Thomas Keneally - A River Town

“So get the dray off the old fellow then,” Tim urged with a surge of temporary joy. This weekend. The last golden sabbath. He felt heady about it.

“I have a little something to tell you,” said Kitty, lying on her back, a small reddish-complexioned knoll in a white night dress without sleeves. His familiar of the night. A rock in his dreams. One day, far in another century, they would turn to dust together on the hill below the hospital in West. They would not travel around in flasks in constables’ saddlebags. These were the assurances which arose from lying beside Kitty.

“No displays of temper,” she warned him.

“Why would I display temper?”

“Why? You don’t know yourself very well.” A little dreamy laugh started up over her lips. “Mr. Habash will accompany us to Crescent Head. Mamie asked him.”

Some anger slithered up through him and out across the floor.

“I bloody well thought I was in charge of asking people.”

A repeat of laughter, partly a soft belch, from Kitty. “Mamie wants a different picnic from the one you planned.”

“Dear Heaven, her stunts. I just want to go to Crescent Head.”

“So do we all.” She reached out her hand. “I’m going to your picnic. Me and Annie. And Johnny of course.”

“I promised to take the Rochester orphan.”

“Some of us will be at your picnic then, Tim. Others of the buggers will be at Mamie’s.”

“All right, I don’t mind Habash any more.” But he minded Mamie.

“Neither do I, as a matter of fact. Shall we say one Our Father and three Hails for the conversion of the infidel or for the repose of lost souls.” It was a joke about Habash.

“Bugger the infidel,” said Tim.

He wondered though what did Bandy Habash and his infidel father and brother do on their Saturdays in Forth Street, Kempsey, New South Wales? Facing the East. Sitting on mats. What did they say, so far from their home? To what torrents or rivers of sand did they compare the Macleay.

On the Sunday morning of the picnic, at the early Mass, Father Bruggy happened to speak of the Holy Name and the common abuse of it on low tongues.

“Ireland is a Catholic nation,” he said, “and possesses a strong sense of the Ten Commandments. But there are two vices the Irish immigrant brings to New South Wales. The one, drunkenness—which shall be the subject of another sermon. The other—the undue invocation of the name of Our Lord and of his Blessed Mother. My English brother, Father McCambridge, comments on the fact that the Holy Name is most under threat from those who most honour it, the Irish emigrant to these shores. Here, his looseness with the Divine Name combines exactly with a colonial looseness of expression in general. I must warn Irish newcomers of their tendency to contribute to the general laxness of colonial, Australian expression. I would urge men to join the Holy Name Sodality, whose purpose is to stamp out the misuse of the Divine Name…”

Kitty was muttering at Tim. “Takes an Englishman to remind us of all this. Put the Holy Name up on a shelf and rent it out for day-to-day use!”

Father Bruggy said that the Holy Name Sodality would meet at the end of Mass.

“Devil you’ll join them!” Kitty told him. When she chose to obey priests she did it thoroughly. But she was discerning on the matter. Fortunately he lacked the inclination to stay behind.

After Mass, Mother Imelda and the other nuns observed a short thanksgiving period—as did their boarders perforce—and then rose and genuflected and processed out of the church. Their boarders in trim clothes and shining faces, behind them. Little Lucy Rochester amongst the boarders with her clenched features and her glowing eyes. The reformed climber. The repentant imperiller.

As already arranged, Mother Imelda brought Lucy to the Sheas. She nodded to Kitty and dragged Tim imperiously by the elbow a little way distant from the group. He could hear Annie say, “That’s Lucy, Mama. Lucy. She lives with the nuns.”

“The child,” Imelda murmured to Tim, “has listened intently to everything, and Sister Philomena is astounded by her grasp of Christian Doctrine.”

Tim groaned—perhaps aloud. He knew what would now be said. “She wishes to take instruction as a Catholic.”

Tim flinched. He had a duty by Albert. “You’re sure, Mother, she isn’t just trying to please you?”

“Mr. Shea, I have watched this occur with other children of Protestant parents. Give me some credit! I can sniff out what is genuine and what is merely opportune.”

“Her father’s so recently dead, and he would not like this.”

“If our faith means anything, Mr. Shea, it means he is now in possession of the real facts and is at peace.”

“Well, as much as I trust your discernment, Mother… Perhaps she should wait a little while. That’s what I think.” Imelda staring him down. He shrugged, touched his hat. “I’ll talk to her on our picnic.”

Mamie had filled a hamper, and it sat in the dray along with a basketful of ale and a number of blankets. Joe and Mamie, shadowed by Johnny, who for some reason liked Joe and was quiet in his presence, climbed into Joe’s uncle’s plain yellow farm cart. It too carried an ample basket of ale.

Tim went and lifted Kitty up to the seat behind Pee Dee. Lucy and Annie were already in the dray, talking. Yet so hard as ever to hear what Lucy said!

All around, the carts of other communicants of St. Joseph’s Kempsey were pulling away from the church. Young men on ponies raced each other like young men of any communion at any time. Men with pipes in their hands who waited outside Kelty’s—Kelty’s opened up to certain Romans after Mass on Sundays, despite the licensing laws—took off their hats and waved to Tim. Did they also think he’d written the Australis letters and provoked bitter Billy Thurmond to his Patriotic Fund motion?

In Elbow Street in West, they encountered an astounding and ominous sight. The postmaster was out in the spare block beside the Post Office. With an axe, he was chopping through the timber uprights of the closed shooting gallery. The postmaster a madeyed Scot named MacAllen, and he paused and wiped his brow and nodded to Tim. “The Shire won’t take action. I’ve complained and complained about lads shooting away to all hours of the evening. Armenian bugger who runs the place is only squatting on this land anyhow.”

“Fair enough,” called Tim. Though secretly he was a little surprised by this kind of lawlessness in an official. MacAllen said, “My wife sits up worrying about the children and the Sydney plague, and all we can hear is bang, bang, bang!”

“Very trying,” called Kitty, turning her short body with difficulty towards the postmaster, but then covering a laugh with her lace-gloved hand.

“Better to agree with a man with an axe,” she muttered to Tim.

As the postmaster applied himself again, the sheet of corrugated iron which had roofed the gallery fell like thunder. The postmaster stepped back and was pleased.

They rolled on, convinced that this might be a good day to be away from the town.

At the Central punt in Smith Street, Bandy was waiting for them, smiling. On the same grey he’d been riding the day of Albert Rochester’s tragedy, and the night of the illicit ride.

“Good morning, Sheas and Miss Kenna and Mr. O’Neill. Prayers completed, the day now belongs to a totally decent picnic!”

Tim looked to the cart behind, because he was curious to see how Mamie reacted to this fulsome sentiment of Bandy’s. She was rolling her eyes at O’Neill and laughing. Yet it did not seem to be in total mockery.

Annie touched Tim’s arm from the back of the cart where she sat on a pile of rugs with the white-frocked Lucy. “Bandy Habash is funny,” she sagely told him.