A River Town

Ten

IT WAS KNOWN that Dr. Erson and the Macleay Shire Sanitation Officer Mr. D. Stevens had visited the quarantine camp, which the citizens of Kempsey had begun to call “the plague camp,” and had reported all quarantined passengers in good condition. The camp conditions were comfortable, they claimed—and Tim now tended to believe Erson’s announcements—and passengers’ clothing had all been boiled up in camp coppers. Even suits had not been exempt, since lives were at stake. Dr. Erson and Mr. Stevens had worn white masks during the inspection.

As Dr. Erson told the Chronicle, the physicians of the Macleay were one in believing, as progressive opinion did, that the disease was caused by the bites of fleas and transmitted by the exhalations of sufferers. After the quarantine period, however, which was hoped to be no longer than ten days if the plague did not manifest itself amongst Burrawong’s passengers, the passengers could all be approached without fear and without white masks. The plague, said Erson with his Saxon or Scots good reason, was not a matter of superstition but of sensible behaviour.

After a week of quarantine, during which no bad news came upriver to town, Tim was beginning to feel grudging reliance on Dr. Erson’s hopeful manner. He stood by his counter and congratulated himself on every passed hour of commerce.

One afternoon, wearing a clean, starched white shirt and a neat grey coat and pants which just the same had plenty of the dust of the Macleay’s roads impacted into the weave, Bandy Habash crossed the diagonal from the Post Office to T. Shea and then actually entered the store, his thin hand held delicately high to encourage peace.

“I know what you have told me, Mr. Shea. But I happen to have some items close to your heart.”

His hand still held up, with the other he took a wadded document out of the left bottom pocket of his jacket.

“These letters have been aired,” he assured Tim and—by displaying them also in the direction of Belgrave Street—anyone unseen who happened to be a witness. Such well-modulated motions, running like silk. His voice was like silk lain over a woman’s shoulders.

“The quarantine period is only seven days in true terms. It seems the passengers are all well with that period expired. This is from Mrs. Kitty.”

“You’ve seen her?” Tim asked.

The man was everywhere, and had forestalled him again.

“I was able to trade with people from the plague camp on the South West Rocks Road.”

“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.

But these little reflections swam like petals on the wide, hypnotic movement of Bandy’s well-kept horses.

You could hear the river now too. By proxy at least. Drumming away in the throats of those huge emerald bullfrogs Kitty hated to find on the shouse seat. The closer you got to the great body of the river the more urgent the wings of night birds sounded. The moon came up and there were flying foxes in it, creaking their way across the mudflats towards somebody’s luscious orchard. Johnny liked to feed those buggers as they hung upside down from branches, bony and natty at the same time, dapper in their fur.

Ah, the bloody river sweeps into sight now. Going to the sea for its salt. Broad between the canebrakes on this side, and the answering canebrakes on the Smithtown shore. Bandy’s grey snorted at the river for its size and the authority of its smell. “Shhhh,” said Bandy. Pacifying it with a small brown hand.

By the bridge at Belmore River, a Macleay tributary, they let the horses drink, and Tim and Bandy swigged cold tea from a billycan and found that it was almost nine o’clock. He was being sucked in well and truly, he knew. Becoming this little brown man’s accomplice.

Through the town of Gladstone, drenched by moonlight but unaware of itself. The Divine Presence resting in the big church Father McCambridge had built. The stained glass windows in memory of dairy farmers’ beloved spouses. Tim took his hat off for the wakeful divinity of the place, and said a prayer for no plague and Missy’s name. The divine mystery: why did Ernie not want to write a letter to cause a proper search? Why was it part of his civic intent to let the Missy question fade?

Bandy had also taken off his hat. Sympathetically, Tim presumed. But his eyes were lustrous as a devotee’s in the moonlight.

They waded Kinchela Creek and then, though the river was always a presence, they came upon it only sometimes. They found themselves now amongst melancholy paperbarks that smelled of nearby swamp. They were getting close, he knew. He was so joyous that sometimes he let himself loll in the saddle like a drunkard, slackening and bending his back. He indulged himself this way frequently, at times when Bandy had drawn ahead.

Past the creek at Jerseyville, where the pub which had nearly been Tim’s was kept by the Whelans, Bandy by a sudden jerk of his elbows showed it was all right to break the horses into a canter. So fresh they still seemed. Lots of running coiled up in their great big hips.

From the top of the last hill, they could see the camp, with plenty of fires still burning. It was set on the first low, dry piece of shore before the mangrove swamps of the Entrance, and beyond it in the river sat Burrawong, whose shape you could read dimly from the storm lantern hanging from the crosstree of its mast.

They left their horses in a patch of lank grass amongst paperbarks, and walked in like two people engaged in approved business. Tim carried with him the twin mercies of the billycan of stew, the condensed milk, and the Messenger of the Sacred Heart.

Paperbark trees, grey by day and stark white by night, smelled anciently and remotely sour. Whatever tragedy or fall they’d been involved in had happened in an unrecorded age. Therefrom they took this air: all debts paid, all tears long shed, all decay long concluded. Tim enlivened though by this very quality. Charmed by this bush which didn’t try to charm him.

Some parts of the track he and Bandy had to scrape through briary shrubs. This may have been why Bandy had wanted them to leave the well-kept horses behind.

From up the path Tim could hear a banjo plunking at midnight! Joined idly by a fiddle. Didn’t the buggers go to bed early for their health?

“Here we are,” Bandy told him in a normal voice.

The paperbarks eased away to right and left to make the New Entrance picnic grounds. Three rows of six or seven bell tents each. A big cooking stove standing in the open with its funnel, and a canvas bathhouse nearby. Light still shone inside the canvas of some tents—a magical look, a tent lit from inside itself. Further along, the men and women who were still up were clustered to the campfire, which was not needed for warmth but for the soul and to keep insects away. This small party were engaged in watching the flames die now. The banjo and the fiddle only a sad strain here and there. A last burst of showiness from their owners, the tag end of brighter, more deliberate stuff performed earlier in the night.

Now Tim heard a familiar little yell of woman-laughter, cut back immediately out of consideration for those who might be sleeping in the tents. Dear God, this was inimitably Kitty’s. Kitty sitting up to all hours in the plague camp.

Within the light of the near-dead fire two little women sat on camp stools, with men standing and lolling about them. The banjo player standing close to the women. He was the one who first saw Bandy and Tim coming.

“Keeping you up, are we, gentlemen?” the banjo player asked. This bewildering night! The fellow was talking in a North Cork accent.

Kitty stood up wobblingly. An empty, froth-lined stout glass stood by her chair. An approved, a respectable drink. So why did he resent her for drinking it amongst strangers?

“Dear mother,” she cried, grabbing the arm of the other, like woman. “It’s Timmy!”

Tim looked at his sister-in-law, Mamie, oval-faced, slim, with a bunched little amused mouth. She had been a bit of a child when Tim had first visited the Kennas.

Kitty clung to him, her hard little head, the brownish-red bun of her hair, pulled up into a knot by some hairdresser in Sydney, socketed into the cavity where his shoulder met his chest. And even though there were strangers looking he bent to this red hair, inhaled its decent, vegetable, mothering smell, and kissed it.

“Don’t catch any fleas now,” she told him.

“I’ll only kiss the bits that aren’t plaguey,” he murmured.

“Get my husband and his friend a drink!” Kitty insisted, and a young man who was English by his accent shook out the froth from a used glass and then filled it with warm stout and passed it into Tim’s free hand. It tasted divine. The Englishman found another glass, but Bandy called musically, “No thank you, sir.”

“Water then?”

“Yes, water.”

The young man picked up a water bag and half-delivered it to, half-threw it, jovially, at Bandy.

“Catch there!”

“There are no guards on this camp, eh?” Tim murmured.

“It’s an utter joke,” Kitty told him. “Captain Reid collected all these rats on board two whole days ago, and not a one showed marks of plague.”

“But were you worried?”

“There are city streets roped off and houses sealed. But Sydney is still Sydney.” A soft malty burp fluttered her lips very slightly. “Now meet Mamie.”

Mamie had risen in her white dress. Very compact. Jesus, what a dangerous smile, and underneath the smile, what? In the bone? He could spot something. Flightiness, a canny soul, a temper. There might be an interest in holding grudges as well.

“Tim,” Mamie said warmly, in a rising tone. She came to him on the other side than the one where Kitty leaned. Brushed his cheeks softly. Again he remembered her somehow, as a partially distinct, largely indefinite part of the Kenna brood. She would have been about eleven, a bit sullen, likely to throw bread across the table. Now she was between kitchens. Red’s and the one she might have here in the end. A thing or two would be thrown about in that one as well.

The fairly neatly turned out young banjo player followed every smallest move she made, Tim could see. Every trace of intent in her face. He certainly had hopes of being her future target.

Mamie said, “Oh! Mr. Habash again.”

Seemingly her old friend, Bandy stood a little way off from the reunion, touching his hat.

“I didn’t expect to see you travelling with the hawker,” said Kitty, laughing at him.

“I didn’t know there’d be bloody plague in Sydney when I had a fight with him,” muttered Tim. “History is a bugger when you are in it.”

“This thing isn’t history. It’ll soon be over.” Kitty nodded to the banjo player. “Here’s Joey O’Neill who worked for the cooperage just over the Mitchelstown road. Three or so miles out from home, would you believe? We met him in Sydney and he’s going to be joining an uncle farming in Toorooka. Can you believe that one? My sisters went to a dance in Kanturk less than a year ago, and saw him there, and here he is on the Macleay. I think the world is certainly shrinking.”

“How are you, Mr. Shea?” said Joey O’Neill, saluting like a soldier, but not normally a shy-acker, only because he’d been drinking. You could tell his manner was more restrained at other times, and he was certainly terrified of Mamie.

“If you read it in a novel,” asked Kitty, “would you even start to believe it? Did you know he had an uncle and aunt in Toorooka?”

Under the power of the Kenna sisters’ sociability, Tim said he was as amazed as anyone. But he wondered how he was supposed to know of Joey O’Neill’s existence down the Mitchelstown road, and so how he was to know that the banjo player had relatives in Toorooka?

They introduced the fiddler, who was a Meath man joining his brother on a dairy farm on Nulla Nulla Creek. And then there was the young Englishman with some washed-out accent—somewhere like Essex—and a couple of Sydney commercial travellers. Decent chaps all of them, no question of that.

“I’m the chaperone for my wild sister,” said Kitty, nuzzling against him once more with an animal insistence. “Otherwise by now I’d be long asleep. But she bears watching.”

“Who’s chaperoning the wild chaperone,” he asked, and everyone laughed. “Welcome to the Macleay, gentlemen,” he then added anyhow at last, that duty devolving on him. “You’re only just inside it, but with any luck you’ll get further, and I don’t know if it’s good or bad news.”

“Rubbish!” called Kitty. “This is the greatest of lands.”

Still holding the fiddle and bow, the fiddler clapped the more or less formal speech of welcome.

The young men began to excuse themselves. Joey O’Neill thought that Mamie would do the same, and seemed to be alarmed to find himself wandering off alone down the avenues of tents, while Mamie stayed behind with the embers and her sister and the two visitors. He couldn’t come back without seeming an idiot, yet loitered in the shadows. The commercial travellers cleared up the stout bottles which lay around and went off themselves to their camp cots.

Kitty murmured to her sister, “Joe wants you to walk with him.”

“I’ve heard everything he has to say,” said Mamie, dismissing the idea. “Good night, Joe,” she called merrily nonetheless. “Thanks for the fine music.”

“You’re an awful hypocrite,” her sister Kitty whispered to her.

Now the camp was very still, but the river still drummed with frogs. Tim had utterly forgotten Bandy, but then noticed that he remained meekly there, keeping a distance.

“You didn’t have to come and see me,” said Kitty. “I’ll be home in two days, they won’t be able to keep this up. All this fuss. Boiling up all our underwear in iron drums. They won’t be able to do it with every shipload. Captain Reid says, we cannot put such hindrances to commerce.”

Smiling Mamie said, “Mr. Habash, are you a gentleman?”

Bandy shifted lightly on his feet.

“You should be aware, Miss Kenna, that I am a follower of the Prophet.”

“Oh Jesus,” said Mamie. “We’ve got prophets and saints to burn, so what does one more matter? But are followers of the Prophet gentlemen?”

“Better than some of the white brethren, if you don’t mind my saying.”

“That’s not much of a claim,” said Mamie. “Anyhow, I believe you are a gentleman, Mr. Habash, and I wonder if you would mind accompanying me down to the shore for a view of Burrawong while my sister and her husband spend a fragment of time together.”

“Miss Kenna, I would be honoured and it would be a sacred trust.”

“Dear Mother, Tim,” said Kitty. “Every bugger here’s talking like a play.”

In the moonlight, Mamie put a small but decisive hand out in front of her, signalling Bandy towards the river.

“Now you two just have your conversations,” she said. “Come on, Mr. Habash.”

She walked off, trailing a big straw hat. Bandy turned his eyes to Tim, and spread his hands in front of him to show they were vacant of any intent.

“Go on, Bandy,” Kitty told him. “If you want to be a bloody gallant, walk in front so it’s you who treads on the sleeping brown snakes.”

Again Bandy touched his hat, and caught up with Mamie. They were about the same height, and Mamie inclined a little to him, chatting away.

Kitty said, “She gives that poor Joe O’Neill an awful time, God help him.”

She stepped back and took Tim by the wrist.

“We can go to the tent. I’ve been missing you. Sydney’s got its points, but it isn’t Tim Shea.”

“How can we go to your tent? Mind you, I’d like to see it, of course. But Mamie could be back at any second.”

“Then why do you think she’s gone for a walk. She won’t be back for at least forty minutes. And if she’d gone with Joey, it’d be all over the camp by breakfast.”

Kitty was leading him amongst the quiet tents, a camp where few lights shone, the canvas itself offering only a night cry here, a brief fragment of snore there.

“How does a girl like that know these things?”

“She’s a Kenna, I suppose,” said Kitty.

This was nearly enough explanation. The Kennas knew things which didn’t seem to be known in his family. Kitty, for example, always insisted that carrying a child was no hindrance to love. The man needed simply to beware of his weight and take reasonable care. Who had told her that? Had Mrs. Kenna bowled right up and told her before she caught the boat? Had her sister told her at the wedding feast which delayed her in her emigration? It wasn’t at all unlikely. But could he imagine his mother, Anne, telling such things to any of the Shea girls before they took their American ship? Telling Brooklyn-bound Ellen Shea there was no need to put off further joy till three months after the child was born?

He had already stiffened up enough. A standing prick hath no conscience. One of Kitty’s axioms. From whom had she heard that? Did the Kennas pass such wisdom around the table?

For some reason, a surmise entered his head. What of Bandy’s Muslim prick, smooth as an eel?

In a light summer night dress which left her shoulders bare, Red Kenna’s freckles visible on them even by kerosene lamp, Kitty drifted asleep on her side. Tim, fully dressed again to fool the unfoolable Mamie Kenna, stretched atop Mamie’s camp cot and went profoundly asleep. Bending over him with pursed, knowing lips, Mamie woke him.

“Mr. Habash has returned me in good fettle. I see you put your wife to sleep, Tim! What a good thing!”

He took his fob watch and saw that it was nearing two o’clock. Oh, Jesus, the huge ride! And the air relentless hot!

He rose and kissed Kitty’s bare shoulder and she shuddered and said, “Dear,” but did not wake.

“I suppose young Bandy is raring to go?” he asked Mamie in a whisper.

Mamie watched him with a subtle smile on her lips.

“So it seems I’ll be meeting you again before the end of the week,” she said.

“May I just check a thing or two?” he asked, and he went to Kitty’s old sea trunk and eased it back by the hinges and inspected her black and white dresses and her undergarments by lamplight, encountering no insect other than a dead tiger moth. Everything in fine order. He repacked the trunk, folding things lovingly. “All clean,” Mamie whispered, “and no fleas. She airs everything every second day anyhow.”

He felt a surge of love and would have kissed Kitty’s shoulder again if they’d been alone. Because Kitty had such a casual air, there was something poignant about her when she took her uncommon care.

“Goodbye then,” he told Mamie, and she brushed his cheek again. “And welcome to the Macleay.”

“Give my regards to Mr. Habash,” she told Tim. “He’s a feller of real charm.”

Outside, some way from the door of the tent, Bandy waited for him by the dead fire.

“Right,” Tim called to him.

Bandy said nothing. Had Mamie staunched his oratorical flow? They fell into step together, tramping back amongst the tea-tree, the melaleuca, the slug-white paperbarks.

“May I say your sister-in-law is a very lively girl, and excellent company.”

“You don’t need to tell me about lively,” said Tim. “I’ll have her on the premises for at least a few months I suppose!”

“Then you will have three women with you, including your little girl. You are a fortunate man, Mr. Shea. My father, my brother and I live in a womanless household. It is not a natural thing at all. But our faith is a problem at the same time as being our glory.”

“Well,” said Tim. “I respect your attitudes in that regard.”

The Habashes had no reputation for seeking solace either in the blacks’ camp. Mind you, a lot of respectable women perversely liked them. Perhaps there was an illicit bit of business sometimes.

They found their horses standing somnolent in the clearing. As Tim climbed aboard he called, “Wake me if I fall asleep. Otherwise, I’ll end up on the ground.”

“The same for me, old chap,” said Bandy, delicately yawning. “Pigs will come and eat our faces.”

On the at first sandy road back up the Macleay, the night grew stiller and even hotter. Tim would sleep and wake, sleep and wake, and Bandy frankly slept for long stretches of the road, his cheek tucked into the hollow of his collarbone. Tim roused again and again, sweating and startled each time and aware at once of all the catalogue of earthly dangers:

It was a chafing, starting, restless eon before they crossed Spencer’s Creek again. Then he would blink at the broad and blatant river which seemed to stretch off limitlessly from his stirrup into an undetermined and unreachable point between water and sky. Now it looked not like his familiar but a foreign river to him, a bitter one. A Congo. Africa, and he some sort of missionary riding to some hopeless task with the heathen.

Breath of a hot westerly met them as they rode through Gladstone. There were fragments of black grit on that wind. Upriver the bush was burning. You could not see it, but it could be read in the force, heat, the density of that blast. Fragments of blackened gum leaf would be raining in his back yard by the river. A furious, hazy ochre light was up by Pola Creek, where the cattle would be already wandering back satisfied from the milking shed.

Tim was starting to revive.

“A hard life,” he commented to Bandy.

But the horses had been so steady, so sure-footed all night. Again they let them drink from the Belmore River, where it entered the Macleay from the south. The horses began pointedly to sniff the air soon thereafter, as if it gave them grounds for unease, but they were not so impolite as to toss their heads around and back downriver as some horses would. Noblesse bloody oblige.

From the top of Red Hill, you could see the mountains distantly burning and the valley filling with hot white smoke.

“Oh, dear,” said Bandy. “It looks like Nulla Creek is ablaze. All my families. A terrible thing. Drought and fire, fire and drought. God’s seasons in the Macleay.”

“I wouldn’t blame God,” said Tim, but not as belligerently as he would have a week ago.

They rode down into the East Kempsey Swamp, where the air was densest. It must be far more than a hundred degrees already in this syrupy bottom, an inhuman day ahead. A good day for selling Stone’s Ginger Beer in its earthenware bottle. Open the top and there’s a marble over which the children can fight. A good day for selling the cordials from Sharp’s factory in West Kempsey. The creaming soda. He could drink a bucket of it now. It didn’t cut the thirst though, not really. Tea. Black and strong. Cut the whistle. Made you sweat.

As they crested Commandant Hill, Constable Hanney and one of the younger constables on police mounts rode into their path.

“May I ask you gentlemen where you have been?” called Hanney through nearly closed lips.

What to say? Visiting the plague camp no more than a technical infringement. But Hanney could make it a massive crime.

Bandy wagged his head significantly to Tim. He seemed to say, I provide the horses but you answer the questions.

At the sight of the uniform, Tim had been unable to prevent himself wondering if Hanney knew somehow of his anonymous letter to the Commissioner. But that was not possible.

“We have been down the river to visit friends.”

“Mohammedan or Christian?” asked Constable Hanney out of his locked jaw.

“I’d take it they were Christian. Why do you ask, constable?”

“Where are these Christian friends of yours located then?”

“Near… near Belmore River, more or less.”

“Is that right?” Hanney called to Bandy.

“That’s right, constable,” Bandy assured the man.

“The beak’s going to ask you the same bloody question,” said Hanney. “Think twice, and tell the truth, or else I’ll stick you with your first answer. The question is: have you been visiting the Burrawong passengers?”

“What would make you ask that?” asked Tim. Just the same, he found himself swallowing those bilious inklings which unleashed power produces in its subjects.

“The sanitation officer had a report that Mr. Bandy Habash started trading with the passengers just a few days back. Someone saw you clearing off down the road to the New Entrance last night. He warned us.”

Billy Thurmond. Old bugger. Would’ve got home and put his son on a horse and sent him to town to complain to Sergeant Fry.

“Those horses of Mr. Habash’s certainly look knackered enough,” the younger constable said.

“My wife is six months pregnant,” said Tim. “I was anxious as to how she was.”

“Is this a confession?” asked Constable Hanney.

For the first time, the profound soreness of the ride was entering. He bent forward in the saddle like a cripple. “Dr. Erson and the sanitation officer are about to release the passengers in any case. I’d come to the conclusion I wasn’t putting a soul in any peril.”

Hanney looked at his colleague. Then back to Tim. “Kind enough to accompany us to the police station?”

It seemed too hot for the execution of the law. Above one hundred and five degrees, who wanted the literal justice whose minister Hanney had decided to be?

“Go easy, constable. I have deliveries to do today.”

“Bugger your deliveries.”

Tim found himself looking at Bandy for directions. Bandy had hung his head. Why not? He had to show himself humble before the ways of superior authority. Tim himself had used them on him.

“There’s nothing you can have at the police station which couldn’t be had here,” said Tim. “If you want to charge us for visiting the passengers, you can do it here and leave our day free. I confess that we visited the camp, and that Mr. Habash did, though not for trade. Purely out of kindness towards me.”

“You weren’t so bloody keen on him the last time we met,” said Hanney.

“Well, I was more ignorant then. Surely you don’t want us to follow you through the streets of town?”

“I think that’s what we’d like, Mr. Shea.”

“I’m a man in business.”

“Something you should have thought about at dusk last night. Follow us, and bloody shut up.”

Fortunately though, even by the time they crossed in the punt with the constables and followed them up Belgrave Street towards West Kempsey, where the Majesty of the Queen abided in the office beside the courthouse, the commercial day had not begun in Kempsey.

The passage through town didn’t take so long. A young woman watched them from the upper verandah of the Commercial. She might carry the news. Bandy’s horses seemed to keep right up with the police mounts, and to be pleased for the company, and Tim hoped that this implied to onlookers a lack of coercion in the whole arrangement. Arriving in Kemp Street, they all trotted into the police yard together. But Tim had no doubt that the pegged and markered world ceased at the gate, and that as the constables ran their mounts in under the shade of their stables, he and Bandy had placed themselves profoundly under the dominion of power exercised fancifully.

Yet as if they had freedom, Bandy and Tim rode their horses up to a post and rail. Now everyone dismounted. He and Bandy and the constables walked together like friends across the barren yard to the station. As Constable Hanney opened the unlocked door—who would be silly enough to steal from a police station?—and led everyone in, he took it as read that Tim and Bandy would follow. On the doorstep Tim saw in Bandy’s eye the intention to decamp. To horse and to buggery! How Hanney would adore that.

“Let’s put up with it,” Tim counselled the hawker.

Inside the warm air which reached for Tim smelled of official ink and carbolic. Hanney opened the flap in the counter, and facing to the interior, kept it negligently open with a hand held behind him. Sure of their obedience. The habits necessary to an officer of the law.

“Get yourselves chairs,” he said.

There were three desks in here, in the joyless interior. On the wall the main poster was a paltry ink sketch of Missy marked Unknown Female.

Tim and Bandy fetched two chairs from their place against the back wall and bore them to Hanney’s desk, while the senior constable himself wiped his sweaty hands on his tunic, saying, “God, bound to be a stinker!”

He was looking around for writing materials. He found some sheets of notepaper with V R on the top and the lion and unicorn. Astounding creatures! Their bite as strong here as anywhere.

The younger constable had already sat at his own desk further back in the room, and was engaged at once in documents which seemed to have no bearing at all on Bandy or Tim.

Dipping his pen in the inkwell, Hanney said, “Bugger this heavy air!” and began to write. He asked Tim what his second name was, and Tim said Edmund. Hanney wrote that down. He asked Bandy for his second name.

“I am not aware of any second name,” said Bandy.

Hanney looked up, considering this departure from the given.

“All right then,” he conceded at last.

Reading upside down what the constable wrote, Tim saw Hanney put down Solus after the word Bandy and before Habash. This perhaps to save magistrates asking the question or presuming that Hanney hadn’t asked. They were deep in the moils of the thing now. They were being prepared to appear in Court Notes in the Chronicle.

“Constable,” said Tim, “with the greatest respect, I will not be signing any documents before I have spoken to Mr. Sheridan.”

The words sounded momentary to Tim, fugitive birds uncaged. Hanney looked up at him. Barely a dent made on the air.

“I’m not accusing you of murder, Tim,” he said with a painful grin. “I’m accusing you of violating the New South Wales Quarantine Act.”

Bandy watchful beside him, expected something clever of him, just as he’d expected a horse of Bandy.

Tim said, “Isn’t that a matter for the sanitation officer to report to you?”

“Jesus, you are a bush lawyer, Mr. Shea. It’s like the bloody Impounding Act, Tim. I can impound wandered cattle and lay a charge, and so can the impounding officer. And now I can impound stray citizens under the Sanitation Ordinance and under the Act.” Hanney shook his head. He found Tim hugely eccentric. “You’ve got deliveries to make, Tim, and I have a day’s work. Do you mind if I expedite matters?”

He continued writing, muttering, “You’re lucky I caught you. If I was in this game for the sake of persecution, I could keep you buggers here all day, ruin your business, confuse your children, leave you spare of anyone’s trust.”

“I have no children,” said Bandy, speaking in defiance for the first time.

“That’s what you say, you black bastard.”

“Brown bastard, constable.”

The second policeman laughed in the dimness of the office, of the eucalyptus shade which fell over the back of the police station.

Tim consulted the watch in his fob. Nearing eight o’clock. His schoolboy son would be along soon, going to Imelda.

Hanney turned the document to them at last. It said,

“I, Timothy Edmund Shea, and I, Bandy Solus Habash, freely admit that each in the company of the other in violation of Section 17 of the New South Wales Quarantine Act and of Macleay Shire’s Sanitation Ordinance 8 illegally travelled to and entered the quarantine camp at the New Entrance, thereby placing ourselves and the community in peril and making ourselves liable to sentencing and a fine before the Macleay District Police Magistrate’s Court.”

He wrote that stuff well, Tim saw. Dressing up a mean intent in flowing terms.

“You both sign at the bottom,” Hanney told them. He turned the inkstand to them so that they could conveniently sign.

Tim said, “Just charge us and let the magistrate decide. You’ve said already it’s not like we committed murder.”

Hanney tilted his chair back, “Is that your casual attitude too, Mr. Habash?”

“I would rather await the settlement of the question before the court,” said Bandy, grandly but looking away.

“Well, I think you two fellows should know that some of us think that as a whole there’s a stink of murder or near-murder about you two. There—yes you, Brownie!—there is a fellow, a herbalist, who supplied specifics to Mrs. Mulroney the abortionist. We found quarts of his arsenic remedy on Mrs. Mulroney’s premises.”

Bandy sat forward and his delicate little hands came passionately into play. “My arsenic tonic is quite harmless, constable, and could not be blamed for anyone’s ill-health let alone demise. The same prescription has a renown absolutely everywhere—from the Alps to Turkey, and from Persia to China, as a specific for rheumatism, anaemia and weak nerves. Mrs. Mulroney was one of my customers, but used the tonic you refer to for her own purposes.”

The hated look from Hanney, snide in the heavy, heavy way of lesser yet total power. “Where’d you get him, Tim? Talks like a bloody professor. Look, cases could be bloody made, Habash. I could consider going lenient on you if you sign up here and avoid court squabbles. But if you bloody rile me…”

With a dry mouth, Tim said, “I won’t advise my friend to sign a confession for something as silly.”

Bandy had gone as pale as a European, but it was clear he was resolved to stand solid. Tim wondered too how he could have been blind to his fellow prisoner’s qualities, the courage and the loyalty. Just the same, there was a sort of plea in Bandy’s eye. Just remember, things will always fall more heavily on me than on you. Police magistrates will believe you more than me.

But not by too bloody much of a margin, Tim wanted to tell him.

“Let me show you something,” murmured Hanney. Standing, Hanney moved to a storeroom and past the junior policeman’s desk. Tim could not think of anything to say to Bandy in the man’s absence. After a time, Hanney emerged, oh Jesus, with the basket covered by the checked cloth. The letter Tim had risked writing had been futile. Had it gone astray or been lost by a clerk? Had the Commissioner lost interest in the young woman’s name?

He placed it all on the table, removed the great flask, took the checked cloth off it. A glimpse showed Tim that Missy leaned here, brow first, in hostage to Hanney. Tim felt his blood abandon him, fleeing this sight. The fixity of dimmed and barely brown eyes more open than at last viewing. Unblinking. Disconnected from the intent of her heart.

“There you are, you black bastard,” said Hanney. “Would you like to come clean that this is what your rheumatic mixture did.”

“Untrue, untrue,” cried Bandy. “My mixture could not achieve this horrible thing. Dear heaven!”

Bandy averted his eyes. You could tell that as much as any North Corker farmer’s son, he was seized by Missy’s unreleased spirit.

“My mixture is nothing,” said Bandy in a thin voice. “A tiny, kindly ripple, constable, on the huge ocean of human pain.”

He stood up, his mouth warped.

“Not this,” he said, trembling. “This is not my tradition or my father’s.”

He fell. His legs gave way. One delicate groan as he dropped like a thrown-off garment.

“What do you think that could mean?” Hanney—looking over his desk at the stupefied Bandy—asked Tim.

Tim had begun to rise to assist Bandy…

“Leave him. Leave him! Tell me what you think it bloody well means?”

“It means he hasn’t seen her before.”

“Well, you wouldn’t find a woman like her messing around with a black hawker.”

“But you said you’d shown him! You told me that. You showed it to cow-cockies but not to Bandy!”

“Are you dissatisfied with my investigation, Tim?” Hanney opened his desk and took a letter out. “Read that, eh.”

It was a letter on the stationery of Ernest Malcolm and Company, Accountants. It was addressed to the Commissioner of Police for New South Wales. “I would be remiss not to commend to you the work done by way of the present enquiry into the identity of the unfortunate young woman by Constable Hanney…” It was signed by Ernie, along with a list of all his secretaryships and posts as treasurer.

Hanney took the letter back. “Bloody nice to be appreciated by a pillar of the community. Now, tell me what you think it means, this bloody fainting?”

“It’s the bloody horror. It’s not guilt.” Another glimpse of the child in the flask. “I feel the same as Habash.”

“So you’d say you are similar characters, would you?”

So tediously Hanney fancied himself as cornering a man whatever way he turned. Were coppers like that as babies? Or did the uniform do it?

“Well?” Hanney insisted. “Similar types, would you say?”

“Will you let me pick up my friend? Fainted people shouldn’t be left lying like that.”

“Just sit there.” Again Hanney craned over his desk and surveyed Bandy. “Look at him there. You’d be bloody surprised, Mr. Shea, by the numbers of women upriver who’d do him favours. The old cow-cockies mistrust him, but the women think he’s a bloody darling. They let him camp near the homestead, and when their old man’s snoring, they go creeping down to his wagon.”

Why would Ernie praise methods like those of Hanney? “If Habash is the sort who gets round to the women, why didn’t you show him Missy earlier?”

Hanney did not answer, but went back to the matter of Bandy the seducer. “You’d be astounded. Even your sister-in-law and that step-niece. He’s the sort of little bugger women like to take on their knees. Look at that! Hands and arms like a bloody cherub.”

Bandy began to cough. Tim got up now and helped him to his feet, and sat him in his chair again. Bandy fluttering his lips like a man about to be sick. He seemed to be unsure of what had befallen him.

He saw the flask again but closed his eyes then.

“Can’t you put that bloody thing away?” Tim asked Constable Hanney. It was not of course a bloody thing. It had a holiness.

The policeman said, “You keep pestering me. Has she been recognised? Buying me drinks, getting me pissed. Were you her bloke, Tim? Where did you meet her? Was it Sydney on some trip?”

Tim writhed. The copper’s profane ideas were a torment.

“I haven’t been to Sydney in five years.”

“So why are you so fussy about Missy’s name? Hoping it’ll come out. Or hoping it won’t.”

Try the truth out on him. Defy him with it. “She’s in torment until she’s named. Any idiot can tell.”

“How do you know, in torment?”

“That’s the way it strikes me. Again and again. If it doesn’t strike you and spur you on, I bloody pity you!”

“Is this some potato superstition you’re into, Tim? Some spuddy thing?”

“I think it’s bloody called using your imagination.”

“Ah,” said Hanney, setting his big jaw. “I’m sorry, my imagination’s not up to scratch with yours. But there’s something all the old coppers in Sydney used to tell me. That if there is a person who hangs around and ask lots of questions, he’s generally the bugger.”

Bandy had placed his hands on the desk.

“And my God,” he murmured. “Woman’s fine features.”

“What do you say, Tim? Don’t wait for others to do it. You give me her name.”

“Get me a Bible. I’ll swear. I just don’t bloody know!”

“Sign this then,” said Hanney, sighing in a concluding manner. “You’ll both receive a summons to answer the charge.” He nudged the flask. “The charge of visiting the quarantine. You do remember that one, don’t you?”

“It’s hard to remember anything with that on the table.”

“You remember some things, son! You couldn’t wait for your wife to be home in two days. So you went up the river to get your end in. You remember that.”

Tim burned but leaned forward in his chair.

“There is no plague,” Bandy murmured to reinforce Tim.

“This isn’t what all the messages off the wire say, but you two smartalecs know better. Sign the bloody thing here.”

But neither of them moved to sign, so Hanney put on a sour mouth and said, “Go and sit down the back of the office there, the both of you.”

Tim, still blazing as any man would from that accusation of lust, one he didn’t want mentioned in court, stood up, helping Bandy by the elbow and grabbing the backs of the two chairs with his free hand. They passed the younger constable’s desk and Tim repositioned the chairs against the back wall and eased Bandy into his.

“Notice, he hasn’t put us in cells,” Tim whispered to Bandy.

As well, and at last, Hanney returned the flask to storage. Carrying it, he moved like a tired servant.

Tim tilted his chair and forced the back of his head against the wall. The back legs of his chair provided him with the other half of the leaning equation which would enable him to sleep. Bandy slept too, and at one stage Tim was drowsily aware of the little man slipping from his chair and curling himself on the floor.

At one stage that morning Sergeant Fry, who was bull-necked but had what many people called an intelligent face, came into the office like a man who hardly had the time for it, and Hanney pointed out the two offenders at the rear of the room. Hanney did not use large gestures or try the smart-copper act on his sergeant. Fry murmured brisk things at Hanney, and Hanney nodded.

Don’t try to scrutinise or interpret the buggers. Drowse. From nowhere now Tim remembers a music hall song, “Never Buy a Copper a Drink”:

Sleep. Waking again, he found Dr. Erson in the office, talking energetically to Hanney. Tim now adjusted his chair and sat upright to convince the doctor of his respectability. He watched Hanney begin shrugging, but Erson was a large magician in the Macleay for his medicine and for his singing, and so the ungifted Hanney now looked shorn of power.

Erson came to Tim now, smiling a little as if remembering miscreant Johnny.

“We should have had guards on the Trial Bay road, shouldn’t we?”

Tim said, “My regrets, doctor. But I was anxious about my wife.”

“I was pleased to see in passing the shed that you have a new horse.”

Tim lowered his eyes for the first time since arrested by Hanney.

“Oh, a borrowed, reliable one. I still use the old one for deliveries. But keep Johnny separate from him.”

Erson grinned briefly, considered him and coughed. “A terrible searing day, Mr. Shea.”

“Yes,” said Tim.

Dr. Erson reached out and felt the glands under Tim’s chin. Then he asked to see Tim’s tongue. Tim let him do whatever he wanted.

Bandy stirred on the floor and sat up.

Dr. Erson smiled. “Mr. Habash.”

Bandy stood up now. “My dear Dr. Erson.”

Tim was of course astounded that they greeted each other as friends.

“Sir,” said Bandy, “forgive my journey, but I know well that the strict quarantine time had expired.”

“Had it?” asked Erson. He still seemed amused, reaching up to Bandy’s chin as he had earlier to Tim’s. “You are not to talk about any of this, Bandy, or of going up there. And God help if you do it again. It is not a good precedent. You must both give me an undertaking!”

“I understand,” said Bandy. “You are such a good friend I have no problem in offering my solemn undertaking.”

“Well, I think in that case you can both go.” The doctor turned to Constable Hanney, who was making himself busy at his desk. “These fellows are free to go, constable?”

Hanney thought a while, an actor who had forgotten the play’s simplest line. “Yes, doctor,” he managed in the end. He began tearing up the page he had written for them to sign.

Outside the air ferocious, an incoming tide, and they fought their way through it, crossing the yard. It scalded the cheeks. It was so thick and full of flecks of black leaf. Yet Erson had made this blazing day habitable.

Tim murmured, “What a civilised fellow!”

Bandy said, “I am a fool for fainting.”

He wavered in the white haze.

“You’ve never seen her before though?”

“I have not, old fellow.” Bandy shook his head to clear it of apparitions. “But as to the rest, they don’t want people to know about us. You noticed what Dr. Erson said? We are not a good precedent for people to know about. It is up to them to guard the camp, and we have shown them up.”

“He seemed such friends with you.”

Bandy smiled. “He visited my father, my brother and myself, looked into our prescriptions to make sure they were safe, and found they were. As of course he should have expected. We have been herbalists and chemists from generation to generation, Mr. Shea. Out of our meeting grew a compact with Dr. Erson. We are to urge our clearly ill customers to attend the surgeries of the doctors in town. We are all brothers in concern for health.”

Tim began to laugh, far too much for the day. But he was tickled by this unexpected kindly alliance the world harboured.

“Bloody hell!”

The air too ferocious for him to consider other alliances and their meaning. The alliance between Ernie and Hanney, stated so fulsomely in Ernie’s letter. What did that bloody signify?

Ten past nine, he saw by his fob watch. Unless she was overtaken by a vengeful mood, Ellen Burke would surely have opened the store. Though who would buy butter on a day like this? Butter from the Central or Warneton creameries melting to a smear in the hands or the back of the cart. Yet he must make deliveries in this furnace.

They found their horses in the shed. The poor beasts were snuffling. The air worried them. They knew that fire was everywhere, downriver and up, out of their control, out of anyone else’s.

Remembering Missy, Bandy continued to shake his head and climbed onto the grey. He said nothing as they rode the horses out of the gate, steering them towards the water trough outside Kelty’s where Tim had got his first bad reputation with Constable Hanney. They found the beasts unwilling, pulling at the reins. Having been pliable all night, they were now jacking up.

“Oh, dear sir, we could have been in great trouble,” said Bandy.

“See,” said Tim, “I told you there was nothing to be gained from friendship with me. I am just one step away, Bandy, from you. I am a white nigger. If I’d been an Orangeman or Good Templar, that old bastard Thurmond would have taken his hat off to us and wished us a good ride.”

As his horse and Bandy’s drank from Kelty’s trough, “How well a lager would go down,” Tim murmured.

“I must not,” muttered Bandy.

Tim felt a sigh escape him. “Black tea is always the best.”

“Mr. Shea, I saw that woman dressed as a boy.”

“A boy?”

“A boy in a school uniform of the English type. I saw him walking in West. This being at a time early in the summer. I saw him at once and thought, that may surely be a girl in masquerade. A beautiful being, boy or girl. More beautiful than most other beings in the Macleay.”

“A boy?” Tim asked.

“That face however,” Bandy murmured. “The very chin. The very forehead. Europeans are so distinct to me, one at a time.”

In a fever, Tim hauled his horse’s head out of Kelty’s slimy water and turned it to the river which the day had turned turgid and browner than manure. Bandy obligingly followed.

“You’re telling me it’s the very girl, are you?”

“Certainly,” said Bandy. “A memorable child.”

“A child,” said Tim. Bandy had the same word Tim had harboured within himself so long. “That’s right. A child.”

Her name wheeled above him in the air, at the margin of sight. It cast the day’s sole shadow.