A youngish nun, the Waterford one, had already begun bandaging his swollen ankle, and the pressure of the bandage was the clearest thing he felt. A second nun brought him fully to his senses by pouring iodine on his right shin below the torn and rucked-up trouser leg. Mr. Crane and his son had the extension ladder up to the top of the tower, and big Arnold was coming down first with Lucy reserved in his arms. Ladies first, as if she did not have Johnny by the scruff of his bloody will. Mr. Crane at the base of the ladder was calling out counsels at Johnny. “Stay up there, sonny!” And then under his breath, “You little bastard.”
Arnold was more lenient and brought Johnny down on his shoulders. Through the mist of all his astringent pain, Tim doubted whether this tribute to Johnny’s manliness was a wise gesture.
Meanwhile Imelda rapped Lucy once across the upper arm with her cane. Immediately a few tears fell down Lucy’s face. They weren’t passionate. The jolt of the cane had shaken them out.
“Go to the dormitory and sit on your bed, miss,” Imelda told her.
“Come here!” Tim called as she went off with that deliberateness so dreadful to find in a child.
The little girl turned and walked across, carrying her scatter of tears.
“Tell me, Lucy, what do you want done that hasn’t been? I asked you before and now have to ask again. Why do you make my son do these things?”
He knew how silly the question was. Adults always ask these questions of children who would not give the answer for another twenty or thirty years. But this particular trick of muteness could drive an adult to blows. And he could feel the blows rising in him.
She looked at him directly and he saw what she was watching in him: that he could support the idea of her falling, but not the idea of Johnny’s plummet. She lacked someone to fear her fall more than his own death. That level stare. She forgave him, she was philosophic. But she knew.
“We thought we could see everything from the top,” she told him. “Johnny’s mother down the river.”
“No. No, it’s not high enough. You must know there’s no place on earth from which you can see all the rest. There’s no height you can get to.”
She bunched her eyes. Another tear emerged under this pressure. “I know.”
“What do you want? I can’t do more.”
She said nothing.
“If you behave like this just once again,” he said, “I will let go of you for good, Lucy. I swear to Jesus! But if you stop being a mad child, I’ll keep you here and take you to Crescent Head for picnics.”
Arnold Crane delivered Johnny now to the base of the tower. Imelda began scourging him with her birch.
“No!” called Tim. “No! Send him to me.”
Imelda stopped lashing and pointed the boy towards his prone father. The boy, too, had a few stained droplets on his cheeks. They meant nothing under this sun.
“I am suspending your education, you bloody ruffian. You have half killed me. Get the Sisters’ boxes out of the cart and take them to the kitchen. I’m too crippled myself.”
So here he was, lamed, reaching up to cuff the boy behind the ear and point him to where Pee Dee stood, tethered to the fence, trying to back away nonetheless from the placid old plough horses who pulled the fire wagon.
“Give Pee Dee a whack for me too and tell him to behave!” Tim roared after the boy.
Two of the nuns were ushering children back towards the classrooms beneath the Celtic cross which stood at the apex of St. Joseph’s school hall. The young Waterford nun had finished binding up Tim’s ankle and was struggling to rise within the great black folds of her habit. A dark, sweat-drenched furze on her upper lip. A plain young woman but beautiful in her own way.
“Can you get up under your own steam now, Mr. Shea?” she asked.
Tim rolled onto his good leg and forced himself upright with his palm. She was by his left elbow, assisting. He put his weight on his bound foot but, of course, it would not take it.
“You may need crutches then,” the consecrated Waterford woman told him.
“I have a blackthorn at home,” he told her.
From the direction of the cart came Johnny labouring under a butterbox but doing fairly well. A number of older and larger boys had joined in to help him carry things. You had to admire the little blackguard. As long as Mad Lucy let him live.
Imelda herself struggled over to ask how he was, and without ceremony he said, “You might remember, Mother. I asked you to keep them apart.”
Imelda angry to be spoken to so outright in front of one of her nuns. “Well, we are not God Himself, Mr. Shea,” she told him. “We cannot enquire into each one of their seconds. We do our best. I now see what you mean. But I would tell you that there is mischief in the boy too. Children don’t have to talk to each other to make up some mad plan. They do things. It is called Original Sin. But their Guardian Angels were with them today.”
He looked at the boxes of groceries making for the convent kitchen on the shoulders of boys large and small. “I thought that was what I was paying you one and threepence a week for. So that Guardian Angels would be saved the trouble.”
She turned away, stung. Yet they always had an answer these women!
After some dawdling children went Imelda, thrashing the air with her cane. The flail of the cane, the rattle of her Rosary. The invisible ministers, the seraphim, the Guardian Angels were taking a bloody thrashing!
Through all this morning’s adventure, while climbing the hard, painted diagonals of the timbers with splayed feet, he’d had it in mind.
“Sister,” he asked the Waterford nun. “Have you heard of the young woman who died at Mulroney’s?”
“Yes, I have, Mr. Shea.”
“Do you think it proper to pray for the repose of her soul?”
The questioning made the young nun nervous. She showed it by being brusque.
“I do. We are all sisters, Mr. Shea.”
“Very good. Now do you think there is any way her soul is running amok? In what we see here. The children run wild.”
“No. I certainly don’t believe that. That’s theologically unsound, Mr. Shea.”
But you could tell she knew about visitations and was as fearful now as if she’d had one, had seen Missy inhabiting fiery ground or glittering sea.
“I am cursed with dreams,” said Tim.
“All human beings are, in this vale of tears,” said the nun. But now she was all business again. “You should wear a scapular for the proper protection, Mr. Shea. We must be on our guard against superstitious belief. Now come and have some tea like a good fellow.”
At that moment Johnny was back in Tim’s vicinity, standing some paces away. His deliveries done.
“You’ll come with me,” said Tim. And to the nun, “Thank you, I have water on my cart.”
On the second day of terrible heat, Dr. Erson and the sanitation officer visited the plague camp and declared everyone well, and clothing clear of infestation. That evening a huge cleansing wind came from the south, gusting up thunderheads with it. The sky cracked and people covered their mirrors with a cloth lest the lightning have a surface to admire itself by. Men were already going around collecting for the burned-out farms of Nulla Creek. The Argus would say that six thousand pigs had been consumed, twelve thousand cattle and as many as a thousand horses. By some startling mercy—no human fatalities.
Tim could have been one if he’d taken an unlucky posture in falling to the earth. The lunatic children could have been if they’d stepped into the air in the way Lucy looked as though she might throughout the enterprise.
On a cleansed and overcast morning, Kitty and Mamie and the other Burrawong passengers were loaded on a drogher with Burrawong’s cargo and made a slow, long passage up the Macleay. People who saw them coming ran up and down Smith and Belgrave Streets announcing it. Those who needed to meet the drogher came up to Central wharf with a strange reluctance. His foot in a sock, and supporting himself on a blackthorn, so that louts outside
the Commercial called, “Dot and carry one!” Tim took Annie down there to see the drogher berth. Others watched it from their windows and under their eaves, and then pretended they weren’t much interested. But of course, you needed to be interested. Even in him an unreasonable voice asked was this slow, blunt vessel the plague’s fatal bark?
In both the papers this morning, a letter had appeared from Captain Reid:
The Captain of Burrawong would like to advise the clientele of the North Coast Steamship Navigation Company that following the fumigation of the ship in Darling Harbour, and its arrival at the New Entrance of the Macleay, the vessel was thoroughly searched for rats, living or dead. The limber boards, sparketting and all lumber corners were removed, and dead rats to the number of thirty-five were collected and disposed of. None of these showed any signs of being infested with the plague.
“Following the disposal of the rats, and in expectation of continued passenger custom from the inhabitants of the Macleay Valley, the crew undertook a further thorough disinfecting of the ship. Disinfectant was spread throughout the ceiling, the forepeak and the lazarette of the vessel. Such procedures will be continued regularly throughout the present epidemic. I can assure passengers that every care will be taken. The ship will be fumigated with charcoal and sulphur prior to every departure from Sydney …
The captain’s letter however was followed by another from someone who signed himself Sanitas, some old cow-cocky from downriver, complaining that there’d been “various improprieties” in the handling of the Burrawong during her time in quarantine at the New Entrance. The droghers which were designated to bring cargo and passengers to Kempsey were permitted to lie beside Burrawong at night, and there existed the possibility of rats infected by the plague passing aboard the droghers and thence to settlements along the river. The sanitation officer, said Sanitas, had to prevent droghers from lying beside Burrawong at night. “The capacity of the flea to travel is nothing short of prodigious …”
So the scholarly farmer continued, pealing his verbal klaxon on the Macleay. No wonder people looked warily as the drogher, laden with provisions and passengers, now neared the wharf.
Telling Annie to be careful, Tim stumbled with her down the embankment towards the river bank itself and, dear God, there was Bandy.
“Mr. Shea,” said Bandy, formally bowing, as if again they had become strangers.
“Well then, Bandy.”
“Mr. Shea,” said Bandy. “I thought the women might need help with their baggage.”
They were bound together in Constable Hanney’s accusations now, so Tim bowed and said, “Very thoughtful of you, Bandy.”
Not a dramatic landing for Mamie the emigrant, not from a drogher. At this tide, the gangplank slanted up to the wharf from the hard-laden deck. Mamie and Kitty waving from the deck, and Joe O’Neill smiling wanly too, banjo-less, a little behind them. Still tormented, poor scoundrel, by Mamie. Kitty plumply pointing towards him, tapping her upper leg. Asking what’s wrong with his?
Tim making soothing motions with his free hand.
At last, after the commercial travellers had hustled back and forth on the narrow gangplank, landing their bags of samples, the sisters struggled up to the wharf. Not even gallant Bandy could get aboard to help the sisters up such a busy plank. Kitty helped ashore by Mr. Joe O’Neill, who then boarded again and came ashore with his and Mamie’s bags. He was strong enough in his desire to carry them all the way to West.
“No fuss, I had a fall, I’ll tell you,” said Tim as Kitty embraced him. Annie hid her face from Mamie and clung to Kitty’s skirts. “I suppose you’d like presents?” said Kitty, grinning down. The girl would grow up taller than her mother. You could see it already in her four-and-a-half-year-old frame.
“I know you have presents, mama.”
“I do. I have lovely things. They are for nice girls who say hello to their Aunt Mamie.”
So all the greetings were made. “Say hello to Mr. O’Neill who comes from near where Mama and Aunt Mamie come in Cork.”
What did Annie think Cork was? The other side of the moon.
Joe had come ashore with Mamie’s sea trunk, and Bandy made certain he went aboard to get Kitty’s. As if to keep the honours even. Tim said, “Didn’t bother hitching up the old feller. I’ll get Naylor’s cab to bring your sea chest down to the residence.”
“Not at all,” said Kitty. “Mr. Habash would do it for us, wouldn’t you?”
At this announcement by his wife, Tim felt rising within him a persisting reluctance at being espoused by Habash. Better that honest Joe O’Neill labour down Smith Street with both on his back.
“No, Mr. Habash has work to do,” said Tim. “I will go and hitch up Pee Dee. It’s no trouble.”
“Nonsense, nonsense, nonsense,” said Kitty. And knowing who was in charge, O’Neill and Bandy were already setting off up the embankment with one of the sea chests. Up there, unnoticed before by Tim, stood Bandy’s green wagon.
“How can you make deliveries with that ankle?” asked Kitty.
“It’s difficult just now.”
“Well, Joe’ll make them for you while he’s waiting for his relatives to turn up.”
Having arranged the muscle power of the men, Kitty took Annie by the hand and mounted the ramp to Smith Street.
Smith Street, where Mamie walked past the banks, the creamery, the Good Templars’ Hall with the demeanour of a native. Typical of Red Kenna’s children, she took things as they presented. This was, he was sure yet again, a gift.
He did not mar the homecoming, the stories of the voyage, the time in Sydney, the quarantine, by telling Kitty about Johnny’s adventure, though Johnny came home from day school looking wary and frightened, suspecting that the tale had been told. He was by now bandage-less, and his hair was growing back, so there was nothing to alert the new arrivals.
Ellen Burke had made another good stew, and its pungency came in from the cookhouse and filled the residence like a solid caress. Bandy had been invited to dinner, and Joe O’Neill was ecstatic to be staying under a roof with Mamie. More or less under a roof anyhow. There was no bed for him in the house but he would spread some blankets outside by the shed. If he had any of the Irishman’s normal advanced dread of serpents, he was willing to forget it for Mamie’s sake. Big red-bellied blacksnakes had once or twice been found on the verandah, yet were timid unless trodden on. Nonetheless, made a big dent in a fellow’s composure. Joey would fight them for Mamie.
Since business proved slow in the afternoon, Tim wondered did people know Kitty had come down on the drogher? Did they fear she’d pass the plague to them along with the crackers and cheese?
Look in the Argus for plague-news and the hope of sighting a new letter to grace the day of Kitty’s return. And it was there! Page nine.
Dear Sir,
It appears from the casualty figures for Queenslanders and northern New South Welshmen published in your last issue and shown to be due to meningitis [1], enteric fever [5], and ambush of a column of two hundred mounted rifles by Boers [13], that the tactics of General French in the Transvaal have been nothing short of disastrous. Even the Australian bushmen move in column of march, like an outmoded British regiment.
Is General French characteristic of the men born to rule over us and long to reign over us? I simply ask the question. While we sacrifice our young in South Africa, we are asked also to sacrifice the best concepts of our coming Federation. Our colonial statesmen, led by Mr. Alfred Deakin of Victoria, are now asked to take our Bill for the Commonwealth of Australia to Britain, where the political equivalents of General French can peer over them in the offices of the Secretary of State for the Colonies in Whitehall. Not only do we then surrender our young to the incompetence of British generals, but we surrender the best ideas for our future to the supervision and amendment of far-off British Ministers of State who have never seen our shore, and can have no chief and primary interest in our welfare.
The British will be very
ill-informed indeed if they decide to interfere too much with the Australian Commonwealth Act. The sweet clauses we have raised up for a Federal Commonwealth, like the sweet boys we have sent to South Africa, will be mowed down by incompetent men if we do not take care.
I am, etc.
Australis
Central Kempsey
Tim laid his hand emphatically a number of times on the page. Fair enough, fair enough, Australis.
But who had written these letters? A farmer with time to think? Yet the address was Central Kempsey. Was that a mere blind? Who was this Thomas Paine of the Macleay?
He went through a list in his head. Old Burke upriver at Pee Dee had time enough and adequate disgruntlement to write these. But they were not his opinions. He was not for Federation. He was in favour purely of running Pee Dee station as he wished under a regime of free trade and low tax. So Old Burke had not written these. Borger, the farmer who had spoken up at the Patriotic Fund meeting in the Good Templars? Certainly Borger, you would think. It was pure Freeman’s Journal stuff.
Well, good for the lad, though he would suffer. He might take his cream to the butter factory and find it turned back by some fellow worried about far, far South Africa. It was the one thing wrong with the country. People were too in love with other quarters of the globe and not enough with this place itself. To an emigrant, the Macleay was sufficient kingdom. You couldn’t tell the women that, of course. Kitty loved reading the Palace news. Didn’t see any of it as political. It was purely a matter of tiaras, blood-lines, balls and regattas. If you wanted to be strict about it, as Australis obviously did, you could say that the women were abettors of the high loyalism of New South Wales. But then why shouldn’t they enjoy themselves, reading about fanciful things?
In late afternoon, more rain to soothe the burnt pastures upriver. Old Kylie from the Good Templars came around under a big black umbrella asking for donations for farmers who had lost their stock, their crops, their outbuildings. Contributions over ten shillings would be published in the list of donations to appear in both the Argus and Chronicle. Tim went into the storeroom, to the black and red cash box. He opened it with the key from his fob and took out a ten bob banknote. A green pound note beckoned to him. Ten bob contributors would be the lowest on the list. In the face of fines and threats, he would show his open-handedness. He knew the crime of vanity beckoned. People on the way to Mass calling out to him with respect and then muttering to each other that he was a good fellow and always ready to extend credit. He loved to be suspected of generosity beyond his means. Besides, poor buggers had lost their stock, their horses and cattle, and could go broke.