Free Death of a River Guide by Richard Flanagan Page B

children take turns reading from Revelations about the end of the earth. Harry, who was on holiday with Eileen, had been rounded up from the street outside along with the MacGuires, some of the Greens and Juno Proctor. Harry wasn’t so sure it was as bad as Eileen was making out, and, curious to know what was going on outside the darkened parlour, out in the cracking winds under the ash-black sky and amidst the heavy smell of smoke, said he would just go out and make sure the earth was ending, because if it were, he didn’t want to miss it for quids. And before Eileen could scruff him, Harry and Juno Proctor were up and out the back door.
    Rose died giving birth to Daisy when Harry was ten. Her death came as a surprise to no one except Harry, who had accepted as normal and healthy what was rather the evidence of a person not long for this earth.
    Before the funeral the men sat around the coffin in the parlour and drank beer while the women sat out in the kitchen and drank tea. Neither the women nor the men talked that much, because Rose’s life had not been a long one full of incident and anecdote, had not been a life that in death made people realise how much they shared in common. Rose’s early death made people think, and what it made them think about brought nobody much happiness. It reminded them that they were poor people whose lives were largely ones of hard drudgery, that the incessant work took its toll and could take people away before their time. It reminded them that their lives could be as thin as the gruel made up of kangaroo tails and spuds that they sometimes fed their children. There was not even that rich, desperate melancholia about the occasion that might accompany the death of an old local celebrity - a melancholia as thick as the clotted cream on the sponge cakes that sat heavy upon the lace-dressed sideboard in the parlour.
    After a time the men made their farewells to Boy and his family. The women cleaned up and put the children in bed, then they too left, until there were only Boy and Ruth sitting in the parlour. Ruth pulled out a tin hipflask, a sister piece, Boy observed, to his cigarette case, complete with Ruth’s italicised initials engraved in one corner. He poured half the hip-flask’s whiskey into his empty beer glass and half into Boy’s empty beer glass. Boy sipped at the whiskey. Ruth didn’t. Ruth ran the nail of his right thumb along his upper front teeth. Then he spoke.
    â€˜You think I am the only one of Rose’s family here because the rest of them are snubbing the funeral. Because they think Rose married below her station.’
    Boy looked up at Ruth. ‘No,’ said Boy.
    â€˜You’d have a right to think it,’ said Ruth.
    â€˜No,’ said Boy. ‘I don’t think it. It’s a long way, Richmond to here, and they’ve got their work and their families. I understand that.’
    â€˜They could have come,’ said Ruth. ‘If they had wanted to. But they’re snobs. You know that, Boy. You don’t need me to tell you. But you have got to understand.’
    Boy looked at Ruth and saw he hadn’t touched the whiskey in his beer glass. He saw that Ruth was looking at him, not at the beer glass and not at the floor, and he guessed that he could perhaps speak his mind. Boy spoke without rancour, without even bitterness. But with a certain deep sadness that now Rose had gone the wrong he felt would never be righted. Boy spoke slowly. ‘What do you mean, I’ve got to understand? Ain’t nothing to understand. They think I am shit. Well, they’re right. I am shit. I snare in winter and I work on the threshing machines in summer and in between jobs I poach to feed the family. I ain’t proud but I ain’t ashamed.’
    Ruth looked at Boy uncomfortable in his old cheap navy suit cut in the fashion popular before the Great War, at the wide black band around his right sleeve; looked at the way