A River Town Page 4

  Once when dropping off an order in the store, a few young men on horseback had ridden wildly by, yahooing and being fools. A look of genuine defeat crossed Winnie Malcolm’s face and one drop of sweat made its way from the direction of her ear down her cheek. Tim had felt a burning pity for her at that second. But she gathered herself and wiped the sweat with a handkerchief.

  “We have to remember, Mr. Shea, that the Saxons themselves were once unruly tribes. Australia will one day become something more august.”

  Did she hope the same thing about Ernie, who was so fortunate to have such a jewel yet didn’t seem overwhelmed by his luck? She stopped by Tim and her husband waited there too, with his blowsy holiday grin fixed in place and some kind of cheroot carried negligently in the corner of his gob. A customer of T. Shea—General Store, Belgrave Street, Kempsey. He had drunk a lot, judging from his hoppy smell, and he was on his way home to eat and drink more, and then he’d probably want to jump on the divine Mrs. Malcolm. Lucky, lucky bugger! On top of everything, he didn’t know that the very air had been mortgaged to Missy, to naming Missy, to giving her rest. And that would be the rape of spirit by flesh, yet Mrs. Malcolm didn’t seem fearful. Her upper lip formed its delicate bow while the lower kept its place, glossy and static.

  Native-born Australians were like that. Never used both lips at once. He was beginning to see it this early in his children, and it was there in the little Rochester girl and helped make her sentences like those of a sleepwalker.

  “What children are these, Tim?”

  “They’re the Rochester children, Mrs. Malcolm.”

  Here in sight of Kitty and his own children, he kept a curb on his pleasure in Mrs. Malcolm’s normal sentences. And as if to show all was fair and above board, he turned to bovine Mr. Ernie Malcolm. What a bush aristocrat! Yet he stood just behind M. M. Chance as a leader of the community.

  “They’re Mr. Albert Rochester’s children,” said Tim. “Poor feller had an accident this morning.”

  “Oh dear,” said Mrs. Malcolm. She had noble, long features. “Where is he put …?”

  “It was a mortal accident, Mrs. Malcolm.”

  Mrs. Malcolm looked at the small, level-gazing Rochester girl who stared so judiciously back at her that now she had to fling her eyes to the sky and say, “Poor darlings.”

  “Here,” said Mr. Malcolm. He didn’t have any sense that this little kid expected him to help her lift the whole disaster to another continent, and then smooth over any tears in the fabrics of place and of time. He kept the cigarette-ish thing in the bunched corner of his mouth as he threw his head back too and began fumbling in the pockets of his vest. He took out two shillings, and offered one in his left hand and one in his right to each of the Rochester children. He did it too as if this were the spacious limit of his charity.

  The children frowned at him. So Malcolm reached down now and opened Hector’s hand and put the shilling in there and closed the fingers for him, and then he did the same with Lucy’s small, grained hand. He was pretty pleased with himself. He was their gift-horse.

  “His head was broken,” Tim whispered to Mrs. Malcolm. “An accident on the road.”

  “Dear God!” she said in a low voice back. “Let me know if there is anything I can do …”

  Was this a token offer? Tim wondered. Tim didn’t like the way, dragging his wife, Mr. Malcolm moved off as soon as Kitty arrived on the wharf. Was she a person beneath his bloody attention?

  “Hello there,” cried Kitty. Her long mouth split in the plainest and most personable of smiles. How could a fellow not like women with their kindnesses so varied?

  “Good evening to you, Mrs. Malcolm,” she called after the Malcolms, and winked at Tim.

  Mrs. Malcolm said over her shoulder almost nervously, “Yes, Mrs. Shea, we met in the store. Didn’t we?”

  And Kitty murmured, “We did, and is that the reason you’re disappearing like a rat down a drain now?”

  How hard his daughter Annie stared at the Rochester child. Tim nudged her round cheek with a knuckle. “Come on, Duchess. Don’t be grim.”

  Kitty said, “She did ask me from the very deck what is papa doing with those children?”

  A trace of chastisement in Kitty’s voice. As if she thought he’d wilfully gone out and collected two children.

  Tim, inhibited by the listening Rochester children, gave a brief summary of the disaster.

  “Their horse dragged their sulky off the edge at O’Riordan’s at Glenrock this morning. Their father Albert Rochester is finished. These infants are on their own now.”

  “Then come, come,” said Kitty when he finished. “Let’s feed you all.”

  “Done already,” he told her with the small pride of a male who manages to put a meal together.

  Johnny performed a cartwheel on the splintery boards of Central landing to show Lucy Rochester it was possible.

  Tipsy excursionists, having crossed the wharf, were struggling now up the ramp to Smith Street and getting up on their parked sulkies and carts. Mr. Malcolm, by now having helped his wife into their trap, unhitched his horse and took some heaving to get himself up. He shook out the reins energetically.

  “I hope the horse is soberer than he is,” Kitty told Tim. “What’s to do with these waifs would you say, Tim?”

  “Careful now,” Tim called to Johnny, who was running into Smith Street and its backing carts and its resentful bucking horses. “Careful there, John.”

  For Johnny had a crazy look in his eye, put there by meeting another child and recognising some answering lunacy there. Soulmates, it seemed. And the steamer trip hadn’t taken all the ginger and stampede out of the boy.

  As they walked along, Smith Street cleared though the dust of others hung still in the air. Old Tapley, who was believed to have once been a London pickpocket and to have been sent to Port Macquarie for it in those days, puttered out of Belgrave Street with his little ladder and his tapers and began lighting up the lamps in front of the draper’s, on a slant across from T. Shea—General Store.

  Kitty said, “You did not have your day of solitude then?”

  “No chance.”

  He felt restored though for the moment. He had that wonderful feeling of being married, and of heading home to a place marked with his name in blue and yellow. He took Kitty’s basket, and in reaching across her to do it, picked up the malty aroma of stout she gave off. Recommended for Carrying and Nursing Mothers.

  When Tim took the basket, letting go of Hector’s hand, Hector immediately walked around and claimed Kitty’s right hand.

  “There you are, darling,” she told him.

  But it sounded a little brisk and offhand to Tim. She didn’t want to make any promises.

  She said, “I’ve been choosing the moment to tell you. I had a letter from the last visit of Burrawong. My young sister Mamie has already arranged to come here and has been accepted by New South Wales. You’d think the bloody Macleay was the centre of the universe, wouldn’t you?”

  “Jesus!” said Tim.

  “Thought you’d say that.” She’d left the “h” out of words as everyone did in the part of North Cork they came from. He’d tried to put it into his diction, since that lost “h” was something the bigots used to beat you on the head with, or at least to justify derision. Kitty however was never going to try. He’d both admired and regretted her for that.

  “I’ve only known myself about Mamie since Thursday,” she said. “The awful little tart didn’t even tell me. Presumed! Presumed we’re always open for emigrants. Since last Thursday is all I knew!”

  Which she’d pronounced now and ever would, Tursdy.

  “Don’t get cranky, Tim,” she pleaded.

  Old Red Kenna, a little rooster of a man, had begotten eleven children along the lines of Kitty. They were a raucous mob. And very earthy. Were they going to come to the Macleay one by one, the arrival of the next one all the more guaranteed by the success of the last? Australia as famous as New York at R
ed Kenna’s hearth and in that corner of North Cork. The same story had already happened in another direction with Tim’s own more sedate clan. His eldest sister had gone to Brooklyn and married a newspaper editor—married the Brooklyn Advocate, in fact. And so, one by one, two others of his older sisters had crossed the Atlantic on the strength of that founding bit of emigrant luck. One of these follow-the-leader sisters was now a housekeeper to a family of Jewish haberdashers, the other had married a stevedore. He, Tim, had been expected to join his sister in Brooklyn, his important sister, the newspaper editor’s wife. From the age of sixteen he’d always said in public that he would, and yet knew in his water he was lying. In the Cork papers were weekly advertisements saying, Attractive Terms of Emigration to New South Wales.

  Of course, no one really understood what distances were involved. You could return from Brooklyn. The emigrant’s return was one of the staple bright hopes of all parties. But who could return from New South Wales?

  The thing was the idea of being on his own, away from the maternal manners of sisters. That interested him more than he could properly utter even to himself. And now, what Brooklyn was to the Sheas, his own little store in Belgrave Street was to Red Kenna’s squat, charming children.

  Kitty said, “You can’t beat Mamie. Went all the way to the Agent-General in the Strand to get a special rate. Imagine!”

  “And we’ll put Mamie on the verandah like Molly?” asked Tim.

  “Out there under a mosquito net while the summer lasts. She should be settled in somewhere by winter. She makes her way, that one. Not at all shy like me!”

  “No room in the inn then for some small people,” murmured Tim.

  Annie was working herself in between the two of them from behind, saying, “Mama, mama.”

  “You’d think those Rochester children had friends and relatives, wouldn’t you?”

  “Well, we surely bloody well do,” said Tim.

  She dug him with her elbow. “Don’t get sullen there, Tim.”

  He flinched. “I saw Hanney’s woman too.”

  “Holy God, the little woman they murdered. Did you? Could you see her features and everything else?”

  “You could.”

  “Anyone we know, would you say?”

  “No one. No one.”

  “Mama, mama,” yelled Annie.

  “She’s such a jealous little creature,” said Kitty.

  Jealous little creature. Missy the true jealous little creature. Resenting his idle hours, hanging on his shoulders, pending on all events. Wanting her name back.

  “Let me alone,” he muttered.

  “What did you say?” asked Kitty. But idly. She did not demand an answer.

  Two

  BEFORE YOU WENT to the trouble of putting a collar on Pee Dee and harnessing him up, it was best to check the Argus to see if any circuses or any large herds of cattle were due to come down Belgrave Street. He didn’t even like the teams of bullocks which brought the big cedars down to the timber mill. He would back in the traces, pigroot, buck.

  There were no circuses on the morning after the holiday, however. No reason to delay taking the Rochester children up to Mrs. Sutter’s house by the showground.

  The Macleay so flood-prone that everyone thought of the Showground Hill primarily as “above flood level.” Tim’s place was not. In still hours when he woke, he asked himself about the wisdom of living as close to the spirited Macleay River as he did. Flood eight years past had drowned Belgrave Street to the awnings and filled the stores with mud. Tight as a bloody nougat. He knew because he’d helped old Carlton shovel mud out of what was now his place. In those days, he’d not been a shopkeeper but—after working three years for Kiley’s haulage—had hopes of the Jerseyville pub. He’d shovelled up the mud and heard Carlton complain. Tim in the last of his four years of bachelorhood in New South Wales. He wanted the license to the Jerseyville pub, but the pub didn’t eventuate—Kitty could not reach New South Wales to marry him in time. Just the same, looking to get into business, and flood was a good season to begin, to trade on Carlton’s weariness, to write to the wholesalers in Sydney, sending along your references.

  That flood had been a flood out of a prophecy. A chastisement unlikely to recur. So forceful that the river found a new way into the sea near Trial Bay. The New Entrance. Such had been the vigour of the Macleay. It had negotiated a new arrangement, dictating terms of its own with the Pacific Ocean. Kitty, arriving later, didn’t understand how bloody strenuous the huge event had been. “Flood, flood,” she’d complained. “All you hear on every side is flood.”

  For she hadn’t seen the way young Wooderson and he rowed out from their moorage, which happened to be the upper floor of the Commercial Hotel, to rescue the Kerridges from the roof of their house in Elbow Street. The current terrible to push against, and on the way back with Kerridge and his wife and two children, they’d seen a chest of drawers sail past. Wooderson, being such a good swimmer, had actually got into the flood and attached a rope to it, and the flow of water had swept it and the boat and them back to the Commercial.

  In case the Book of Floods Part Two struck Kempsey, he had acquired a rowboat, in which he sometimes took the children out on the river. When not so used, it was kept tethered on a long lead, like a goat, in the yard. A prayer against further floods. A child, he knew, was a wafer before the force of the water. And Lucy, the wafer of a child beside him, had been through that, would have been an infant in Glenrock, would have been taken onto the iron roof by her mother and father to wait things out. The range of perils which surrounded young flesh. This was what astounded Tim more than he could ever express.

  He hoped she still wasn’t pushing Africa round in her head: the possible locale where Albert Rochester might have been safe.

  “Do you like Mrs. Sutter’s place?” he asked.

  As ever, she answered in the way she chose. “Mrs. Sutter was mama’s and papa’s best friend of all.”

  For relief from the features of Hanney’s Missy, he’d happily clung to Kitty last night, but it had been so hot she did not welcome that. For some hours before going to bed, he had known that once he put his head on the pillow and turned the wick down on the storm lantern, he would feel lost in a particular way. And it had happened. He had felt too nakedly what he was: the lost man on the furtherest river bank of the remotest province. But terrible to apprehend it, awful to feel wadded away under distance. A sort of—what was it?—twelve or thirteen thousand mile high column of distance under which he had managed to pin himself.

  Now poor Rochester could nearly be safely thought of in the dark. In this sense: Rochester lived, Rochester perished in a fall from his sulky and while insensible was attacked by beasts. It was different with the girl who’d been cut about by someone who could smile. She was dreadfully everywhere, a face begging its name back.

  Predictable dreams of her followed, of course, and their pungency remained by daylight and flavoured the act of getting rid of Lucy.

  On the tranquil hill, Mrs. Sutter the widow had two gates, one canopied, and another one at the side marked TRADESMEN’S ENTRANCE. Her late husband himself probably put it there. So much nonsense under the gumtrees. A gate for the afternoon tea gentry to enter, and a gate for others to deliver wood and ice and groceries.

  You’d think by that label on the gate that beyond Mrs. Sutter’s bungalow lay hundreds of villagers, dozens of tenant-farmers. And in Kempsey the main gate and tradesmen’s gate lay within a short spit of each other. He was buggered if he was going to take Mrs. Sutter’s suitor’s orphans in by the side gate.

  Palm off Lucy and Hector to make a place for Kitty’s sister. Kitty would have had to have nominated her. A form would have come from the New South Wales Department of Immigration, and she would have needed to sign it. But it had taken the sudden arrival of orphans to make her mention it. Jesus, the slyness!

  And at the moment he seemed to get, from the direction of Mrs. Sutter’s bungalow, a whiff of slyness too. W
idowed once, she had now been widowed in a certain sense again. She’d had none of the joy of drinking tea with, none of the secure married talk with poor Rochester. But now she would be offered his children.

  He heard the noise of her children inside now, and holding the little boy’s hand, he knocked on the yellow front door with its panels of pebbled glass. No one came for some time, and then a boy of about eleven opened the door, grabbed the Rochester children in by the hand and told Tim, “Mama’s round the back.” The door was closed in his face. Tim went around the flank of the yellow house. You could smell the hot, moist odour of the spaces under the house. The Sutter residence had the honour of standing on brick piers. The idea of air circulating beneath the floor had seemed an odd one to him when he first arrived. On top of the moist earth smell there was a tang of sweet corruption from the garbage tip of the yard, but between him and that rankness lay the smell and then the sight of soap-cleansed sheets blowing on a breeze.

  A woman wore boots amongst the great flags of bedclothing. Mrs. Sutter, dark-haired and tall, narrow in the shoulders, well-set in the hips. An occasional customer of his. A lot of people worked on the principle of spreading custom around, because you never knew when you’d need to spread your debts out a bit as well.

  She came forward to him, her hands out, pallid from the soap and water.

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh, you were so brave, Mr. Shea.”

  He didn’t know what she was talking about.

  “You relieved poor Bert’s last moments, a friendly face bending over him. Constable Hanney told me.”

  She began to weep. She smoothed her tears sideways with big, lovely, soapy hands.

  “There was another man there,” said Tim.

  “Yes, the hawker. God Almighty, that wouldn’t have been a particular comfort to Bert.”

  He found himself in defence of Bandy Habash. “He behaved very, very well, Mrs. Sutter.” For one damn thing, he dealt with the horse who would have still been thrashing and heaving out there if he hadn’t. “He’s not a bad little chap.”