A River Town by Thomas Keneally Read Free Book Online

God, the little woman they murdered. Did you? Could you see her features and everything else?”
    “You could.”
    “Anyone we know, would you say?”
    “No one. No one.”
    “Mama, mama,” yelled Annie.
    “She’s such a jealous little creature,” said Kitty.
    Jealous little creature. Missy the true jealous little creature. Resenting his idle hours, hanging on his shoulders, pending on all events. Wanting her name back.
    “Let me alone,” he muttered.
    “What did you say?” asked Kitty. But idly. She did not demand an answer.

Two

    BEFORE YOU WENT to the trouble of putting a collar on Pee Dee and harnessing him up, it was best to check the
Argus
to see if any circuses or any large herds of cattle were due to come down Belgrave Street. He didn’t even like the teams of bullocks which brought the big cedars down to the timber mill. He would back in the traces, pigroot, buck.
    There were no circuses on the morning after the holiday, however. No reason to delay taking the Rochester children up to Mrs. Sutter’s house by the showground.
    The Macleay so flood-prone that everyone thought of the Showground Hill primarily as “above flood level.” Tim’s place was not. In still hours when he woke, he asked himself about the wisdom of living as close to the spirited Macleay River as he did. Flood eight years past had drowned Belgrave Street to the awnings and filled the stores with mud. Tight as a bloody nougat. He knew because he’d helped old Carlton shovel mud out of what was now his place. In those days, he’d not been a shopkeeper but—after working three years for Kiley’s haulage—had hopes of the Jerseyville pub. He’d shovelled up the mud and heard Carlton complain. Tim in the last of his four years of bachelorhood in New South Wales. He wanted the license to the Jerseyville pub, but the pub didn’t eventuate—Kitty could not reach New South Wales to marry him in time. Just the same, looking to get into business, and flood was a good season to begin, to trade on Carlton’s weariness,to write to the wholesalers in Sydney, sending along your references.
    That flood had been a flood out of a prophecy. A chastisement unlikely to recur. So forceful that the river found a new way into the sea near Trial Bay. The New Entrance. Such had been the vigour of the Macleay. It had negotiated a new arrangement, dictating terms of its own with the Pacific Ocean. Kitty, arriving later, didn’t understand how bloody strenuous the huge event had been. “Flood, flood,” she’d complained. “All you hear on every side is
flood
.”
    For she hadn’t seen the way young Wooderson and he rowed out from their moorage, which happened to be the upper floor of the Commercial Hotel, to rescue the Kerridges from the roof of their house in Elbow Street. The current terrible to push against, and on the way back with Kerridge and his wife and two children, they’d seen a chest of drawers sail past. Wooderson, being such a good swimmer, had actually got into the flood and attached a rope to it, and the flow of water had swept it and the boat and them back to the Commercial.
    In case the
Book of Floods Part Two
struck Kempsey, he had acquired a rowboat, in which he sometimes took the children out on the river. When not so used, it was kept tethered on a long lead, like a goat, in the yard. A prayer against further floods. A child, he knew, was a wafer before the force of the water. And Lucy, the wafer of a child beside him, had been through that, would have been an infant in Glenrock, would have been taken onto the iron roof by her mother and father to wait things out. The range of perils which surrounded young flesh. This was what astounded Tim more than he could ever express.
    He hoped she still wasn’t pushing Africa round in her head: the possible locale where Albert Rochester might have been safe.
    “Do you like Mrs. Sutter’s place?” he asked.
    As ever, she answered in the way she chose. “Mrs. Sutter was mama’s and