Thomas Keneally - A River Town

“Winnie Malcolm was my most esteemed customer,” said Tim.

“The joy went out of her though at some stage.”

“This is nothing to do with joy,” the doctor reminded him.

“This is a matter of minute organisms entering the blood.”

Finished his inspection, Erson said, “I have every hope you might come out of here on your own legs, Tim.”

But he sounded too much like a punter assessing odds.

“Have you heard? Has the girl been found yet at Crescent Head?”

But Tim knew it was her nature to be lost for good.

“No word on that, Tim. But let me tell you, you have room in your head to deal with only one problem. Plague. So with the rest of us.”

Tim must write a letter for his parents. In the event and when the first fever comes and after the one to Kitty. What would they think of New South Wales if they heard of his death from plague here in the Macleay? They would think barbarous, Asian place . They would consider him an unfortunate exile. They would never know how he loved all this, the mad antipodean river.

“You are having a hard year,” said Erson.

Under the doctor’s loving yet mistrusting gaze, Tim said nothing. Too complicated a remark to answer.

Finished with him, Erson stood up and took on the air of a tired, ordinary man leaving to take his day’s dinner, looking for the oblivion of his bed.

Ernie asleep still. Only his shoes off, waiting by his bed for the night walk to Winnie. Sister Raymond had placed fresh white gloves and a fresh mask on Ernie’s camp bed. Tools for making his farewells.

Sister Raymond had issued her orders. “It would be good, Tim, if you stuck to your ward and even to your cot.” She must know he had an impulse to go and show Winnie his face.

Taking the beads down from the mosquito net bracket, he dosed himself asleep with the repeated, numb Aves . First Sorrowful Mystery, Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane . Let this cup pass from me. And if it does, then the other cups to be drunk, the ones waiting for him in Belgrave Street, at Templars’ Hall, off Crescent Head, in Hanney’s care.

Ernie with lost-looking eyes and Sister Raymond standing over him, Tim was shaken awake at midnight.

“Ring the bell at the kitchen door,” said Sister Raymond. “When the orderlies come, ask for tea.”

She was brightly awake. The emergency blazed in her eyes.

As Tim waited for the metal-strengthened door to be opened, masked Ernie staggered towards him along the corridor.

“She is very bad, she is very bad. And no conversation possible either, Tim.”

One of the ambulance men unlocked the outer door.

“Sister Raymond would like some tea brought.”

“Oh, Jesus,” said the ambulance man, rubbing his brow.

But he came back with the teapot quicker than Tim expected.

“Likely to need us again?” he asked from behind the linen.

“Yes,” said Tim. “I think it’s likely.”

“All right, all right,” said the man, as if someone had been harrying him. He went out and locked the door.

After the normal hygiene, Tim poured out the tea in the kitchen, putting plenty of sugar into Ernie’s. He took it out to Ernie, who was pacing in the hall, and then began carrying a mug towards Sister Raymond when she emerged from the sickroom.

“Prepare yourself, Ernie. Wear the gloves.”

Ernie put his cup on the floor and went off for what might be farewells.

“Do you want tea yourself?” Tim asked the nurse.

“You could leave it by the door in the hallway.”

Carrying the nurse’s tea and setting it by Winnie’s door, Tim saw Ernie lay his covered mouth to Winnie’s unknowing forehead. Sister Raymond then sent him across the room, where at last he lay down on the bare boards like someone doing penance.

Tim, not permitted to join the tragedy but dazed by it anyhow, returned to his cot, slept two haunted hours in his own bed, but woke at the first lightening of the sky. He heard a hammering at the door—the orderlies with breakfast. Sister Raymond answered them, and his mask dutifully in place, Tim helped her carry the bucket of porridge in. When he and Sister Raymond returned towards Winnie’s room, they met Ernie emerging crazed.

Tim, who had not gone to caress Winnie, now clasped plain Ernie in his arms. Erson couldn’t have asked for more giving of comfort: may in fact have asked for less. You could hear Ernie’s plaintive hiccoughs. But no rasp of breath and no noise at all could be heard from lovely, poetical Winnie Malcolm.

The solid feel of Ernie. The thick cage of his bones. Tim had to continue to hold and caress him as the orderlies came and covered her totally and briskly carried her out.

“She will have all the appropriate rites,” Sister Raymond, frowning and pale now, promised Ernie in passing and in the hope of calming him.

Tim and Ernie clumsily following the procession to the door. As the ambulance men worked the stretcher down the stairs, Sister Raymond said, “Let’s close the door now. We have to close it at once.”

Her large, burly, country hands shut them in. Could it be, though? Could Winnie, so august on the shopping mornings of the past years, be crept out so casually? By men whose ordinary leather boots could be heard on the plain wooden steps?

Ernie reared up, trying not only to escape Tim’s clasp. Trying to disappear through the space in his own ribs, and roaring with the loss.

“I must give him something,” Sister Raymond called across the storm of Ernie’s misery.

She went to the dispensary. Tim felt very lonely, struggling with heavy-breathing Ernie. He found himself, as with children, uttering useless things—“Settle yourself, Ernie,” and, “She felt nothing, she was far away.” But he wasn’t himself a mere witness. His own eyes streamed. Sister Raymond brought out some murky fluid for Ernie. “Best to get him to sit on his cot,” suggested the weary nurse.

Tim wrestled blocky, crazed civic Ernie into the big ward, and could only sit him down by sitting down himself as well. The camp cot felt it might collapse under their weight.

She snatched Ernie’s mask away and forced the drug in over his lips. Splashes of brown fluid fell from the process onto Tim’s shirt.

“Damn and bugger you!” yelled Ernie now. But he gave up wrestling with Tim, who stood up and went halfway across the room and surveyed him. Ernie began to grieve in a more orderly way now, doubled over in grief.

Outside curlews and currawongs were everywhere raucous, disclosing as always the fresh day. Bullying the town awake, accompanying the dairy farmer and his lank wife and children back from the milking shed to the porridge pot in the kitchen. Unlyrical, practical birds. Galahs and the rosellas beautiful though, and frequent in the Macleay. The white cockatoos with their crests of sulphur.

Poetry had died with Winnie. No maiden phoenixes new-creating themselves here in West. Only the limepit.

As Tim wept, Sister Raymond came up and took off her glove and put a hand to Tim’s forehead.

“What can you feel with that?”

Ernie was quiet in his cot against the far wall, but Tim took up the grieving for him. And the nurse’s touch so welcome that Tim wished to raise his hand too and grab her fingers.

She said, “While Ernie rests, I must rest too until the doctor comes. I’ve had no sleep.”

“Yes,” Tim assented, composing himself.

The nurse closed their door on them, as a sign that she wanted no intrusions.