A River Town Read online

  When he brought the food and drink to the girl, she seemed lost at the head of the table in his large-backed chair. He had earlier bathed her leg with iodine, and this little ritual against sepsis had done them both some good, making her cry out in a plain iodine anguish, proving to him that there were still simple human services to be supplied.

  It occurred to Tim now and then that her father was in the room of the dead in the hospital above the river in West, keeping company with a thirteen-year-old boy from Collombattye who had perished from lockjaw. Tim had helped the nurses place him there after they had washed the corpse.

  This awareness of her father’s location seemed to overtake the small girl too, because sometimes she would put her bread down, appetite fled, and weep purely and privately like a brave grown woman.

  She was an orphan now. Her name was Lucy Rochester. Her sleeping brother was Hector. Her father was or had been Albert. Tim knew him—he’d sometimes come into the store on Friday afternoons. A good type. The industrious cow-cocky who rises at four for milking and ends his days in terrible muteness. His children with him milking through every dawn of his life. You could tell it from Lucy Rochester’s hands as they held the bread. They were creased from the milking, the butter churn, and from cranking the chaff-cutter. And then, no doubt, her feet hardened by walking into school from Glenrock. Falling asleep in the mathematics class. Smartalec children from town laughing at that. He knew what she didn’t. The history of her hard little hands. In the Old Testament-style flood of ’92, the maize crops had been wiped out when the water swept over the lowlands and lapped against that embankment where Mr. Albert Rochester had this morning suffered his accident. Great hardships at that time. Farms going broke. The prices of produce in Sussex Street, Sydney’s bourse of all farm products, being squeezed and squeezed. And authoritative men from the New South Wales Agriculture Department and all manner of dairy enthusiasts, some of them from Sydney University, had come and delivered the dairy message. The Jersey cow. Unlike the maize crops, it could walk to high ground in time of flood, and the dumped mud from upriver would soon be fertilised and would feed herds in coming seasons.

  And yet now men were enslaved to the dairy farms, and their women were taken by chills in the predawn, and their children grew hard-handed and sleepy and thus ignorant. He would not be a dairy farmer unless, like the Burkes of Pee Dee, he could hire hands to do the dawn milking.

  In the Macleay, men like Rochester were owned by their Jersey cattle.

  “Why were you coming to town?” Tim asked the child.

  “Seeing Mrs. Sutter,” said the little girl. She had a strange grown way of addressing him. People spoke of little women. She was one. “Mama’s best friend, Mrs. Sutter. We would stay till night. Papa got the Coleman boys to do the afternoon milking.”

  A cow-cocky’s holiday, and he’s killed while it’s all still in anticipation! Was Mrs. Sutter to be the second Mrs. Rochester?

  The glass in the store door was being rattled.

  He went through the living room, past the sleeping boy. Through a tasselled doorway. The shop was full of its pent-up special smell today, a smell of tin and tea, sugar and sisal, candles and methylated spirits. A slight honeying of the air from the cans of treacle resting on the shelves. A hint of shortbread, a manly reek of kerosene. Goods supplied to him on two months’ credit, unlike the three months’ credit he gave his best clients, the Malcolms say and, of course, Old Burke from up the river. And how could you dun a nice man like the Offhand, who needed his scribe’s salary to pay for his habits? Miss Myra Howard’s theatrical company had run up a bill during their stay at the Commercial, tinned sausages and peas, tea and lemonade. That bill six months unpaid. Miss Howard’s agent in Sydney said that he would draw it to her attention as soon as she returned to Sydney from a tour of Far North Queensland at the end of the summer. As a result of such experiences, he no longer looked at the shelves with the undoubting sense of ownership which had, until recently, been one of his vanities.

  Rangy Constable Hanney was rattling the glass. He’d tied up his horse and trap to one of the posts which held up the awning of T. Shea—General Store.

  When Tim opened the door, the constable stepped straight in; a matter of habit. His hat was off, his brushy hair glittering with sweat.

  “I thought you were on Terara,” said Tim. Don’t let him show me the murdered girl’s face, on top of everything else!

  “No. Sergeants go off on steamers. Mug coppers stay at home. Got to get that statement from you, Shea. You have the children? Good. I need to talk to the girl. Poor bastard. Might have got his leg over with Mrs. Sutter. Not now though.”

  Tim led him into the dining room. The girl put her bread down and observed the policeman.

  “Oh dearie,” said Constable Hanney. “Dr. Gabriel says your papa died straight off. He did not feel any of the pigs. In heaven he’s got everything.” Hanney made a sort of inventory with his fingers of his own forehead, his eyes, his nose, his cheeks. “Your papa is a glorious young fellow in heaven.”

  She opened her mouth but did not weep. She rubbed her jaw with her seamed little hand.

  She said, “The horse shied at a heap of gravel. Hector fell out when the wheel went off the edge. My dress got caught on the footboard and I cut my leg. Papa fell too. I saw the wheel go over his head.”

  Hanney took notes and questioned Tim, who felt grateful for the constable’s official compassion.

  The child had gone back to her bread. Hanney and Tim could have been speaking of a separate tragedy from hers.

  Hanney said at the end, “You should see if Mrs. Sutter will take them. She’s got an income, you know. Her husband left her land upriver, and she sold it and lives off the interest. She and Rochester spoke of buying a pub somewhere, Kew I think, by the bridge there. We have not here a lasting bloody city, eh. Did that bloody ruffian Habash behave himself?”

  “He behaved well,” said Tim at once. “He fixed up Rochester’s horse very humanely. Then brought the children here while I took the father …”

  Why such a defence of the hawker? he asked himself. The bugger had flogged the grey. Yet Tim didn’t want him punished for that any more. The horror of the forenoon had been enough punishment.

  “You couldn’t have the kids go with him,” said Hanney. “Not into a Mohammedan household. Do you have any brandy?”

  Tim admitted he did.

  “What if you get one for yourself and one for me?”

  “Do you think I need it? I don’t think I need it.”

  This request for a stimulant was faintly surprising to Tim. Hanney did not look like a cadger of drinks. He lowered his voice. “I brought the young woman with me. Saves me coming back tomorrow.”

  “Oh God,” said Tim, getting up. He went and took the Old Toby brandy out of the encyclopedia bookcase in the living room. He poured two hefty glassfuls.

  “Whoa!” cried Constable Hanney, smiling slightly. “I don’t have much of a head for liquor.”

  The little girl had finished eating and had folded her arms. “To your papa,” Hanney told her, hitching his glass up and beginning to sip. The child watched him with indifference or lack of forgiveness.

  “Yes,” was all Tim could think to say. He drank in uneven gulps. He did not savour it like Hanney did. He noticed though, as the liquor went trembling through him, that his fever was gone.

  “But you didn’t know him,” said the girl evenly.

  Hanney half-smiled but Tim thought Lucy Rochester should be answered. “We know you and Hector,” he said. “We feel for you.”

  He put his glass down and went and got a bound volume of the Sydney Mail of ten years past out of the front room. He brought it back in to Lucy Rochester.

  “You might find that interesting to look through,” he said. She began to do it. With her yellowed, seamy, little fingers.

  In front of Tim, Hanney walked a bit unsteadily but like a man mellowed. Out through the store, opening the front door for
himself. The day had settled sweetly and thickly in Belgrave and Smith Streets, and there was a hint of blueness, of the advancing satin of the wide-open night. The populous frogs of the Macleay had already started up.

  Hanney inexactly gestured him around to the passenger side of the trap. A fruit basket lay under the seat there, holding something wrapped in blue and white cloth.

  “All right then!” he said, closing his eyes for a second and shaking his head. “This is the woman they found in the bootbox washed up at Sherwood.”

  “I know, I know,” said Tim.

  “We call her Missy. She was only young. Just go easy with it, Shea. You’ll see, she was lovely in life.”

  The empty town’s air spoke of all the lovely dead, including Mr. Albert Rochester who showed his young man’s face forth now only in heaven. Tim gripped one of the handlebars on the trap and Hanney dragged the basket forth and lifted the cloth. Inside was a huge preserving jar. Hanney raised it with care, his great hand with fist and fingers spread wide to keep it steady.

  The head of a girl of perhaps twenty years sat crookedly in there. How piteous that crookedness, as if the surgeon hadn’t taken enough pains. Barely a complaint on that face, the eyes nearly shut, the lips of what had been a small mouth slightly parted. The docked but trailing hair was light brown. No shallow, no vulgar plea there, in the way she presented herself. This was a serious child, making serious claims. Tim felt them at first sight.

  “Nothing but heads today,” he said in confusion. “Bert’s and hers.”

  “Steady, old chap,” said Hanney, who didn’t seem steady himself. “Someone must know her. She must have a mother or father somewhere. Or of more interest to me, she’s got to have had a lover. Probably here—I bet she got Mrs. Mulroney’s name from him. He could settle the matter. Then she wouldn’t need to be called Unnamed Female in court.”

  No question this was at once the chief question. Bigger than raising regiments. The girl or young woman not to be Unnamed Female. Her unnamed state was the shadow over things. The shadow over him.

  Tim swallowed and looked away at the violet evening settling on the river. So bloody hard to make any easy connection between the dusk splendour and that face separated from its heart.

  “See I thought she might’ve made a purchase, Shea. The day it happened. She may have had a craving say. Wanted chocolate. Have a good look.”

  Tim drew his eyes down again from the lavender southeast, the bluest quarter of the evening, and took a further stare. The demand on him was still there behind the lowered lids. And why not? Such useless and terrible beauty, beauty lopped from its roots. And in new and desperate alliance with him. Begging for the mercy of an identification. Aching for his word. “Yes, I did see her.” Or the supremely exorcising sentence, “Yes, that’s …” Waiting to be liberated from the constable’s fluid.

  Tim would have made a name up right then if it could have helped her.

  Hanney said, “Showed her to Captain Reid of the Burrawong, but he swore she hadn’t travelled with him. I showed it to the people at Keogh’s and Naylor’s coaches, thinking she might have come into town on them.”

  Hanney staring at him. Was this stare totally kind?

  Tim said, “Never seen her. I wish I could put a name to her. I’d be very damn happy to.”

  Hanney took the flask into the crook of his right arm and whacked his police trousers sharply with his left hand. He still looked calm enough though.

  “Bloody all beats me,” said Hanney. “If we can’t identify her here, I’ll have to go on the road with her.”

  “For God’s sake,” Tim asked, “why in the age of the photograph wasn’t a picture taken?”

  “There was one. And a sketch. But the Commissioner in Sydney says nothing has ever worked like this method. Pierces the imagination, see. Gingers up the memory. It’s an old Scottish method.”

  “Holy bloody hell,” said Tim.

  Hanney had at last covered the jar again, returned it to the basket, said good afternoon without any discernible disappointment, climbed shakily aboard and rode away. Tim knew at once that in sleep his vacant brain would be taken up with the features of the mute, dissected woman.

  Still no sign of the Terara downriver. A long, long, long way to the New Entrance which the river had found for itself in the awful flood of eight years past.

  Entertaining the orphans in these waiting, intervening hours seemed such a huge ordeal. Back through the store, he turned his eyes from the jars on the higher shelves, the bland faces of peaches and pears. In the dining room he told the girl, “A bit later, we’ll go to Mrs. Sutter’s when I have Pee Dee in his traces.” She looked up briefly and returned her head to the page. Wanting to know what had her engrossed, Tim stepped around the table and looked over her bony shoulder.

  It was an engraving marked, View of the Kimberley Goldfields, Cape Colony, Southern Africa.

  “You look at that then,” he advised her, and decided he must not seem to be rushing the orphans to their father’s woman friend, particularly not now, at this most threatening time, as the light faded.

  From the meat safe on the back verandah he took two pounds of Knauer’s sausages bought fresh a few days before, and in the hot cookhouse re-kindled the fire and began to cook them up with potatoes and sliced onion in a huge frying pan.

  When they were fully cooked, he took them inside and dished out a plateful to the girl. She watched him.

  “If papa and Hector and I were in a sulky in South Africa,” she asked him, not like a trick question, “would it’ve all fallen over like that?”

  Unanswerable questions from Missy and now from the waif!

  “Sad thing is,” he told her, “we are where we are.”

  He put a hand on her wrist, to still her mind. Then he woke the little boy and took him to the outhouse, waiting in the stillness until he was done. Back at the table, Hector ate fitfully, not speaking at all however of his horrible morning. The girl proved a ferocious eater of her tea. Stick-thin but a real forager.

  “Hold hard, Lucy,” he laughed, reloading her plate, refilling her tea cup. Sugar very good for grief. He shovelled four spoonfuls into her cup. She looked up at him without a smile, planting on him his part of the blame for Albert Rochester and his children being here and not in some level place in Africa.

  Unlike his industrious diner of a sister, the boy had sat back after devouring half a snag and seemed to be taking pretty judicious thought about his future. Almost for his own comfort, Tim lit a kerosene lamp on the first evening of their fatherlessness.

  Crickets had set up madly in the paddock. The evening full of frog-thunder and insect-chirping, and he began to feel orphaned himself.

  “Are you tired?” he asked the boy hopefully. But the boy did not answer, and the girl still had her mind on Africa.

  The hoot of the river boat Terara was at last heard. No august hoot, like that of the Burrawong. No memory of New South Wales’s long coastline in its bleat. Slower than a cripple, it was bearing Kitty home.

  “Do you want to see the Terara come in?” Tim asked the children, and they immediately slipped from their chairs as if they’d been threatened, and stood ready to go. He must have been pretty good at getting orders obeyed, poor Albert Rochester.

  Tim got his coat and old brown hat off a peg on the wall, and led the children through the shop and out beneath the awning, across the neck of Belgrave Street whose dust had got a churning from the hawker and his grey, and down Smith Street past the Greek cafe and so to the landing. Missy and the day’s tragedy receded a little. For a while all felt restored to him. A man in an average season. Across the kindly waters he could hear the picnickers, the returning townspeople, all talking at once.

  “See!” he told the orphans. “Mrs. Shea and Johnny and Annie are on that ship.”

  He saw his lanky six-and-a-half-year-old son Johnny hanging over the gunwales. Just his arms and shoulders and head. Unruly little bugger! And Kitty and sedate little Annie w
aiting on the edge of the ruck of would-be disembarkers. Kitty with veil up and basket in hand. From this distance, she looked somehow more pregnant than when she had left that morning. Not possible, of course. Just that you did not often see your wife distanced in this way. Separated by elements. You on earth. She on water.

  The black flank of Terara touched the great hempen buffers on the wharf, gates opened amidships and the gangplank came down. People streamed down it pretty much in order of social eminence. Dr. Erson with his lush theatrical moustache, his thin wife. Mr. Chance, the natty livestock and property agent, his musical daughter …

  Here were men Tim envied not for their better income but for being at home in the world. No sense of being exiled at all. Erson one of them. Reputed to be the best doctor in the Macleay, though some swore by Doctors Gabriel and Casement. Which of them had separated Missy from her body though?

  Women and children milling on deck to descend. Couldn’t wait for land after the slow steamer excursion. His wife among them. He felt calmer to watch her, she looked in such control. There should be at least one of those in every family. Someone anchored. Hanney’s woman in the jar would be more apprised of all this next time around. She would play things safe and cosy and join the Macleay Valley Theatrical and Operatic Society.

  Some of those descending the gangplank with their mild, dazed picnickers’ smiles halted for a second wondering what Mr. Tim Shea was doing there with children not his own. Mr. Sheridan the solicitor and his wife. Sheridan very much the young statesman and destined for politics, one or other of the two Parliaments which would soon be available, the parliament of Australia-wide or the old parliament of New South Wales.

  Then the accountant Mr. Malcolm, a beefy man, very jovial, representing earth, and his lovely dark-haired ivory-skinned wife. Slender and—for a woman—tall, Mrs. Malcolm. White dress, huge pink hat with a rucked-up veil. She was his finest customer, the only one who occasionally used couplets of Tennyson while buying groceries. But not in a flashy way. As naturally as breathing. Poetry the mist from a noble soul.