A River Town (14 page)

“Is that a telegram there?” asked Tim. It evoked the first one he’d ever encountered, the one which said
REGRET NOT ARRIVING BY SS
PERSIC
IN VIEW MARRIAGE OF SISTER STOP TRAVELLING NEXT MONTH BY SS
RUNIC
.

“For Mrs. Kitty Shea,” said the boy.

Characteristic: Kitty a casual client of the wonders of the age.

“Would you sign my book?”

Tim did. He found Kitty at the dining room table drinking tea with one hand and feeling her back with the other. Such a squat frame to take the full weight of maternity, to carry a reasonably tall fellow’s children.

It struck him as he handed it over: Could it be something dismal about Red Kenna or her mother? But somehow he could not envisage even one of those wild children rushing into Doneraile to a telegraph office, instead of writing a more kindly letter. Rowdy at table, yes, yet they liked to talk and explain at length. So they would have thought of sea mail as the proper organ for sad, detailed news. He hoped he could swear to that.

“Have you ever received a telegram before?” he asked as cheerily as he could. “You’ve got one today, Mrs. Kitty Shea.”

She was eager at once. “Wouldn’t it astound you?” she murmured.

When she had it in her hands and had opened and begun to read it, she broke out in laughter. Her laugh delightful to him; unless directed to someone like Bandy Habash, or joined in with the relentless chorus of her loud family.

“Isn’t this Mamie to the nearest square inch? It’s from a ship at sea. Who’d think of sending a cable from a ship at sea? She must have been drinking.”

Kitty stood up to read it. “
ARRIVE MELBOURNE TUESDAY 10TH
—Holy God, that’s just tomorrow!
STAYING WITH MAGS PHELAN MIGRANT WOMENS HOSTEL ONE WEEK EMBARK SS
IRIS
TO SYDNEY ON TUESDAY 18 EXCITED SISTERLY LOVE—MAMIE
.”

When she’d finished reading, Kitty’s breath escaped her. “Oh
huh!” She sat down at the table, and began to laugh again. “Of all the people you’d pick as likely to send cables from a ship at sea!”

He smiled too, but was thinking with a new clarity, my God another one of them. One more robust woman to feed. As long as the two Kenna boys didn’t decide to come. Powerful, little mottled men with gappy smiles. Devout drinkers like their father. Although the bush, the reaches of Euroka and Toorooka, would in the end absorb their rowdiness.

He heard Kitty still laughing. “You’ve got to watch that Mamie. Go through you for a short cut!”

The fact was Mamie already ashore and laughing in Melbourne. The Kenna girls bracketing the great east coast of the continent of Australia with their hectic laughter. It was to be hoped she didn’t laugh too much with some unreliable fellow.

Tim himself had never seen Mrs. Malcolm’s great gold city of Melbourne, except from a distance. He’d had to stay aboard his ship with influenza. Had walked the low foreshores of Fremantle, the ones that made you wonder what you’d let yourself in for. But not Melbourne. Melbourne had this august, distant aura in his mind.

He’d landed in Sydney still fevered and hoped for clerk’s work, but the clerks were out of work here too. So it was the truth: hard times all over the globe. He’d been a little surprised at that. He hadn’t got out of the hard times latitudes. At the Migrant Settlement Office, they were advertising for carters for the Macleay.

Sydney seemed a close, warm, seedy city of rough and casual manners—out of key with his normal way of doing business. But the tone … something in the tone of the place suited him. He would have stayed if the job had been there.

He remembered liking the huge noisy pubs where you could be quiet and unknown, and make a shy friendship with another newcomer and share crumbs of information you had picked up from this landfall.

These days Molly Kenna, the first arriving sister, reverted to form only in Kitty’s company. For example, Tim could hear Kenna laughter surging from the residence as he arrived at the storefront one afternoon after deliveries. He left Pee Dee tethered outside, still in the traces, meditating in his chaff bag, and came in through the store. It was women’s laughter he could hear. Kitty’s ringing in the midst of it.

He went through the store into the residence out the back and came upon the visitors seated at the crowded table set with the Stafford china, a silver cake stand glittering, and the plate with shepherds painted on it laden with shortbread.

First in view, long-faced Old Burke smoking his aromatic and temperamental pipe. Husband of Molly Kenna. He’d come here before Molly was even born. A twenty-year-old timber cutter. There had still been at that time convict shipwrights and labourers working around the river for Enoch Rudder, the town’s founder, a West Country Englishman who’d built small launches and tried everything from maize to vineyards. A long time ago, Burke moved far upriver and selected a little land at Pee Dee. Always a very frugal fellow. A lot of sheep up the river in those days, but the rich pasturage devoted now to cattle. Burke owned steeper slopes too, covered with a bountiful native growth of blackbutt and other hardwoods.

Buying up the land of other small selectors, and fragments here and there of the original land grants to English gentlemen, this canny Antrim labourer had taken on and still possessed the gravity which land gives a person.

At Tim’s dinner table now he was smoking his aromatic pipe, and sat a little separate from his wife, Molly Burke. Molly had acquired the Burke gravity too, though you could see she was letting it slip a bit today. She’d been enough like a Kenna when she’d first arrived on
Burrawong
and worked in the store. Some of the smaller dairy farmers who were bachelors hung around a lot to joke with her and to be melodiously laughed at.

Old Burke’s daughter Ellen—by his first, deceased wife—sat at the table today too. A tall girl, and would be a big one later in life. Sixteen or was it seventeen years? She had pretty features—Burke’s
features in fact transmuted and graced. According to what Kitty said, she had no cross words at all for her stepmother, Molly. Ellen Burke had been one of Mother Imelda’s students too until two years ago. She could play the piano for occasional visitors to Pee Dee—Constable Hanney, Mr. Chance the stock and station agent, Dr. Erson, Father Bruggy. Bandy Habash? Was Bandy allowed into the homestead for recitals?

Tim said, “Hello to all.”

Young Ellen rose and politely laid a place for him at the table, saving pregnant Kitty the trouble.

You could see, despite Molly’s new respectability, the glimmer of a kind of conspiracy between the two sisters. Even Ellen Burke was in it too.

Tim asked the expected questions—why they were in town, how their two-horse cart had stood up to the hilly grades upriver. (Old Burke believed in getting himself to town without spending cash on the Armidale stage.) A good run it seemed to have been for them. Up the first morning before four—Old Burke’s normal rising hour anyhow. First a long day to the pub at Willawarrin where they put up. Then making good time from Willawarrin at dawn to Kempsey late afternoon. Ellen read to them a large part of the way. Charles White’s
History of Australian Bushranging
. “Lawless rubbish!” said Burke, “and glorified cattle-duffing. But it stimulates the women.”

“We said the Rosary too,” said Molly. “The whole fifteen decades spaced out throughout the day. Made the time pass.”

Following the long river down, the Joyful, Sorrowful and Glorious Mysteries, the incense of those old prayers rising amongst the heathen eucalypts. But they seemed to Tim to be delighted to have made the journey, the Burkes. Old Burke said with lenient disapproval that the women had been after him to come to town for months. But the real reason he was here was to go to court.

He complained sepulchrally, “Bloody man has cattle duffed by some scoundrel, and has to travel two days there and back to give evidence of it.”

“Well,” said Molly, winking across the table, “this is one of those cases where Mohammed has to come to the mountain.”

All the women laughed. They were ready for it.

Working to keep his pipe going, struggling with the damned thing, re-packing it, re-lighting it, strewing his plate with used matches, Old Burke told the story. A dairy farmer called Stevens from Clybucca was found in possession of a heifer bearing Burke’s brand which was a BB. Stevens was a bloody Scot and he might as well have been talking Gaelic for all you could understand him. “But he’s a cute bastard,” Old Burke added.

Tim noticed the women were beginning to clear, a dish of this and a cup of that, and trail out to the kitchen. Soon you could hear them talking out there, saying loud bird-like things. They’d obviously heard enough about Old Burke and Stevens.

“… so when Sergeant Fry asks him why he has my poley heifer in his back paddock, the crafty old bugger says,
But I sent seven pounds with Ferguson the bullocky who goes up to Pee Dee for timber. Hasn’t bloody Ferguson given it to Mr. Burke?
”

“My God!” said Tim, sounding appalled because Old Burke wanted him to. “How would a Clybucca dairy farmer be, putting shoes on his children’s feet? What with paying seven quid for one of your heifers?”

“That’s the right bloody question to ask. But you see, under our justice, all stories stand up. But not before a man had to travel two bloody days and put up with that drunken cook at the Willawarrin Hotel on the way through.”

Burke did even further sucking and tending of the pipe. Yet he wasn’t really upset about his journey to town. An old man content with his grievances. He’d be pretty disgusted, of course, if Stevens the dairy farmer got away with his story. He’d be a two-day misery for the women all the way back to Pee Dee.

Thinking of where Old Burke came from at the start, and so daring him to exercise the sort of pity Old Burke himself would once have welcomed, Tim said, “The smaller cockies always say they duff cattle to feed their families.”

Old Burke groaned. “They duff cattle to cosset their habits and buy liquor.”

Gales of woman-laughter from the kitchen.

“Listen to them,” murmured Old Burke. “This is very good for Molly and Ellen.”

“You should take them to Sydney next summer,” Tim suggested
for mischief’s sake. “Cooler than here. And that’s where the celebrations will be.”

According to all the papers, Sir William Lyne, who’d once opposed the Federation of the Australian states, had now decided it represented the future, and he was full of suggestions and edicts to do with the coming Commonwealth of Australia. He had urged that Tumbarumba should be considered for the national capital! (He must need votes in Tumbarumba.) And his decision was that the chief Federation celebrations should be in Sydney. A nice arrangement for the big town and its businesses. From this enormous state almost too large to be imagined, encompassed, travelled, old Sir William wanted everyone with the rail or boat fare, with a reliable string of horses, to come all that way and so behold the founding of the Federation he had so determinedly fought.

“I wouldn’t grace the event, Tim,” said Old Burke. “Humans bloody astound me. Change for change’s sake. And Sir William Lyne, who used to be a decent feller and against the Federal idea … now in consort with the Sydney Jews and pub-keepers. Trying to conscript people to a festival! Just to watch some hopeless, chinless, English bugger in a cocked hat saying
I declare
 … And can you imagine the bloody footpads and the mashers and the razor gangs everywhere, running round in derby hats. I say, no bloody thanks, Sir William.” Still more pipe-work. “I voted against Federation. You realise we’ll need to have bloody taxes spent on keeping hopeless Tasmania afloat. Ever been to Tasmania, Tim? Awful bloody hole! Full of tattooed criminals. And the weather frightful. Like bloody Donegal with gum trees.”

Tim was pleased with the rise he’d got from Old Burke. Now he kept his voice soft so that he could cause greater annoyance still. Something about Old Burke set him off.

“I think there is a vision in it all, you know. I think there is something of the future to it too. A Federal Australia.”

“Sentimentality,” Old Burke grunted. “This is nothing about Australia. This is all to do with Britain, Tim. They would have us raise a Federal army. And where would that army fight? Like the Irish, like the Scots, like the poor, bloody niggers of India and Africa, this army would die for British enterprises. Read the
Freeman’s Journal
on this. No, I won’t go to Sydney to honour that kind
of arrangement. Not at Billy Lyne’s word. He can go to the whores and lawyers in Phillip Street and order them around! Not me!”

Tim said, “I weighed it up but voted in favour. Do you know why? For the sake of my children.”

“It’s a keen mind that can see a connection between the matter of Federation and his children.”

“I wanted Johnny and Annie, if they chose, to live in South Australia or Western Australia on the same terms as the locals.”

“Why would you want your children to live in West Australia? It’s a desert shore of totally no value.”