Thomas Keneally - A River Town

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.

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.