook of the same latitude as did parts of Africa, and the sun had an African sort of bite. Tim was delirious for lack of breath. The tall dairy farmer came on and bowled again, but both he and Wooderson had their eye in now and kept cracking him away for runs.

  The medium pacer back on, Tim sent the ball off untrammelled and high in the direction of the river.

  But one of the Singles, a wholesome teetotal boy perhaps, who had not been vitiated by the beer, was running for the ball like a terrier. He had an appointment with that ball and Wooderson kept running, and Tim had his back to the boy when he heard the scream of triumph, and over his shoulder saw that the boy was flat on his back holding up in one hand the safely taken catch. Tim was exceptionally out. Patting his left hand with the blade of his bat, Wooderson applauded him as he left the paddock. Johnny came running towards him. �
��Dada, you scored thirty-seven runs.” The boy stood on his hands and remained like that for a time. A sign that he had all his unruliness back and would need to be watched.

  Approaching Kitty, Tim could hear the patter of applause from wives and spectators. He yielded up his sweaty bat to the next batsman in, who said, “Can’t match you, Tim.”

  “Here he is,” called Kitty to him. He noticed she had a glass of stout sitting thickly by her chair. Ideal for expectant and nursing mothers … Deep in the shade he saw pale Mrs. Malcolm clapping, though in a distracted way. As he knelt to unclasp the pad on his right leg, he saw his large white feet stained with grass and dirt. He wished he’d been wearing shoes for his cricketing performance. The river, by taking one of his new canvas shoes, had rendered him into a yokel.

  “Sturdy chap, Tim!” called Ernie Malcolm. As if a score of 37 runs confirmed everything he’d ever known.

  Someone put some warm ale into his hand, and as he drank it down he felt its amber pressure in his bladder. He waved to Kitty, and then off to the bushes for one of the great male delights. The open air piddle. A lion of cricket marking the open ground. Knees bent. Looking up at the rugged filigree tops of eucalypts. And 37 runs. Bugger me! Wondrous number.

  In returning to Kitty he passed the keg. Two young men were standing there. One of them held his ale glass in his left hand, and in his right had raised up for viewing by himself and his friend a photograph of a young woman. One of those photographs taken by what they flashly called a studio. The photo was stiffly backed in cardboard. Passing behind them, Tim had no reason not to glance at it. The endless fascination of the twinning of souls. This kind of photograph commonly celebrated in photographic studies with the photographer’s name and address embossed on the edge of the object of desire and tenderness.

  So he glanced. And oh Jesus it was Missy. Quite clearly so. Missy with her throat and shoulders shown off by a summer blouse. She stared indirectly at the viewer. Her head was turned down towards the bottom corner of the photograph, but her eyes held the centre of his gaze.

  “What is this?” he asked the young man urgently. They turned to him, but the one with the photograph did not lower it.

  “A dear friend of mine,” said the young man holding the photograph.

  “Dear God,” said Tim. “Do you not bloody know …?”

  “Know what?” asked the young man.

  Tim’s face felt insanely hot. The sun had burned him by its massive stealth, and he was aware of the fact now.

  “What is her name?” he asked the young man. “What is her name?”

  The young man winked at his mate.

  “Afraid she’s spoken for, Tim,” said the mate.

  “For God’s sake, don’t play around. Give her name!”

  “Go to hell, Tim,” said the boy with the photograph, lowering it now.

  “Don’t you know?” asked Tim. “Don’t you even know that Constable Hanney is riding around with her head in a bottle?”

  The first young man, the owner of the photograph, stepped forward.

  “What’re you saying? What sort of bloody insult is that?”

  “The sun’s got to him,” said the second young man, holding back his friend.

  “Bloody hope so!” said the first one. He had however decided now not to attack Tim. He was looking around for his blazer to put the photograph away in it. Tim stepped out though and grabbed him by the arm. “For dear Christ’s sake, son, give me her name.”

  “Miss Millie Holmes,” the young man yelled at him. “Miss Millie Holmes of Summer Island. Not in any bloody bottle, I can tell you, and I resent the idea like blazes.”

  To prove the point, the young man ran at Tim and pushed him away. Trying to keep balance, Tim found he had no legs. He fell hard on his back under a bare, blue, circling sky. He saw the young man’s face swing like an errant star across his vision, and felt in his skull the urgent tread of many people on the earth close by. Wooderson’s voice crying, “Hold hard there!”

  “Bloody disgrace, bloody disgrace,” he heard the friend of Millie Holmes say. A man’s voice asked, “Has he been drinking?” Kitty’s face and Wooderson’s swung into his vision, both massive. Welcome stars descended.

  “It’s shock,” said Wooderson.

  “And the heat,” said Kitty. “Poor Tim. Get him up, will you?” Of course Kitty could not bend forward. Wooderson could, and helped sit him up.

  “He was ranting on about Millie Holmes,” Millie’s admirer’s well-liquored, easily-angered mate said. But he sounded uncertain.

  “Don’t be a bloody fool,” Wooderson told the tipsy boy, and Kitty from her lesser height made soothing noises with her lips. Mrs. Malcolm had appeared with a glass of lemonade, and she was able to bend also. Tim was very careful to make all these observations, comparisons and calculations about people’s movements. He wasn’t sure which pieces of knowledge would be of help to him later. “Mr. Shea,” Mrs. Malcolm said in her lovely, serious, fey manner. “I knew this morning would prove altogether too much for you.”

  Tennyson’s Maude. “On either side the river lie,” Tim told her, “long fields of barley and of rye.”

  “Well, that is correct,” said Mrs. Malcolm, but Tim could tell she didn’t get the message.

  Wooderson on his haunches now right beside him.

  “Ask them please to show me the girl’s photograph,” Tim pleaded with Wooderson.

  “Why, dear, do you want to see it?” murmured Kitty over Wooderson’s shoulder. She was frowning, and fearful too. She spoke softly. “Who do you think it is?”

  “It’s Hanney’s Missy,” he told her. He had begun to shudder. He was fevered.

  “That’s sunstroke talking,” said Wooderson to Kitty.

  Kitty walked straight to the young man who owned the photograph.

  “Let my husband see the picture,” she said commandingly. “Come on, give the thing up! He’s not going to eat it.”

  And the boy did, defeated by little Kitty, who brought it over and lowered it towards Tim and said, “There!”

  But when Tim inspected it the photograph had changed to something normal. All the lightning had gone from it. He saw there an altered, ordinary young woman who would see old age. A woman with an ordered life ahead. It could be told just by looking at her that she would not be hauled around the country by a bewildered constable. Hard for Tim to know now how the mistake had been made.

  “I’m sorry,” he told Kitty, shivering. “I made an awful mistake. I’m sorry.”

  Wooderson said. “No, don’t give it a thought. It’s heat prostration and the shock.”

  “He’s sensitive to these things,” Kitty explained to Wooderson and Mrs. Malcolm. “To a fault, you know. Too much of a poet.”

  Tim saw Winnie Malcolm’s rose-pink lips purse, going along with Kitty’s judgment.

  The young admirer received his photograph back from Kitty, and went and put it away in his jacket with scarcely any show of grievance.

  Someone—not Kitty—brought a cushion for Tim’s head. Perhaps it was Mrs. Malcolm again, but he could not be sure.

  “No need for you to field, Tim,” said Wooderson. “You’ve done the brave task with your batting.”

  Tim lay back on the utterly comfortable earth now of New South Wales. People drifted away from him, as if from a kind of respect. He felt very much at one with this ground, with the way it harboured him beneath branches.

  “There’s been surprises, eh?” he heard Kitty say, the words trailing over his face like fingers. “But it’s sweet here. Take a rest, Mr. Shea.”

  He drowsed. Of course, he’d made a fool of himself and been punished for inaction by Missy. Yet under the sun, she receded from his mind now. The whole farce of it, her face jumping out at him from a usual photo. But chastised now, he could have a licensed break in the shade. His wife beside him, hands folded, in a canvas chair she’d dragged over for the sake of being near.

  Jesus, he and Kitty would rest here in the ab
solute end as well. This fact struck him for the first intimate time. No going back to reclaim soggier ground in Duhallow. This was the earth which would take them. And they would feed this ground. He lay close down to it, and it seemed to him to yield slightly as if it were in on the realisation too.

  “Mother of God,” Kitty told him after a time. “They are having a tossing-the-ball-at-the-stumps contest out there. And that bloody scamp Johnny’s involved. Crikey, he has an arm on him! Where did he get that from?”

  And she recounted to him as it happened, how their son kept hitting the wicket from all angles and from thirty yards out, then forty yards out. The men were whistling Johnny for his sure eye. He and some great lump of a farmer were left in the contest at the end, and the farmer won. But it seemed to Tim that Johnny had made a claim on things, on Australia itself, with his true eye. As he himself now made the same claim by his tranquil lying-down, his New South Wales holiday in the shade.

  “Couldn’t you just see him playing the toff’s game? That Johnny. Wearing creams. You know, I won’t be going on Burrawong unless you’re well.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, woman. Of course I’m bloody well, and you’ll travel saloon. And your sister too.”

  Mamie Kenna travelling saloon. Poshly into the valley of plenty.

  Seven

  YOU WOULD THINK a fellow’s reputation as a cricketer would pause the pace of the world for him for at least a few weeks. But it wasn’t so, and he knew it wouldn’t be either. The question of attending the loyal meeting to do with Macleay lancers or bush battalions had had a certain light thrown on it by the mail arrived from Burrawong. Amongst a shovelful of accounts and catalogues, a letter written the previous November by his father, Jeremiah.

  Tim was still pensive from the seizure he’d taken at the cricket, and was fit to receive the patriarchal letter. Distance too, of course, gave it more force, and Jeremiah wrote with such graciousness as well. Famous for it in his locality and amongst his family.

  We have got photos, how lovely, how grand. You appear thin, but apparently in good health, and all the connoisseurs of beauty and taste to have the privilege of seeing your amiable wife’s photo pronounce her as being far in excellence as could scarcely be seen. On that subject there is a deed of separation. I fear an eternal decree that during my life I shall never again see you or any of my exiled children—which is painful to endure on your part and on ours.