A River Town

Five

THOUGH IT HAD no railway, the Macleay Valley was full of railway sleeper cutters. The railways were far away, had reached the Hunter River a hundred and fifty miles south, but not further. The country between the Hunter and the Macleay was so mountainous, so full of terrifying grades, that only those who profoundly feared the sea or were profoundly attracted to steam engines travelled down there by a succession of coaches to the distant steel tracks on the Hunter.

So for the moment it was a matter of ironic reflection that the right trees for railway sleepers grew here. Burrawong frequently went to Sydney loaded with them, as with maize and pigs. People who got visionary would look out south across the great, green face of the Macleay and say, “The railway will one day arrive and let me tell you it’ll make this bloody place.” One of the sleeper cutters was a Kerry man called Curran, who came in at intervals to buy plug tobacco.

“Jesus, Tim!” he’d say, raving away. “They’re catching it now! They’re catching more than we ever threw their way. Those Boer boys are throwing more the way of the bloody English than they ever saw before this, on any battlefield. It’s one thing to fight and beat niggers. Another to face up to white men with decent rifles.”

It was a glorious thing to see fellers like Curran work with their string and pencil and adze, turning a mere log or branch into an exactly shaped oblong, fit and beautiful enough to hold up the rails on which the enormity of locomotive engines progressed. A man like Curran was all grace at work. Clean cuts, and great florid, generous motions.

“Modder River, eh? Majersfontein! The punishment they’ve been looking for all this century they’re getting now, the bloody Saxons!”

“A lot of Scotties though,” Tim reminded him. “A lot of Paddies too!”

“I say more fool them,” Curran cried, his eyes alight.

“Lads looking for a wage, you know,” said Tim. “A fellow could imagine himself in the ranks if it weren’t for emigration.”

Tim also imagined Curran, in his shack on the mudflats, haranguing his wife and her brood. A primitive Wolfe Tone of the bush. Looking in the Argus and the Chronicle, in the Freeman’s Journal, for clues to the Empire’s death.

Curran’s propositions of vengeance had a certain dark appeal to Tim. But the old trouble was—as people of any mental discrimination at all knew—that the price was always paid by the wrong people. Not one course was deducted from the table of the rulers. They moaned and bleated, but their wine was still in its bottle, and their gloved servants still brought the plate. Curran, full of native wit, kept himself determinedly innocent enough to believe in the fairy story of thorough vengeance.

With an air of gloating, Curran went off with his tobacco. He received no regular deliveries of supplies from Tim. The Offhand also received no regular deliveries of groceries, and bought things as he needed them. He ate only occasionally and when he remembered to, breakfast at Mottee’s Greek cafe, dinners at the Commercial. Soap for his toilet and tea for his painful mornings, however, he got at T. Shea.

Breathlessness could overcome the Offhand and he might need to hitch his lean thigh onto a stool which had come from Swallow and Ariel, Biscuit Makers, with the first large order Tim had made eight years ago.

While in this posture one day he said, “This meeting to form our battalion the Empire so badly needs.”

“Yes, I read about it.”

“General Roberts will say, Who is that battalion we gallantly slaughtered in the past ten minutes? And his aides will say, They’re the Macleay Mounted Farters, milord. And General Roberts will say, If only we had more of that calibre! Where in the name of God did you say they’re from?”

Tim laughed, relishing the Offhand nearly as fully in the flesh as in print.

“That’s a fable if you like,” said Tim. “That’s M. M. Chance’s fable.”

“Absolutely right,” groaned the Offhand.

The consumption he’d suffered as a young man and theological student still had at least a second mortgage on his flesh.

“This meeting of Baylor’s and M. M. Chance’s then. In the flatulent minds of some, anti-war and pro-Boer are the same thing of course. So I wonder might it not be politic for you to attend that meeting? You need donate nothing to the Patriotic Fund, but you could treat the question with solemnity. No one would resent your saying nothing—they all have enough inflated concepts of their own to fill up a good evening.”

Tim didn’t like the idea. Having been forced into heroic mould against his wishes, he was now advised by the Offhand it was good business to show himself off in the guise of a devout Briton.

“And I suppose to end the evening I would have to listen to Dr. Erson singing ‘Soldiers of the Queen.’ ” That seemed the final item he would not be able to bear. Dr. Erson’s loyal tenor.

“Not too big a price, Tim. Yes, ‘Soldiers of the Queen’ with rich Scottish vigour. But you will also hear me speak. The benefits, you see!”

Some of Curran’s hot, heedless anger sizzled in him.

“I can’t be bullied by Baylor or Chance into standing up for some belief I don’t have. As far as I’m concerned, the Boers are entitled to manage their own affairs in Transvaal without intrusion. And there are men in the House of Commons itself who agree with me, especially the Liberals. Imagine if the French landed here now and muscled into New South Wales. There’d be Froggy versions of M. M. Chance back in country towns in France approving of it all and making their bloody loyal lists. I won’t waste an evening on this, Offhand. They can go to buggery!”

The Offhand looked away and up at the rafters of the shop. He seemed to be scared out of his irony.

“Well, of course, the depth of your feeling… and a pungent argument you put forward… one which accords with my own. I don’t ask you to act against your principles. I ask you to trip them up in theirs. They are fair enough democratic men in most matters, but in this area of jingoism… well, they seem to believe all the Monarch thinks of is them, here, on the banks of the Macleay. Never mind. You’ll read about the whole pompous affair in the Chronicle. Dealt with according to the lesser Muse of whimsy, the only Muse to give yours truly the time of any day.”

The Offhand grinned, nearly wistful, and got down from his stool, gathering himself for a return to his newspaper. Whereas Tim had the eternal deliveries to do, which were the office of the grocer. The counterpart of milking the cows.

As he crested the top of River Street in West, Constable Hanney was blurred by heat haze. He came from the direction of the upriver settlements, and in the afternoon humidity he and his horse made no show of liveliness.

The dead hour of the afternoon, quarter to three, and every westward blind in River Street drawn against a sun still evilly high above lavender-coloured mountains to the west. Women who came to the back doors to take Tim’s orders, made up to their request, looked stewed and wiped their upper lips with handkerchiefs and asked Tim when it would end, this calm, deadly heat.

Now, at the sight of Hanney, it seemed to Tim that Missy was instantly back with him, standing sideways at Mrs. Catton’s front fence. Her features were more sharply defined in apparition than were Kitty’s and Winnie Malcolm’s in memory.

“Quiet for Jesus’s sake!” said Tim. He made himself appear busy by moving butterboxes around in the back of the dray.

When Hanney drew nearer and clearer, out of the haze, Tim saw that his navy collar was undone. He wore an old pair of white breeches tucked into his boots, and a white pith helmet on his head. The breeches had streaks of reddish dust on them. Work at the washing tub for Mrs. Hanney. He rode a big-bellied police mount, and that implied he had been to the remoter parts, up the Armidale Road, where the hard mountain terraces of the track to New England did lots of damage to carriage work.

Tim finished with the cart and now waited as he had recently waited for Bandy, though this time waving one arm slowly and without the tension of threat. Hanney hardly had to rein in to make the police horse stop.

“Comara, that’s where,” said Hanney out of stubbled jaw and in answer to the question Tim didn’t need to ask. “I’ve been on patrol all the way to bloody Comara.”

“Holy God,” said Tim. Comara more than fifty rough miles up the Macleay. Tim looked at the nearer of the policeman’s big saddlebags. Was she there, enduring her hard journey? And still unnamed?

Hanney said, “Christ, I’m fed up, Tim!” His big rectangular face was pink, and there was a coating of sweat or prickly heat under his chin, and down the V of his unbuttoned shirt. Poor big lump.

Tim said, “You’d think there aren’t many that could possibly know her at a place like Comara.”

“You’d be surprised. Some of the pastoralists’ sons… never fully buttoned up! Some of the pastoralists for that matter… It was thought, too, that maybe she came down the road from Armidale by coach. If someone said, Yes, we saw her stop here then I could send her to Armidale. The blokes up there could have the pleasure…”

He scratched his under-chin and looked so piteous.

“Are you able to drink a beer while in the Queen’s uniform?” asked Tim on a mad impulse. Once he’d uttered the idea, he remembered how Hanney had been unsteady from brandy on the holiday when Bert Rochester died.

“No bugger would mind after the journey I’ve had. I drank my last beer in Willawarrin last night. Dismal little town.”

“I’m at the end of deliveries. I could shout you.”

“You’re a bloody white man, Shea. Make it fast as you can.”

Yet they were a mile from the nearest pub.

“My shout then,” said Tim.

“Thank you, son!”

It was strange though to be exercising the muscles of male joviality. Promising to shout. There was a small social cost in being seen drinking with a policeman. Cattle theft was a regular enterprise of the frequenters of some Kempsey pubs, and they did not like policemen in the bar. But he would not be back there to hear the regulars cry, “Drinking with a trap, Tim?”

Tim went to his cart and turned Pee Dee and it about in River Street’s torpid dust. The tired policeman travelled at his side down the hill. Hope no bugger thinks I’ve been arrested! But the ill-shaven policeman, with his big rectangular face in shadow and hung at an angle which had nothing to do with authority, looked himself under arrest.

The constable said, “I’ve even been to the blacks’ camps at Greenhill and Burnt Bridge. When I took out the flask, the black gins screamed pretty awful and threw up handfuls of dust in the air. An off-chance, of course, them knowing her. But I’ve always found them very honest in that regard. They don’t like to lie about the dead, the dusky brethren.”

“I reckon they know the dead have too much bloody power,” said Tim.

“Jesus! Especially in the form I have to present things.”

The way he shook his head, he looked more defeated than a officer of public order ever should. He showed Missy to black women. Did he show her to any white ones? Kitty hadn’t seen her, Tim was pretty sure.

There was a bakery at the bottom of River Street, and they rode through the pool of fragrance it made as the road turned, copying the bend in the river. Now they were in aptly named Elbow Street, the long low verandah of Kelty’s Hotel could be seen beyond Bryant’s store. It had a reputation as a rough house but no noise escaped today from beneath its low eaves. Everything in sight spoke of eternal life and fixity. Tim was in a mood to like the idea of the world having stopped under the day’s fierce hand. The sun never to go down. The river, set like a pudding in its banks, never to rise. The bread always fragrant. The award for false bravery never given. But then… Missy never named or delivered!

Some cream and butter haulage carts and a scatter of horses were tethered in the street, very still as if to prove the day’s point. Tim let the dismounted Constable Hanney go down the steps to Kelty’s low-slung verandah and so pass into the dark, fuggy warmth of Kelty’s public bar. As the policeman walked he rolled his spine to get the saddle soreness out. A few of the men in the public bar looked up at the strange company that had entered. Tim heard one of them murmur, “Come in, why don’t you bloody well?” Another muttered, “Commercial, bugger it!”

The Commercial in Central was better suited for talk between a constable and a grocer.

At the bar with the travel-dazed constable, Tim ordered two schooners which pale Mrs. Kelty poured, and he and Hanney took them to a table rather than stand at the bar. In one draft, Hanney drank half the schooner down.

“Oh, that’s fine,” he said at the end of the process, his eyes misting with the delight.

In the meantime, Tim found he’d rashly uttered aloud what was meant to be a private surmise. “You haven’t shown the girl to my wife, have you?”

Tim had never asked Kitty straight out. He would have been ashamed to give her a hint of the grasp Missy had on him.

“I don’t show it to respectable women,” said Hanney. “They would not have had contact with her after all. Except the Mulroney woman.”

“But women may have spoken with her.”

Hanney laughed, and wiped his long, doggy face. “Are you a bush lawyer or something, Tim? Let me tell you, whoever I’m looking for as witness is a fellow with a standing prick and no conscience.”

“You show it to the black gins though.”

“Well, it’s a good warning for them.”

Holy hell. Did the Police Commissioner in Sydney know the random and illogical way Hanney was carrying out his orders? Should he be told?

The policeman drank down the rest of his pot. Tim had barely sipped of the sour, heavy brew from kegs shipped up aboard Burrawong. He liked rum better than ale anyhow.

“I’m getting another,” said Hanney. “You?”

Tim said no, he would hold what he had for a while. He noticed that when Mrs. Kelty refilled Hanney’s pot, there was no exchange of cash. Hanney did not expect to pay; Mrs. Kelty to receive payment. His transaction however, or lack of transaction, changed him. He came back with a strange, frank gleam on his face, and sat down. Tim no longer felt as safe with him. What sort of fellow, forced to travel to Comara in awesome heat, missed out on trying to solve his puzzle by showing Missy’s features to women?

Hanney drank again and then stared at Tim from beneath a lowered brow.

“Look, you’re very interested in this, aren’t you? Strikes me you’ve got a load of interest in this Missy. I have to wonder. Why do you keep quizzing me? A man no sooner back from Comara…”

“I have a normal desire to see the poor child finished with.”

“A normal desire, eh?”

Tim felt now an unwelcome panic in his blood. How fast a uniform would turn on a person! How it divided man from man.

Deciding not to take a step back, Tim said, “Bugger it, constable. I claim to have no more pity than other fellers. But the girl’s face struck me very hard.”

“Enough to buy a constable a bloody ale,” commented Hanney pretty much to himself. “I’ve never known anyone to take so much interest. Upriver, you show Missy and they hold their heads on the side and say no, and that’s the end, she’s forgotten, the little slut. But not you, Tim. It’s the big interest of your bloody life.”

By now the new tack had enlivened Hanney. Tim wondered how he’d not noticed before how large the man’s hands were. Shall I be able to break such a grasp?

“You have something to tell me, Paddy?”

“My name’s not bloody Paddy. I was Tim when I bought you a drink.”

The constable raised his chin and drained his glass the second time. He had a good, defiant swallow. He put the nearly finished schooner down.

“And you can buy me a drink a second time, Tim.”

Tim said, “But then I’m going to leave. Back to the store. My wife…”

“Do you think I am a leper?”

“Not on the strength of a few jars. But you’ve already started to rave.”

Men at the bar were frankly turning around now to sneer at the argument between the policeman with his poor capacity for liquor and the grocer from Central.

“If I took you in for some long questioning on the matter… do you think that would do your business any good?”

“You know it wouldn’t.”

“Well, I won’t yet anyhow. I’m too buggered.”

A blowfly distracted Hanney by swimming noisily in a little pond of ale on the table. Hanney’s gaze got stuck on that area of standing liquor, and the insect’s agitated desire to stupefy and drown itself there.

“You know, you’re a tall feller to be married to such a short woman,” he said, still watching the fly. “I’d say you’ve probably got other women. Taller girls. Missy was taller.”

“As a matter of fact, I don’t have any interest in other women.”

Almost true. Mrs. Malcolm an exception. An Australian incarnation of Tennyson’s heavenly girls.

“Get me that beer though,” said Hanney. He did not seem capable now of raising his eyes from the small lake of spilled beer and the fly. Tim took both pots up to the bar. He put down a two shilling piece in front of Mrs. Kelty and said nothing.

“Mad bastard,” she said without moving her lips.

“Me or the copper?” muttered Tim. No one could hear that. “Make mine a smaller one.”

She nodded minutely, her stewed-looking brow. She was used to muttered arrangements. Kelty himself lay in the cool cellar most of the day, asleep amongst all the fermentation. Where had liquor got its reputation from, its name for joviality? Tim felt a genuine but enlarged dread taking the beer back to big Hanney, who had managed now to loll back and take thought about the ceiling. His white breeches and black boots seemed to take up a lot of space between the few tables.

“Truth is I’m like you, you hapless bastard,” Hanney said. He sat forward, applied himself and drank some more, but his mouth was sour when it rose again from the rim of the glass. He drank far too fast, but Tim wasn’t going to tell him that.

He covered his eyes with both great hands which could just as easily have taken hold of Tim and forced him into custody. Tim could hear him groaning from behind the fingers. It was a short little session of gasps, and it ended soon.

“Aaah,” said the constable, clearing his hands away from his face now. “No decent sleep, that’s the problem.”

In fact he stretched his arms straight across the table and laid his head on them and got ready to sleep.

“Dear God,” said Tim. “We must get you home.”

“Home’s not home,” Hanney murmured.

This was said not necessarily for Tim’s instruction.

The drinkers at the bar, and Mrs. Kelty herself, laughed to see the grocer trying to help the constable to his feet.

“Put the bastard in charge, Tim,” one of the men called. “Charge him with all the bloody heifers gone missing!”

It was a relief to push Hanney outside, let down the tailboard of the cart, sit the constable on the tray, jump up yourself, haul him along so that he lay flat. Bugger, his hat was still inside. Tim jumped down and walked in again and took it from the table, and that made the drinkers double up with hilarity. Tim and the hat, Victoria’s laughed-at crown on the front of it.

“Your hat,” said Tim outside again, putting it in beside prone Constable Hanney.

Then tether the weary police horse to the tailboard. No mockery echoed out here, in this silent, stolid air.

Now they started off for Hanney’s house in Cochrane Street. Slow, slow. No quick pace likely. They waded through swamps of light towards Central but turned left then. And there in Kemp Street, Habash’s wagon parked. Habash labouring out of a house carrying three bolts of linen he’d taken in there for some wife’s consideration. Habash stood still with his eyes lit.

“Mr. Shea,” he called tentatively.

Tim shook the reins. Pee Dee increased his pace a little. Gracious of the bugger!

Habash of course saw the prone constable in the back.

“But what are you doing, Mr. Shea?”

“Taking Constable Hanney home. He grew sick upriver.”

“Ever the man of mercy, old chap,” Habash yelled after him. “You see. Ever the man!”

“Go to buggery!” Tim called.

They rounded the corner of Cochrane and he pulled up outside the right house. A dreary little weatherboard place, with a low-slung verandah, the designated house for New South Wales constables of police.

Missy’s unreliable constable. Missy’s berserk officer of peace. Who showed her to some, protected her from others. Ease him down and prop him up and take the side gate. Then there could be at the front door no problem or scene observable from the street. Let it be backyard drama, if there had to be a drama. Backyard smells—shit and creosote from the jakes, a sourness from the refuse pile, a fragrance of split wood from the pyramidal woodheap.

Tim didn’t have to knock. Large Mrs. Hanney appeared at the door and advanced down the steps. She had delicate shoulders, spacious hips, and wore the broiled complexion which suited the season and which all citizens were wearing. Macleay fashions.

“Oh God!” she said. “Did you give him drink?”

Laden with the constable’s enormous weight, Tim could barely get an answer together before she said, “Every damned fool knows he can’t take drink. Hell and damnation, who are you? You’re that grocer, aren’t you?”

“I met your husband on the edge of town. Coming back from Comara. Pretty down, missus. Pretty thirsty.”

“Everyone knows it!” she accused Tim again.

“Missus, I didn’t know. It’s not written up in Chambers’ Encyclopedia.”

She had picked up a broom from inside the door. It was possible she intended an attack.

“No, but it’s written on his forehead, isn’t it? You can all bloody tell. He’s a butt. Sergeant Fry sends him around with a head in a bottle. Damned great laugh! And you get him drunk pretty cheaply and drop him back so I have to tidy up his misery.”

“Madame, I’m not in a plot with anyone. I don’t know Sergeant Fry. Could I lay your husband down somewhere?”

Mrs. Hanney squeezed her eyes shut and raised her face, complaining to the eaves.

“I have no life. I have no damned life. All right. Bring him in.”

But at least she put the broom down. It proved nearly impossible to get big Hanney up the steps. Mrs. Hanney had to help in the end. Struggling with the bulky policeman, Tim wondered would either of them have it in for him over this. Want his head. Forevermore.