Thomas Keneally - A River Town

“I should have stood up. I should have stood up to your sister. But she wanted everyone on that mountain for the vanity of teasing the hell out of poor Joe.”

“It’s not Mamie’s fault, Tim. Be a sensible fellow.”

“So mother and father departed from Lucy. Mrs. Sutter wouldn’t give her the time of day. We hived her off on Imelda. No wonder the poor brat took to the air like a bird!”

Kitty struggled to an upright stance now and came towards him. Seeing this fraught little woman, he wondered how she could ever have been considered beloved, this hard creature who hadn’t room for orphans. Who had wheedled him into having no room.

“Our own child will be cursed, you bloody know!” he told her. “That child you have there. Bloody cursed!”

Kitty so nakedly alarmed. She moved in and tried to embrace him. He fought her off.

“No, no,” he yelled. “Facts are facts!”

He still hoped she would combat him, that there could be mutual screaming this intolerable night. But she was both so measured and so frightened of him.

“Timmy, listen to me. I am too busy giving life to one child without carrying the blame for another. None of us took her there from ill will. She was at Crescent Head as a kindness.”

“Then she was killed with bloody kindness. A pretty miserable bloody kindness.”

“I won’t have this, Timmy! You’re going mad in front of my eyes. Pull back, for Jesus’ sake.”

He thrust his long, long finger at her. “We will not be let off this, Kitty. We will not be forgiven this.”

With a strange exaltation he saw how he distressed her. Her face bunched in pain. Good! Bloody good! Did the world operate for her convenience? Did the tides of pain flow to suit her awful, freckled, pushing clan?

“Oh God!” she roared.

He hoped that Mamie on the back verandah would be awakened and suffer for all this. Taking children to a precipice so they could watch her play off Bandy against Joe O’Neill.

Yet he had not thought it likely that Kitty would so easily accept his condemnation, take it upon her frame. Which now looked far too small and too much at risk. Her face cracked and an awful cry came out.

“For mercy’s sake don’t judge me, Timmy! The world’s full of orphans, but they don’t go flying off cliffs!”

Her cries seemed to raise an echo somewhere else in the house, an outburst on a higher, weirder pitch.

“Johnny,” he told his wife.

He left Kitty, turning into the corridor and so into the room where Johnny was sitting up in his sleep wailing, while Annie, who had been jolted awake by everyone’s rage, complaints, defences, uttered more usual sobs. Kitty went to comfort her daughter while Tim shook Johnny back to the world and said the usual, blessed things.

“All right, Johnny darling. You are here with Papa. You didn’t fly off.”

But Lucy had of course, and no one could get beyond that.

“You see, you see,” Kitty called to him as she caressed Annie to sleep. “John stayed, he’s here, here. No earthly reason she couldn’t have been. Here on solid ground. No reason.”

Staying indeed seemed at once to Tim the most important achievement miscreant Johnny had ever been responsible for. Staying proved his innocence of real malice. It had been a joke to him. He had sat down at the end. While Lucy flew off seriously and with intent.

Now that Johnny was fully awake he had nothing to say to his father but sat rocking in his arms. “I’ll stay with him,” Tim told Kitty. He looked at her dim, night shape. His beloved accomplice. It was all certain and fixed and nothing could be done. Between them and in concert with others they had encouraged Lucy to embrace the thin air.

Kitty said, “You’re the one who must rest, Tim. You’ll only grow madder still.”

“Bugger it, woman!” he warned her, and so when drowsiness overcame Annie, Kitty went off. Johnny leaned into Tim’s arms and began to sleep with a few complaining moans. How unfair to the child it had been to begin screaming at night. He saw now that attaching blame was an exercise best pursued in morning calm. They would need to watch John and ensure Lucy had not done for him, for young John, the thrower at cricket stumps, the circus performer.

Un-sleeping Tim held Johnny in the dismal hours and for the sake of his own much-needed stillness of mind he began to think of certain protocols of the living which must somehow be attended to.

First of all, he went and pulled on a shirt, his drawers faintly yellowed in the Macleay’s muddy water in which the women washed them, grey coat and pants. Old hat with the required sweat around the band. Ruined forever in shape by too much rain followed by too much sun. But part of the habit worn in the valley of the living.

THE BUSINESS DAY would have started before anyone got from Crescent Head with fish and news, good, bad, nil. So put a saddle on Pee Dee and ride him to the dawn Mass. Imelda and the Waterford nuns and some of the boarders were there, praying for the lost child. On a plinth, the Angel Gabriel flourished a trident at the serpents and ministers of hell. Had Lucy taken a special note of his plaster wings? She wouldn’t have been tempted by them if Albert had lived, and taken her to the Primitive Methodists.

Imelda walked down the aisle towards him. He stood to meet the big nun. She leaned towards him and her breath smelled of communion wafers and almonds. She asked him if he had any hope.

“No,” he said. “The poor child fell into the total maelstrom.”

He felt nothing while telling her. No anger at all now. How curious. No anger against Lucy, Kitty, Mamie. No blame against Imelda pointing Lucy to Gabriel’s wings.

Imelda said, “I spent summers by the sea when I was a child.”

Tim tried to discern the child in that huge face.

“Are you familiar with Mullaghmore?”

“No, Mother.”

“I know enough to believe that we should perhaps reconcile ourselves to God’s will. I’ll convert the rest of her school fees to Masses to be said either for her safety or eternal rest.”

He would have welcomed even fifteen bob of that money heartily. But so profane to think like that.

“Yes,” he said. “For Lucy by name.”

“By name, yes,” she said. Putting her hand to his elbow briefly to ensure that he would stay upright.

“You see,” she said. “Remember the Angelus tower? She is a very hard child to predict.”

All right , he would have said, except that it would soil Lucy’s memory. You win that bloody argument!

As he moved out of the church, he was astonished and consoled to see Bandy in the rear row, kneeling very neatly. A formal Muslim in the house of the infidel.

Bandy the sole hero in all this. Innocent in all Mamie’s little dramas. He was the one who had taken the fishing boat to where Lucy had entered battling waves which hissed like acid. Bandy raised a tear-streaked seraphic face to him.

“Come outside,” Tim told him.

Out into the morning’s velvet, fraternal air. Bandy, Tim noticed, had not shaven. The features of the satiny upturned face seemed a little swollen with earnestness.

“Have you slept, Bandy?”

Bandy bowed his head. “I waited here. I didn’t wish to go anywhere else.”

“Here? Here? ”

“I saw at once that I possessed no other home.”

“But your father’s home…?”

Bandy stared up at the top of the Angelus tower where Johnny and Lucy had shared their high hazy view. “I have to tell you, Mr. Shea, that I am the newest Christian of all—at least in my desire. I am a fallible creature with my sins written on my forehead. But I have felt God’s breath, and where it lists in the valley of the Macleay. It lists to the Christ rather than to the Prophet. Hearing the wind, I have decided not so much to turn myself around as to increase my store.”