A River Town (30 page)

Ten past nine, he saw by his fob watch. Unless she was overtaken by a vengeful mood, Ellen Burke would surely have opened the store. Though who would buy butter on a day like this? Butter from the Central or Warneton creameries melting to a smear in the hands or the back of the cart. Yet he must make deliveries in this furnace.

They found their horses in the shed. The poor beasts were snuffling. The air worried them. They knew that fire was everywhere, downriver and up, out of their control, out of anyone else’s.

Remembering Missy, Bandy continued to shake his head and climbed onto the grey. He said nothing as they rode the horses out of the gate, steering them towards the water trough outside Kelty’s where Tim had got his first bad reputation with Constable Hanney. They found the beasts unwilling, pulling at the reins. Having been pliable all night, they were now jacking up.

“Oh, dear sir, we could have been in great trouble,” said Bandy.

“See,” said Tim, “I told you there was nothing to be gained from friendship with me. I am just one step away, Bandy, from you. I am a white nigger. If I’d been an Orangeman or Good Templar, that old bastard Thurmond would have taken his hat off to us and wished us a good ride.”

As his horse and Bandy’s drank from Kelty’s trough, “How well a lager would go down,” Tim murmured.

“I must not,” muttered Bandy.

Tim felt a sigh escape him. “Black tea is always the best.”

“Mr. Shea, I saw that woman dressed as a boy.”

“A boy?”

“A boy in a school uniform of the English type. I saw him walking in West. This being at a time early in the summer. I saw
him at once and thought, that may surely be a girl in masquerade. A beautiful being, boy or girl. More beautiful than most other beings in the Macleay.”

“A
boy
?” Tim asked.

“That face however,” Bandy murmured. “The very chin. The very forehead. Europeans are so distinct to me, one at a time.”

In a fever, Tim hauled his horse’s head out of Kelty’s slimy water and turned it to the river which the day had turned turgid and browner than manure. Bandy obligingly followed.

“You’re telling me it’s the very girl, are you?”

“Certainly,” said Bandy. “A memorable child.”

“A child,” said Tim. Bandy had the same word Tim had harboured within himself so long. “That’s right. A child.”

Her name wheeled above him in the air, at the margin of sight. It cast the day’s sole shadow.

SAVOURING BLACK TEA at last from a big mug in a respite in the living room, the deepest, most shadowy room of the house, Tim in his crazed exhausted wakefulness turned to the
Argus
. Ellen Burke had bought it that morning in between kindly making up the orders in the storeroom and scratching clients’ names on them with indelible pencil. What he sought, for relief from all the wakeful tangles of the day, was the normal mismatched bags of bones newspapers, the restful oddments of fiction and items off the wire and cattle sales and distant murders.

He did not get it. He turned a page and at once encountered a startling letter. This was a document so outright that it seemed to Tim to be incised into the great furriness of the heat and the burning air by the sharpness of its tone, its zest for its own argument.

“Sir,” it began.

Tim looked up from the paper and lifted his ear, as if even in this torpid air, the cries of outrage could be heard in Belgrave Street.
Australis
was out to cause an outcry and the most stir he could, by writing to the more staid
Argus
instead of the jauntier
Chronicle
.

Nothing though to be heard. Nothing. The Empire of Billy Thurmond, M. M. Chance, Mr. Malcolm went maligned, and no single protest pierced the walls of heat, the circle of fire, the shower of vegetable ash. In Pompeii-on-the-Macleay, the sentinels had gone to sleep.

In the shade of the peppermint tree outside, Ellen Burke and Annie lay together on a rug, wearing shifts which had been dipped in water. He went out to them and smiled. He approved of this stratagem and thought it a clever thing. The whole bloody town should be doing it. He would dearly love to dampen himself and lie there with them. But he needed to lead Pee Dee out and place him in the traces. Pee Dee, of course, in a much higher spirit of protest than Bandy’s horses. Dragging his head from side to side. Alarmed by the torrid wind.

Loading the cart at the front of the store, a very slow matter. With one or two people drifting by, one or two broiled ladies of the Macleay entering the store to interrupt his loading, to rant about the criminal day it was and buy some item—lard or flour—their households had run out of.

And then, dear merciful God, finding that amongst what must be loaded there were five butter boxes full of the plenty of the earth and the manufactures of Sydney destined for the Sisters of Mercy. Nothing for the Malcolms, though. Ernie true to his threat!

He put the feed bag on Pee Dee to distract him from the day. Some orders from East could wait till tomorrow. He was not crossing the river. He’d already crossed twice to his peril in less than a day.

At last ready, nearly fainting, to bring people their supplies. Lead Pee Dee, deprived of his feed bag and tossing his head in a way which said, “Not me, not me. And not today.” Up for a last water fill-up at the trough outside Savage’s. For himself, a fill-up with Sharp’s lemonade. The whole bottle down him as quick as half a cup of tea.

And now off! Struggle forth into mid-street, mid-heat. In Belgrave Street, no one doing business, but Pee Dee heading now—with sudden, touching uncomplaint—for West. What must it be like in the camp? But Kitty and Mamie would be lying in moistened white shifts beneath a tree, he hoped, and the sea breeze which would end this madness would reach them first.

Yet Mamie must be repenting of her emigration. Australia presenting
her with all its disadvantages on the one day or in the one week. Plague and fire, heat that withered the Celtic skin.

In the haze, the Offhand came loping diagonally from the door of the
Chronicle
office. He wore a suit coat and a vest as always. He might have thought he was running across the street somewhere else, not in a valley in a furious old continent you knew could fry you in a second if it was not so casual.

“Tim, Tim,” said the Offhand. The normal stewed face. The temporary tan of whiskied veins either side of the delicate nose. The pink lips enriched with the thinnest blood. The Reverend Offhand.

“Did you, Tim, happen to see that letter in the
Argus?
Can you imagine them actually publishing such a thing?”

“What is it?… 
Australis.
”

“That one. A robust, Australian bloody letter, wouldn’t you agree, Tim?”

His eyes were dancing away. Even today, it was all excitement and passionate opinion to him. Of course, he didn’t have to deliver groceries to West.

“I read it. The argument had a certain virtue.”

“Tim, I do not ask you as a correspondent. I am speaking about literary matters as any man speaks in the streets to a friend.”

“My mind is rather distracted. My wife is up the river in that plague or quarantine camp or whatever it is.”

“Oh, that place is a formality now, Tim.” The Offhand shook his head, but his eyes glittered still. “But tell me, don’t you hope this
Australis
will write again? A fresh voice in a backward place is always most, most welcome! I found it so. A bloody minor miracle, Tim.”

“The fires and the heat are likely to take people’s minds more,” Tim warned. “Do you have any news from the Upper Macleay?”

“Oh,” said the Offhand. Offhandedly. “Hickey’s Creek is ablaze, and the Nulla.”

“The wife’s sister’s at Pee Dee.” Square miles of blaze distant.

“There are no reports of death, Tim. People place their homesteads in clearings for that reason, you might remember.”

“Exactly right,” said Tim. “But the gum trees explode like bombs.”

“Will you come into the Commercial with me and toast
Signor Australis
?”

“Is he Italian then? Or Spanish?”

“I use the
Signor
loosely, Tim,” said the Offhand.

“I hope you won’t be offended, Offhand. I have all this to deliver.”

He swept his hand towards the crammed tray of the cart. “I have a fifteen pounds fine to pay off.”

“How is that so, Tim? What did you do?”

“I am reluctant to say.”

“Again, please, as a friend.”

Tim told his tale of the smooth-faced inspector from the Colonial Secretary’s.

“This is outrageous in a democracy,” said the Offhand when Tim had finished. It was a true sentiment, but how would it hold up against a magistrate’s? And what would be its place amongst the other grievances—Ernie Malcolm, the suggestions of Constable Hanney. The Offhand was taken by the surface glitter of injustices. That was the great fault of writers. Injustice never penetrated their skins too deeply, put them off a meal, or the next drink which waited for them in the bar of the Commercial.

“For God’s sake, don’t put it in your column. I am in deep enough trouble.”

The Offhand held his hands up. They weren’t much bigger than Bandy’s.

“But you can be sure that that brute of an inspector checked with the powers of the town to ensure he made no example of one of theirs. Hence the injustice which cannot be defined, but which is everywhere in our community!”

“I shouldn’t have sold him the bloody sugar to start with.”

“And he should not have been a
provocateur,
” the Offhand insisted. “Is the coming Commonwealth of Australia to operate by such principles? By spying and provocation? If it is, we might as well be in Europe!”

“Except that the climate is better,” said Tim, laughing, and to spite the blaze and black grit of the air.

“I shall toast
Australis
on my own then,” said the Offhand. “I
still cannot get over the
Argus
actually putting ink to them. It’s bloody rich, Tim. Not you, by any chance?”

“Never,” said Tim.

And the Offhand laughed and passed on his way.

Tim and Pee Dee straggled on a mile and into Kemp Street.

“Tiptoe past the bloody police station,” Tim urged Pee Dee. Everything dormant. Birds vanished from the trees. The trees themselves, between gusts of fiery wind, looking like they were considering the desirability of themselves blossoming into flame.

And yet there was undue movement at St. Joseph’s Convent. Nuns were running by the wooden scaffolding tower from which the Angelus bell hung. Children were moving, and piercing the white heat with excited cries. My God, the poor little savages will faint if they don’t stop! Mad Johnny would run till he dropped. Unless mercifully stopped.

The Angelus tower in front of the convent. It was made of yellow painted struts of hardwood bolted together. Yellow diagonals of timbers rose to the little, corrugated iron roof, beneath which was slung the great crossbeam from which hung the bell. Rung at six o’clock in the morning, twelve noon, six o’clock in the evening.
The Angel of the Lord declared unto Mary
, everyone in the convent prayed as the bell rang out, inviting even the godless New South Wales police down the road to celebrate the Annunciation. Three Hail Marys, one Glory Be. Bandy the Muslim would understand these impulses, these summonses from a tower, better than Constable Hanney. And Missy in her motherless fluid at the cop shop—did redemption call to her thus? Was someone in the town moved secretly to name her, in a bathroom or at the corner of a bar, muttering into his lapel? Daphne or Winnie or Constance. Ellen or Hilda or Dorothea. Naming her on an impulse at hearing the far-off, familiar three-times-a-day bell of the Tykes.