A River Town (32 page)

On a cleansed and overcast morning, Kitty and Mamie and the other
Burrawong
passengers were loaded on a drogher with
Burrawong’
s cargo and made a slow, long passage up the Macleay. People who saw them coming ran up and down Smith and Belgrave Streets announcing it. Those who needed to meet the drogher came up to Central wharf with a strange reluctance. His foot in a sock, and supporting himself on a blackthorn, so that louts outside the Commercial called, “Dot and carry one!” Tim took Annie down there to see the drogher berth. Others watched it from their windows and under their eaves, and then pretended they weren’t much interested. But of course, you needed to be interested. Even in him an unreasonable voice asked was this slow, blunt vessel the plague’s fatal bark?

In both the papers this morning, a letter had appeared from Captain Reid:

The captain’s letter however was followed by another from someone who signed himself
Sanitas
, some old cow-cocky from downriver, complaining that there’d been “various improprieties” in the handling of the
Burrawong
during her time in quarantine at the New Entrance. The droghers which were designated to bring cargo and passengers to Kempsey were permitted to lie beside
Burrawong
at night, and there existed the possibility of rats infected by the plague passing aboard the droghers and thence to settlements along the river. The sanitation officer, said
Sanitas
, had to prevent droghers from lying beside
Burrawong
at night. “The capacity of the flea to travel is nothing short of prodigious …”

So the scholarly farmer continued, pealing his verbal klaxon on the Macleay. No wonder people looked warily as the drogher, laden with provisions and passengers, now neared the wharf.

Telling Annie to be careful, Tim stumbled with her down the
embankment towards the river bank itself and, dear God, there was Bandy.

“Mr. Shea,” said Bandy, formally bowing, as if again they had become strangers.

“Well then, Bandy.”

“Mr. Shea,” said Bandy. “I thought the women might need help with their baggage.”

They were bound together in Constable Hanney’s accusations now, so Tim bowed and said, “Very thoughtful of you, Bandy.”

Not a dramatic landing for Mamie the emigrant, not from a drogher. At this tide, the gangplank slanted up to the wharf from the hard-laden deck. Mamie and Kitty waving from the deck, and Joe O’Neill smiling wanly too, banjo-less, a little behind them. Still tormented, poor scoundrel, by Mamie. Kitty plumply pointing towards him, tapping her upper leg. Asking what’s wrong with his?

Tim making soothing motions with his free hand.

At last, after the commercial travellers had hustled back and forth on the narrow gangplank, landing their bags of samples, the sisters struggled up to the wharf. Not even gallant Bandy could get aboard to help the sisters up such a busy plank. Kitty helped ashore by Mr. Joe O’Neill, who then boarded again and came ashore with his and Mamie’s bags. He was strong enough in his desire to carry them all the way to West.

“No fuss, I had a fall, I’ll tell you,” said Tim as Kitty embraced him. Annie hid her face from Mamie and clung to Kitty’s skirts. “I suppose you’d like presents?” said Kitty, grinning down. The girl would grow up taller than her mother. You could see it already in her four-and-a-half-year-old frame.

“I know you have presents, mama.”

“I do. I have lovely things. They are for nice girls who say hello to their Aunt Mamie.”

So all the greetings were made. “Say hello to Mr. O’Neill who comes from near where Mama and Aunt Mamie come in Cork.”

What did Annie think Cork was? The other side of the moon.

Joe had come ashore with Mamie’s sea trunk, and Bandy made certain he went aboard to get Kitty’s. As if to keep the honours even. Tim said, “Didn’t bother hitching up the old feller. I’ll get Naylor’s cab to bring your sea chest down to the residence.”

“Not at all,” said Kitty. “Mr. Habash would do it for us, wouldn’t you?”

At this announcement by his wife, Tim felt rising within him a persisting reluctance at being espoused by Habash. Better that honest Joe O’Neill labour down Smith Street with both on his back.

“No, Mr. Habash has work to do,” said Tim. “I will go and hitch up Pee Dee. It’s no trouble.”

“Nonsense, nonsense, nonsense,” said Kitty. And knowing who was in charge, O’Neill and Bandy were already setting off up the embankment with one of the sea chests. Up there, unnoticed before by Tim, stood Bandy’s green wagon.

“How can you make deliveries with that ankle?” asked Kitty.

“It’s difficult just now.”

“Well, Joe’ll make them for you while he’s waiting for his relatives to turn up.”

Having arranged the muscle power of the men, Kitty took Annie by the hand and mounted the ramp to Smith Street.

Smith Street, where Mamie walked past the banks, the creamery, the Good Templars’ Hall with the demeanour of a native. Typical of Red Kenna’s children, she took things as they presented. This was, he was sure yet again, a gift.

He did not mar the homecoming, the stories of the voyage, the time in Sydney, the quarantine, by telling Kitty about Johnny’s adventure, though Johnny came home from day school looking wary and frightened, suspecting that the tale had been told. He was by now bandage-less, and his hair was growing back, so there was nothing to alert the new arrivals.

Ellen Burke had made another good stew, and its pungency came in from the cookhouse and filled the residence like a solid caress. Bandy had been invited to dinner, and Joe O’Neill was ecstatic to be staying under a roof with Mamie. More or less under a roof anyhow. There was no bed for him in the house but he would spread some blankets outside by the shed. If he had any of the Irishman’s normal advanced dread of serpents, he was willing to forget it for Mamie’s sake. Big red-bellied blacksnakes had once or twice been found on the verandah, yet were timid unless trodden
on. Nonetheless, made a big dent in a fellow’s composure. Joey would fight them for Mamie.

Since business proved slow in the afternoon, Tim wondered did people know Kitty had come down on the drogher? Did they fear she’d pass the plague to them along with the crackers and cheese?

Look in the
Argus
for plague-news and the hope of sighting a new letter to grace the day of Kitty’s return. And it was there! Page nine.

Tim laid his hand emphatically a number of times on the page. Fair enough, fair enough,
Australis
.

But who had written these letters? A farmer with time to think? Yet the address was Central Kempsey. Was that a mere blind? Who was this Thomas Paine of the Macleay?

He went through a list in his head. Old Burke upriver at Pee Dee had time enough and adequate disgruntlement to write these. But they were not his opinions. He was not
for
Federation. He was in favour purely of running Pee Dee station as he wished under a regime of free trade and low tax. So Old Burke had not written these. Borger, the farmer who had spoken up at the Patriotic Fund meeting in the Good Templars? Certainly Borger, you would think. It was pure
Freeman’s Journal
stuff.

Well, good for the lad, though he would suffer. He might take his cream to the butter factory and find it turned back by some fellow worried about far, far South Africa. It was the one thing wrong with the country. People were too in love with other quarters of the globe and not enough with this place itself. To an emigrant, the Macleay was sufficient kingdom. You couldn’t tell the women that, of course. Kitty loved reading the Palace news. Didn’t see any of it as political. It was purely a matter of tiaras, blood-lines, balls and regattas. If you wanted to be strict about it, as
Australis
obviously did, you could say that the women were abettors of the high loyalism of New South Wales. But then why shouldn’t they enjoy themselves, reading about fanciful things?

In late afternoon, more rain to soothe the burnt pastures upriver. Old Kylie from the Good Templars came around under a big black umbrella asking for donations for farmers who had lost their stock, their crops, their outbuildings. Contributions over ten shillings would be published in the list of donations to appear in both the
Argus
and
Chronicle
. Tim went into the storeroom, to the black and red cash box. He opened it with the key from his fob and took out a ten bob banknote. A green pound note beckoned
to him. Ten bob contributors would be the lowest on the list. In the face of fines and threats, he would show his open-handedness. He knew the crime of vanity beckoned. People on the way to Mass calling out to him with respect and then muttering to each other that he was a good fellow and always ready to extend credit. He loved to be suspected of generosity beyond his means. Besides, poor buggers had lost their stock, their horses and cattle, and could go broke.

He took the thirty shillings, the one pound ten, out to old Kylie. Lunacy. The old man whistled and wrote him a receipt. “This is very generous of you, Mr. Shea. Not all the tradespeople are as generous as this!”

One in the eye for Ernie Malcolm.

Through the rain
without
an umbrella came Joe O’Neill slightly aglow and his lips a little thick. Stammery. He’d been to the Commercial to meet the natives, and now was coming to dinner carrying bottles of lager and stout cradled in his arms. If the rain kept up he would have to sleep in the cart in the shed.

“I think I’ll like this place,” he told Tim, coming into the store and shaking himself. It would have been the Offhand who pumped almost too much grog into Joe, asking him for impressions of recent events in Ireland and the British Isles. Would Ireland ever get Home Rule, or had Home Rule run aground for good on the snowy white breast of Mrs. O’Shea (a Kitty like his), mistress of the late, great Parnell? And so on. Ireland suffering mortally from Parnell’s mortal lusts, and Joe passing on the news to the Offhand on the Northern Rivers of New South Wales.

Joe had the look of an emigrant who believed he’d settled in already. A few pints with the natives had done it. With the denizens. But there was no chance that he’d make an easy voyager, the way Mamie did. When he got out to his relatives and started to live in his slab hut, the silence and otherness would get to him, and he’d be struck by a big bush melancholy.

At dinner, Joe and Mamie took the chance to tell further tales of the voyage. An extraordinary thing, a voyage of that extent. When you are on it, you think that you would be able to talk by the hour about it afterwards. But there is something you can’t convey about the sea’s repetitive sunsets and dawns, about the variations of
swell, about porpoises seen off the stern, about the ferocity of sea sickness. The other mistake you made was to think that life after you landed would be as varied as that. A frustration that in giving a picture of the voyage, you made it sound as ordinary as the rest of life.

When it came to taking places at table, Mamie insisted on sitting between Kitty and Bandy Habash. Then the children down one side, and Joe O’Neill and Ellen Burke at the foot, looking a little wan together. Tim praised Ellen to Kitty, and recounted now the accidents which had marked her absence.

“Holy Mary,” said Kitty, “Pee Dee. And Angelus tower! If I’d stayed away another week, you’d all be dead!”

But tonight it seemed a comic rather than fatal possibility. Joe O’Neill flicked Johnny’s ear playfully, and even Tim found himself laughing.

A number of bottles of stout and ale had been opened with the soup, and everyone was drinking freely except for Bandy.