They both watched through the glass as a white horse drawing a sulky pig-rooted while turning into Smith Street outside T. Shea—General Store. The horse did not send up much dust since the road was baked hard now, and after the intense storms it had grown quite hot again. They saw Meagher, a publican, beefy but with very fine, good-looking features, fighting with the reins, looking too heavy for his sulky.
“Ah,” said the Offhand, puffing away. “Tim, there’s a parable for you. How decency brings its own ruin!”
Meagher managed to wrench his horse and buggy around the corner, heading towards the Wharf Hotel, which he owned.
“He still walks with a limp you know,” said the Offhand.
Tim knew.
“No good deed goes without its proper punishment,” said the Offhand, smiling at that truth.
The events they were reflecting on concerned a man called Slater, who had been a heavy client of Meagher’s Wharf Hotel. The drink, as people curiously say, had got him. Mr. Meagher was a scrupulous man, and concerned for Slater’s wife and children. He’d begun returning money to the wife at her house in West Kempsey, saying that Mr. Slater had accidentally left it behind. Such delicacy of feeling on Meagher’s part was fabled. It was believed he’d done similar things before. Mrs. Slater had been revived by Meagher’s kindness. They had begun a romance.
Impossible for these things to happen in the Macleay without people finding out. When Mrs. Meagher discovered it, she took their son and daughter and went to live in Sydney. When drunken Slater found out, he attended the Wharf Hotel with an axe and hacked poor Meagher in the ribs and the hip. Arrested, of course, Slater was tried and shipped on Burrawong to Darlinghurst jail. Mrs. Slater moved away from the Macleay in acute shame, and Meagher was left with his pub. He limped around the bar, weary of the whispered jokes of drinkers. And whatever people paid him now, he kept. He did not try any straight-out refunds to the widows and orphans of those men good-as-dead who lived for grog. Because he had grief of his own, one good leg left, and barely half a life.
Dragging these mysteries behind him in tiny puffs of sun-glinting grit from the hard pavement, Meagher vanished out of sight and pretty much out of light, bound for his dark front bar.
“He’s been to Corrigan’s funeral,” said the Offhand. “Cousin of his. Does Meagher still take the Catholic sacraments, would you say?”
“He goes to Communion, but people point him out.”
“Well, where would this town be without pointings-out? And makings of loyal lists. It’s enough to make a scribe turn mischievous. I came to tell you. Look out for some mischief in tomorrow’s paper, Tim.”
The Offhand finished his Woodbine and stubbed out the nose of it and put it in his side pocket. He always did that. You’d see him handing them out by the fistful to this or that blackfellow from Greenhill. Charitable according to his means. Like poor bloody Meagher.
He could hear his children out the back, playing around the shed and paddock. Well-married, well-fathering Tim Shea. But without Kitty today. Dear God, the little buggers were making a noise. Even Annie shouting out some ditty. He’d go out the back and see what was exciting them.
In the shade of the shed, Bandy Habash and Ellen Burke sat together applauding a song Annie was singing in a reedy voice. Johnny doing his normal stuff, hand-walking and somersaults to entertain the hawker.
Here was a fellow he refused to be charmed by, the man he’d warned off so frequently. Yet the children had behind their father’s back been mesmerised into performing for the bugger. Here too the protector of his children laughed in the man’s company. Tim felt not only the anger of being betrayed but as well the instant fury Habash seemed always and at an instant to call forth in him. Certainly it was that Habash was a brown man, but most of all that he was an insinuator of himself into places, into roles, where Tim resented finding him. The image of Kitty in yellow cloth recurred to him as flaming proof of this.
Tim did not want his children to hear the full force of his anger. They were not at fault. Ellen was. Johnny sensed a change in his audience, saw his father, and stood upright and still.
“You and Annie go to the shop. Go on, go on. Tell any people that your papa’s coming. Go on!”
Annie stopped her singing, inspected him, frowned, and placed her hand in her brother’s. They went together. The duchess and the bloody vagabond. Bandy had risen from the log and looked crestfallen already, his face as smooth and as pausable as an infant’s. No flashiness to him though. An ordinary brown suit and an open collar. The girl displayed pursed, full lips and her brow was flushed as she stood. But she looked for her age a bit defiant as well. Her hands folded, but not contritely. Seventeen-year-olds were meant to be easily made contrite.
“You have been put in my charge by your parents,” Tim told her, “and I’ve put my children in your charge.”
Ellen Burke worked her tongue inside her jaws. Was she getting together the spit for an argument?
“Mr. Habash is a great friend of my family’s, uncle,” she said.
So that part of Bandy’s oft-repeated argument was correct.
“When he comes to Pee Dee, he’s allowed to camp in the home paddock.”
“Then,” Tim argued, “he’s got a better sight reputation at Pee Dee than he has here in town.”
Bandy stepped in between Ellen and Tim. “It is the case, Mr. Shea. I am not here on business. I am here renewing friendship.”
“You’re like the bloody hydra, Bandy. Kick one head and another arises to take you in the backside. And besides, you, Ellen! He wasn’t a hundred yards from the bloody door in the home paddock. He was beside you on a log.”
Tim again expected her to step back or turn away enraged, leaving him alone to chastise Bandy Habash if it were possible. But she stood up to him. She was ferocious.
She said, “We girls from the bush have an easier manner than women do in that terrible old place you all talk about all the time. I’m pleased I’m an Australian, and let me tell you, Ellen and Kitty came here to have an easier manner without being shouted at! I think you’re trying to suggest something else than manners though, Uncle Tim. And since you think I’m that sort of person, I’ll see the children fed, go to Mrs. Manion’s tonight, and wait there till the Friday coach up the river.”
“Jesus, you won’t! On your own responsibility? No.”
Ellen Burke marched off down the yard. Tim turned on Habash.
“Will you go?”
Bandy stood straight, spreading his fingers at his sides and then drawing them back into a fist.
“Mr. Shea,” he said pleadingly. “It seems I cannot do anything to suit you.”
“All the more reason to clear out to blazes. I don’t look to be pleased by you. I don’t look for you to break the bloody horizon more than is necessary.”
Bandy swallowed. “Yet the rest of your clan likes me, old chap. You think you do not need to look at me. But you are not ignorant like others. You understand that my God is your God and my prophets your prophets. And you can see that you and I are in the same club. For even amongst Christians there are the despised and the despisers. I would remind you of that.”
Ah. Cunning, cunning little bastard.
And he continued. “I may be a jockey the Turf Club won’t license, but it may happen, since these things do happen, that you will one day need me for a friend. What am I then to make of your hostility, Mr. Shea? Even a man of my equable nature can be tested too far.”
“Believe me to the limit, Habash! I won’t want anything you have.”