A River Town (15 page)

“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 down 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.

Terara
shuddered and set itself against the current, gentle though it was today. The old tub eked its way around the new curve the river had taken in ’92, when it had shown them all its easy, unanswerable force.

Tim took off his coat and let the expansive surroundings influence him.

Rich pastures on the western side. Euroka, where dairy farmers lived, rich and poor, with some of them taking occasional recourse to cattle-duffing. They thought they were remote from police scrutiny, those people, since the river had chosen to set a barrier between them and the law. Lavender mountains ran forever to the north behind those emerald mudflats.

Aboard, young men were earnestly drinking now. Tim hoped they were the Singles batsmen blurring their sight. “I can hit
drunk, balls other fellers can’t hit sober!” Marriage would educate them on what their limits were.

“The willows,” said Kitty, pointing to the shoreline from her chair. “They are so lovely. No wonder the Chinamen put them on their plates.”

Both to port and starboard river mullet leapt. “Fish leppin’ out of the rivers at you there,” an old man had told Tim before emigration. Old fool had never seen Australia, but had been right by either accident or vision. If his own father could see this—the spacious sky, the violet mountains, the potent river enriched with fertile silt—he’d be reconciled to the loss of children. Raucous little Red Kenna would be pleased to yield up three daughters to such a splendid place.

The great hill of West Kempsey bore up. It looked so wooded that an uninformed traveller wouldn’t know there were houses and graves, a hospital and Greenhill blackfellers’ camp up there.

“D’you know, we could be explorers,” said Kitty.

He reached his hand to her shoulder. “You would be the first child-carrying explorer there was.”

She laughed that quick chuckle.

“Shea, you’ll find me telling people that you’ve got this sense of humour. But you don’t do it when others are around.”

“I do it,” said Tim, “for Bandy Habash when I’m telling him to get to buggery!”

“So, there you are. It takes love or anger.”

She stood up urgently and grabbed his arm.

“My God, Tim. What’s that little ruffian doing?”

As Kitty had, he looked to the stern and was at once appalled. Johnny in his knee pants and Lucy Rochester in her muslin dress. Both barefoot, they had climbed up on the taffrail and were standing on the stern looking down into the river. You could see their bodies jolting with every shudder of
Terara
. They had this air of having decided to do it by spontaneous mental messages, without any words passing between them. All they had to keep them in place was a hand each attached to the flag pole which rose up the middle of the railing. They were staring down into the wonderful surf of
Terara
’s wake.

“Get down from there!” he yelled, sounding predictable to
himself and therefore negligible to the brats on the railing. Others were moving towards the children too, a couple of the young Singles team who made amused noises. It seemed to him that Lucy and Johnny jumped by common and wilful consent, but again without words. His son and Lucy were simply gone in an instant. The Singles cricketers screamed, “Children overboard!”

Kitty stood behind Tim gasping and crying out in terror. Tim knew that the playful Singles were no use to him, nor overdressed Ernie. A simple and dreadful thing to act. Rushing aft, he climbed the taffrail and launched himself, sandshoes first, into the turbulence behind
Terara
, where the children could be seen bobbing and apparently enjoying themselves.

He was no more than a social swimmer, he remembered on the way down. He’d have swum a few strokes at a beach in Capetown and another few in Ceylon. He’d swum sometimes in the creek at Crescent Head and, observing the style of Wooderson, in the river. Then during the great floods, small distances, down Belgrave Street, from the dinghy to a given rooftop say, from one hotel upstairs verandah to another, or to put a rope on an item of floating furniture. Assisting Wooderson who was the sublime, unbeatable swimmer. Now here he was going alone into the ferment of water behind
Terara
.

Before Tim’s white shoes broke the tumbled surface, he confusedly saw Johnny swimming free of the wake with short choppy strokes. But Lucy on her back, her pinafore blossoming, flapping casually at the water with her hands.

A shock to hit the river and go down into that dark, bubbling mess and get at once the tang of mud on your tongue and the pinching fullness of water in your nose. And so long under, yearning for the fall to cease, for the ascent to light. And who bloody said the ascent
was
to happen, who guaranteed he would rise? Was it physics or just occasional good luck that brought people up for a last look at a known world?