A River Town (41 page)

“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.

“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.

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.