Thomas Keneally - A River Town

“I just wanted to touch your face,” Ernie yelled.

One of the orderlies volunteered to spread his swag on the boards in the corridor against the arousal of further childlike desires in Ernie. Yet despite this molestation, Sister Raymond nursed him lovingly. To be fair to Ernie, it was easy to see how—child to mother—he could seek her out in the night.

At last she began to take Ernie for walks in the garden. She made sure that Tim knew he was welcome to accompany them, since Ernie had an old man’s stagger and no conversation. Through the scattered gum trees she led the masked two of them towards the edge of the unregenerate bush fringing the Warwick Racecourse and the cemetery. Primrose and Winnie had taken this path, but no one else walked here and the blowflies distracted the party from its grief. Afternoon sweat showed at the points of Sister Raymond’s cheeks and under her veil on her brow. Ernie content in his drugged state, a man willing to be mutely unhappy, one who had half-forgotten the causes of his misery.

The progress was slow.

“Does Mr. Kerridge the stonemason know that if spared I’ll be needing to see him?” Ernie asked suddenly one afternoon while he and Tim and Sister Raymond returned through the straggle of saplings into the garden and up to the old mad barracks.

“I’ve already sent a message,” said Sister Raymond, but like one who probably hadn’t.

“I want something that will draw all the town’s attention to this tragic thing,” said Ernie.

Meanwhile, Tim could tell Dr. Erson was beginning to feel less despair, and touched their glands and their brows more jovially with each day. “Lucky chaps it isn’t typhus or some such. Quarantine of ten days after the last death is considered utterly adequate for plague. The Black Death doesn’t hang about the place being subtle.”

Late in that quarantine time, Ernie suddenly showed himself to be more clear-headed. Up he got, looking for one of his clean, fumigated shirts, and the white and yellow tie he’d been wearing the day the emergency had begun. For the first time he picked up his watch and its medallioned fob. Time had become once again of some interest to him. As Tim watched him from across the room, he put on his jacket to go walking with Sister Raymond.

“Can we go to the grave?” he asked as they neared the cemetery.

“We can’t go too close,” said Sister Raymond wearily.

“You think I’ll be unruly,” Ernie smiled sadly. “I won’t be unruly. I want to visit it. Like any mourning husband.”

“So I have a promise from you?” asked Sister Raymond. “You won’t get distressed.”

“Certainly I won’t.”

They headed off to their right, downhill, amongst Australia’s own go-to-hell, deliberately unpleasing and perennial shrubs. Hardy, dull olive in colour. Lean, canny branches. Perhaps they grew in Eden before God even knew. Perhaps they came after the Fall. The cemetery lay ahead, the lost town of Macleay people, beneath its collection of Celtic crosses and broken columns, its occasional standing marble angel.

The first thing they came to, on the hospital side of the informal cemetery fence, was the grave. Covered not only with earth but with planks, as if it were not yet fully filled in. Still a chance that one or two more might need to be put there. Tim saw Ernie’s face bunch and grow piteous.

“On the edge of a cemetery, and in quicklime! Like someone bloody hanged! Like Mrs. Mulroney!”

Sobs started out of him again. Mrs. Mulroney hadn’t been hanged yet, had she? The name Florence Meades was needed for her trial.

“Poor Winnie’s dignity taken away,” moaned Ernie. Ernie said, “If she had not been so kind in nursing Primrose and the bloody cat!”

Even on the seventh evening since Winnie’s death, night came on with its acid dread and fidgets and false fevers, and Kitty’s remembered visage seemed a lost hope yet again. Dr. Erson calmer, sagely taking pulses, feeling for fevers without expecting to find them. As Sister Raymond looked on like one unlikely to be required to offer consolation.

Before he left for the night, Erson turned to Tim and said, “Mr. Shea, I must congratulate you on your technical survival of the plague.”

Tim asked, “Technical?”

“Well,” said Dr. Erson, seeming to be enjoying himself at last, to think himself a real wag, “should you develop the signs tonight, you would be entitled to feel discriminated against by the odds. As it is, I’ve told your friends and relatives to greet you both at the front of the hospital at three o’clock tomorrow afternoon.”

A strange berserk joy in this promise of reunion. Like schoolmasters all at once lenient at the year’s end, the orderlies left the barracks door unlocked until nine o’clock, and Tim wandered in the garden and sat for a time on a bench, looking up at what was so brightly evident. Venus, Orion—that’s a good one, with his tail, his sword, his handle. The Southern Cross, emblem of migration. People crowding up to the taffrail somewhere in the Indian Ocean. The navigation officer pointing upwards. There, there .

Ernie came out, no longer masked, sat near him on a bench and lit a cigarette. A widower. He too looked upwards.

“Winnie, are you there?” He sighed and puffed. “Answer came there bloody none.”

Despicable, pitiful Ernie. Had he ever invoked the stars for Missy? Now he concentrated on the humbler glowing star of the cigarette end, which he held before him at chin level.

“You’ve been a white man to me, Tim, through all this.”

“It’s a pity you didn’t know me, Ernie, before your mob wrote their letters to supply houses.”

Ernie murmured, “I bloody told you. I take no pride in overzealous business like that.”

“Will you write me a reference? Will you break with your friends and say I’m an honest fellow? Now we’re in the land of the living, Ernie?”

Ernie thought awhile. “You say that, Tim. Not all of us really with the living though. Not all.”

Albert, Lucy, Missy, Primrose, Winnie. The holy, diverse ever-present departed.

“Ernie, I see the signs of mending in you. You’ve put on your bright medals again, haven’t you. You’ll want to be a father of our city. West, Central, East.”

“Tim. It’s all hollowness…”

“The injustice that’s been done me and others. Is that hollow, Ernie?”

“Come to me, Tim, then, when I go back to the dreary bloody desk, the dreary bloody office. I’ll see what I can do for you. You’ve been a white man…”

But Tim could taste stale reality on his tongue. The same nonsense, saving and beginning. And then the lies, the contentions, the same ruinous enthusiasms. In the earth, solely Kitty, the thought of Kitty, did not weary him. Apart from that, a hemispheric weariness from here down the huge coast and over limitless water and ice to the South Pole. Weariness across the snow there like a stale yellow light.

Turning a shoulder, Ernie withdrew himself. He was looking at the piercing stars again.

SULLEN AFTERNOON for Tim’s and Ernie’s release. Bulky, plum-blue clouds conspired above the mountains and casually threatened the valley. They would bring a great gush of air behind them, a great coolness. At such an hour as this Lazarus had emerged. Under such biblical clouds.

Carrying their portmanteaus. They had still not exchanged names with the ambulance men. But having thanked them earnestly, Tim and Ernie walked around the side of the building like two workmates going off a shift. At the end of their imprisonment, short in time but intense in content, they moved edgily, unused to the outer world.