Habash got up laughing and with his neat hands brushing brown dust from his black trousers.
“Bad show eh? I thought everyone but the darkies was down the river.”
He spoke exact English, every word presented as its own unit. It made Tim think of a conjuror, smilingly offering one card after another, but face up. They let too many kinds of different people into Australia for its own good.
Habash swung his right arm to test his shoulder. “Oh God,” he said. “I was putting the grey mare through its paces, you know. I have a notorious weakness for speed and horse-flesh, Mr. Shea.”
“I know,” said Tim, not yielding. “You’re on a good behaviour bond. Here you are bloody breaking it.”
Habash made a noise with his teeth and lowered his head and swung it in an arc. This was some bloody fake act of contrition.
“If I’d known you were there, sir… for I do know the sort of man you are. I have often camped on your sister-in-law’s property upriver.”
Kitty’s younger sister, this was. Molly. She’d emigrated here just five years ago, come up the coast to her sister on SS Burrawong, that floating shame of the North Coast Steamship Navigation Company. Lots of very nice-looking, plump, sisterly hugging on the Central wharf. A half-pint like Kitty, actually skinnier than Kitty though, and with a little more restraint. Molly began her Australian career sleeping in the canvassed-off part of the back verandah, near the cookhouse.
A man named Old Burke owned Pee Dee Station, where Tim’s own useless nag came from. Far up in the most beautiful reaches of the river. Old Burke rode in one day with his fourteen-year-old motherless daughter Ellen, and gave Molly Kenna a grocery order to fill out while he went and saw M. M. Chance, the stock and estate agent, and then to complain and drink with other farmers in the Commercial. His daughter was still shopping at Savage’s or drinking cordial at the Greeks’ cafe in Smith Street, pretending this was the big life, and Old Burke had come back into the store with a glow on and thought Molly was a pretty bright girl. What you needed to cheer up a grim homestead and the lonely seasons up at Pee Dee. Rich pasture there, but a bugger of a way up the Macleay!
So now it turned out Habash carried his fabrics and his medical mixtures way up there to Molly.
Tim liked Mrs. Molly Burke and usually said so. She was a natural democrat and put on no airs. And Jesus, what the people thought of her back in the Doneraile area when they found out—without understanding what sort of place New South Wales was—that she’d married thirty-one hundred and fifty acres!
Tim said nothing now though. He wasn’t going to share his enthusiasms for his sister-in-law with the hawker.
“What she says,” Habash continued, “is that you are generous to a fault. So how fortunate I am that it is you who blocked my path.”
“Don’t expect the bloody advantage of me, Mr. Habab.”
“Not Habab if I dare say so, sir. Habash. My father is Saffy Habash of Forth Street, and I am Saffy Bandy Habash, Bandy to acquaintances. You may know my father.”
“An old feller. On a stick.”
“Yes. On a stick.” Bandy let the wistfulness of that penetrate. “He is indeed our patriarch. Founded our business in the Macleay twenty years ago. Soon after my mother perished, and my father swallowed his grief and kept at work. Now my brother Mouma and myself have taken the load. Mouma does the settlements north to Macksville and south to Kundabung. I take the valley itself from Comara to the New Entrance. We are hawkers and sellers of medicines to every remote acre of the region. We are the servants of the valley and we rarely see each other. From Arakoon and the wives of the prison officers at Trial Bay to far-off Taylor’s Arm. And, of course, to your esteemed sister-in-law at Pee Dee Station.”
“I’ve seen your wagons,” Tim conceded. “Moving about the place.”
“As we all do, I get tired of plodding in a wagon, and I want to gallop like my ancestors in the Punjab, horsemen—if I dare say so—to rival the horsemen of the New South Wales contingent.”
Habash’s grey was still drinking heartily from the trough outside Savage’s two-storey emporium. Habash, admiring it, didn’t move however to take its reins and stop it from gorging on the water. “I paid eleven pounds for it. Its dam is Finisterre, who won the cup at Port Macquarie.”
Tim said, “You wrench the poor beast around a bit for such an expensive one. Why don’t you race it? That would get you out of having to use Belgrave Street as your bloody track.”
“Sir, I was foolish enough to try racing it. But the Kempsey Race Committee pooh-bahs don’t wish to see races run by a hawker’s grey.”
Tim experienced a second’s sympathy for this little Muslim. “The buggers are utter bloody pooh-bahs, you’re right about that.”
“My father says not to waste money on such a thing. And I am an obedient child. That is in our tradition.”
“It’s in every bugger’s tradition,” said Tim, sharply remembering old Jeremiah Shea, his father, left behind childless in another hemisphere. “You don’t have to come from east of Suez to have a tradition like that.”
“But you do not have the honour to have your father with you here in New South Wales,” said Habash.
“That’s exactly right. My father lives in a rainy place called Newmarket. It would take me only two months there and two months back and an expenditure of two hundred pounds to visit him and see if he’s aged. As the poor old feller must have. All his children are in New South Wales or in America. Nothing for them in Newmarket. A small tenant holding. Laughable land. No bloody dignity.”
Habash shook his head and tested his shoulder again. “Life is hard for so many in such a lot of places.”
Jeremiah Shea, a literate Irish farmer who rented fifteen acres from a man named Forester. He did part-time clerking in the town of Newcastle for the Board of Works. Knew his Latin but had nothing to give his children. That was for Jeremiah Shea, pater, the saddest thing. In hic valle lacrimarum. In this vale of tears.
Speaking of Newmarket this way, idly in the Australian dust, revived Tim’s joy in having come here. The heat, the sky, the place: all tokens that he wouldn’t need to leave Johnny and Annie with dismal prospects.
Behind Habash, like a phantom of the sort of orphaned hope Tim had been reflecting on, a small child in a torn white dress staggered around the corner by Worthington’s butchery. Her head twisted back for air, and a keening plea came from her lips. Tim ran to her and Habash collected his grey by the reins and followed. Her sharp little face was red, and she couldn’t understand or tolerate the silent town. Tim rushed up to her and asked her, “What? What, dear?”
“Papa,” she told him, pointing north towards the farms in that direction. Her dress was all marred with red clay. “Papa and Hector. The sulky tipped.”
Her face clenched up. Habash asked, “Where, miss?”
The child said Glenrock near O’Riordan’s, and that was a mile and a half. Tim saw the light in Habash’s eye. The supreme license to gallop.
“Come on, little miss,” Habash cried and fetched the grey and swung the small girl, who may have been ten but was slight for her age, onto the neck of the horse, arranging her sidesaddle, fixing her small hands around the pommel. His own delicate brown hands on the reins would encase her and keep her from falling.