His Uncle Johnny of Glenlara transported to Western Australia more than thirty years back for being a Fenian organiser in Cork. Did no one good. Made his mother prematurely aged so that the young Tim had to be silent in her presence.
“I came here to be an ordinary citizen,” Tim repeated. “This is all a vanity on Ernie Malcolm’s part.”
Bandy murmured, “Mr. Shea, you cannot expect me, can you, to go to Mr. Malcolm now and tell him I was mistaken. I was not mistaken. You deserve to be considered a true man. Again, Mrs. Burke tells me you are a giver of alms and feed half the valley. I as your friend would like you to be publicly acclaimed.”
Since all this smelt of excess, Tim—in protest and not without fear—took hold of the lapel of Bandy’s coat.
“Listen, you’re using the wrong bloody methods, my dear Indian friend. I am not here to be the sort of feller that suits you. I have a hard time enough being the sort of feller that suits me.”
“But I know, Mr. Shea, that what I’ve done doesn’t displease your charming wife.”
“What do you know about Kitty?”
“I came to the store two nights past. I saw Mrs. Shea. She said to me that it was grand for you to be praised like this, and thanked me for bringing it to the notice of the public. Look for wisdom to the women. For they know all our faces, don’t they? The face of the hero. The face of the coward as well. The face of the brute and the face of the beloved.”
So how to work up a consuming rage when even now, with Bandy intruding on the question of Kitty, he had to strain to achieve it. What he really felt was fear. Fear of being dragged down and marred by this little hawker’s efforts to exalt him.
Tim felt the burden of this defeat. No one could be dissuaded from the fable of brave Shea. And the man so artful. He had the approaches to this lie of his ratified by all parties except Tim, and covered from every angle. Habash couldn’t be defeated by an average good talking-to and a flick in the ear.
“Don’t discount that I can take you to court,” Tim impotently told the hawker. “I can talk to the solicitor Sheridan about this, and I bloody will. I’ll leave it at that for now. We don’t have anything more to say from this point.”
But he felt he’d fallen into the overstating trap, and his summing-up had already erred by being too long. He turned away sharply and walked back to Pee Dee, deliberately using an urgent gait that suggested he might punch the horse. He heard Bandy murmur something. It sounded like, “I am already part of your family.” Yet it could just be Mohammedan incantations or curses. He decided to ignore it, but within five yards of Pee Dee he adopted a less menacing stance—for Pee Dee might have taken the excuse to rear in the traces if he hadn’t softened his approach—and waited there by his dray, his back to the hawker, his face to the river, until Bandy drew level and passed him. He watched the faded green and yellow paint on the pressed-tin walls of Bandy’s wagon.
People on the lonely farms, with little else to swear by, swearing by the Habash herbal remedies. As always, people preferred to be poisoned in hope than to live sanely and know the strict limits of the world.
“Remember,” Tim cried after him, but it sounded a fairly limp command.
Five
THOUGH IT HAD no railway, the Macleay Valley was full of railway sleeper cutters. The railways were far away, had reached the Hunter River a hundred and fifty miles south, but not further. The country between the Hunter and the Macleay was so mountainous, so full of terrifying grades, that only those who profoundly feared the sea or were profoundly attracted to steam engines travelled down there by a succession of coaches to the distant steel tracks on the Hunter.
So for the moment it was a matter of ironic reflection that the right trees for railway sleepers grew here. Burrawong frequently went to Sydney loaded with them, as with maize and pigs. People who got visionary would look out south across the great, green face of the Macleay and say, “The railway will one day arrive and let me tell you it’ll make this bloody place.” One of the sleeper cutters was a Kerry man called Curran, who came in at intervals to buy plug tobacco.
“Jesus, Tim!” he’d say, raving away. “They’re catching it now! They’re catching more than we ever threw their way. Those Boer boys are throwing more the way of the bloody English than they ever saw before this, on any battlefield. It’s one thing to fight and beat niggers. Another to face up to white men with decent rifles.”
It was a glorious thing to see fellers like Curran work with their string and pencil and adze, turning a mere log or branch into an exactly shaped oblong, fit and beautiful enough to hold up the rails on which the enormity of locomotive engines progressed. A man like Curran was all grace at work. Clean cuts, and great florid, generous motions.
“Modder River, eh? Majersfontein! The punishment they’ve been looking for all this century they’re getting now, the bloody Saxons!”
“A lot of Scotties though,” Tim reminded him. “A lot of Paddies too!”
“I say more fool them,” Curran cried, his eyes alight.
“Lads looking for a wage, you know,” said Tim. “A fellow could imagine himself in the ranks if it weren’t for emigration.”
Tim also imagined Curran, in his shack on the mudflats, haranguing his wife and her brood. A primitive Wolfe Tone of the bush. Looking in the Argus and the Chronicle, in the Freeman’s Journal, for clues to the Empire’s death.
Curran’s propositions of vengeance had a certain dark appeal to Tim. But the old trouble was—as people of any mental discrimination at all knew—that the price was always paid by the wrong people. Not one course was deducted from the table of the rulers. They moaned and bleated, but their wine was still in its bottle, and their gloved servants still brought the plate. Curran, full of native wit, kept himself determinedly innocent enough to believe in the fairy story of thorough vengeance.
With an air of gloating, Curran went off with his tobacco. He received no regular deliveries of supplies from Tim. The Offhand also received no regular deliveries of groceries, and bought things as he needed them. He ate only occasionally and when he remembered to, breakfast at Mottee’s Greek cafe, dinners at the Commercial. Soap for his toilet and tea for his painful mornings, however, he got at T. Shea.
Breathlessness could overcome the Offhand and he might need to hitch his lean thigh onto a stool which had come from Swallow and Ariel, Biscuit Makers, with the first large order Tim had made eight years ago.
While in this posture one day he said, “This meeting to form our battalion the Empire so badly needs.”
“Yes, I read about it.”
“General Roberts will say, Who is that battalion we gallantly slaughtered in the past ten minutes? And his aides will say, They’re the Macleay Mounted Farters, milord. And General Roberts will say, If only we had more of that calibre! Where in the name of God did you say they’re from?”
Tim laughed, relishing the Offhand nearly as fully in the flesh as in print.
“That’s a fable if you like,” said Tim. “That’s M. M. Chance’s fable.”
“Absolutely right,” groaned the Offhand.
The consumption he’d suffered as a young man and theological student still had at least a second mortgage on his flesh.
“This meeting of Baylor’s and M. M. Chance’s then. In the flatulent minds of some, anti-war and pro-Boer are the same thing of course. So I wonder might it not be politic for you to attend that meeting? You need donate nothing to the Patriotic Fund, but you could treat the question with solemnity. No one would resent your saying nothing—they all have enough inflated concepts of their own to fill up a good evening.”