Thomas Keneally - A River Town

“Oh God!” she said. “Did you give him drink?”

Laden with the constable’s enormous weight, Tim could barely get an answer together before she said, “Every damned fool knows he can’t take drink. Hell and damnation, who are you? You’re that grocer, aren’t you?”

“I met your husband on the edge of town. Coming back from Comara. Pretty down, missus. Pretty thirsty.”

“Everyone knows it!” she accused Tim again.

“Missus, I didn’t know. It’s not written up in Chambers’ Encyclopedia. ”

She had picked up a broom from inside the door. It was possible she intended an attack.

“No, but it’s written on his forehead, isn’t it? You can all bloody tell. He’s a butt. Sergeant Fry sends him around with a head in a bottle. Damned great laugh! And you get him drunk pretty cheaply and drop him back so I have to tidy up his misery.”

“Madame, I’m not in a plot with anyone. I don’t know Sergeant Fry. Could I lay your husband down somewhere?”

Mrs. Hanney squeezed her eyes shut and raised her face, complaining to the eaves.

“I have no life. I have no damned life. All right. Bring him in.”

But at least she put the broom down. It proved nearly impossible to get big Hanney up the steps. Mrs. Hanney had to help in the end. Struggling with the bulky policeman, Tim wondered would either of them have it in for him over this. Want his head. Forevermore.

ON SUNDAYS when Tim had her home for dinner, Lucy Rochester ate it with the rest of them in the silence Tim required. The same silence which had been ordained by his father at table in Glenlara, a townland of Newmarket, County Cork, in Munster of the kings and the Kingdom of Ireland. A fellow of standards. Dear Jerry Shea.

But it seemed that behind the august silence of Sunday dinner, Lucy kept an extra, secretive silence of her own. He would have liked her to say she liked life in boarding school, or even to weep and beg him to get her out. She seemed cautious to give him neither one version nor the other.

Comfort could be taken from observing little Annie, who examined gristle in her fingers exactly like a scientist making up a picture in his head of a whole beast out of one of the fragments. Silence suited Annie’s style. Early in courtship he’d told Kitty he preferred silent tables, their ceremony. That was fine by her though it hadn’t been the way things were done at Red Kenna’s. She’d travelled fourteen thousand miles on the White Star Line from Red’s disordered board to the Shea Sunday table in the Macleay. Jeremiah Shea’s little triumph at the limits of the Empire was the silence maintained here in the shop residence.

A penny chocolate for all hands at the end of the meal. By these normal exercises he kept at length an idea which plagued him by night: that he should perhaps for Missy’s sake press sergeants and commissioners to put her into the hands of someone of greater strength of spirit than Constable Hanney.

He greased the axle on Sunday afternoons, a soothing Sabbath task. Meanwhile the river drew the children. He kept an eye on them. They would be no more than poor bloody little leaves on the surface of its powerful charm. One time, looking up, he saw Lucy and Annie and Johnny all together in a rowing boat. How had the little buggers managed that? A silent plan carried out between them. Lucy on one oar, Johnny on the other, an uneven match. Tim heard Annie begin shrilling with fright or pleasure, you couldn’t tell which. Saw the boat swirling in a lazy current, downriver towards the great black pylons of the still largely imaginary, unbuilt bridge.

“Bring that bloody thing back in here!” Tim yelled.

The girls would float in their pinafores. Flapping their hands. But it would be Lucy who would come to shore, and Annie’s sedate spirit that would be likely to sink.

Kitty was lax about the river, philosophic, leaving the children to luck. To the Angel of God. My guardian dear, to whom God’s care commits me here, ever this day be up to my side to light and guard, to rule and guide. Amen. A more regular kick in the ass for Johnny was certainly called for, yet his puzzled, animal watchfulness turned away wrath.

The children got the oars working together and brought the boat back to the river bank. Lucy piggy-backing Annie ashore.

And after Lucy had been taken back to the care of the Mercy nuns, Annie says, when she’s in her night dress and he is about to read to her from her Funny Picture Book , “Lucy pulls the bung out from the boat.”

“What?”

“Lucy lets the water in the boat. That’s why I screamed Papa !”

“Well, don’t you go into the boat with her.”

He would discuss this with Kitty except she would take it as a final reason to limit Lucy to the boarding school and not let her into the house. Bung-pulling would go to warrant the lack of room for the orphan in the shop residence. Tim in the storeroom later in the week when the postmaster’s son turned up on a bicycle and rang the bell on the counter. Tim came out from making up the orders, from that lovely odour of kerosene and shortbread, candles and tea-leaves, and saw the peculiar envelope in the boy’s hand.

“Is that a telegram there?” asked Tim. It evoked the first one he’d ever encountered, the one which said REGRET NOT ARRIVING BY SS PERSIC IN VIEW MARRIAGE OF SISTER STOP TRAVELLING NEXT MONTH BY SS RUNIC .

“For Mrs. Kitty Shea,” said the boy.

Characteristic: Kitty a casual client of the wonders of the age.

“Would you sign my book?”

Tim did. He found Kitty at the dining room table drinking tea with one hand and feeling her back with the other. Such a squat frame to take the full weight of maternity, to carry a reasonably tall fellow’s children.

It struck him as he handed it over: Could it be something dismal about Red Kenna or her mother? But somehow he could not envisage even one of those wild children rushing into Doneraile to a telegraph office, instead of writing a more kindly letter. Rowdy at table, yes, yet they liked to talk and explain at length. So they would have thought of sea mail as the proper organ for sad, detailed news. He hoped he could swear to that.

“Have you ever received a telegram before?” he asked as cheerily as he could. “You’ve got one today, Mrs. Kitty Shea.”

She was eager at once. “Wouldn’t it astound you?” she murmured.

When she had it in her hands and had opened and begun to read it, she broke out in laughter. Her laugh delightful to him; unless directed to someone like Bandy Habash, or joined in with the relentless chorus of her loud family.

“Isn’t this Mamie to the nearest square inch? It’s from a ship at sea. Who’d think of sending a cable from a ship at sea? She must have been drinking.”

Kitty stood up to read it. “ARRIVE MELBOURNE TUESDAY 10TH—Holy God, that’s just tomorrow! STAYING WITH MAGS PHELAN MIGRANT WOMENS HOSTEL ONE WEEK EMBARK SS IRIS TO SYDNEY ON TUESDAY 18 EXCITED SISTERLY LOVE—MAMIE.”

When she’d finished reading, Kitty’s breath escaped her. “Oh huh!” She sat down at the table, and began to laugh again. “Of all the people you’d pick as likely to send cables from a ship at sea!”

He smiled too, but was thinking with a new clarity, my God another one of them. One more robust woman to feed. As long as the two Kenna boys didn’t decide to come. Powerful, little mottled men with gappy smiles. Devout drinkers like their father. Although the bush, the reaches of Euroka and Toorooka, would in the end absorb their rowdiness.