Thomas Keneally - A River Town

“I have a number of outstandings. I will send Joe O’Neill out to ask for them. It should be a change for our customers and a good introduction to Australia for Joe.”

“Go yourself. Joe’s no persuader, for God’s sake.”

The notice of meeting at the Good Templars stood over him and the anger of Ernie bloody Malcolm. Too complicated to recount. He felt the weight of his unutterable fragility as he stood in the doorway, halfway between his store and his home fire.

“If you leave this bill another month,” said practical Kitty, “they’ll send the bailiffs.”

“I know, I know,” he told her. He wished between partners in life there could be an instant passage of mind, so that all the threatening news received in her absence could be in a second transferred to her. It was not totally deceit that made him a liar, it was the difficulty of exact translation.

“Do you think Joe O’Neill will take Mamie off our hands soon?”

“You’re very quick to get rid of my sister.”

“No. Your sister is very welcome. It just seemed…”

“My sister will never attach herself to a wet item like Joey O’Neill. Why do you think she’s in the front of the store? She’s hoping for something better. She’s not hoping for the world. But at least she’s hoping for something better than Joe bloody O’Neill.”

He gathered himself to squeeze the truth out. “I have to tell you this. Our future may depend on a motion presently before the Patriotic Fund. To make a list of the disloyal.”

“Oh, Jesus,” she said. She knew somehow that he could so readily be described as disloyal by those who sought to depict him that way. She had married a man who could so handily be a butt. Done it knowingly. Hard to see what possessed her. Love, of course, whatever that entailed.

“We will have to leave the bill another week,” he told her.

“The outstandings?” she said. “Our useless clients. You’ll just have to hit them hard, Timmy. I can’t go out in this condition putting a scare in them, but dear Jesus I’ll do it as soon as this child’s born.” She seemed to thrust forward a little of the belly made by the child. A claim. At the end of all the dancing, shouting, stout-drinking of the Kennas, a hardhead. “I know you. Jesus stand in the way of anyone thinking I want to be paid for what I supply! Talk to the Malcolms again, then. Find them in the morning before Mrs. Malcolm can get near the bottle.”

“She didn’t always drink. She has become a shadow.”

Kitty laughed to herself. It was half vengeance. “She can’t talk Alfred Lord T by the hour any longer. Poor ninny. She liked you in the way I do, but couldn’t get the message over!”

He began to laugh, shaking his head. She knew that in this world they were wedded, and he was gratified by her knowledge. But she understood his taste for literature and betterment and all that. Not that in New South Wales he hadn’t got into the way of all manner of slang and flash talk and saying bugger to everything. But he betrayed the voice of the aspirer in what he’d said at the Good Templars!

“We can’t have the Malcolms’ sort of people leaving us,” she told him flatly, the fun over, her hands folded on her risen abdomen.

From the store, Mamie appeared. “There’s a woman been talking to me from the door. She told me, the old whore, that she doesn’t mean any harm. She’ll be back with you as soon as the plague proves out.”

“Jesus,” said Tim. “Rank superstition.”

He thought of the sign in Savage’s window. He really should try a similar sign in his own window.

Mamie smiled at her sister and winked. “We’re totally assured of two customers. Joe O’Neill and Mr. Habash.”

Once Joe O’Neill was collected by his uncle and aunt from Toorooka, he found it was a long ride into town to court Mamie.

Joe was also finding the patterns of Australian farming harder than those of the Irish. Encouraged by the late arriving sun and the sluggish seasons, Irish farmers often slept late. But Joe O’Neill’s Toorooka uncle’s Jerseys bellowed for milking at first light, like everyone else’s in New South Wales. The rich mudflats were heavy ploughing too. So not even Mamie’s tantalisations could keep Joe awake all the time after he rode to town in the evenings. Joe would even forget to bring his banjo, though Annie thought it the cleverest thing on earth. But if he drank stout before dinner—and he always did—his head lolled at the table. When Bandy was there, Joe would try bravely to be awake.

It was an old story: an uncle in the Macleay bringing out from Ireland, England, Scotland, Wales and sometimes Germany a nephew to become a slave-by-kinship. So was Australia populated. A bright fellow like Joe would sicken of it, get a small acreage of his own or even inherit his uncle’s, and repeat the eternal story, bringing out in twenty years’ time another sister’s son to labour in Toorooka. Or perhaps Joe might get sick of bush life and move to town and be a haulier like Tim. When that time came, he would certainly marry Mamie. A saving if Kitty was looking for one, a marriage to be encouraged.

Mamie would say to Joe coolly as he nodded, “You should bring the cart to town with you. Less likely to fall off a cart while you’re sleeping than off a horse.”

Tim felt he had been given a short, near-happy season of adjournment. He’d collected some money from his humbler customers but not spoken to Winnie Malcolm yet, for the loyal vote still a week or more off.

Obdurate Captain Reid had earlier today walked along Smith Creek to catch his drogher downriver to his ship. Men in the street stopped and reflected on the captain as he passed. He was going back to the plague city and bore watching. Tim found himself looking at the man in a different light too. A man not to blame, of course, but stubborn, possessed by what was called invincible ignorance. Believing only in extinction and putrefaction. Sailed off leaving Missy in the same limbo as ever. And Tim in similar postponement too—between mixed fortunes of one kind and another.

Now Mamie’s mention of the cart struck Tim as a chance to declare a holiday such as events called for. To speed as well the unavoidable bush marriage—no matter what the women said—between Mamie and Joe.

“Get the cart from your uncle on Sunday and we’ll all go to Crescent Head,” Tim told Joe. “Your cart and mine.”

“With our mad horse?” said Kitty, kindling at the idea though. “Bring your banjo, for God’s sake, Joe.”

Tim felt immediately enlivened. The Crescent Head jaunt was a journey he did for new arrivals. Had done it for Kitty seven years ago, for her sister Molly in the days Old Burke was courting her. And now he had Mamie and Joe, and—as promised—the orphaned Lucy. In return for the jaunt Lucy might feel appeased and desist from urging Johnny to high points.

“It’s the grandest place,” said Kitty. “The grandest beach.”

“We saw some long, long beaches on the way up in that rat ship,” said Mamie.

“Different to see them from the land side,” Tim argued. “Different to see them from the Big Nobby at Crescent.”

“Beach to the north, I swear,” Kitty corroborated, kindly helping him and gesturing with her plump right arm. “Beach to the south. Neither of them ends.”

“They must end,” said peevish Mamie. She suspected Tim’s impulse to set her up with Joe.

“I’ll ask the old man,” said Joe in an intrepid voice, since he saw the chance too.

The night waited, and the matter of Missy in abeyance, Reid gone, Ernie resistant, his own letters to the Commissioner trumped by Ernie’s. He had tried every avenue. Wouldn’t she in her waiting for the name to break, for her tragedy to be entitled and lodged and forgotten, indulge his modest demand for a holiday?