The Law of Dreams

by Peter Behrens

  “You watch your gash with me, miss! Sraoilleog! Hussy! Clipping the cash off poor men! He hasn’t taken your swag and if you say it again I’ll smack you down, what you deserve!”

  “Well someone’s got it!”

  “They don’t,” said Fergus wearily, “they are our shipmates.”

  “Well who then?” White faces were peering down from the tiers. “Who has our money? Do you? Do you? You wretches, which of you has stolen our money? God help me if I find you, I’ll whip you blue —”

  “Quench it, Molly, it’s no use.”

  She flung herself into their berth and lay in stormy silence, wrapped in her cloak, until Mrs. Coole went up on deck to cook the stirabout. Then Molly crawled out and began digging through the Cooles’ trunk while the schoolmaster lay in his berth not lifting a finger to stop her. Finding nothing in the trunk, she began to poke and feel the straw pallet where he lay.

  “Stop it, Molly.” Fergus began pulling her away. She struggled, then broke free and ran up the ladder.

  After helping Coole repack the trunk, Fergus climbed on deck. There was little-wind. The sails were flapping and banging. Smoke from the cabooses hung over the deck. Mrs. Coole glared at him.

  Seeing Molly up in the bow, he went forward. She was alone, smoking her pipe. He stood next to her, resting his elbows on the rail, watching Laramie’s prow split the black river, curling back a froth of white.

  “I’m sorry for your horses, Fergus.”

  How different was the river from the sea. Sweeter. He could feel the country drawing in, the scent of trees and ground.

  “There will still be horses.”

  “Hold on to me, man.”

  Her body light and warm, like a candle.

  THE MAN he had chased up the ladder died with his face dark and swollen. Fiabhras dub, black fever. The sailors called it ship fever.

  It was snowing so thickly they couldn’t see either shore. Two of the man’s daughters shivered as the sailmaker sewed up the corpse in a piece of canvas, along with a chunk of iron. Mr. Blow didn’t try to read any prayers. The hands set the bundle on a plank, carried it to the rail, and quickly tipped it into the river.

  “Call it what you will, it’s typhus,” Fergus overheard Ormsby telling Mr. Blow. “Scour the ship, scour what can be scoured and throw away everything else, then lower a caboose to smoke the hold and hope to God we raise Quebec before it spreads.”

  For the first time since Cape Clear, they were ordered to collect the filthy straw from the hold and pitch it overboard along with blankets, old clothes, rags, and garbage. There was no fresh straw; they would have to sleep on the boards. Sailors were made to throw away their hammocks. The passengers scrubbed the ship from stem to stern using hot water, straw brooms, and clean yellow sand from the ballast.

  He was helping dump straw and trash into the river when he saw a bungled hammock passed up through the fo’c’sle scuttle. The sailors placed the bundle on deck, the sailmaker folded it open, and with wet snow driving in their faces they all stared down at Nimrod Blampin’s naked corpse, his chest and arms covered with maroon blotches. “He went quite hard, poor fellow. Very warm, terrible headache, sweats, then blisters.”

  Nimrod’s hammock was sewn up with a lump of iron ballast inside and Mr. Blow was summoned. The sailors removed their tarpaulin caps and stood in silence while the master read English prayers then slapped his prayer book shut with a last, distracted “Amen” and hurried back to the afterdeck. “There it is, Nimrod dear,” cried the sailmaker as the hands raised the plank and tipped it. The bundle stuck for a moment then slid off abruptly, knifing into the current and sinking quickly so that when Fergus looked back he saw nothing in their wake but the tawny flotsam of straw and garbage.

  “IF IT’S spread to the crew, we’ll be next,” Mrs. Coole said. “See what your politics and your false religion have done? My poor children!”

  “A good douse will preserve them.” Coole clapped his hands. “Come, Carlo! Come, Deirdre!”

  The Coole children peeked out from the uppermost berth where they had taken refuge with Brighid. A few passengers were still scrubbing, but most were occupied packing and repacking their trunks and sea chests.

  “Clean they must be. Come with me, children!”

  “No, the water’s too cold, Martin.”

  Ignoring his wife, Coole lifted down Carlo and Deirdre. He began leading them to the ladder, but Mrs. Coole grabbed Deirdre’s hand.

  “You cannot wash off what you have done to us, Martin!”

  “Clean they must be,” the schoolmaster said doggedly. “It’s filth that kills.”

  They tugged the little girl back and forth, both children howling, until Mrs. Coole let go suddenly and the schoolmaster began herding them up the ladder.

  “Stop him! Whatever I say only makes him worse!” Mrs. Coole begged Fergus. “Don’t let my babies come to harm!”

  Reluctantly, he climbed onto the deck where Coole was looking agitated and disheveled, his jacket, wild hair, and beard flapping in the wind. “Don’t you say, Fergus,” the schoolmaster shouted, “there is nothing healthier than a freshwater bath?” Carlo and Deirdre were crying as they undressed, and Fergus wondered if the schoolmaster intended to pitch his children overboard. Then he saw that Coole had dropped a bucket over the side and was hauling it up.

  “Too cold for bathing, mister.”

  “Never! Hurry! Hurry now!” Coole shouted at the children. “Peel off your clothes! Pluck off your hideous things! Time to get clean!”

  “Why not Mama?” the little girl whined. “Why isn’t she come with us?”

  “She will, she will!”

  “Come on, mister,” Fergus cajoled. “You ought not to soak them — it’s too cold.”

  “Too cold for pure water? It’s not cold that kills, it’s filth and the poison air, the miasma down below.”

  Setting one full bucket at his feet, Coole quickly lowered another. He turned to the afterdeck where the figure of Mr. Blow could be seen, standing near the ship’s wheel.

  “I have seen Hell, and Hell is a ship! Hell, sir, is your ship! Can you hear me, sir?” the schoolmaster roared. “That makes you the devil, don’t it? The Satan of the pits! I curse thee, Satan! From a thousand tombs I curse thee!”

  The wind was blowing strong off the beam. It was doubtful the master could hear.

  “Cold is clean. Come, come, Carlo! Who shall be first? It must be you.”

  The little boy stood with arms by his sides, fists clenched, and eyes squeezed shut as his father drenched him. Picking up the next bucket, Coole approached the little girl, who was naked and shivering. He dashed the bucket over her and the child began to dance and howl, slapping herself.

  “There it is, my turn now!” Coole cried, throwing off his coat. He tore his shirt over his head and was kicking off his boots when his wife appeared at the hatch.

  “Martin!”

  Both children ran to her, howling.

  “Douse me, for the love of God!” Coole cried to Fergus. “Douse me!”

  Flinging away his trousers and his drawers, the schoolmaster stood naked. “For the love of God, will you give me a drench! Satan, I renounce thee!”

  The bos’n and a party of sailors were approaching — the bos’n holding a cargo net. “I renounce thee, Satan!” Coole screamed. “Get behind me, imps of Hell!” Fergus picked up a bucket and pitched it and the schoolmaster whooped when the water struck him, then, slipping on wet planks fell onto his hands and knees. “Again!” he screamed. “Douse me again! Douse me!”

  The bos’n flung the net, and the sailors quickly seized him up like a lobster and started carrying him below. Fergus followed, sickened by the schoolmaster’s howls as the men crammed him into a sail locker, ruin burst open for strangers to see, humiliation exposed to the world.

  The Wager

  OVERNIGHT THEY HAD SLIPPED into settled country. The Canada sun shone with strange ferocity as Laramie beat her way upriver.

&nb
sp; Soaked with spray, he stood out on the slick, wet bowsprit, clutching a buzzing stay and watching farmers with ox teams working fields running back from the river in black and yellow stripes.

  The St. Lawrence River threw herself at them in brilliant splashes. The moan of wind on canvas.

  Passengers stood packed along the starboard rail, holding up babies, laughing in the light, pointing out farmhouses with chimneys leaking smoke, wooden barns, stone churches.

  The new country dousing them awake.

  He saw children tending cattle, driving flocks of sheep. At a wooden jetty two men stacked cordwood into a scow.

  “Here it is, man, here it is!” Molly stood in the prow, small and soaked, her hair black from spray, the wet gown clinging to her body.

  The passion in her voice was the bead of life. She was scanning the country like a hungry owl, absorbing it.

  Men and women need each other, don’t they.

  * * *

  FORTY-ONE days after clearing Clarence Dock, Laramie dropped anchor below the quarantine station at Grosse Île, an island in the St. Lawrence twenty miles downstream of Quebec. They had two fever cases aboard: the girl Fergus had tried to protect, and her sister.

  The line of ships at anchor stretched two miles in the river. A few had been inspected and flew the green flag of quarantine, but most were awaiting medical men to come out and remove their fever cases to the island so that their days in quarantine could begin.

  Ormsby was pacing the deck impatiently. They had been at anchor twentyfour hours, with no sign of inspectors. “Dammit, we’ll be floating here all summer! I must reach Montreal before the canoes leave!”

  There were swans in the river. Even the quarantine island looked green and pleasant from the ship. The fever lazarettos — long white sheds — were isolated at the eastern tip, and the rest of the island was covered in broad-leaved trees that were coming out soft and green in the heat.

  In the middle of the second afternoon at anchor he watched a noisy little steamer beating away from a jetty at the western end of the island, carrying emigrants who had passed through quarantine upriver for Quebec and Montreal.

  Three more emigrant ships hove into sight and dropped anchor that afternoon. The powerful heat of Canada enclosed Laramie, pungent with the stink of liquefying tar. A scum of trash and straw floated on the river — masters hoping to impress the medical authorities were cleansing their emigrant holds.

  Skiffs and flatboats worked between the ships at anchor selling provisions and water. Leaned over the rail, Fergus listened to Ormsby haggling in the Canadian tongue with a boatman who wore a red stocking cap. The old man handed down coins bundled in a handkerchief, and the boatman passed up a cheese, a loaf of fresh bread, and a pot of honey.

  At twilight the cabooses were fired. They sat on coils of warm rope and ate stirabout. Martin Coole had kept to his berth since his release, not saying a word, eating only what his children spooned him, taking water only if their hands held the cup. “Is there a potion you can dose him?” Mrs. Coole had asked the old woman. “Something to deliver him back — he’s no man at all now.”

  “Get him on the ground. If he can walk on ground he’ll be cured, if you can keep him alive so far. I want nothing but ground myself.”

  They anxiously waited for the inspectors. Since Cape Race everyone had been alert for the coughs, blushes, and headaches that might signal fever. No one wished to be taken off the ship, though the island looked pretty enough, birches growing down to the shore, bright and fresh, without the darkness of Anticosti.

  At dusk the sun was red and fat. When it grew dark, Fergus heard uilecan laments, funeral cries, drifting across the water from the other ships. It seemed there was fever on the anchorage.

  THEY LAY spooned on the bare boards of their berth. Molly slept after a while, but the stillness kept him awake, listening to the anchor chain gnash at the hawsers.

  Finally he swung out of the berth and climbed out onto the main deck, where the air was a little livelier.

  The sound floated across the water, so low and soft he thought it was an owl. Somewhere on the anchorage a woman was keening.

  The sound cut off abruptly, as though someone had shushed her. A moment later he heard a splash. He couldn’t see anything but knew it must be a body going into the river from one of the ships near them, getting rid of their dead before the inspectors came out from the island.

  He spent the rest of the night moving around the main deck and foredeck, sleeping in snatches on various coils of rope. When dawn showed, he headed for the galley, intending to trade tobacco for a mug of coffee.

  “Laramie! Salût, Laramie!”

  He looked over the side. The boatman who’d bartered with Ormsby stood in his scow, which bumped lightly against the ship. Seeing Fergus, the boatman threw a line, which Fergus caught and made fast as he had seen the sailors do.

  “Prenez garde, Michaud.” Ormsby had appeared on the afterdeck, wearing rawhide slippers. “Keep everything quiet, I warn you.”

  The bosn’n appeared with three sailors, who began quietly passing Ormsby’s trunks, casks, and wooden crates down into the scow.

  “I’m glad to see you — I have something for you. Come with me.” Taking Fergus by the arm, Ormsby led him to the other side of the ship. There were swans clucking in the river. Ormsby took out a purse and snapped it open. “Hold out your hands.”

  “What for?”

  “Just do as I say.”

  Ormsby turned out the purse, and the coins tumbled into Fergus’s hands, clicking and heavy.

  “What is it?”

  “Eight pounds. It’s yours, I believe.”

  “Mine? You stole our stake? You?”

  “I won it. Fairly, mind you.”

  “You won it?”

  “Ask your girl.” Ormsby clicked the purse shut. “That morning you went up, she asked if I thought you’d make it down alive. I said you weren’t the first passenger to climb a peak — I’d done it myself, half a dozen times. Then, she said, we must make a wager on it, for I believe he’ll fall and break his head.

  “What makes you think that? I asked. A feeling, she said.

  “You’d bet against your own man’s life? I asked.

  “I’d better get something out of it, she replied.

  “I thought this very cold.

  “Eight pounds even money, she said.

  “Done, I said. That evening she had the money wrapped in handkerchiefs.” Ormsby hesitated. “It is strange winnings, I feel. It’s your blood money. Better you should keep it.”

  Suddenly turning away, Ormsby crossed to the other side of the ship, where they were still lowering his baggage into the scow. “Easy there, men,” he called softly. “There’s beauty glass sunk in them tubs.”

  Betrayal tastes cold on the tongue, but you don’t feel it so much, right at first; you’re trying to pull yourself inside.

  IN THE dimness of the ’tween deck, a few mothers were nursing their children, but most people still lay in the berths, with their curtains drawn open in the breathless heat.

  Coole lay on his side. Mrs Coole was asleep. The old woman was snoring like a frog in the uppermost, with Carlo and Deirdre snuggled beside her.

  Molly was wrapped in her cloak, her mouth slightly open. She looked peaceful. She looked happy.

  As he began laying out coins on the berth, she stirred, sighed. He added coins softly. A carpet of metal. A shield. He knew he was letting go of something but didn’t know what it was. The lightness was making him dizzy.

  You betray only yourself, you turn away from yourself.

  He wanted to touch her neck, spine, hip, buttocks. Reach between her legs and open her up.

  Her eyes opened suddenly. She gazed at him.

  He turned and headed to the ladder.

  What does it matter, the souls of others? Inside your head you’re alone. Nothing’s real but your own brain talk.

  He heard the coins jingling as she sat up. “Fergu
s!” He grabbed the rungs and ran up the ladder. The last load of Ormsby’s goods was being passed over the side as he came out on deck.

  “I’d like to go with you.”

  Ormsby looked at him keenly for a moment, then nodded. “Your baggage — fetch it quickly.”

  “There’s nothing. Let’s go.”

  A minute later he was sitting in the scow with the river breeze on his shoulders. He glimpsed her at the rail wearing her cloak and heard her calling his name, but he looked away. He didn’t wish to feel anything; he was tired of feeling. He wondered if there were salmon in the river and how to catch them.

  PART VI

  The Law of Dreams

  CANADA, MAY 1847

  Grosse Île

  THE CANADIAN BOATMAN was shouting in his peculiar tongue as their little vessel bobbed and smacked against the current.

  “Michaud says les Irlandais are dying like shad flies, this year.” Ormsby was studying the quarantine island through his looking glass. Fergus saw long, low whitewashed sheds in a clearing, iron roofs glinting in the sun.

  “Lazarettos. Fever sheds.” The old man lowered his glass. “Don’t feel feverish, do you? Got the shakes? Moldy tongue?”

  “I don’t.”

  “The flush? Any bones aching?”

  “No there isn’t.”

  “Good. Michaud is taking us direct to the point on the island where the Montreal steamer puts in. Quarantine never was intended for gentlemen.”

  MICHAUD PUT them ashore at a little cove. There was a wooden jetty, and dozens of emigrants scrubbing their clothes in the shallows.

  “Michaud says these have all passed their quarantine. William Molson’s due in an hour. We’ll see Montreal tomorrow.”

  The boatman quickly unloaded Ormsby’s boxes and trunks.

  “Sure you don’t want to come with us, Michaud?” the old man teased as he paid the Canadian. “We’ll find you a pretty Blackfoot wife up the country.”

  Michaud shook his head and bit the coins before wrapping them in his handkerchief. Fergus helped push the boat off the beach. The line of ships riding at anchor stretched as far as he could see. He couldn’t tell which was Laramie; they were all three-masters and looked alike from this distance, and he wasn’t accustomed to seeing her from without.