A River Town

  “How are you, Mr. Shea?” said Joey O’Neill, saluting like a soldier, but not normally a shy-acker, only because he’d been drinking. You could tell his manner was more restrained at other times, and he was certainly terrified of Mamie.

  “If you read it in a novel,” asked Kitty, “would you even start to believe it? Did you know he had an uncle and aunt in Toorooka?”

  Under the power of the Kenna sisters’ sociability, Tim said he was as amazed as anyone. But he wondered how he was supposed to know of Joey O’Neill’s existence down the Mitchelstown road, and so how he was to know that the banjo player had relatives in Toorooka?

  They introduced the fiddler, who was a Meath man joining his brother on a dairy farm on Nulla Nulla Creek. And then there was the young Englishman with some washed-out accent—somewhere like Essex—and a couple of Sydney commercial travellers. Decent chaps all of them, no question of that.

  “I’m the chaperone for my wild sister,” said Kitty, nuzzling against him once more with an animal insistence. “Otherwise by now I’d be long asleep. But she bears watching.”

  “Who’s chaperoning the wild chaperone,” he asked, and everyone laughed. “Welcome to the Macleay, gentlemen,” he then added anyhow at last, that duty devolving on him. “You’re only just inside it, but with any luck you’ll get further, and I don’t know if it’s good or bad news.”

  “Rubbish!” called Kitty. “This is the greatest of lands.”

  Still holding the fiddle and bow, the fiddler clapped the more or less formal speech of welcome.

  The young men began to excuse themselves. Joey O’Neill thought that Mamie would do the same, and seemed to be alarmed to find himself wandering off alone down the avenues of tents, while Mamie stayed behind with the embers and her sister and the two visitors. He couldn’t come back without seeming an idiot, yet loitered in the shadows. The commercial travellers cleared up the stout bottles which lay around and went off themselves to their camp cots.

  Kitty murmured to her sister, “Joe wants you to walk with him.”

  “I’ve heard everything he has to say,” said Mamie, dismissing the idea. “Good night, Joe,” she called merrily nonetheless. “Thanks for the fine music.”

  “You’re an awful hypocrite,” her sister Kitty whispered to her.

  Now the camp was very still, but the river still drummed with frogs. Tim had utterly forgotten Bandy, but then noticed that he remained meekly there, keeping a distance.

  “You didn’t have to come and see me,” said Kitty. “I’ll be home in two days, they won’t be able to keep this up. All this fuss. Boiling up all our underwear in iron drums. They won’t be able to do it with every shipload. Captain Reid says, we cannot put such hindrances to commerce.”

  Smiling Mamie said, “Mr. Habash, are you a gentleman?”

  Bandy shifted lightly on his feet.

  “You should be aware, Miss Kenna, that I am a follower of the Prophet.”

  “Oh Jesus,” said Mamie. “We’ve got prophets and saints to burn, so what does one more matter? But are followers of the Prophet gentlemen?”

  “Better than some of the white brethren, if you don’t mind my saying.”

  “That’s not much of a claim,” said Mamie. “Anyhow, I believe you are a gentleman, Mr. Habash, and I wonder if you would mind accompanying me down to the shore for a view of Burrawong while my sister and her husband spend a fragment of time together.”

  “Miss Kenna, I would be honoured and it would be a sacred trust.”

  “Dear Mother, Tim,” said Kitty. “Every bugger here’s talking like a play.”

  In the moonlight, Mamie put a small but decisive hand out in front of her, signalling Bandy towards the river.

  “Now you two just have your conversations,” she said. “Come on, Mr. Habash.”

  She walked off, trailing a big straw hat. Bandy turned his eyes to Tim, and spread his hands in front of him to show they were vacant of any intent.

  “Go on, Bandy,” Kitty told him. “If you want to be a bloody gallant, walk in front so it’s you who treads on the sleeping brown snakes.”

  Again Bandy touched his hat, and caught up with Mamie. They were about the same height, and Mamie inclined a little to him, chatting away.

  Kitty said, “She gives that poor Joe O’Neill an awful time, God help him.”

  She stepped back and took Tim by the wrist.

  “We can go to the tent. I’ve been missing you. Sydney’s got its points, but it isn’t Tim Shea.”

  “How can we go to your tent? Mind you, I’d like to see it, of course. But Mamie could be back at any second.”

  “Then why do you think she’s gone for a walk. She won’t be back for at least forty minutes. And if she’d gone with Joey, it’d be all over the camp by breakfast.”

  Kitty was leading him amongst the quiet tents, a camp where few lights shone, the canvas itself offering only a night cry here, a brief fragment of snore there.

  “How does a girl like that know these things?”

  “She’s a Kenna, I suppose,” said Kitty.

  This was nearly enough explanation. The Kennas knew things which didn’t seem to be known in his family. Kitty, for example, always insisted that carrying a child was no hindrance to love. The man needed simply to beware of his weight and take reasonable care. Who had told her that? Had Mrs. Kenna bowled right up and told her before she caught the boat? Had her sister told her at the wedding feast which delayed her in her emigration? It wasn’t at all unlikely. But could he imagine his mother, Anne, telling such things to any of the Shea girls before they took their American ship? Telling Brooklyn-bound Ellen Shea there was no need to put off further joy till three months after the child was born?

  He had already stiffened up enough. A standing prick hath no conscience. One of Kitty’s axioms. From whom had she heard that? Did the Kennas pass such wisdom around the table?

  For some reason, a surmise entered his head. What of Bandy’s Muslim prick, smooth as an eel?

  In a light summer night dress which left her shoulders bare, Red Kenna’s freckles visible on them even by kerosene lamp, Kitty drifted asleep on her side. Tim, fully dressed again to fool the unfoolable Mamie Kenna, stretched atop Mamie’s camp cot and went profoundly asleep. Bending over him with pursed, knowing lips, Mamie woke him.

  “Mr. Habash has returned me in good fettle. I see you put your wife to sleep, Tim! What a good thing!”

  He took his fob watch and saw that it was nearing two o’clock. Oh, Jesus, the huge ride! And the air relentless hot!

  He rose and kissed Kitty’s bare shoulder and she shuddered and said, “Dear,” but did not wake.

  “I suppose young Bandy is raring to go?” he asked Mamie in a whisper.

  Mamie watched him with a subtle smile on her lips.

  “So it seems I’ll be meeting you again before the end of the week,” she said.

  “May I just check a thing or two?” he asked, and he went to Kitty’s old sea trunk and eased it back by the hinges and inspected her black and white dresses and her undergarments by lamplight, encountering no insect other than a dead tiger moth. Everything in fine order. He repacked the trunk, folding things lovingly. “All clean,” Mamie whispered, “and no fleas. She airs everything every second day anyhow.”

  He felt a surge of love and would have kissed Kitty’s shoulder again if they’d been alone. Because Kitty had such a casual air, there was something poignant about her when she took her uncommon care.

  “Goodbye then,” he told Mamie, and she brushed his cheek again. “And welcome to the Macleay.”

  “Give my regards to Mr. Habash,” she told Tim. “He’s a feller of real charm.”

  Outside, some way from the door of the tent, Bandy waited for him by the dead fire.

  “Right,” Tim called to him.

  Bandy said nothing. Had Mamie staunched his oratorical flow? They fell into step together, tramping back amongst the tea-tree, the melaleuca, the slug-white paperbarks.


  “May I say your sister-in-law is a very lively girl, and excellent company.”

  “You don’t need to tell me about lively,” said Tim. “I’ll have her on the premises for at least a few months I suppose!”

  “Then you will have three women with you, including your little girl. You are a fortunate man, Mr. Shea. My father, my brother and I live in a womanless household. It is not a natural thing at all. But our faith is a problem at the same time as being our glory.”

  “Well,” said Tim. “I respect your attitudes in that regard.”

  The Habashes had no reputation for seeking solace either in the blacks’ camp. Mind you, a lot of respectable women perversely liked them. Perhaps there was an illicit bit of business sometimes.

  They found their horses standing somnolent in the clearing. As Tim climbed aboard he called, “Wake me if I fall asleep. Otherwise, I’ll end up on the ground.”

  “The same for me, old chap,” said Bandy, delicately yawning. “Pigs will come and eat our faces.”

  On the at first sandy road back up the Macleay, the night grew stiller and even hotter. Tim would sleep and wake, sleep and wake, and Bandy frankly slept for long stretches of the road, his cheek tucked into the hollow of his collarbone. Tim roused again and again, sweating and startled each time and aware at once of all the catalogue of earthly dangers:

  that Johnny would go on seeking chances to crack his skull;

  that Ernie Malcolm would malign Tim Shea;

  that all customers might leave;

  that the plague might after all—surely not through him—come to town.

  It was a chafing, starting, restless eon before they crossed Spencer’s Creek again. Then he would blink at the broad and blatant river which seemed to stretch off limitlessly from his stirrup into an undetermined and unreachable point between water and sky. Now it looked not like his familiar but a foreign river to him, a bitter one. A Congo. Africa, and he some sort of missionary riding to some hopeless task with the heathen.

  Breath of a hot westerly met them as they rode through Gladstone. There were fragments of black grit on that wind. Upriver the bush was burning. You could not see it, but it could be read in the force, heat, the density of that blast. Fragments of blackened gum leaf would be raining in his back yard by the river. A furious, hazy ochre light was up by Pola Creek, where the cattle would be already wandering back satisfied from the milking shed.

  Tim was starting to revive.

  “A hard life,” he commented to Bandy.

  But the horses had been so steady, so sure-footed all night. Again they let them drink from the Belmore River, where it entered the Macleay from the south. The horses began pointedly to sniff the air soon thereafter, as if it gave them grounds for unease, but they were not so impolite as to toss their heads around and back downriver as some horses would. Noblesse bloody oblige.

  From the top of Red Hill, you could see the mountains distantly burning and the valley filling with hot white smoke.

  “Oh, dear,” said Bandy. “It looks like Nulla Creek is ablaze. All my families. A terrible thing. Drought and fire, fire and drought. God’s seasons in the Macleay.”

  “I wouldn’t blame God,” said Tim, but not as belligerently as he would have a week ago.

  They rode down into the East Kempsey Swamp, where the air was densest. It must be far more than a hundred degrees already in this syrupy bottom, an inhuman day ahead. A good day for selling Stone’s Ginger Beer in its earthenware bottle. Open the top and there’s a marble over which the children can fight. A good day for selling the cordials from Sharp’s factory in West Kempsey. The creaming soda. He could drink a bucket of it now. It didn’t cut the thirst though, not really. Tea. Black and strong. Cut the whistle. Made you sweat.

  As they crested Commandant Hill, Constable Hanney and one of the younger constables on police mounts rode into their path.

  “May I ask you gentlemen where you have been?” called Hanney through nearly closed lips.

  What to say? Visiting the plague camp no more than a technical infringement. But Hanney could make it a massive crime.

  Bandy wagged his head significantly to Tim. He seemed to say, I provide the horses but you answer the questions.

  At the sight of the uniform, Tim had been unable to prevent himself wondering if Hanney knew somehow of his anonymous letter to the Commissioner. But that was not possible.

  “We have been down the river to visit friends.”

  “Mohammedan or Christian?” asked Constable Hanney out of his locked jaw.

  “I’d take it they were Christian. Why do you ask, constable?”

  “Where are these Christian friends of yours located then?”

  “Near … near Belmore River, more or less.”

  “Is that right?” Hanney called to Bandy.

  “That’s right, constable,” Bandy assured the man.

  “The beak’s going to ask you the same bloody question,” said Hanney. “Think twice, and tell the truth, or else I’ll stick you with your first answer. The question is: have you been visiting the Burrawong passengers?”

  “What would make you ask that?” asked Tim. Just the same, he found himself swallowing those bilious inklings which unleashed power produces in its subjects.

  “The sanitation officer had a report that Mr. Bandy Habash started trading with the passengers just a few days back. Someone saw you clearing off down the road to the New Entrance last night. He warned us.”

  Billy Thurmond. Old bugger. Would’ve got home and put his son on a horse and sent him to town to complain to Sergeant Fry.

  “Those horses of Mr. Habash’s certainly look knackered enough,” the younger constable said.

  “My wife is six months pregnant,” said Tim. “I was anxious as to how she was.”

  “Is this a confession?” asked Constable Hanney.

  For the first time, the profound soreness of the ride was entering. He bent forward in the saddle like a cripple. “Dr. Erson and the sanitation officer are about to release the passengers in any case. I’d come to the conclusion I wasn’t putting a soul in any peril.”

  Hanney looked at his colleague. Then back to Tim. “Kind enough to accompany us to the police station?”

  It seemed too hot for the execution of the law. Above one hundred and five degrees, who wanted the literal justice whose minister Hanney had decided to be?

  “Go easy, constable. I have deliveries to do today.”

  “Bugger your deliveries.”

  Tim found himself looking at Bandy for directions. Bandy had hung his head. Why not? He had to show himself humble before the ways of superior authority. Tim himself had used them on him.

  “There’s nothing you can have at the police station which couldn’t be had here,” said Tim. “If you want to charge us for visiting the passengers, you can do it here and leave our day free. I confess that we visited the camp, and that Mr. Habash did, though not for trade. Purely out of kindness towards me.”

  “You weren’t so bloody keen on him the last time we met,” said Hanney.

  “Well, I was more ignorant then. Surely you don’t want us to follow you through the streets of town?”

  “I think that’s what we’d like, Mr. Shea.”

  “I’m a man in business.”

  “Something you should have thought about at dusk last night. Follow us, and bloody shut up.”

  Fortunately though, even by the time they crossed in the punt with the constables and followed them up Belgrave Street towards West Kempsey, where the Majesty of the Queen abided in the office beside the courthouse, the commercial day had not begun in Kempsey.

  The passage through town didn’t take so long. A young woman watched them from the upper verandah of the Commercial. She might carry the news. Bandy’s horses seemed to keep right up with the police mounts, and to be pleased for the company, and Tim hoped that this implied to onlookers a lack of coercion in the whole arrangement. Arriving in Kemp Street, they all trotted into the pol
ice yard together. But Tim had no doubt that the pegged and markered world ceased at the gate, and that as the constables ran their mounts in under the shade of their stables, he and Bandy had placed themselves profoundly under the dominion of power exercised fancifully.

  Yet as if they had freedom, Bandy and Tim rode their horses up to a post and rail. Now everyone dismounted. He and Bandy and the constables walked together like friends across the barren yard to the station. As Constable Hanney opened the unlocked door—who would be silly enough to steal from a police station?—and led everyone in, he took it as read that Tim and Bandy would follow. On the doorstep Tim saw in Bandy’s eye the intention to decamp. To horse and to buggery! How Hanney would adore that.

  “Let’s put up with it,” Tim counselled the hawker.

  Inside the warm air which reached for Tim smelled of official ink and carbolic. Hanney opened the flap in the counter, and facing to the interior, kept it negligently open with a hand held behind him. Sure of their obedience. The habits necessary to an officer of the law.

  “Get yourselves chairs,” he said.

  There were three desks in here, in the joyless interior. On the wall the main poster was a paltry ink sketch of Missy marked Unknown Female.

  Tim and Bandy fetched two chairs from their place against the back wall and bore them to Hanney’s desk, while the senior constable himself wiped his sweaty hands on his tunic, saying, “God, bound to be a stinker!”

  He was looking around for writing materials. He found some sheets of notepaper with V R on the top and the lion and unicorn. Astounding creatures! Their bite as strong here as anywhere.

  The younger constable had already sat at his own desk further back in the room, and was engaged at once in documents which seemed to have no bearing at all on Bandy or Tim.

  Dipping his pen in the inkwell, Hanney said, “Bugger this heavy air!” and began to write. He asked Tim what his second name was, and Tim said Edmund. Hanney wrote that down. He asked Bandy for his second name.