A River Town

  At mid-afternoon, when the isolation ward was quiet and masked Ernie across the room and Winnie Malcolm further down the hallway seemed to be asleep, he decided to pick up his own white mask, tying it at the back, all like a well-ordered patient, and went down the corridor to the door of Primrose’s room. Sister Raymond, however, intercepted him at the door, forbidding him with her huge eyes.

  “I wanted to see what it was like,” Tim explained. “The poor woman … she’s had no company.”

  “She’s not aware of that, Mr. Shea. The struggle is extreme.”

  Patches of supremely black skin now in Primrose’s half-black face. What townsperson, very aged these days, maybe under the sod, had taken his lust up the river to Primrose’s black mother. A quart bottle of port handed over as the contractual grounds for Primrose’s mixed blood. She had white relatives in town who did not know of her. Didn’t know that their blood went to make the plague’s first target.

  An awful struggle for Primrose. Her chin stretched up above a mumpy neck. Sister Raymond put a wet cloth on her forehead, dribbled some water across her mouth.

  “It feels so normal, all this, don’t you agree?” he asked. “So usual?”

  Albert Rochester normal across Pee Dee’s shoulders with a bag over his head.

  In the humidity of mid-afternoon the thunderstorm, still standard in this late summer, struck the hospital hill. Three o’clock. Beneath the thunder Tim, gone to Primrose’s door again, witnessed the last weak seizures. In spite of nature’s bombast and the fury of rain on the roof, there was no sense of a great culminating tragedy. Tim in fact felt he was there yet not there, witnessing from another place. In the spiritless moment, in the ward wilfully empty of human decoration, fitful pieces of old prayers and funeral verses spilled over his lips but reached no proper conclusion. And yet while distant, still too real, too actual.

  Behind the cold glass of his own fear he saw something to be admired. Sister Raymond stood up to make a healthy distance though not ten feet between herself and the half-caste and took off her mask so that Primrose could pass with the sight of a human face. He knew at once he had never given Lucy such a thing. He’d given her an anxious face, a dutiful, solicitous, guilty face. But nothing as frank as this.

  The struggles ended as simply as you could wish. Primrose exemplary and quick at the end.

  Her recent employers the Malcolms slumbered. Their suitcases of fumigated clothes lay by now at the foot of their beds so that like Tim they could dress as usual inhabitants when they woke.

  But they still slept as the two men came down the corridor past Tim and lifted Primrose up and out without ceremony and straight away.

  “Make way, Tim,” said Sister Raymond.

  “Call the Malcolms,” he suggested.

  “No. Not now.”

  “You won’t burn her?” Tim found himself softly pleading as the ambulance fellows carried Primrose fairly delicately to the door.

  “Doctor will see her,” said the nurse.

  “Where will she go?”

  “Consecrated ground, Tim.”

  “Where? Where consecrated?”

  He might in fact need to share her space with her, Primrose, Ernie, Winnie, Shea. Somewhere, haphazardly and uncritically, he and Primrose might be free with each other’s limbs.

  Sister Raymond’s huge eyes over the restored mask, brown with some selfless, calm, sisterly virtue. “You do want to know things, Mr. Shea. In consecrated ground. The edge of West Kempsey cemetery.”

  “A common pit?”

  “Tim!” the sister warned him. But in times of epidemic, he knew, it was a matter of common pits, not individual resting places. Common pits and quicklime. The rumour of Primrose’s girlhood, let alone all the uncelebrated dinners and ironing she had done for the Malcolms, would be resigned to the fast work of that pit.

  For superstition’s rather than medicine’s sake, mask off now, thrown into a bucket of carbolic and water. Hands washed in carbolic. New mask fetched for coming use from the pile in the small room named the dispensary. No need yet to put it on. No close contact planned. But performing these small duties very comforting.

  Back in the ward where Ernie slept, he took down the thorn beads and applied himself to reciting one of the Sorrowful Mysteries. Jesus Is Crowned with Thorns. Hands trembling, beads likely to fall. Under his whispers, Primrose and her handlers crossed the garden outside and vanished past the window. Out to sea with Lucy and the narwhals.

  He would choose that, though. To voyage with lucky Lucy. Rather than be with Primrose.

  Later, while he read, Sister Raymond could be heard arguing soothingly down the corridor with an awakened Mrs. Malcolm. Winnie crying, “But I must see her!”

  For something to say, Sister Raymond advised Winnie to wait for Doctor who would be here soon. Across the room Ernie writhed in his shallow afternoon slumber. Sister Raymond came in holding up a hand to signify that Tim should sit still.

  “Mr. Malcolm, Mr. Malcolm,” said Sister Raymond. Ernie sat up in his white gown.

  “I regret to tell you that your wife has a fever.”

  “Oh dear God!” said Ernie. “She isn’t ready for this.” He sat up. “We have a reconciliation still to make …”

  “Come and see her. I have dressed her in one of her own nightgowns.”

  Ernie reached for his pile of fumigated clothes, but then covered his face with his hands and was defeated by the prospect of dressing.

  “I’ll manage it soon,” he promised.

  “Yes, but be quick.”

  The accountant gathered himself and picked up a limp, fumigated white shirt with a high collar, rushed into his brown pants without bothering with drawers, and hauled on a pair of oxfords without socks.

  “Dear, sweet God,” he murmured softly, catching Tim’s eye. “It’s all too quick by half, Tim. Where’s the bloody time for a resolution?”

  Then he sat on his cot again.

  “Could be just a simple fever,” Tim kept saying. How could you believe bloody Ernie would have looked so affecting? Recklessly shaking his square head. Tears spilling from his eyes.

  “I have put a fresh mask there for you to wear when you’re ready, Mr. Malcolm,” Sister Raymond told him.

  “Dear God, these masks,” said Ernie. “We are punished, we are punished.”

  Tim stood as if to help Ernie by example, and Ernie painfully stood but then got going quickly towards the door.

  “Wait for me,” the nurse called. In big masterful shoes she pursued him.

  Winnie’s letter was certainly infested, then. He’d leave it where it was pending events. On his own, Tim spent a little time regarding Ernie’s watch-chain, which had flopped on the floor. With its array of civic medallions, scarlet, blue, gold, green, white, it resembled a brilliant snake. Ernie’s public skin sloughed off there while the poor bugger went in sockless pain to see his wife.

  “Fatherless children,” he murmured aloud.

  Annie uselessly earnest once she was fatherless, and turning suspicious. Johnny rushing down the precipices of the new century with every Lucy Rochester he could find. Seven-months-pregnant wife. Left with a barren store, a store from which the credit had run out. Kitty would fight, of course, but the idea of her undertaking this struggle seemed to him poignant beyond bearing. Old Burke might be sparingly kind, in a cold, cautionary way, saying what a fool her husband had been. Joey O’Neill would be more generous in spirit, he and Mamie supporting the children. But they’d all become a bread-and-dripping clan. No roast potatoes or leg of lamb or sago and custard as he and Kitty had grown accustomed to. O’Neill wasn’t fashioned for wealth.

  Winnie not designed either for this silly plague, this paltry, plain affair in the old prison of Macleay lunatics. She was devised by temperament and by her lean and elegant bones to invite Death wistfully, to intend it. Not to be jumped on, nor ambushed like this.

  I have been half in love with easeful death,

  Called him soft names in
many a mused rhyme.

  Young Keats the poet who melted like snow. Winnie entitled to do the very same. Her poets had promised her that. Bloody Alfred Lord had promised it.

  “Death closes all: But something ere the end, some work of noble note, may yet be done, Not unbecoming men that strove with gods …” Bullshit.

  I should expose the bloody poets, Tim promised himself. That’s the letter I’ll write to the Chronicle! For Ernie’s sake, but for Winnie’s above all. For she’d believed them. Believed the posturers, the death-flirtatious buggers, and here she was in a plague ward amongst gum trees.

  He took a decision to get up and follow the direction Ernie had taken. No mask on, since with Sister Raymond on duty no closeness could be hoped for. Following the corridor he reached a point from which he could see into Winnie Malcolm’s room. Nothing there that was up to the high level of Tennyson. The plainness of it all brought that instant sting of grief. Winnie very flushed, her face unencumbered and open, since she was beyond protecting … Seeing Ernie, and pushing at him with her fists. Ernie stepping back, uttering through the linen gag he wore un-poetical, forlorn sobs, moist in the wrong way for grandeur. But truly mourning also, poor fellow. Not the sort of sound normal to a mongrel pillar of the bush.

  Sister Raymond soothed mewling Winnie with a wet cloth, holding her by the shoulder and persuading her to drink the second half of a cup of something—bromide, laudanum, God knows what. Something Lethean, Tim hoped. To make her serene. How could Ernie, whose duty was to love her, restrain himself at such a time?

  “Now sit down by the door, Mr. Malcolm, if you don’t mind,” said the nurse, forcing the dose over Winnie’s lips.

  Splendid Winnie Malcolm grew quieter—weakness and the drug curtailed the low drama, loosened her face, made it serene. On his chair, Ernie raked the backs of his hands with his nails and said at last so much, so many appeals to God and mercy, that Sister Raymond looked at him with something less than patience.

  “Now we must be calm. Do you want us to have to bring more and more nurses?”

  “No, no,” Ernie agreed. “But it’s too bloody cruel.”

  “And it must be borne,” said Sister Raymond.

  “I’m not afraid of bearing things,” Ernie claimed like a child on the edge of some darkness.s

  All the thwarting of Tim’s letter to the Commissioner, all the betrayal over accounts and all the useless urgings to loyalty and valour meant nothing now to Tim. At this hour, Ernie presented himself as a plain animal in grief.

  And this large young woman who commanded them. Be thankful at least for her. She would not permit florid deaths. They were under a duty, he and Ernie, to grieve and be fearful in an orderly manner. Theatre on their parts would only drag in more nurses or masked attendants and spread the peril too broadly.

  In the early dusk, as Tim sat on his cot in the men’s ward, one of the white-coated men went by unmasked in the garden. Idly moving amongst the rhododendrons. Sun-leathered, about Tim’s age. Tim swore he’d never become such a man if lucky enough to live on. He’d get work hauling, cutting or milking rather than this. The fellow looked aimless, glancing up at the highest branches of a red gum. No doubt he and his mate paid a margin for plague duty, for waiting in their hut in the garden and carrying food and medicine back and forth, carrying the thunder-boxes. Carrying Primrose. But what margin would be worth it? And were they scared too? They certainly maintained a distance and didn’t swap their names with him and Ernie. Men with a memory of labour so fierce that they’d rather now be paid to hang around for the plague’s pleasure.

  Soon after this sighting, he heard both attendants came along the path to the armoured door. They talked as they advanced. “Lost half the bloody herd,” Tim heard one of them say. Unlocking the barracks, they came in carrying trays of corned beef, potatoes, split peas, sago pudding. Their gloves, brilliant white, looked delicate on their big hands. Tim watched from his doorway as they put the four meals down on the table in the little kitchen by the door, and one of them went to get the teapot while the other began to trim and light the hurricane lamps. This lamplighter saw Tim approaching, held up a hand to keep him at a safe distance, and asked, “Feeling all right at this stage, Tim?”

  “Thanks. It’s a bugger but I’m perfectly well so far.”

  “Saw you walloping the cricket ball at Toorooka. Bloody good innings.”

  “Ah yes,” said Tim gratefully. “My son’s a great chucker of the ball, did you notice?”

  The lamp-trimmer nodded in his mask. “Fires upriver did for me. Lost half the bloody herd.”

  But still no offer of his name. The other one went out again and came back with the teapot. Then both men left, locking the door. “Dinner,” Tim called as melodiously as he could down the corridor. Past the closed door beyond which Primrose had perished.

  Entering the kitchen with Ernie, Sister Raymond took off her mask and then Ernie’s, stripped off her gloves, threw everything into the bucket of carbolic and water. She washed her hands with the prescribed carbolic soap—Tim watched all this, this antiseptic rite—and ate her meal quickly, standing at the kitchen bench, her back to Tim and Ernie.

  “The corned beef will make us thirsty,” Ernie plaintively announced at the end of the table. He ate little before fetching a fresh mask without having to be told to, and returning to his station on the chair in the room along the corridor. Tim and Ernie plague-trained in less than a day by this rigorous nurse.

  “Don’t go up close though,” Sister Raymond called after the accountant.

  Not feeling entitled to crowd in on Ernie and Winnie, Tim loitered on his side in the male ward. The men could be heard coming in to take away the remnants for burning or burial. Tim could hear them chinking the plain china together as they exited.

  He wondered were there sick half-castes and spiritual women in Grafton, Lismore, Bellingen, Taree? Or was the plague particular to this valley and to Sydney? If the latter, were they writing him up as a “contact” in the Sydney Morning Herald?

  How sweet if released from here to make himself in a new town, taking definite account that everywhere there were Billy Thurmonds, M. M. Chances, Ernie Malcolms to be courted and reassured. Everywhere Lucy Rochesters looking for the sea or lost parents. He must give them a place at table too, no matter what Kitty told him about new-arriving Kennas. But within those limits, re-making yourself. Talk to Old Burke about a loan for a pub. Then, be a harder man! Meagher the publican had learned to be hard. Not to return cash to drunkards’ wives.

  In darkness the new visitor was rapping on the door of the plague barracks, and then opened it with his key. Dr. Erson. Erson went by down the corridor in his fresh houndstooth suit.

  The doctor could soon be heard discussing Winnie’s vital signs with demented Ernie. Tim waited. Winnie, Winnie. Erson came back past Tim’s door on his way to the dispensary. Some energetic washing went on there, hands were flapped about in the carbolic. When he walked in again to visit Tim, he looked perhaps tired. Perhaps fearful. He had his gloves off to feel the pulse in Tim’s wrist and placed the back of his hand against Tim’s forehead, but then put them on again to feel the glands under the chin and the arms and in the groin. He asked about joint pains and fever.

  “Be kind to our friend Malcolm,” he murmured then to Tim. “We have hope for his wife, but …” The doctor looked steadily at him now. “The bubonic plague in the Macleay. Not possible says my every instinct. We must insist shipments to the Macleay are all unpacked and directly fumigated. That’s the only way. Perhaps you could mention that should people like Offhand ask you.” The doctor sighed to indicate the beginning of reflectiveness. “The plague returns at the end of a startling century and in a new location. To remind us that even here we are dust.”

  “Winnie Malcolm was my most esteemed customer,” said Tim.

  “The joy went out of her though at some stage.”

  “This is nothing to do with joy,” the doctor reminded him.

 
“This is a matter of minute organisms entering the blood.”

  Finished his inspection, Erson said, “I have every hope you might come out of here on your own legs, Tim.”

  But he sounded too much like a punter assessing odds.

  “Have you heard? Has the girl been found yet at Crescent Head?”

  But Tim knew it was her nature to be lost for good.

  “No word on that, Tim. But let me tell you, you have room in your head to deal with only one problem. Plague. So with the rest of us.”

  Tim must write a letter for his parents. In the event and when the first fever comes and after the one to Kitty. What would they think of New South Wales if they heard of his death from plague here in the Macleay? They would think barbarous, Asian place. They would consider him an unfortunate exile. They would never know how he loved all this, the mad antipodean river.

  “You are having a hard year,” said Erson.

  Under the doctor’s loving yet mistrusting gaze, Tim said nothing. Too complicated a remark to answer.

  Finished with him, Erson stood up and took on the air of a tired, ordinary man leaving to take his day’s dinner, looking for the oblivion of his bed.

  Ernie asleep still. Only his shoes off, waiting by his bed for the night walk to Winnie. Sister Raymond had placed fresh white gloves and a fresh mask on Ernie’s camp bed. Tools for making his farewells.

  I fear thy kisses, gentle maiden,

  Thou needest not fear mine.

  Sister Raymond had issued her orders. “It would be good, Tim, if you stuck to your ward and even to your cot.” She must know he had an impulse to go and show Winnie his face.

  Taking the beads down from the mosquito net bracket, he dosed himself asleep with the repeated, numb Aves. First Sorrowful Mystery, Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. Let this cup pass from me. And if it does, then the other cups to be drunk, the ones waiting for him in Belgrave Street, at Templars’ Hall, off Crescent Head, in Hanney’s care.

  Ernie with lost-looking eyes and Sister Raymond standing over him, Tim was shaken awake at midnight.