Thomas Keneally - A River Town

He heard Kitty still laughing. “You’ve got to watch that Mamie. Go through you for a short cut!”

The fact was Mamie already ashore and laughing in Melbourne. The Kenna girls bracketing the great east coast of the continent of Australia with their hectic laughter. It was to be hoped she didn’t laugh too much with some unreliable fellow.

Tim himself had never seen Mrs. Malcolm’s great gold city of Melbourne, except from a distance. He’d had to stay aboard his ship with influenza. Had walked the low foreshores of Fremantle, the ones that made you wonder what you’d let yourself in for. But not Melbourne. Melbourne had this august, distant aura in his mind.

He’d landed in Sydney still fevered and hoped for clerk’s work, but the clerks were out of work here too. So it was the truth: hard times all over the globe. He’d been a little surprised at that. He hadn’t got out of the hard times latitudes. At the Migrant Settlement Office, they were advertising for carters for the Macleay.

Sydney seemed a close, warm, seedy city of rough and casual manners—out of key with his normal way of doing business. But the tone… something in the tone of the place suited him. He would have stayed if the job had been there.

He remembered liking the huge noisy pubs where you could be quiet and unknown, and make a shy friendship with another newcomer and share crumbs of information you had picked up from this landfall.

These days Molly Kenna, the first arriving sister, reverted to form only in Kitty’s company. For example, Tim could hear Kenna laughter surging from the residence as he arrived at the storefront one afternoon after deliveries. He left Pee Dee tethered outside, still in the traces, meditating in his chaff bag, and came in through the store. It was women’s laughter he could hear. Kitty’s ringing in the midst of it.

He went through the store into the residence out the back and came upon the visitors seated at the crowded table set with the Stafford china, a silver cake stand glittering, and the plate with shepherds painted on it laden with shortbread.

First in view, long-faced Old Burke smoking his aromatic and temperamental pipe. Husband of Molly Kenna. He’d come here before Molly was even born. A twenty-year-old timber cutter. There had still been at that time convict shipwrights and labourers working around the river for Enoch Rudder, the town’s founder, a West Country Englishman who’d built small launches and tried everything from maize to vineyards. A long time ago, Burke moved far upriver and selected a little land at Pee Dee. Always a very frugal fellow. A lot of sheep up the river in those days, but the rich pasturage devoted now to cattle. Burke owned steeper slopes too, covered with a bountiful native growth of blackbutt and other hardwoods.

Buying up the land of other small selectors, and fragments here and there of the original land grants to English gentlemen, this canny Antrim labourer had taken on and still possessed the gravity which land gives a person.

At Tim’s dinner table now he was smoking his aromatic pipe, and sat a little separate from his wife, Molly Burke. Molly had acquired the Burke gravity too, though you could see she was letting it slip a bit today. She’d been enough like a Kenna when she’d first arrived on Burrawong and worked in the store. Some of the smaller dairy farmers who were bachelors hung around a lot to joke with her and to be melodiously laughed at.

Old Burke’s daughter Ellen—by his first, deceased wife—sat at the table today too. A tall girl, and would be a big one later in life. Sixteen or was it seventeen years? She had pretty features—Burke’s features in fact transmuted and graced. According to what Kitty said, she had no cross words at all for her stepmother, Molly. Ellen Burke had been one of Mother Imelda’s students too until two years ago. She could play the piano for occasional visitors to Pee Dee—Constable Hanney, Mr. Chance the stock and station agent, Dr. Erson, Father Bruggy. Bandy Habash? Was Bandy allowed into the homestead for recitals?

Tim said, “Hello to all.”

Young Ellen rose and politely laid a place for him at the table, saving pregnant Kitty the trouble.

You could see, despite Molly’s new respectability, the glimmer of a kind of conspiracy between the two sisters. Even Ellen Burke was in it too.

Tim asked the expected questions—why they were in town, how their two-horse cart had stood up to the hilly grades upriver. (Old Burke believed in getting himself to town without spending cash on the Armidale stage.) A good run it seemed to have been for them. Up the first morning before four—Old Burke’s normal rising hour anyhow. First a long day to the pub at Willawarrin where they put up. Then making good time from Willawarrin at dawn to Kempsey late afternoon. Ellen read to them a large part of the way. Charles White’s History of Australian Bushranging . “Lawless rubbish!” said Burke, “and glorified cattle-duffing. But it stimulates the women.”

“We said the Rosary too,” said Molly. “The whole fifteen decades spaced out throughout the day. Made the time pass.”

Following the long river down, the Joyful, Sorrowful and Glorious Mysteries, the incense of those old prayers rising amongst the heathen eucalypts. But they seemed to Tim to be delighted to have made the journey, the Burkes. Old Burke said with lenient disapproval that the women had been after him to come to town for months. But the real reason he was here was to go to court.

He complained sepulchrally, “Bloody man has cattle duffed by some scoundrel, and has to travel two days there and back to give evidence of it.”

“Well,” said Molly, winking across the table, “this is one of those cases where Mohammed has to come to the mountain.”

All the women laughed. They were ready for it.

Working to keep his pipe going, struggling with the damned thing, re-packing it, re-lighting it, strewing his plate with used matches, Old Burke told the story. A dairy farmer called Stevens from Clybucca was found in possession of a heifer bearing Burke’s brand which was a BB. Stevens was a bloody Scot and he might as well have been talking Gaelic for all you could understand him. “But he’s a cute bastard,” Old Burke added.

Tim noticed the women were beginning to clear, a dish of this and a cup of that, and trail out to the kitchen. Soon you could hear them talking out there, saying loud bird-like things. They’d obviously heard enough about Old Burke and Stevens.

“…so when Sergeant Fry asks him why he has my poley heifer in his back paddock, the crafty old bugger says, But I sent seven pounds with Ferguson the bullocky who goes up to Pee Dee for timber. Hasn’t bloody Ferguson given it to Mr. Burke? ”

“My God!” said Tim, sounding appalled because Old Burke wanted him to. “How would a Clybucca dairy farmer be, putting shoes on his children’s feet? What with paying seven quid for one of your heifers?”

“That’s the right bloody question to ask. But you see, under our justice, all stories stand up. But not before a man had to travel two bloody days and put up with that drunken cook at the Willawarrin Hotel on the way through.”

Burke did even further sucking and tending of the pipe. Yet he wasn’t really upset about his journey to town. An old man content with his grievances. He’d be pretty disgusted, of course, if Stevens the dairy farmer got away with his story. He’d be a two-day misery for the women all the way back to Pee Dee.