Thomas Keneally - A River Town

Tim lay back on the utterly comfortable earth now of New South Wales. People drifted away from him, as if from a kind of respect. He felt very much at one with this ground, with the way it harboured him beneath branches.

“There’s been surprises, eh?” he heard Kitty say, the words trailing over his face like fingers. “But it’s sweet here. Take a rest, Mr. Shea.”

He drowsed. Of course, he’d made a fool of himself and been punished for inaction by Missy. Yet under the sun, she receded from his mind now. The whole farce of it, her face jumping out at him from a usual photo. But chastised now, he could have a licensed break in the shade. His wife beside him, hands folded, in a canvas chair she’d dragged over for the sake of being near.

Jesus, he and Kitty would rest here in the absolute end as well. This fact struck him for the first intimate time. No going back to reclaim soggier ground in Duhallow. This was the earth which would take them. And they would feed this ground. He lay close down to it, and it seemed to him to yield slightly as if it were in on the realisation too.

“Mother of God,” Kitty told him after a time. “They are having a tossing-the-ball-at-the-stumps contest out there. And that bloody scamp Johnny’s involved. Crikey, he has an arm on him! Where did he get that from?”

And she recounted to him as it happened, how their son kept hitting the wicket from all angles and from thirty yards out, then forty yards out. The men were whistling Johnny for his sure eye. He and some great lump of a farmer were left in the contest at the end, and the farmer won. But it seemed to Tim that Johnny had made a claim on things, on Australia itself, with his true eye. As he himself now made the same claim by his tranquil lying-down, his New South Wales holiday in the shade.

“Couldn’t you just see him playing the toff’s game? That Johnny. Wearing creams. You know, I won’t be going on Burrawong unless you’re well.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, woman. Of course I’m bloody well, and you’ll travel saloon. And your sister too.”

Mamie Kenna travelling saloon. Poshly into the valley of plenty.

YOU WOULD THINK a fellow’s reputation as a cricketer would pause the pace of the world for him for at least a few weeks. But it wasn’t so, and he knew it wouldn’t be either. The question of attending the loyal meeting to do with Macleay lancers or bush battalions had had a certain light thrown on it by the mail arrived from Burrawong . Amongst a shovelful of accounts and catalogues, a letter written the previous November by his father, Jeremiah.

Tim was still pensive from the seizure he’d taken at the cricket, and was fit to receive the patriarchal letter. Distance too, of course, gave it more force, and Jeremiah wrote with such graciousness as well. Famous for it in his locality and amongst his family.

We have got photos, how lovely, how grand. You appear thin, but apparently in good health, and all the connoisseurs of beauty and taste to have the privilege of seeing your amiable wife’s photo pronounce her as being far in excellence as could scarcely be seen. On that subject there is a deed of separation. I fear an eternal decree that during my life I shall never again see you or any of my exiled children—which is painful to endure on your part and on ours.

In the meantime, it is pleasing to hear and know that your brothers and sisters are well. We have lately heard from them one and all, particularly from the New York contingent with encouraging prospects. May God continue His Graces to us all.

The mere fact of the photos so joyfully received was near putting out of my mind thanks for the two sovereigns so gratefully received last August. And though much money may be valued, the photos far exceed as an endearing, everlasting memorial. What would I give if I could only gaze on your lovely wife and children for one moment.

Thanks for the two sovereigns so gratefully received .

Tim was all at once turned into a staid citizen by a sentence like that. If ruined, he could always go back to hauling to support Kitty and the children. But then where would the two sovereigns so gratefully received be found? On top of the fifty bob he was paying Imelda for the child?

So where was the harm in a man turning his face for a second towards the oratory of such city fathers as Baylor and Chance, Good Templars and patriots to something or other?

In the same batch of letters, one from Truscott and Lowe saying how much they had valued his custom, but that his account with them was in arrears by in excess of seventeen pounds. From the cash box in the store, he had perhaps enough to send them a soothing tenner, and ask them to bear with him two weeks for the rest. But keep enough to hold off his other chief supplier, Staines and Gould. If people like Imelda paid an occasional token and the Malcolms and others paid two monthly instead of three, he could meet Truscott and Lowe’s account in full. He would need to go out to rattle the tin at his customers.

Kitty of course found and read the Truscott and Lowe account. Other men were able to sequester that sort of correspondence from their wives. No bloody chance with Kitty.

And government interference in the business of keeping a store! NOTICE TO STOREKEEPERS ran in all the papers. Trading hours to be enforced by exemplary fines. Selling after six o’clock: fifteen pounds! The government of New South Wales trying to keep people off the streets after dark. Don’t put troops on the corners—that didn’t suit the temper of Australian life. But close the shops and fine the poor shopkeepers.

In any case, in this complicated world, he resolved he would go to the Patriotic Fund meeting for safety’s sake, just to observe. The Offhand would be surprised when he appeared. But the fact was there was no reason, in a land where he had considerable freedoms, why a fellow like him couldn’t attach himself to the same drama as true Britons like Chance. To feel for a short time right in with the drama—the grieving loss of a glaring battle here and there. The joyous winning of trudging wars.

The afternoon of the meeting, back from deliveries, he saw Hanney just sitting a horse outside the Commercial Hotel.

In the back, releasing Pee Dee from the traces and taking him into his pasture, he saw his four-year-old daughter Annie rise in a white pinafore of sacking from where she was sitting on the back step, and come with her hand out to fetch him. Her solidly composed face looked as though she had a complaint. He could hear Kitty singing in the dining room.

He could tell that Annie, who got her air of reserve from him, thought that singing immoderate. A rough but resonant voice. Girlish in some of its register, full and mature in others. The voice of someone from a comic variety show.

In wonder at what he might find, he led the child inside. She was clinging though. So in they went. Observing herself in a handheld mirror, Kitty stood by the sand-soaped table, swathed in yellow cloth. It ran crookedly around her legs, her hips, her upper body, and made a cowl over her head. She looked splendid but alien, like an Indian, or the women he had seen in Colombo when coming out on the SS Ayrshire .

“Oh, Tim,” she said lightly.

“What are you doing in that bloody cloth?” he asked, trying to sound half-amused. “Where did you get it?”