A River Town (27 page)

But these little reflections swam like petals on the wide, hypnotic movement of Bandy’s well-kept horses.

You could hear the river now too. By proxy at least. Drumming away in the throats of those huge emerald bullfrogs Kitty hated to find on the shouse seat. The closer you got to the great body of the river the more urgent the wings of night birds sounded. The moon came up and there were flying foxes in it, creaking their way across the mudflats towards somebody’s luscious orchard. Johnny liked to feed those buggers as they hung upside down from branches, bony and natty at the same time, dapper in their fur.

Ah, the bloody river sweeps into sight now. Going to the sea for its salt. Broad between the canebrakes on this side, and the answering canebrakes on the Smithtown shore. Bandy’s grey snorted at the river for its size and the authority of its smell. “Shhhh,” said Bandy. Pacifying it with a small brown hand.

By the bridge at Belmore River, a Macleay tributary, they let the horses drink, and Tim and Bandy swigged cold tea from a billycan and found that it was almost nine o’clock. He was being sucked in
well and truly, he knew. Becoming this little brown man’s accomplice.

Through the town of Gladstone, drenched by moonlight but unaware of itself. The Divine Presence resting in the big church Father McCambridge had built. The stained glass windows in memory of dairy farmers’ beloved spouses. Tim took his hat off for the wakeful divinity of the place, and said a prayer for no plague and Missy’s name. The divine mystery: why did Ernie not want to write a letter to cause a proper search? Why was it part of his civic intent to let the Missy question fade?

Bandy had also taken off his hat. Sympathetically, Tim presumed. But his eyes were lustrous as a devotee’s in the moonlight.

They waded Kinchela Creek and then, though the river was always a presence, they came upon it only sometimes. They found themselves now amongst melancholy paperbarks that smelled of nearby swamp. They were getting close, he knew. He was so joyous that sometimes he let himself loll in the saddle like a drunkard, slackening and bending his back. He indulged himself this way frequently, at times when Bandy had drawn ahead.

Past the creek at Jerseyville, where the pub which had nearly been Tim’s was kept by the Whelans, Bandy by a sudden jerk of his elbows showed it was all right to break the horses into a canter. So fresh they still seemed. Lots of running coiled up in their great big hips.

From the top of the last hill, they could see the camp, with plenty of fires still burning. It was set on the first low, dry piece of shore before the mangrove swamps of the Entrance, and beyond it in the river sat
Burrawong
, whose shape you could read dimly from the storm lantern hanging from the crosstree of its mast.

They left their horses in a patch of lank grass amongst paperbarks, and walked in like two people engaged in approved business. Tim carried with him the twin mercies of the billycan of stew, the condensed milk, and the
Messenger of the Sacred Heart
.

Paperbark trees, grey by day and stark white by night, smelled anciently and remotely sour. Whatever tragedy or fall they’d been involved in had happened in an unrecorded age. Therefrom they took this air: all debts paid, all tears long shed, all decay long
concluded. Tim enlivened though by this very quality. Charmed by this bush which didn’t try to charm him.

Some parts of the track he and Bandy had to scrape through briary shrubs. This may have been why Bandy had wanted them to leave the well-kept horses behind.

From up the path Tim could hear a banjo plunking at midnight! Joined idly by a fiddle. Didn’t the buggers go to bed early for their health?

“Here we are,” Bandy told him in a normal voice.

The paperbarks eased away to right and left to make the New Entrance picnic grounds. Three rows of six or seven bell tents each. A big cooking stove standing in the open with its funnel, and a canvas bathhouse nearby. Light still shone inside the canvas of some tents—a magical look, a tent lit from inside itself. Further along, the men and women who were still up were clustered to the campfire, which was not needed for warmth but for the soul and to keep insects away. This small party were engaged in watching the flames die now. The banjo and the fiddle only a sad strain here and there. A last burst of showiness from their owners, the tag end of brighter, more deliberate stuff performed earlier in the night.

Now Tim heard a familiar little yell of woman-laughter, cut back immediately out of consideration for those who might be sleeping in the tents. Dear God, this was inimitably Kitty’s. Kitty sitting up to all hours in the plague camp.

Within the light of the near-dead fire two little women sat on camp stools, with men standing and lolling about them. The banjo player standing close to the women. He was the one who first saw Bandy and Tim coming.

“Keeping you up, are we, gentlemen?” the banjo player asked. This bewildering night! The fellow was talking in a North Cork accent.

Kitty stood up wobblingly. An empty, froth-lined stout glass stood by her chair. An approved, a respectable drink. So why did he resent her for drinking it amongst strangers?

“Dear mother,” she cried, grabbing the arm of the other, like woman. “It’s Timmy!”

Tim looked at his sister-in-law, Mamie, oval-faced, slim, with a
bunched little amused mouth. She had been a bit of a child when Tim had first visited the Kennas.

Kitty clung to him, her hard little head, the brownish-red bun of her hair, pulled up into a knot by some hairdresser in Sydney, socketed into the cavity where his shoulder met his chest. And even though there were strangers looking he bent to this red hair, inhaled its decent, vegetable, mothering smell, and kissed it.

“Don’t catch any fleas now,” she told him.

“I’ll only kiss the bits that aren’t plaguey,” he murmured.

“Get my husband and his friend a drink!” Kitty insisted, and a young man who was English by his accent shook out the froth from a used glass and then filled it with warm stout and passed it into Tim’s free hand. It tasted divine. The Englishman found another glass, but Bandy called musically, “No thank you, sir.”

“Water then?”

“Yes, water.”

The young man picked up a water bag and half-delivered it to, half-threw it, jovially, at Bandy.

“Catch there!”

“There are no guards on this camp, eh?” Tim murmured.

“It’s an utter joke,” Kitty told him. “Captain Reid collected all these rats on board two whole days ago, and not a one showed marks of plague.”

“But were you worried?”

“There are city streets roped off and houses sealed. But Sydney is still Sydney.” A soft malty burp fluttered her lips very slightly. “Now meet Mamie.”

Mamie had risen in her white dress. Very compact. Jesus, what a dangerous smile, and underneath the smile, what? In the bone? He could spot something. Flightiness, a canny soul, a temper. There might be an interest in holding grudges as well.

“Tim,” Mamie said warmly, in a rising tone. She came to him on the other side than the one where Kitty leaned. Brushed his cheeks softly. Again he remembered her somehow, as a partially distinct, largely indefinite part of the Kenna brood. She would have been about eleven, a bit sullen, likely to throw bread across the table. Now she was between kitchens. Red’s and the one she
might have here in the end. A thing or two would be thrown about in that one as well.

The fairly neatly turned out young banjo player followed every smallest move she made, Tim could see. Every trace of intent in her face. He certainly had hopes of being her future target.

Mamie said, “Oh! Mr. Habash again.”

Seemingly her old friend, Bandy stood a little way off from the reunion, touching his hat.

“I didn’t expect to see you travelling with the hawker,” said Kitty, laughing at him.

“I didn’t know there’d be bloody plague in Sydney when I had a fight with him,” muttered Tim. “History is a bugger when you are in it.”

“This thing isn’t history. It’ll soon be over.” Kitty nodded to the banjo player. “Here’s Joey O’Neill who worked for the cooperage just over the Mitchelstown road. Three or so miles out from home, would you believe? We met him in Sydney and he’s going to be joining an uncle farming in Toorooka. Can you believe that one? My sisters went to a dance in Kanturk less than a year ago, and saw him there, and here he is on the Macleay. I think the world is certainly shrinking.”

“How are you, Mr. Shea?” said Joey O’Neill, saluting like a soldier, but not normally a shy-acker, only because he’d been drinking. You could tell his manner was more restrained at other times, and he was certainly terrified of Mamie.

“If you read it in a novel,” asked Kitty, “would you even start to believe it? Did
you
know he had an uncle and aunt in Toorooka?”

Under the power of the Kenna sisters’ sociability, Tim said he was as amazed as anyone. But he wondered how he was supposed to know of Joey O’Neill’s existence down the Mitchelstown road, and so how he was to know that the banjo player had relatives in Toorooka?

They introduced the fiddler, who was a Meath man joining his brother on a dairy farm on Nulla Nulla Creek. And then there was the young Englishman with some washed-out accent—somewhere like Essex—and a couple of Sydney commercial travellers. Decent chaps all of them, no question of that.

“I’m the chaperone for my wild sister,” said Kitty, nuzzling
against him once more with an animal insistence. “Otherwise by now I’d be long asleep. But she bears watching.”

“Who’s chaperoning the wild chaperone,” he asked, and everyone laughed. “Welcome to the Macleay, gentlemen,” he then added anyhow at last,
that
duty devolving on him. “You’re only just inside it, but with any luck you’ll get further, and I don’t know if it’s good or bad news.”

“Rubbish!” called Kitty. “This is the greatest of lands.”

Still holding the fiddle and bow, the fiddler clapped the more or less formal speech of welcome.

The young men began to excuse themselves. Joey O’Neill thought that Mamie would do the same, and seemed to be alarmed to find himself wandering off alone down the avenues of tents, while Mamie stayed behind with the embers and her sister and the two visitors. He couldn’t come back without seeming an idiot, yet loitered in the shadows. The commercial travellers cleared up the stout bottles which lay around and went off themselves to their camp cots.

Kitty murmured to her sister, “Joe wants you to walk with him.”

“I’ve heard everything he has to say,” said Mamie, dismissing the idea. “Good night, Joe,” she called merrily nonetheless. “Thanks for the fine music.”

“You’re an awful hypocrite,” her sister Kitty whispered to her.

Now the camp was very still, but the river still drummed with frogs. Tim had utterly forgotten Bandy, but then noticed that he remained meekly there, keeping a distance.

“You didn’t have to come and see me,” said Kitty. “I’ll be home in two days, they won’t be able to keep this up. All this fuss. Boiling up all our underwear in iron drums. They won’t be able to do it with every shipload. Captain Reid says, we cannot put such hindrances to commerce.”

Smiling Mamie said, “Mr. Habash, are you a gentleman?”

Bandy shifted lightly on his feet.

“You should be aware, Miss Kenna, that I am a follower of the Prophet.”

“Oh Jesus,” said Mamie. “We’ve got prophets and saints to burn, so what does one more matter? But are followers of the Prophet gentlemen?”

“Better than some of the white brethren, if you don’t mind my saying.”

“That’s not much of a claim,” said Mamie. “Anyhow, I believe you
are
a gentleman, Mr. Habash, and I wonder if you would mind accompanying me down to the shore for a view of
Burrawong
while my sister and her husband spend a fragment of time together.”

“Miss Kenna, I would be honoured and it would be a sacred trust.”

“Dear Mother, Tim,” said Kitty. “Every bugger here’s talking like a play.”

In the moonlight, Mamie put a small but decisive hand out in front of her, signalling Bandy towards the river.

“Now you two just have your conversations,” she said. “Come on, Mr. Habash.”

She walked off, trailing a big straw hat. Bandy turned his eyes to Tim, and spread his hands in front of him to show they were vacant of any intent.

“Go on, Bandy,” Kitty told him. “If you want to be a bloody gallant, walk in front so it’s you who treads on the sleeping brown snakes.”

Again Bandy touched his hat, and caught up with Mamie. They were about the same height, and Mamie inclined a little to him, chatting away.

Kitty said, “She gives that poor Joe O’Neill an awful time, God help him.”

She stepped back and took Tim by the wrist.

“We can go to the tent. I’ve been missing you. Sydney’s got its points, but it isn’t Tim Shea.”

“How can we go to your tent? Mind you, I’d like to see it, of course. But Mamie could be back at any second.”

“Then why do you think she’s gone for a walk. She won’t be back for at least forty minutes. And if she’d gone with Joey, it’d be all over the camp by breakfast.”

Kitty was leading him amongst the quiet tents, a camp where few lights shone, the canvas itself offering only a night cry here, a brief fragment of snore there.

“How does a girl like that know these things?”

“She’s a Kenna, I suppose,” said Kitty.

This was nearly enough explanation. The Kennas knew things which didn’t seem to be known in his family. Kitty, for example, always insisted that carrying a child was no hindrance to love. The man needed simply to beware of his weight and take reasonable care. Who had told her that? Had Mrs. Kenna bowled right up and told her before she caught the boat? Had her sister told her at the wedding feast which delayed her in her emigration? It wasn’t at all unlikely. But could he imagine his mother, Anne, telling such things to any of the Shea girls before they took their American ship? Telling Brooklyn-bound Ellen Shea there was no need to put off further joy till three months after the child was born?

He had already stiffened up enough. A standing prick hath no conscience. One of Kitty’s axioms. From whom had she heard
that
? Did the Kennas pass such wisdom around the table?