A River Town

by Thomas Keneally

  The man not burdened with Winnie’s port swung open the back door of the ambulance, then stepped down to allow the rest of the party to mount, the doctor first. In the soft brown light of the interior, Primrose had been lain on a broad bench far forward.

  Dr. Erson directed the seating. The Malcolms on a bench running down one side of the wagon—“You and Winnie should really sit apart as hard as that might be.” He pointed Tim to the bench on the other side, a position near the door.

  This was the side where Primrose lay, but at a more than safe distance forward. Tim squinted up the length of the wagon to where she had been lodged on her stretcher and thought that in this umber air Primrose looked uneven in colour. Still she murmured, engaged in some horrid argument.

  Erson stepped out to travel in the front with the ambulance fellows, and Tim sat last of all and the door was closed. Winnie and Ernie opposite him, lit through the canvas-covered windows. Against the rules, Ernie reached for and held Winnie’s hand at what would in normal times be thought a comic distance. Tim’s finest, imperious customers. The spacious couple who had descended the gangplank of Terara on picnic day.

  The door now bolted from outside. Erson could be heard instructing Constable Hanney on returning Pee Dee and the cart to T. Shea—General Store.

  “Tell the Shea woman not to be concerned,” Tim heard Erson tell Hanney. How could this constable be depended on not to twist the news in some way?

  “Don’t play with the message, Hanney!” Tim called, but the warning sounded weirdly muffled in here.

  “Why would I have to, Tim?” Hanney cried.

  Outside. In no way a contact. Lucky bugger.

  Behind the huge bungalow which was the Macleay District Hospital lay a barracks-like wooden building which had been the first hospital. People knew it as the loony house, since it was fitted out as a place to hold those lonely spirits who went mad up and down the river and needed to await shipment to the asylums of Sydney. Therefore it was set up with heavy wooden doors layered with steel, and barred windows.

  Now it would be the Macleay’s quarantine.

  The nurse to whom Tim had once delivered the body of Albert Rochester waited in the opened doorway of this isolation ward. Though she wore a mask, he could tell her by her forehead and eyes. At the top of the stairs, she stood aside as the ambulance men carried Primrose in. Then she addressed the rest of the party. Inside, she asked, could they kindly undress and put on gowns provided. Masks of white cotton would be found in the small dispensary and were to be worn whenever possible within ten feet of other patients. Future health depended on that. After close contacts with other patients, the masks were to be dropped in a bucket she would point out and new ones could be taken from the dispensary. In between, hands were to be strictly washed with carbolic soap. The clothing they were wearing at the moment would be fumigated—that was the best policy—and they would be supplied with clothing from their suitcases once that too had been fumigated.

  She came down the stairs and took Winnie’s arm. “Is that her portmanteau?” she asked the man carrying Mrs. Malcolm’s bag. She did not wait for an answer but led Winnie up the steps. “You have a fever, dear,” she said. “Possibly just a cold.”

  “Have you seen my cat, miss?” Winnie asked.

  “I think the fellows are looking after it.”

  Dr. Erson himself led the men upstairs, past the door lined with metal. Its flakes of paint and indentations made Tim’s soul creak with melancholy. He could taste despair brownly on his tongue. Into a comfortless yellow corridor of tongue-and-groove timber. Erson addressed Ernie and Tim. “That is your bathroom there. Are you aware of Sister Raymond? She is a brave young woman who has volunteered to attend to plague cases.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” said Tim. “At least take my receipt and cash books from my top pocket. My wife will need them.” He thought too of his letters. Winnie’s un-posted one as well.

  Ahead, Sister Raymond said through her mask, “Of course, of course. All that.”

  Dr. Erson said, “Place them by the door, Tim. We shall fumigate them and get them to your wife.”

  Tim doubled back and laid the books by the door. Love letters to Kitty in a sense. But not enough joy in them.

  Past three other doors down the corridor, a large whitewashed ward waited for him and Ernie to share. Camp beds set out. Two barred windows and the camp beds strictly separate and adorned with a scaffolding for mosquito nets. No nets were in place however, since mosquitoes were rarely found on top of this hill. All boards scrubbed. A place designed for perishing.

  Everyone who wore a mask very busy now. Erson and the nurse discussing near the kitchen: refining their minds on the whole regulation of these perhaps-sufferers of bubonic. From the door of the large ward, Tim heard the two masked men clattering about, sloshing tubs of water into baths somewhere closer to the door, toting other heavy things elsewhere.

  Then, Tim saw, they exited through the iron-girt door and brought back commodes. Thunder-boxes, shafts and handles affixed either side for carrying night soil away. They put such a contraption in a pantry across from the kitchen, for use by Ernie and Tim. What a divine punishment for political opponents: to have to share a shouse seat and smell each other’s water.

  A second thunder machine. Located far down the corridor for use by the women.

  In the men’s bathroom two tubs of steaming water waited, reeking of carbolic. Tim could smell the fragrance. One of the men came to the door of the ward and told him and Ernie to undress and lay out by the door the contents of their pockets, and any books and newspapers they had with them. Imagine, the letter returned to Winnie.

  If it were a plaguey letter, the damage had already been done. He had already held it in his hands. Instead of putting it out, as he did all his other effects, including a wallet and the black Rosary his mother Anne had given him for his emigration, he slipped Winnie’s letter under his mattress.

  Going to the bathroom, he was instructed to dip himself into one of the carbolic baths. Watched by the ambulance men, Tim unclothed, looking down at the auburn hair of his chest and legs and wondering why the failed and masked dairy farmers didn’t laugh.

  Taking off his shirt across the bathroom—more than ten feet, Tim was pleased to see—Ernie revealed himself a chunk of a man. Certainly an ale-y belly, but grafted onto a body built for labour. Four square like the Army at Waterloo, hurrah! Gingery hair marked his heart and his prick and connected the two. So this is the boy Winnie had taken into her garden.

  For a breeze of morning moves,

  And the planet of Love is on high,

  Beginning to faint in the light that she loves

  On a bed of daffodil sky …

  He wondered was he already fevered? All this Tennyson he’d read for Winnie’s sake washing up casually in his brain now.

  Scalding in the tub, and something in the water burning at his skin. As long as the plague was scoured out by these means!

  Opposite him, Ernie plunged his body into the tub with a sigh. Across the hallway in the women’s bathroom, Sister Raymond could be heard advising Winnie towards the hot water and soap.

  “Take the bath, darling,” Ernie called musically from his own tub of water. “It’s for your good.”

  He turned a tormented face to Tim and whispered, “She’s been hugging that bloody, flea-bitten cat half the night. Thank Christ though she always kept her distance from Primrose.”

  Seen through the partially opened bathroom door, the ambulance fellows had begun working in the corridor, piling clothing into a wicker tub, Primrose’s night dress, Mrs. Malcolm’s chemise, his own shirt and drawers all tumbled in there promiscuously with Ernie’s tie and butterfly collar. The collected wealth of those infested.

  “He left her nothing but a failed business,” people would say wisely as they watched poor little Kitty.

  From the women’s bathroom, they could hear Sister Raymond saying, “Let me inspect you there, dear, to look for broken skin.
”

  Tim rose too, covering his privates with a freckled hand. Then to one of the white wraps which hung on the wall. He folded himself into it. His long feet stared bluely up at him. Flippers fit for a slab, he thought.

  “Ernie,” he asked, “will your friends still blacklist me if I get the plague?”

  Ernie shook his head and rose up urgently from his bathwater, his stub of a prick showing. Slug and angel of mercy.

  “Poor Winnie,” Ernie said, his arse to Tim now as he gathered himself into a wrap. “What you call my friends … various of the Patriotic Fund gentlemen … I can’t undo the sort of work they’ve done on people already. As soon as you were suspected, Tim, they started writing off letters to the Sydney suppliers. You know, warning them your credit isn’t good. Your social credit as much as anything.”

  Tim was struck still in his white shroud. Come on, Ernie! Was that possible? Something relayed so offhandedly. The ordinary power to ruin a man. On his big feet, Tim could say nothing. His tongue an orb of leather. You couldn’t pick the poisoned world apart with such a silly instrument.

  “Your little store has a pretty hard row to hoe now,” Ernie stated. “I don’t approve of that sort of thing, Tim. A little campaign, without warning a man. Easy to get going though, don’t you see? But more so if a fellow is a bit behind on his payments and a bit strained for the ready.”

  This knowledge couldn’t be contained. He knew that in this garment you could not exercise a rage properly, but that itself fed the rage. He rushed white-robed Ernie and pushed him up against the grooves of the wall.

  “In that case, Ernie, God damn you! You’ve as good as murdered me, your whole murdering bunch!”

  Ernie however wouldn’t give Tim the joy Tim wanted from him, the rage he could have punished. Wouldn’t even try. Ernie’s eyes slid sideways. He seemed too melancholy to be hit.

  “Come, Tim. You’re not a solid sort, you’ve got to admit. Though I suppose the flea bites us both with equal venom. I could have forgiven even the dunning of Winnie.”

  Tim stopped pushing so hard. You couldn’t push against such a pale talker.

  “But those Australis letters, Tim. Baylor picked them at once. Boils down to this. A man who renounces his own society … who lies there at its heart pretending to patriotism … what can that fellow bloody well expect, Tim? What could you bloody well expect?”

  Anger revived and Tim pushed Ernie back in place after all. “But I am not the sodding man.”

  “Whatever you say, Tim. Everyone knows. It would have gone better for you had you appended your bloody name in the first place. Had the courage to do that … By the way, Tim, we are meant to be wearing masks aren’t we? Up this close.”

  Tim let Ernie go and walked across the room. Just as well too, he decided then. Before Erson took any further false notion of him. “I suppose that was part of the bloody plan also then? That bloody inspector.”

  “People like Billy Thurmond are very energetic. They meet like-minded visitors to the Good Templars and guide them to the people they would like to see punished.”

  Ernie sighed, and Tim knew it was not just because the plague had him hostage. But on top of that he had changed in a month. At all recent encounters, there’d been no real enthusiasm in Ernie. No fuming rage even when he pretended there was. No hectic affection. Take the bath, darling. It’s for your good.

  All his enthusiasm had been spent in writing that glowing letter about Hanney.

  Not waiting for any further Ernie clarifications, Tim opened the door of the bathroom. It was—based on Ernie’s recent information—an even more venomous world, and what he saw now stood as evidence. Under Sister Raymond’s directions Winnie, barefoot in a white gown, staggered down the corridor.

  “He said, ‘She has a lovely face,’ ” Tim remembered.

  “ ‘God in his mercy lend her grace,

  “ ‘The Lady of Shalott.’ ”

  Mrs. Winnie Malcolm guided to a room further along than Primrose’s, and casually declaring, “I have a dreadful headache.”

  “Oh, yes,” called Ernie soothingly over Tim’s shoulder. “But it may be from what you’ve taken.”

  Winnie said nothing in rebuttal.

  Ernie and Tim then were to share the third, big space. The men’s ward, for companionable madmen. Ernie sitting on his camp bed, his naked knees showing through the shroud-like cloth.

  Soon one of the men in white brought in Tim’s fumigated effects and put them on a chair—watch, the letter offering the Patriotic Fund an affidavit, the blackthorn rosary beads his mother had given him when his trunk was packed and waiting for the charabanc to come for it and him. Oh migration, oh!

  Carried habitually, these beads. Not honoured by as much use as his present fix would seem to warrant.

  A negligible little pile of possessions was brought in and put on the chair near Ernie’s bed. Tim touched the big rosary beads above his cot. No need to be guarded about any of that any more. Murder revived in his heart with the sight of the beads. He imagined himself mad and purple with plague riding naked to Pola Creek and breathing on Billy Thurmond’s family.

  The as-yet-unworn mask someone had placed on the deal chair by his bed depressed him, but he was cheered when a portmanteau packed by Kitty was delivered late in the day. Tim opened it gratefully and began to dress, a man reassuming his skin. Nothing smelled of fumigation—these came from Kitty’s uninfected household. A modest joy in that fact. His better pants and coat. Under-drawers and a singlet which smelled of sun and soap. Small aspects of her care—folded against the singlet for wearing around the neck a scapular, two patches of brown cloth connected by cord. A note in her hand said: “We all cry for you, Timmy. But soon soon I don’t doubt it! Saint Anthony’s scapula guards against plage and influenza.” Every Kenna family misspelling delicious to him. Then today’s Argus, Saturday’s unfinished Chronicle. So touching. Kitty knew he liked newspapers.

  Added to the note, “Poor child still not found so must commit her to mercy, Tim.”

  Across the room Ernie sighed and rose. His mask was in his hand. He seemed embarrassed by it. “You have reading matter, Shea. Perhaps when you’re finished with them … I wonder has the singing doctor seen fit to fumigate them. For now, I must visit poor old Winnie, as unwelcome as a man might be.”

  Still in his white garment and on his white little blocks of feet, he went off to keep his marital post. He was on safe ground. For the nurse wouldn’t let him stand too close to his wife.

  In the Chronicle, as Kitty had foreshadowed, news of no news of Lucy. Tim was now guilty to realise that in this pressing hour he had half-forgotten her. “Crescent Head fisherman Mr. Eric Dick says that the drowned child, who fell from Crescent Head’s Big Nobby during a picnic on Sunday, should by now have been found in the vicinity, unless caught by the stronger Pacific coastal current …” How Lucy would have embraced that stronger current! Sought its hand and let it make her a journeyer. While I am justly made to serve the plague’s time.

  Page eight, the third Australis letter.

  Sir,

  The year progresses, and since the British garrisons in South Africa still go unrelieved, and since they like us must be wearying of all the talk of the much-praised British mettle, I am forced to reflect further and in the frankest terms so far on our colonial situation. I do so as the valour of the Australian Mounted Bushmen is sacrificed by clumsy British generals in bungled attempts to relieve those garrisons.

  As all this occurs to our disadvantage, we nonetheless take the Constitution of our infant Nation off to London, to have it ticked and amended by a Colonial Secretary in Whitehall, who is not one of us and who has no understanding of what we are, or of the equality and independence which are the better side of what we are. Could you imagine Jefferson and Washington submitting the Constitution of the United States to the scrutiny of Lord North? They would laugh at you if you suggested it, those great democrats! How is it that even approaching Nationhood we lack the
confidence to seek only one assent alone to what we should be? That is: our own assent?

  Until we do that, there will be many follies like the follies of South Africa. Until we do that, we will need to seek leave in perpetuity of aristocratic dolts in Whitehall who will arrange matters for the convenience of the Mother rather than the welfare of the Child.

  I trust that fair-minded citizens will see that my three letters are a good and reasonable summary of an Australian democratic position, one taken irrespective of race and sect. In the spirit of that, I am, forever and with just pride,

  Yours, etc.

  Australis

  “Oh, Holy Christ,” Tim whispered. Reasonable citizens! In a town where people wrote off to the supply houses in Sydney, saying you were done for. Reasonable bloody citizens!

  Masked Ernie wandered in again, glum, and slumped down on his cot.

  “Not allowed close to her. She has a cold and looks a little flushed. Primrose, though, not well at all. The glands show black under her chin.”

  Poor Primrose then. Winnie wouldn’t weep for her, and Ernie wasn’t likely to.

  Tim knew Winnie’s letter lay beneath his mattress, but he had his useless statement of innocence beside his bed. No use giving it to Ernie now. Ernie was out of the debate. Perhaps use the back of the sheet to write to Kitty. As soon as he felt the first fever. Not till then would he know what to say.

  A restless grief for Lucy had grown in him again. He tried to contain and soothe it with print. He shook out his Argus—Ernie could bloody whistle for the Chronicle, though reading the Off-hand might improve his mental habits. Tim leafed past the serials full of genteel fairness and simple maps of the world. He began to read how New South Wales had defeated South Australia outright in the Sheffield Shield cricket in Adelaide. Where, reports said, plague had also made its landing.