A River Town (40 page)

He took the letter pleading his innocence from his breast pocket. But remembered he was meant to keep his distance.

“I wish to give Ernie this letter,” Tim told Erson.

“Hold on to it for now,” murmured the doctor, putting one of the plates down.

Seven days’ quarantine. There would be time to talk to Ernie.

“So china, eh?” Dr. Erson asked.

“Yes,” said Ernie. “A present for my wife.”

“A peace offering,” murmured Mrs. Malcolm to herself. “A dove. An olive branch.”

“Just settle down, dear,” weary Ernie advised her.

“China,” said Dr. Erson. “From China by way of David Jones. And it came in a crate?”

“Yes. Very flash.”

“The ungrateful wife!” said Winnie Malcolm theatrically.

“I did find a deceased rat in the crate,” Ernie confessed. “Took it out and threw it to the back of the yard. However, found it bloody dragged back into the house by that cat. I took it finally and properly burned it.”

At the mention of the cat, Winnie Malcolm bent to pick the creature up again.

“No, Mrs. Malcolm,” Erson cried out.

“You can’t get plague from a cat, can you?” Ernie asked in a
pathetic husbandly voice. “Your cat may be very ill, dear,” he explained to Winnie without waiting for Erson’s answer.

Dr. Erson’s grimness of movement. No longer that of the matinee actor. He took off gloves already perhaps sullied by contact with Primrose, and felt Winnie’s brow and the glands under her jaws, and then her underarms. After vanishing to wash his hands like a modern physician, he returned and repeated his medical exercises with Ernie and then Tim. Tim had had to try to read the doctor’s eyes as the other two victims were gauged and handled, but now he felt Erson’s masterly cool fingers probing at his armpits. They were somehow a sacrament of comfort.

Outside, beyond the gate, pulled by two draught horses and greeted by Constable Hanney, the Macleay’s white ambulance wagon turned up, putting a full stop to Tim’s attempt to make peace with Dr. Erson. Two men got down, tying white linen masks around their noses and mouths as they came towards the door, and dragging white gloves onto their hands. The world entire, it seemed now, knew that he and Primrose, Ernie and Winnie could not be safely touched. How astonishing an idea in a place like New South Wales, a modern colony, a land of promise.

Dr. Erson opened the door to the men, and they came in in official boots, ordinary men raised to authority by their masks. In their hands they carried a rolled-up stretcher. Failed farmers reduced to carrying out the mercies of the ambulance.

“Take the cat,” Dr. Erson murmured through his mask. “Wring its neck. Watch yourself. It may have plague fleas. Then the stretcher for the black woman. Wrap her up well.”

Tim shook his head. How did I manage to be here, at the end of the world, on a remote river, in a bushweek town on precisely the right morning to incur this risk?

Primrose protesting at their presence in her own language. The Gaelic of the Yarrahappini of the Macleay. One of the ambulance men wearing heavy gauntlet gloves now and lifting the cat from Winnie’s feet and gingerly holding it at most of his arm’s length.

“Poor cat, poor cat!” murmured Winnie. She stood up and made a noise of protest. Dr. Erson rushed to hold her back by the shoulders, and she begged to know, “Has the rot gone so far?”

“Kitty will follow,” called Ernie. As Winnie had predicted, he
did not use the flasher Greek name Electra. “The cat will come behind.”

“Is the dumb universe spoiled too?” cried Winnie.

A fine question, Tim thought, deserving a better audience.

“No, be at ease, Mrs. Malcolm,” he cried.

One of the ambulance men, carrying a sealskin sack, proof against fleas, passed through the garden towards the wagon. Winnie thank Christ not alert enough to see that. The fellow hung the bag from a hook on the side of the wagon. Back in the house then to rejoin his mate.

As the two ruined farmers lifted the black woman from the ground, Ernie stepped forward overtaken by sudden anguish. “I have a very important meeting to attend tonight,” he told Erson.

Above the linen mask, Dr. Erson looked at him. “Ernie, this is grievous indeed. There are no meetings for us at the moment. Your associates would not thank you for coming amongst them, and will postpone the meeting anyhow on the advice of the sanitation officer.”

“And we are most endangered?” Ernie asked.

“You are most endangered, sad to say, Ernie.”

“Bloody hell then,” said Ernie, looked at Tim, and laughed.

Winnie paid more attention than he did as her un-liked servant was borne away.

The ambulance waiting, Ernie packed a bag of clothing each for himself and Winnie. From the living room he could be heard sighing as he chose items. Packing not for some brave voyage on
Burrawong
but for a meaner one in the white wagon.

Each item would need to be fumigated at the hospital, said Dr. Erson, so certain as to what would be done. There must have been secret meetings between the physicians and sanitation officer to plan how these affairs would be managed. From the hallway he encouraged Ernie and Winnie, who had now joined her husband in the packing. Ernie’s muttered directions and Winnie’s sudden raised voice marked the work of sorting garment from garment. In the dreary air, Tim stood by astounded and dismal.

When the Malcolms were ready and had emerged from their room, Tim moved to pick up Winnie’s bag, but the two men in
masks were back. One of them offered to carry it at the rear of the promenade out of the house. As they all gathered themselves to leave, neither Winnie nor Ernie seemed to look back. Winnie won’t be returning, Tim thought. She will go back to her Melbourne.

Here now on the garden path, the procession still in good order. Erson at the head, the man who knew their chances best, and Winnie, hair unbrushed, assisted—contrary to the rules of keeping distance—by Ernie, who toted his own portmanteau.

From far up the fence, Hanney watched. Safe from exhalations or fleas or whatever it was which made up the curse. In lazy delight he waved a hand at Tim. No chance he would lose this bit of the contest. If plague were in Tim, then Hanney would consider it an utter and personal victory, a knock-out punch, a besting. Tim Shea clean bowled—Hanney!

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.

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.