Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

Sally, he said wonderingly. He asked the sister, It’s not the fever, is it?

No, said the sister. She’s here, all right.

Aren’t I lucky? he said but without the boyish exhilaration which often took over young men with disabling but not mortal wounds. A Blighty wound, he told her, and the left arm. All I need to paint is the right. Best of both worlds.

His eyes were fevered from the gangrene.

I mean, he told her, I can open the tubes of paint with my teeth.

Sally leaned and kissed him on the mouth—a lover with a lover. The sister did not object.

The sister said, The surgeon has him down for a below-elbow amputation, but it depends on nerve and tendon and the ability to get a good flap. And on the infection. Either way, he’ll still have a stub of wing to wave with, won’t you?

Precisely, Charlie slurred.

She waited until he was taken away and they brought her cocoa heavily laced with sugar—the way at Deux Églises and other places she had fed it to the casualties. After an hour and a half Charlie was carried back stupefied and when the surgeon visited and inspected him, he murmured to Sally that they’d done an above-elbow amputation to save him from the threat of the gangrene. The state of the brachial artery and the tendons—together with the sepsis—warranted above the elbow, said the surgeon.

She sat with him into the evening as they fed him morphine as regularly as she would have and dressed and irrigated the wound, which she wanted to do but was not permitted to. She felt an abounding thankfulness. They were no less prompt or less expert than she would have been. He was an utterly standard case, except that he was Charlie. The nurses found a bed for her in their quarters and at last persuaded her to go to it.

Sally left Étaples the following afternoon, with everyone assuring her Charlie was coming on well and already showing himself a robust recuperant. His temperature was down. They boasted they had “caught” the gangrene in time. She would be contacted if there was any change.

On the way back by ambulance, she felt her own fever return—not gradually but in a rush. Her joints were in agony and by the time the ambulance reached the clearing station the fever had her bewildered.

But the poor thing had it earlier, she heard Honora say to Dr. Bright as she lay in the influenza tent where Leo had died. Honora and Bright wore masks.

It’s unfortunate, said Dr. Bright helplessly, but her first one wasn’t the influenza. Honora’s dissatified eyes loomed above Sally. Her mother looked over Bright’s shoulder. Her mother was unmasked and knew that her daughter had drowned in the Archimedes and showed a curiosity about Sally’s process of sinking. Sally had enough mind left to wonder why it was always the Archimedes she ended up with.

Do you have the morphine I stole for you? she asked her mother. The idea was if her mother would give it back now, it would take Sally away into light and air.

It has all gone to young men, her mother told her. And Mrs. Durance put her hands to her own temples as if trying to puzzle this out—the lack of comfort available to Sally.

Sally could feel things happen at the gallop within her. She blazed. Her lungs were bleeding southwards, melting away. She was frightened. But Charlie might come and pour her the sweet wine of clear air.

She’s such a beautiful one, said Slattery to Bright. And Leonora went too. It takes the beautiful.

No, said Dr. Bright. I trust that can’t be true.

Masked Slattery knelt by Sally’s bed at some hour. Her face became as large as a balloon. But she said nothing. My lungs are bleeding away, Sally in the meantime acknowledged, stealing the breath pledged to Charlie, and the delight of lungs filled and expelled. Her mother’s wan good wishes radiated out but could not prevail over melting luck.

The rottenest of luck, said Bright.

Charlie knows my body, she stated. I have opened it to him.

All the Sallys of her acquaintance—the child, the country nurse, the Egyptian tourist, the seaborne nurse, the landlocked one—were torn away like leaves off the boughs of her fever. The thief, the murderer, the sister, the hater, the sinker, the swimmer, the lover, the unloved, the witness of light, the coward of dark, and the binder and rinser of wounds, the daughter fled and the daughter forever. What do I think you do to your friends on the wire, Charlie? Australian mercy comes from the mouth of the rifle. Where is Charlie and his wing, his docked arm? So busy up in a hospital. Not knowing to come once more for a visit and give me back the air.

When air was not returned to her, terror gave way to confusion and it was all dreams and much tumult. It was dreadful how fast the tumult faded, until she let go of all the strings and felt herself choke awhile in a serenity that was A1, first class, not so bad as all that. A woman who wanted to feel more than this serenity would want portholes in her coffin. Ah, ease! It was not hard, after all, to rise—and even Charlie was just part of a mass of people left.

As Sally struggled, the revived influenza struck the Voluntary. Patients and orderlies and English Roses caught the thing and were in a special wing. Naomi too all at once sensed it advancing within her, but for about six hours—from ten in the morning until four that afternoon—denied the symptoms. When one staggered in corridors and was unsure of where the walls were—and the differentiation between them and the floor—then it was time to pay the fever attention. Declaring herself to Airdrie, Naomi was permitted to take to bed in her own room—an isolation ward of one. Her joints throbbed, she vomited the clear broth one of the masked Australian nurses fed her. Through lack of breath she felt a hellish separation from everything, from even the simplest objects in her room—a cup, a book, a coat hanging from a hook behind the door.

An English nurse came in to look at her with arresting but overhuge eyes. She was followed by two masked orderlies manhandling a bed, and two more with a stretcher on which one of the English Roses lay. The girl was gasping hard and thrashed her head continuously, squandering strength. They might both have been the victims of membrane-blistering yperite. At some stage of her fever Naomi was sure they were.

Separated from herself in this plain room, she was aware that another colleague visited her and stood writing on a chart as well. You have stayed here—she wanted to say. No military authority told you. Lady Tarlton asked you and you stayed. Was it to give me back my breath?

Naomi descended from her airless space above the bed to the deck of the Archimedes, where men and women ran about in hysteria. But with an acidic grief in her belly she went looking for Kiernan and her mother, who were both there and not there, who had both stayed and gone. She saw ponies milling on the foredeck as it began to rise.

Shoot the horses! shouted a nurse.

No one is doing it, her mother declared with that wistful smile Naomi had seen in childhood.

Naomi felt the rage she had always had against her mother, who was crying, Nothing can be done, nothing can be done…

Something can be done, Mama! Naomi insisted. Nothing can be done? I killed you with morphine because you said that sort of thing. Sally had taken it from the cupboard in the Archimedes . Sally, the little thief, had put it in place for me. I found it and let the snake run into your heart.

The horses first, said Mrs. Durance, farm-bred and grimly practical, the corners of her lower lip tucked under the upper in resignation. So she went off to attend to those things—the neighing beasts who would not question her, who offered no chance to this victim who made no threats and was content with her own murder.