Thomas Keneally - A River Town

“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,

“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.”