A River Town (26 page)

“I suppose you sell them all sorts of herbal rubbish.”

“I sold some jasmine and camomile tea. But not much. The people are in excellent health and not anticipating an outbreak.”

Tim took the pages from Bandy and felt the slight shock of risk which they possessed. He would not open them in front of the Punjabi. But he could envisage Red Kenna’s daughters loudly trading with Bandy at the green wagon parked on a sandy road amongst paperbarks.

Kitty: “What do you have for the awful tedium of sitting in the bush, Mr. Habash? And something for my sister please, so she can get one of the big old blokes upriver crazy for her!”

“Wait by the door there,” Tim told Bandy. He might need to send a reply to Kitty.

Tim took the letter into the storeroom to read it. Safe in the hempen sweet perfume of the sugar bags, which despite everything was a fragrance associated with riches! He sat on a bag of sago and delicately unwrapped the pages.

He emerged from the storeroom, half-ashamed to face Habash. His desire to see Kitty might be discernible. Bandy seemed to read him anyhow, and nodded.

“I have two fine horses. The grey you remember. My gelding as well. I do not want to make unwelcome offers, though.”

“You’re going again?”

“If you are, Mr. Shea.”

So easy to see the fellow as an ally now, and Tim barely resisted it.

“I could not go till dusk. And I would need to leave Miss Burke here with the children.”

Bandy screwed up his eyes and took thought. “It is a safe township,” he said. “They would be secure. However, yet again I do not wish to have my gestures mistaken for butting in.”

The little bugger had him on toast.

Tim said, “I could rent horses, but that would be all over town. And Pee Dee … in spite of his bloodlines … he’s not the horse for a fifty-mile round-trip.”

“That’s clear to everyone,” said Bandy.

“I will pay you for a horse.”

“Please, sir.”

“No, I’ll pay.”

“I intended to go anyhow. I have business. Packages to deliver.”

“Wait then, will you?” he asked. Politeness. He might as well try that, since the hawker seemed to flourish on hostility.

Tim went to see Ellen Burke in the kitchen at the back of the house. He weighed the hard light in her eye as she listened, frowning a little. “… and tell people I’ll deliver tomorrow afternoon.”

“But how can you after more than twenty miles there and twenty back? You’ll rest here and I’ll make deliveries.”

“No,” he said. “No. I’ll put in my normal day.”

She looked away across the room, to the wall on which molten light within the oven was reflecting. She was the sort of robust girl who very much liked to think of herself as a possible cartwoman.

“So,” she said. “Some people are allowed to travel and talk with Mr. Habash then?”

“This is a different case, miss,” Tim warned her.

“Is that what it is?” she asked. She began feeding the fire with split wood. “I’ll be very pleased if when I am married seven years, a man will do a mad ride for me just to spend an hour.”

From a seventeen-year-old, this was an astounding observation. Just the same, someone was sure to do it for Ellen, for her big bones and her ironic tongue.

“You’re not going to bring us back the plague, are you?” she asked.

“No. The seven days are more than up. There is, thank God, no plague out there.” He smiled at her. “Do you fight with my sister-in-law, Molly? I bet you fight like blazes.”

“Sometimes. We’re like sisters, you see. Putting up with my father. I’ll make you a quart of stew to take to Kitty.”

He would take some condensed milk too, in case the quarantine groceries didn’t cover that. Kitty liked condensed milk in her tea best of all. She had that in common with Lucy. She would acclaim condensed milk, breathing out through her broad lips.

Back in the store, Tim and Bandy made their arrangements for after closing. “I shall be back with both horses,” Bandy promised formally.

Johnny’s dawdling manner of returning home from school showed he fancied himself as a schoolboy and that Imelda was not a terror to him. It was to be hoped someone would be. His bandage was still in place, but it had ochre dust on it. His eyes looked clear, which was what counted. So don’t enquire into the history of his day.

Annie, sipping her own tea, watched Tim narrowly with wide brown eyes.

“Father,” she enquired, “are
you
going to leave us now?”

At the stove, Ellen Burke covered her mouth with a hand.

“I’m going to see Mama. Back tomorrow. Tell you what, I’ll leave that friend of mine with you.” He turned to his right and theatrically pushed towards her that phantom spirit which had attended him in North Cork and supposedly emigrated with him.

“There,” he said. “Look after Annie, and answer all her questions.”

The child said to the vacancy and to Tim, “I’ve got a question then. Will we have treacle duff?”

“It happens I was going to make sago pudding,” said Ellen Burke. “But something or other told me treacle duff!”

Bandy shamed him by bringing the horses the back way, not down Belgrave Street to the front of the shop, but by laneways across the hip of river bank behind the main thoroughfare. All to save Tim
embarrassment. The grey mare, the bay gelding. Two horses neat as skiffs. Not bloated and gone slack with the Macleay’s easy grass. All the quiet energy Bandy put into keeping these horses up to the mark!

Seeing him coming from a window, Tim ducked out of the back of the house to greet him. “You could have come the front,” he called.

“That manner of proceeding leaves people knowing all our business, old chap,” said Bandy, touching his nose with the finger of a hand which still held the grey’s reins.

A man could have asked him then, why tell the
Chronicle
about our bumbling rescue of Albert? But who could be so crude to a fellow who had delivered two such wonderful horses to your door?

“Please, come into the kitchen for some tea. Talk to Ellen Burke and wait for me to pack a saddlebag.”

Bandy put his head on the side and closed one eye. “It will be one or two in the morning before we reach the quarantine camp. If you wanted a rest first or …?”

Tim decided to shave and even then found himself hoping that the town, closing for business now, seeing him and Bandy ride together to the river punt, wouldn’t use it as an excuse to say, “There he goes. Fine thing. One day extorting money from Mrs. Malcolm, doing business with the hawker the next.”

“The trouble with you,” he told his mirror, the receptor of his discourse, “is that you’re stuck halfway between a madman and a cagey bugger.”

Wrap the stew in a big cloth, then in a sealskin bag. Ignore its then resemblance to Hanney’s package. Chocolate and condensed milk and some Norwegian sardines. A copy of the
Messenger of the Sacred Heart
, which Kitty must have ordered at Mass one Sunday, and which had turned up two days after she left—took the lazy buggers at the post office that long to sort and deliver the mail which had come on
Burrawong
. Then he stood in the store, looking about him at the shelves. What else to take Red Kenna’s beloved daughter? He used the opportunity of the customerless store to readjust his breeches and privates for the punishing ride.

At last, outside the back door with Pee Dee whickering at the two fine horses from his paddock, Tim drew himself up into his
saddle on the gelding. Beside Bandy on the grey. Mounted bushmen. He ignored Pee Dee and he felt the leather creak, so well-oiled, so delicate, accommodating him as precisely as you could hope. Annie watched him from the back verandah like a chronicler, and Ellen Burke kept a good hold on bandaged Johnny. Tim blew kisses. “Now go inside with Ellen!”

He rode out waving his hand. Then out of the lane into Smith Street. Beyond the part-built bridge, a crowd of end-of-day people were waiting for the punt to return from East. Old Billy Thurmond, the patriotic farmer, was there with his wagon and looked coldly up the embankment at arriving Tim, as if what he saw confirmed something. Maybe something he’d heard from Ernie Malcolm.

Tim took off his hat. “Mr. Thurmond.” But the old man, model farmer, Pola Creek, merely fluttered his lips with a blast of air. You couldn’t tell whether it was contempt or hello.

Tim murmured to Bandy, “Do you call at old Billy’s place?”

“His big daughter buys cloth from me, and a remedy for costiveness.”

“Pity Billy himself didn’t take some of it,” said Tim.

The punt had left East and was eking its way back over darkening water. Some ducks and then a pelican made late, low flights over the surface, dragging a rumour of light behind them. Yet shadow also fell like a veil from the pelican’s big wings. Smelling of its peculiar, cranky old steam engine the punt came into Central wharf. A few wagons and tired-looking horsemen rode ashore. Tim and Bandy led their horses aboard, and the gelding travelled from embankment to punt so easily and without fuss that Tim was reminded of Dr. Erson’s question: “Will you shoot that cranky horse of yours?”

Everyone on the Central side was able to crowd aboard, with walking passengers and Billy’s dray and the two horsemen, and old Hagan, the punt captain, and his son Boy Hagan, pulled levers and let the thing be swung away from shore, let the current take it and the cable hold it, balancing the drift against the thrust of the engine.

“You’re going out selling herbals, are you?” Billy Thurmond called down the length of his wagon to Tim. Tim did not answer.

Some fine enough houses in East, rising up Rudder’s Hill. At the end of the journey, Billy Thurmond urged his wagon ashore in East. Bandy and Tim tranquilly led their horses down the ramp, pleased to give Billy a head start, and then mounted and took the hill at an easy trot.

“You keep these horses marvellously,” Tim called across to Bandy. He hoped he sat half as well as Bandy did, but doubted it.

Bandy grinned softly, flicking his head sideways towards the river.

“They are my total passion, old fellow,” he said.

The signpost turning left at Rudder’s Hill said
Gladstone
. They swung their horses to it and saw before them the paperbark lowlands of Dock Flat and O’Sullivan’s Swamp. A brown, swampy darkness beginning to pool down there, pricked with the kerosene lamp of this and that cottage. Melancholy country, this. The river’s abandoned ground. The lonely lights looked as if they’d been set there by survivors of a flood. These were the houses of men who did not do one thing but many: they kept cows, they grew some cane and bananas, they burned charcoal, they cut shingles, and when they had done all that, were still landed with the question of how to feed a family.

Soon, at an easy pace, he and Bandy were at the furtherest point to which he made deliveries—the slopes of Red Hill, where better farms and orchards lay, where prosperous farmers could be found sitting at their tables reading the
Argus
with such a clear, scrupulous eye that you’d think they’d been here two hundred years. Some of the fanciest new ploughing, threshing, winnowing and seeding machines, coming up straight out of the catalogues of the Sydney manufacturers by way of
Burrawong
, were taken to Red Hill whose farmers considered themselves advanced. To Red Hill and Pola Creek too came the agricultural and horticultural journals of the world, and they were read and disseminated. Agriculture sat as science, not as hit-and-miss magic, atop Red Hill.

A long way away to the north, beyond the mudflats and the river, was a perfect bar of golden light, and then violet all the way to the apex of the dusk. And on this side of things the road down to Pola Creek, and night a blue mist. This air, this air. The same
air which dealt tenderly with him after his cricketing mistake, which pressed so knowingly on the seam in mad Johnny’s scone.

The most wonderful thing to do, to ride recklessly to the supreme woman in a soft night.

At the corner of a laneway amongst corn paddocks in Pola Creek a young woman in a black dress waited, bare-headed. Piled up hair. She daunted Tim. An echo of Missy? Or just waiting for some cow-cocky’s son who’d sent her a note? Seeing Tim and Bandy, she seemed abashed and turned and moved away through corn taller than she was.

“The road downriver used to be so devilish bad when my father first brought us to the Macleay,” Bandy recounted, his voice sounding like a ballad. “You saw broken-down drays every mile, and men marked the particular mud holes with a cut-down sapling and a rag tied to it, to warn travellers away.”

Austral Eden, wide, low, rich land, beside the track now. The river was somewhere near too. You could smell its muddiness, for all the world like the sweet drag of odour you got from a freshly opened two pound can of plum jam. Austral Eden. What a name! Southern heaven.