Thomas Keneally - A River Town

ON A HOT MORNING in the New Year, a black police wagon went rolling along Kempsey’s Belgrave Street from the direction of West Kempsey. All of this in the valley of the Macleay on the lush and humid north coast of New South Wales. The wagon attracted a fair amount of notice from the passers-by and witnesses. Many shopowners and customers in fact came out onto the footpaths to watch this wagon be drawn by, and some of them waved mockingly at the dark, barred window of the thing. Tim Shea of T. Shea—General Store stayed behind his counter but looked out with as much fascination as anyone as the wagon passed, two constables on the driver’s seat, and Fry the sergeant of police riding behind.

The prisoners inside the wagon were being taken to Central wharf for shipment aboard SS Burrawong to their trial in Sydney. They were the abortionist Mrs. Mulroney and her husband Merv, both of them about fifty years of age.

Just before Christmas, Mrs. Mulroney had been visited by a young woman she did not know and who offered only a first name of convenience for the purpose of their transaction. Mrs. Mulroney fed the young woman some of the standard drugs of her trade, but the patient had at some stage, instead of miscarrying her unwanted baby, gone into convulsions and perished.

Panicking, the Mulroneys had cleaned her body, packed her into a large bootbox, and driven her by night upriver to Sherwood, where they had added some stones to the box and released it into the river. The box had perversely floated through, and was found the next day wedged amongst logs on the river bank. It was traced almost immediately to Mrs. Mulroney.

But she and her husband were obviously sincere in their inability to give the woman a meaningful name. A number of other citizens were similarly incapable of putting a name to her. She was said by the police to be no more than nineteen years old.

To help in identification, the Commissioner of Police in Sydney, nearly three hundred miles south, authorised one of the Kempsey surgeons—in accordance with long police practice in such affairs—to separate the head from the rest of the body. The remains were then given burial on the edge of the cemetery in West Kempsey, but to assist the police, the head was preserved in a flask of alcohol.

When the Mulroneys were shipped south, the flask remained to torment the dreams of some, and to shock and chasten even the hardened citizens of the Macleay.

The age to some was otherwise hopeful. Hard times were said to be ending. Within a year the six former colonies of Australia would—to suit the new century—fall into line as a new federal Commonwealth. Commonwealth . A flowering, bountiful word.

But on hearing of this police severing of the unhappy girl, some may have been seized by the superstition that a new spate of barbarities would be let loose.

Despite and because of himself, Tim Shea was one of these.

ANNIVERSARY DAY today. The birthday of Australia, as the newspapers liked to say. Today everyone could suit himself and not fret much about the severed girl.

What Tim Shea loved was to read newspapers in peace. He used his slight fever as an excuse for not going down with Kitty and the children to the New Entrance on the Agricultural and Horticultural Association’s chartered steamer for the day. SS Terara . It stuck entirely to the river, poor old Terara , unlike the sea-going Burrawong . It would creep down the broad, heat-struck reaches of the Macleay towards the sandbar marking off the deep green river from the Pacific’s blue glitter. The old tub would take that peculiar kind of riverine forever to get there too.

It would drift, for example, up to the pier at the Smithtown Creamery to collect further picnickers, and then edge by Summer Island where dengue fever had been a force throughout the New Year. Mosquitoes from ashore there would certainly be able to outpace Terara . So keep the veiling down over your face, Kitty.

Then after another two hours of mudflats and mangroves, Jerseyville.

Kitty, his beloved stranger and spouse, could look at the pub at Jerseyville without nostalgia, though he never could. He’d come close once to getting the license to sell spirituous liquors there. The Jerseyville pub brought out the darker feelings so strong in his character. Whereas Kitty was not touched by nostalgia and regret. She could be imagined pointing to the pub and saying to the children, “That’s where Papa and I nearly lived. Then you would be a Jerseyville kid, Johnny. And you, little sister.”

Last night, he’d taken some influenza mixture provided by Mr. Nance, the pharmacist of West. He was still too drowsy when Kitty bustled up to wake the children. And that was the thing, could he have faced it? Could he have faced the Empire Loyalist effusions of the Chairman of the A and H, Mr. M. M. Chance? The references to our beloved and gracious Majesty the Queen. God forbid anyone should cut into a picnic pie or open an ale bottle in New South Wales unless some old bugger like Chance consecrated the whole bloody indulgence to Her Majesty.

Yet Kitty would have no trouble with any of that. Watching with a smile while Miss Chance and Dr. Erson were persuaded to climb up on the coamings and recite or sing! Kitty could let their references to the perils Britain found herself in in Africa—of Australia’s duty in the face of those perils, of New South Wales’s responsibilities, and all the rest of it—slide off her. To her all that stuff was just like band music at a picnic. It didn’t make a dent in the sunlight. What were matters of private principle to him were matters of what came next to her. A happy, happy soul, that Kitty. Drank stout and farted as unabashedly as a farmhorse, in particular when with child. Melancholy didn’t claim her.

He’d begun fretting in his sleep about the idea Constable Hanney would ride up soon with horrible remains in a bottle of ether or alcohol. And he knew his turn to countenance her was coming. But it could not happen today, when Hanney and his wife were on Terara with perhaps half the population. Excluding the ill like him, the dusky brethren of the native reservations at Burnt Bridge and Greenhill, and those shingle-cutters who could not afford the one and six for adult, the ninepence for child.

He intended to take a folding camp stool into his back paddock. This was in fact part of the high river bank. One section of his property a yard with a shed for his delivery dray, the other a fenced pasture for his turbulent horse Pee Dee. He intended to sit in the yard under the peppertree shade, hear the river close by, read the Argus and the Chronicle , and take an idle interest in what Bryant’s and Savage’s were selling jam and soap for. And try to work up an opinion on whether the Chronicle was more democratic than the Argus or vice versa.

Anyhow, some consideration of these questions in a camp chair in the shade. And he’d take a flask of rum. His aloneness in a town emptied of all the grander people. Very welcome. He’d take a blanket with him too, to lie on, in case the stupor of the day got the better of him.