Thomas Keneally - A River Town

Rounding the side of the verandah where he had unloaded poor Albert, Tim saw first someone who meant least. M. M. Chance, standing by his sulky under the big Morton Bay fig at the front of the hospital. Waiting for his bereaved friend. Ernie walked to him like a soldier surrendering, Chance reaching a hand out, drawing Ernie back to the community’s daily offices. Over his shoulder, Ernie looked across at Tim, as if what terrified him most was that Chance would lift him into the vehicle and cart him away.

“You’re welcome to stay with Mrs. Chance and me until you’re steady again,” said Mr. Chance.

“Mrs. Chance has been reassured by Dr. Erson about the plague?” asked Ernie.

“She’s an educated woman,” said M. M. “She knows you don’t get the plague from people looking at you.”

Kitty and the children were beyond the gates standing by the gold and blue T. Shea—General Store dray. Pee Dee, the old fool, his bag on, deigning to wait, not to back the cart through the hospital fence. And familiar horses of a different order waited a little further down the hill—Bandy’s grey and his beautiful roan, and by their heads, side by side with reins in their hands, stood Bandy and Mamie. Mamie had ridden up here on the roan. It had a woman’s saddle on it. Tim was tickled somehow by the idea of his sister-in-law the horsewoman. What a goer, that Mamie!

By the dray, Kitty waited, grinning a big, criminal grin. He gave himself up to the first huge embrace, the children taking a part at the edges. Kitty’s mouth full of affection and warm spittle, and her face moist.

“I knew that scapular would see you out, Tim,” she wetly cried, and delight and hope and terror went through him and brought out his tears…

“Are we broke yet?” he asked her.

“It’s a mixed bag. I’ll certainly be telling you.”

“I am a victim of injustice,” Tim confided to her.

“But the fleas didn’t bite you, so let it go at that.”

He did let it go at that, let his limbs hang, and her arms encircled him at the elbows. When strength returned he lifted Annie, whose face was full of a terrible confidence in his immortality. Johnny kept a distance.

Meanwhile Bandy and Mamie closed in together. Their unison seemed strange. They smiled foolishly.

“Give your congratulations to the engaged couple,” Kitty told him.

“Is this so?” Tim asked. He felt a surge of outrage but a kind of innocence in Bandy’s face chastened Tim when it came to expressing outrage.

“Bandy is accepting instruction as a Catholic,” said Mamie blithely.

“Well,” said Tim. “Well. I’d heard that earlier on.”

“Wish them every happiness, you miserable old bugger,” said Kitty. “The happiness we have.”

“Oh, I do, of course I do,” said Tim. “You don’t come out of the plague hospital for the purpose of cursing people.”

“I should hope bloody not.” Kitty was laughing. She who had always been at home to Bandy.

“I will be a very obedient husband,” Bandy told him. “I will give up the reckless expense of racehorses.”

“Don’t make rash promises,” said Tim. “Just because you’re getting married.”

Though he’d meant it in strict terms, everyone seemed to find it hilarious.

“God you’re such an individual, Tim,” said Kitty.

“I’d like some black tea with rum in it and a large lump of fruit cake. Does our present condition permit such luxuries?”

“Buckets of tea. Pounds of cake!”

Both Kenna sisters uttered their totally individual laugh.

“Wild horses!” cried Tim though. For a sulky was thundering up the hill out of West. He could see it was driven along by his friend the Offhand, and seated in it by his side, holding her hat, was the little wisp of widow with whom rumour associated him. The rumour publicly declared today in this stormy light.

Offhand, pink-faced from the rush, drew the sulky up and tied the reins to a gum tree on the far side of the road. Rough old road which led to the upriver demesne of Old Burke, to Comara, and in the end, by breakneck escarpments to Armidale. As the Offhand came running across the road, Kitty and Mamie and the children stood back, so clearly was Tim in the Offhand’s sights. He drew Tim aside without apology.

“There is nothing to say,” Tim warned him. “No bloody tales of the plague ward. Except there isn’t any Boer War in there. And let me tell you, the plague keeps different bloody lists than at Templars’ bloody Hall.”

Panting Offhand held his hands up. “You are entitled to your chagrin. But I’m talking to you for the last time, Tim. My fiancée Mrs. Flitch has agreed to marry me, as women will—it’s typically when my affairs are at their worst. I have no job, Tim. I have been dismissed by the management board of the Macleay Chronicle. Australis , you see. I wrote those letters off to the Argus for a joke. Regretted them straight after the first one, when people began to attribute them to you. I laid low though, thinking, damage is done! Might as well finish with my rodomontade, might as well cover the canon of my concerns. Then I kept postponing the confession, Tim. Hit me if you want.”

It’s always your friends who do you the worst harm. Tim would need to pretend to be furious, when what he felt was weariness. “I don’t bloody well want to hit you. A hit isn’t enough.”

“Tim, Tim,” murmured the Offhand and looked very ill. “Let’s at least part friends. The fact is I am emigrating to America. I have a sister there. San Francisco and Oakland are excellent newspaper towns, I am told. If mistakes made in the rest of the world are unknown in Australia—just ask half the doctors on this coastline if that’s not true, half the older men married to younger women too—the converse is that mistakes made in Australia are unknown in the wider world! I go with a reference as to my editorial competence, and with little else. The editorial board are very happy to foist me onto the Americans. They say I’m too puckish for the bush.”

Tim whistled to himself.

“Puckish? They say you were puckish. I wish they’d say that about me, I wish they wrote my crimes so bloody low. They say I’m so despicable that they need to write to the supply houses and cancel my credit! You’re sent off with a reference. I’m on my own.”

“Oh, I’ve written a full confession which shall appear, and an exhortation to sanity. Last Tuesday, Tim, the news came that Ladysmith had been relieved. The British column had at last broken through to rescue the gritty garrison, et cetera, et cetera. Now you would have thought that the gentlemen of the Patriotic Fund would have danced in the streets of Central. But no such thing. An ordinary day of business. No giddiness, no great municipal gasps of relief! They still smoke their pipes and clang their cash boxes and milk their bloody cows! I’ve written this in my last piece. It is already composited. Might do some good.”

“I hope to Christ you didn’t mention me!”

“Ah, you think I have a poison touch, don’t you, Tim. No, though I do mention certain businesses in the Macleay district which have been singled out, and so forth. But Tim, let me say, for any harm I’ve done you, please accept this.”

He took an envelope from his vest pocket and pushed it into Tim’s hands. “There’s fifteen pounds in there. It’ll pay for some things.”

“No,” Tim said. “I can’t take this.”

But the Offhand had skipped backwards, waving his hands. Already making for his sulky and Mrs. Flitch. “Won’t take it back, Tim,” he called.

He untethered and jumped aboard his vehicle so fast that for Tim to chase him to argue would have been out of kilter with this afternoon, this plain plague resurrection on which the first grand drops of rain were beginning to fall.