Thomas Keneally - A River Town

“You know, I think it might be the humidity,” Tim suggested. “The closer you get to the tropics, the more irregular personal behaviour grows.”

That was scientific fact as reported in all the papers. The Argus and Chronicle agreed on that one.

“Yes,” she agreed. “Humidity is a great ally of barbarism.”

“You agree with me all the way and in each bloody particular, Mr. Shea, don’t you?” Kitty later mocked. He needed to be grateful she found his conversations with Mrs. Malcolm more a cause for poking fun than the other, the jealous stuff.

He found out a little more about Mrs. Malcolm at each visit. “It’s so pleasant to find a storekeeper who can carry a proper conversation, Mr. Shea,” she told him once, and he felt his face blaze with the compliment. And in the course of conversations, it came out that she was an only child and that her father had been an umbrella manufacturer and an alderman of Brighton Council, a municipality of the city of Melbourne. She had grown up in the shadow of a public-spirited man, and perhaps that was why she’d taken to Ernie.

Her favourite poem, she said, was Tennyson’s grand In Memoriam .

She looked down from the tenebral heights of In Memoriam at the efforts of the men Tim liked—Henry Lawson, the revolutionary of the Bulletin , and Victor Daley of both the Bulletin and the Freeman’s Journal . The greater of these being Victor.

But today at Albert’s grave, her face bleared and all at once giving itself up to puffiness, she didn’t look like a Tennyson woman. It made you wonder, was she really well?

The filling in began. One of the diggers was Causley, who’d had all his money invested in a cream-separating business. Everything lost when the small patented separating machines every farmer could own had come in. Reduced now to restoring earth to Albert Rochester’s grave.

By the cemetery gate Mr. Fyser bade Mrs. Sutter and the children good-bye. Constable Hanney waited by his sulky. Dear God, if Mrs. Malcolm hadn’t seen it, let him not spring that thing on her. She and Ernie had caught up with Tim now and she uttered a liquid, “Mr. Shea,” and passed on. Ernie himself stopped.

“Well,” said Mr. Malcolm rubbing his jawline. “Some things even valour can’t attend to. I salute you though, Mr. Shea.”

“For dear God’s sake, don’t do that,” said Tim.

Tim couldn’t be too raw though in his methods of telling Malcolm to give away the idea of heroic rescue. Malcolm was a customer, even if he did have three months’ terms, and had normally to be spoken to gently. But this fiction of bravery had to be trampled on.

“You might as well give Bandy a medal,” Tim said.

Ernie began fanning himself with his hat. “Him? Sooner decorate the bloody Mahdi for killing General Gordon!”

“Then reward neither of us.”

“Imagine this, Tim. The opening of the bridge, Central to East. Imagine a line of men, women, even children, receiving medals and certificates for valour. Young Shaw who lifted a fallen tree from his uncle’s leg and carried him sixteen miles to rescue. Tessie Venables who rescued a grown youth from the surf at South West Rocks. Yourself. With yourself, Tim, we begin to get an array of appropriate acts of gallantry. I see you standing at the mouth of the bridge, at the mouth of a new century. Standing for our community.”

You also see yourself, Tim might have said if he didn’t fear losing Malcolm as a customer, as commanding officer of the brave. You see your words reproduced in the Sydney Morning Herald . Mr. Malcolm, accountant, brave by association, and quoted verbatim.

Ernie said, “I have been waiting some time for the third appropriate act to report to the main committee in Sydney. With proper respect, Tim, I can identify it when I see it. Mr. Habash tells me that you were endless in your attempts at resuscitation, even though poor Albert had become a thing of revulsion.”

Ahead of them, in the street, Winnie Malcolm had baulked by the stirrup-step up to her sulky, as if the idea of the climb was too much to be faced. Then, shakily, she tried it. One of her less graceful ascents. If Malcolm hadn’t been a customer, he might have said, “Why don’t you be brave yourself and go and look after your wife?”

“It is a time in the Empire’s history,” Malcolm—with something almost like desperation—confided in him, “when in each community an exemplar, a paladin, is very much looked for.” He rubbed some sweat into his upper lip. “I know you agree.”

At least, Tim noticed, Hanney had untethered the police horse and sulky and trotted away on his sombre business.

Tim put a restraining hand on Malcolm’s arm. That was what he had been driven to.

“Please,” he said. “Please, Ernie. We are all being made a mockery of by that dark little jockey, Habash. Please.”

Stepping back, Ernie looked up at the great sky.

“Tim, what do we have in this world to go on except the accounts of witnesses? The British army itself…”

“But they don’t listen to just one unreliable bugger of a hawker.”

“Ah, you’re a bloody Jesuit, aren’t you, Tim? I spoke to the child too at the convent. And to the duty sister at the hospital up there.”

“No, look! Any fool could carry a poor dead bastard to hospital. It wasn’t a rush to mercy, Ernie. He was past mercy.”

Ernie laughed again. “I hope to Jesus you make a better speech than that when they give you the medal and make us in the Macleay famous.”

Make Ernie famous, that meant.

Now Mrs. Malcolm sat uncertain in the sulky, shoulder turned, considering her situation. As if Ernie could see what Tim was seeing he now remembered his wife. “Must go, Tim,” he said, making a chastened face.

Mrs. Sutter walked up holding Hector’s hand and accompanied by Lucy. “Thank you for coming, Mr. Shea. I take it you’ll drop Lucy back at the convent.”

“I have a business you know, Mrs. Sutter,” he said. Then for Lucy’s sake repented. It did not cause even a shadow on Lucy’s sharp little face. But for fatal tact he’d say, share the cost of her schooling, you miserable old jade! Or at least buy all your stores from me.

“I have the care of five children,” she said. “I know you understand.”

Her children by the late Mr. Sutter were playing loudly amongst the graves, clutching at broken columns, grazing their fingers in the apertures of Celtic crosses.

“I suppose I must understand.” He cupped a hand around Lucy’s head. “My wife and I… I ought to tell you… are very fond of Lucy. She plays well with our children and gives us no problem.”

“I’m very pleased.”

Yet she seemed barely tolerant as Lucy and Hector made their farewells. Dawn milkings and hardships had consumed the childhoods of Albert’s boy and girl. They were like an aged sister caressing an aged brother.

In his pocket he had a chocolate for Lucy, especially for the post-burial, to distract her from the knowledge of Mrs. Sutter’s disregard of her, and of his own neglect as well. The heat had softened it in its silver wrapping.

He gave it to her as they sat on the board of the dray. “Keep it till the cool of evening, Lucy,” he told her. “It will get more solid then.”

She said, “We have Benediction tonight.”

“But you as a Protestant don’t need to go.”

“I like it. Sometimes I see papa’s face there.”

In the great gilt orb of the monstrance the priest lifted.

Tim had some customers across the river, in East. People who’d fallen out with the storekeeper Corbett there, an argumentative Orangeman and high pricer. A number took the trouble to come across to Central in the punt, to buy from T. Shea—General Store. Or children would come over on Mondays or Tuesdays with their mothers’ requirements written on notes in their hands, spend a while playing with Johnny and Annie, tending to end up messing about in the river with Johnny, while Annie sat barefoot at the very edge, plying the rich silt with her fingers. He hoped Johnny wouldn’t put his customers’ children, who were often blackguards themselves, in any harm.