Thomas Keneally - A River Town

Tim got down from the cart on the embankment just past the store, and held Pee Dee’s head and called for his son. “Come out now. Don’t be a town ruffian. Come out!”

The child sat bolt upright in the water, like a bloody weasel. Then he swam to shore and found his shirt. The trousers he’d swum in were all discoloured with the river’s alluvium, the rich soil which it picked up upstream. Kitty didn’t seem to mind any of this, or the idea of a six-year-old swimming about in that massive river.

“You aren’t cold?” he asked the boy.

The boy said, “No.”

Tim shook him by the shoulder. “You are to keep out of the river, sir. I’ll give you a bloody great whack.”

“That’s right,” said the boy. He mimed a bloody great whack with one open hand against the other.

“It won’t be as funny when it happens,” said Tim. “Go to the back of the house and dry. Don’t come into the store in that condition.”

“Whatever you say,” said the boy.

He didn’t sound like his parents. It was as if the sun had got inside his nose and throat and dried all the cords. His say sounded like sigh . This is what it is to be an emigrant. Your children won’t speak like you. He’d never thought of it till it happened.

As a consolation, he took the boy by the hand and together they led Pee Dee and the cart around the back.

When he came into the store, Kitty looked up from the Chronicle and smiled at him.

“So you are a hero, darling Tim.”

“You shouldn’t believe it. I collected over twenty-three shillings this morning.”

“Just as well since we owe the wholesalers twenty-seven. This Bandy Habash is a good talker, isn’t he? Speaks so highly of you.”

“I wonder where he thinks he gets the right from?”

“Well,” she said, reaching for his upper arm. “You are what is reported, you are. ”

“Kitty, why don’t you get some strong tea and have a rest?”

She was willing to do it. He cried after her, “I just tore that bloody rascal Johnny out of the river!”

Going, she murmured, “That’s him. He isn’t frightened of a thing in the known world, the little bugger…”

Now he was able to read the paper himself.

The Rochester accident was then detailed.

“Mr. Timothy Shea, grocer of Belgrave Street, and Mr. Bandy Habash, hawker of West Kempsey, had been alerted to the accident by Lucy Rochester, and had galloped together to O’Riordan’s in Glenrock where they had found… Mr. Bandy Habash has since visited the offices of the Chronicle to praise the behaviour of Mr. Timothy Shea… carried the remains of the unfortunate Mr. Rochester on the back of his horse…”

But it was the front. And Albert’s back visible all the way.

“…to the Macleay District Hospital… took in the two unfortunate orphans until suitable places… Mr. Habash’s account of Mr. Shea’s attempts to revive the unfortunate Mr. Rochester have interested the Secretary of the Macleay Valley Branch of the Royal Humane Society, Mr. E. V. Malcolm, who has forwarded to Sydney a recommendation that Mr. Shea’s acts of courage and generosity be recognised by an award.”

His client, Ernie Malcolm, carried on his fob watch chain the bright medallions of at least a dozen civic bodies: Patriotic Fund, Shipwreck Society, Empire Day Committee, Australian Wesleyan Missionary Society, the Australian National Defence League, the Free Trade Association, the New South Wales Typographical Association, the Christian Endeavour Union, the New South Wales Cricket Association. A correspondent of all of them, a convenor of meetings to assess public interest. On top of that an attender of Masonic meetings at the Good Templars. A life spent all in public, sometimes with lovely, tall, fine-drawn Winnie Malcolm beside him, but frequently not. A woman made for private adoration married to a fellow always on a rostrum or at a committee table.

And cracked about bravery and the Humane Society. Inspector of courage and acts of mercy. He had talked in the past as if he saw the Macleay as some valley of pre-eminent valour. Where that impulse came from Tim couldn’t understand, since he seemed an ordinary fellow, a man designed for homely things. It frightened Tim to be Ernie’s target. It was a sign of the disorder he had sensed as Missy’s slaughterers were led to Central wharf.

After Anniversary Day his dreams grew more arduous, more stubborn. Threw their shadow too into the light of morning. Constant presences: Albert for a bloody but ordinary start. But more, more present was Missy. She had so quietly burrowed into his head, like an Oriental bug one heard of in the Argus , which sent planters in Malaya screaming out into the jungle.

A dream recurred set aboard the Burrawong —a very bright day, and threatening the way Australian brightness can be. An awful quantity of azure and ozone all around this boat which in different years had brought him and Kitty to the Macleay. Tim at the gunwale and the girl, Hanney’s Missy, indefinitely dressed in blackish clothes, approached him and pointed downwards into the water, where a very clearly perceived porpoise was rippling like silk in the water.

She said, “The captain tells me it’s the slops they follow us for. But no. They prefer the company of humans.”

She had some English country accent. That was not unexpected.

Waking, he took account of all the men of the Macleay. Timber-getters and small farmers from far up the river. The sort of places where mountains began to squeeze the valley in. Fellows from Taylor’s Arm, Hickey’s Creek, from Nulla Nulla, Five Day, Stockyard, Kookaburra and Mount Banda Banda. They lived in slab huts. They cut railway sleepers for shipment to Sydney on Burrawong . They brought great thews of cedar to town on jinkers dragged by teams of bullocks. Or else their blackbutt planking, cut to provide the decking of the future Kempsey bridge. Perhaps only once every two or three months did these men come to town to meet a woman.

A usual visit: they would park their drays on the river bank, turn in their orders for bacon, split peas, tea and sugar (and even sometimes soap), and then go to the Commercial or the Royal or Kelty’s and get drunk. Tim would fill their orders, place each one in the appropriate dray, and then late, late at night, when he and Kitty were asleep, the bachelor owners of the drays would come out, haranguing their own phantoms, would generally take the right vehicle, and head off up the river. Out of the dark streets into the sadder darkness of the bush. Sometimes they fell from the wagon and were found the next morning sleeping on some embankment as their horse cropped grass nearby. Sometimes they simply pitched themselves backwards into the tray of the wagon and slept with the reins in their hands. The sober horses knew the way to whatever far-off acreage these fellows were working.

None of these men from the bush, owners of knowledgeable horses, could be imagined as the lover of Hanney’s fine-faced girl. Townsmen though. Some townsman then. Some townsman was it.

One humbler townsman of his acquaintance came to the store at the hottest hour of the afternoon. Wooderson. With whom Tim had shared a dinghy in the great flood, when they were very young and husky.

Wooderson said, “Tim, I read of your heroism. Bloody good!”

The humid air filled up again with this silly, vaporous rumour from bloody Habash.

“It’s all a put-up.”

Big Wooderson laughed. He still worked as a haulier, was easy with life, uninflamed by ambitions. An Australian. Very suntanned and muscular, and his big hands were a map of small, hurtful accidents to do with loading and unloading wagons.