A River Town Page 11

  He went through the store into the residence out the back and came upon the visitors seated at the crowded table set with the Stafford china, a silver cake stand glittering, and the plate with shepherds painted on it laden with shortbread.

  First in view, long-faced Old Burke smoking his aromatic and temperamental pipe. Husband of Molly Kenna. He’d come here before Molly was even born. A twenty-year-old timber cutter. There had still been at that time convict shipwrights and labourers working around the river for Enoch Rudder, the town’s founder, a West Country Englishman who’d built small launches and tried everything from maize to vineyards. A long time ago, Burke moved far upriver and selected a little land at Pee Dee. Always a very frugal fellow. A lot of sheep up the river in those days, but the rich pasturage devoted now to cattle. Burke owned steeper slopes too, covered with a bountiful native growth of blackbutt and other hardwoods.

  Buying up the land of other small selectors, and fragments here and there of the original land grants to English gentlemen, this canny Antrim labourer had taken on and still possessed the gravity which land gives a person.

  At Tim’s dinner table now he was smoking his aromatic pipe, and sat a little separate from his wife, Molly Burke. Molly had acquired the Burke gravity too, though you could see she was letting it slip a bit today. She’d been enough like a Kenna when she’d first arrived on Burrawong and worked in the store. Some of the smaller dairy farmers who were bachelors hung around a lot to joke with her and to be melodiously laughed at.

  Old Burke’s daughter Ellen—by his first, deceased wife—sat at the table today too. A tall girl, and would be a big one later in life. Sixteen or was it seventeen years? She had pretty features—Burke’s features in fact transmuted and graced. According to what Kitty said, she had no cross words at all for her stepmother, Molly. Ellen Burke had been one of Mother Imelda’s students too until two years ago. She could play the piano for occasional visitors to Pee Dee—Constable Hanney, Mr. Chance the stock and station agent, Dr. Erson, Father Bruggy. Bandy Habash? Was Bandy allowed into the homestead for recitals?

  Tim said, “Hello to all.”

  Young Ellen rose and politely laid a place for him at the table, saving pregnant Kitty the trouble.

  You could see, despite Molly’s new respectability, the glimmer of a kind of conspiracy between the two sisters. Even Ellen Burke was in it too.

  Tim asked the expected questions—why they were in town, how their two-horse cart had stood up to the hilly grades upriver. (Old Burke believed in getting himself to town without spending cash on the Armidale stage.) A good run it seemed to have been for them. Up the first morning before four—Old Burke’s normal rising hour anyhow. First a long day to the pub at Willawarrin where they put up. Then making good time from Willawarrin at dawn to Kempsey late afternoon. Ellen read to them a large part of the way. Charles White’s History of Australian Bushranging. “Lawless rubbish!” said Burke, “and glorified cattle-duffing. But it stimulates the women.”

  “We said the Rosary too,” said Molly. “The whole fifteen decades spaced out throughout the day. Made the time pass.”

  Following the long river down, the Joyful, Sorrowful and Glorious Mysteries, the incense of those old prayers rising amongst the heathen eucalypts. But they seemed to Tim to be delighted to have made the journey, the Burkes. Old Burke said with lenient disapproval that the women had been after him to come to town for months. But the real reason he was here was to go to court.

  He complained sepulchrally, “Bloody man has cattle duffed by some scoundrel, and has to travel two days there and back to give evidence of it.”

  “Well,” said Molly, winking across the table, “this is one of those cases where Mohammed has to come to the mountain.”

  All the women laughed. They were ready for it.

  Working to keep his pipe going, struggling with the damned thing, re-packing it, re-lighting it, strewing his plate with used matches, Old Burke told the story. A dairy farmer called Stevens from Clybucca was found in possession of a heifer bearing Burke’s brand which was a BB. Stevens was a bloody Scot and he might as well have been talking Gaelic for all you could understand him. “But he’s a cute bastard,” Old Burke added.

  Tim noticed the women were beginning to clear, a dish of this and a cup of that, and trail out to the kitchen. Soon you could hear them talking out there, saying loud bird-like things. They’d obviously heard enough about Old Burke and Stevens.

  “… so when Sergeant Fry asks him why he has my poley heifer in his back paddock, the crafty old bugger says, But I sent seven pounds with Ferguson the bullocky who goes up to Pee Dee for timber. Hasn’t bloody Ferguson given it to Mr. Burke?”

  “My God!” said Tim, sounding appalled because Old Burke wanted him to. “How would a Clybucca dairy farmer be, putting shoes on his children’s feet? What with paying seven quid for one of your heifers?”

  “That’s the right bloody question to ask. But you see, under our justice, all stories stand up. But not before a man had to travel two bloody days and put up with that drunken cook at the Willawarrin Hotel on the way through.”

  Burke did even further sucking and tending of the pipe. Yet he wasn’t really upset about his journey to town. An old man content with his grievances. He’d be pretty disgusted, of course, if Stevens the dairy farmer got away with his story. He’d be a two-day misery for the women all the way back to Pee Dee.

  Thinking of where Old Burke came from at the start, and so daring him to exercise the sort of pity Old Burke himself would once have welcomed, Tim said, “The smaller cockies always say they duff cattle to feed their families.”

  Old Burke groaned. “They duff cattle to cosset their habits and buy liquor.”

  Gales of woman-laughter from the kitchen.

  “Listen to them,” murmured Old Burke. “This is very good for Molly and Ellen.”

  “You should take them to Sydney next summer,” Tim suggested for mischief’s sake. “Cooler than here. And that’s where the celebrations will be.”

  According to all the papers, Sir William Lyne, who’d once opposed the Federation of the Australian states, had now decided it represented the future, and he was full of suggestions and edicts to do with the coming Commonwealth of Australia. He had urged that Tumbarumba should be considered for the national capital! (He must need votes in Tumbarumba.) And his decision was that the chief Federation celebrations should be in Sydney. A nice arrangement for the big town and its businesses. From this enormous state almost too large to be imagined, encompassed, travelled, old Sir William wanted everyone with the rail or boat fare, with a reliable string of horses, to come all that way and so behold the founding of the Federation he had so determinedly fought.

  “I wouldn’t grace the event, Tim,” said Old Burke. “Humans bloody astound me. Change for change’s sake. And Sir William Lyne, who used to be a decent feller and against the Federal idea … now in consort with the Sydney Jews and pub-keepers. Trying to conscript people to a festival! Just to watch some hopeless, chinless, English bugger in a cocked hat saying I declare … And can you imagine the bloody footpads and the mashers and the razor gangs everywhere, running round in derby hats. I say, no bloody thanks, Sir William.” Still more pipe-work. “I voted against Federation. You realise we’ll need to have bloody taxes spent on keeping hopeless Tasmania afloat. Ever been to Tasmania, Tim? Awful bloody hole! Full of tattooed criminals. And the weather frightful. Like bloody Donegal with gum trees.”

  Tim was pleased with the rise he’d got from Old Burke. Now he kept his voice soft so that he could cause greater annoyance still. Something about Old Burke set him off.

  “I think there is a vision in it all, you know. I think there is something of the future to it too. A Federal Australia.”

  “Sentimentality,” Old Burke grunted. “This is nothing about Australia. This is all to do with Britain, Tim. They would have us raise a Federal army. And where would that army fight? Like the Irish, like the Scots, like the p
oor, bloody niggers of India and Africa, this army would die for British enterprises. Read the Freeman’s Journal on this. No, I won’t go to Sydney to honour that kind of arrangement. Not at Billy Lyne’s word. He can go to the whores and lawyers in Phillip Street and order them around! Not me!”

  Tim said, “I weighed it up but voted in favour. Do you know why? For the sake of my children.”

  “It’s a keen mind that can see a connection between the matter of Federation and his children.”

  “I wanted Johnny and Annie, if they chose, to live in South Australia or Western Australia on the same terms as the locals.”

  “Why would you want your children to live in West Australia? It’s a desert shore of totally no value.”

  “We can’t tell the future.”

  “That’s the very cause why I voted no. No, the first time, and still no the second. You’re not telling me you voted yes the first referendum as well as the second?”

  “After serious thought,” said Tim.

  The truth was that there was something which excited him in the idea of the unity of such immense spaces of earth.

  “Well, Tim, I gave you credit for a more sensible fellow.”

  “When you have men like Barton in favour,” Tim argued, “and when a feller like George Reid comes around.”

  “Puppets,” said Burke. “Look how Barton switched over from Free Trade to Protection once the Jews and the British spoke. And Yes-No Reid. Yes, I want Federation! one day, No, I oppose it! the next. Besides, he’s a lunatic for the women and riddled with social disease.”

  Tim smiled. “But has he duffed anyone’s cattle?”

  Old Burke took it well. “All jokes aside, I can see a Federal tyranny behind this whole move, and I can see lots of blood in the end. The Americans had their grand bloody federation, and look what blood was spilt at Gettysburg!”

  But the huge spaces still sang in Tim’s mind.

  The women came in whispering, tamping their laughter down their throats with their pleasing, splayed fingers. Plump Kenna fingers in the case of Kitty and Molly. How these Burke women must run rings around Old Burke’s simple and fixed ideas.

  In the residue of the teaparty, for some reason, Kitty kept pressing Annie and Johnny—whenever you could get the latter little bugger in from the paddock out the back—on Ellen Burke, and they all took to each other. Annie ending by sitting on Ellen Burke’s knee. To Tim it all seemed to have a purpose not yet revealed.

  Then Tim minded the store while in the dusk Kitty and the children walked the Burkes down Belgrave Street to the Commercial. Good to see Old Burke go, taking the assumptions that went with all his acreage back with him to the Commercial. In the Macleay’s lavender dusk, Tim could see Johnny doing cartwheels for the Burke women in Smith Street’s reddish dust. It was his way of communicating with people.

  Kitty and Ellen leaning together, he noticed. What conspiracy?

  A bit of swank catching the Terara to Toorooka. Because you could ride by cart there easily cross-country. Even Tim could see the limits of that, though. Going on the river itself, in numbers, was appropriate to Marrieds versus Singles cricket match. A more thorough relief too from amounts owed, spirits unappeased, coppers offended. A day of undistinguished enjoyment in a paddock upriver awaited all passengers.

  After an early Mass though. The tales of childhood, after all, were salted with stories of the faithful who missed Mass once for a river excursion, and drowned with their omission screaming to Heaven.

  Tim at the presbytery early to renew yet again and for another last time the five bob offering. The secret, relentless intention. “They prefer the company of humans,” Missy still insisted in his dreams. Since he kept delaying writing to the Commissioner of Police (signed “Concerned, Kempsey”) and doubted it might do much good anyhow, he was reduced to more ancient magics at five bob a pop.

  The boarding school pupils left the church in two long lines, Lucy at the back, just in front of Imelda and the other nuns. Keeping the heretics close to the sisters. No rosary in Lucy’s hands, no missal. Outside, Tim extracted her from the shadow of Mother Imelda, took her to Kitty and the others in the dray and rode home with her. There, full of an unusual exhilaration and sense of the plenteousness of the world, he took Pee Dee out of his traces and let him loose in his paddock—the horse wouldn’t have been happy with a day spent standing round at Central wharf with a chaff bag round his neck. He would have done his best to get loose and kick buggery out of the buckboards.

  And now a sweet walk to the Terara, Kitty on one arm, and a picnic in hand, “Carry me,” aristocratic Annie saying. Tim had bought canvas sandshoes for himself and Johnny, but before they reached the gangplank, bloody Johnny had them off and hung by the laces around his neck. If Tim and Kitty had been born here, the boy still couldn’t have turned out a more thorough colonial urchin.

  Big Wooderson, captain of the Marrieds, waited with young Curnow at the head of the gangplank, each greeting his team aboard. Young Curnow wore the whole rig—a straw hat, a blazer and flannels, and a business-like handkerchief tied around his neck to protect him during what he intended to be a long time at the wicket.

  “We’ve got Tim,” called Wooderson, spotting the Sheas. “The other fellers are doomed.”

  Curnow was a bank clerk and half the women in town were crazy to marry him. Bank clerks happened to be such bloody aristocrats in piss-ant towns at the world’s end. Free of counts and marquis and all that clap, the Macleay citizens made their own tin-pot version. People devoted their energies and waking hours to trying to ensure Kempsey was as caste-ridden as anywhere else on earth. The only saving grace: democracy did break out everywhere and wasn’t punished like at home. The castes were fragile too. One bad season could get rid of the bush aristocrats, one flood, one unwise investment, one reckless act. That could be said. The word hereditary didn’t count for much.

  So pretension frayed pretty readily, even if not fast enough. And it didn’t have battalions to support it. A far, far from terrible universe on Terara, under the universal shell of blue. Not yet the heat which would creep up at mid-morning to stupefy those who drank ale too early, nor a prophecy of the afternoon, sure-thing thunderstorm from the mountains.

  He was surprised and yet not surprised to see Ernie Malcolm on board, standing by a forward hatch, half in the shade of the awnings, laughing with some of the Singles. This was not a serious Cricket Association game. Yet no social event, planned and advertised, got past Ernie’s attention. You had to give it to him.

  On a canvas chair under the awning sat Mrs. Malcolm herself. She was dressed in white for the day, and her white straw hat was loaded with gossamer she could pull down to keep out the flies and wasps of Toorooka. She had at base a divine, willowy shape and yet was somehow tightly bundled up. As if to signal that the world was not to touch. Or was she trying to curb and punish her own beauty? That happened with particular kinds of women.

  No whisper of the birth of little Ernies. She often carried a cat in her arms whenever Tim called. A not very distinguished-looking cat. In the ordinary way she stroked it, there seemed to be a prospect of the ordinary offices of motherhood. If so she had better get a move on. About thirty-five years, Tim would guess.

  Tim tipped his flannel hat to her. To be a lover to her, even if he were sure he wished to be, could not even be imagined. Like the idea of walking on the moon, in both splendour and reality it evaded all speculation.

  “Mr. Shea,” she called in a tired voice. “With your whole family!”

  “Mrs. bloody Shea too,” murmured Kitty at his side. “There’s room in the back.” Kitty pointed in the opposite direction to the Malcolms, past Terara’s quaint amidships castle to the stern where another awning had been stretched and canvas chairs set out.

  So by Kitty’s decree the Shea family moved on out of sight of Mrs. Malcolm’s half of Terara. “Holy Christ,” whispered Kitty to him, secure in her own squat beauty. “That Mrs. Malcolm’s straight up and dow
n like a yard of pump water. Ernie should feed her up on stout.”

  He and Kitty and Annie found three chairs beneath the awning. Nearby two young men were already broaching a keg. Boys would drink too fast and be sick after lunch in Toorooka’s thick grass. He wondered was Hanney, who couldn’t handle enquiries or ale, on board, and the wife who’d been ready to toss blame round so bitterly? Not in sight, thank Christ!

  Someone had brought a banjo which could be heard forward. A few bars of “Nellie the Flower of the Bower.” Lucy and Johnny already tearing around the place. She too had ditched her shoes somewhere.

  “Why doesn’t Johnny sit still in the cool?” asked Annie in that voice, as if she were raising one of the universe’s most broadly debated questions.

  What an august and sturdy thing a river is. Terara pulled away and began its turn in midstream, and at once you felt the tension between the current and Terara’s old iron. Huge forces: the river, Terara’s much-laughed-at engines. But you only laughed at them ashore.

  There was an old excitement you couldn’t help in leaving a wharf. Always hard to keep seated during the experience. The banjo rattling away in full spate now. “Lilly of the Glade,” “My Old Kentucky Home,” “Mister, Give Me a Bob.”

  Anyone could foretell the notice the day would get in the Argus: “A gleeful party of cricketers, spectators and their families departed the Central Wharf at 8:30 in the morning.”

  Ernie Malcolm came wandering down towards the taffrail in his very sporty light-blue suit. His tie was undone, his eyes lively. You wondered what it meant. That the Humane Society had not yet told him to cease being a fool. Or that they’d said yes to him, had agreed, and had false honours in store for Timothy Shea, storekeeper, Belgrave Street, Kempsey, and a number of others.