A River Town (31 page)

Methodists and the good Wesleyans of South Kempsey didn’t go for any of it, yet shared the town with the mystery for which that tower stood in its plain Macleay timbers.

Where was the sense in paying Imelda a bob a week for a full-time boarder? If they were permitted to run themselves mad under a sun and in an air like this one? Drawing nearer, he saw Imelda striking the uprights of the tower with her cane, and then
standing back, pointing the cane to the apex where the seemingly white bell stood.

This white bell at the peak of the structure was not the real gun-metal bell at all. Rather it was Lucy. And in brown pants and a blue shirt, with the dirty bandage on his head awaiting removal by Dr. Erson, Johnny. Somehow they had climbed the tower to the highest side beam together. He could envisage too clearly Johnny going up with his long, pliable feet, Lucy with her crazy suppleness.

Tim drew up Pee Dee and the cart and ran into the convent garden. Someone’s redheaded brat was imitating with hooting sounds the spread-armed balancing pose Johnny took as he walked a little way along his beam and grabbed a corner upright. Tim reached Imelda, who was still whacking the corner of one of the tower’s uprights with her cane.

“Come down, you two ruffians!” she yelled. But the diagonals which someone with climbing skills might well shinny up were too steep to shinny down.

Two girls about Lucy’s age—in pinafores, strolling together, an arm around each other’s shoulder—chattered away, engrossed. To them, time out of the classroom was a gift to amity. Didn’t matter to them that there were two pupils who had got themselves to an impossible point in today’s bloody murderous sky.

Imelda panted from punishing the tower, but would not give up the practice.

“Don’t do that,” Tim called to her. “Could make them jump.”

Imelda did at least soften and decrease the tempo of her blows. Her face broiling under the black cloth, under the white band which covered her forehead for Christ’s sake. No man shall see thy brow …

“Tea,” she called to one of the younger nuns, who was standing by, clutching the huge black beads hanging at her waist from the Order’s thick black belt. “Could you ever get me tea, sister? I’m dying of parchment.”

And before the young nun runs off to do it, Tim mentally complained that
parchment
was something you wrote on, an animal skin.
Parched
was thirsty. Was he paying out all this money to a headmistress who didn’t know the difference?

Imelda stopped caning the tower altogether.

“I’ve sent a child for the fire brigade,” she told Tim. “Mr. Crane, you know. And their extension ladder. But God knows, they could be in the bush somewhere battling flames.”

To look directly up the thwarts at the two figures at the apex of the tower was too terrifying a view. He stepped away many paces and tried it from a slightly kinder angle. “Don’t jump!” he yelled. “We have some men coming. Sit still. Wait for the ladder!”

It was Lucy who looked so light up there, as if she might step out and float to ground on the searing westerly. Johnny looked solider, in possession of himself and the tower, and so more endangered.

“I will see if I can come up,” Tim yelled, pronouncing each word.

He wrenched off his elastic-sided boots.

“Oh, dear Jesus,” he said to himself, looking up again and assessing the task. Johnny always putting him up for awful trials for heroism.

He lifted himself into the angle where a diagonal beam came down and bolted itself to one of the uprights of the tower. This diagonal would take him up to a cross bar perhaps twenty feet from the earth, and then another diagonal would begin. No other way up existed. You had to admire and abhor the little buggers for having managed it in such blazing air!

He forced himself to begin climbing the diagonal. Splayed-out feet. Hauling himself on the harsh, barely-planed, yellow-painted timber. Bowed over like a bloody ape. Everything aching. And bent like this, the idea about not casting your eyes to the earth utterly impossible! He knew to all the nuns and all the children he looked graceless, scrambling and frightened. There were bloody convent urchins mimicking him. Swinging one foot out, as he had to to bypass the one which held him to his previously highest point. Up to the first cross bar. Haul yourself up on it and award yourself a breath, grasping the diagonal which might take you up to the tower’s next stage. The thing built in three sections, like the prayers of the Angelus itself. Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Three Hail Marys for your sins and the repose of souls. Some bloody repose up here in a sky abandoned even by the magpies!

“Careful, Mr. Shea,” cried a nun from below. Waterford accent.

“Listen to me,” he called to Johnny, who had the grace to stare down, to Lucy who was looking off into the unscannable haze. “Stay there. The ladder’s coming. Papa’s coming.”

How would
he
stand up there though, looking out at the seared heavens and the valley full of smoke?

His breath as good as terror would let it be, he began the next diagonal. He found he had a way with it all now. Sailors he had so admired, up in the top mast, feet on one of those ratlines. It can be learned. Ascent. He’d learned to rescue Johnny from the stern of
Terara
. Now in the topmost! Watch below on deck!

Shinnying on further, diagonally to the sky, calling in a voice in which people could hear the quavers. “Stay there! Stay there!” Since history showed that if
she
jumped for whatever reason of her own, Johnny would step out too, falling like a willing stone and getting joy from it for the instant it lasted.

There was further flutter of activity below. Horses were mixed up in it, and stupid Imelda cried, “Mr. Shea. Save yourself!” Smoky air passed in front of his eyes. Had the tower itself caught alight? One of his feet had slithered away from the diagonal. An awful shin-whack pain in that leg! He fell now and was full of terror for the instant that lasted. The thunder of the ground, punishing him on the soles of the feet. The bastinado punishment, up through the soles.

“Oh Mother,” he said, lying on his side and gulping with pain. Nuns were touching his legs in a spirit of medical experiment.

It turned out it had been another of Imelda’s inexact meanings, like
parchment
. In calling, “Save yourself!” she had meant
Save yourself the trouble
. When he could make sense of things again, he could see she had been informing him that Mr. Crane and his big boy Arnold had ridden up to the gate on the fire engine behind its two old draught horses. He had heard it as a warning though, and it had knocked one of his legs from beneath him.

A youngish nun, the Waterford one, had already begun bandaging his swollen ankle, and the pressure of the bandage was the clearest thing he felt. A second nun brought him fully to his senses by pouring iodine on his right shin below the torn and rucked-up trouser leg. Mr. Crane and his son had the extension ladder up to the top of the tower, and big Arnold was coming down first with
Lucy reserved in his arms. Ladies first, as if she did not have Johnny by the scruff of his bloody will. Mr. Crane at the base of the ladder was calling out counsels at Johnny. “Stay up there, sonny!” And then under his breath, “You little bastard.”

Arnold was more lenient and brought Johnny down on his shoulders. Through the mist of all his astringent pain, Tim doubted whether this tribute to Johnny’s manliness was a wise gesture.

Meanwhile Imelda rapped Lucy once across the upper arm with her cane. Immediately a few tears fell down Lucy’s face. They weren’t passionate. The jolt of the cane had shaken them out.

“Go to the dormitory and sit on your bed, miss,” Imelda told her.

“Come here!” Tim called as she went off with that deliberateness so dreadful to find in a child.

The little girl turned and walked across, carrying her scatter of tears.

“Tell me, Lucy, what do you want done that hasn’t been? I asked you before and now have to ask again. Why do you make my son do these things?”

He knew how silly the question was. Adults always ask these questions of children who would not give the answer for another twenty or thirty years. But this particular trick of muteness could drive an adult to blows. And he could feel the blows rising in him.

She looked at him directly and he saw what she was watching in him: that he could support the idea of her falling, but not the idea of Johnny’s plummet. She lacked someone to fear her fall more than his own death. That level stare. She forgave him, she was philosophic. But she knew.

“We thought we could see everything from the top,” she told him. “Johnny’s mother down the river.”

“No. No, it’s not high enough. You must know there’s no place on earth from which you can see all the rest. There’s no height you can get to.”

She bunched her eyes. Another tear emerged under this pressure. “I know.”

“What do you want? I can’t do more.”

She said nothing.

“If you behave like this just once again,” he said, “I will let go of you for good, Lucy. I swear to Jesus! But if you stop being a mad child, I’ll keep you here and take you to Crescent Head for picnics.”

Arnold Crane delivered Johnny now to the base of the tower. Imelda began scourging him with her birch.

“No!” called Tim. “No! Send him to me.”

Imelda stopped lashing and pointed the boy towards his prone father. The boy, too, had a few stained droplets on his cheeks. They meant nothing under this sun.

“I am suspending your education, you bloody ruffian. You have half killed me. Get the Sisters’ boxes out of the cart and take them to the kitchen. I’m too crippled myself.”

So here he was, lamed, reaching up to cuff the boy behind the ear and point him to where Pee Dee stood, tethered to the fence, trying to back away nonetheless from the placid old plough horses who pulled the fire wagon.

“Give Pee Dee a whack for me too and tell him to behave!” Tim roared after the boy.

Two of the nuns were ushering children back towards the classrooms beneath the Celtic cross which stood at the apex of St. Joseph’s school hall. The young Waterford nun had finished binding up Tim’s ankle and was struggling to rise within the great black folds of her habit. A dark, sweat-drenched furze on her upper lip. A plain young woman but beautiful in her own way.

“Can you get up under your own steam now, Mr. Shea?” she asked.

Tim rolled onto his good leg and forced himself upright with his palm. She was by his left elbow, assisting. He put his weight on his bound foot but, of course, it would not take it.

“You may need crutches then,” the consecrated Waterford woman told him.

“I have a blackthorn at home,” he told her.

From the direction of the cart came Johnny labouring under a butterbox but doing fairly well. A number of older and larger boys had joined in to help him carry things. You had to admire the little blackguard. As long as Mad Lucy let him live.

Imelda herself struggled over to ask how he was, and without
ceremony he said, “You might remember, Mother. I asked you to keep them apart.”

Imelda angry to be spoken to so outright in front of one of her nuns. “Well, we are not God Himself, Mr. Shea,” she told him. “We cannot enquire into each one of their seconds. We do our best. I now see what you mean. But I would tell you that there is mischief in the boy too. Children don’t have to talk to each other to make up some mad plan. They do things. It is called Original Sin. But their Guardian Angels were with them today.”

He looked at the boxes of groceries making for the convent kitchen on the shoulders of boys large and small. “I thought that was what I was paying you one and threepence a week for. So that Guardian Angels would be saved the trouble.”

She turned away, stung. Yet they always had an answer these women!

After some dawdling children went Imelda, thrashing the air with her cane. The flail of the cane, the rattle of her Rosary. The invisible ministers, the seraphim, the Guardian Angels were taking a bloody thrashing!

Through all this morning’s adventure, while climbing the hard, painted diagonals of the timbers with splayed feet, he’d had it in mind.

“Sister,” he asked the Waterford nun. “Have you heard of the young woman who died at Mulroney’s?”

“Yes, I have, Mr. Shea.”

“Do you think it proper to pray for the repose of her soul?”

The questioning made the young nun nervous. She showed it by being brusque.

“I do. We are all sisters, Mr. Shea.”

“Very good. Now do you think there is any way her soul is running amok? In what we see here. The children run wild.”

“No. I certainly don’t believe that. That’s theologically unsound, Mr. Shea.”

But you could tell she knew about visitations and was as fearful now as if she’d had one, had seen Missy inhabiting fiery ground or glittering sea.

“I am cursed with dreams,” said Tim.

“All human beings are, in this vale of tears,” said the nun. But
now she was all business again. “You should wear a scapular for the proper protection, Mr. Shea. We must be on our guard against superstitious belief. Now come and have some tea like a good fellow.”

At that moment Johnny was back in Tim’s vicinity, standing some paces away. His deliveries done.

“You’ll come with me,” said Tim. And to the nun, “Thank you, I have water on my cart.”

On the second day of terrible heat, Dr. Erson and the sanitation officer visited the plague camp and declared everyone well, and clothing clear of infestation. That evening a huge cleansing wind came from the south, gusting up thunderheads with it. The sky cracked and people covered their mirrors with a cloth lest the lightning have a surface to admire itself by. Men were already going around collecting for the burned-out farms of Nulla Creek. The
Argus
would say that six thousand pigs had been consumed, twelve thousand cattle and as many as a thousand horses. By some startling mercy—no human fatalities.

Tim could have been one if he’d taken an unlucky posture in falling to the earth. The lunatic children could have been if they’d stepped into the air in the way Lucy looked as though she might throughout the enterprise.