A River Town (6 page)

That flood had been a flood out of a prophecy. A chastisement unlikely to recur. So forceful that the river found a new way into the sea near Trial Bay. The New Entrance. Such had been the vigour of the Macleay. It had negotiated a new arrangement, dictating terms of its own with the Pacific Ocean. Kitty, arriving later, didn’t understand how bloody strenuous the huge event had been. “Flood, flood,” she’d complained. “All you hear on every side is
flood
.”

For she hadn’t seen the way young Wooderson and he rowed out from their moorage, which happened to be the upper floor of the Commercial Hotel, to rescue the Kerridges from the roof of their house in Elbow Street. The current terrible to push against, and on the way back with Kerridge and his wife and two children, they’d seen a chest of drawers sail past. Wooderson, being such a good swimmer, had actually got into the flood and attached a rope to it, and the flow of water had swept it and the boat and them back to the Commercial.

In case the
Book of Floods Part Two
struck Kempsey, he had acquired a rowboat, in which he sometimes took the children out on the river. When not so used, it was kept tethered on a long lead, like a goat, in the yard. A prayer against further floods. A child, he knew, was a wafer before the force of the water. And Lucy, the wafer of a child beside him, had been through that, would have been an infant in Glenrock, would have been taken onto the iron roof by her mother and father to wait things out. The range of perils which surrounded young flesh. This was what astounded Tim more than he could ever express.

He hoped she still wasn’t pushing Africa round in her head: the possible locale where Albert Rochester might have been safe.

“Do you like Mrs. Sutter’s place?” he asked.

As ever, she answered in the way she chose. “Mrs. Sutter was mama’s and papa’s best friend of all.”

For relief from the features of Hanney’s Missy, he’d happily clung to Kitty last night, but it had been so hot she did not welcome that. For some hours before going to bed, he had known that once he
put his head on the pillow and turned the wick down on the storm lantern, he would feel lost in a particular way. And it had happened. He had felt too nakedly what he was: the lost man on the furtherest river bank of the remotest province. But terrible to apprehend it, awful to feel wadded away under distance. A sort of—what was it?—twelve or thirteen thousand mile high column of distance under which he had managed to pin himself.

Now poor Rochester could nearly be safely thought of in the dark. In this sense: Rochester lived, Rochester perished in a fall from his sulky and while insensible was attacked by beasts. It was different with the girl who’d been cut about by someone who could smile. She was dreadfully everywhere, a face begging its name back.

Predictable dreams of her followed, of course, and their pungency remained by daylight and flavoured the act of getting rid of Lucy.

On the tranquil hill, Mrs. Sutter the widow had two gates, one canopied, and another one at the side marked
TRADESMEN’S ENTRANCE
. Her late husband himself probably put it there. So much nonsense under the gumtrees. A gate for the afternoon tea gentry to enter, and a gate for others to deliver wood and ice and groceries.

You’d think by that label on the gate that beyond Mrs. Sutter’s bungalow lay hundreds of villagers, dozens of tenant-farmers. And in Kempsey the main gate and tradesmen’s gate lay within a short spit of each other. He was buggered if he was going to take Mrs. Sutter’s suitor’s orphans in by the side gate.

Palm off Lucy and Hector to make a place for Kitty’s sister. Kitty would have had to have nominated her. A form would have come from the New South Wales Department of Immigration, and she would have needed to sign it. But it had taken the sudden arrival of orphans to make her mention it. Jesus, the slyness!

And at the moment he seemed to get, from the direction of Mrs. Sutter’s bungalow, a whiff of slyness too. Widowed once, she had now been widowed in a certain sense again. She’d had none of the joy of drinking tea with, none of the secure married talk with poor Rochester. But now she would be offered his children.

He heard the noise of her children inside now, and holding the little boy’s hand, he knocked on the yellow front door with its panels of pebbled glass. No one came for some time, and then a boy of about eleven opened the door, grabbed the Rochester children in by the hand and told Tim, “Mama’s round the back.” The door was closed in his face. Tim went around the flank of the yellow house. You could smell the hot, moist odour of the spaces under the house. The Sutter residence had the honour of standing on brick piers. The idea of air circulating beneath the floor had seemed an odd one to him when he first arrived. On top of the moist earth smell there was a tang of sweet corruption from the garbage tip of the yard, but between him and that rankness lay the smell and then the sight of soap-cleansed sheets blowing on a breeze.

A woman wore boots amongst the great flags of bedclothing. Mrs. Sutter, dark-haired and tall, narrow in the shoulders, well-set in the hips. An occasional customer of his. A lot of people worked on the principle of spreading custom around, because you never knew when you’d need to spread your debts out a bit as well.

She came forward to him, her hands out, pallid from the soap and water.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, you were so brave, Mr. Shea.”

He didn’t know what she was talking about.

“You relieved poor Bert’s last moments, a friendly face bending over him. Constable Hanney told me.”

She began to weep. She smoothed her tears sideways with big, lovely, soapy hands.

“There was another man there,” said Tim.

“Yes, the hawker. God Almighty, that wouldn’t have been a particular comfort to Bert.”

He found himself in defence of Bandy Habash. “He behaved very, very well, Mrs. Sutter.” For one damn thing, he dealt with the horse who would have still been thrashing and heaving out there if he hadn’t. “He’s not a bad little chap.”

“Yes, but I know that you directed the rescue,” she said.

She didn’t know what a pitiable state Bert had been in. Bert in his ending needed the help of all parties.

Tim said, “I brought his two children with me. Both of them are
indoors with yours. The girl Lucy. More presence than a judge, that Lucy. And then the poor little boy.”

He saw tall Mrs. Sutter, whose face poor de-faced Rochester had dwelt on, look away. He knew it was bad news. It astounded him the way women could set limits. The mothers and the motherers, and yet they always had definite ideas about what could be done with ease, and what the boundaries of content were.

Mrs. Sutter inhaled and was gathering herself for an answer when three or four children burst from the back steps. A boy, three girls and the children with whom he was now as familiar as if they had emigrated with him. Lucy, Hector. The oldest Sutter boy had proposed some sort of roughhouse, some racing around. Lucy stood back, weighing what it meant. Sharp-featured and calm. What a daughter! She did not blunder into things like the boy Hector. Every course she took a chosen one.

They all went shrilling off around the side of the house towards the front. Towards the Tradesmen’s Entrance. Lucy ran behind them, inspecting the Sutter yard as if she’d never seen it before.

Mrs. Sutter took a pair of child’s bloomers out of a basket, pegged them to the line, but then seemed to need to hang on to them for a sort of support. She stared very hard at the wet fabric.

“I’ll take the boy. But Bert wouldn’t have expected me to take the girl. She hates me. I’ve got no affection for her.”

“Is there someone else then?” asked Tim. “Who can take her? I have a third child on its way, and then my sister-in-law is emigrating, due here on the Aberdeen Line …”

“There’s no one else I can think of. I wondered would the nuns take her? Get somewhere with her? You know the nuns, don’t you? Wonderful music-teachers.”

He waited for her to say she could help with the expense. He was damned if he would mention it and draw her grudgingly into some undertaking. She let go of the bloomers and stood up and looked at him directly.

“
She
was the problem with Bert and me. She didn’t like me and did brutal things to the other children. Just to keep me in my place. She’s a brutal little thing.”

“I hadn’t noticed that.”

Mrs. Sutter looked away across her well-ordered backyard. Her
garbage heap far off at the back fence. Her woodheap in order against the side fence. You could bet Bert had cut the wood and stacked it for her a week back, on some visit. The palpable benefits of marriage. Stacked wood, cut in regular sizes. A mound of kindling and a tidy little wall of split softwood. Tears appeared on Mrs. Sutter’s long lashes.

“But for her I would have been widowed twice, I suppose. I can’t live with her. Take her to the nuns. She is a destroying little soul. You’d think they would extend their charity to her and do her some benefit. I’m sorry about all this when you’ve already been so good …”

But however sorry she might be, Mrs. Sutter was implacable. She went on pegging her clothes.

“It occurred to me though,” said Tim. “Whether you’d buy the farm.”

“Oh no. No, there’s nothing for me in the farm. There’s something for the bank.”

Five minutes later, out the front by Tim’s wagon, the two Rochester children were making a supervised farewell to each other.

Hector cried, but Mrs. Sutter’s son and four girls began to distract him. Mrs. Sutter herself issued formal instructions from a distance. “Kiss good-bye to your sister now.”

Tim began offering Lucy consideration. “I’ll bring you to see him on the weekends.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Sutter. “Perhaps for tea on Sundays.”

Limited to such a small set of future reunions, Lucy gave her tear-stained brother an embrace more muscular than emotional. It was a hug which carried a sort of promise of return in it. Lucy climbed up into the cart without being asked to—she seemed to be too proud to face being directed as her brother had. Tim took the reins and turned Pee Dee’s head. Rolling downhill at last from Hector’s sadness, he could hear the widow and her children kindly turning young Hector’s attention to the Sutters’ aged dog.

“Well,” Tim said, shaking Pee Dee into a trot. “Your brother has a good billet there, eh. For you we might need to see the nuns. It’s good there I hear. Girls the one age as you. In from the farms. Friends to make. And no milking. Mind you, the nuns
do
have a
cow or two, and the boarders take it in turns to milk. But that’s not every morning, is it?”

She said calmly, “I don’t mind milking. I have a poddy calf called Chuckles.” Her tough little hands were folded in her lap.

“You understand … there might be others who have a claim on the farm.”

She said nothing. Was she thinking of farms elsewhere that could be held on to?

“My own boy, Johnny. I’m sending him to the nuns from May. Sooner if the little ruffian gets into trouble. The boarding students down there … they complain about food. Well, you’ll have no need to. I’ll make sure you’ve got ham and chocolate, and a regular supply of cocoa.”

So these were items of the world’s trade to a doubting little orphaned heart. A full can of Fry’s Cocoa. She didn’t seem to take notice. Too busy tasting the world, gauging what it would do to her, doubtful of what he said to explain it to her.

“The Sisters of Mercy,” he muttered, more for his own comfort than hers.

“But I’ll need my clothes,” she told him suddenly.

“Of course you will, of course.”

“Hector will need his too. Mrs. Sutter’ll wash his, I suppose.”

Tim turned Pee Dee’s head towards Glenrock.

“Look,” lied Tim. “No one has anything against you.”

He knew she saw through that.

“I don’t have a thing against you. You’re a fine little woman. I wish there was room.”

“Your place is very small,” she stated. Letting him off the hook. Putting him on it.

Albert Rochester’s little farmhouse on a slope in Glenrock was the standard one they gave you a diagram of in
A Guide for Immigrants and Settlers
. It was supported not on piers of brick like Mrs. Sutter’s but on stumps of trees capped with a plate of zinc to defeat termites. It was unpainted, and the door had no lock. The inside walls, Tim found when he and Lucy entered, were not lined, but pasted over with old
Herald
s and
Chronicle
s and
Argus
es. The energetic
North Coast spiders had filled in every panel of the wall frames with misty web.

There was a note on the scrubbed kitchen table which said,

Some shirts and underwear hanging from a string by the dead fire. They were Bert’s and the boy’s and a chemise of the girl’s. Let Mrs. Sutter, Bert’s near-wife, sort Bert’s stuff out. But the girl went over and took the chemise and folded it up and put it in a sugar bag which had till now lain on a chair. She took the bag into the other room, and he could see her through the open door putting other things in it. He noticed a picture of thin Bert and his pinched wife on the deal dresser at the end of the room. A wedding picture. Mrs. Rochester stood up to her wedding day wearing a hat, and the little hands she was to give Lucy were meekly folded in front of her. Blessed was she meek and hers was the kingdom of heaven these days, where, if what was taken as gospel had any value, she had got Bert back and was consoling him again.

It was nearly out of his mouth to tell Lucy to take the photo. He was close to saying, “While you’re here you’ll want to …” But then he knew he’d be ashamed to see it in her hands, the reproach of her departed parents. It could be collected at another time. At the time of the final notice kindly Jim Coleman spoke of. If from anyone, the notice would probably come from the British Australia and New Zealand Bank. They would want to sell for certain. Mrs. Sutter had already said she wouldn’t buy Bert’s hard little hillside. She needed something like a pub instead, to feed all her children.