A River Town Page 17

  “Mate, be a good feller to me!” the man pleaded. The thunder high above and wide out in the cow pastures seemed to jolt his head.

  “No. Don’t you come in here asking for White Lady. I tell you that every time.”

  The man went out muttering, and stood under the awning, looking to the left up Belgrave Street, to the right up Smith. His White Lady beckoned. His love. Visiting circuses always went out there, to the blacks’ camp. The circus midgets with their liquor to trade. The huge men with beards and breasts like women. Some townsmen too. Cheap delights. Black velvet, they were reputed to call it. God knows why. Such a luscious name for wretched townships of hessian and bark and iron sheeting. But how must it be for a fellow to see the half-castes trailing into town and see your features on the brown faces of the Greenhill children?

  “White Lady, mate,” the natives said lovingly. It had brought quick ruin to blackfellers who hadn’t even seen white men until three score and ten years ago. The first of them a few convicts escaped out this way from Port Macquarie. They’d begun the long mix of blood. And the torment. And now everyone said the blacks would die out, that that was the world’s way.

  The Offhand cheered one of his wifeless midmornings by coming in for Woodbines. A sparing smoker, he lit one shakingly in the shop and very politely went outside to hurl the spent match into Smith Street. Then he returned, puffing and trembling.

  “A second great rescue for you, Tim. This time from the decks of Terara. The Chronicle reports many a bush cricket match, but this one will stand out in the telling. Children overboard! The two highest scoring batsmen dive in to save said children overboard! And one of the children saved is then runner-up in the wicket-hitting competition. Sublime!”

  Tim began to laugh. “That’s Johnny. Born athlete. Only drawback is the little bugger seems to want to kill his father.”

  “And then,” said the Offhand, “going on to a new topic. The courage of Mr. Artillery, Lancer, Mounted-Bushman, Light-Infantry, Horse-Guards Chance. It was good to have a few sane men there to say otherwise to him and his brethren.”

  Tim felt a spurt of unrest. All right for the Offhand to volunteer to be sane or mocking or whatever he’d been. The mighty feared his powers of satire.

  “I would have been better not to go,” said Tim. “It always comes back to loyal vows I would rather not take.”

  The Offhand shook his head. “Tim, they will find it very hard to get up a loyal list or a disloyal list or whatever it is they want to get up. The civilised British value of free speech takes precedence over monarchs in my book, and I shall be saying so.”

  They both watched through the glass as a white horse drawing a sulky pig-rooted while turning into Smith Street outside T. Shea—General Store. The horse did not send up much dust since the road was baked hard now, and after the intense storms it had grown quite hot again. They saw Meagher, a publican, beefy but with very fine, good-looking features, fighting with the reins, looking too heavy for his sulky.

  “Ah,” said the Offhand, puffing away. “Tim, there’s a parable for you. How decency brings its own ruin!”

  Meagher managed to wrench his horse and buggy around the corner, heading towards the Wharf Hotel, which he owned.

  “He still walks with a limp you know,” said the Offhand.

  Tim knew.

  “No good deed goes without its proper punishment,” said the Offhand, smiling at that truth.

  The events they were reflecting on concerned a man called Slater, who had been a heavy client of Meagher’s Wharf Hotel. The drink, as people curiously say, had got him. Mr. Meagher was a scrupulous man, and concerned for Slater’s wife and children. He’d begun returning money to the wife at her house in West Kempsey, saying that Mr. Slater had accidentally left it behind. Such delicacy of feeling on Meagher’s part was fabled. It was believed he’d done similar things before. Mrs. Slater had been revived by Meagher’s kindness. They had begun a romance.

  Impossible for these things to happen in the Macleay without people finding out. When Mrs. Meagher discovered it, she took their son and daughter and went to live in Sydney. When drunken Slater found out, he attended the Wharf Hotel with an axe and hacked poor Meagher in the ribs and the hip. Arrested, of course, Slater was tried and shipped on Burrawong to Darlinghurst jail. Mrs. Slater moved away from the Macleay in acute shame, and Meagher was left with his pub. He limped around the bar, weary of the whispered jokes of drinkers. And whatever people paid him now, he kept. He did not try any straight-out refunds to the widows and orphans of those men good-as-dead who lived for grog. Because he had grief of his own, one good leg left, and barely half a life.

  Dragging these mysteries behind him in tiny puffs of sun-glinting grit from the hard pavement, Meagher vanished out of sight and pretty much out of light, bound for his dark front bar.

  “He’s been to Corrigan’s funeral,” said the Offhand. “Cousin of his. Does Meagher still take the Catholic sacraments, would you say?”

  “He goes to Communion, but people point him out.”

  “Well, where would this town be without pointings-out? And makings of loyal lists. It’s enough to make a scribe turn mischievous. I came to tell you. Look out for some mischief in tomorrow’s paper, Tim.”

  The Offhand finished his Woodbine and stubbed out the nose of it and put it in his side pocket. He always did that. You’d see him handing them out by the fistful to this or that blackfellow from Greenhill. Charitable according to his means. Like poor bloody Meagher.

  He could hear his children out the back, playing around the shed and paddock. Well-married, well-fathering Tim Shea. But without Kitty today. Dear God, the little buggers were making a noise. Even Annie shouting out some ditty. He’d go out the back and see what was exciting them.

  In the shade of the shed, Bandy Habash and Ellen Burke sat together applauding a song Annie was singing in a reedy voice. Johnny doing his normal stuff, hand-walking and somersaults to entertain the hawker.

  Here was a fellow he refused to be charmed by, the man he’d warned off so frequently. Yet the children had behind their father’s back been mesmerised into performing for the bugger. Here too the protector of his children laughed in the man’s company. Tim felt not only the anger of being betrayed but as well the instant fury Habash seemed always and at an instant to call forth in him. Certainly it was that Habash was a brown man, but most of all that he was an insinuator of himself into places, into roles, where Tim resented finding him. The image of Kitty in yellow cloth recurred to him as flaming proof of this.

  Tim did not want his children to hear the full force of his anger. They were not at fault. Ellen was. Johnny sensed a change in his audience, saw his father, and stood upright and still.

  “You and Annie go to the shop. Go on, go on. Tell any people that your papa’s coming. Go on!”

  Annie stopped her singing, inspected him, frowned, and placed her hand in her brother’s. They went together. The duchess and the bloody vagabond. Bandy had risen from the log and looked crestfallen already, his face as smooth and as pausable as an infant’s. No flashiness to him though. An ordinary brown suit and an open collar. The girl displayed pursed, full lips and her brow was flushed as she stood. But she looked for her age a bit defiant as well. Her hands folded, but not contritely. Seventeen-year-olds were meant to be easily made contrite.

  “You have been put in my charge by your parents,” Tim told her, “and I’ve put my children in your charge.”

  Ellen Burke worked her tongue inside her jaws. Was she getting together the spit for an argument?

  “Mr. Habash is a great friend of my family’s, uncle,” she said.

  So that part of Bandy’s oft-repeated argument was correct.

  “When he comes to Pee Dee, he’s allowed to camp in the home paddock.”

  “Then,” Tim argued, “he’s got a better sight reputation at Pee Dee than he has here in town.”

  Bandy stepped in between Ellen and Tim. “It is the case, Mr. Shea. I a
m not here on business. I am here renewing friendship.”

  “You’re like the bloody hydra, Bandy. Kick one head and another arises to take you in the backside. And besides, you, Ellen! He wasn’t a hundred yards from the bloody door in the home paddock. He was beside you on a log.”

  Tim again expected her to step back or turn away enraged, leaving him alone to chastise Bandy Habash if it were possible. But she stood up to him. She was ferocious.

  She said, “We girls from the bush have an easier manner than women do in that terrible old place you all talk about all the time. I’m pleased I’m an Australian, and let me tell you, Ellen and Kitty came here to have an easier manner without being shouted at! I think you’re trying to suggest something else than manners though, Uncle Tim. And since you think I’m that sort of person, I’ll see the children fed, go to Mrs. Manion’s tonight, and wait there till the Friday coach up the river.”

  “Jesus, you won’t! On your own responsibility? No.”

  Ellen Burke marched off down the yard. Tim turned on Habash.

  “Will you go?”

  Bandy stood straight, spreading his fingers at his sides and then drawing them back into a fist.

  “Mr. Shea,” he said pleadingly. “It seems I cannot do anything to suit you.”

  “All the more reason to clear out to blazes. I don’t look to be pleased by you. I don’t look for you to break the bloody horizon more than is necessary.”

  Bandy swallowed. “Yet the rest of your clan likes me, old chap. You think you do not need to look at me. But you are not ignorant like others. You understand that my God is your God and my prophets your prophets. And you can see that you and I are in the same club. For even amongst Christians there are the despised and the despisers. I would remind you of that.”

  Ah. Cunning, cunning little bastard.

  And he continued. “I may be a jockey the Turf Club won’t license, but it may happen, since these things do happen, that you will one day need me for a friend. What am I then to make of your hostility, Mr. Shea? Even a man of my equable nature can be tested too far.”

  “Believe me to the limit, Habash! I won’t want anything you have.”

  Bandy reflected on him a while and started to go, but Tim knew in his water that it wasn’t final. That the departure wouldn’t take. He knew it in fact before Bandy seemed to. And Bandy did turn.

  “The fault is mine,” he said. “Miss Burke was not aware that there was any lack of amity between you and me.”

  “Yes, but you knew it bloody well, and should have told her.”

  “Miss Burke is faultless, and should be treated in those terms.”

  He turned and stared at Ellen Burke, whose back was to him. She stood on the shady, eastern side of the cookhouse.

  “We don’t punish women,” said Tim, proud of his manners, shipped from Europe and to the bush.

  When Ellen would not return Bandy’s gaze, he walked defeated off down the lane beside the residence towards his wagon, which Tim could remotely see parked near Central wharf. A perverse image of their joint endeavours with poor Albert Rochester arose, and Tim felt regretful.

  Ellen Burke stood between himself and the house and now turned, her cheeks plumped out with rage.

  Trying to be conciliatory, Tim said, “Very well, you were not to know. But would your father and stepmother want the familiarity of a shared log? That’s all I’m saying.”

  She went on regarding him from beneath the dark eyebrows her dead mother had given her.

  “Naturally, it won’t go further,” he promised.

  “But,” she said, not pointedly, not testy in a girlish way. Like a woman ten years older perhaps. “You’ll hold this over me.”

  “It’s not my mode of doing business,” he murmured. She looked away but seemed to believe him. “Except, if you go back to Mrs. Manion’s, your father would know there had been an argument, and ask me about the cause.”

  “So you will hold it over me.”

  “No, but stay till Friday. If you like, stay till next week and meet Kitty’s other sister.”

  She said, “You can’t turn it into a tea party as easily as that.”

  “All right, don’t damn well stay.”

  “You swear too much!”

  “It’s an Irish failing.”

  “Not only swearing, if you ask me!”

  “You shouldn’t bloody sneer, miss. Your father came here without anything but a pair of hands.”

  She said, “I have to see to the children.” And to show she was still arguing like an equal, “And you still have half an hour before closing.”

  Though he intended to walk with her towards the residence, she made an officious and aggrieved detour towards the cookhouse. Feeling hollow now after his flaring display of anger, Tim turned through the residence and into the store where Johnny was, of course, chalking a wildly rendered tree on the floorboards, and Annie had climbed on the stool to extract cans of peaches from the shelf and fixedly build a pyramid with them on the counter. Tim didn’t have the steam left for an argument with blithe Johnny. He pushed the boy’s shoulder. “That again. You are a colonial ruffian who can’t be reformed!”

  Annie stared at him, seeking with raised chin his permission to continue with her peach-tin construction. He smiled.

  Kitty was on the sea off the Hunter River, and Sydney still a huge way south on a coastline of submerged ledges. She watched the sunset with Mrs. Arnold and perhaps drank for health and fortitude some stout brought to her by the Pommy steward on a tin tray.

  The children stayed in the store, and he let them pursue their works. When the Central post office clock rang six, he closed the door, as the distant Parliament in Macquarie Street decreed. A curious thing—the power of such far-off authority. He was further from the New South Wales Parliament than the outmost Atlantic isle was from Dublin. How strange the consent of the citizen to government notices posted in the Argus. Rebellion was in his opinion not the mystery. Civic agreement was the mystery. Uncle Johnny and the other transported Fenians had misunderstood such things.

  The door closed. He faced the house, the evening. Ellen Burke’s stew, whose smell warmly penetrated from the cookhouse, came like a pledge as far as the store, and would aid him. Stews made a man sleepy and served as a signal of the close of things. Ambition and industry unclenched themselves, were etherised by stew-aroma.

  “How do you think that smells, eh?” he asked the children, who looked up at him in some wonder, some puzzlement, as if he were speaking to them in French. They took their stew when it came. Why mention it, though, while there were still peach pyramids to be built, boards to be profaned with chalk?

  Tonight he was tempted to suggest to Ellen Burke that they ought all to talk at table as if it was Christmas. But perhaps that would increase Johnny’s giddiness, license his desire to be an entertainer. Tim could envisage how he might walk down the table on his hands, avoiding the vinegar cruets and the salt and pepper cellars by great concentration on the task.

  Afterwards, settling with a somewhat water-stained volume of the London Illustrated News 1891 bought at the auction in Chance’s auctioneering offices from old Miller’s deceased estate. He liked these books, since they had the marks of the great flood upon them. The flood waters had read these pages too. The great brown, snaky Australian flood waters invading the genteel magazine. The news utterly out of date, of course, even by the standards of the Macleay. South Africa nine years back a minor cloud on the Empire’s remote horizon.

  In fact in this volume, views of Uganda, newly ceded by Germany to Great Britain in return for Heligoland. Looked a bit like views of western New South Wales—wheat and sheep country.

  Ellen Burke was settling the children in their bedroom. Later she would sleep in the screened-off bed on the back verandah. At the moment she did not seem to be punishing his son and daughter at all for the quarrel he’d had with her and bloody Bandy.

  Someone was rattling and banging on the door of the store.
He unlatched the storm lantern from its hook on the wall and walked out of the sitting-room to see to it.

  At the door a man of ordinary height in an aged but well-tended suit waited. The cluster of rare acetylene street lamps at the junction of Smith and Belgrave Streets threw bright light on his right shoulder, but his square, hatted head was obscured.

  “Yes?” Tim called through the glass.

  “I wonder could you help me, old fellow,” the man said loudly, but then he lowered his voice so that it could not really get through the door glass. Tim therefore opened the door.

  “Do I know you?” asked Tim.

  “Perhaps. I just moved here with the bank. My wife’s having an important tea and—if the truth were told—gin party. To meet the locals. She’s out of biscuits and petit-fours and low on sugar. Does everyone on the Macleay eat like a bloody grasshopper?”

  “It’s almost seven. Strange enough time to be having a tea party.”

  “Know how it is. We’re a bit of a novelty and the guests won’t go home, and being newcomers who are we to tell them to?”

  “You’re aware there’s a new law?”

  “It’s a pretty poor state of human freedom when a man can’t get some shortbread and sugar for his wife’s party. Can a fellow come in?”

  Tim opened the door just enough to admit the man. The man entered, pleasant-faced, smiling. Could of course be a first-class customer to have. Would no doubt want extended credit.

  Tim asked him how much sugar and how many pounds of biscuits? Then stealthily weighed out the sugar from a bag beneath the counter into the scales. He went into the back storeroom where the biscuits were kept in their rectangular, insect- and water-proof tin cases. He weighed out the amount on the scales in there, put them in a paper bag, and then came out to the smiling man and weighed them on the counter scales as well. A conscientious storekeeper. Then he did a sum in his head and announced the amount the man owed him.

  Without changing demeanour, the man produced an ornamental badge from the fob of his vest. He said, “I am an officer from the Department of Colonial Secretary. Our instructions have been to warn storekeepers of the new regulations via notice in local papers and then to enact punitive fines for violations. The fine as advertised is fifteen pounds.”