Thomas Keneally - A River Town

This was their venture now. They were running down the incline of the headland, their hands clasped. Johnny could be heard laughing in between Joe’s shouting, but Lucy was silent. It was such an inviting slope, and from some angles you found it hard to imagine or give credence to the drop, the indented face below, the Nobby’s true, black sting. So piteously confident were they of their impunity, that seeing them you were possessed by an absolute panic of pity. Pity could be heard in the way everybody howled.

Now they all followed—Bandy, Joe, Mamie. Then himself, dropping Annie’s hand, since she could be trusted. All the party running with their heels thrust forward to avail themselves of the holding power of the grass. All yelling direly. Pleas not to be remembered afterwards word by word. Simply a general, frantic, fatherly pleading of the two little buggers running hand in hand. Ahead the feverish sapphire sea, and a sky of acid blue. Tim feeling his ankle yell at this strange usage as he ran madly towards the gulf. The younger men and the one young woman still ahead of him, all helplessly shrieking. Nooooooooooo! So steep now where the children were, and Johnny leaning back, Tim saw with hope, but Lucy thrusting skinny shoulders forward. Welcoming the fall. And still hands locked. Soon they would go flying over together. This beat the stern of Terara . This beat the Angelus tower. This so clearly a venue worthy of their shared will that he cursed himself for allowing anyone but Mamie and Joe to approach this climb.

But when the result seemed obvious, Johnny simply sat on a tussock. The grasp was as easily broken as that. Lucy sailed out alone. Shrilling but not with terror. And vocal now she had taken to the air. So close to the fall of the cliff was everyone that they saw only the first liberated segment of her fall. Tim continued down the awful grade and yanked Johnny upright by his collar. Johnny’s face was ghastly. He had been playing. Had expected her to sit too after the joke had been played out. Look, we are reformed! You only thought we were playing the old games!

Nonetheless, Tim couldn’t stop himself striking the boy on the head in a kind of horror and gratefulness. Bandy was working energetically around the rim, the only one not screaming and exclaiming. He wanted a better view. To see if Lucy was frolicking or fluttering in and out on the waves in that chaos down there. Everyone, whimpering and pleading, worked their way around the edge as Bandy had, so that they could see into the cauldron.

“There is nothing,” Bandy yelled against the wind. “Nothing to be seen.” The hugh masses of white there contained none of Lucy’s whiteness or white fabric. She had been swallowed.

Above them, Annie—who had had the best view—was wailing for him to come back.

It was Bandy’s idea to rush down the hill and alert Crescent Head’s four families of fishermen. Tim followed, arriving back down to the bottom with stark-eyed Johnny and with Annie just in time to see Bandy and two fishermen put out in a rowboat from the creek.

Kitty was standing, frowning at the boat. She turned. “How could this happen?” she asked in reproach.

“How could it be bloody stopped?” Tim howled so furiously that both children began to sob.

By Bandy’s later report, the fishermen rowed him around right up as close as the surf would let them to the face of Big Nobby’s cliff. They were so long coming back that Joe, Mamie and Tim climbed the Nobby again and looked down on them. You could understand why such a scrap had been devoured without trace. Such a bullying, sucking, rending sea. So much chagrined. Bandy could be seen down there, standing in the dory, agilely shifting his stance at each swell.

The boat returned to Front Beach in late afternoon, and by then Tim and the others were in place to give it a bleak welcome. The offspring of Port Macquarie convicts, these Crescent Head fishermen. The younger fisherman came to speak to them. His father utterly leathered and browned, but Viking blue eyes glittering in there amongst the creases, kept quiet.

“See, a kiddy like that. Would be taken straight down. Tumbled over and torn out by water getting away. Straight out to sea. Only a long way out there would she be thrown up again, see. Ought to come up on Back Beach in the long run.”

The rugged fish-takers and eaters didn’t want demented people from town hanging around to spoil with questions a tranquil evening meal. And because they knew it was no one’s child who had fallen into the gulf, they were very honest about the chances.

“Could she be crying for us somewhere on a beach?” asked Tim.

“No, she’s drowned. You can bet on that. She drowned, and nothing to be done about it.”

After midnight, Tim woke so vastly angry and walked so heavily up and down the bedroom in his bare feet, hoping his fury would wake Kitty. It had of course been a dreadful journey home over Dulcangui, with Annie gone tearfully asleep in Kitty’s arms on the blanket in the back of the cart and Johnny still and staring. In their trance of surprise and grief, their suspicion that there was something further to be done they hadn’t done, they did not once, these two queenly folk Kitty and Annie, complain of the roughness of the mountain or the jolting of the corduroy road through the paperbark swamps.

There had been a comedy, an awful one given the history of the day. Unsupervised, Pee Dee had made a feast of cunjevoi root which lay along the banks of the creek at Crescent Head. The root was succulent and poison, and most livestock had the sense to avoid it. Not Pee Dee, and it had got to his bowels. Mamie had had to sit beside Tim with an opened parasol while Pee Dee blurted, farted, and bucked his way up and down Dulcangui.

“Bandy,” said Tim as they crossed the Macleay by punt. “Could I leave you to take a note to the priest? That Bruggy feller? He’ll tell Imelda.”

Strange not to ask Joe, but in this tragedy Bandy seemed more trustworthy.

“I will do that,” said Bandy, bowing a little in the saddle. Shaking his head. No one could believe the day. The brain had to be shaken into accepting it.

Tim knew he needed to face the police, the sharper civil priesthood, the real binders and loosers. They would certainly be confused into their normal suspicions if he and Bandy presented themselves as joint reporters of Lucy Rochester’s supposed drowning. But he himself would be less ashamed somehow to face the constables than the priests.

“You send me though I am not a Christian,” Bandy remarked.

“You’re a better poor bugger than most Christians, and if you give him ten bob for two Masses I’ll repay you tonight out of the cash box.”

After making town Tim and Joe had found the younger constable minding the station, the one who had no grievance yet, and he had taken their deposition without showing any tendency to define blame.

“You can ask the nuns,” said Tim. “Always given to climbing things. Mad on heights.”

As if he had not killed her by keeping her out of his house.

And now he woke enraged over that.

And of course she woke, sitting up awkwardly, using an elbow, and watching him stamp around.

“Timmy, what is it?” she cried.

“ I would take her in!” he accused her. “I would bloody take her in. But she couldn’t be fitted for Kennas. This is something fairly regular on the Macleay. Jerseyville pub could not be fitted either. For the sake of Kennas. Kennas marrying, Kennas arriving, Kennas suiting them-bloody-selves!”

Kitty looked appalled, but he could see with a perverse further annoyance that she didn’t intend to fight the matter. “Oh Jesus, Tim. Not all that at this moment. We all feel badly enough.”