“The road downriver used to be so devilish bad when my father first brought us to the Macleay,” Bandy recounted, his voice sounding like a ballad. “You saw broken-down drays every mile, and men marked the particular mud holes with a cut-down sapling and a rag tied to it, to warn travellers away.”
Austral Eden, wide, low, rich land, beside the track now. The river was somewhere near too. You could smell its muddiness, for all the world like the sweet drag of odour you got from a freshly opened two pound can of plum jam. Austral Eden. What a name! Southern heaven.
But these little reflections swam like petals on the wide, hypnotic movement of Bandy’s well-kept horses.
You could hear the river now too. By proxy at least. Drumming away in the throats of those huge emerald bullfrogs Kitty hated to find on the shouse seat. The closer you got to the great body of the river the more urgent the wings of night birds sounded. The moon came up and there were flying foxes in it, creaking their way across the mudflats towards somebody’s luscious orchard. Johnny liked to feed those buggers as they hung upside down from branches, bony and natty at the same time, dapper in their fur.
Ah, the bloody river sweeps into sight now. Going to the sea for its salt. Broad between the canebrakes on this side, and the answering canebrakes on the Smithtown shore. Bandy’s grey snorted at the river for its size and the authority of its smell. “Shhhh,” said Bandy. Pacifying it with a small brown hand.
By the bridge at Belmore River, a Macleay tributary, they let the horses drink, and Tim and Bandy swigged cold tea from a billycan and found that it was almost nine o’clock. He was being sucked in well and truly, he knew. Becoming this little brown man’s accomplice.
Through the town of Gladstone, drenched by moonlight but unaware of itself. The Divine Presence resting in the big church Father McCambridge had built. The stained glass windows in memory of dairy farmers’ beloved spouses. Tim took his hat off for the wakeful divinity of the place, and said a prayer for no plague and Missy’s name. The divine mystery: why did Ernie not want to write a letter to cause a proper search? Why was it part of his civic intent to let the Missy question fade?
Bandy had also taken off his hat. Sympathetically, Tim presumed. But his eyes were lustrous as a devotee’s in the moonlight.
They waded Kinchela Creek and then, though the river was always a presence, they came upon it only sometimes. They found themselves now amongst melancholy paperbarks that smelled of nearby swamp. They were getting close, he knew. He was so joyous that sometimes he let himself loll in the saddle like a drunkard, slackening and bending his back. He indulged himself this way frequently, at times when Bandy had drawn ahead.
Past the creek at Jerseyville, where the pub which had nearly been Tim’s was kept by the Whelans, Bandy by a sudden jerk of his elbows showed it was all right to break the horses into a canter. So fresh they still seemed. Lots of running coiled up in their great big hips.
From the top of the last hill, they could see the camp, with plenty of fires still burning. It was set on the first low, dry piece of shore before the mangrove swamps of the Entrance, and beyond it in the river sat Burrawong, whose shape you could read dimly from the storm lantern hanging from the crosstree of its mast.
They left their horses in a patch of lank grass amongst paperbarks, and walked in like two people engaged in approved business. Tim carried with him the twin mercies of the billycan of stew, the condensed milk, and the Messenger of the Sacred Heart.
Paperbark trees, grey by day and stark white by night, smelled anciently and remotely sour. Whatever tragedy or fall they’d been involved in had happened in an unrecorded age. Therefrom they took this air: all debts paid, all tears long shed, all decay long concluded. Tim enlivened though by this very quality. Charmed by this bush which didn’t try to charm him.
Some parts of the track he and Bandy had to scrape through briary shrubs. This may have been why Bandy had wanted them to leave the well-kept horses behind.
From up the path Tim could hear a banjo plunking at midnight! Joined idly by a fiddle. Didn’t the buggers go to bed early for their health?
“Here we are,” Bandy told him in a normal voice.
The paperbarks eased away to right and left to make the New Entrance picnic grounds. Three rows of six or seven bell tents each. A big cooking stove standing in the open with its funnel, and a canvas bathhouse nearby. Light still shone inside the canvas of some tents—a magical look, a tent lit from inside itself. Further along, the men and women who were still up were clustered to the campfire, which was not needed for warmth but for the soul and to keep insects away. This small party were engaged in watching the flames die now. The banjo and the fiddle only a sad strain here and there. A last burst of showiness from their owners, the tag end of brighter, more deliberate stuff performed earlier in the night.
Now Tim heard a familiar little yell of woman-laughter, cut back immediately out of consideration for those who might be sleeping in the tents. Dear God, this was inimitably Kitty’s. Kitty sitting up to all hours in the plague camp.
Within the light of the near-dead fire two little women sat on camp stools, with men standing and lolling about them. The banjo player standing close to the women. He was the one who first saw Bandy and Tim coming.
“Keeping you up, are we, gentlemen?” the banjo player asked. This bewildering night! The fellow was talking in a North Cork accent.
Kitty stood up wobblingly. An empty, froth-lined stout glass stood by her chair. An approved, a respectable drink. So why did he resent her for drinking it amongst strangers?
“Dear mother,” she cried, grabbing the arm of the other, like woman. “It’s Timmy!”
Tim looked at his sister-in-law, Mamie, oval-faced, slim, with a bunched little amused mouth. She had been a bit of a child when Tim had first visited the Kennas.
Kitty clung to him, her hard little head, the brownish-red bun of her hair, pulled up into a knot by some hairdresser in Sydney, socketed into the cavity where his shoulder met his chest. And even though there were strangers looking he bent to this red hair, inhaled its decent, vegetable, mothering smell, and kissed it.
“Don’t catch any fleas now,” she told him.
“I’ll only kiss the bits that aren’t plaguey,” he murmured.
“Get my husband and his friend a drink!” Kitty insisted, and a young man who was English by his accent shook out the froth from a used glass and then filled it with warm stout and passed it into Tim’s free hand. It tasted divine. The Englishman found another glass, but Bandy called musically, “No thank you, sir.”
“Water then?”
“Yes, water.”
The young man picked up a water bag and half-delivered it to, half-threw it, jovially, at Bandy.
“Catch there!”
“There are no guards on this camp, eh?” Tim murmured.
“It’s an utter joke,” Kitty told him. “Captain Reid collected all these rats on board two whole days ago, and not a one showed marks of plague.”
“But were you worried?”
“There are city streets roped off and houses sealed. But Sydney is still Sydney.” A soft malty burp fluttered her lips very slightly. “Now meet Mamie.”
Mamie had risen in her white dress. Very compact. Jesus, what a dangerous smile, and underneath the smile, what? In the bone? He could spot something. Flightiness, a canny soul, a temper. There might be an interest in holding grudges as well.
“Tim,” Mamie said warmly, in a rising tone. She came to him on the other side than the one where Kitty leaned. Brushed his cheeks softly. Again he remembered her somehow, as a partially distinct, largely indefinite part of the Kenna brood. She would have been about eleven, a bit sullen, likely to throw bread across the table. Now she was between kitchens. Red’s and the one she might have here in the end. A thing or two would be thrown about in that one as well.