A River Town (10 page)

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.