A River Town by Thomas Keneally

Author:Thomas Keneally [Keneally, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-80063-3
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-10-26T04:00:00+00:00

And yet just one more dusk and Kitty and Mamie would board Burrawong in Darling Harbour, in the port of Sydney. They would drink stout beforehand in some hotel in Sussex Street and catch a cab down to the boat. Burrawong the humble, old iron midwife of all their arrivals and returns. Burrawong might plough up the coast in record time for all a man knew. Might put in by midnight Thursday.

Sitting by Johnny’s bed, Tim felt the wheels of night turn so minutely. He imagined the dark, slow weight of time seeping into the split in Johnny’s scalp. All to the good, all to the good! He kept a wet cloth on the boy’s brow. Coolness a known aid against convulsions. Beyond the window, the last light was on the river, which seemed set and inert in its dark green silty mass.

Across the room Annie slept a dignified, unfevered, steadfast sleep.

“England,” he read for consolation in the Chronicle, “pays seventy million pounds a year for Australian butter. The three criteria of good butter, as applied by judges at Agricultural and Horticultural Shows through the civilised world, are flavour, aroma and grain. Lack of farm hygiene and contaminated containers are the great enemy of these three vaunted qualities …”

The night air pressing on Johnny’s much-praised Celtic scalp was soft and warm and gracious. “Bless it,” said Tim. “Bless it!”

At the window however, Missy bowed in, pale-eyed. Tim looked at her not with a sense of terror but with something more familiar.

“Out to sea,” she said genially, though he wondered was it a threat.

He felt the room itself reach down into a trough, like a hearty old steamer taking on the first complexity of the open Pacific beyond the New Entrance. Like an echo of the sea, a spray of air broke over him. The square, unseaworthy room whirled, and again he saw Burrawong by day, in the blue Pacific with the two distant Kenna sisters, the known and unknown one, Kitty and Mamie, grinning at the rails. As the room bucked, Annie and Johnny kept solidly to their cots. Anchored. He saw a sky of stars, but then the window took a swing down and caught Red Kenna’s loud fire-lit kitchen. “Well, you don’t expect me to take the bugger too seriously,” called Red to him.

Shudder. Another wave taking the room. Albert Rochester galloped through Glenrock up a hill. Serious but intact, carnation in lapel, on his way to Mrs. Sutter. Johnny ran with strange Lucy into some surf as three agile rats came over the windowsill, but then couldn’t be seen. Missy re-entered from the hallway and passed by Johnny’s bed. A normal tread. She hadn’t come to point any doomy finger. When the room pitched, she fell in her black dress from the window.

All stopped rolling. Tim stood up in relief and Johnny snorted.

“Dear God,” said Tim, sitting down and picking up the Chronicle, which had fallen to the floor from all the room’s gyrations.

“Oh, Kitty,” he pleaded.

While his son swam down to profounder sleep.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.