“Fair enough,” called Tim. Though secretly he was a little surprised by this kind of lawlessness in an official. MacAllen said, “My wife sits up worrying about the children and the Sydney plague, and all we can hear is bang, bang, bang!”
“Very trying,” called Kitty, turning her short body with difficulty towards the postmaster, but then covering a laugh with her lace-gloved hand.
“Better to agree with a man with an axe,” she muttered to Tim.
As the postmaster applied himself again, the sheet of corrugated iron which had roofed the gallery fell like thunder. The postmaster stepped back and was pleased.
They rolled on, convinced that this might be a good day to be away from the town.
At the Central punt in Smith Street, Bandy was waiting for them, smiling. On the same grey he’d been riding the day of Albert Rochester’s tragedy, and the night of the illicit ride.
“Good morning, Sheas and Miss Kenna and Mr. O’Neill. Prayers completed, the day now belongs to a totally decent picnic!”
Tim looked to the cart behind, because he was curious to see how Mamie reacted to this fulsome sentiment of Bandy’s. She was rolling her eyes at O’Neill and laughing. Yet it did not seem to be in total mockery.
Annie touched Tim’s arm from the back of the cart where she sat on a pile of rugs with the white-frocked Lucy. “Bandy Habash is funny,” she sagely told him.
The exhilaration of being on the deck of a punt, all in a party, observing the thickness of fertile soil in the banks, the splendid mountains too bluely distant to show their burnt trunks.
They landed in East, Bandy leading his biddable grey and at the same time hauling Pee Dee by the bit, while Tim hallo-ed and urged. The road followed for a little way the path he and Bandy had taken to the plague camp. But went past the turnoff for a mile before itself veering back to the coast, becoming a sandy, claggy track. Ahead, between them and the sea, lay a huge mountain, Dulcangui. Covered with grey-green trees and displaying gnarls of sandstone, it rose up out of the low ground like a threat. When they reached the rise, the road now became a cutting through the mountain’s rock. Kitty took over the reins of the Shea wagon. Tim and Lucy got down to walk. Bandy himself dismounted from the grey after making a number of experimental canters up and down the stony slope. Then he put Annie in the saddle, a place that seemed to please her very much, and began to lead the way up Dulcangui.
“Watch out for snakes!” cried Tim. For he did not want the grey shying with Annie in its saddle.
To make the ascent, Tim walked level with Pee Dee’s neck, grabbing him by the harness to hold him to the mountain. After Pee Dee had shaken his head the required number of times to satisfy the Horse Union’s idea of bloody-mindedness in a beast, he allowed Kitty at the reins to gee him up the first section of road. Rocks and saplings designed for impaling lay all the way down the murderous slope which fell away from the side of the track.
Mamie strode past Tim and Lucy, her neat knees ploughing away beneath the fabric of her white dress. A bit of an athlete, this one. She went ahead and walked and talked with Annie and Habash, while Joe O’Neill, alone except for Johnny and at the rear, learned to urge his uncle’s cart up this severe track.
In country like this, the Patriotic Fund seemed barely a dent on human contentment. Yet Tim could hear Pee Dee snorting, the bugger. Just to make things interesting. Kitty tugged at him with her now-bare, red little hands and uttered both soothing and threatening non-words to get him over the hill.
Lucy beside him. The little would-be Papist. How horrified the Primitive Methodists would be.
“Well, you want to be a convert, do you?” he asked the child.
“Yes.” She walked with the gait of a grown woman.
“You wouldn’t do that just to please the nuns, eh? You can’t please them. I know it because I’m their grocer.”
He could tell by her up-tilted gaze that she knew it too. They were hungry goddesses.
“You’ll have to remember,” said Tim, “that your little brother at Mrs. Sutter’s won’t be with you in this.”
Typical of her, she said nothing.
“Well, do you think he’d mind?”
“He’s too young,” she told him. “This is a business for me.”
“Why do you want to do it though?”
“I want to have God. But I want the angels too.”
“Wouldn’t the other people let you have angels?”
“I want the Blessed Mother too.”
“You are an ambitious little woman, aren’t you?”
“I want a Blessed Mother.”
A reasonable and pitiable desire in an orphan, he thought. He took one of the lollies he was keeping for the children out of his pocket and slipped it into her hand.
“I’ll tell you this. Don’t do it too easily. And don’t do it to please anyone. Because you’re stuck with it for life then and people think the worse of you. Suspect you of all sorts of things they don’t suspect you of if you stayed Primitive Methodist.”
“I know. But.”
“But. But you have the angels and the saints?”
“Yes,” said Lucy. “There’s lots of them.”
“Some people consider that a problem.”
Kitty on the reins and Tim at the halter dragged Pee Dee and the cart around a last wall of rock, and now this was the top. A vast glitter of sea could be seen from up here. Its line broken only by Crescent Head’s two famous headlands—the Little Nobby and the Big.
Down again towards the paperback swamps which lay between Dulcangui and the ocean. Bandy let Lucy lead the grey and came back to help control Pee Dee. Pee Dee fussy on the stony down-slope. Mamie climbed up beside Kitty and took a hand at the reins. You could hear the bottles jiggling in their baskets. Before they got to the bottom, two in the hamper on Joe O’Neill’s cart exploded.
Meanwhile, Lucy and Johnny, who had abandoned poor Joe for the greater excitement of the vanguard, between them led the grey down onto the corduroy road across the swamp to the sea. In the grey’s saddle, Annie still sat. Entering into a fair imitation of her kingdom.
The picnic place finally chosen was on a sward above the surf at the bottom of the Little Nobby. They could look out over the sea and then across a small saltwater creek to the twelve miles of Front Beach, and Mamie was enthused by this vigorous bright sight and was soon knee-deep in the creek with the children. Johnny, shirt off, began splashing round as he did in the river, but his strokes were interrupted by the shallowness of the creek and the playful current. Tim waded in too, his trousers rolled up. Standing still you could see mullet swim by. Annie, Johnny, Lucy kept trying to catch them in their hands.
Ashore Kitty lay on her back on a rug and under a parasol, pointing the unborn Shea child straight at the arc of blue sky. Near her, Joe O’Neill began smoking reflectively and plunking his banjo. The tune “Bold Phelim Brady” was raggedly released into the air. His boots were still on. Perhaps he had an inlander’s fear of the water. When Tim waded ashore, Joe and he began opening beer with flourishes. After the rough trip, the stuff fizzed out of the necks of the bottles.
“Porter, Mrs. Shea?” asked Joe, putting a long glass of frothy stout in Kitty’s outreaching hand.
“Oh, dear,” sighed Kitty. “As lovely as you’ll get.”
Meanwhile Bandy took the saddle off his grey’s back. Steam rose gently from the crushed, damp hair. Tim was surprised to see Bandy take his shirt and pants off too, so that now he wore only a singlet and his long, white linen breeches. The singlet was low-cut and revealed in part a smooth, brown, hairless chest. Arms not like the arms of men from Europe. Both smaller and yet more sinewy. He jumped on the grey’s back and urged it gently into the creek. It went placidly, standing to its belly in the water, seeming content amongst the little waves. Bandy turning to throw a salute to the shallows where Mamie and the children were prancing and yelling and trying to grab mullet.