Thomas Keneally - A River Town

“How’s old Corbett?” he would ask of the customers in East, and a number would say, “I hope the old bastard dies!”

Naturally, to make the deliveries, Tim needed to coax Pee Dee onto the punt. If there were other conveyances and horses getting off, Pee Dee would often shy sideways, wilfully feigning fright. Pee Dee really didn’t like it when there were cattle aboard, or when pigs harried him, running between his legs. One day he was going to shy right over the embankment and cover the river banks in sugar, flour, baking soda, oatmeal, tapioca, tea and broken biscuit.

People disembarking from East sometimes cried, “Why don’t you get rid of the old nag, Tim?” It was in a sense a sane question. “Pee Dee’s my bloody horse,” he answered. Part of T. Shea’s terms of trade. Sometimes louts cried that sentence back at him as he and Pee Dee clopped past making the deliveries.

Recently Tim had taken to avoiding embarrassment by waiting with Pee Dee in the butter factory lane, not approaching the ramp to the punt until all the traffic from East had dispersed itself. Then led him down onto the punt apron, hoping he wouldn’t make a display. And so with the stutter of the steam engine, out into the current. No great sea journey, but in Tim’s mind the crossing of water always significant.

Out there today Daley still with him. No apparent ghosts out here on the bright river, but Daley had the lines for the season of Albert’s tragedy:

The sunk pylons for the new Macleay bridge, which would make the punt unnecessary by the start of winter, rose from the green river like columns from a sunk civilisation.

Some time later that day, he was delivering in Rudder Street, East Kempsey, when he saw a covered hawker’s wagon swaying up the road out of the Dock Flat swamp. One of the Habashes. He reined Pee Dee in to the side and got down from the dray. He could see bloody Bandy at the reins of his green wagon all right. Coming back to town after palavering the poor women of Pola Creek.

A bracing anger rose in Tim at the sight of that failed Punjabi jockey. He walked out and waited in the middle of the road. He raised his arms and couldn’t help calling out, “Get round me if you can, you little ruffian!”

Bandy Habash waved joyously at this prospect of reunion. He drew up, and Tim walked to the side of the green wagon with its tin canopy and stared up at him.

“I wanted to know… What in the bloody hell are you doing telling these lies about me?”

Bandy put on a wonderful, melodramatic frown.

“This stuff about Albert is all rubbish and flummery, and it makes me ashamed. What in God’s name were you doing going to Ernie bloody Malcolm?”

“Mr. Shea, after our adventure I was simply full of admiration…”

“What bloody for? Might as well admire a man for making the tea or emptying a jerry. You’ve made a bloody fool of me!”

Tim kicked one of the wheels of the hawker’s wagon.

“My dear old chap, may I get down and talk to you?”

“What do you bloody well think? I’m looking for an explanation.”

Bandy worked himself trimly out of his seat and fell gracefully to the road. Wholly and neatly in front of Tim.

“I watched you in your movements, Mr. Shea. In all respects I thought they were the movements of a hero.”

“I was not anything in my movements. I hung back. You were the person who fixed his horse!”

“I was well-educated in the English language, Mr. Shea. I have read Scott, Dickens and Thackeray, in all of whom such sentiments as I expressed to Mr. Malcolm are common.”

“But I ask you! Why land me, a poor bloody grocer, with this stuff?”

Bandy was abashed. Beyond the theatrical manners, a true bewilderment could be seen. He lowered his head and shook it.

“I was alarmed by what I saw on approaching the place of the accident, Mr. Shea. I would have found it hard to approach such horrifying affairs. Yet I witnessed the heroism of your movements, sir, the decisiveness you showed. This alone made it possible for me to draw near.”

“Bugger it! You were the one who did the real work.”

“Oh, Mr. Tim, my dear chap. We both behaved well to be honest, though I yield first place to you. But do you think Mr. Malcolm would want to write to the Royal Humane Society about a Punjabi hawker? About the courage of a Muslim? To be the first amongst the brave in the Valley of the Macleay? The world would not be interested in my bravery. They want true British grit.”

“Well, Mr. Bandy, I’m an Irishman.”

“Same thing in my book. They are willing to see British grit in your face, you see. We were brave together, Mr. Shea, in the face of the tragedy. But my part could not be pushed forward, so I was more than happy to push forward your part. I know about these things. I don’t complain. But I do know that if you are honoured as you deserve, I am partially honoured too. In your shadow, as they say, old chap.”

Tim could do little more at first than wave his head from side to side. “What sort of plan is this? What bloody sort? A prank? Poking mullock at Ernie and the Turf Club? And me as the bait!”

“No, no, no, no! I am above all an admirer of yours, Mr. Shea, and wish your family well. When I had heard of you from Mrs. Burke at Pee Dee, your sister by marriage, for some reason I thought, I want that good man as a friend in town. And now, as an honoured friend.”

Now that it was all explained Tim in fact felt quite awed by the scale of Bandy’s intentions. His relentless and always denied desire to race his grey at the Warwick Course. So he raced his grey up and down empty streets, a sort of audition for greater things. Showing the indifferent vicinity how worthy his grey was, while the Turf Club committee picnicked on Terara .

Tim had a lurking and undeclared sympathy for such deranged schemes. This one so lunatic, and Bandy deserved to be thumped for it. But it was its scope that slowed you down. Made you understand: this is a really serious little bugger!

Tim said, “I came here to be an ordinary citizen. I’ve seen heroes and don’t like them.”

His Uncle Johnny of Glenlara transported to Western Australia more than thirty years back for being a Fenian organiser in Cork. Did no one good. Made his mother prematurely aged so that the young Tim had to be silent in her presence.

“I came here to be an ordinary citizen,” Tim repeated. “This is all a vanity on Ernie Malcolm’s part.”

Bandy murmured, “Mr. Shea, you cannot expect me, can you, to go to Mr. Malcolm now and tell him I was mistaken. I was not mistaken. You deserve to be considered a true man. Again, Mrs. Burke tells me you are a giver of alms and feed half the valley. I as your friend would like you to be publicly acclaimed.”

Since all this smelt of excess, Tim—in protest and not without fear—took hold of the lapel of Bandy’s coat.

“Listen, you’re using the wrong bloody methods, my dear Indian friend. I am not here to be the sort of feller that suits you. I have a hard time enough being the sort of feller that suits me.”

“But I know, Mr. Shea, that what I’ve done doesn’t displease your charming wife.”

“What do you know about Kitty?”

“I came to the store two nights past. I saw Mrs. Shea. She said to me that it was grand for you to be praised like this, and thanked me for bringing it to the notice of the public. Look for wisdom to the women. For they know all our faces, don’t they? The face of the hero. The face of the coward as well. The face of the brute and the face of the beloved.”

So how to work up a consuming rage when even now, with Bandy intruding on the question of Kitty, he had to strain to achieve it. What he really felt was fear. Fear of being dragged down and marred by this little hawker’s efforts to exalt him.