A River Town (11 page)

“You might as well give Bandy a medal,” Tim said.

Ernie began fanning himself with his hat. “Him? Sooner decorate the bloody Mahdi for killing General Gordon!”

“Then reward neither of us.”

“Imagine this, Tim. The opening of the bridge, Central to East. Imagine a line of men, women, even children, receiving medals and certificates for valour. Young Shaw who lifted a fallen tree from his uncle’s leg and carried him sixteen miles to rescue. Tessie Venables who rescued a grown youth from the surf at South West Rocks. Yourself. With yourself, Tim, we begin to get an array of appropriate acts of gallantry. I see you standing at the mouth of the bridge, at the mouth of a new century. Standing for our community.”

You also see yourself, Tim might have said if he didn’t fear losing Malcolm as a customer, as commanding officer of the brave. You see your words reproduced in the
Sydney Morning Herald
. Mr. Malcolm, accountant, brave by association, and quoted verbatim.

Ernie said, “I have been waiting some time for the third appropriate act to report to the main committee in Sydney. With proper respect, Tim, I can identify it when I see it. Mr. Habash tells me that you were endless in your attempts at resuscitation, even though poor Albert had become a thing of revulsion.”

Ahead of them, in the street, Winnie Malcolm had baulked by the stirrup-step up to her sulky, as if the idea of the climb was too much to be faced. Then, shakily, she tried it. One of her less graceful ascents. If Malcolm hadn’t been a customer, he might
have said, “Why don’t you be brave yourself and go and look after your wife?”

“It is a time in the Empire’s history,” Malcolm—with something almost like desperation—confided in him, “when in each community an exemplar, a paladin, is very much looked for.” He rubbed some sweat into his upper lip. “I know you agree.”

At least, Tim noticed, Hanney had untethered the police horse and sulky and trotted away on his sombre business.

Tim put a restraining hand on Malcolm’s arm. That was what he had been driven to.

“Please,” he said. “Please, Ernie. We are all being made a mockery of by that dark little jockey, Habash. Please.”

Stepping back, Ernie looked up at the great sky.

“Tim, what do we have in this world to go on except the accounts of witnesses? The British army itself …”

“But they don’t listen to just one unreliable bugger of a hawker.”

“Ah, you’re a bloody Jesuit, aren’t you, Tim? I spoke to the child too at the convent. And to the duty sister at the hospital up there.”

“No, look! Any fool could carry a poor dead bastard to hospital. It wasn’t a rush to mercy, Ernie. He was past mercy.”

Ernie laughed again. “I hope to Jesus you make a better speech than that when they give you the medal and make us in the Macleay famous.”

Make Ernie famous, that meant.

Now Mrs. Malcolm sat uncertain in the sulky, shoulder turned, considering her situation. As if Ernie could see what Tim was seeing he now remembered his wife. “Must go, Tim,” he said, making a chastened face.

Mrs. Sutter walked up holding Hector’s hand and accompanied by Lucy. “Thank you for coming, Mr. Shea. I take it you’ll drop Lucy back at the convent.”

“I have a business you know, Mrs. Sutter,” he said. Then for Lucy’s sake repented. It did not cause even a shadow on Lucy’s sharp little face. But for fatal tact he’d say, share the cost of her schooling, you miserable old jade! Or at least buy all your stores from me.

“I have the care of five children,” she said. “I know you understand.”

Her children by the late Mr. Sutter were playing loudly amongst the graves, clutching at broken columns, grazing their fingers in the apertures of Celtic crosses.

“I suppose I must understand.” He cupped a hand around Lucy’s head. “My wife and I … I ought to tell you … are very fond of Lucy. She plays well with our children and gives us no problem.”

“I’m very pleased.”

Yet she seemed barely tolerant as Lucy and Hector made their farewells. Dawn milkings and hardships had consumed the childhoods of Albert’s boy and girl. They were like an aged sister caressing an aged brother.

In his pocket he had a chocolate for Lucy, especially for the post-burial, to distract her from the knowledge of Mrs. Sutter’s disregard of her, and of his own neglect as well. The heat had softened it in its silver wrapping.

He gave it to her as they sat on the board of the dray. “Keep it till the cool of evening, Lucy,” he told her. “It will get more solid then.”

She said, “We have Benediction tonight.”

“But you as a Protestant don’t need to go.”

“I like it. Sometimes I see papa’s face there.”

In the great gilt orb of the monstrance the priest lifted.

Tim had some customers across the river, in East. People who’d fallen out with the storekeeper Corbett there, an argumentative Orangeman and high pricer. A number took the trouble to come across to Central in the punt, to buy from T. Shea—General Store. Or children would come over on Mondays or Tuesdays with their mothers’ requirements written on notes in their hands, spend a while playing with Johnny and Annie, tending to end up messing about in the river with Johnny, while Annie sat barefoot at the very edge, plying the rich silt with her fingers. He hoped Johnny wouldn’t put his customers’ children, who were often blackguards themselves, in any harm.

“How’s old Corbett?” he would ask of the customers in East, and a number would say, “I hope the old bastard dies!”

Naturally, to make the deliveries, Tim needed to coax Pee Dee onto the punt. If there were other conveyances and horses getting off, Pee Dee would often shy sideways, wilfully feigning fright. Pee Dee really didn’t like it when there were cattle aboard, or when pigs harried him, running between his legs. One day he was going to shy right over the embankment and cover the river banks in sugar, flour, baking soda, oatmeal, tapioca, tea and broken biscuit.

People disembarking from East sometimes cried, “Why don’t you get rid of the old nag, Tim?” It was in a sense a sane question. “Pee Dee’s my bloody horse,” he answered. Part of T. Shea’s terms of trade. Sometimes louts cried that sentence back at him as he and Pee Dee clopped past making the deliveries.

Recently Tim had taken to avoiding embarrassment by waiting with Pee Dee in the butter factory lane, not approaching the ramp to the punt until all the traffic from East had dispersed itself. Then led him down onto the punt apron, hoping he wouldn’t make a display. And so with the stutter of the steam engine, out into the current. No great sea journey, but in Tim’s mind the crossing of water always significant.

Out there today Daley still with him. No apparent ghosts out here on the bright river, but Daley had the lines for the season of Albert’s tragedy:

The sunk pylons for the new Macleay bridge, which would make the punt unnecessary by the start of winter, rose from the green river like columns from a sunk civilisation.

Some time later that day, he was delivering in Rudder Street, East Kempsey, when he saw a covered hawker’s wagon swaying up the road out of the Dock Flat swamp. One of the Habashes. He reined Pee Dee in to the side and got down from the dray. He could see bloody Bandy at the reins of his green wagon all right. Coming back to town after palavering the poor women of Pola Creek.

A bracing anger rose in Tim at the sight of that failed Punjabi jockey. He walked out and waited in the middle of the road. He raised his arms and couldn’t help calling out, “Get round me if you can, you little ruffian!”

Bandy Habash waved joyously at this prospect of reunion. He drew up, and Tim walked to the side of the green wagon with its tin canopy and stared up at him.

“I wanted to know … What in the bloody hell are you doing telling these lies about me?”

Bandy put on a wonderful, melodramatic frown.

“This stuff about Albert is all rubbish and flummery, and it makes me ashamed. What in God’s name were you doing going to Ernie bloody Malcolm?”

“Mr. Shea, after our adventure I was simply full of admiration …”

“What bloody for? Might as well admire a man for making the tea or emptying a jerry. You’ve made a bloody fool of me!”

Tim kicked one of the wheels of the hawker’s wagon.

“My dear old chap, may I get down and talk to you?”

“What do you bloody well think? I’m looking for an explanation.”

Bandy worked himself trimly out of his seat and fell gracefully to the road. Wholly and neatly in front of Tim.

“I watched you in your movements, Mr. Shea. In all respects I thought they were the movements of a hero.”

“I was not anything in my movements. I hung back.
You
were the person who fixed his horse!”

“I was well-educated in the English language, Mr. Shea. I have read Scott, Dickens and Thackeray, in all of whom such sentiments as I expressed to Mr. Malcolm are common.”

“But I ask you! Why land me, a poor bloody grocer, with this stuff?”

Bandy was abashed. Beyond the theatrical manners, a true bewilderment could be seen. He lowered his head and shook it.

“I was alarmed by what I saw on approaching the place of the accident, Mr. Shea. I would have found it hard to approach such horrifying affairs. Yet I witnessed the heroism of your movements,
sir, the decisiveness you showed. This alone made it possible for me to draw near.”

“Bugger it! You were the one who did the real work.”

“Oh, Mr. Tim, my dear chap. We both behaved well to be honest, though I yield first place to you. But do you think Mr. Malcolm would want to write to the Royal Humane Society about a Punjabi hawker? About the courage of a Muslim? To be the first amongst the brave in the Valley of the Macleay? The world would not be interested in my bravery. They want true British grit.”

“Well, Mr. Bandy, I’m an Irishman.”

“Same thing in my book. They are willing to see British grit in your face, you see. We were brave together, Mr. Shea, in the face of the tragedy. But my part could not be pushed forward, so I was more than happy to push forward your part. I know about these things. I don’t complain. But I do know that if you are honoured as you deserve, I am partially honoured too. In your shadow, as they say, old chap.”

Tim could do little more at first than wave his head from side to side. “What sort of plan is this? What bloody sort? A prank? Poking mullock at Ernie and the Turf Club? And me as the bait!”

“No, no, no, no! I am above all an admirer of yours, Mr. Shea, and wish your family well. When I had heard of you from Mrs. Burke at Pee Dee, your sister by marriage, for some reason I thought, I want that good man as a friend in town. And now, as an honoured friend.”

Now that it was all explained Tim in fact felt quite awed by the scale of Bandy’s intentions. His relentless and always denied desire to race his grey at the Warwick Course. So he raced his grey up and down empty streets, a sort of audition for greater things. Showing the indifferent vicinity how worthy his grey was, while the Turf Club committee picnicked on
Terara
.

Tim had a lurking and undeclared sympathy for such deranged schemes. This one so lunatic, and Bandy deserved to be thumped for it. But it was its scope that slowed you down. Made you understand: this is a really serious little bugger!

Tim said, “I came here to be an ordinary citizen. I’ve seen heroes and don’t like them.”

His Uncle Johnny of Glenlara transported to Western Australia
more than thirty years back for being a Fenian organiser in Cork. Did no one good. Made his mother prematurely aged so that the young Tim had to be silent in her presence.

“I came here to be an ordinary citizen,” Tim repeated. “This is all a vanity on Ernie Malcolm’s part.”

Bandy murmured, “Mr. Shea, you cannot expect me, can you, to go to Mr. Malcolm now and tell him I was mistaken. I was
not
mistaken. You deserve to be considered a true man. Again, Mrs. Burke tells me you are a giver of alms and feed half the valley. I as your friend would like you to be publicly acclaimed.”

Since all this smelt of excess, Tim—in protest and not without fear—took hold of the lapel of Bandy’s coat.

“Listen, you’re using the wrong bloody methods, my dear Indian friend. I am not here to be the sort of feller that suits you. I have a hard time enough being the sort of feller that suits me.”

“But I know, Mr. Shea, that what I’ve done doesn’t displease your charming wife.”

“What do you know about Kitty?”

“I came to the store two nights past. I saw Mrs. Shea. She said to me that it was grand for you to be praised like this, and thanked me for bringing it to the notice of the public. Look for wisdom to the women. For they know all our faces, don’t they? The face of the hero. The face of the coward as well. The face of the brute and the face of the beloved.”

So how to work up a consuming rage when even now, with Bandy intruding on the question of Kitty, he had to strain to achieve it. What he really felt was fear. Fear of being dragged down and marred by this little hawker’s efforts to exalt him.

Tim felt the burden of this defeat. No one could be dissuaded from the fable of brave Shea. And the man so artful. He had the approaches to this lie of his ratified by all parties except Tim, and covered from every angle. Habash couldn’t be defeated by an average good talking-to and a flick in the ear.

“Don’t discount that I can take you to court,” Tim impotently told the hawker. “I can talk to the solicitor Sheridan about this, and I bloody will. I’ll leave it at that for now. We don’t have anything more to say from this point.”

But he felt he’d fallen into the overstating trap, and his summing-up
had already erred by being too long. He turned away sharply and walked back to Pee Dee, deliberately using an urgent gait that suggested he might punch the horse. He heard Bandy murmur something. It sounded like, “I am already part of your family.” Yet it could just be Mohammedan incantations or curses. He decided to ignore it, but within five yards of Pee Dee he adopted a less menacing stance—for Pee Dee might have taken the excuse to rear in the traces if he hadn’t softened his approach—and waited there by his dray, his back to the hawker, his face to the river, until Bandy drew level and passed him. He watched the faded green and yellow paint on the pressed-tin walls of Bandy’s wagon.