A River Town

Nine

SO WELL did Ellen Burke give off that air of resentful efficiency that Tim sheltered from it for hours at a time in the store. The Chronicle or Argus spread as if for wrapping goods, but in fact to comfort and illumine the day. Argus carrying a demented report that in Africa the New South Wales and New Zealand contingents bravely participated in a gymkhana on the Modder River in spite of shelling. Then Queen Natalie of Serbia retains her beauty by a diet of buttermilk and by washing her face in it. Exactly what the Macleay storekeeper needs to know. Some plague reported in the French Pacific in January. Cases in Noumea.

“Mr. John McDonald is leaving Coopernook for the Transvaal.” Coopernook a very quiet place, beside which Kempsey was London, Vienna, New York. So it went on—papers a great chaotic puzzle omniscient as God but not in as orderly a manner. Queen Natalie’s cheeks shoved up against Chinese silkworms and sick Kanakas in Noumea.

Amongst these drifts of information, Tim remotely heard one forenoon sudden wild laughter and whistles from Smith and Belgrave Streets. From the direction of the river appeared a strange bolt of colour and jolting, interrupted light flickered past the windows of the store. Mad, barefoot Johnny aboard mad pig-rooting, barebacked Pee Dee! Not so quickly did they flash by that Tim couldn’t tell Johnny had a rope halter on Pee Dee, but only that. Not even a saddle cloth. A pretty fragile means of containing all the flight there was in Pee Dee.

Running from behind the counter, one still hoped, even in a state of alarm, for Johnny’s continued life. His wiriness encouraged that margin of hope which edged the all-but-consuming alarm. Even in mid-rush for the door, with the known chance Pee Dee might make all decisions unnecessary by driving a hoof through the child’s head, Tim resolved at once that this flash beyond the glass meant it was time to send Johnny to Imelda. Yet fear choked a man and made him slow. The boards of the floor on which Johnny had sometimes been at least a placid artist canted up and delayed him.

Getting into the street, Tim saw almost at once far up Belgrave Street beyond Pee Dee and Johnny that, oh dear Jesus, there was a mob of cattle coming down from the direction of West. Pee Dee could not tolerate cattle. And on the footpaths of Belgrave, callous men and boys whistled and cat-called as the abominable horse went juddering and flicking and bucking down towards the cattle. What a frenzy when their beefy, pissy scent got to Pee Dee!

His flour-bag apron still wrapped around him, Tim went running after the horse. In a valley of heroes or mounted bushmen or whatever they were to be, there was no one of the criminal pedestrian cowards up Belgrave Street to run out and grap the mad horse’s halter. They whistled, and called, “Wild horses!”

Pee Dee had not even seen the cattle yet.

But the drovers had seen him. They sent their dogs out in front of the herd, which were all over the road and footpaths, and rode hard themselves to wheel them, stop them and see what developed with the crazed Pee Dee.

Pee Dee at last scented the cattle.

He stood on his hind legs as upright as some flash stallion from Aroni’s Circus. Johnny simply hung free and swung by the halter. Then a sideways contortion and Johnny was hurled against one of the posts of the Commercial Hotel. Shoulder and head. Tim saw Johnny’s brown-red hair flick out with the shock of the thing.

This impact cut off all the cat-calls and whistles. Men who had a second before been hooting at Johnny’s peril came running up to him. Drinkers appeared from the Commercial’s front bar. Miss Dynes, the barmaid, appeared while Tim still ran towards the boy. She had towels in her hands, and she began mopping at Johnny’s head and ordering the spectators. Complaining to God and to Johnny, Tim scooped the boy up and began to run, and wizened Miss Dynes kept pace with him, holding the bloody towels in place as Tim ran towards Dr. Erson’s rooms in Forth Street.

Tim could see some wiry little man soothing Pee Dee and leading him off to tether him.

Along the footpath, into Dr. Erson the songbird’s garden, up the steps and into the front room where Mrs. Erson, a pale-skinned goddess used to bloody events, opened the door of the doctor’s inner office for Tim and Miss Dynes to carry the sluggrey, bloodied child indoors. Erson, so often mocked by Tim as an over-active tenor, now gloriously present here when needed! Packing his bag to visit Macleay District Hospital, where women patients always found him so knightly and such a darling fellow.

“Oh doctor!” Tim yelled, so grateful that forever more when he heard Erson start up with, “We are tenting tonight on the old camp ground,” he would greet it as a wonderful, strange, divinely generous sound.

Erson called, “Here! here!” Patting the leather of his surgical couch like a doctor in a crisis in a play. No more than half a degree away from being a Thespian at most times.

But now he became all business.

“Is Johnny dead?” Tim asked repeatedly. Dr. Erson did not say so, and yet did not seem to be ignoring the question for the sake of theatrical suspense either. He was checking pulse and raising Johnny’s eyelids to see the pole-axed eyes beneath, and he and his wife had bowls of water and iodine, and Mrs. Erson went to a cabinet and got needle and thread and catgut.

“He is not dead, Mr. Shea,” said Dr. Erson. “My God, a good skull. Where are you and your wife from?”

“Newmarket and Doneraile. Near Mallow. You know it? In North Cork.”

“Oh, God, yes,” said Erson enthusiastically. “Utterly characteristic. A well-formed Celtic scone, this one of your son’s. Fortified by a little Norman interbreeding. A fortunate shape. If he had a squarer Germanic skull, your concerns might be justified.”

Mrs. Erson washed around the wound and dribbled iodine and water in it. Erson himself threaded the needle and began sewing together the living flesh of Johnny’s scalp.

“You must watch him,” the doctor told Tim. “He may swallow his tongue and may fit.”

Erson went on with brisk sutures, sewing life back into the boy.

At last he asked Tim what had happened. Tim recounted the sudden accident. Miss Dynes, the ugliest and loveliest barmaid of any valley, stood by the door smoothing the alarm out of her cheeks with both hands.

“You will kill a horse as mad as that, I suppose,” said Dr. Erson, pulling a stitch.

Johnny began to murmur to himself. “Hold hard,” pleaded Johnny.

“He is an old racehorse,” said Tim. “Temperamental by nature.”

My dear God, he thought, I am pleading for my cart horse!

“Temperament is not worth putting up with,” said Dr. Erson.

“My God, what a beautiful skull your boy has. Where my grandparents come from, in Saxony, a skull like this would be a relic from a much earlier age.”

“I thought you were Scottish,” said Tim, watching carefully. And after all, didn’t they call the English Saxons?

“My grandparents went to Scotland in the wool trade,” said Dr. Erson, distractedly, tugging on the thread. “But the horse …?”

“He is all right if you obey certain rules with him,” said Tim. To himself it sounded hollow.

“I thought we were the rule-makers,” said Dr. Erson. “When it comes to beasts.”

Tim thought of Bandy Habash in that instant. Wanting the Turf Club to consider the merits of his grey. The question formed beneath his ribs. So, Bandy was suspect for his horse-passion. Yet what excuse can be made for the sort of man who expects his own issue, the bone of his bone, scalp of scalp, to obey the rules of a broken-down thoroughbred like Pee Dee? Who was this bloody horse, after all?

“I’ll certainly consider selling him,” said Tim.

The doctor laughed. “So that I can be mending someone else’s head. Well, this boy may, as I said, have convulsions and will need to be sat with all night. Can that be arranged? By the way, a bruising on his shoulder but no fracture. And he’s young, so I’m sure no memory loss. He’ll recall his adventure. Which might not be a bad thing.”

“I’m going to send him to school after this,” pledged Tim. “But how can I thank you?”

Dr. Erson began tenderly to wash Johnny’s scalp a last time. The water in the bowl pinkened as he proceeded. He flapped one hand.

“Oh, this is nothing. This is gross medicine. This is carpentry. I was prepared for far more momentous things in the School of Medicine at Edinburgh.”

He finished the laving of Johnny’s head suddenly. He said he had to be off to the Macleay District Hospital. He left his wife to wrap Johnny in a blanket and put the boy murmuring into Tim’s arms.

“I shall post you an account,” she whispered. Tim began to weep, walking out with the boy. Miss Dynes accompanied him.

“You are going to kill that bloody horse, aren’t you, Tim?” she asked him. “He’s always backing and pig-rooting. The wrong type.”

You couldn’t argue with her. But my comrade, thought Tim. My fellow campaigner.

Not all the blame was Pee Dee’s.

It quietened Ellen Burke down to see Johnny and to keep watch at his bedside. He himself, Tim, returned Pee Dee to his paddock, and took the extreme measure of flicking him on his way with a branch of a gum tree.

“You’re a bloody scoundrel blackguard,” he told Pee Dee. But the horse had the bearing of a creature who could explain himself adequately to a judge of his own distinction. A noble in bloody exile, a remittance man of the horseworld.

In the afternoon Tim found himself making notes on paper as to whether Dr. Erson would charge a half-sovereign or a sovereign and putting it against other debts. Dear Christ, the bills were heroic.

By now, as his son lay under the watchfulness of Ellen Burke, plump-with-child Kitty would be at the wharf, seeing SS Iris heave into the Semi-Circular Quay over Sydney’s bright water. Kitty innocent, and waving to her sister. Putting on a cockney scream as a joke. “Oi to you, Mamie!”

When she came back, she might bloody persuade me to shoot my brother, the horse!

And he would meet her at the boat and say, “I think it’s time Johnny began schooling. Can’t be trusted around horses or boats or rivers. Needs the Joyful and Sorrowful Mysteries, including an occasional Sorrowful Mystery across the arse from Mother Imelda.”

He’d returned from deliveries to find Johnny a little fevered and muttering—this is what Ellen Burke reported—but nothing too severe. Then into the store to wait the normal afternoon tea rush, on whose tail-end the man from the Colonial Secretary’s had craftily tacked himself.

He saw Ernie Malcolm stride out of Smith Street from the direction of his office. Oh, Jesus, Tim thought. I’m going to be given credit for carrying my own bleeding son to Dr. Erson’s. And yet there was a change in manner here. It made you wonder the way Ernie was walking in his light grey suit. He didn’t look as open to any rumour of brave service, any chance for civil pride, as he usually did.

There was a child in the store with a note when Ernie stepped in. Ernie offered no background greeting, but concerned himself with the labels of the biscuit cans, the hams, the treacles and the puddings on the further wall near the storeroom. But Ernie’s reading of labels was only a way of banking some urgency he had in him.

The child left. Ernie looked at Tim. His head had an unusual angle. Not the angle of expecting the best of the best of all possible citizens in the best of all possible Empires. It was some other, more private and dangerous angle.

“Mr. Malcolm,” said Tim.

“Mr. Shea, I take it very badly that you impose yourself on Mrs. Malcolm in this way.”

“What way is that?”

“Certainly I am happy to pay my way, and I don’t think any man’s ever said otherwise. But I find my wife has been in a moment of illness gouged for extra money, more than due. This makes me wonder about my judgment on you. Makes me more disposed, too, to listen to other buggers whose judgment of you isn’t as high as mine. If the terms were Cash On Delivery, and you’d made them clear to me, that would have been acceptable. But Cash Before Delivery… well, they’re terms of trade I haven’t heard of before.”

Tim shook his head. “Oh, God, Ernie,” he said. “I was uneasy about that extra payment, and I never asked for it.”

“Well, you would say that. And if you do say it, what am I supposed to believe about my wife?”

“I think your wife may have been a bit indisposed that afternoon. That was behind the extra money. But I expect you to believe she didn’t pay it at my suggestion.”

Of course, he should have taken the extra to Ernie’s office, but the man from the Colonial Secretary’s had certainly put that idea fair out of his head.

“I’m not going to hang around while you do your sums,” said Mr. Ernie Malcolm, flushed. “But I expect a full accounting of where we stand at the moment and a refund. I think you’ll understand if I transfer my account here to some other shop.”

“Oh God, Mr. Malcolm.”

The fellow seemed to be pleased to have an excuse for anger though. This was the next step along the road of warnings Ernie began after the loyal meeting. It was more. A punishment for suggesting Ernie write about Missy.

“I have to caution you, there are those who think you are a pretty subtle feller, a cunning paddy. A joker behind it all. I’ll be more disposed to listen to them now.”

He tucked the fingers of one hand into the base of his vest, tugged it downwards, and walked for the door, turning at the end of course for the required final word.

“All awards for bravery are in abeyance,” he said.

Then he rushed out.

To hear his social credit cancelled in that way! Tim clutched the counter and groaned. He was in severe trouble now in his chosen place in New South Wales. A damaged son, an absent wife, a significant client, an exemplary fine. Apparitions to be dealt with by night. He was no longer the happy immigrant. The world had pretty thoroughly found him out on the Macleay.

And yet just one more dusk and Kitty and Mamie would board Burrawong in Darling Harbour, in the port of Sydney. They would drink stout beforehand in some hotel in Sussex Street and catch a cab down to the boat. Burrawong the humble, old iron midwife of all their arrivals and returns. Burrawong might plough up the coast in record time for all a man knew. Might put in by midnight Thursday.

Sitting by Johnny’s bed, Tim felt the wheels of night turn so minutely. He imagined the dark, slow weight of time seeping into the split in Johnny’s scalp. All to the good, all to the good! He kept a wet cloth on the boy’s brow. Coolness a known aid against convulsions. Beyond the window, the last light was on the river, which seemed set and inert in its dark green silty mass.

Across the room Annie slept a dignified, unfevered, steadfast sleep.

“England,” he read for consolation in the Chronicle, “pays seventy million pounds a year for Australian butter. The three criteria of good butter, as applied by judges at Agricultural and Horticultural Shows through the civilised world, are flavour, aroma and grain. Lack of farm hygiene and contaminated containers are the great enemy of these three vaunted qualities…”

The night air pressing on Johnny’s much-praised Celtic scalp was soft and warm and gracious. “Bless it,” said Tim. “Bless it!”

At the window however, Missy bowed in, pale-eyed. Tim looked at her not with a sense of terror but with something more familiar.

“Out to sea,” she said genially, though he wondered was it a threat.

He felt the room itself reach down into a trough, like a hearty old steamer taking on the first complexity of the open Pacific beyond the New Entrance. Like an echo of the sea, a spray of air broke over him. The square, unseaworthy room whirled, and again he saw Burrawong by day, in the blue Pacific with the two distant Kenna sisters, the known and unknown one, Kitty and Mamie, grinning at the rails. As the room bucked, Annie and Johnny kept solidly to their cots. Anchored. He saw a sky of stars, but then the window took a swing down and caught Red Kenna’s loud fire-lit kitchen. “Well, you don’t expect me to take the bugger too seriously,” called Red to him.

Shudder. Another wave taking the room. Albert Rochester galloped through Glenrock up a hill. Serious but intact, carnation in lapel, on his way to Mrs. Sutter. Johnny ran with strange Lucy into some surf as three agile rats came over the windowsill, but then couldn’t be seen. Missy re-entered from the hallway and passed by Johnny’s bed. A normal tread. She hadn’t come to point any doomy finger. When the room pitched, she fell in her black dress from the window.

All stopped rolling. Tim stood up in relief and Johnny snorted.

“Dear God,” said Tim, sitting down and picking up the Chronicle, which had fallen to the floor from all the room’s gyrations.

“Oh, Kitty,” he pleaded.

While his son swam down to profounder sleep.

Tim woke on the floor of the children’s room in the silken first light. The children slept heroically. Give them a medal, Mr. Malcolm, you old bastard.

He remained stiffly where he was and could soon hear energetic hammering from somewhere outside.

Oh he knew! They’d started again the daily work of putting down the planking over the pylons of the bridge. It had happened suddenly after all the work of sinking columns, and now less than seventy yards from his door, the bridge had taken on a surprising reality, making its first small but conclusive flight above the river. Perhaps three dozen men in flannel shirts and big hats hammering and bolting the carriageway to the pylons and joists. Drills and auger bits spun beneath their hands. This was civilisation, and you could foresee the completed physical bridge now from what they had done. East and Central and West being made one by a lot of scrawny men with hammers. The community would come to take this convenient arrangement as a given, putting down its weight with confidence.

He went and got some tea and took it to the storefront to watch the labourers in the high middle distance. Out in Belgrave Street a number of boys appeared, running up with news-sheets in their hands. A Chronicle special, Tim could see. No bigger than a poster for a concert. Tim went to the door, opened it, and bought one. He took it back off the street and into the shade of the store to read.

The news-sheet said, PLAGUE OUTBREAK IN SYDNEY.

An epidemic of bubonic plague, Tim read, the terrible Black Death of the Middle Ages, broken out in the port of Sydney. Believed the disease has made its way into the town through infected rats arriving on freighters from a number of Chinese ports… the United States vessel Mindanao aboard which the first victim, a seaman, perished ten days ago in Sydney Harbour…

“Dear God almighty!” murmured Tim to the now awakened street, to the industrious bridge-builders on whose labours he had so recently been congratulating himself and society. Kitty had found infallibly the time and place of greatest peril. Sweat flooding all his pores here in the shade—some sort of sympathetic fever. He was powerless before the lavish distance which lay between Kitty and him.

The news-sheet then alarmed him further by claiming to know who was the first Sydney victim. A Mr. Gleason, licensee of the Hunter River Inn in Sussex Street. He had taken ill the previous Thursday, and he and seventeen contacts had been sealed up in the inn. Two members of the Benson-Howard wedding party in the Rocks on Saturday afternoon, a young man of seventeen years and another of nineteen, took sick before midnight and were dead of the most sudden and violent form of plague—pneumonic plague—before the end of church on Sunday. The entire wedding party had been moved to the quarantine station. A woman in Darling Harbour who had sickened on Sunday had been sealed up in her house with nine contacts, and a young wife from a boarding house on Margaret Street with eleven contacts had been taken sick.

A British plague expert, Dr. Hugh Mortonson, who had helped combat an outbreak in Calcutta two years before, had been sent for, and Dr. Silver, a Brisbane expert on tropical diseases, had made a long statement about oxygen and the plague. “Oxygen is a deadly foe of the plague…” Fumigating teams were being sent into houses in the Rocks… and rats bearing signs of the plague, though few in number, had been found in areas of Darling Harbour. The fur of rats suffering from plague turned grey and then fell out… Onset of pneumonic plague was very sudden, beginning with the normal signs of a cold or fever and progressing through extreme temperatures and great difficulty in breathing to an utter collapse of the system…

Another collapse of the system. In streets where Kitty walked with Mamie, congratulating her on her Australian landfall!

Inside to the dining room to finish reading of the disaster. Spreading the sheet on Kitty’s table. The North Coast Steamship Navigation Company had announced that all its vessels would be fumigated before departure from Sydney. Captains of the steamship company’s vessels had been instructed to co-operate fully with the local requirements of the sanitation inspectors of the North Coast settlements serviced by those vessels… Burrawong upon arrival at the New Entrance would have its passengers and freight transferred to droghers for the eventual journey down-river. Hence direct contact between Burrawong and Kempsey itself would cease.

It had already been decided by the Macleay Shire sanitation officials that passengers arriving from Sydney would be put ashore near the Pilot Station and detained there for a week.

Looking out over Trial Bay and waiting to see if they had plague or not!

With all this information spread on the table before him, Tim could not avoid the crazed suspicion that wilfully Kitty had put herself in the way of such giant dangers from the East! Rather, the North for Australians. The feared, the deadly Asiatic North. Cockpit of every strangeness and disease.

He took the news-sheet one further step, out through the residence and into the back garden where Annie, awakened by now but still in a night dress, was watching a weary Ellen Burke drinking tea. He handed the sheet to Ellen, who could see at once that it stood for something weightier than their squabble over Habash.

“I don’t know what this means,” said Tim.

Yet surely Kitty would come back. There was enough oxygen in her even for Dr. Silver of Brisbane.

Before Johnny’s dizziness fully went, but while he was still reflective, Tim asked Ellen Burke to dress him up, including putting a little pair of oxfords on his feet, which would show he had caring parents. Then, given he was delivering his gratis supplies to Imelda, he took the bandaged Johnny with him on the cart.

Imelda didn’t blink, of course. In the big front parlour where bishops had tea—His Lordship lording it—Imelda said thrippence a week as if Tim was a stranger, and hadn’t just delivered the next week’s food and sandsoap round the back.

Tim sent Johnny outside to wait in the wagon. “And don’t touch the horse!”

When the boy left, Tim said, “I wanted to know about Lucy. What kind of pupil is she?”

“She’s in the better half,” said Imelda. “And her work is very tidy.”

“She does not talk much to me. Does she talk much here?”

“No. Yet that is always valuable in a student.”

Yes, he could have said. And something strange as buggery too. Lucy’s silences were not like Johnny’s. They were silences crammed with something pressing to be uttered.

“Does she get herself into danger, Mother? Do you find her climbing things, say.”

“You know we don’t let the girls climb or jump off heights. That is what parents are paying the convent for. As well, of course, as communicating the Faith.”

“When she meets up with my son, they both tend to climb things. You may have read they fell together from Terara. They must set each other off.” He could too readily imagine Imelda giving Johnny what-for with a cane for this. So he said, “When they climb things together, you get the clear idea Lucy’s not being led. She’s a stronger soul altogether than Johnny. But you’d never guess it. Looking at her when she’s sitting down drinking tea. I think you could tell the nuns to keep them apart.”

Imelda nodded, her head concedingly on its side. Was her scalp shaven under that great black hood? What a sight that would make!

A great joy for Tim to make these little arrangements today, the day Burrawong would be fumigated in Sydney Harbour, Kitty and her sister would be coming aboard laughing once the fumes cleared, the last of the odour twitching at their nostrils.

The fifteen quid writ awaited him and he had another week to pay. Society looked sideways at him. Missy remained in Hanney limbo from which the Commissioner in Sydney must now be giving orders that she be rescued and at least put into the hands of Sergeant Fry. Altogether, given the present cast of the world, it was soothing to be able to arrange a thing or two. To tell the nuns not to let Johnny and Lucy go together on ledges.