He worried about her? Surely he was the kindest man she had ever known; and yet after all he understood so little. “How would I go?” she said. “When my only chance of finding Ned and Denis is to stay right here, and hope they find me. You didn’t hear any news of them?”
“Nothing,” he said. “But I put in the advertisements, as you asked. There were so many people at the newspaper office, though. So many people looking.” He touched her gently on the shoulder.
It was as she’d dreaded, then. Her brothers were adrift in this gigantic, unknowable country, along with a flood of their countrymen. She stood frozen for a moment, trying to absorb what he’d said. And why hadn’t he told her this calamitous news before anything else? Other things must be weighing on his mind. He had on different clothes, she saw; a worn, darned shirt with a low collar and a jacket that seemed slightly too large.
“You brought new clothes from home,” she said. “A good thing, too. You needed them.”
He looked down at his shirt front absently. “Annie made me. Annie has ideas about clothes and sickness, she made me strip and wash and put on clean things. I boiled the others, they’re in my grip.”
Nora nodded. She’d been very careful with her own clothes, sponging them off each night with a solution of vinegar and warm water and then hanging them outside her window while she slept. No substitute for a full change, but she had nothing more than the dress and undergarments in which she’d been taken from the ship. Her trunk was gone; she liked to think that Ned and Denis had it. Around her the chapel was filled with groaning people, who needed her attention. Margaret seemed slightly better today. Somewhere else, perhaps someone was bending over her brothers. “Who’s Annie?” she asked.
“One of Mrs. Rowley’s servants, back home.” Who was Mrs. Rowley? “She’s…you don’t know her, what am I talking about?” He walked as he talked, moving quickly among the patients and checking a pulse here, a damp forehead there. George Maloney, Catherine Conran, Matthew Kennedy, Eliza Regan.
Nora could hardly keep up with him. “I don’t know,” she said uneasily. “What are you talking about?”
“Fever,” he said, as if to himself. He turned back blankets, lifted shirts. Francis O’Rourke, Martin Mulrooney. “Thready pulse, shallow respirations; this one’s dehydrated, abdominal rash…” He was not himself; he was changed. What had happened to him?
That day she saw for the first time the wild energy and obsession that overtook him. He’d worked long hours before, but now he seemed to work all the time. He was with his patients when she arrived in the morning and still with them, or bent over his books, when she left late at night for the small room he’d found for her in one of the village boarding houses. When he was not in the chapel he was at one of the other hospitals, or one of the sheds; when he wasn’t there he was down at the tents or out making rounds of the ships or at the shoreline helping land the sick. He was at the cemetery, directing the sanitary arrangements; he was in the kitchens giving the cooks and their helpers instructions about food preparation; he was at Dr. Douglas’s cottage, writing up reports.
The ships continued to arrive, the numbers of patients and quarantined passengers continued to rise beyond all reasonable bounds, and she saw Lauchlin—“You must call me Lauchlin,” he said at some point. “What’s the point of standing on ceremony?”—lose his brief, false flush of health and grow pale and gaunt again. His flesh fell off him as if it belonged to someone else, and had only been borrowed. She believed he had ceased to sleep at all.
During those weeks she and Lauchlin flew past each other like birds, both so busy that they paused only to exchange the most important information. And yet they grew curiously intimate, so that in her mind she carried on long conversations with him. She imagined that he knew just how worried she was about Denis and Ned, and about him. She imagined that she rested her hand on his sleeve and said, “Lauchlin. You must slow down. You must rest. What is it that’s driving you so?”
She could not imagine his answer to this question, but she understood, after a week or so, that his utter lack of care for himself was not purely a wish to heal everyone but rather a symptom of a kind of insanity: He believed himself to be invulnerable. She had seen this at home, in Ireland; she had even felt it herself. She knew what it meant. When she couldn’t bear to think about Ned and Denis she thought of her father, who had lost his mind before he lost his life.
Last summer, when the blight came, her father had at first reacted like everyone else. One afternoon a chill had come, after days of peculiar sultriness, and then a fog that rolled down the mountains. A great silence followed, in which no birds called; nor was there any other sound. When the wind lifted the fog from the ground, it left a dusting like snow on the leaves and stalks of the potatoes. The dust turned brown and spread. And then the smell came, a stench that filled the valley and made the dogs slink into the ditches and howl. The leaves and stalks of the potatoes turned black; the potatoes, when dug, were slimy and corrupted. Her father had bent his head and wailed like his neighbors.
It had frightened her to see him that way but it was normal: tragedy had come among them, and it was right to mourn. What was wrong and from the devil was the strangeness that came on her father that winter, after her mother and sister and brothers had died. He rose one day from the floor, laughing, cursing, and he drove her and Denis and Ned to the river, searching for cress where every living thing had long since been stripped. “We’ll not lie down in this cottage and starve like cattle,” he said. Nor would he let them join the crowds around the huge iron boilers where the stirabout was cooked and served by the government relief workers. “The feeding of dogs in a kennel is more orderly,” he said bitterly. “They treat us as though we were creatures not made in the image of God.”
Up the hill he drove them instead, looking for fiddleheads and dock leaves; down the hill, looking for carrion. He found a dead dog and dove on it exultantly, roasting it over a fire he made right there. For days he was like that, full of a frenetic, useless bustle; then he set off for town, where a crowd had gathered demanding work on the roads. When he was denied he threw a rock at the head of one of the members of the relief committee. He was shot, she heard from the men who carried his body home. Shot dead there in the street, still cursing and demanding.
She’d seen others go the same way, men and women both, though more often men. Pretending courage and strength could save them, when salvation was clearly only a matter of luck. The passive waited for death, which came; the active fought and cursed and railed and death came anyway. It was fate, which could not be defeated. Fate was starvation and fever back home, and humiliation and fever here, and in neither case could fate be fought but only tricked a bit.
That was what she’d learned from her grandmother, during the days they’d cared for the sick together. You ought not lie down and let your fate roll over you, her grandmother taught her; neither ought you stand unbending, as her father had, and wait for fate to lop off your head. There was a bending, weaving, cunning way, in which you appeared to give in but rolled aside just slightly, evading the blow at the last minute. The way of eating whenever there was food to eat, sleeping whenever a stray minute came; never angering anyone stronger nor harming anyone weaker. “Make your mind like a pond,” her grandmother had said, when she found Nora weeping at night. “Push away longing and fury and make your mind still, like water.”
That’s what she’d done when Lauchlin had first brought her to Dr. Douglas and said he wanted her hired as an attendant. That first minute, when Dr. Douglas had looked her up and down—she’d begun to tremble. And when he’d said, as if she didn’t have ears to hear, “Can she follow instructions?” she might have struck him had she not remembered her grandmother’s training and stilled her mind until it resembled the lake near her lost home. While Lauchlin had argued on her behalf and reminded Dr. Douglas of their desperate shortage of help, she’d stood calm and quiet, waiting. She had even been able to bob a small cur
tsy when Dr. Douglas agreed.
Here there was water wherever she looked—and Lauchlin, humming like a sail under too much wind. Frenetic, like her father, though surely not useless. She feared for him. One day, crossing paths on the porch, he seized her arm and said, “Nora. Are you all right? Are you taking care of yourself? I’m so tired I don’t know what I’m doing half the time, I forget to ask how you are.” His hands were dry and cracked and his knuckles were dotted with blood where the skin had split.
“I’m fine,” she told him, although in the last few days her bowels had loosened and she feared she had a mild case of the flux.
He patted her arm and then disappeared. He was admirable, if mad. Dr. Douglas called on Lauchlin one evening, and the two of them holed up in Lauchlin’s converted closet. As she bathed the patients and tidied bedclothes she overheard them drafting indignant letters to someone named Buchanan, to someone else named Lord Elgin: Canadian officials, she understood, powerful people who might have sent more help but refused. “A petition,” she heard Lauchlin say to Dr. Douglas. “To Earl Grey, Secretary of State for the Colonies—we’ll demand he take action to stem the flood of immigration.”
“These half-naked, famished paupers,” she heard Dr. Douglas dictate. “Sick or aged or too young to work—are you writing this down, Lauchlin?—shipped off to our young country with promises of clothes and food and money on their arrival, when in fact there is no one here to greet them, and no prospect but further starvation or private charity: Where is the humanity in this? Where is our common decency?”
It was her and her kind they were talking about; Nora shivered. Of course she was grateful to them, to everyone working on this island. Yet it was horrible to hear herself described this way: a “pauper,” a “half-naked pauper.” Before the blight fell on the potatoes, her family had been hard-working and decent; if they had no savings it was only because the landlord took everything in rent. What kind of new world was this, where the rich blamed the poor for their poverty?
But still, the physicians were admirable, even Dr. Douglas; despite his brusqueness he worked very hard, and was fair with her and the other attendants. No one worked like Lauchlin, though. She watched him draw up a list of healthy orphaned children and then sit down with a group of six priests and convince them to divide the orphans among their parishes for adoption. She saw him bathe patients with his own hands, when the attendants were too busy. She saw him carry out armfuls of filthy straw he had no business touching, and make new beds from fresh straw he’d gotten who knew where. And at night she saw him reading and writing, reading and writing, as if in his papers he might find an answer to this nightmare afflicting them all.
July 28, 1847. A break in the weather; three days of blessed coolness and light breezes. No word from Susannah, although I have written her twice. No word from Arthur Adam. Perhaps this is because he’s already on his way back.
We have been forced to abandon quarantine entirely. Dr. Jaques is down with fever; his replacement now simply calls at the ships and instructs the passengers to file past him while he looks at their tongues. Those in fever are carried here; those appearing even remotely well are given clean bills of health and transferred immediately to steamers headed for Montreal. The steamers move from ship to ship, collecting their cargo. In the prow of these steamers, fiddlers scrape away with a horrible gaiety.
In this month of July we have entered 941 persons in the death-register under the description of “unknown.” Dr. Alfred Malhiot died July 22, of fever. Dr. Alex Pinet died July 24, also of fever. Twelve other physicians are sick, including Dr. Jaques.
At night I write letters to officials of our government; it is as if I’ve turned into Arthur Adam, but without his skills of persuasion. At night I lie on the pallet in this room for a few hours and listen to the sighs and cries and moans around me, and I wonder how it is I spent my whole life with so little understanding. In Paris, I thought of medicine as a science. I thought that by understanding how the body worked, I might cure it when diseased. What’s going on here has nothing to do with science, and everything to do with politics—just what John Jameson tried to tell me. Jameson has the fever now. I look out at the harbor and all I can think is: Stop the ships. Stop the ships. This although I know, from talking to Nora, that to forbid further emigration from Ireland would be to condemn those people absolutely.
I met Nora today by accident, just around suppertime. We stole half an hour and walked to the top of Telegraph Hill, where we shared some bread and cheese. She sang me a song about a woman standing on a cliff in Ireland, waiting for a fishing boat to return. Untrained, uneducated, she has been of more use and shown more dedication than anyone except the Sisters who came this month from Quebec. Two of them have already died. Still no news of Nora’s brothers. Four dogs were shot today, found scavenging in the cemetery.
August 3, 1847. Hot again; 98 degrees where I measured in the tent. New sheds are under construction at the eastern end of the island: I have requested that boilers be built between two of the old sheds; if they can be completed I plan to order the attendants and other visitors to the sheds to remove their clothes immediately upon leaving and soak them in the hot water. Nora is in favor of this; I do not tell her the idea comes partly from Annie and partly from her own stories about her grandmother. But why would I scorn their ideas, when everything I have tried on my own has failed?
I believe I can convince the other physicians to adopt this plan as well: there is precedent in the writings of Lind, whom many respect; also in Wood’s new text. Of course we will need tents in which to change—I wonder how many of us have a spare set of clothes? I am down to three changes myself; the remainder are in tatters from the constant scrubbing. I will worry about the details later. The important thing is to take action, to do something to stem this flood of deaths among the staff.
Nothing from Susannah. Nothing from Arthur Adam. None of the promised supplies have arrived. Dr. John Jameson died yesterday. Two of the carters engaged to transport the sick and dying and dead are dead themselves. In the woods delirious patients wander, finding the forest less fearful than our hospitals. When they die they are buried where they fall, as their finders are afraid to transport them elsewhere.
August 6, 1847. Still hot; this weather is insufferable. The river surrounding us looks like soup. A man separated from his wife threw himself over the rail of his ship and sank in this turgid filth. On the beach the sick and dying taken from the ships are dumped without ceremony. As there are no longer enough carts to transport them promptly to the hospitals, nor enough healthy carters, they flop like fish among the mud and rocks as they try to haul themselves to higher ground.
I carried a woman up to some grass beneath a tree, where she might have shade until we could get her to one of the sheds. I carried two boys and a younger girl, aged perhaps five or six, and a man my age reduced to half my weight. Then one of Dr. Douglas’s clerks spotted me and came running, irritated and anxious; I was needed at the hospital, I was needed at one of the sheds. And what was I doing down here by the water, lifting bodies like a servant?
I am being torn to pieces. Wherever I am, whatever I do, means only the neglect of someplace else I need to be and something else I ought to be doing. I have given up sleeping almost entirely and no longer miss it.
The new hospital is almost completed. No doubt it will be ready for use just as the emigrants cease to come. Will they ever cease?
Bishop Mountain of Montreal has descended upon us. He demonstrates his concern by making speeches and wrinkling up his fat face. In Dr. Douglas’s quarters, where the few of us healthy enough to be presentable had been ordered to gather for a welcoming dinner, we listened to the Bishop wax indignant. He is corpulent; his hands are plump and small-boned. With a wineglass in his hand, with his voice trembling in anger or surprise or both, he told us about the scenes he’d witnessed his first day on the island. Sick people newly brought from the ships, lying outside the church and screaming for
water: “They were lying on the ground,” he said. “It is a sin, what’s happening here.”
Does he suppose we haven’t noticed?
When he calmed down, after several glasses of wine from the last case Dr. Douglas had set aside, he spoke at length of the situation in Montreal. Until just a few days ago, he told us, steamers from this island had been landing emigrants at the old stone wharves there. Absolutely as predicted, many were already in fever on arrival. No one was there to receive them, no arrangements had been made. “They lay on the wharves,” the Bishop said. “In the open air, like here. Some of them crawled into an old passenger shed.”
I could not help thinking of Nora’s poor brothers: can this be what has happened to them? Some of the sick, the Bishop said, were carted off to the hospital. Those apparently healthy but destitute were crowded into the old sheds near the Wellington Bridge, there to await transport further upriver by barge. Many sickened, and despite the ministrations of the Grey Sisters upwards of thirty a day died.
Earlier this week they were transferred to a new site, above the Lachine Canal at Point St. Charles, on a low piece of ground where the Indians once encamped each summer. A better place: and yet, the Bishop says, it is still very bad. Fifteen or twenty die each day, and the crowding is appalling. The barge firms, who promised a wait of only a few hours before the next stage of the journey to Kingston or Toronto, must often leave prospective passengers waiting for days. During that time, many sicken.
Of the Catholic priests from Montreal who have been tending to these emigrants, eight have already died. Some twenty of the Grey Sisters are sick, as is the Vicar-General. It is Bishop Mountain’s considered opinion that the sick in Montreal number many thousands. How many sick have we here? he asks.
Ship Fever Page 22
