He wondered were there sick half-castes and spiritual women in Grafton, Lismore, Bellingen, Taree? Or was the plague particular to this valley and to Sydney? If the latter, were they writing him up as a “contact” in the Sydney Morning Herald?
How sweet if released from here to make himself in a new town, taking definite account that everywhere there were Billy Thurmonds, M. M. Chances, Ernie Malcolms to be courted and reassured. Everywhere Lucy Rochesters looking for the sea or lost parents. He must give them a place at table too, no matter what Kitty told him about new-arriving Kennas. But within those limits, re-making yourself. Talk to Old Burke about a loan for a pub. Then, be a harder man! Meagher the publican had learned to be hard. Not to return cash to drunkards’ wives.
In darkness the new visitor was rapping on the door of the plague barracks, and then opened it with his key. Dr. Erson. Erson went by down the corridor in his fresh houndstooth suit.
The doctor could soon be heard discussing Winnie’s vital signs with demented Ernie. Tim waited. Winnie, Winnie. Erson came back past Tim’s door on his way to the dispensary. Some energetic washing went on there, hands were flapped about in the carbolic. When he walked in again to visit Tim, he looked perhaps tired. Perhaps fearful. He had his gloves off to feel the pulse in Tim’s wrist and placed the back of his hand against Tim’s forehead, but then put them on again to feel the glands under the chin and the arms and in the groin. He asked about joint pains and fever.
“Be kind to our friend Malcolm,” he murmured then to Tim. “We have hope for his wife, but…” The doctor looked steadily at him now. “The bubonic plague in the Macleay. Not possible says my every instinct. We must insist shipments to the Macleay are all unpacked and directly fumigated. That’s the only way. Perhaps you could mention that should people like Offhand ask you.” The doctor sighed to indicate the beginning of reflectiveness. “The plague returns at the end of a startling century and in a new location. To remind us that even here we are dust.”
“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.