“Go,” said Tim. “I’ll be ten seconds behind.”
He ran down the street and turned into the laneway beyond his store and so to the gate of the paddock where Pee Dee, a bay with white markings, was still grazing and trying to pretend Tim would make no demands. An old Macleay racehorse himself, Pee Dee, a gelding of promise but of erratic temperament. Tim bought him two years ago and had an obstinate affection for the brute. He served Tim and Kitty both as a dray horse and occasionally as a fairly stylish hack. Only four years old, but his previous owner Mr. Milner had given up on him early. Too chancy in behaviour to race. He took to the shafts of the cart with disdain and only after lots of assurance. But he didn’t make quite the same outstanding objection to being ridden. Especially if you did not go to the trouble of bridle and reins and all that leather. Tim took one of the stacked sugar bags from the back verandah, grabbed a rope halter and mouthpiece from the shed, eased himself through the fence and approached Pee Dee with it all.
“Here we go, boy.”
He slung the sugar bag well forward on Pee Dee’s shoulders and worked the rope halter over his head. He led the unwilling and yet strangely tolerant horse to the gate and opened it. Then he took a handful of the beast’s mane with his left hand and clung as best he could to its withers with his right, and so hauled himself onto Pee Dee’s back, stomach first. Leaning low over the horse’s neck and with his arms extended a long way down the beast’s shoulders, he trotted Pee Dee out of the paddock and around the corner of the residence. Hitting Belgrave Street, Pee Dee fell into an apparently eager gait.
“OK,” said Tim leaning forward. “We’ll show that bloody Asiatic something, eh.”
In the street Habash was still waiting, wheeling his horse, impatient as a bloody chasseur of some kind.
But it became apparent as they set out that Habash’s mare was quite clearly tired now from all the racing Bandy had given it, and Pee Dee went frolicking after her, and they rounded the corner by Worthington’s butchery in tight convoy. They galloped leftwards into Forth Street, past the gardens of cottages whose owners were absent, steamer-picnicking townspeople. Pee Dee ahead, as he’d so rarely been on the racecourse, and relishing it. A few dogs chased them. Looking back, Tim saw the little wizened child with the bloody leg and the torn dress leaning back confidingly into Habash. She may even have fallen asleep. Tim felt Pee Dee’s backbone cut into his groin like a blade.
The Macleay River, renowned in its own shire, contained most of the town in a half circle. First, hilly West built up high above its steep-cut bank. Some of the better houses there, and—out beyond the last houses on the hard upriver road to Armidale—the Greenhill blacks’ reservation. Then low Central where the Sheas lived, convenient to wharfs but likely to flood. East then of course lay across the water from Central, reached by punt. Its own place, and not party to the dash Habash and Tim were now engaged on. They were making for the farmlands between West and Central, where the river had flowed earlier in its history and had left some fairly good soil for corn and cane-growing and for dairy cattle. Amongst the country fences and the milking sheds, Pee Dee drew enthusiastically clear of the grey. Mad and unpredictable bugger, he was! Showing the way up past Cochrane Street and over a low hill.
Ahead then you could see something, a terrible mess, a sulky pitched sideways over the edge of the road. Tim had to fight an urge to yank on the reins for fear of nearing the catastrophe on his own and seeing unguessable things. But you could not manage such subtle changes anyhow on Pee Dee and, given the primitive rope halter and reins, it was now a case of bloody Pee Dee surging on, performing well only when it was least suitable.
Thus he was first at the mess. “Oh merciful Jesus!” he said, jumping down, feeling light as a wafer, delivered of his heavy horse.
Seated wailing on the edge of the road, picking up handfuls of gravel and throwing them towards the wreckage down the slope, was a little boy of perhaps four. His targets seemed to be three pigs grazing down there.
Below lay an awfully wounded horse and the ruins of the sulky. One of the shafts had snapped and was stuck deep in the horse’s flank. The beast was writhing very weakly to work the stake loose. Impaled and lying on its side, it looked over its shoulder occasionally to get a glimpse of its injury. The hopeless wound did not invite close consideration and Tim did not give it any. A man in a suit lay on his back. He looked intact, even his clothes looked fresh, but O’Riordan’s three robust pigs were feeding on his head.
Tim slid down the claggy embankment. He did not necessarily want to do it but had to, couldn’t leave it to Habash. White man’s bloody burden in a year already tainted with woman-slaughter.
The poor bastard lay on rain-softened earth and even had a white flower in his buttonhole. Worn but clean white shirt, an eloquent, well-sewn button on the neck. No tie. A cow-cocky coming to town on the holiday. His head had been broken somehow, perhaps by the wheel, and the pigs had come in and eaten at his forehead and his nose. Cruel, cruel bloody world. Beheaded girls, defaced men. Jesus! The gravel thrown by the little boy had no impact at all upon the swine.
Bandy Habash was now descending from his grey, and lifted the small girl down.
Tim began kicking the pigs away. He wished he was armed to state his revulsion with more force. He lifted handfuls of shale to throw at them. But, squealing, they only retreated a certain distance, to see if his passionate objections would last. He felt the man’s wrist with his dusty hands. There seemed to be no life there but how could he tell? Tim’s hands were thickened by the rope reins and his brain clotted with the awfulness.
He heard a huge exhaling, a hiss, a brief gallop of the sulky horse’s breath. Turning, he saw that Habash, bloodied knife in hand, had cut into the side of the horse’s neck and found some decisive vein. Habash stood back delicately to avoid dirtying his boots. From the road, Pee Dee objected loudly to the released smell of horse blood.
“Yes,” Tim said to the hawker. “The right thing.”
The poor horse continued to thrash his legs very feebly but for a few seconds only.
Tim told the hawker, “Go and find one of the doctors.”
Bandy Habash cleaned his knife by plunging it into soft earth. He sighed, “No, old chap. My horse is tired out. You must go with this poor fellow. I shall take the children to your residence, sir, following behind.”
“How can I take him?” asked Tim. “His head such a bloody mess!”
But he knew how already and ran up the muddy slope again to the road.
“Papa, papa?” both the children were asking.
“I’m going to get him, darlings,” said Tim. He took the sugar bag saddle from Pee Dee’s back and descended the slope again with it. He asked Habash to hold the man upright by the shoulders, and then he placed the sugar bag over his head. Together, Habash by the armpits and he by the ankles, they got the man up to the horse while the children wailed.
“Now you know, Mr. Shea,” hissed Habash under the weight, “why we, like the Jews, think pigs unclean. Oh yes, unclean. Over the withers or over the rump?”
“Oh, Jesus,” said Tim. “Give me your saddle at least, and I’ll carry him over the shoulders.”
They put the man down for a while and found Pee Dee strangely tractable while the saddle was swapped and the girth adjusted. Kitty always said the horse was human. Then the man was lifted and balanced over Pee Dee’s very broad withers. The bag, despite the amounts of muck which affixed it in place, threatened to fall off his head. Habash produced string and tied it loosely around the man’s neck.