A man has only one lifetime, and in it he should combine as many lives as possible.
Dr A. J. Turner to the Entomological Society of Queensland, 1930
HUMPHRY WORKED THE SEQUENCE out later: Bacot had decided to rush the gate while no one was looking. He picked the worst moment: the old man was on the top step, agitated by the Mayor’s arrival and the police decision to push the crowd back. Cockerill couldn’t have known what was going on, and still had the gun pointed loosely in that direction. He surely had no idea who it was coming up to the gate and he stood too tense, then, in a panic stumbled and the thing fired.
Bacot dropped like a bag of nails.
The recoil might have knocked the old man back into his kitchen. Whatever the reason, he didn’t appear again, probably deciding to get drunk and maybe even unaware he’d hit anyone.
The surgeon had a gaping wound where the bullet had glanced off a rib and ripped his side open. It missed vital organs and his chances of survival were good, said Humphry, because he’d be spared the greater danger of being under his own knife.
After the shooting, though still not feeling sober, I’d borrowed Humphry’s buggy and took Allan home to his mother. After what was some initial shock, Allan had become talkative and reconstructed the event as an adventure in which I’d stepped into the battlefield and rescued a man who’d been shot.
Maria came straight up to me and slapped my face so hard I staggered and nearly fell.
‘Tu es completement debile!’
And then she collapsed into me, weeping. Allan seemed more horrified by this than by the shooting and began crying into her skirt and we stood that way until the girls came to see what the commotion was about and joined in.
Although I was still affected by Humphry’s elixir, the blow brought back the pain. But the euphoria I felt, I believed, was genuine.
They wouldn’t let go for a long time and that, more than anything that day, disturbed me. And as the sobbing subsided another knot inside me slipped loose. Just a little.
When I went to the sink and spat some blood, it caused another scene until I explained that I’d had the tooth pulled.
In an odd way, as I sat in the kitchen with Maria preparing tea and pouring French blasphemies, I felt relieved. There was something more than grief between us.
And I would have stayed. My jaw was aching again now and I’d begun to stiffen up.
But I had to return Humphry’s buggy.
I squinted into the sun and could just make out the figures in a pall of yellow dust. The men stopped talking as I pulled up.
One of the constables, O’Donnell I think it was, was at the gate with a rifle loosely aimed at the house. Near his feet was a dark splash of mud, and a jagged wet trail led to the road. There was no sign of Cockerill.
‘Anyway, the man’s a hero,’ Humphry said, pointing at me as I jumped down. ‘What do you say?’
Dawson examined me as if I was a steer carcass. ‘I say if he hadn’t forced Cockerill into a damned corner none of this would have happened. I’ll be making my own report on this fiasco.’
‘Lin! Did you hear that?’ said Humphry. ‘Mr Dawson’s going to recommend you for a medal.’
Dawson seemed to be steaming in front of the setting sun. ‘You had something to do with this, too,’ he hissed at Humphry.
‘Just say I was right behind him, if you like. That’s Dr Humphry, with no ‘e’, by the way.’
‘All right,’ said Moylan, who still looked shaky and was cradling his silver rifle. ‘Bacot broke the law and was fool enough to get himself shot. The Lord knows what the old man was aiming at – he couldn’t have hit his neighbour’s house if he’d been trying to. What we have to do now is avoid more bloodshed.’ By that, I assumed he meant he didn’t want to shoot Cockerill.
‘Where’s Turner now?’ I said.
‘Informing the Home Secretary,’ said Humphry. ‘Never seen him so mad.’
Most of the crowd had gone now, but some groups of men had returned, less sober. Moylan occasionally called out for Cockerill to surrender, but there was no sound from the house. The sun set, the air cooled, there was a sense that the best of the show was over.
Sergeant Moylan agonised over sending in the constables, but decided if Cockerill still had his gun they’d have to shoot him. It would soon be too dark to see and they might well shoot each other.
‘What state is Cockerill junior likely to be in?’ Moylan asked me.
I’d forgotten my patient. It was hard to say, I said, but he certainly needed medical attention as soon as possible.
‘Could he survive the night?’
If junior’s disease progressed, the pain might force the old man to seek help. He would survive the night, though.
‘We’ll wait until morning then. The old man might have run out of tobacco by then.’
Lanterns were brought from the rear of the police van. The ambulance returned. Moylan mounted a guard.
Dawson, at some stage, vanished into the night. I supposed he had other souls to torment.
Fatigue rooted me to the spot. I wondered aloud what had happened to Black Bird. Did she win?
Humphry struck a match and in the glow I saw him wince.
‘Not exactly,’ he said, lighting a cigarette and saying no more for a long time. Eventually, though, he had to tell me: Black Bird had thrown her jockey before the race, and bolted into the scrub. Humphry had got his money back, but not his horse. Dawson’s comeuppance, it seemed, would have to wait.
The windows of the Cockerill house were black holes. Humphry said he’d stick around, in case something happened.
‘An unmitigated disaster.’ McCreedy was sitting in Turner’s office. The light was second-hand, from the gas lights outside, and illuminated only the very edges of things: window, table, the Mayor’s hand in mid-air, a curl of cigarette smoke, and a silver slash of jacket. ‘Wouldn’t you say?’
I think they’d been at it for some time. Seeing me and probably realising only then that the dark had crept up on him, Turner lit a lamp on his desk.
McCreedy continued to look out into the night, a bottle on the table and a tumbler half full. A cigarette shook as he raised it to his mouth. ‘Our hospital superintendent.’
‘An unfortunate incident,’ said Turner, getting up from his chair.
‘Damned right.’
Turner opened the French door behind him and sat back down, McCreedy staring past him into the night and saying, ‘I warned you. Didn’t I damn well tell you?’
The Mayor was addressing me, I realised. He could see my reflection in the glass of the door. I didn’t answer.
Turner said, ‘The old man lost his temper and Dr Bacot wouldn’t mind his own business.’ He went over to his laboratory to light the stove.
‘It was Bacot’s business.’
‘As soon as Dr Row diagnosed plague, it stopped being Dr Bacot’s business.’
‘Plague be damned. Plague’s nothing.’ McCreedy flicked his hand and cigarette ash floated to the floor. ‘What’s plague? A word. Pl-ague.’ He blew out a thin stream of smoke. ‘Means whatever you want and nothing. Something to scare children, if you want. The Black Death? More people have died in driving accidents around here lately.’
‘The deaths are fewer only because of the measures we’ve taken.’
‘And those measures have now resulted in someone being shot. You know, perhaps we should all be quarantined against damned doctors. You follow me?’
McCreedy drained his glass and poured another. ‘You know what people fear more than death, don’t you. Eh? Being separated from their loved ones.’
Turner fiddled with a pot in his laboratory, not answering.
‘That’s right,’ the Mayor called out to him. ‘You know. I’ve told you before. Force them off to some damned concentration camp like they’re Boers and of course they’re going to stick their heels in.’
Turner made his coffee. He said, ‘Did you encourage Dr Bacot to enter the house?’
‘Cockerill was his patient,’ said McCreedy. ‘I don’t care what you say, he had every right. If he’d been let in in the first place it would have ended peacefully.’
‘He entered the yard illegally. He broke the law.’
‘No. He did not. He had the Home Secretary’s permission.’
Turner froze. ‘What did you say?’
‘Yes. I thought that might shake you up. While you were provoking a riot, Mr Dawson sent off a telegram to Brisbane on behalf of the old man. Had a reply within the hour, so if you’d let Bacot in in the first place –’
‘If he hadn’t gone in at all he wouldn’t have been shot,’ said Turner, leaving his cup to face McCreedy. ‘And why wasn’t I informed of this telegram?’
‘I believe Mr Dawson tried to tell you.’
‘I don’t believe he did.’ Turner’s voice had dropped ominously. ‘I want to speak to Mr Dawson.’
‘Well.’ McCreedy stood unsteadily. ‘Please yourself. But enough damage has been done, I should think.’ He grabbed his bottle and left.
I wished he’d left it behind.
During that night, Humphry took matters into his own hands. He ordered the constable on watch into the house by intimidating him with the Health Act. Cockerill was asleep under the kitchen table and it was simply a matter of taking the gun and then calling for the stretcher.
Public opinion, though, was now as firmly against us as if we’d brought the plague and shot Bacot ourselves, and given the town nothing but fear and threats and incarceration.
Which, of course, was partly true.
Turner sat at his table condensing the events of the previous day into a five-line telegram and drafting his resignation.
‘Is that wise?’ I said. My tongue explored the wonder of the hole in my mouth. The pain had gone and I was left with a sense of…detachment.
‘If the Home Secretary allowed Bacot entry, then my position is untenable,’ said Turner. ‘I have no authority to implement plague regulations if they can be overruled. Anyway, I’m tired.’
The confession alarmed me. I relied on Turner to be strong. He’d been fighting battles on all fronts, but was now uncharacteristically bent at the table. He looked old. His shirt collar was open and he wore no tie.
‘I should resign, too,’ I said, but I really didn’t care one way or the other this morning. I felt light-headed from actually having had some sleep.
‘That would be unwise.’
Turner went to the Post Office and his telegraph flew down a wire to Brisbane.
‘What now?’ I said.
‘Now? We wait.’
We waited.
‘I was beginning to like the place,’ I said, back in his office. Behind Turner I could see Castle Hill, looking small under a wider, clearer sky.
A clerk came with the reply:
Mayor is mistaken in reporting I authorised him defy health authorities or use force for obtaining admission for Dr Bacot or anyone else stop Both Mayor and Dr Bacot will be held responsible for any breach of regulations stop Resignation refused stop Foxton
‘What now?’ I said.
‘I suppose, just now, we should get back to work.’
The Mayor took the Home Secretary’s telegram as a physical blow. He appeared deeply offended that Turner held so much clout; that the Home Secretary would back this small, weak-chested doctor over the Mayor of Townsville.
‘He’s not heard the last of it, you follow me?’ he told me in the corridor.
McCreedy didn’t seem to appreciate that Turner could still press charges.
I believe what happened next was the result of people mistaking the cure for the disease.
Most residents had encountered only the inconvenience of the plague: the clouds of phenyl, the stench of burning rats, news of forced evictions, quarantine flags, letters to the editor, and the sound of the ambulance in the night.
The plague itself wasn’t the ultimate issue. The desecration of Mrs Duffy’s funeral and the shooting of Dr Bacot confirmed the general perception that all those evils were the fault of the doctors.
And McCreedy, true to his word, would launch one more attack.
Humphry and I walked into Turner’s office and sat down. Turner reached over his desk and handed me a piece of paper. I read the leaflet addressed to All Prominent Citizens.
Humphry sniffed at my shoulder. ‘Mine must still be in the mail.’
The leaflet called for a meeting to discuss the way the health officers, Drs Turner and Rowe, had been administering the Health Act. It proposed forming a Vigilance Committee to protect the public.
‘They’ve spelt my name wrong again,’ I said, trying to make light of it but feeling sick to my stomach. Vigilantes? I’d thought Routh had been exaggerating about getting a gun.
‘Why isn’t your name on here?’ I handed it to Humphry.
‘I don’t go around picking fights with people who are bigger than me. Anyway,’ he lit a cigarette, settling back, ‘I live in this town. The pair of you just blew in. You’re Southerners and you’ve been telling them how to save their own skins. The cheek.’
Turner, who was staring up at the hill: ‘It doesn’t matter. We’ve done our job within the law.’
‘But we did save their damned hides, didn’t we?’ I said.
Humphry flicked the paper back to Turner. ‘Dawson must be terrified,’ he said. ‘That’s what this is about.’
I had assumed that Dawson had slipped back to Charters Towers, perhaps realising that the incident could turn into a political scandal that might hurt his apparent ambition to run for the Senate the next year – perhaps realising that, like McCreedy, he’d misjudged the respect with which Turner was held in Brisbane.
‘It’s spite,’ I said. But it wasn’t spite, it was raw political instinct. Humphry was right. Turner and I had threatened the authority of his Worship the Mayor and the Honourable Member of Parliament, and we still had the power to make them look like fools.
So…this leaflet, which now lay between us on the table.
Humphry, as a ratepayer, made a point of attending the meeting and reported back the next morning.
McCreedy had chaired the meeting and Humphry said Dawson was there, prowling the fringes, the representative MP glad-handing prospective voters, no doubt.
One hundred prominent citizens were on the platform.
‘A hundred?’ I couldn’t believe there’d been such a set against us. Turner said nothing as Humphry described what happened.
I felt uneasy hearing things said about me that were plainly untrue. We were described as if we’d attacked the town to tear it to pieces. One man had apparently stood to say we’d forced the Reverend Ward at gunpoint to the plague hospital, in the dead of night.
Humphry said he’d made a courageous attempt to correct this, but was booed down.
The meeting had gone on in this vein for a while. The Cockerill case came up and McCreedy told the crowd Dr Bacot would not have been shot if the health officers had simply let him visit his patient. No one said that Bacot was shot because he was trying to do just that.
Someone moved that a collection be taken to buy Cockerill a new pair of glasses and a Snider rifle so he could hit the right doctor next time.
I must have looked horrified, but Humphry appeared to be enjoying himself. ‘Don’t worry, the motion was lost.’
Humphry said the whole event to that point was restrained. I looked at him with frank disbelief.
‘Comparatively restrained,’ he said, as he lit another cigarette. ‘The best is to come.’
Everyone must have been saving their voices for the next item, said Humphry. The burial of plague victims. It seemed everyone knew someone who had died and been buried at the plague cemetery. They seemed to think that the doctors were doing this simply to throw around their misplaced power, and that we enjoyed torturing the grieving families.
‘Your name came up, Lin, over some affair involving the landlady of the Commercial Hotel,’ said Humphry. ‘Did you really bring her down in a tackle and drag the poor woman away from her poor husband’s coffin? That’s something I wish I’d seen. Mind you, having seen you rush an armed man I’m not at all surprised.’
Well, then. The meeting, he said, had erupted in a chorus of Shame!
When that died down, Mr Ogden took the floor and told everyone he’d been in the funeral procession of poor Mrs Duffy when the health officers arrived and threatened Watt the undertaker with arrest if he didn’t take the coffin out to Three Mile Creek immediately. This, despite a grave having already been dug in the family plot at West End, and the mourners left standing around with no body to bury. If he was the woman’s husband, Mr Ogden told the mob, he’d have horsewhipped Dr Turner.
‘You can imagine how that got them going,’ said Humphry. ‘I thought they might rush out, there and then, to find an appropriate whip.’
‘I’m glad we weren’t invited,’ I said, my face in my hands.
‘That’s about it,’ said Humphry, crushing the stub of his cigarette. ‘Oh, and they resolved that Doctors Turner and Row be removed from their positions. Unanimously.’
‘Unanimously?’
‘I missed that vote. Call of nature.’
The Mayor unwisely sent the Home Secretary a copy of the meeting’s resolutions. Foxton was furious and told Turner to bring charges against anyone who’d breached the regulations.
I was all for it. Bacot had broken quarantine, and McCreedy and probably Dawson had encouraged him. I was about to lose my job, although strangely that still wasn’t worrying me.
It was Humphry who defended the Mayor. I was astonished.
‘He believes he’s protecting his town,’ Humphry said. ‘That’s his job. You have to give him that.’
In the end, even Cockerill senior escaped gaol. Sergeant Moylan didn’t want a trial because the police either believed the shooting was the reasonable response of a father protecting his son, or that it was an accident. Moylan charged him with resisting arrest, confiscated the Martini, and let him go.
Bacot was already pacing his corridors, no more contrite than before.
I went out to Three Mile Creek. I took the Carbine along the sandy track, which had deteriorated so much that I had to walk it the last half-mile.
There’d been no new cases since the Cockerill affair. The few rats trapped by councils’ rat catchers in the previous week showed no sign of plague. It was too soon to declare the epidemic over, but that was enough for the Epidemic Board, despite my objections, to order the plague hospital closed when the last patient was discharged. It made political sense, I supposed. The siege had given everyone a fright, and even the police would baulk at packing anyone else off to Three Mile Creek.
It already had an abandoned look. The ropes had loosened and the canvas snapped in the sea-breeze.
Cockerill junior was sitting on the edge of his bed smoking, and raised a finger in greeting, thinking I was just another medico.
I asked about the girl and he shook his head. ‘Not here.’
‘Where?’
He shrugged.
I went to Routh’s office and pushed open the flap.
‘Row?’ He was sitting on a box. ‘Good of you to come. Packing,’ he said, his sad face nodding to a box in front of him. ‘Losing my last patient today.’
‘Today? I didn’t think he was due to leave until tomorrow.’
‘Don’t start that again.’
‘No, no. I came to see the girl.’
‘Sarah?’
‘Her name’s Sarah?’
‘Sarah Gard. Gone, I’m afraid.’
‘She can’t be gone. She has nowhere to go.’
‘Oh, some woman showed up from The World and said she was an aunt. She sent papers out from town. I released the child,’ said Routh. ‘Is that a problem?’
‘No.’ I shook my head, my heart in my throat. ‘On the contrary. I suppose I just wanted to check that everything was all right with her.’
‘Good as gold when she left. I suspect the aunt waited. You know, until…’
I nodded.
So I knew, suddenly, that this would be my last trip out here. And that I’d never see the child again. I wheeled my bicycle to the cemetery; not to pay my respects, more to get some sense of what had happened. The graves were marked by wooden crosses that were already leaning in the sandy soil.
But I felt no connection with the mounds of blowing sand in front of me, and I even found it hard to conjure up the once familiar face of Mrs Duffy.
I knew it would have been easier to believe it was an Act of God if I’d been lying there myself.
Turner was right. It’s all a matter of perspective, and the victim’s often the last person to see what really hit him.