Thomas Keneally - A River Town

There was further flutter of activity below. Horses were mixed up in it, and stupid Imelda cried, “Mr. Shea. Save yourself!” Smoky air passed in front of his eyes. Had the tower itself caught alight? One of his feet had slithered away from the diagonal. An awful shin-whack pain in that leg! He fell now and was full of terror for the instant that lasted. The thunder of the ground, punishing him on the soles of the feet. The bastinado punishment, up through the soles.

“Oh Mother,” he said, lying on his side and gulping with pain. Nuns were touching his legs in a spirit of medical experiment.

It turned out it had been another of Imelda’s inexact meanings, like parchment . In calling, “Save yourself!” she had meant Save yourself the trouble . When he could make sense of things again, he could see she had been informing him that Mr. Crane and his big boy Arnold had ridden up to the gate on the fire engine behind its two old draught horses. He had heard it as a warning though, and it had knocked one of his legs from beneath him.

A youngish nun, the Waterford one, had already begun bandaging his swollen ankle, and the pressure of the bandage was the clearest thing he felt. A second nun brought him fully to his senses by pouring iodine on his right shin below the torn and rucked-up trouser leg. Mr. Crane and his son had the extension ladder up to the top of the tower, and big Arnold was coming down first with Lucy reserved in his arms. Ladies first, as if she did not have Johnny by the scruff of his bloody will. Mr. Crane at the base of the ladder was calling out counsels at Johnny. “Stay up there, sonny!” And then under his breath, “You little bastard.”

Arnold was more lenient and brought Johnny down on his shoulders. Through the mist of all his astringent pain, Tim doubted whether this tribute to Johnny’s manliness was a wise gesture.

Meanwhile Imelda rapped Lucy once across the upper arm with her cane. Immediately a few tears fell down Lucy’s face. They weren’t passionate. The jolt of the cane had shaken them out.

“Go to the dormitory and sit on your bed, miss,” Imelda told her.

“Come here!” Tim called as she went off with that deliberateness so dreadful to find in a child.

The little girl turned and walked across, carrying her scatter of tears.

“Tell me, Lucy, what do you want done that hasn’t been? I asked you before and now have to ask again. Why do you make my son do these things?”

He knew how silly the question was. Adults always ask these questions of children who would not give the answer for another twenty or thirty years. But this particular trick of muteness could drive an adult to blows. And he could feel the blows rising in him.

She looked at him directly and he saw what she was watching in him: that he could support the idea of her falling, but not the idea of Johnny’s plummet. She lacked someone to fear her fall more than his own death. That level stare. She forgave him, she was philosophic. But she knew.

“We thought we could see everything from the top,” she told him. “Johnny’s mother down the river.”

“No. No, it’s not high enough. You must know there’s no place on earth from which you can see all the rest. There’s no height you can get to.”

She bunched her eyes. Another tear emerged under this pressure. “I know.”

“What do you want? I can’t do more.”

She said nothing.

“If you behave like this just once again,” he said, “I will let go of you for good, Lucy. I swear to Jesus! But if you stop being a mad child, I’ll keep you here and take you to Crescent Head for picnics.”

Arnold Crane delivered Johnny now to the base of the tower. Imelda began scourging him with her birch.

“No!” called Tim. “No! Send him to me.”

Imelda stopped lashing and pointed the boy towards his prone father. The boy, too, had a few stained droplets on his cheeks. They meant nothing under this sun.

“I am suspending your education, you bloody ruffian. You have half killed me. Get the Sisters’ boxes out of the cart and take them to the kitchen. I’m too crippled myself.”

So here he was, lamed, reaching up to cuff the boy behind the ear and point him to where Pee Dee stood, tethered to the fence, trying to back away nonetheless from the placid old plough horses who pulled the fire wagon.

“Give Pee Dee a whack for me too and tell him to behave!” Tim roared after the boy.

Two of the nuns were ushering children back towards the classrooms beneath the Celtic cross which stood at the apex of St. Joseph’s school hall. The young Waterford nun had finished binding up Tim’s ankle and was struggling to rise within the great black folds of her habit. A dark, sweat-drenched furze on her upper lip. A plain young woman but beautiful in her own way.

“Can you get up under your own steam now, Mr. Shea?” she asked.

Tim rolled onto his good leg and forced himself upright with his palm. She was by his left elbow, assisting. He put his weight on his bound foot but, of course, it would not take it.

“You may need crutches then,” the consecrated Waterford woman told him.

“I have a blackthorn at home,” he told her.

From the direction of the cart came Johnny labouring under a butterbox but doing fairly well. A number of older and larger boys had joined in to help him carry things. You had to admire the little blackguard. As long as Mad Lucy let him live.

Imelda herself struggled over to ask how he was, and without ceremony he said, “You might remember, Mother. I asked you to keep them apart.”

Imelda angry to be spoken to so outright in front of one of her nuns. “Well, we are not God Himself, Mr. Shea,” she told him. “We cannot enquire into each one of their seconds. We do our best. I now see what you mean. But I would tell you that there is mischief in the boy too. Children don’t have to talk to each other to make up some mad plan. They do things. It is called Original Sin. But their Guardian Angels were with them today.”

He looked at the boxes of groceries making for the convent kitchen on the shoulders of boys large and small. “I thought that was what I was paying you one and threepence a week for. So that Guardian Angels would be saved the trouble.”

She turned away, stung. Yet they always had an answer these women!

After some dawdling children went Imelda, thrashing the air with her cane. The flail of the cane, the rattle of her Rosary. The invisible ministers, the seraphim, the Guardian Angels were taking a bloody thrashing!

Through all this morning’s adventure, while climbing the hard, painted diagonals of the timbers with splayed feet, he’d had it in mind.

“Sister,” he asked the Waterford nun. “Have you heard of the young woman who died at Mulroney’s?”

“Yes, I have, Mr. Shea.”

“Do you think it proper to pray for the repose of her soul?”

The questioning made the young nun nervous. She showed it by being brusque.

“I do. We are all sisters, Mr. Shea.”

“Very good. Now do you think there is any way her soul is running amok? In what we see here. The children run wild.”

“No. I certainly don’t believe that. That’s theologically unsound, Mr. Shea.”

But you could tell she knew about visitations and was as fearful now as if she’d had one, had seen Missy inhabiting fiery ground or glittering sea.

“I am cursed with dreams,” said Tim.

“All human beings are, in this vale of tears,” said the nun. But now she was all business again. “You should wear a scapular for the proper protection, Mr. Shea. We must be on our guard against superstitious belief. Now come and have some tea like a good fellow.”

At that moment Johnny was back in Tim’s vicinity, standing some paces away. His deliveries done.