Thomas Keneally - A River Town

“Albert Rochester,” Fyser told the mourners, “was a member of the brethren of this church. He was as sober and restrained in his habits as one could wish. Dead cruelly and at a younger age than he should have been. But look at the children, brother and sister, from Summer Island who were buried late last year. Wounded by prongs of the same rake, both succumbing to lockjaw. The young Queenslanders whose deaths were reported in yesterday’s Argus . Fighting the Boer in a far place. How can we face these mysteries? The ant looks up from his antheap and sees man and thinks, that must be God. But God is larger and larger by far, and his purposes larger and larger by far. Better to ask of a bucket that it contain the huge Pacific Ocean than to ask the human mind that it contain the extent of God’s purpose. To one single part of that purpose have we been made privy. Redemption. The consciousness of having been saved, as Albert Rochester opened himself to his Saviour and was numbered amongst the saved…”

Tim felt a hand on his shoulder. A large one. Hanney was there, in uniform, expressing his reverence. For the corpse and—bloody hell—for Tim himself. Hanney murmured, “Did all you could, old feller.”

Carr the undertaker’s men carried Albert Rochester out and placed him in the black lacquered hearse with its black plumes and two fat white horses. Albert had, of course, never travelled so plushly between Glenrock and town.

A long way to the cemetery in West where the grave of Lucy’s and Hector’s mother was located. Tim chose not to be part of the procession for fear people would point to him as well as at the hearse and shame him by nodding in approval that he should be there. He crossed back to town on an earlier punt than the one the hearse caught and called instead into the store, did brief business, then made his own way to the grave, arriving as the hearse did.

From here you could look across the river to the far mudflats of Euroka and Dongdingalong, where families maintained their hopeful ways growing maize and milking dairy cattle. And then the mountains, which sent a thundershower every summer afternoon, and from which those others of his customers dragged down the great stalks of cedar. Geography of the sweet world seen from a graveside. It looked a world sufficient to itself. Why did it need all its feverishness about Boers and Empire, the threat of Papism, the fear of the Jewish financiers who held the Queen’s son in their thrall? Why the bloody need to raise lancers or hussars or mounted rifles? Albert Rochester had joined the real regiment. The army that had the numbers.

Mrs. Malcolm, Tennyson lover, looked down on Victor Daley, a Sydney poet Tim loved. Daley wrote an incomparable elegy to humankind. A sensible Australian name to it too. The Woman at the Wash Tub , old Victor’s best. He had learnt it by heart for the unlikely eventuality of having to recite. As he did now for funerary purposes to himself, while Carr’s men stumbled across the hill with Albert’s plain coffin.

“I saw a line with banners,” Tim grumbled into his moustache,

In the approaching group, it was Lucy who seemed to be fitted more as the eternal washer, the cleaner-up of disaster. More than wary Mrs. Sutter, who looked cautious, shying clear of such a comprehensive role.

Prayers had begun when a sulky pulled up and two people got down from it. Late comers for Albert. Ernie Malcolm and Mrs. Malcolm. Getting down from her seat, Winnie Malcolm looked unfamiliar, at odds with what he knew of her. She looked flushed and bleared. She was a being of air. Earth had now somehow entered her long, luscious bones.

Ernie Malcolm guided her over uneven ground amongst the gravestones. The broken columns which were popular and one of Des Kerridge’s, the stonemason’s, standard items.

And Kerridge did the things suitable for Tim’s clan too. Celtic crosses. They and broken columns covered most needs.

Victor Daley again, Australian poet. The vanity of that. Of being Mrs. Malcolm’s grocer, secretly harbouring verses by the Bard of Enfield, that suburb in the west of Sydney which Daley honoured by living there. But the pleasure and savour of all this now overshadowed and reduced by the poor appearance of Winnie. Fair play, how bleared and uncertain she was. On the plainest level, that bloody public buffoon Ernie had privately upset her. Or something had. Didn’t Hanney say he wasn’t showing Missy to townswomen? Not that. Just loutish unworthy Ernie. Jesus Almighty Christ!

The Malcolms stood behind a mound of grave dirt and were dressed very well for Albert’s funeral. He had a black tie around his stand-up collar, and she was in bombazine so lustrously black that it seemed to attract flies. Within the cloth her body like that of nuns and other goddesses would be pink with the heat. But she had always dressed formally. Her Melbourne origins.

Ernie Malcolm nodded to Tim and then composed himself to listen to Mr. Fyser’s burial prayers.

They were quickly done, and Hector’s hand was contained by Lucy’s as Albert made his eternal descent. Tim prayed his pagan Ave within sight of Mr. Fyser, an heretical utterance for the repose of Bert who, according to Fyser, was already in the Kingdom anyhow. As the coffin hit the bottom of the pit, Tim betrayed himself with the sign of the cross. Mr. Fyser observed him coolly. As an insult did it rank beside what the pigs had done?

Mrs. Sutter now encouraged the two children forward, and Lucy, demonstrating for her brother what should be done, picked up a red clod and threw it in. Hector did it then, reaching over the hole with the dirt held between his thumb and forefinger. Farewell, chieftain and father. Fountain of kindnesses, maker of chastisements. In Mr. Fyser’s presence, the chance of an ecstatic reunion of the Rochesters at some redeemed date didn’t quite seem a starter.

Mrs. Malcolm looked out at the children with ponderous and darkly plush reflection from beneath her lashes. She was still concerned with whatever grief had delayed Ernie and herself. No children of her own, though Ernie looked like a lusty bugger.

Hector raised his arm and said aloud, “Heaven, heaven.” Lucy re-gathered his hand, pulling him back into the ranks of the Sutter children. Maybe to ensure there was still a place for him there. Tim himself couldn’t refrain from looking regularly at unquiet Mrs. Malcolm. Images of consoling her too readily came to mind.

One Friday afternoon she had asked him where he had come from, and he had told her. And yourself, Mrs. Malcolm? he’d asked. Melbourne born-and-bred, she’d told him, with that robust pride which typified Melbourne people. “It’s a far more refined city than Sydney, isn’t it?” she enquired of him. “If you wanted a city to represent young Australia before the world, Melbourne would be the one, Mr. Shea, wouldn’t it? Sydney’s so rough at the edges. When you land at Darling Harbour, you take your life in your hands getting to the Hotel Australia. And a cab’s the only form of transport open to you. Even the tram conductors are rough and ready and likely to swear. And there’s far too much of the spirit of Sydney in the Macleay, isn’t there?”

There were lots of Isn’t-its and Wouldn’t-its in Mrs. Malcolm’s charming discourse.