A River Town (2 page)

And now he could take a mouthful of the rum—ahh, the delicious too-muchness at the back of the throat, the shudder that out-shuddered fever—and then picked up the
Argus
. For though he respected the
Chronicle
, the
Argus
was very generous with its serial by A. A. Druitt, the Dickens of the end-of-century.

The Honourable Delia Hobham was the spirited girl who had made three previous appearances in the serial in the
Argus
throughout January. She came from somewhere in the West Country of England, since A. A. Druitt made a meal out of what the peasants and servants said to her. “Auw, Miss Delia, there bain’t been no bakin’ powder fur cook to gi’ the pantry a freshenin’ wi’.” A. A. Druitt’s Miss Hobham lived in Hobham Hall with her mother and father, and every day she rode out amongst the villagers and tenant farmers, who called down blessings on her father’s head. Silly buggers!

The father never seemed to turf any tenants off their land. That’s how you knew this was fiction. For the Allbrights at home, landowners of Newmarket in Duhallow, North Cork, took every chance to evict people for their own good and recommend them to emigrate to Massachusetts or Australia. But no one ever mentioned emigration from the Hobham estate. Too busy being grateful to bloody Squire Hobham. So the world was fine if you had a good squire and foul if you had a bad one. What about having none at all? This tale, however, was suitable old world pap to serve up in a place like Kempsey, New South Wales.

The male Danggadi blacks had been followed by a string of women now, and children. Gluey ears and blighted eyes on the young ones. Searching for a bloody carnival in a carnival-less town. From looking at them a man got the momentary, mad, missionary urge to live amongst their humpies and pass away with them. Everyone said they were passing. Poor buggers!

He watched them loping for a time down towards the butter factory near Central wharf.

Out in Belgrave Street—broad because surveyed more than seventy years past by a British army officer from Port Macquarie—the younger Habash brother rode past at a mad pace on a grey. He was of a family of licensed hawkers and herbalists. He’d taken advantage of the empty town to get involved in such riding in the two chief commercial thoroughfares. The bloody little brown-complexioned hawker, in a broad felt hat and black waistcoat and trousers, leaning forward in the saddle. Where were the Habashes from? Somewhere east of bloody Suez for a start. India maybe.

“Bloody slow down!” Tim cried, but not too loudly. Habash’s golden dust hung in the air, held up there by the day’s humidity.

“Jesus,” Tim asked the Honourable Delia, who sat there on the page of the
Argus
, “where’s the bloody Nuisance Inspector?”

On the
Terara
probably. Under the awnings. Within sight of Kitty who wore her gossamer veil let down over her pink little oval of a face. Annie his daughter sedate on the forehatch. Such a staid child all the time. Johnny of course wild as buggery at six and a half years, climbing things, threatening to hurl himself over the gunwales.

Holy Christ, that bugger Habash was galloping back
down
Belgrave Street now! You could see him fleet through the neck of the laneway between T. Shea—General Store and E. Coleman—Bootmaker. Thundering back into the dust he’d already made.

“Do you want me to knock you out of the bloody saddle?” Tim asked of the top branches of the peppertree.

Britain’s griefs in Africa filled the papers. From them the New South Wales Mounted Rifles, recently embarked for Natal, had not yet had time to deliver the mother nation. However … on the masthead page of the
Argus
, he noticed, flipping backwards and forwards between the sweet, ridiculous drama of the Honourable Delia Hobham and the pages full of harder intelligence, Mr. Baylor, Treasurer of the Patriotic Fund, raised the idea of a Macleay Valley lancer regiment being recruited to send off. To sort out Britain’s African affairs. The Australians would pull the fat out of the fire.

Tim reached out of his chair and picked up the
Macleay Chronicle
. Tim’s favourite the good old Offhand, editor and chief columnist. No one ever called him by his real name. Through his column he’d become Offhand to everyone. He’d have sent off one of the junior journalists to write of the
Terara
and would be drinking somewhere indoors today, somewhere dark and cool. Maybe with the skinny little widow, Mrs. Flitch, he visited in West.

There was the Offhand on page nine. “The factors of the British Army in India, on their visit to the Macleay Valley last August, could find from a total of one hundred Macleay horses offered for their perusal only five that were suitable for active service. It would seem that only the most rigorous and widespread breeding programme
would produce enough mounts here to save Macleay Valley volunteers from the disgrace of being infantry.”

One in the eye for Mr. Baylor with his plans for a public meeting to raise a regiment. Bloody good for you, son!

Bloody hell, that Afghan or Punjabi hawker was flogging the grey back down Belgrave Street again. He’d been fined just six months back for thrashing some other poor piece of horsemeat down Kemp Street. Then fined again by the Macleay police magistrate for using raucous language with Mrs. Clair, standing on her front steps and accusing her of not paying for cloth he’d ordered especially.

In heavy air, Tim folded his papers and laid them on his camp stool. Somewhere on earth a wind was blowing, and somewhere sleet cutting the faces of men and women. But here it was hard to believe that. The Macleay air at mid-summer was gravid, a first class paperweight. Tim got up and walked past the gate behind which his own eccentric and leaden-footed horse, Pee Dee, stood grazing and ignoring him, and out into Belgrave Street. Down by Worthington’s butchery, the hawker was recklessly yanking the grey around for another assault on Kempsey’s stolid atmosphere. He was lightly whacking the poor beast’s sides, but with such a smile that you thought he must believe the horse was enjoying all this as much as he was.

Tim waited a while in the shade of his storefront. Only when Habash was well-launched did he step forward. Thinking in his dark way,
Let the bugger run me down and see what the police magistrate makes of that!

When Tim presented himself in the middle of the road, he saw Habash’s face filled with sudden and innocent alarm. Yes, Tim thought. Yes, I do find myself taking strange risks. He saw Habash reining the horse in crazily to avoid running him down. But the hawker must have put unequal weight on the bridle. The grey slipped and threw the young rider backwards into the street. Tim felt the thud of the falling hawker in his own teeth. Grateful the madness was over, the grey strolled into the shade of Savage’s Emporium, and began to drink from the trough there.

Habash got up laughing and with his neat hands brushing brown dust from his black trousers.

“Bad show eh? I thought everyone but the darkies was down the river.”

He spoke exact English, every word presented as its own unit. It made Tim think of a conjuror, smilingly offering one card after another, but face up. They let too many kinds of different people into Australia for its own good.

Habash swung his right arm to test his shoulder. “Oh God,” he said. “I was putting the grey mare through its paces, you know. I have a notorious weakness for speed and horse-flesh, Mr. Shea.”

“I know,” said Tim, not yielding. “You’re on a good behaviour bond. Here you are bloody breaking it.”

Habash made a noise with his teeth and lowered his head and swung it in an arc. This was some bloody fake act of contrition.

“If I’d known you were there, sir … for I do know the sort of man you are. I have often camped on your sister-in-law’s property upriver.”

Kitty’s younger sister, this was. Molly. She’d emigrated here just five years ago, come up the coast to her sister on SS
Burrawong
, that floating shame of the North Coast Steamship Navigation Company. Lots of very nice-looking, plump, sisterly hugging on the Central wharf. A half-pint like Kitty, actually skinnier than Kitty though, and with a little more restraint. Molly began her Australian career sleeping in the canvassed-off part of the back verandah, near the cookhouse.

A man named Old Burke owned Pee Dee Station, where Tim’s own useless nag came from. Far up in the most beautiful reaches of the river. Old Burke rode in one day with his fourteen-year-old motherless daughter Ellen, and gave Molly Kenna a grocery order to fill out while he went and saw M. M. Chance, the stock and estate agent, and then to complain and drink with other farmers in the Commercial. His daughter was still shopping at Savage’s or drinking cordial at the Greeks’ cafe in Smith Street, pretending this was the big life, and Old Burke had come back into the store with a glow on and thought Molly was a pretty bright girl. What you needed to cheer up a grim homestead and the lonely seasons
up at Pee Dee. Rich pasture there, but a bugger of a way up the Macleay!

So now it turned out Habash carried his fabrics and his medical mixtures way up there to Molly.

Tim liked Mrs. Molly Burke and usually said so. She was a natural democrat and put on no airs. And Jesus, what the people thought of her back in the Doneraile area when they found out—without understanding what sort of place New South Wales was—that she’d married thirty-one hundred and fifty acres!

Tim said nothing now though. He wasn’t going to share his enthusiasms for his sister-in-law with the hawker.

“What she says,” Habash continued, “is that you are generous to a fault. So how fortunate I am that it is you who blocked my path.”

“Don’t expect the bloody advantage of me, Mr. Habab.”

“Not Habab if I dare say so, sir. Habash. My father is Saffy Habash of Forth Street, and I am Saffy Bandy Habash, Bandy to acquaintances. You may know my father.”

“An old feller. On a stick.”

“Yes. On a stick.” Bandy let the wistfulness of that penetrate. “He is indeed our patriarch. Founded our business in the Macleay twenty years ago. Soon after my mother perished, and my father swallowed his grief and kept at work. Now my brother Mouma and myself have taken the load. Mouma does the settlements north to Macksville and south to Kundabung. I take the valley itself from Comara to the New Entrance. We are hawkers and sellers of medicines to every remote acre of the region. We are the servants of the valley and we rarely see each other. From Arakoon and the wives of the prison officers at Trial Bay to far-off Taylor’s Arm. And, of course, to your esteemed sister-in-law at Pee Dee Station.”

“I’ve seen your wagons,” Tim conceded. “Moving about the place.”

“As we all do, I get tired of plodding in a wagon, and I want to gallop like my ancestors in the Punjab, horsemen—if I dare say so—to rival the horsemen of the New South Wales contingent.”

Habash’s grey was still drinking heartily from the trough outside Savage’s two-storey emporium. Habash, admiring it, didn’t move however to take its reins and stop it from gorging on the water. “I
paid eleven pounds for it. Its dam is Finisterre, who won the cup at Port Macquarie.”

Tim said, “You wrench the poor beast around a bit for such an expensive one. Why don’t you race it? That would get you out of having to use Belgrave Street as your bloody track.”

“Sir, I was foolish enough to try racing it. But the Kempsey Race Committee pooh-bahs don’t wish to see races run by a hawker’s grey.”

Tim experienced a second’s sympathy for this little Muslim. “The buggers are utter bloody pooh-bahs, you’re right about that.”

“My father says not to waste money on such a thing. And I am an obedient child. That is in our tradition.”

“It’s in every bugger’s tradition,” said Tim, sharply remembering old Jeremiah Shea, his father, left behind childless in another hemisphere. “You don’t have to come from east of Suez to have a tradition like that.”

“But you do not have the honour to have your father with you here in New South Wales,” said Habash.

“That’s exactly right.
My
father lives in a rainy place called Newmarket. It would take me only two months there and two months back and an expenditure of two hundred pounds to visit him and see if he’s aged. As the poor old feller must have. All his children are in New South Wales or in America. Nothing for them in Newmarket. A small tenant holding. Laughable land. No bloody dignity.”

Habash shook his head and tested his shoulder again. “Life is hard for so many in such a lot of places.”

Jeremiah Shea, a literate Irish farmer who rented fifteen acres from a man named Forester. He did part-time clerking in the town of Newcastle for the Board of Works. Knew his Latin but had nothing to give his children. That was for Jeremiah Shea,
pater
, the saddest thing.
In hic valle lacrimarum
. In this vale of tears.

Speaking of Newmarket this way, idly in the Australian dust, revived Tim’s joy in having come here. The heat, the sky, the place: all tokens that he wouldn’t need to leave Johnny and Annie with dismal prospects.

Behind Habash, like a phantom of the sort of orphaned hope Tim had been reflecting on, a small child in a torn white dress staggered around the corner by Worthington’s butchery. Her head twisted back for air, and a keening plea came from her lips. Tim ran to her and Habash collected his grey by the reins and followed. Her sharp little face was red, and she couldn’t understand or tolerate the silent town. Tim rushed up to her and asked her, “What? What, dear?”