Thomas Keneally - A River Town

“Oh God, Bandy. What are you saying? A change of faith? It won’t make any difference to the Turf Club.”

His gaze still on the apex of the tower, Bandy sighed. “No, Mr. Shea. Please don’t do me that injustice. I heard the wind, old chap. When I visited the priest’s house here to tell them of Lucy’s accident, the woman who maintains the house asked me to wait. And I waited, and in my waiting was confident of what I had been taught in childhood, that Jesus was a prophet but not the final one. The priest stayed inside, as if knowing that my mind could be turned. And as I stood there I felt a wind blowing from within the house, from the very centre of things. It pushed against my brow. All around, in Kemp Street, nothing happening. But here at the priest’s door a blast!”

Bandy burned with his story.

“Like you I am used to doorways, to waiting, to receiving the odour of the house and the currents a house contains. Often curious smells, Mr. Shea. Made up of God knows what. Bad secrets and failures here and there. But this door was so different, this house. A mighty breeze, Mr. Shea. Blasting away at me.”

“It’s a big, old, comfortless place,” explained Tim.

“No, no,” insisted Bandy, shaking off Tim’s blunt explanations. “More than that, old chap. As that wind washed over me, I knew at once that Jesus was more than prophet, was the living Son of God. It was so clear to me, Mr. Shea. Christ the Son of God. The man I was waiting to see might well be perhaps nothing more than a hawker like me. Except for this, this serious truth which had washed over my face and skin, bathed and baptised me. And I was ready and thirsty for it after the awful day we had suffered. Ready to be refreshed, Timothy, and made anew. I am not a servant of the valley. I am its citizen.”

“But you always have been.”

“Not quite,” said Bandy with a tired smile. “But now I felt that my blood was your blood, Mr. Shea, and that we were both brothers in redemption. I have become one with you, old chap. I am, to quote Father Bruggy, taking instruction in the faith.”

Bruggy. Consumptive Bruggy.

“What will your father say of this move?”

“It will be a sadness for my father. He will say this to me: You would not do it if they threatened to shoot you. So why do you do it for the sake of a breeze? ”

“I think that’s a bloody good question, Bandy.”

“I pray with a fresh voice. A fresh voice which the Great Virgin has never heard before.”

The idea washed into Tim and gave him a sudden colour of hope. But it came to his tongue as irony and laughter. “At least they won’t be able to say you’re a Fenian, son. Fenians come a bit pinker than you.”

A sulphur-crested cockatoo, a big, robust bird, tore through the air at the corner of Tim’s sight. It arrested and shocked him with its brilliant white, its splendid yellow comb. It joined others of its species in a tall gum tree in the paddock across the road. A tree so adorned always looked as if its branches were hung with white and yellow silk.

There was something about this brightness this morning which caused Tim to sag and weep. Bandy was forced to hold him up.

“Tim, Tim,” said Bandy. “We must go to our daily work, though in grief and weariness.” He freed a hand and indicated the sky, the Angelus tower, the Celtic cross atop the church and the school. “We must be borne up and consoled by all this.”

Drinking tea at the dining room table, Mamie and Kitty looked wan.

“You went to Mass?” asked Mamie.

Considering her, he felt no enmity. No admiration either. Not for her vanity. But Lord, the hell had been shaken out of it!

“A lot of people were there,” said Tim. But he did not mention Bandy. With sleep and in time, Bandy might change his attitude.

“I must go,” said Mamie. “I must go too. I must go to the Rosary tonight.”

Become a nun while you’re at it and leave a space here for orphans.

“Will you excuse me,” he asked, forcing a little sociable smile. “I have a letter to write.”

Kitty looked so pale. “Don’t work too hard, Tim,” she sighed.

Johnny and Annie still slept. An hour to store-opening. He found the inkwell in the living room and the special paper and sat at the table with the formal lamp on it. Rarely lit, this one, painted glass. A shepherdess with a bodice. French. Visits by Old Burke might warrant lighting this special lamp.

He began to write a letter.

“To Whom It May Concern”

The whom , he knew very well, was Ernie. Ernie who had chosen to be aggrieved with him. Ernie who had wanted a ceremony and citizenry unspoiled by the Missy affair. But it was impossible that Ernie actually knew the girl. Unthinkable that the spouse of divine Winnie… Well not impossible, but unlikely. Missy simply a shire scandal so huge no one talked about it. They wished to cover it up with regiments, to diminish it to scale beside the proposed Central-to-East bridge.

To Whom It May Concern

This stands for my willingness to declare upon oath that I am not the author of the Australis letters or any other letters appearing in the newspapers of the Macleay. I am willing to swear an affidavit to this effect before any Justice of the Peace the Patriotic Fund may wish to name. I make this solemn assertion in the hope that the Patriotic Fund, set up to preserve the values of our society, will take care not to cause reckless harm to any man’s business.

When he re-read it the letter reeked to him of the willing, peasant cleverness which marred his family and made it so uneasy on earth. Yet he felt as well so guiltily consoled by finishing this testimony. Would Lucy forgive the small joy he felt in repairing this one wall? In re-making the little world out of a pond of ink when she had taken on the huge ocean?

He knew in his blood that she wasn’t coming back soon or late. She would lie punishingly far out beyond the surf. Not for days either. It would be decades he would need to wait and wait.

His affirmation and pledge sat now in an envelope in his breast pocket in readiness for an early call on Winnie and Ernie Malcolm.

To the dining room door beyond which Kitty and her sister sat, soberly drinking their tea and discussing in hushed voices. While staring at the door jamb, he stated his intentions. “I’ll be back in time for opening,” he said. He creaked out an oblique smile.

Kitty drew his gaze, and her frown and her clannishness now seemed beautiful to him. Small, deliciously indented lips. A network of sisters too. For what he’d ranted about at night now had a new light on it.

“It’s just business,” he told her.

He put Pee Dee in his traces. Pee Dee recovered from his comic spasm.

“Off to Winnie’s,” he told the horse. “It’s for her intercession.” Hail, Holy Queen, sister of Alfred Lord T… Wife to Ernie, the Buddha of the Macleay. If Ernie not in then on to his office. Had Missy ever seen something of Ernie? If so, how, when, where?

No, Ernie was a citizen, not a lover. It was simply this: Ernie did not want promising Kempsey burdened with Missy’s name.

A few morning people in the streets of mauve dust. They did not seem to be electrified by the news from Crescent Head. Two saw-millers walked down Belgrave Street carrying tucker bags, their children with them, running and returning. He hauled at Pee Dee’s reins a bit, secretly examining the men as they passed, and saw at once—or so he thought—that they would respond wistfully to the Rochester orphan. The only rage at her death came from him. “Sad, sad,” they would say. “Poor little thing…” The little doll-like tragedy would sit in the corner of their rooms for a week or so. Small-boned. Meagre. Fading.