Thomas Keneally - A River Town

“Well, of course, the depth of your feeling… and a pungent argument you put forward… one which accords with my own. I don’t ask you to act against your principles. I ask you to trip them up in theirs. They are fair enough democratic men in most matters, but in this area of jingoism… well, they seem to believe all the Monarch thinks of is them, here, on the banks of the Macleay. Never mind. You’ll read about the whole pompous affair in the Chronicle . Dealt with according to the lesser Muse of whimsy, the only Muse to give yours truly the time of any day.”

The Offhand grinned, nearly wistful, and got down from his stool, gathering himself for a return to his newspaper. Whereas Tim had the eternal deliveries to do, which were the office of the grocer. The counterpart of milking the cows.

As he crested the top of River Street in West, Constable Hanney was blurred by heat haze. He came from the direction of the upriver settlements, and in the afternoon humidity he and his horse made no show of liveliness.

The dead hour of the afternoon, quarter to three, and every westward blind in River Street drawn against a sun still evilly high above lavender-coloured mountains to the west. Women who came to the back doors to take Tim’s orders, made up to their request, looked stewed and wiped their upper lips with handkerchiefs and asked Tim when it would end, this calm, deadly heat.

Now, at the sight of Hanney, it seemed to Tim that Missy was instantly back with him, standing sideways at Mrs. Catton’s front fence. Her features were more sharply defined in apparition than were Kitty’s and Winnie Malcolm’s in memory.

“Quiet for Jesus’s sake!” said Tim. He made himself appear busy by moving butterboxes around in the back of the dray.

When Hanney drew nearer and clearer, out of the haze, Tim saw that his navy collar was undone. He wore an old pair of white breeches tucked into his boots, and a white pith helmet on his head. The breeches had streaks of reddish dust on them. Work at the washing tub for Mrs. Hanney. He rode a big-bellied police mount, and that implied he had been to the remoter parts, up the Armidale Road, where the hard mountain terraces of the track to New England did lots of damage to carriage work.

Tim finished with the cart and now waited as he had recently waited for Bandy, though this time waving one arm slowly and without the tension of threat. Hanney hardly had to rein in to make the police horse stop.

“Comara, that’s where,” said Hanney out of stubbled jaw and in answer to the question Tim didn’t need to ask. “I’ve been on patrol all the way to bloody Comara.”

“Holy God,” said Tim. Comara more than fifty rough miles up the Macleay. Tim looked at the nearer of the policeman’s big saddlebags. Was she there, enduring her hard journey? And still unnamed?

Hanney said, “Christ, I’m fed up, Tim!” His big rectangular face was pink, and there was a coating of sweat or prickly heat under his chin, and down the V of his unbuttoned shirt. Poor big lump.

Tim said, “You’d think there aren’t many that could possibly know her at a place like Comara.”

“You’d be surprised. Some of the pastoralists’ sons… never fully buttoned up! Some of the pastoralists for that matter… It was thought, too, that maybe she came down the road from Armidale by coach. If someone said, Yes, we saw her stop here then I could send her to Armidale. The blokes up there could have the pleasure…”

He scratched his under-chin and looked so piteous.

“Are you able to drink a beer while in the Queen’s uniform?” asked Tim on a mad impulse. Once he’d uttered the idea, he remembered how Hanney had been unsteady from brandy on the holiday when Bert Rochester died.

“No bugger would mind after the journey I’ve had. I drank my last beer in Willawarrin last night. Dismal little town.”

“I’m at the end of deliveries. I could shout you.”

“You’re a bloody white man, Shea. Make it fast as you can.”

Yet they were a mile from the nearest pub.

“My shout then,” said Tim.

“Thank you, son!”

It was strange though to be exercising the muscles of male joviality. Promising to shout. There was a small social cost in being seen drinking with a policeman. Cattle theft was a regular enterprise of the frequenters of some Kempsey pubs, and they did not like policemen in the bar. But he would not be back there to hear the regulars cry, “Drinking with a trap, Tim?”

Tim went to his cart and turned Pee Dee and it about in River Street’s torpid dust. The tired policeman travelled at his side down the hill. Hope no bugger thinks I’ve been arrested! But the ill-shaven policeman, with his big rectangular face in shadow and hung at an angle which had nothing to do with authority, looked himself under arrest.

The constable said, “I’ve even been to the blacks’ camps at Greenhill and Burnt Bridge. When I took out the flask, the black gins screamed pretty awful and threw up handfuls of dust in the air. An off-chance, of course, them knowing her. But I’ve always found them very honest in that regard. They don’t like to lie about the dead, the dusky brethren.”

“I reckon they know the dead have too much bloody power,” said Tim.

“Jesus! Especially in the form I have to present things.”

The way he shook his head, he looked more defeated than a officer of public order ever should. He showed Missy to black women. Did he show her to any white ones? Kitty hadn’t seen her, Tim was pretty sure.

There was a bakery at the bottom of River Street, and they rode through the pool of fragrance it made as the road turned, copying the bend in the river. Now they were in aptly named Elbow Street, the long low verandah of Kelty’s Hotel could be seen beyond Bryant’s store. It had a reputation as a rough house but no noise escaped today from beneath its low eaves. Everything in sight spoke of eternal life and fixity. Tim was in a mood to like the idea of the world having stopped under the day’s fierce hand. The sun never to go down. The river, set like a pudding in its banks, never to rise. The bread always fragrant. The award for false bravery never given. But then… Missy never named or delivered!

Some cream and butter haulage carts and a scatter of horses were tethered in the street, very still as if to prove the day’s point. Tim let the dismounted Constable Hanney go down the steps to Kelty’s low-slung verandah and so pass into the dark, fuggy warmth of Kelty’s public bar. As the policeman walked he rolled his spine to get the saddle soreness out. A few of the men in the public bar looked up at the strange company that had entered. Tim heard one of them murmur, “Come in, why don’t you bloody well?” Another muttered, “Commercial, bugger it!”

The Commercial in Central was better suited for talk between a constable and a grocer.

At the bar with the travel-dazed constable, Tim ordered two schooners which pale Mrs. Kelty poured, and he and Hanney took them to a table rather than stand at the bar. In one draft, Hanney drank half the schooner down.

“Oh, that’s fine,” he said at the end of the process, his eyes misting with the delight.

In the meantime, Tim found he’d rashly uttered aloud what was meant to be a private surmise. “You haven’t shown the girl to my wife, have you?”

Tim had never asked Kitty straight out. He would have been ashamed to give her a hint of the grasp Missy had on him.

“I don’t show it to respectable women,” said Hanney. “They would not have had contact with her after all. Except the Mulroney woman.”

“But women may have spoken with her.”

Hanney laughed, and wiped his long, doggy face. “Are you a bush lawyer or something, Tim? Let me tell you, whoever I’m looking for as witness is a fellow with a standing prick and no conscience.”