A River Town (44 page)

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.

Rounding the side of the verandah where he had unloaded poor Albert, Tim saw first someone who meant least. M. M. Chance, standing by his sulky under the big Morton Bay fig at the front of the hospital. Waiting for his bereaved friend. Ernie walked to him like a soldier surrendering, Chance reaching a hand out, drawing Ernie back to the community’s daily offices. Over his shoulder, Ernie looked across at Tim, as if what terrified him most was that Chance would lift him into the vehicle and cart him away.

“You’re welcome to stay with Mrs. Chance and me until you’re steady again,” said Mr. Chance.

“Mrs. Chance has been reassured by Dr. Erson about the plague?” asked Ernie.

“She’s an educated woman,” said M. M. “She knows you don’t get the plague from people looking at you.”

Kitty and the children were beyond the gates standing by the gold and blue T. Shea—General Store dray. Pee Dee, the old fool, his bag on, deigning to wait, not to back the cart through the hospital fence. And familiar horses of a different order waited a little further down the hill—Bandy’s grey and his beautiful roan, and by their heads, side by side with reins in their hands, stood Bandy and Mamie. Mamie had ridden up here on the roan. It had a woman’s saddle on it. Tim was tickled somehow by the idea of his sister-in-law the horsewoman. What a goer, that Mamie!

By the dray, Kitty waited, grinning a big, criminal grin. He gave himself up to the first huge embrace, the children taking a part at the edges. Kitty’s mouth full of affection and warm spittle, and her face moist.

“I knew that scapular would see you out, Tim,” she wetly cried, and delight and hope and terror went through him and brought out his tears …

“Are we broke yet?” he asked her.

“It’s a mixed bag. I’ll certainly be telling you.”

“I am a victim of injustice,” Tim confided to her.

“But the fleas didn’t bite you, so let it go at that.”

He did let it go at that, let his limbs hang, and her arms encircled him at the elbows. When strength returned he lifted Annie, whose face was full of a terrible confidence in his immortality. Johnny kept a distance.

Meanwhile Bandy and Mamie closed in together. Their unison seemed strange. They smiled foolishly.

“Give your congratulations to the engaged couple,” Kitty told him.

“Is this so?” Tim asked. He felt a surge of outrage but a kind of innocence in Bandy’s face chastened Tim when it came to expressing outrage.

“Bandy is accepting instruction as a Catholic,” said Mamie blithely.

“Well,” said Tim. “Well. I’d heard that earlier on.”

“Wish them every happiness, you miserable old bugger,” said Kitty. “The happiness we have.”

“Oh, I do, of course I do,” said Tim. “You don’t come out of the plague hospital for the purpose of cursing people.”

“I should hope bloody not.” Kitty was laughing. She who had always been at home to Bandy.

“I will be a very obedient husband,” Bandy told him. “I will give up the reckless expense of racehorses.”

“Don’t make rash promises,” said Tim. “Just because you’re getting married.”

Though he’d meant it in strict terms, everyone seemed to find it hilarious.

“God you’re such an individual, Tim,” said Kitty.

“I’d like some black tea with rum in it and a large lump of fruit cake. Does our present condition permit such luxuries?”

“Buckets of tea. Pounds of cake!”

Both Kenna sisters uttered their totally individual laugh.

“Wild horses!” cried Tim though. For a sulky was thundering up the hill out of West. He could see it was driven along by his friend the Offhand, and seated in it by his side, holding her hat, was the little wisp of widow with whom rumour associated him. The rumour publicly declared today in this stormy light.

Offhand, pink-faced from the rush, drew the sulky up and tied the reins to a gum tree on the far side of the road. Rough old road which led to the upriver demesne of Old Burke, to Comara, and in the end, by breakneck escarpments to Armidale. As the Offhand came running across the road, Kitty and Mamie and the children stood back, so clearly was Tim in the Offhand’s sights. He drew Tim aside without apology.

“There is nothing to say,” Tim warned him. “No bloody tales of the plague ward. Except there isn’t any Boer War in there. And let me tell you, the plague keeps different bloody lists than at Templars’ bloody Hall.”

Panting Offhand held his hands up. “You are entitled to your chagrin. But I’m talking to you for the last time, Tim. My fiancée Mrs. Flitch has agreed to marry me, as women will—it’s typically when my affairs are at their worst. I have no job, Tim. I have been dismissed by the management board of the Macleay
Chronicle. Australis
, you see. I wrote those letters off to the
Argus
for a joke.
Regretted them straight after the first one, when people began to attribute them to you. I laid low though, thinking, damage is done! Might as well finish with my rodomontade, might as well cover the canon of my concerns. Then I kept postponing the confession, Tim. Hit me if you want.”

It’s always your friends who do you the worst harm. Tim would need to pretend to be furious, when what he felt was weariness. “I don’t bloody well want to hit you. A hit isn’t enough.”

“Tim, Tim,” murmured the Offhand and looked very ill. “Let’s at least part friends. The fact is I am emigrating to America. I have a sister there. San Francisco and Oakland are excellent newspaper towns, I am told. If mistakes made in the rest of the world are unknown in Australia—just ask half the doctors on this coastline if that’s not true, half the older men married to younger women too—the converse is that mistakes made in Australia are unknown in the wider world! I go with a reference as to my editorial competence, and with little else. The editorial board are very happy to foist me onto the Americans. They say I’m too puckish for the bush.”

Tim whistled to himself.

“Puckish? They say
you
were puckish. I wish they’d say that about me, I wish they wrote my crimes so bloody low. They say
I’m
so despicable that they need to write to the supply houses and cancel my credit! You’re sent off with a reference. I’m on my own.”

“Oh, I’ve written a full confession which shall appear, and an exhortation to sanity. Last Tuesday, Tim, the news came that Ladysmith had been relieved. The British column had at last broken through to rescue the gritty garrison, et cetera, et cetera. Now you would have thought that the gentlemen of the Patriotic Fund would have danced in the streets of Central. But no such thing. An ordinary day of business. No giddiness, no great municipal gasps of relief! They still smoke their pipes and clang their cash boxes and milk their bloody cows! I’ve written this in my last piece. It is already composited. Might do some good.”