At the stove, Ellen Burke covered her mouth with a hand.
“I’m going to see Mama. Back tomorrow. Tell you what, I’ll leave that friend of mine with you.” He turned to his right and theatrically pushed towards her that phantom spirit which had attended him in North Cork and supposedly emigrated with him.
“There,” he said. “Look after Annie, and answer all her questions.”
The child said to the vacancy and to Tim, “I’ve got a question then. Will we have treacle duff?”
“It happens I was going to make sago pudding,” said Ellen Burke. “But something or other told me treacle duff!”
Bandy shamed him by bringing the horses the back way, not down Belgrave Street to the front of the shop, but by laneways across the hip of river bank behind the main thoroughfare. All to save Tim embarrassment. The grey mare, the bay gelding. Two horses neat as skiffs. Not bloated and gone slack with the Macleay’s easy grass. All the quiet energy Bandy put into keeping these horses up to the mark!
Seeing him coming from a window, Tim ducked out of the back of the house to greet him. “You could have come the front,” he called.
“That manner of proceeding leaves people knowing all our business, old chap,” said Bandy, touching his nose with the finger of a hand which still held the grey’s reins.
A man could have asked him then, why tell the Chronicle about our bumbling rescue of Albert? But who could be so crude to a fellow who had delivered two such wonderful horses to your door?
“Please, come into the kitchen for some tea. Talk to Ellen Burke and wait for me to pack a saddlebag.”
Bandy put his head on the side and closed one eye. “It will be one or two in the morning before we reach the quarantine camp. If you wanted a rest first or …?”
Tim decided to shave and even then found himself hoping that the town, closing for business now, seeing him and Bandy ride together to the river punt, wouldn’t use it as an excuse to say, “There he goes. Fine thing. One day extorting money from Mrs. Malcolm, doing business with the hawker the next.”
“The trouble with you,” he told his mirror, the receptor of his discourse, “is that you’re stuck halfway between a madman and a cagey bugger.”
Wrap the stew in a big cloth, then in a sealskin bag. Ignore its then resemblance to Hanney’s package. Chocolate and condensed milk and some Norwegian sardines. A copy of the Messenger of the Sacred Heart, which Kitty must have ordered at Mass one Sunday, and which had turned up two days after she left—took the lazy buggers at the post office that long to sort and deliver the mail which had come on Burrawong. Then he stood in the store, looking about him at the shelves. What else to take Red Kenna’s beloved daughter? He used the opportunity of the customerless store to readjust his breeches and privates for the punishing ride.
At last, outside the back door with Pee Dee whickering at the two fine horses from his paddock, Tim drew himself up into his saddle on the gelding. Beside Bandy on the grey. Mounted bushmen. He ignored Pee Dee and he felt the leather creak, so well-oiled, so delicate, accommodating him as precisely as you could hope. Annie watched him from the back verandah like a chronicler, and Ellen Burke kept a good hold on bandaged Johnny. Tim blew kisses. “Now go inside with Ellen!”
He rode out waving his hand. Then out of the lane into Smith Street. Beyond the part-built bridge, a crowd of end-of-day people were waiting for the punt to return from East. Old Billy Thurmond, the patriotic farmer, was there with his wagon and looked coldly up the embankment at arriving Tim, as if what he saw confirmed something. Maybe something he’d heard from Ernie Malcolm.
Tim took off his hat. “Mr. Thurmond.” But the old man, model farmer, Pola Creek, merely fluttered his lips with a blast of air. You couldn’t tell whether it was contempt or hello.
Tim murmured to Bandy, “Do you call at old Billy’s place?”
“His big daughter buys cloth from me, and a remedy for costiveness.”
“Pity Billy himself didn’t take some of it,” said Tim.
The punt had left East and was eking its way back over darkening water. Some ducks and then a pelican made late, low flights over the surface, dragging a rumour of light behind them. Yet shadow also fell like a veil from the pelican’s big wings. Smelling of its peculiar, cranky old steam engine the punt came into Central wharf. A few wagons and tired-looking horsemen rode ashore. Tim and Bandy led their horses aboard, and the gelding travelled from embankment to punt so easily and without fuss that Tim was reminded of Dr. Erson’s question: “Will you shoot that cranky horse of yours?”
Everyone on the Central side was able to crowd aboard, with walking passengers and Billy’s dray and the two horsemen, and old Hagan, the punt captain, and his son Boy Hagan, pulled levers and let the thing be swung away from shore, let the current take it and the cable hold it, balancing the drift against the thrust of the engine.
“You’re going out selling herbals, are you?” Billy Thurmond called down the length of his wagon to Tim. Tim did not answer.
Some fine enough houses in East, rising up Rudder’s Hill. At the end of the journey, Billy Thurmond urged his wagon ashore in East. Bandy and Tim tranquilly led their horses down the ramp, pleased to give Billy a head start, and then mounted and took the hill at an easy trot.
“You keep these horses marvellously,” Tim called across to Bandy. He hoped he sat half as well as Bandy did, but doubted it.
Bandy grinned softly, flicking his head sideways towards the river.
“They are my total passion, old fellow,” he said.
The signpost turning left at Rudder’s Hill said Gladstone. They swung their horses to it and saw before them the paperbark lowlands of Dock Flat and O’Sullivan’s Swamp. A brown, swampy darkness beginning to pool down there, pricked with the kerosene lamp of this and that cottage. Melancholy country, this. The river’s abandoned ground. The lonely lights looked as if they’d been set there by survivors of a flood. These were the houses of men who did not do one thing but many: they kept cows, they grew some cane and bananas, they burned charcoal, they cut shingles, and when they had done all that, were still landed with the question of how to feed a family.
Soon, at an easy pace, he and Bandy were at the furtherest point to which he made deliveries—the slopes of Red Hill, where better farms and orchards lay, where prosperous farmers could be found sitting at their tables reading the Argus with such a clear, scrupulous eye that you’d think they’d been here two hundred years. Some of the fanciest new ploughing, threshing, winnowing and seeding machines, coming up straight out of the catalogues of the Sydney manufacturers by way of Burrawong, were taken to Red Hill whose farmers considered themselves advanced. To Red Hill and Pola Creek too came the agricultural and horticultural journals of the world, and they were read and disseminated. Agriculture sat as science, not as hit-and-miss magic, atop Red Hill.
A long way away to the north, beyond the mudflats and the river, was a perfect bar of golden light, and then violet all the way to the apex of the dusk. And on this side of things the road down to Pola Creek, and night a blue mist. This air, this air. The same air which dealt tenderly with him after his cricketing mistake, which pressed so knowingly on the seam in mad Johnny’s scone.
The most wonderful thing to do, to ride recklessly to the supreme woman in a soft night.
At the corner of a laneway amongst corn paddocks in Pola Creek a young woman in a black dress waited, bare-headed. Piled up hair. She daunted Tim. An echo of Missy? Or just waiting for some cow-cocky’s son who’d sent her a note? Seeing Tim and Bandy, she seemed abashed and turned and moved away through corn taller than she was.