A River Town

Four

TIM PUT HIS HAT on the back pew of the Primitive Methodist church in Euroka. A church utterly humble in its unadornment. He could see the appeals of humility, the Christianity of plainness.

He pointed Lucy forward towards the coffin, and the pew where Mrs. Sutter sat with her four children and young Hector, who looked as brightly kept as the rest.

“You go and sit with your brother,” Tim said.

Pews, and a lectern. Plain frosted glass in the windows behind. No single aid to the remembrance of God. No stained glass, no statues, no intercessors. The plain act.

A man wasn’t supposed to be here. Meant to get the permission of your parish priest, tra-lah, for the deaths and marriages of your heretical and dissenting neighbours. If he was damned for sitting in a back pew, then the clergy were welcome to heaven. Poor coughing Bruggy. Welcome to coughless paradise.

But Jesus this was as bare as the South Pole when put beside the rich, coloured jungles of the Catholic piety he was bred in and Kitty savoured. All its beings, its saints more brilliant than a tiger and more potent. This little Methodist place was something different: on this ice you could be God’s Eskimo, in this desert God’s Arab. The vacancy spoke. Part of the deranged season was that he could imagine himself a Primitive Methodist, going for this cleanness, condemning the overdone other. Heretical thought. But there was a tendency in him to respect traditions more austere. If he were raised to it, this Euroka Methodist sort of thing would suit his character, his mistrust of stagey things. Whereas Kitty needed the forests of devotion, the scarlet martyrs, the bright blue intercessors.

In this underdecorated, scoured air, Kitty’s scapulars to Saint Anthony and special devotion to Saint Blanche, the saint of goitres, a condition to which the Kenna family were susceptible, could look pagan as blazes.

She could forget Saint Blanche anyhow, said Mr. Nance the chemist. There was plenty of iodine in the Macleay water. Tim didn’t know how it got there. Into the rain-fed tanks at backdoors. Did Nance and other benefactors go around pouring it into household water supplies? The river rich in it too. Go swimming and swallow one mouthful, and you swallowed most of the minerals and chemicals. That rich, broad, healthy, muddy river his son tried to live in.

The Colemans from Glenrock in the second row, with their big bony hands which had kept Albert’s herd milked. An official from the Good Templars, Mr. Gittoes—Albert Rochester must have been a lodge member. All there to hold back the waters of eternity and oblivion from washing poor Albert’s face utterly away. What remained of it.

Lucy had by now sat beside her brother, who’d tried to tell her something. Like a good convent school girl, she hushed him. She didn’t seem to want his domestic news. She pointed towards the coffin, fixed Hector’s attention on it. Not hard to do. The young child’s head did not move any more. All the churches had this one big mystery, free of charge, without debate. Death.

Mr. Fyser the minister came up the aisle of the church, wearing a suit. No brocaded vestments, of course. He stopped and spoke to Mrs. Sutter. He shook his head a little. “Expecting to marry you rather than bury Bert,” he could be heard saying.

Then he went to the rostrum and read the “Our Father” and uttered his confidence that Albert Rochester had been saved. Well, that was different. Here in the plain Methodism of Euroka, the story was ended when it ended. Judgment had already been made, redemption already received. No five bob Masses for the dead. No writhing crowds of the imperfect in Purgatory to be relieved by prayer and sacrifice, by going without rum! A great deal of fuss saved. Except you had to ask what could Mr. Fyser, grey suit and little dicky collar, do if haunted by the face in Hanney’s bottle? Where was there something in this purity to combat the more luxuriant ghosts?

“Albert Rochester,” Fyser told the mourners, “was a member of the brethren of this church. He was as sober and restrained in his habits as one could wish. Dead cruelly and at a younger age than he should have been. But look at the children, brother and sister, from Summer Island who were buried late last year. Wounded by prongs of the same rake, both succumbing to lockjaw. The young Queenslanders whose deaths were reported in yesterday’s Argus. Fighting the Boer in a far place. How can we face these mysteries? The ant looks up from his antheap and sees man and thinks, that must be God. But God is larger and larger by far, and his purposes larger and larger by far. Better to ask of a bucket that it contain the huge Pacific Ocean than to ask the human mind that it contain the extent of God’s purpose. To one single part of that purpose have we been made privy. Redemption. The consciousness of having been saved, as Albert Rochester opened himself to his Saviour and was numbered amongst the saved…”

Tim felt a hand on his shoulder. A large one. Hanney was there, in uniform, expressing his reverence. For the corpse and—bloody hell—for Tim himself. Hanney murmured, “Did all you could, old feller.”

Carr the undertaker’s men carried Albert Rochester out and placed him in the black lacquered hearse with its black plumes and two fat white horses. Albert had, of course, never travelled so plushly between Glenrock and town.

A long way to the cemetery in West where the grave of Lucy’s and Hector’s mother was located. Tim chose not to be part of the procession for fear people would point to him as well as at the hearse and shame him by nodding in approval that he should be there. He crossed back to town on an earlier punt than the one the hearse caught and called instead into the store, did brief business, then made his own way to the grave, arriving as the hearse did.

From here you could look across the river to the far mudflats of Euroka and Dongdingalong, where families maintained their hopeful ways growing maize and milking dairy cattle. And then the mountains, which sent a thundershower every summer afternoon, and from which those others of his customers dragged down the great stalks of cedar. Geography of the sweet world seen from a graveside. It looked a world sufficient to itself. Why did it need all its feverishness about Boers and Empire, the threat of Papism, the fear of the Jewish financiers who held the Queen’s son in their thrall? Why the bloody need to raise lancers or hussars or mounted rifles? Albert Rochester had joined the real regiment. The army that had the numbers.

Mrs. Malcolm, Tennyson lover, looked down on Victor Daley, a Sydney poet Tim loved. Daley wrote an incomparable elegy to humankind. A sensible Australian name to it too. The Woman at the Wash Tub, old Victor’s best. He had learnt it by heart for the unlikely eventuality of having to recite. As he did now for funerary purposes to himself, while Carr’s men stumbled across the hill with Albert’s plain coffin.

“I saw a line with banners,” Tim grumbled into his moustache,

In the approaching group, it was Lucy who seemed to be fitted more as the eternal washer, the cleaner-up of disaster. More than wary Mrs. Sutter, who looked cautious, shying clear of such a comprehensive role.

Prayers had begun when a sulky pulled up and two people got down from it. Late comers for Albert. Ernie Malcolm and Mrs. Malcolm. Getting down from her seat, Winnie Malcolm looked unfamiliar, at odds with what he knew of her. She looked flushed and bleared. She was a being of air. Earth had now somehow entered her long, luscious bones.

Ernie Malcolm guided her over uneven ground amongst the gravestones. The broken columns which were popular and one of Des Kerridge’s, the stonemason’s, standard items.

And Kerridge did the things suitable for Tim’s clan too. Celtic crosses. They and broken columns covered most needs.

Victor Daley again, Australian poet. The vanity of that. Of being Mrs. Malcolm’s grocer, secretly harbouring verses by the Bard of Enfield, that suburb in the west of Sydney which Daley honoured by living there. But the pleasure and savour of all this now overshadowed and reduced by the poor appearance of Winnie. Fair play, how bleared and uncertain she was. On the plainest level, that bloody public buffoon Ernie had privately upset her. Or something had. Didn’t Hanney say he wasn’t showing Missy to townswomen? Not that. Just loutish unworthy Ernie. Jesus Almighty Christ!

The Malcolms stood behind a mound of grave dirt and were dressed very well for Albert’s funeral. He had a black tie around his stand-up collar, and she was in bombazine so lustrously black that it seemed to attract flies. Within the cloth her body like that of nuns and other goddesses would be pink with the heat. But she had always dressed formally. Her Melbourne origins.

Ernie Malcolm nodded to Tim and then composed himself to listen to Mr. Fyser’s burial prayers.

They were quickly done, and Hector’s hand was contained by Lucy’s as Albert made his eternal descent. Tim prayed his pagan Ave within sight of Mr. Fyser, an heretical utterance for the repose of Bert who, according to Fyser, was already in the Kingdom anyhow. As the coffin hit the bottom of the pit, Tim betrayed himself with the sign of the cross. Mr. Fyser observed him coolly. As an insult did it rank beside what the pigs had done?

Mrs. Sutter now encouraged the two children forward, and Lucy, demonstrating for her brother what should be done, picked up a red clod and threw it in. Hector did it then, reaching over the hole with the dirt held between his thumb and forefinger. Farewell, chieftain and father. Fountain of kindnesses, maker of chastisements. In Mr. Fyser’s presence, the chance of an ecstatic reunion of the Rochesters at some redeemed date didn’t quite seem a starter.

Mrs. Malcolm looked out at the children with ponderous and darkly plush reflection from beneath her lashes. She was still concerned with whatever grief had delayed Ernie and herself. No children of her own, though Ernie looked like a lusty bugger.

Hector raised his arm and said aloud, “Heaven, heaven.” Lucy re-gathered his hand, pulling him back into the ranks of the Sutter children. Maybe to ensure there was still a place for him there. Tim himself couldn’t refrain from looking regularly at unquiet Mrs. Malcolm. Images of consoling her too readily came to mind.

One Friday afternoon she had asked him where he had come from, and he had told her. And yourself, Mrs. Malcolm? he’d asked. Melbourne born-and-bred, she’d told him, with that robust pride which typified Melbourne people. “It’s a far more refined city than Sydney, isn’t it?” she enquired of him. “If you wanted a city to represent young Australia before the world, Melbourne would be the one, Mr. Shea, wouldn’t it? Sydney’s so rough at the edges. When you land at Darling Harbour, you take your life in your hands getting to the Hotel Australia. And a cab’s the only form of transport open to you. Even the tram conductors are rough and ready and likely to swear. And there’s far too much of the spirit of Sydney in the Macleay, isn’t there?”

There were lots of Isn’t-its and Wouldn’t-its in Mrs. Malcolm’s charming discourse.

“You know, I think it might be the humidity,” Tim suggested. “The closer you get to the tropics, the more irregular personal behaviour grows.”

That was scientific fact as reported in all the papers. The Argus and Chronicle agreed on that one.

“Yes,” she agreed. “Humidity is a great ally of barbarism.”

“You agree with me all the way and in each bloody particular, Mr. Shea, don’t you?” Kitty later mocked. He needed to be grateful she found his conversations with Mrs. Malcolm more a cause for poking fun than the other, the jealous stuff.

He found out a little more about Mrs. Malcolm at each visit. “It’s so pleasant to find a storekeeper who can carry a proper conversation, Mr. Shea,” she told him once, and he felt his face blaze with the compliment. And in the course of conversations, it came out that she was an only child and that her father had been an umbrella manufacturer and an alderman of Brighton Council, a municipality of the city of Melbourne. She had grown up in the shadow of a public-spirited man, and perhaps that was why she’d taken to Ernie.

Her favourite poem, she said, was Tennyson’s grand In Memoriam.

She looked down from the tenebral heights of In Memoriam at the efforts of the men Tim liked—Henry Lawson, the revolutionary of the Bulletin, and Victor Daley of both the Bulletin and the Freeman’s Journal. The greater of these being Victor.

But today at Albert’s grave, her face bleared and all at once giving itself up to puffiness, she didn’t look like a Tennyson woman. It made you wonder, was she really well?

The filling in began. One of the diggers was Causley, who’d had all his money invested in a cream-separating business. Everything lost when the small patented separating machines every farmer could own had come in. Reduced now to restoring earth to Albert Rochester’s grave.

By the cemetery gate Mr. Fyser bade Mrs. Sutter and the children good-bye. Constable Hanney waited by his sulky. Dear God, if Mrs. Malcolm hadn’t seen it, let him not spring that thing on her. She and Ernie had caught up with Tim now and she uttered a liquid, “Mr. Shea,” and passed on. Ernie himself stopped.

“Well,” said Mr. Malcolm rubbing his jawline. “Some things even valour can’t attend to. I salute you though, Mr. Shea.”

“For dear God’s sake, don’t do that,” said Tim.

Tim couldn’t be too raw though in his methods of telling Malcolm to give away the idea of heroic rescue. Malcolm was a customer, even if he did have three months’ terms, and had normally to be spoken to gently. But this fiction of bravery had to be trampled on.

“You might as well give Bandy a medal,” Tim said.

Ernie began fanning himself with his hat. “Him? Sooner decorate the bloody Mahdi for killing General Gordon!”

“Then reward neither of us.”

“Imagine this, Tim. The opening of the bridge, Central to East. Imagine a line of men, women, even children, receiving medals and certificates for valour. Young Shaw who lifted a fallen tree from his uncle’s leg and carried him sixteen miles to rescue. Tessie Venables who rescued a grown youth from the surf at South West Rocks. Yourself. With yourself, Tim, we begin to get an array of appropriate acts of gallantry. I see you standing at the mouth of the bridge, at the mouth of a new century. Standing for our community.”

You also see yourself, Tim might have said if he didn’t fear losing Malcolm as a customer, as commanding officer of the brave. You see your words reproduced in the Sydney Morning Herald. Mr. Malcolm, accountant, brave by association, and quoted verbatim.

Ernie said, “I have been waiting some time for the third appropriate act to report to the main committee in Sydney. With proper respect, Tim, I can identify it when I see it. Mr. Habash tells me that you were endless in your attempts at resuscitation, even though poor Albert had become a thing of revulsion.”

Ahead of them, in the street, Winnie Malcolm had baulked by the stirrup-step up to her sulky, as if the idea of the climb was too much to be faced. Then, shakily, she tried it. One of her less graceful ascents. If Malcolm hadn’t been a customer, he might have said, “Why don’t you be brave yourself and go and look after your wife?”

“It is a time in the Empire’s history,” Malcolm—with something almost like desperation—confided in him, “when in each community an exemplar, a paladin, is very much looked for.” He rubbed some sweat into his upper lip. “I know you agree.”

At least, Tim noticed, Hanney had untethered the police horse and sulky and trotted away on his sombre business.

Tim put a restraining hand on Malcolm’s arm. That was what he had been driven to.

“Please,” he said. “Please, Ernie. We are all being made a mockery of by that dark little jockey, Habash. Please.”

Stepping back, Ernie looked up at the great sky.

“Tim, what do we have in this world to go on except the accounts of witnesses? The British army itself…”

“But they don’t listen to just one unreliable bugger of a hawker.”

“Ah, you’re a bloody Jesuit, aren’t you, Tim? I spoke to the child too at the convent. And to the duty sister at the hospital up there.”

“No, look! Any fool could carry a poor dead bastard to hospital. It wasn’t a rush to mercy, Ernie. He was past mercy.”

Ernie laughed again. “I hope to Jesus you make a better speech than that when they give you the medal and make us in the Macleay famous.”

Make Ernie famous, that meant.

Now Mrs. Malcolm sat uncertain in the sulky, shoulder turned, considering her situation. As if Ernie could see what Tim was seeing he now remembered his wife. “Must go, Tim,” he said, making a chastened face.

Mrs. Sutter walked up holding Hector’s hand and accompanied by Lucy. “Thank you for coming, Mr. Shea. I take it you’ll drop Lucy back at the convent.”

“I have a business you know, Mrs. Sutter,” he said. Then for Lucy’s sake repented. It did not cause even a shadow on Lucy’s sharp little face. But for fatal tact he’d say, share the cost of her schooling, you miserable old jade! Or at least buy all your stores from me.

“I have the care of five children,” she said. “I know you understand.”

Her children by the late Mr. Sutter were playing loudly amongst the graves, clutching at broken columns, grazing their fingers in the apertures of Celtic crosses.

“I suppose I must understand.” He cupped a hand around Lucy’s head. “My wife and I… I ought to tell you… are very fond of Lucy. She plays well with our children and gives us no problem.”

“I’m very pleased.”

Yet she seemed barely tolerant as Lucy and Hector made their farewells. Dawn milkings and hardships had consumed the childhoods of Albert’s boy and girl. They were like an aged sister caressing an aged brother.

In his pocket he had a chocolate for Lucy, especially for the post-burial, to distract her from the knowledge of Mrs. Sutter’s disregard of her, and of his own neglect as well. The heat had softened it in its silver wrapping.

He gave it to her as they sat on the board of the dray. “Keep it till the cool of evening, Lucy,” he told her. “It will get more solid then.”

She said, “We have Benediction tonight.”

“But you as a Protestant don’t need to go.”

“I like it. Sometimes I see papa’s face there.”

In the great gilt orb of the monstrance the priest lifted.

Tim had some customers across the river, in East. People who’d fallen out with the storekeeper Corbett there, an argumentative Orangeman and high pricer. A number took the trouble to come across to Central in the punt, to buy from T. Shea—General Store. Or children would come over on Mondays or Tuesdays with their mothers’ requirements written on notes in their hands, spend a while playing with Johnny and Annie, tending to end up messing about in the river with Johnny, while Annie sat barefoot at the very edge, plying the rich silt with her fingers. He hoped Johnny wouldn’t put his customers’ children, who were often blackguards themselves, in any harm.

“How’s old Corbett?” he would ask of the customers in East, and a number would say, “I hope the old bastard dies!”

Naturally, to make the deliveries, Tim needed to coax Pee Dee onto the punt. If there were other conveyances and horses getting off, Pee Dee would often shy sideways, wilfully feigning fright. Pee Dee really didn’t like it when there were cattle aboard, or when pigs harried him, running between his legs. One day he was going to shy right over the embankment and cover the river banks in sugar, flour, baking soda, oatmeal, tapioca, tea and broken biscuit.

People disembarking from East sometimes cried, “Why don’t you get rid of the old nag, Tim?” It was in a sense a sane question. “Pee Dee’s my bloody horse,” he answered. Part of T. Shea’s terms of trade. Sometimes louts cried that sentence back at him as he and Pee Dee clopped past making the deliveries.

Recently Tim had taken to avoiding embarrassment by waiting with Pee Dee in the butter factory lane, not approaching the ramp to the punt until all the traffic from East had dispersed itself. Then led him down onto the punt apron, hoping he wouldn’t make a display. And so with the stutter of the steam engine, out into the current. No great sea journey, but in Tim’s mind the crossing of water always significant.

Out there today Daley still with him. No apparent ghosts out here on the bright river, but Daley had the lines for the season of Albert’s tragedy:

The sunk pylons for the new Macleay bridge, which would make the punt unnecessary by the start of winter, rose from the green river like columns from a sunk civilisation.

Some time later that day, he was delivering in Rudder Street, East Kempsey, when he saw a covered hawker’s wagon swaying up the road out of the Dock Flat swamp. One of the Habashes. He reined Pee Dee in to the side and got down from the dray. He could see bloody Bandy at the reins of his green wagon all right. Coming back to town after palavering the poor women of Pola Creek.

A bracing anger rose in Tim at the sight of that failed Punjabi jockey. He walked out and waited in the middle of the road. He raised his arms and couldn’t help calling out, “Get round me if you can, you little ruffian!”

Bandy Habash waved joyously at this prospect of reunion. He drew up, and Tim walked to the side of the green wagon with its tin canopy and stared up at him.

“I wanted to know… What in the bloody hell are you doing telling these lies about me?”

Bandy put on a wonderful, melodramatic frown.

“This stuff about Albert is all rubbish and flummery, and it makes me ashamed. What in God’s name were you doing going to Ernie bloody Malcolm?”

“Mr. Shea, after our adventure I was simply full of admiration…”

“What bloody for? Might as well admire a man for making the tea or emptying a jerry. You’ve made a bloody fool of me!”

Tim kicked one of the wheels of the hawker’s wagon.

“My dear old chap, may I get down and talk to you?”

“What do you bloody well think? I’m looking for an explanation.”

Bandy worked himself trimly out of his seat and fell gracefully to the road. Wholly and neatly in front of Tim.

“I watched you in your movements, Mr. Shea. In all respects I thought they were the movements of a hero.”

“I was not anything in my movements. I hung back. You were the person who fixed his horse!”

“I was well-educated in the English language, Mr. Shea. I have read Scott, Dickens and Thackeray, in all of whom such sentiments as I expressed to Mr. Malcolm are common.”

“But I ask you! Why land me, a poor bloody grocer, with this stuff?”

Bandy was abashed. Beyond the theatrical manners, a true bewilderment could be seen. He lowered his head and shook it.

“I was alarmed by what I saw on approaching the place of the accident, Mr. Shea. I would have found it hard to approach such horrifying affairs. Yet I witnessed the heroism of your movements, sir, the decisiveness you showed. This alone made it possible for me to draw near.”

“Bugger it! You were the one who did the real work.”

“Oh, Mr. Tim, my dear chap. We both behaved well to be honest, though I yield first place to you. But do you think Mr. Malcolm would want to write to the Royal Humane Society about a Punjabi hawker? About the courage of a Muslim? To be the first amongst the brave in the Valley of the Macleay? The world would not be interested in my bravery. They want true British grit.”

“Well, Mr. Bandy, I’m an Irishman.”

“Same thing in my book. They are willing to see British grit in your face, you see. We were brave together, Mr. Shea, in the face of the tragedy. But my part could not be pushed forward, so I was more than happy to push forward your part. I know about these things. I don’t complain. But I do know that if you are honoured as you deserve, I am partially honoured too. In your shadow, as they say, old chap.”

Tim could do little more at first than wave his head from side to side. “What sort of plan is this? What bloody sort? A prank? Poking mullock at Ernie and the Turf Club? And me as the bait!”

“No, no, no, no! I am above all an admirer of yours, Mr. Shea, and wish your family well. When I had heard of you from Mrs. Burke at Pee Dee, your sister by marriage, for some reason I thought, I want that good man as a friend in town. And now, as an honoured friend.”

Now that it was all explained Tim in fact felt quite awed by the scale of Bandy’s intentions. His relentless and always denied desire to race his grey at the Warwick Course. So he raced his grey up and down empty streets, a sort of audition for greater things. Showing the indifferent vicinity how worthy his grey was, while the Turf Club committee picnicked on Terara.

Tim had a lurking and undeclared sympathy for such deranged schemes. This one so lunatic, and Bandy deserved to be thumped for it. But it was its scope that slowed you down. Made you understand: this is a really serious little bugger!

Tim said, “I came here to be an ordinary citizen. I’ve seen heroes and don’t like them.”

His Uncle Johnny of Glenlara transported to Western Australia more than thirty years back for being a Fenian organiser in Cork. Did no one good. Made his mother prematurely aged so that the young Tim had to be silent in her presence.

“I came here to be an ordinary citizen,” Tim repeated. “This is all a vanity on Ernie Malcolm’s part.”

Bandy murmured, “Mr. Shea, you cannot expect me, can you, to go to Mr. Malcolm now and tell him I was mistaken. I was not mistaken. You deserve to be considered a true man. Again, Mrs. Burke tells me you are a giver of alms and feed half the valley. I as your friend would like you to be publicly acclaimed.”

Since all this smelt of excess, Tim—in protest and not without fear—took hold of the lapel of Bandy’s coat.

“Listen, you’re using the wrong bloody methods, my dear Indian friend. I am not here to be the sort of feller that suits you. I have a hard time enough being the sort of feller that suits me.”

“But I know, Mr. Shea, that what I’ve done doesn’t displease your charming wife.”

“What do you know about Kitty?”

“I came to the store two nights past. I saw Mrs. Shea. She said to me that it was grand for you to be praised like this, and thanked me for bringing it to the notice of the public. Look for wisdom to the women. For they know all our faces, don’t they? The face of the hero. The face of the coward as well. The face of the brute and the face of the beloved.”

So how to work up a consuming rage when even now, with Bandy intruding on the question of Kitty, he had to strain to achieve it. What he really felt was fear. Fear of being dragged down and marred by this little hawker’s efforts to exalt him.

Tim felt the burden of this defeat. No one could be dissuaded from the fable of brave Shea. And the man so artful. He had the approaches to this lie of his ratified by all parties except Tim, and covered from every angle. Habash couldn’t be defeated by an average good talking-to and a flick in the ear.

“Don’t discount that I can take you to court,” Tim impotently told the hawker. “I can talk to the solicitor Sheridan about this, and I bloody will. I’ll leave it at that for now. We don’t have anything more to say from this point.”

But he felt he’d fallen into the overstating trap, and his summing-up had already erred by being too long. He turned away sharply and walked back to Pee Dee, deliberately using an urgent gait that suggested he might punch the horse. He heard Bandy murmur something. It sounded like, “I am already part of your family.” Yet it could just be Mohammedan incantations or curses. He decided to ignore it, but within five yards of Pee Dee he adopted a less menacing stance—for Pee Dee might have taken the excuse to rear in the traces if he hadn’t softened his approach—and waited there by his dray, his back to the hawker, his face to the river, until Bandy drew level and passed him. He watched the faded green and yellow paint on the pressed-tin walls of Bandy’s wagon.

People on the lonely farms, with little else to swear by, swearing by the Habash herbal remedies. As always, people preferred to be poisoned in hope than to live sanely and know the strict limits of the world.

“Remember,” Tim cried after him, but it sounded a fairly limp command.