Thomas Keneally - A River Town

“That’s nonsense,” said Tim. Bugger clientele like Ernie!

“Tim, you are a credit to your kind. It is a mark of the new country, where one citizen has as much at stake in the society as the next, that valour should gradually become universal. The point we want to emphasise as the Macleay is spanned later this year. And you have proven the point.”

Tim had taken enough. His son in the river, his wife going to sea, and these further unwelcome accusations of gallantry.

Ernie chose to laugh and to jostle Tim’s shoulder.

“Well, you’re a remarkable fellow, Tim, and I see your gallantry in that vigorous Australian son of yours.”

Then he grew pensive.

“I’ve noted Wooderson’s bravery. There’s a fellow. He’ll be in my correspondence too.”

Ask him about Missy, said an impulse in Tim. If he’s such a letter-writer. So public-spirited. A letter from him on accounting stationery, and the Commissioner would sit up.

But he couldn’t manage it in time. Johnny and other boys ran past and distracted Ernie. He took Tim’s elbow and grew solemn. “Mrs. Malcolm and I cannot achieve any such reflection of ourselves. Problems, you see… This is why I like to think of myself as being related to the entire civis of the Macleay. And, of course, not only the valley. My organisations. These are some of the means by which a life of a childless man is fulfilled, Mr. Shea.”

“And by umpiring cricket matches,” suggested Tim, for the sake of good humour.

“That also,” Mr. Malcolm assented, and as he did so a third wicket fell to the Singles’ rangy fast bowler. Someone brought a cricket pad to Tim.

“Better put that on, Tim.”

Wooderson was out there at the moment. An athlete from his mother’s womb. He traipsed down the wicket to play their slower bowler on the full. Whack! The red pellet came singing like a wasp towards the wives, and there were cries of alarm and then clapping. The little red orb sizzled in amongst the picnic baskets but rolled away into long grass.

“Stroke!” called Ernie Malcolm by way of applause. “How much now, scorer?”

“Wooderson 47 not out, MacKenzie 29 not out. Three wickets for 123.”

Ernie Malcolm whistled. “Fast scoring!”

Tim hadn’t noticed most of Wooderson’s rapid earning of runs.

But then MacKenzie slashed at square leg and Curnow caught him.

“You’re in there, Tim.”

Tim rose, barefoot, a pad on one leg.

“There you go now, Tim,” Kitty whispered. How strange to advance towards the centre of the mown area. A sort of electric otherness to it, of being outside yourself. The kind of actor you were in your dreams of the theatre. Unsure of your lines. MacKenzie coming towards you yields up the bat, its handle clammy. “I went too much for the slash, Tim! Should have been more careful.”

“Here he is!” yelled one of the inner fieldsmen joyfully, as if they expected Tim to be easy game. An edge to what the boy said too. Here comes a tyke, an Irishman, a Papist. No good at honest British games . But Tim decided to be jovial, a mere batsman and not a token of divine debate.

“I want some mullygrubbers, thank you, boys!” he called, to show that he could face his fate with irony. “Right along the ground if you don’t mind.”

His fellow batsman Wooderson came up to Tim’s end of the wicket. “If we can have twenty-five runs from you, then I think it’ll be dead easy. Get ’em well and truly pissed at lunchtime. They won’t see our bowlers on this pitch.”

At the stumps, Tim went through the ritual he’d seen other men engage in at cricket matches, moving his bat about on the crease until the umpire at the bowler’s end assured him that it now covered his middle stump. He settled into a stance copied from cricketers’ pictures in the Sydney Mail . The big dairy farmer-cum-bowler thundered in, and the faces on the fielders became intent, their hands stretched out to take a catch. He thought he saw the ball coming and made a swipe, but there was no connection. The ball went through to the keeper. Some of the fieldsmen whistled to show how close it had been to the wicket. Tim hated that whistle, the idea of his coming victimhood that went with it.

“Watch the bloody thing, Tim,” he told himself aloud.

The big bugger running in again. But on to it this time. Whack! The vibration from the willow bat up into the arms. The ball rising up to the left of him and towards the river. Flying down past mid-bloody-glorious-wicket! Wooderson has already begun running, and Tim starts too. They are co-conspirators as in the flood of ’92.

One of the men who whistled when I missed the last ball is chasing like buggery after it. Yes, turn and run again. Wooderson is. Bloody bindi-eye sticking in my bare foot. Damn the thing. Cast not your seed on barren ground for the tares and thistles will rise up and cripple the Jesus out of you!

The over ended, and he had time to stand by his wicket and feel like a man in possession. What must Kitty think of him? Diving in the river before ten o’clock. Defending his stumps at noon. A gentleman batsman, three not out.

He bent and picked the bindi-eye out of his foot. A small irritant. He hoped that his son the river rat was watching. This was how you behaved. You were nonchalant between threats.

The other bowler now, not as tall as the dairy farmer, came in and bowled to Wooderson, who gave the ball a little nudge into the covers, and the two of them ran one—another bloody bindi-eye in the pad of his foot. Tim facing the bowler again. Medium speed. Oh, he span the ball, but that was all right. Tim could not read fast bowling, but he could read a spinning ball. Again the beautiful contact. In the arms, the sweet echo of a full-bladed hit.

The ball had disappeared around the back of the wicket—to the field position they called deep fine leg. Square leg umpire was signalling four runs. This makes me a bloody citizen, Tim thought. He and Wooderson didn’t even have to move. Dear God, he had the sudden eminence of a man now seven not out. Batting amongst the furtherest English. The English of New South Wales. Batting at their best game. Seven not out!

Next ball he didn’t hit clean. It dribbled off the bat. But Wooderson thought they should run, and so he and Tim were running. One run. And the pressure off him.

Wooderson in command of the bowler, and the bowler seemed to know it and bowl in a defeated way. Way out across the mown grass the red ball flew. One hop, two hops. Into the wilderness. Four more runs. Applaud at your end by knocking the palm of your left hand casually with the bat held in your right.

Another Wooderson slice then. A run in it. The tares and bindi-eyes were a distant rumour in his flesh. He and Wooderson casually crossed in mid-pitch and changed ends. The cavalry of cricket. The mounted bloody bushmen.

A fat young man, Tim noticed, had begun supplying glasses of beer to the outer fringe of fielders. Accepting the amber glasses, the fielders laughed, but each had to put his glass down as Tim knocked the ball off through square leg again. Set the bloody Singles running with froth on their mouths to cut off the ball. A poor throw-back from a beer-blurred Single. He and Wooderson ran three. “Seeing them, Tim!” Wooderson called to him in commendation as they passed each other in the middle of the wicket.

The sun had started to burn his scalp through his flannel hat. The Macleay partook of the same latitude as did parts of Africa, and the sun had an African sort of bite. Tim was delirious for lack of breath. The tall dairy farmer came on and bowled again, but both he and Wooderson had their eye in now and kept cracking him away for runs.

The medium pacer back on, Tim sent the ball off untrammelled and high in the direction of the river.