A River Town (3 page)

“Papa,” she told him, pointing north towards the farms in that direction. Her dress was all marred with red clay. “Papa and Hector. The sulky tipped.”

Her face clenched up. Habash asked, “Where, miss?”

The child said Glenrock near O’Riordan’s, and that was a mile and a half. Tim saw the light in Habash’s eye. The supreme license to gallop.

“Come on, little miss,” Habash cried and fetched the grey and swung the small girl, who may have been ten but was slight for her age, onto the neck of the horse, arranging her sidesaddle, fixing her small hands around the pommel. His own delicate brown hands on the reins would encase her and keep her from falling.

“Go,” said Tim. “I’ll be ten seconds behind.”

He ran down the street and turned into the laneway beyond his store and so to the gate of the paddock where Pee Dee, a bay with white markings, was still grazing and trying to pretend Tim would make no demands. An old Macleay racehorse himself, Pee Dee, a gelding of promise but of erratic temperament. Tim bought him two years ago and had an obstinate affection for the brute. He served Tim and Kitty both as a dray horse and occasionally as a fairly stylish hack. Only four years old, but his previous owner Mr. Milner had given up on him early. Too chancy in behaviour to race. He took to the shafts of the cart with disdain and only after lots of assurance. But he didn’t make quite the same outstanding objection to being ridden. Especially if you did not go to the trouble of bridle and reins and all that leather. Tim took one of the stacked sugar bags from the back verandah, grabbed a rope halter and mouthpiece from the shed, eased himself through the fence and approached Pee Dee with it all.

“Here we go, boy.”

He slung the sugar bag well forward on Pee Dee’s shoulders and worked the rope halter over his head. He led the unwilling and yet strangely tolerant horse to the gate and opened it. Then he took a handful of the beast’s mane with his left hand and clung as best he could to its withers with his right, and so hauled himself onto Pee Dee’s back, stomach first. Leaning low over the horse’s neck and with his arms extended a long way down the beast’s shoulders, he trotted Pee Dee out of the paddock and around the corner of the residence. Hitting Belgrave Street, Pee Dee fell into an apparently eager gait.

“OK,” said Tim leaning forward. “We’ll show that bloody Asiatic something, eh.”

In the street Habash was still waiting, wheeling his horse, impatient as a bloody chasseur of some kind.

But it became apparent as they set out that Habash’s mare was quite clearly tired now from all the racing Bandy had given it, and Pee Dee went frolicking after her, and they rounded the corner by Worthington’s butchery in tight convoy. They galloped leftwards into Forth Street, past the gardens of cottages whose owners were absent, steamer-picnicking townspeople. Pee Dee ahead, as he’d so rarely been on the racecourse, and relishing it. A few dogs chased them. Looking back, Tim saw the little wizened child with the bloody leg and the torn dress leaning back confidingly into Habash. She may even have fallen asleep. Tim felt Pee Dee’s backbone cut into his groin like a blade.

The Macleay River, renowned in its own shire, contained most of the town in a half circle. First, hilly West built up high above its steep-cut bank. Some of the better houses there, and—out beyond the last houses on the hard upriver road to Armidale—the Greenhill blacks’ reservation. Then low Central where the Sheas lived, convenient to wharfs but likely to flood. East then of course lay across the water from Central, reached by punt. Its own place, and not party to the dash Habash and Tim were now engaged on. They were making for the farmlands between West and Central, where the river had flowed earlier in its history and had left some fairly good soil for corn and cane-growing and for dairy cattle. Amongst the country fences and the milking sheds, Pee Dee drew enthusiastically
clear of the grey. Mad and unpredictable bugger, he was! Showing the way up past Cochrane Street and over a low hill.

Ahead then you could see something, a terrible mess, a sulky pitched sideways over the edge of the road. Tim had to fight an urge to yank on the reins for fear of nearing the catastrophe on his own and seeing unguessable things. But you could not manage such subtle changes anyhow on Pee Dee and, given the primitive rope halter and reins, it was now a case of bloody Pee Dee surging on, performing well only when it was least suitable.

Thus he was first at the mess. “Oh merciful Jesus!” he said, jumping down, feeling light as a wafer, delivered of his heavy horse.

Seated wailing on the edge of the road, picking up handfuls of gravel and throwing them towards the wreckage down the slope, was a little boy of perhaps four. His targets seemed to be three pigs grazing down there.

Below lay an awfully wounded horse and the ruins of the sulky. One of the shafts had snapped and was stuck deep in the horse’s flank. The beast was writhing very weakly to work the stake loose. Impaled and lying on its side, it looked over its shoulder occasionally to get a glimpse of its injury. The hopeless wound did not invite close consideration and Tim did not give it any. A man in a suit lay on his back. He looked intact, even his clothes looked fresh, but O’Riordan’s three robust pigs were feeding on his head.

Tim slid down the claggy embankment. He did not necessarily want to do it but had to, couldn’t leave it to Habash. White man’s bloody burden in a year already tainted with woman-slaughter.

The poor bastard lay on rain-softened earth and even had a white flower in his buttonhole. Worn but clean white shirt, an eloquent, well-sewn button on the neck. No tie. A cow-cocky coming to town on the holiday. His head had been broken somehow, perhaps by the wheel, and the pigs had come in and eaten at his forehead and his nose. Cruel, cruel bloody world. Beheaded girls, defaced men. Jesus! The gravel thrown by the little boy had no impact at all upon the swine.

Bandy Habash was now descending from his grey, and lifted the small girl down.

Tim began kicking the pigs away. He wished he was armed to
state his revulsion with more force. He lifted handfuls of shale to throw at them. But, squealing, they only retreated a certain distance, to see if his passionate objections would last. He felt the man’s wrist with his dusty hands. There seemed to be no life there but how could he tell? Tim’s hands were thickened by the rope reins and his brain clotted with the awfulness.

He heard a huge exhaling, a hiss, a brief gallop of the sulky horse’s breath. Turning, he saw that Habash, bloodied knife in hand, had cut into the side of the horse’s neck and found some decisive vein. Habash stood back delicately to avoid dirtying his boots. From the road, Pee Dee objected loudly to the released smell of horse blood.

“Yes,” Tim said to the hawker. “The right thing.”

The poor horse continued to thrash his legs very feebly but for a few seconds only.

Tim told the hawker, “Go and find one of the doctors.”

Bandy Habash cleaned his knife by plunging it into soft earth. He sighed, “No, old chap. My horse is tired out. You must go with this poor fellow. I shall take the children to your residence, sir, following behind.”

“How can I take him?” asked Tim. “His head such a bloody mess!”

But he knew how already and ran up the muddy slope again to the road.

“Papa, papa?” both the children were asking.

“I’m going to get him, darlings,” said Tim. He took the sugar bag saddle from Pee Dee’s back and descended the slope again with it. He asked Habash to hold the man upright by the shoulders, and then he placed the sugar bag over his head. Together, Habash by the armpits and he by the ankles, they got the man up to the horse while the children wailed.

“Now you know, Mr. Shea,” hissed Habash under the weight, “why we, like the Jews, think pigs unclean. Oh yes, unclean. Over the withers or over the rump?”

“Oh, Jesus,” said Tim. “Give me your saddle at least, and I’ll carry him over the shoulders.”

They put the man down for a while and found Pee Dee strangely tractable while the saddle was swapped and the girth
adjusted. Kitty always said the horse was human. Then the man was lifted and balanced over Pee Dee’s very broad withers. The bag, despite the amounts of muck which affixed it in place, threatened to fall off his head. Habash produced string and tied it loosely around the man’s neck.

“I don’t think he’ll smother, poor fellow,” said Tim, fighting the shudders.

“Mr. Shea,” said Habash, straightening. “The man is quite dead. God has received his soul.”

“Oh Jesus,” said Tim. “But we’ll see.”

He could afford no more than a second to steel himself for sharing the horse with the man almost certainly gone. Then he got up decisively into the saddle. It felt unbalanced to have a fine saddle and rope reins, and between those two the lean man. But no delay to be permitted. He kicked Pee Dee’s flanks and made decent progress towards town. The man pressed back against his thighs like a living thing.

What doctor? Dr. Erson was singing operetta on the
Terara
. Dr. Casement, he knew from a notice in the
Argus
, had taken Keogh’s coach to the beaches of Port Macquarie. Dr. Gabriel was perhaps at home across the river in East, and it would be a nightmare waiting for the punt to come across. It was therefore a matter of the district hospital.

Pee Dee kept up a surprisingly brave canter towards town. You could go on the better roads through West, or more directly over the bush tracks towards the hospital. Through West was the supposedly civilised way, but there would be a few people around the shooting gallery beside the Post Office. Yahoos who couldn’t afford the boat fare or who thought such normal country diversions beneath them.

“What do you have there, Tim?” they would call, and the damaged man deserved better, both softer and more urgent enquiries. The Armenian who ran the eyesore of a shooting gallery would grin out from under the shade of the awning and hand one of the would-be Macleay sharpshooters a rifle loaded with pellets.

These sorts of possibilities steered Tim right, along the bush tracks across country to the hill above West Kempsey and the hospital.

“Quick along,” Tim kept urging Pee Dee. He was a much better mount than he was a carthorse, the mad bugger.

The path took him through humid, fly-ridden bush and past the Warwick racecourse the Race Club wouldn’t admit Habash to. Heat was pretty dense under these scraggy gumtrees. At last the Macleay could be seen ahead, broad and set low in a wide bed. The heedless river was a pathetic blue here.

“Look, look,” said Tim to the jolting man. “Did you come to town for a holiday? Look, look, you poor feller.”

Pee Dee, just to be unpredictable, still trotted briskly as they entered the hospital driveway and stopped by the large Morton Bay fig tree. Tim tethered him to the hospital railing. On the verandah, he noticed, a frail child in a nightdress sat in a big wicker chair. Beginning to weep, Tim eased the man down by the shoulders, the feet being the last heavily to flop off Pee Dee’s neck, but both boots staying on—for which Tim was somehow grateful. Tim laid the man in the shade of the verandah and ran inside. A pleasant-faced, full-breasted nurse saw him and cried, “Yes?”

It was the long dusk. In the cookhouse at the back of the store, he lit the range and the heat it gave off reacted more pleasantly than you’d expect on the warmth trapped in the room. Sweating, he made tea and slabs of white bread and honey for the little girl who waited inside in the dining room and whose brother had fallen asleep on the sofa in the drawing room.

This will be an awful year, he knew in spite of knowing better. The omens were so terrible. He shook his head, not wanting to think that way. Wanting to think like a modern fellow, not a bloody peasant. But this will be an awful year.

When he brought the food and drink to the girl, she seemed lost at the head of the table in his large-backed chair. He had earlier bathed her leg with iodine, and this little ritual against sepsis had done them both some good, making her cry out in a plain iodine anguish, proving to him that there were still simple human services to be supplied.

It occurred to Tim now and then that her father was in the room of the dead in the hospital above the river in West, keeping
company with a thirteen-year-old boy from Collombattye who had perished from lockjaw. Tim had helped the nurses place him there after they had washed the corpse.

This awareness of her father’s location seemed to overtake the small girl too, because sometimes she would put her bread down, appetite fled, and weep purely and privately like a brave grown woman.

She was an orphan now. Her name was Lucy Rochester. Her sleeping brother was Hector. Her father was or had been Albert. Tim knew him—he’d sometimes come into the store on Friday afternoons. A good type. The industrious cow-cocky who rises at four for milking and ends his days in terrible muteness. His children with him milking through every dawn of his life. You could tell it from Lucy Rochester’s hands as they held the bread. They were creased from the milking, the butter churn, and from cranking the chaff-cutter. And then, no doubt, her feet hardened by walking into school from Glenrock. Falling asleep in the mathematics class. Smartalec children from town laughing at that. He knew what she didn’t. The history of her hard little hands. In the Old Testament-style flood of ’92, the maize crops had been wiped out when the water swept over the lowlands and lapped against that embankment where Mr. Albert Rochester had this morning suffered his accident. Great hardships at that time. Farms going broke. The prices of produce in Sussex Street, Sydney’s bourse of all farm products, being squeezed and squeezed. And authoritative men from the New South Wales Agriculture Department and all manner of dairy enthusiasts, some of them from Sydney University, had come and delivered the dairy message. The Jersey cow. Unlike the maize crops, it could walk to high ground in time of flood, and the dumped mud from upriver would soon be fertilised and would feed herds in coming seasons.

And yet now men were enslaved to the dairy farms, and their women were taken by chills in the predawn, and their children grew hard-handed and sleepy and thus ignorant. He would not be a dairy farmer unless, like the Burkes of Pee Dee, he could hire hands to do the dawn milking.