Pee Dee had not even seen the cattle yet.
But the drovers had seen him. They sent their dogs out in front of the herd, which were all over the road and footpaths, and rode hard themselves to wheel them, stop them and see what developed with the crazed Pee Dee.
Pee Dee at last scented the cattle.
He stood on his hind legs as upright as some flash stallion from Aroni’s Circus. Johnny simply hung free and swung by the halter. Then a sideways contortion and Johnny was hurled against one of the posts of the Commercial Hotel. Shoulder and head. Tim saw Johnny’s brown-red hair flick out with the shock of the thing.
This impact cut off all the cat-calls and whistles. Men who had a second before been hooting at Johnny’s peril came running up to him. Drinkers appeared from the Commercial’s front bar. Miss Dynes, the barmaid, appeared while Tim still ran towards the boy. She had towels in her hands, and she began mopping at Johnny’s head and ordering the spectators. Complaining to God and to Johnny, Tim scooped the boy up and began to run, and wizened Miss Dynes kept pace with him, holding the bloody towels in place as Tim ran towards Dr. Erson’s rooms in Forth Street.
Tim could see some wiry little man soothing Pee Dee and leading him off to tether him.
Along the footpath, into Dr. Erson the songbird’s garden, up the steps and into the front room where Mrs. Erson, a pale-skinned goddess used to bloody events, opened the door of the doctor’s inner office for Tim and Miss Dynes to carry the sluggrey, bloodied child indoors. Erson, so often mocked by Tim as an over-active tenor, now gloriously present here when needed! Packing his bag to visit Macleay District Hospital, where women patients always found him so knightly and such a darling fellow.
“Oh doctor!” Tim yelled, so grateful that forever more when he heard Erson start up with, “We are tenting tonight on the old camp ground,” he would greet it as a wonderful, strange, divinely generous sound.
Erson called, “Here! here!” Patting the leather of his surgical couch like a doctor in a crisis in a play. No more than half a degree away from being a Thespian at most times.
But now he became all business.
“Is Johnny dead?” Tim asked repeatedly. Dr. Erson did not say so, and yet did not seem to be ignoring the question for the sake of theatrical suspense either. He was checking pulse and raising Johnny’s eyelids to see the pole-axed eyes beneath, and he and his wife had bowls of water and iodine, and Mrs. Erson went to a cabinet and got needle and thread and catgut.
“He is not dead, Mr. Shea,” said Dr. Erson. “My God, a good skull. Where are you and your wife from?”
“Newmarket and Doneraile. Near Mallow. You know it? In North Cork.”
“Oh, God, yes,” said Erson enthusiastically. “Utterly characteristic. A well-formed Celtic scone, this one of your son’s. Fortified by a little Norman interbreeding. A fortunate shape. If he had a squarer Germanic skull, your concerns might be justified.”
Mrs. Erson washed around the wound and dribbled iodine and water in it. Erson himself threaded the needle and began sewing together the living flesh of Johnny’s scalp.
“You must watch him,” the doctor told Tim. “He may swallow his tongue and may fit.”
Erson went on with brisk sutures, sewing life back into the boy.
At last he asked Tim what had happened. Tim recounted the sudden accident. Miss Dynes, the ugliest and loveliest barmaid of any valley, stood by the door smoothing the alarm out of her cheeks with both hands.
“You will kill a horse as mad as that, I suppose,” said Dr. Erson, pulling a stitch.
Johnny began to murmur to himself. “Hold hard,” pleaded Johnny.
“He is an old racehorse,” said Tim. “Temperamental by nature.”
My dear God, he thought, I am pleading for my cart horse!
“Temperament is not worth putting up with,” said Dr. Erson.
“My God, what a beautiful skull your boy has. Where my grandparents come from, in Saxony, a skull like this would be a relic from a much earlier age.”
“I thought you were Scottish,” said Tim, watching carefully. And after all, didn’t they call the English Saxons?
“My grandparents went to Scotland in the wool trade,” said Dr. Erson, distractedly, tugging on the thread. “But the horse …?”
“He is all right if you obey certain rules with him,” said Tim. To himself it sounded hollow.
“I thought we were the rule-makers,” said Dr. Erson. “When it comes to beasts.”
Tim thought of Bandy Habash in that instant. Wanting the Turf Club to consider the merits of his grey. The question formed beneath his ribs. So, Bandy was suspect for his horse-passion. Yet what excuse can be made for the sort of man who expects his own issue, the bone of his bone, scalp of scalp, to obey the rules of a broken-down thoroughbred like Pee Dee? Who was this bloody horse, after all?
“I’ll certainly consider selling him,” said Tim.
The doctor laughed. “So that I can be mending someone else’s head. Well, this boy may, as I said, have convulsions and will need to be sat with all night. Can that be arranged? By the way, a bruising on his shoulder but no fracture. And he’s young, so I’m sure no memory loss. He’ll recall his adventure. Which might not be a bad thing.”
“I’m going to send him to school after this,” pledged Tim. “But how can I thank you?”
Dr. Erson began tenderly to wash Johnny’s scalp a last time. The water in the bowl pinkened as he proceeded. He flapped one hand.
“Oh, this is nothing. This is gross medicine. This is carpentry. I was prepared for far more momentous things in the School of Medicine at Edinburgh.”
He finished the laving of Johnny’s head suddenly. He said he had to be off to the Macleay District Hospital. He left his wife to wrap Johnny in a blanket and put the boy murmuring into Tim’s arms.
“I shall post you an account,” she whispered. Tim began to weep, walking out with the boy. Miss Dynes accompanied him.
“You are going to kill that bloody horse, aren’t you, Tim?” she asked him. “He’s always backing and pig-rooting. The wrong type.”
You couldn’t argue with her. But my comrade, thought Tim. My fellow campaigner.
Not all the blame was Pee Dee’s.
It quietened Ellen Burke down to see Johnny and to keep watch at his bedside. He himself, Tim, returned Pee Dee to his paddock, and took the extreme measure of flicking him on his way with a branch of a gum tree.
“You’re a bloody scoundrel blackguard,” he told Pee Dee. But the horse had the bearing of a creature who could explain himself adequately to a judge of his own distinction. A noble in bloody exile, a remittance man of the horseworld.
In the afternoon Tim found himself making notes on paper as to whether Dr. Erson would charge a half-sovereign or a sovereign and putting it against other debts. Dear Christ, the bills were heroic.
By now, as his son lay under the watchfulness of Ellen Burke, plump-with-child Kitty would be at the wharf, seeing SS Iris heave into the Semi-Circular Quay over Sydney’s bright water. Kitty innocent, and waving to her sister. Putting on a cockney scream as a joke. “Oi to you, Mamie!”
When she came back, she might bloody persuade me to shoot my brother, the horse!
And he would meet her at the boat and say, “I think it’s time Johnny began schooling. Can’t be trusted around horses or boats or rivers. Needs the Joyful and Sorrowful Mysteries, including an occasional Sorrowful Mystery across the arse from Mother Imelda.”
He’d returned from deliveries to find Johnny a little fevered and muttering—this is what Ellen Burke reported—but nothing too severe. Then into the store to wait the normal afternoon tea rush, on whose tail-end the man from the Colonial Secretary’s had craftily tacked himself.