The Voyage of the Morning Light

by Marina Endicott

  Kay expected, without allowing herself to examine the idea closely, that she would not marry now, because her future husband had already died. She had taken it for granted that one day she would marry Arthur Wetmore, not because of any real romantic attachment, but because that was how the world operated: you eventually married a person known to your family. And he was kind. She told Marion about his drowning, and Marion (who had been to school with Arthur) cried all afternoon, which weighed in her favour.

  Although they would not have been friends in the ordinary way, it was good to have a companion for the long, cloud-wreathed days. Thea was in such a state that there was no hope of talking to her. She sat with Aren endlessly, not hammering away at his English as before, but reading to him and letting him read with her any book from the pousada’s shelves that caught his fancy. In the afternoons, sometimes she would let Kay sit with him while she drifted away to sleep for an hour. She was becoming pale too.

  Kay was happy to sit on the long sun porch outside their room, the curtains beside Aren’s couch billowing in and out on each breath of wind. There was a very old children’s book in the library that Aren took a fancy to—Nursery Lessons, In Words of One Syllable—and asked her to read with him over and over. It had lovely illustrations, especially the one of a two-masted boat (that even Kay could tell was rigged all wrong, like no boat ever seen on this or any other ocean) that he liked to look at even when he was too tired to read. The text below it read,

  How hard the wind blows!

  and how the little boats rock to and fro!

  It must be sad for those poor men

  who have to earn their bread on the sea.

  I hope they will bring home a good net full of fish

  that they may buy food and warm clothes

  for their poor wives and little ones.

  Sometimes, as they read it, Kay would find herself almost crying with sorrow for those poor men who earned their bread, and their poor wives and little ones. Then she would turn to her own favourite page, which read,

  Ann’s papa had a large dog,

  of which she was very fond,

  and when Ann had a bun or cake,

  she would give some to Dash.

  One day, Ann fell into a pond,

  but the good dog did not let her sink,

  but sprang in and drew her safe to land.

  “Good old Dash,” Kay said, patting Pilot’s head where it was jammed into the fold of her knee.

  One page made both Kay and Aren laugh:

  See! Here is a fine nag.

  And that is a good boy who rides on it too;

  for he reads his book so well, and is so neat and clean,

  that his kind aunt gave him this nice horse;

  and I am sure James takes good care of her gift.

  “See here is a fine nag,” Aren repeated, laughing again, very gentle, suppressed laughter, so as not to provoke a coughing fit.

  Kay said, “And you are a good boy who rides on it too, and reads his book so well.”

  At Corcovado, Kay grew used to Aren’s illness, and to the telltale white sputum cup always in his hand, which Thea guarded jealously and washed with vigorous care. When they left Rio, the cup came with them, the badge of TB. There were other provisions for the journey: new sheets and a dozen warm red blankets (plenty of those, to accommodate the inevitable night sweats) reserved to Aren’s use for fear of infection; a reclining wooden deck chair in which he would spend the days outdoors; and a metal hospital cot that could be lashed in place each night, for sleeping on deck.

  It was all much nicer than the crowded ward where the Blade Lake children had breathed and coughed and sipped at their gruel. Kay sank into almost-panic, remembering that. She wished she could sleep on deck too, and secretly planned to keep Aren company.

  Jiacheng went to market to find fifteen chickens instead of the usual dozen; three good eggs per day was the doctor’s prescription for Aren, shaken up with plenty of cream. Luckily, Brazil was a good place for cattle, and by bartering and bargaining, Francis secured a nice-natured little cow, guaranteed to give a sufficiency of milk to sustain the poor child.

  Without drawing Thea’s attention to it, Jiacheng also dosed Aren with a concoction of his own, which he had puzzled out in his little book of cures. Kay loved the delicate vertical strands of words in that book, drawn by some meticulous hand. Aren had coaxed Jiacheng to draw out some elementary letterforms for him to copy, but Kay was content to simply look, since she already had the unending task and burden of gaining fluency in Greek.

  She gathered that the book held recipes and advice for all things, not unlike Thea’s Fanny Farmer; but it was more mystical than that practical text. Jiacheng said it required interpretation, but would not elaborate further. He made a wormwood tea, as bitter as bile, and had to add Lyle’s Golden Syrup to each cup to convince Aren to take it. The cream-and-eggnog was easier, especially when Kay gave it to Aren saying, like the Words of One Syllable book, “See here is a fine nog” to make him laugh. But even then, the poor boy often gagged at the viscous richness before catching himself into better bravery and swallowing it down. Once he had taken it, Kay would pronounce, “And that is a good boy who drinks it too.”

  There was nothing to be done but the things that were being done, Thea told herself. She spent the long weeks of the voyage up to New York in constant half-buried trepidation, not allowing her mind to race ahead to the inevitable, familiar conclusion of tuberculosis. Not dwelling on the many stick-thin bodies whose eyes she had closed, and carried down the long stairs and delivered into the earth.

  In the first week back on the ship, she found she had been ashore too long—her stomach betrayed her again and she had some uncomfortable mornings before she grew sea-wise once more. She had no time to suffer nausea, anyway, for Aren needed her. And the weather smiled on them; if only she could have given those poor Indian children this sea air, this fresh wind and beating, hygienic sunlight . . . But she would put aside regret, and instead set about making one of the three good meals a day that Aren must have, or fetching him the next glass of milk. She became quite fond of the little cow, who did diligently produce milk at a rate that, well beyond Aren’s capacity for drinking, allowed for puddings on the Aft table almost every day, and quite often junket for Below.

  The dreams were back again, and no wonder. Thea heard Kay crying in her bunk, and went barefoot down the corridor to catch her before she woke Aren, sleeping inside in this miserable weather. Rain pelted on the little port window when she opened Kay’s door—perhaps it had entered her sleep and provoked the nightmare.

  “Hush,” she said, and Kay turned, startled, and sat up.

  “I am sorry!” Her eyes a little wild in the dim light. “Did I wake him?”

  “No, no, but you must try to be quieter.”

  “Yes,” Kay said. She wiped a hand across her eyes.

  The lack of argument pierced Thea’s defences. She sat on the bunk and took Kay into her arms. “Dear heart, what were you dreaming?”

  Kay did not burst into crying again, but only whispered, “You know.”

  “The children dying, I know, this pulls us back there. But listen, Kay, if you think only backwards, if you think so much about them, you cannot help Aren now. I think of them too, but it is too late for us to help them. They are with God now—we have to wipe that slate clean and make a different ending for Aren.”

  “But are you sorry?” Kay asked, her eyes boring up to search Thea’s face.

  “Oh, how can you ask me! Of course I am sorry, of course I am. But what about forgiveness, Kay? Do you think we can never be forgiven?”

  Kay looked and looked at her face, as if she would never stop looking, and Thea had to gather her thoughts and self together to carry on. “I believe God knew our good intention, and how sorry we are that it all came to naught. I would give anything for it not to have happened, for all those children to be safe and warm and well now. But I must believe God has forgiven
us—forgiven me, I mean, and Father. And I believe the way to make it right is to keep Aren safe.”

  Kay still stared, her eyes unable to wake completely from the dream. It always took her a little while to come back into herself. Thea pulled the blue blanket over them and rocked her sister gently until she calmed into sleep again.

  Although he was so sick, Aren was not downcast. His cheeks burned with red flags and he talked more than before, to Kay, but also to Mr. Wright and Jacky Judge, and particularly to Seaton. He asked that his deck chair be put close to Seaton’s lifeboat, and they kept up a running conversation, more intelligible on Aren’s part than Seaton’s. Kay did her work on deck even when the weather was cool, wrapped up almost as well as Aren was in his chair, and got her only exercise trotting up and down with his empty glasses (and helping him totter to the head as necessary).

  Most of the time their talk flowed along under Kay’s consciousness, but some things poked up from the streaming surface. “When I am-was fish in the old place, I would make a net by now,” Aren said, and Seaton growled some answer from above. Kay did not ask, “Do you mean if I was fishing?” but left it alone.

  One afternoon he made the sound of his father’s canoe for Seaton, scraping a ruler along the side of the deck chair. “Then we know to come help bring in over the sand,” he was saying when Kay began to pay attention. “It is the inside sound of our own canoe. Almost the sound . . .” He scraped again, adjusting it, trying to make just the right noise.

  Another time he made a different sound, this time with his hands, which had grown so thin! He was not satisfied with the sound he achieved, and was growing angry with himself, when Seaton said, “Ay!” and tossed down two pieces of coconut shell. He must have a little treasure store up there, Kay thought.

  The coconut pieces worked much better. “It must not be thum-thum-thum-thum,” Aren told Seaton, “but must have-be surprise—thum-thum . . . thum thum-thum . . .”

  “What is that sound for?” Kay asked.

  “It is to call echarivus,” Aren said. “Then with a white rock I go up and down, a string on it, in the water . . .”

  She did not want to make it difficult for him, so she nodded as if she understood.

  Then, from the boat above, Seaton’s mahogany arm descended with a boiled egg on a string, bobbing slowly up and down, and that made Aren laugh. “Fishing shark, Miss,” Seaton said. “First they calls ’em with the rubbing sound, then lure ’em with something they can see from a ways away . . . That what that fish-word means, boy?”

  Aren said, like Kay with her Greek vocabulary: “Echarivus, bites white stone.”

  After long and useful discussion with the Brazilian doctor, they had decided against dosing with syr. iodide iron or maltine, which had been shown to have no real benefit, although cod-liver oil could not hurt. The doctor had spoken seriously to Aren, explaining that while his physician for the voyage—Thea—must be “determined and forceful,” the ideal patient must be “intelligent, earnest and obedient.”

  Thea was not certain Aren understood, but it did not matter; he had those qualities innately. Her aim was to keep him perfectly rested and fed, thoroughly invigorated by exposure to sun and wind; then, when he had regained some strength, to give him as much exercise as could be managed on board the ship.

  But no matter how much milk the little cow produced, no matter how many eggs Kay found in the chickens’ nests, Aren’s arms and legs still grew thinner, and his face acquired the tight patience that she remembered from Blade Lake, that she was not allowed ever to forget, however much, or if, she ever was forgiven.

  And then, before she was at all ready, the Morning Light approached New York, where he would be taken out of her hands.

  18

  New York

  At Presbyterian, they were taken on a tour through the TB ward. Kay kept very quiet behind Francis, not wanting to be left in the waiting room. Miss Burgess, the charge nurse, said they would admit Aren today, but it was possible that a stint in the Shively Sanitary Tenements, a facility designed for patients who could be cared for by family, would be more productive.

  Miss Burgess told them she had a high calling for this work. She was a medical philosopher, with theories and authority. “I have occasionally had to reprove an intern who forgot that his hospital patient was more than an interesting study. They look on this class of patient as a curiosity, rather than as a human being!”

  Thea had slowed, feeling Aren’s steps flagging. Francis picked him up and carried him, and Kay took Aren’s place beside Thea, sliding a hand softly into her sister’s.

  Nurse Burgess looked back and smiled, stiff lips not revealing her teeth. “I feel it is my responsibility to provide the atmosphere of refinement and culture my patients need to get well. I encourage nature studies—I am in the habit of bringing a flower to each bed patient, and I recommend that our nurses read good literature aloud to our patients. I have acquired decorative china and tray cloths so food can be attractively presented. It is the task of our nurses to see that the sanatorium experience be a civilizing influence. Sanatoriums should not resemble prisons! Each of our patients, I hope, returns home with a knowledge of the essentials of a true home life.”

  “If,” Thea said, “they do not have that knowledge already.”

  Nurse Burgess smiled again, with pity this time, and shook her head. “All too few,” she said. “All too few.”

  They had reached a large set of japanned double doors with a window in each one. Miss Burgess pushed the doors so they flew wide on loose hinges, and they were in a long, echoing ward, green-painted, open windows down one long wall. It smelled of strong disinfectant. Each bed was occupied by a skeleton in white clothes.

  A young nurse came toward them, but Miss Burgess waved her off. “I know I do not have to explain to you, Mrs. Grant, how desperately essential cleanliness, of the person and of the home, is to disease prevention.”

  She struck out to the left and they followed her past twenty or thirty cots to a space with an empty bed, freshly made, with a thin blanket thrown across the foot. Very clean, very clinical, Kay thought.

  “Here we are!” Miss Burgess raised a hand and an orderly came with a list. She dictated: “Bed 39, Grant, Aaron, eight years of age, male, Negroid.”

  Thea’s head lifted. “What is this list for?”

  Kay could hear how angry she was, her boundless anger about everything to do with this.

  “Dr. Shively’s great project is to begin tabulation of the statistics of the disease. It will be of great help in future delineaments of treatment.”

  Thea said, “He is Micronesian, if you care for precision.”

  Kay looked at the woman’s spotless uniform and self-satisfied face. But perhaps, perhaps, this place could cure Aren, so they must endure it too.

  Aren climbed down from Francis’s arms onto the expanse of bed. He looked very small, standing there. Thea helped him into the bedclothes and sat stroking his arm, smiling with him in her way, and Kay and Francis leaned against the wall beside them, letting Miss Burgess’s talk run over their heads like a sluice of bilge water, effusive but not important.

  “Dr. Shively says our advanced tubercular patients need the same kind of attention lepers do, and for the same reason: our lepers are nursed and cared for, not altogether out of sympathy, but because they constitute a menace to the community.”

  Kay remembered Miss Ramsay, at the worst of the sickness, declaring in disgust before she took herself off, “I might as well have gone and worked amongst the lepers!”

  Then there was the tedious process of having Aren’s disease classified. Eventually he was declared Moderately Advanced, which Thea translated in her head as Stage II, according to the terms Dr. Bryce had used in the West. She was trying to remember everything Dr. Bryce had ever told her, in the bad time. Moderately Advanced. Next would come Advanced. There was no further stage, only death.

  She looked at the little head slumped against the propped-up p
illow. Strands of black hair lay plastered to his head in a day-sweat of exertion and emotional strain. His eyes were closed, and blue stained the skin below the tangled lashes. His mouth, small and delicately outlined, seemed to her never to have smiled once since she’d met him.

  She sat by the bed, one hand uselessly set on the sheet beside him, and wished she could make sense of anything.

  Aren stayed in the ward for three weeks. For four, and five. Thea spent every day there. Francis saw to the unloading of his cargo and began to seek another, in a half-hearted way. He acquired a boy called Jimmy Giles, fresh from New Zealand, to replace poor Arthur and keep Jacky Judge company in the rigging; but he could not have the whole crew eating their heads off for nothing, and would have to discharge some of them soon if they were to be in dock for much longer. He had been offered a contract for Belgium, if Thea thought she could manage without him—a short run, a month or a little more, and it would do if Thea could be comfortable alone in lodgings. Kay listened to their conversation, but she had no stake in the matter at all. Thea would stay with Aren, and she would stay with them.

  It seemed to be a case of waiting for the inevitable, a feeling Kay remembered from the old days, which she put aside by taking Pilot for long walks along the Hudson or by going down to the galley to beg Jiacheng for a job to do. The empty saloon was not fit to be in by oneself these days, and after that first day she had not been allowed back to the tubercular ward. She was lonely.

  She wrote to Mr. Brimner, sending him a translation from Lucian, of the inhabitants of the Island of the Blessed who wear clothes made of spiderweb “very fine and of a purple colour” because she thought New York was a bit like it:

  They have no bodies, nor flesh, nor can they be touched; but yet though they have the form and semblance only of men, they stand and move, and think and speak. It seemed to me when I saw them as if it were the bare soul, clothed only with a certain likeness of the body, that did these things . . . For these people, though they are shadows, are yet shadows that stand upright, and not such as we see here cast upon the ground or upon a wall. In this country none grow old, but whatever a man’s age may be when he comes hither, at that he remains.