A River Town (22 page)

“We don’t have children, but as Ernie says we have the Masonic Lodge and the Good Templars, and the Macleay District Hospital
Board, and the Board of the Cricket Club, and, of course, the Turf Club and the Patriotic Fund and the Royal Humane Society. And we keep accounts at as many stores as we can. Spread the wealth, eh. I suppose that in a way the storekeepers’ children are our children. By an indirect route. So we must be happy, I suppose.”

Ernie had talked like that at the cricket. It must be an article of faith of the Malcolm household.

“That’s a fair way of looking at it, Mrs. Malcolm,” said Tim. Now he wanted to escape, to take his embarrassment out to old Pee Dee, his confessor nag to whom he could mutter away as he drove.

She grabbed his wrist. Frantic suddenness. “I’d be grateful if you would look at it that way.”

“Of course,” he said. He would make any pledges if she’d let him go.

“Good,” said Mrs. Malcolm. “That’s guaranteed then.”

“Could I call Primrose for you, Mrs. Malcolm?”

She laughed at this. “I can find my way around my own house, thank you.”

“Of course.”

But she stood there, did not move further into the house, did not release him to the working day, the hard outside light.

“If you’ll excuse me, Mrs. Malcolm,” he said.

“Yes, I suppose you’ve done your business, haven’t you, Tim?”

It sounded as if he were again being cast as a storekeeper in a variety sketch. Meanness, the vice you found in everyone, and everywhere in the hard-up bush. The copper tedium of coins coloured the soul.

“Far beyond the price of any grocery bill, there’s the friendship with yourself and Mr. Malcolm.”

“Oh,” she said. “Very well. Then you might as well go.”

He thanked her in a normal voice and took his hat and left. Outside, in heat like a blow on the back of the head, he passed the sterile verandahs where the dream of elegant Winnie and devoted Ernie sitting together in childless serenity on hot evenings had soured and gone stale. He passed out the
TRADESMEN’S ENTRANCE
, untethered the cart and got aboard, Pee Dee waving his head from side to side in complaint. Tim spoke in the huge afternoon, into
which longed-for thunderclouds had now come massing from the west. “Five pounds, you bugger! Gratefully received.”

Back to the wifeless store and hearth. Ellen Burke cooked a better bush-style breakfast than Kitty, and sandsoaped the kitchen table afterwards as a matter of course. So he would have been an ungrateful fellow indeed to complain. But the tidiness felt like the tidiness of someone else’s house, and the food like food from a stranger’s kitchen.

The store felt his, and so he minded it while Ellen exercised his permission to take the children for a walk.

An Aboriginal man, in a blue shirt and trousers tied with rope, appeared as the afternoon storms began and lightning reduced Belgrave Street to size. He looked around to be sure where he was. His feet had left on the boards the faintest trace of soft yellow dust. He had that damaged look: his eyes at odds with his face and with each other. A bad case. People sold them any old poison to drink.

“Mr. Shea,” the man said in a sharp-edged accent, half-cockney, half something left from before whites came to the Macleay. “I’d like a pint of methylated for cleaning things. And you got some of that rosehip syrup?”

They were barred from the pubs, and so they drank methylated spirits sweetened with syrup. That’s why the man had that look, as if his eyes were not part of his body but were floating, without reference to one another.

Tim said, “Not here, Jack. I don’t sell methylated for those purposes.”

Every other bugger did, so why should he be so fastidious and not a practical man?

“Mate, be a good feller to me!” the man pleaded. The thunder high above and wide out in the cow pastures seemed to jolt his head.

“No. Don’t you come in here asking for White Lady. I tell you that every time.”

The man went out muttering, and stood under the awning, looking to the left up Belgrave Street, to the right up Smith. His White Lady beckoned. His love. Visiting circuses always went out there, to the blacks’ camp. The circus midgets with their liquor to
trade. The huge men with beards and breasts like women. Some townsmen too. Cheap delights.
Black velvet
, they were reputed to call it. God knows why. Such a luscious name for wretched townships of hessian and bark and iron sheeting. But how must it be for a fellow to see the half-castes trailing into town and see your features on the brown faces of the Greenhill children?

“White Lady, mate,” the natives said lovingly. It had brought quick ruin to blackfellers who hadn’t even seen white men until three score and ten years ago. The first of them a few convicts escaped out this way from Port Macquarie. They’d begun the long mix of blood. And the torment. And now everyone said the blacks would die out, that that was the world’s way.

The Offhand cheered one of his wifeless midmornings by coming in for Woodbines. A sparing smoker, he lit one shakingly in the shop and very politely went outside to hurl the spent match into Smith Street. Then he returned, puffing and trembling.

“A second great rescue for you, Tim. This time from the decks of
Terara
. The
Chronicle
reports many a bush cricket match, but this one will stand out in the telling. Children overboard! The two highest scoring batsmen dive in to save said children overboard! And one of the children saved is then runner-up in the wicket-hitting competition. Sublime!”

Tim began to laugh. “That’s Johnny. Born athlete. Only drawback is the little bugger seems to want to kill his father.”

“And then,” said the Offhand, “going on to a new topic. The courage of Mr. Artillery, Lancer, Mounted-Bushman, Light-Infantry, Horse-Guards Chance. It was good to have a few sane men there to say otherwise to him and his brethren.”

Tim felt a spurt of unrest. All right for the Offhand to volunteer to be sane or mocking or whatever he’d been. The mighty feared his powers of satire.

“I would have been better not to go,” said Tim. “It always comes back to loyal vows I would rather not take.”

The Offhand shook his head. “Tim, they will find it very hard to get up a loyal list or a disloyal list or whatever it is they want to get up. The civilised British value of free speech takes precedence over monarchs in my book, and I shall be saying so.”

They both watched through the glass as a white horse drawing a sulky pig-rooted while turning into Smith Street outside T. Shea—General Store. The horse did not send up much dust since the road was baked hard now, and after the intense storms it had grown quite hot again. They saw Meagher, a publican, beefy but with very fine, good-looking features, fighting with the reins, looking too heavy for his sulky.

“Ah,” said the Offhand, puffing away. “Tim, there’s a parable for you. How decency brings its own ruin!”

Meagher managed to wrench his horse and buggy around the corner, heading towards the Wharf Hotel, which he owned.

“He still walks with a limp you know,” said the Offhand.

Tim knew.

“No good deed goes without its proper punishment,” said the Offhand, smiling at that truth.

The events they were reflecting on concerned a man called Slater, who had been a heavy client of Meagher’s Wharf Hotel. The drink, as people curiously say, had got him. Mr. Meagher was a scrupulous man, and concerned for Slater’s wife and children. He’d begun returning money to the wife at her house in West Kempsey, saying that Mr. Slater had accidentally left it behind. Such delicacy of feeling on Meagher’s part was fabled. It was believed he’d done similar things before. Mrs. Slater had been revived by Meagher’s kindness. They had begun a romance.

Impossible for these things to happen in the Macleay without people finding out. When Mrs. Meagher discovered it, she took their son and daughter and went to live in Sydney. When drunken Slater found out, he attended the Wharf Hotel with an axe and hacked poor Meagher in the ribs and the hip. Arrested, of course, Slater was tried and shipped on
Burrawong
to Darlinghurst jail. Mrs. Slater moved away from the Macleay in acute shame, and Meagher was left with his pub. He limped around the bar, weary of the whispered jokes of drinkers. And whatever people paid him now, he kept. He did not try any straight-out refunds to the widows and orphans of those men good-as-dead who lived for grog. Because he had grief of his own, one good leg left, and barely half a life.

Dragging these mysteries behind him in tiny puffs of sun-glinting
grit from the hard pavement, Meagher vanished out of sight and pretty much out of light, bound for his dark front bar.

“He’s been to Corrigan’s funeral,” said the Offhand. “Cousin of his. Does Meagher still take the Catholic sacraments, would you say?”

“He goes to Communion, but people point him out.”

“Well, where would this town be without pointings-out? And makings of loyal lists. It’s enough to make a scribe turn mischievous. I came to tell you. Look out for some mischief in tomorrow’s paper, Tim.”

The Offhand finished his Woodbine and stubbed out the nose of it and put it in his side pocket. He always did that. You’d see him handing them out by the fistful to this or that blackfellow from Greenhill. Charitable according to his means. Like poor bloody Meagher.

He could hear his children out the back, playing around the shed and paddock. Well-married, well-fathering Tim Shea. But without Kitty today. Dear God, the little buggers were making a noise. Even Annie shouting out some ditty. He’d go out the back and see what was exciting them.

In the shade of the shed, Bandy Habash and Ellen Burke sat together applauding a song Annie was singing in a reedy voice. Johnny doing his normal stuff, hand-walking and somersaults to entertain the hawker.

Here was a fellow he refused to be charmed by, the man he’d warned off so frequently. Yet the children had behind their father’s back been mesmerised into performing for the bugger. Here too the protector of his children laughed in the man’s company. Tim felt not only the anger of being betrayed but as well the instant fury Habash seemed always and at an instant to call forth in him. Certainly it was that Habash was a brown man, but most of all that he was an
insinuator
of himself into places, into roles, where Tim resented finding him. The image of Kitty in yellow cloth recurred to him as flaming proof of this.

Tim did not want his children to hear the full force of his anger. They were not at fault. Ellen was. Johnny sensed a change in his audience, saw his father, and stood upright and still.

“You and Annie go to the shop. Go on, go on. Tell any people that your papa’s coming. Go on!”

Annie stopped her singing, inspected him, frowned, and placed her hand in her brother’s. They went together. The duchess and the bloody vagabond. Bandy had risen from the log and looked crestfallen already, his face as smooth and as pausable as an infant’s. No flashiness to him though. An ordinary brown suit and an open collar. The girl displayed pursed, full lips and her brow was flushed as she stood. But she looked for her age a bit defiant as well. Her hands folded, but not contritely. Seventeen-year-olds were meant to be easily made contrite.

“You have been put in my charge by your parents,” Tim told her, “and I’ve put my children in your charge.”

Ellen Burke worked her tongue inside her jaws. Was she getting together the spit for an argument?

“Mr. Habash is a great friend of my family’s, uncle,” she said.

So that part of Bandy’s oft-repeated argument was correct.

“When he comes to Pee Dee, he’s allowed to camp in the home paddock.”

“Then,” Tim argued, “he’s got a better sight reputation at Pee Dee than he has here in town.”

Bandy stepped in between Ellen and Tim. “It is the case, Mr. Shea. I am not here on business. I am here renewing friendship.”

“You’re like the bloody hydra, Bandy. Kick one head and another arises to take you in the backside. And besides, you, Ellen! He wasn’t a hundred yards from the bloody door in the home paddock. He was beside you on a log.”

Tim again expected her to step back or turn away enraged, leaving him alone to chastise Bandy Habash if it were possible. But she stood up to him. She was ferocious.

She said, “We girls from the bush have an easier manner than women do in that terrible old place you all talk about all the time. I’m pleased I’m an Australian, and let me tell you, Ellen and Kitty came here to have an easier manner without being shouted at! I think you’re trying to suggest something else than manners though, Uncle Tim. And since you think I’m that sort of person, I’ll see the children fed, go to Mrs. Manion’s tonight, and wait there till the Friday coach up the river.”

“Jesus, you won’t! On your own responsibility? No.”

Ellen Burke marched off down the yard. Tim turned on Habash.

“Will you go?”

Bandy stood straight, spreading his fingers at his sides and then drawing them back into a fist.

“Mr. Shea,” he said pleadingly. “It seems I cannot do anything to suit you.”

“All the more reason to clear out to blazes. I don’t look to be pleased by you. I don’t look for you to break the bloody horizon more than is necessary.”

Bandy swallowed. “Yet the rest of your clan likes me, old chap. You think you do not need to look at me. But you are not ignorant like others. You understand that my God is your God and my prophets your prophets. And you can see that you and I are in the same club. For even amongst Christians there are the despised and the despisers. I would remind you of that.”

Ah. Cunning, cunning little bastard.

And he continued. “I may be a jockey the Turf Club won’t license, but it may happen, since these things
do
happen, that you will one day need
me
for a friend. What am I then to make of your hostility, Mr. Shea? Even a man of my equable nature can be tested too far.”

“Believe me to the limit, Habash! I won’t want anything you have.”

Bandy reflected on him a while and started to go, but Tim knew in his water that it wasn’t final. That the departure wouldn’t take. He knew it in fact before Bandy seemed to. And Bandy
did
turn.