A River Town

by Thomas Keneally

  In the meantime, it is pleasing to hear and know that your brothers and sisters are well. We have lately heard from them one and all, particularly from the New York contingent with encouraging prospects. May God continue His Graces to us all.

  The mere fact of the photos so joyfully received was near putting out of my mind thanks for the two sovereigns so gratefully received last August. And though much money may be valued, the photos far exceed as an endearing, everlasting memorial. What would I give if I could only gaze on your lovely wife and children for one moment.

  Thanks for the two sovereigns so gratefully received.

  Tim was all at once turned into a staid citizen by a sentence like that. If ruined, he could always go back to hauling to support Kitty and the children. But then where would the two sovereigns so gratefully received be found? On top of the fifty bob he was paying Imelda for the child?

  So where was the harm in a man turning his face for a second towards the oratory of such city fathers as Baylor and Chance, Good Templars and patriots to something or other?

  In the same batch of letters, one from Truscott and Lowe saying how much they had valued his custom, but that his account with them was in arrears by in excess of seventeen pounds. From the cash box in the store, he had perhaps enough to send them a soothing tenner, and ask them to bear with him two weeks for the rest. But keep enough to hold off his other chief supplier, Staines and Gould. If people like Imelda paid an occasional token and the Malcolms and others paid two monthly instead of three, he could meet Truscott and Lowe’s account in full. He would need to go out to rattle the tin at his customers.

  Kitty of course found and read the Truscott and Lowe account. Other men were able to sequester that sort of correspondence from their wives. No bloody chance with Kitty.

  And government interference in the business of keeping a store! NOTICE TO STOREKEEPERS ran in all the papers. Trading hours to be enforced by exemplary fines. Selling after six o’clock: fifteen pounds! The government of New South Wales trying to keep people off the streets after dark. Don’t put troops on the corners—that didn’t suit the temper of Australian life. But close the shops and fine the poor shopkeepers.

  In any case, in this complicated world, he resolved he would go to the Patriotic Fund meeting for safety’s sake, just to observe. The Offhand would be surprised when he appeared. But the fact was there was no reason, in a land where he had considerable freedoms, why a fellow like him couldn’t attach himself to the same drama as true Britons like Chance. To feel for a short time right in with the drama—the grieving loss of a glaring battle here and there. The joyous winning of trudging wars.

  The afternoon of the meeting, back from deliveries, he saw Hanney just sitting a horse outside the Commercial Hotel.

  In the back, releasing Pee Dee from the traces and taking him into his pasture, he saw his four-year-old daughter Annie rise in a white pinafore of sacking from where she was sitting on the back step, and come with her hand out to fetch him. Her solidly composed face looked as though she had a complaint. He could hear Kitty singing in the dining room.

  “Oh kind Providence, won’t you sent me to a weddin’.

  And it’s oh dearie me, how will it be

  If I die an old maid in a garret?”

  He could tell that Annie, who got her air of reserve from him, thought that singing immoderate. A rough but resonant voice. Girlish in some of its register, full and mature in others. The voice of someone from a comic variety show.

  In wonder at what he might find, he led the child inside. She was clinging though. So in they went. Observing herself in a handheld mirror, Kitty stood by the sand-soaped table, swathed in yellow cloth. It ran crookedly around her legs, her hips, her upper body, and made a cowl over her head. She looked splendid but alien, like an Indian, or the women he had seen in Colombo when coming out on the SS Ayrshire.

  “Oh, Tim,” she said lightly.

  “What are you doing in that bloody cloth?” he asked, trying to sound half-amused. “Where did you get it?”

  Still regarding herself but at least dropping the cloth back from her head, Kitty said, “Mr. Habash, you know. The hawker. I invited him in to show me material.”

  “Show you? Smother you in the stuff!”

  “Don’t you understand? After the child, I’ll be needing new clothes. You know that. I’ve let the old out as far as they’ll go.” She patted her abdomen. “Don’t you see I have to prepare for the little scoundrel. You were keen enough on the making of him.”

  Had the hawker bedecked her? Or had his visit made her flighty enough to do it herself? Tim was frightened by the strangeness Bandy Habash had brought into Kitty’s behaviour, and angry he was not still there to be expelled from the premises.

  “What if a customer came in and heard all that hooting out here in yellow cloth?”

  “I’d say that I owe him the supply of kerosene and butter and soap. But nothing says I can’t sing as much as I bloody like!”

  She ran her stubby little fingers over the cloth. He wouldn’t mind betting she had also bought a fresh bottle of some mad Punjabi elixir as well. He’d found the bottles in the past. Now he walked up, held her by the shoulder and unwrapped her. Beneath the golden extravagance, she wore a dress of white muslin. He let the swathes fall on the floor. “How many yards is this?” he asked.

  “I needed four,” she told him, unabashed, firm. “I can use it for Anne’s dresses too.”

  “There are other bloody hawkers, you know.”

  “And I have regard for what they cost. Do you want me to run up a bill? I can certainly manage that but normally leave it to you.”

  Again, a blow delivered. Kitty was landing all of them. He had no chance of successful rage, since the bloody little Punjabi was gone.

  “You should understand,” he told her, “I’ve already warned Mr. Habash off.”

  “And I’m supposed to know. Read it in the Argus I suppose.”

  The bell in the shop began to ring. Someone had come in wanting something. Kitty processed out, her small hands joined in front of the bulge beneath her breasts.

  Tim was restless with this slow, uneasy rage. To help contain and diffuse it he sat down at the table and read the Chronicle. Habash made all a man’s Britishness rise in him. You were going pretty well to do that in an Irishman. Bandy made you think of regiments, flashes of scarlet, take that you Dervish dogs! Such feelings came in handy for spiking up his enthusiasm for tonight’s meeting.

  Good Templars’ Hall, Smith Street, Kempsey: centre of civic enthusiasms. Of sandstone quarried by the prisoners at Trial Bay, it rose two storeys and had a Greek architrave in which the symbol of masonry, the compass, had its place.

  Approaching it by the gas lanterns lit by Tapley, who had once done the Empire’s time, you couldn’t see stars, and you felt you were a squat, solid citizen in a low-ceilinged world. You forgot your half-shameful, half-just rancour against the hawker and fixed on other questions. Whether to wear a tie and dress as a player in that world, or an open collar as a spectator, a contemplative observer of tonight’s argument? He’d decided on a tie, but worn casually, the top button undone. And please don’t ask me for a donation to the Patriotic Fund! I gave all I had to Imelda. The Irish Empire. The British Empire needs to get in line.

  “Sure you want to go?” Kitty asked. “Look a bit weird you being there.”

  “I’m going to hear the Offhand,” he said, telling part of the truth.

  “Don’t you dare enlist,” she warned him as a joke. As if the Macleay’s contingent would be enlisted by the end of the meeting and marched straight past the enthusiastic citizens of the Shire to embark on the Burrawong for Cape Town or Durban!

  An immense crowd inside, barely a seat left. The Offhand was already there, flushed with his evening’s drink, and holding very visibly a notebook and shorthand pencil, recording names. The names of people whose ties were done up, the names of the well-suited. Constable Hanney patrolling a side aisle, s
ober and unburdened tonight, without Missy, without a bewildered spouse. And on the platform, dapper M. M. Chance, and old Mr. Baylor, father of a tormented chemist in West who—the year before—had killed himself by accident, through drinking laudanum. Now Mr. Baylor was all suited up to show the Boers he meant business. To give them indirectly the hell which would be delivered in person through the hands of sleeper-cutters and dairy farmers’ sons. Why not go himself and bully them into becoming opium-eaters like his poor son?

  Chance had a pleasant, smooth face, and the capacity to dress up his ideas in very appeasing language. He was a widower with two daughters everyone called brilliant. One sang duets with Dr. Erson, the second was a famous painter of the East Kempsey swamp and of the river. Chance was supporting her now as she painted in Paris, which as a city was, according to the Argus, very pro-Boer.

  Everywhere, members of the Farmer’s Union wearing blue ribbons to show their high calling as owners of cattle and growers of corn. Feeders of swine as well. Willing now to discuss the form in which boys were to be sent to the cannon, to the bullet, or—even more likely—to the fevers of the encampment. One little louse, after all, more potent than a sniper. One tiny and impartial louse.

  Ernie Malcolm came in from the edge of the stage. Treasurer.

  At five past eight Baylor got up and called for silence and read some unintelligible minutes, which someone on the floor moved the acceptance of. Ernie Malcolm presented a financial statement and tendered various minor bills for settlement. Then Chance rose and initiated the debate on the major item of that evening’s agenda. Speaking first, moustache jutting and gleaming with wax, a hand hooked on a watch chain, easy command of the gift of oratory.

  “The underpinning proposition of our existence is that we live in a robust dominion of British citizens, in a smiling land whose safety is dependent on the British fleet and on British military force. Thus, if the centre of the Empire is under threat, we are by that fact ourselves under threat. Britain stands between our smiling society and the prospect of our becoming a mongrelised province of Asia. For that reason it behoves us to help Britain in every season of her distress.”

  A tall dairy farmer named Borger stood up and asked whether it were possible for Australia to depend on itself for safety?

  Though there were catcalls, Mr. Chance himself seemed neither affronted nor threatened by Borger’s interjection.

  “Sir, I believe the answer is obvious. We are six fledgling colonies, just now contemplating a unity of self-defence. We are dependent upon the protection of the parent. But like a maturing child, we are able to come to the mother’s defence.”

  Borger would not sit down, even though people groaned. Tim thought him in a way an admirable but dangerous fellow. Like Uncle Johnny, his own political uncle from Glenlara, a Shea family secret. Uncle Johnny was Fenian “Centre”—they said at his trial in Tim’s infancy—for the whole of Cork. Denied absolution by most priests. Broke his aging mother, whom Tim remembered from funerals and weddings in the old days. Uncle Johnny harried in the newspapers. Stuck by his ideas, like Borger, and was shipped on the last convict ship to Western Australia. Ultimately pardoned, the last Tim had heard of him. Johnny named in his honour and having the same dangerous edge. Uncle Johnny now old and living in California somewhere, according to old Jerry Shea. A soul like Borger’s. A soul Tim didn’t want to have.

  “Great Britain took it into its head to commit aggression against the Boers of the Transvaal, purely for the sake of British gold mining interests there. And look at it—an army so pathetic, generals so pathetic, they can’t get within coo-ee of their goal.”

  There were now cries of “Fenian!” and “Papist bastard!” But despite the accusations of being fatally Irish, Borger was native-born of the Macleay and had the accent to go with it.

  “This war is being fought for gold, and for Jewish gold interests! Read the Bulletin and have the scales fall from your eyes. I tell you!”

  Borger pursed his lips and sat down in a welter of hisses.

  Old Billy Thurmond, owner of a model farm at Pola Creek, and a scientific sort of farmer, was on his feet with an Antrim voice which Tim thought of as being capable of ripping through ice and disintegrating glaciers.

  “There you have, Mr. Chairman, the basis, the living reason for a black list for pro-Boer sympathisers. Borger’s not the sole one. There are others too in this hall.”

  A native Australian voice took it up, the vowels slung like wet washing on a droopy, lazy line. “Botha the Boer’s down there on the river, Billy, in the bilges on Burrawong, waiting for word from Borger. He’s shitting himself they’re going to send the boys from Hickey’s Creek.”

  Laughter. Joyful laughter. And safe to join in. Great mockers, the Australians. One of their graces. Billy Thurmond held out the fingers of both his hands before him crookedly. “Don’t you worry about that,” he yelled, nodding. What he knew, he knew. He cast his eyes around the hall and they lay a second at a time on all those likely to agree with Borger. The old man’s gaze hung, of course, on Tim amongst others.

  “Go to buggery,” Tim muttered under his breath.

  Tim saw Ernie Malcolm rise immaculate from the Treasurer’s chair, a man with a clean domestic and civil plate.

  “Mr. Chairman,” Ernie said. His medallions glittered on his watch fob, each one of them a token of community service. You had to admire the bugger, and Tim did. Would there be a timetable of fětes for Kitty to attend and Tim to stand aside from without fellows like him?

  His voice was strong but with an adenoidal timbre. From it, you could bet he was a snorer. There he would lie beside darkly well-ordered Mrs. Malcolm snorting like a mastiff with a bone.

  “We are an equestrian nation,” said Ernie. “From childhood we think nothing of travelling huge distances on horseback.”

  Kempsey to Comara and back, like Constable Hanney.

  “There would be no better form for our boys to make their entry onto the world’s scene than as mounted cavalry. I would like to move a motion that a light cavalry regiment be raised from the Macleay. Its fibre would far outshine that of recruits drawn from the slums of Birmingham or Manchester.”

  Ernie’s wide-set eyes shone. He was pre-awarding the medals and preparing his speech for the Argus, the Chronicle, the Sydney Morning Herald.

  “I move too, that the Macleay’s willingness to recruit such a body of men be communicated, if necessary by a delegation of citizens, to Sir William Lyne, Premier of New South Wales.”

  “Seconded!” shouted Billy Thurmond. There was a lot of applause and a few whistles which could have stood for votes either way. But the clapping was a sign that you never went wrong congratulating Australians on their horsemanship.

  In the mêlée of general approval for Ernie’s gallantry, the tall Scot Dr. Erson had risen to his feet.

  “I would like to inform the company that my brother-in-law, who is a surgeon to a company of Natal mounted gentlemen …”

  This unfinished sentence itself brought a round of cheers for the popular physician’s brother, who was no doubt a charming, sportive bloke like Erson himself.

  “He informs me, gentlemen, that irregular formations do well against the Boer. Men who can dismount to take shelter, then mount again quickly and be in pursuit. Marksmanship a premium, horsemanship essential. How do you describe these sorts of men? You describe them as mounted bushmen. With the greatest respect to our treasurer, Mr. Malcolm, I urge that the motion be amended and that the Premier be informed of our willingness to enlist a battalion of mounted bushmen.”

  “Exactly, exactly!” men were crying.

  “Well why not send bloody both?” remarked a tie-less satirical young farmer at Tim’s side. “And a bloody navy as well.”

  Tim noticed with a pulse of excitement that the Offhand was amongst those who had risen now and had their arm up. There seemed to be a reluctance in dapper M. M. Chance as, knowing the press could not safely be ignored, he gestured towards the
journalist. Sad to see the Offhand’s flushed face and purple gills. Tuberculosis, liquor or both. Would have made a British statesman if not for the drink.

  “Sir,” said the Offhand in his cockneyish accent, redeemed a little by oratory lessons in an Anglican school of divinity. “Sir, I take both Mr. Ernie Malcolm’s point about young Australians spending their childhood on horseback, and likewise Dr. Erson’s observation that an irregular horse unit would best suit the moral temperament of the young men of Northern New South Wales. We would first, of course, need to find foreign horses for them, since there aren’t enough up-to-scratch military horses in the Macleay.”

  There was a stutter of laughter. The Offhand raised his eyes to the ceiling and smiled with charming, lax lips. “I ask, what is the most common relationship between man and horse in this valley? What is the most universal competence and trade which the men of the Macleay demonstrate?”

  There were cries of, “Boozing!” or, “Gin jockeying.”

  Oh the black camps. The mineral spirits drunk there! Who rode out there stealthily on horseback to beget on the black gins the half-white little bastards of Greenhill or Burnt Bridge? The gin jockeys.

  The Offhand picked up again in the lee of everyone’s hilarity.

  “The men of this valley are above all hauliers and carters. The men of this valley, above all, know how to grease an axle, and how to get a wagon out of a bog. The men of this valley are not easily defeated by dust or mud, like—to quote Mr. Malcolm—the children of the slums of Manchester and Birmingham. I believe that we can raise from the Macleay a transportation unit unparalleled in the Empire. And since the armies of Generals Buller and Roberts and French are faced above all with this problem—the problem of supply, and problems of hygienic facilities—let the Macleay come to the party with the finest company of wagoneers imaginable under any dispensation!”