“I don’t think he’ll smother, poor fellow,” said Tim, fighting the shudders.
“Mr. Shea,” said Habash, straightening. “The man is quite dead. God has received his soul.”
“Oh Jesus,” said Tim. “But we’ll see.”
He could afford no more than a second to steel himself for sharing the horse with the man almost certainly gone. Then he got up decisively into the saddle. It felt unbalanced to have a fine saddle and rope reins, and between those two the lean man. But no delay to be permitted. He kicked Pee Dee’s flanks and made decent progress towards town. The man pressed back against his thighs like a living thing.
What doctor? Dr. Erson was singing operetta on the Terara. Dr. Casement, he knew from a notice in the Argus, had taken Keogh’s coach to the beaches of Port Macquarie. Dr. Gabriel was perhaps at home across the river in East, and it would be a nightmare waiting for the punt to come across. It was therefore a matter of the district hospital.
Pee Dee kept up a surprisingly brave canter towards town. You could go on the better roads through West, or more directly over the bush tracks towards the hospital. Through West was the supposedly civilised way, but there would be a few people around the shooting gallery beside the Post Office. Yahoos who couldn’t afford the boat fare or who thought such normal country diversions beneath them.
“What do you have there, Tim?” they would call, and the damaged man deserved better, both softer and more urgent enquiries. The Armenian who ran the eyesore of a shooting gallery would grin out from under the shade of the awning and hand one of the would-be Macleay sharpshooters a rifle loaded with pellets.
These sorts of possibilities steered Tim right, along the bush tracks across country to the hill above West Kempsey and the hospital.
“Quick along,” Tim kept urging Pee Dee. He was a much better mount than he was a carthorse, the mad bugger.
The path took him through humid, fly-ridden bush and past the Warwick racecourse the Race Club wouldn’t admit Habash to. Heat was pretty dense under these scraggy gumtrees. At last the Macleay could be seen ahead, broad and set low in a wide bed. The heedless river was a pathetic blue here.
“Look, look,” said Tim to the jolting man. “Did you come to town for a holiday? Look, look, you poor feller.”
Pee Dee, just to be unpredictable, still trotted briskly as they entered the hospital driveway and stopped by the large Morton Bay fig tree. Tim tethered him to the hospital railing. On the verandah, he noticed, a frail child in a nightdress sat in a big wicker chair. Beginning to weep, Tim eased the man down by the shoulders, the feet being the last heavily to flop off Pee Dee’s neck, but both boots staying on—for which Tim was somehow grateful. Tim laid the man in the shade of the verandah and ran inside. A pleasant-faced, full-breasted nurse saw him and cried, “Yes?”
It was the long dusk. In the cookhouse at the back of the store, he lit the range and the heat it gave off reacted more pleasantly than you’d expect on the warmth trapped in the room. Sweating, he made tea and slabs of white bread and honey for the little girl who waited inside in the dining room and whose brother had fallen asleep on the sofa in the drawing room.
This will be an awful year, he knew in spite of knowing better. The omens were so terrible. He shook his head, not wanting to think that way. Wanting to think like a modern fellow, not a bloody peasant. But this will be an awful year.
When he brought the food and drink to the girl, she seemed lost at the head of the table in his large-backed chair. He had earlier bathed her leg with iodine, and this little ritual against sepsis had done them both some good, making her cry out in a plain iodine anguish, proving to him that there were still simple human services to be supplied.
It occurred to Tim now and then that her father was in the room of the dead in the hospital above the river in West, keeping company with a thirteen-year-old boy from Collombattye who had perished from lockjaw. Tim had helped the nurses place him there after they had washed the corpse.
This awareness of her father’s location seemed to overtake the small girl too, because sometimes she would put her bread down, appetite fled, and weep purely and privately like a brave grown woman.
She was an orphan now. Her name was Lucy Rochester. Her sleeping brother was Hector. Her father was or had been Albert. Tim knew him—he’d sometimes come into the store on Friday afternoons. A good type. The industrious cow-cocky who rises at four for milking and ends his days in terrible muteness. His children with him milking through every dawn of his life. You could tell it from Lucy Rochester’s hands as they held the bread. They were creased from the milking, the butter churn, and from cranking the chaff-cutter. And then, no doubt, her feet hardened by walking into school from Glenrock. Falling asleep in the mathematics class. Smartalec children from town laughing at that. He knew what she didn’t. The history of her hard little hands. In the Old Testament-style flood of ’92, the maize crops had been wiped out when the water swept over the lowlands and lapped against that embankment where Mr. Albert Rochester had this morning suffered his accident. Great hardships at that time. Farms going broke. The prices of produce in Sussex Street, Sydney’s bourse of all farm products, being squeezed and squeezed. And authoritative men from the New South Wales Agriculture Department and all manner of dairy enthusiasts, some of them from Sydney University, had come and delivered the dairy message. The Jersey cow. Unlike the maize crops, it could walk to high ground in time of flood, and the dumped mud from upriver would soon be fertilised and would feed herds in coming seasons.
And yet now men were enslaved to the dairy farms, and their women were taken by chills in the predawn, and their children grew hard-handed and sleepy and thus ignorant. He would not be a dairy farmer unless, like the Burkes of Pee Dee, he could hire hands to do the dawn milking.
In the Macleay, men like Rochester were owned by their Jersey cattle.
“Why were you coming to town?” Tim asked the child.
“Seeing Mrs. Sutter,” said the little girl. She had a strange grown way of addressing him. People spoke of little women. She was one. “Mama’s best friend, Mrs. Sutter. We would stay till night. Papa got the Coleman boys to do the afternoon milking.”
A cow-cocky’s holiday, and he’s killed while it’s all still in anticipation! Was Mrs. Sutter to be the second Mrs. Rochester?
The glass in the store door was being rattled.
He went through the living room, past the sleeping boy. Through a tasselled doorway. The shop was full of its pent-up special smell today, a smell of tin and tea, sugar and sisal, candles and methylated spirits. A slight honeying of the air from the cans of treacle resting on the shelves. A hint of shortbread, a manly reek of kerosene. Goods supplied to him on two months’ credit, unlike the three months’ credit he gave his best clients, the Malcolms say and, of course, Old Burke from up the river. And how could you dun a nice man like the Offhand, who needed his scribe’s salary to pay for his habits? Miss Myra Howard’s theatrical company had run up a bill during their stay at the Commercial, tinned sausages and peas, tea and lemonade. That bill six months unpaid. Miss Howard’s agent in Sydney said that he would draw it to her attention as soon as she returned to Sydney from a tour of Far North Queensland at the end of the summer. As a result of such experiences, he no longer looked at the shelves with the undoubting sense of ownership which had, until recently, been one of his vanities.
Rangy Constable Hanney was rattling the glass. He’d tied up his horse and trap to one of the posts which held up the awning of T. Shea—General Store.
When Tim opened the door, the constable stepped straight in; a matter of habit. His hat was off, his brushy hair glittering with sweat.