“Mr. Habash has returned me in good fettle. I see you put your wife to sleep, Tim! What a good thing!”
He took his fob watch and saw that it was nearing two o’clock. Oh, Jesus, the huge ride! And the air relentless hot!
He rose and kissed Kitty’s bare shoulder and she shuddered and said, “Dear,” but did not wake.
“I suppose young Bandy is raring to go?” he asked Mamie in a whisper.
Mamie watched him with a subtle smile on her lips.
“So it seems I’ll be meeting you again before the end of the week,” she said.
“May I just check a thing or two?” he asked, and he went to Kitty’s old sea trunk and eased it back by the hinges and inspected her black and white dresses and her undergarments by lamplight, encountering no insect other than a dead tiger moth. Everything in fine order. He repacked the trunk, folding things lovingly. “All clean,” Mamie whispered, “and no fleas. She airs everything every second day anyhow.”
He felt a surge of love and would have kissed Kitty’s shoulder again if they’d been alone. Because Kitty had such a casual air, there was something poignant about her when she took her uncommon care.
“Goodbye then,” he told Mamie, and she brushed his cheek again. “And welcome to the Macleay.”
“Give my regards to Mr. Habash,” she told Tim. “He’s a feller of real charm.”
Outside, some way from the door of the tent, Bandy waited for him by the dead fire.
“Right,” Tim called to him.
Bandy said nothing. Had Mamie staunched his oratorical flow? They fell into step together, tramping back amongst the tea-tree, the melaleuca, the slug-white paperbarks.
“May I say your sister-in-law is a very lively girl, and excellent company.”
“You don’t need to tell me about lively,” said Tim. “I’ll have her on the premises for at least a few months I suppose!”
“Then you will have three women with you, including your little girl. You are a fortunate man, Mr. Shea. My father, my brother and I live in a womanless household. It is not a natural thing at all. But our faith is a problem at the same time as being our glory.”
“Well,” said Tim. “I respect your attitudes in that regard.”
The Habashes had no reputation for seeking solace either in the blacks’ camp. Mind you, a lot of respectable women perversely liked them. Perhaps there was an illicit bit of business sometimes.
They found their horses standing somnolent in the clearing. As Tim climbed aboard he called, “Wake me if I fall asleep. Otherwise, I’ll end up on the ground.”
“The same for me, old chap,” said Bandy, delicately yawning. “Pigs will come and eat our faces.”
On the at first sandy road back up the Macleay, the night grew stiller and even hotter. Tim would sleep and wake, sleep and wake, and Bandy frankly slept for long stretches of the road, his cheek tucked into the hollow of his collarbone. Tim roused again and again, sweating and startled each time and aware at once of all the catalogue of earthly dangers:
that Johnny would go on seeking chances to crack his skull;
that Ernie Malcolm would malign Tim Shea;
that all customers might leave;
that the plague might after all—surely not through him—come to town.
It was a chafing, starting, restless eon before they crossed Spencer’s Creek again. Then he would blink at the broad and blatant river which seemed to stretch off limitlessly from his stirrup into an undetermined and unreachable point between water and sky. Now it looked not like his familiar but a foreign river to him, a bitter one. A Congo. Africa, and he some sort of missionary riding to some hopeless task with the heathen.
Breath of a hot westerly met them as they rode through Gladstone. There were fragments of black grit on that wind. Upriver the bush was burning. You could not see it, but it could be read in the force, heat, the density of that blast. Fragments of blackened gum leaf would be raining in his back yard by the river. A furious, hazy ochre light was up by Pola Creek, where the cattle would be already wandering back satisfied from the milking shed.
Tim was starting to revive.
“A hard life,” he commented to Bandy.
But the horses had been so steady, so sure-footed all night. Again they let them drink from the Belmore River, where it entered the Macleay from the south. The horses began pointedly to sniff the air soon thereafter, as if it gave them grounds for unease, but they were not so impolite as to toss their heads around and back downriver as some horses would. Noblesse bloody oblige.
From the top of Red Hill, you could see the mountains distantly burning and the valley filling with hot white smoke.
“Oh, dear,” said Bandy. “It looks like Nulla Creek is ablaze. All my families. A terrible thing. Drought and fire, fire and drought. God’s seasons in the Macleay.”
“I wouldn’t blame God,” said Tim, but not as belligerently as he would have a week ago.
They rode down into the East Kempsey Swamp, where the air was densest. It must be far more than a hundred degrees already in this syrupy bottom, an inhuman day ahead. A good day for selling Stone’s Ginger Beer in its earthenware bottle. Open the top and there’s a marble over which the children can fight. A good day for selling the cordials from Sharp’s factory in West Kempsey. The creaming soda. He could drink a bucket of it now. It didn’t cut the thirst though, not really. Tea. Black and strong. Cut the whistle. Made you sweat.
As they crested Commandant Hill, Constable Hanney and one of the younger constables on police mounts rode into their path.
“May I ask you gentlemen where you have been?” called Hanney through nearly closed lips.
What to say? Visiting the plague camp no more than a technical infringement. But Hanney could make it a massive crime.
Bandy wagged his head significantly to Tim. He seemed to say, I provide the horses but you answer the questions.
At the sight of the uniform, Tim had been unable to prevent himself wondering if Hanney knew somehow of his anonymous letter to the Commissioner. But that was not possible.
“We have been down the river to visit friends.”
“Mohammedan or Christian?” asked Constable Hanney out of his locked jaw.
“I’d take it they were Christian. Why do you ask, constable?”
“Where are these Christian friends of yours located then?”
“Near… near Belmore River, more or less.”
“Is that right?” Hanney called to Bandy.
“That’s right, constable,” Bandy assured the man.
“The beak’s going to ask you the same bloody question,” said Hanney. “Think twice, and tell the truth, or else I’ll stick you with your first answer. The question is: have you been visiting the Burrawong passengers?”
“What would make you ask that?” asked Tim. Just the same, he found himself swallowing those bilious inklings which unleashed power produces in its subjects.
“The sanitation officer had a report that Mr. Bandy Habash started trading with the passengers just a few days back. Someone saw you clearing off down the road to the New Entrance last night. He warned us.”
Billy Thurmond. Old bugger. Would’ve got home and put his son on a horse and sent him to town to complain to Sergeant Fry.
“Those horses of Mr. Habash’s certainly look knackered enough,” the younger constable said.
“My wife is six months pregnant,” said Tim. “I was anxious as to how she was.”
“Is this a confession?” asked Constable Hanney.
For the first time, the profound soreness of the ride was entering. He bent forward in the saddle like a cripple. “Dr. Erson and the sanitation officer are about to release the passengers in any case. I’d come to the conclusion I wasn’t putting a soul in any peril.”