Ship Fever

by Andrea Barrett

  No one could tell him for sure. Our last count was two days ago; more ships have since arrived, and among the fleet still awaiting transport of the sick to the island is the bark Larch, of Sligo, with 150 sick out of 440 embarked; 108 dead during the passage. Also the Ganges, from Liverpool, with upwards of 80 sick. And more and more: the Naparima from Dublin, the Trinity from Limerick, the Brittania from Greenock among them.

  We know that near 80,000 emigrants have arrived here since May; of these some 2,500 have died in hospital or in the quarantine sheds, and we will without a doubt lose another two or three thousand. Among the nearly 200 attendants and nurses and cooks, almost half have sickened and 22 are dead. Eight policemen have sickened, two have died; all of the 21 stewards have sickened and two so far have died. Six Catholic priests have died here: Fathers Robson, Roy, Paisley, Power, Bardy, and Montminy. Also two Anglican clergymen: Anderson and Morris.

  Among us physicians, I said—for it was I who told the Bishop these things; I rose from the table, spilling my wine; I shouted, I could not help myself—he had only to look at the haggard faces around our small table: where at our peak we were twenty-six, four are already dead and eighteen down with fever. There were four of us, only four, at that table. Count us, I said to him. Count us.

  Dr. Douglas led me outside; although he might have rebuked me he did not. Nora is nowhere to be found. My hand is shaking so that I can hardly write. What is to become of us?

  One minute Lauchlin was rushing between two sheds and the next he was flat on his back, in a room he didn’t recognize. Like one of his father’s trees he’d been felled, thrown in the river, chained into a raft with the others to begin the long journey downstream.

  In fact he was in his converted closet, on a pallet surrounded by his books. Dr. Douglas came by when he could, but by then only he and two other physicians were well enough to work. So it was Nora who tended to Lauchlin, sponging him down with lukewarm water, dripping water into his mouth from a cloth, massaging his legs and feet and hands. She did for him all she wished had been done for her during her illness on the ship. All her brothers had wanted to do but been unable. There had not been enough fresh water on the ship for drinking, never mind for washing; there had been so little food, and no brandy of course, no milk, no clean linen, no space nor privacy. Unlike her brothers, she had access to these things. As soon as Dr. Douglas heard of Lauchlin’s illness, he gave Nora everything she asked for. He had a private stock of supplies, she learned, for treating his sick staff.

  She did not resent this; the medical staff on the island were not to blame for what had happened to her and the others on the ships. Perhaps the authorities in Quebec were at fault, for not making better arrangements. Certainly the landlords back home had acted badly, and the passage brokers, the ships’ captains, the government in England that had encouraged emigration and then closed its eyes to conditions on the ships.

  But these people here, the few remaining physicians and nurses and attendants still well enough to work—weren’t they all doing what they could? And if they gathered outside in knots sometimes, smoking and talking bitterly about the filth and poverty of her fellow travelers, their ignorance of the most elementary principles of hygiene and the way their habits contaminated the entire province, certainly they didn’t mean for her to overhear them. They were exhausted, she knew. They had no understanding of what the people they treated had been through, no ability to imagine the hardships that still lay before those who survived and tried to make a life in this new country. She overheard one attendant say, both puzzled and outraged, that he had yesterday seen a woman land whose only piece of clothing was made from a scrap of a biscuit bag. And how, he said, could a woman let herself come to that?

  But they meant well, and they risked their own lives, and whenever she felt bitter she reminded herself of this. Thirty-six people died on the island the first two days Lauchlin was sick, among them another attendant and three emigrants she’d tended herself in the chapel: Jane Quinn, Peter Hogan, Caspar Fitzpatrick. She grieved for them, as she grieved for everyone. But Lauchlin had raised her from the dead, and while she did not neglect her other duties she bent herself to returning the favor.

  Her hands cradled Lauchlin’s head, but although he was vaguely aware of her touch his mind slipped and turned like a sturgeon in the river. He was in Paris, peering into a microscope and examining the infusoria he’d scraped from his own tongue. He turned and he was deep in his first cadaver, dissecting the muscles and nerves of the upper arm; he turned again and saw a famous physician demonstrating mediate auscultation with a stethoscope. Dum-DUM…swooosh; dum-DUM…swooosh: the sounds of disease in the heart. In his chest something raced and leapt like a heart gone wild, but it didn’t belong to him. Someone said, in French, a sentence that in English defined nephritis associated with dropsy and albuminuria as Bright’s disease. As a girl Susannah’s face had been severe to the point of plainness, but he had loved her forehead even then. Dilatation of the aortic arch was named after Hodgson; transposition of the great vessels was rare but possible. In a café not far from the university, he and Gerhard had toasted each other with rough red wine and eaten omelettes and fried potatoes. Morphine, strychnine, and quinine were among the first alkaloids isolated; in Ireland, just a few years ago, a doctor had successfully given morphine by hypodermic needle. Why was it he had never gone to Ireland? Nora said he looked Irish. He saw the fingers of his left hand plucking at the sheet that lay over him; he gathered a fold between two fingers and saw in it a map.

  Nora, watching his fingers twitch, was filled with fear. His fever was very high; although she sponged him again and again his skin still burned and the words that burst from his mouth now and then were not in English, except for a woman’s name: Susannah, he cried. She had boiled some milk, which she’d obtained only at frightful expense, using money Dr. Douglas gave her himself. She trickled a spoonful of the cooled liquid into Lauchlin’s mouth.

  And he thought, I have done something wrong. I have come here out of envy and wounded vanity and have acted without understanding. And so of course I am to be punished. Something ran down the back of his throat; he tried to swallow and gagged. Then he saw a woman’s face recede from his, as if she’d been lying beneath him, passed through him and risen, and he said to himself: But everything’s fine. Somewhere, not far from here, Susannah sits in a chair before an open window, basking in the smell of roses as she bends her head over some sewing. He sighed and turned his head until his right cheek was buried in his pillow. The cloth was cool and clean. In his own bedroom, when he was a child, he had pressed his face all the way into his pillow, folding it up over both cheeks with just a small cleft for his nose and mouth. In that cleft he had hidden the evidence of his grief for his mother. That cloth had felt like this cloth; that sun, which came through his window in a low dusty beam, was like this sun. But this sun burned his eyes and brought tears to them and he had a pain in his head, such a terrible pain, and he was extraordinarily cold. A hand came up before his eyes: his hand? The skin was gray and mottled and damp. Whoever owned this hand had typhus; tuphos, a mist. Very clouded was the mental state of such a patient. Once he’d had no patients, and then Susannah had chided him and he had been childish and had gone to a place where he had too many patients. Now all the patients were gone. The face appeared again: Susannah? The features could not be distinguished; he saw a pale oval, dark hair, teeth. Something moist and horrid pressed against his mouth and he pushed his lips out and spluttered and blew, trying to push the object away with his breath.

  “Patience,” Nora said. “Just a little patience, my dear. I beg you. Take a few drops.” Had she ever been so tired? Lauchlin’s lips were so dry that they cracked when he pursed them and tried to roll the lower one outward. The faintest stream of air came from between them, no more than a sigh. Was he trying to speak? She held the moistened sponge to his lips again, but he would have none of it. She stripped his shirt, kicked it away from her, and ease
d his arms into a clean one; she had found his spare clothes, and each night she rinsed out a set for him and hung them to dry in the wind, so that he might have fresh things to sweat through the next day. While the clothing dried she stood at Lauchlin’s makeshift desk and piled his books into towers that she then dismantled and built again, moving the books from hand to hand and place to place as if, through handling them, the knowledge contained in the words she couldn’t read might be absorbed into her blood.

  Very early on the sixth day of Lauchlin’s illness, with the sun just up and no one watching, she walked into the forest and gathered herbs resembling those her grandmother had taught her to recognize in Ireland. She steeped them in brandy she begged from Dr. Douglas and hid the bottle behind the books; twice daily she dripped the infusion into Lauchlin’s parched mouth. All this time, she believed that Lauchlin recognized her and was grateful for her care.

  On the eighth day, Dr. Douglas came by for his morning visit and examined Lauchlin briefly. When he stood his face was grave. “Worse, I’m afraid,” he said to Nora. “He has a friend in the city who has been inquiring after him. I must write her.”

  “Annie?” Nora said, remembering a conversation with Lauchlin that might have taken place a year ago. Somewhere, in the city she had not yet seen and might never reach, he had a life she knew nothing about.

  “No,” Dr. Douglas said. “Susannah, it was.” Nora recognized the name Lauchlin had cried. “Although perhaps that’s a nickname for the same person. You’ve been sponging him?”

  “Every hour.”

  “Good.” He gave her a small bottle containing solution of ammonia and cayenne pepper, with instructions to rub it along Lauchlin’s legs and spine. “Hot bricks, too,” he said. “To help stimulate diaphoresis. If you can find them, if you can find the time…I’m so sorry, I have to go.”

  Outside birds were speaking. Lauchlin was aware that he could no longer move his legs, that his spirit and his body were coming unglued from the feet up, like a pair of black-paper silhouettes separating. But it’s all right, he thought. The people moving around him would glue his two parts back together; no harm would come to him because what mattered was not his legs or the lack of feeling in them but all he knew and thought and felt. Of course nothing could happen to him, he loved Susannah and had told her so and she had acknowledged it. That she had never loved him, and never would, mattered not at all. What mattered was that he had understood that he loved her, and also his life and the world; what could happen to him now?

  His memory turned and burrowed through the places he had loved. First it brought him the foothills of the Pyrenees, through which he’d tramped with Nicholas Benin one July, during a break in his studies. Then the upper reaches of the Ottawa—oh, he had hated being with his father, hated the business and the noise, but after all the place had been beautiful, the massive rapids and the unclouded sky and the smell, overwhelming and everywhere, of the trees. The white sails in the St. Lawrence, fluttering below the cliffs. His mother’s hair, the fragrance of the stables, the lobsters Annie had split and broiled, the market at the height of harvest, the weight and smoothness and promise of books—the cadavers, even, cool and preserved on a slab, slowly yielding the secrets beneath the skin.

  What had he been doing these past years? What had he been so worried about? Fussing and struggling to build a practice, continue his research, establish himself—if he died now his life would have been only that, almost nothing, a chain of meaningless accomplishments and struggles. Why had he wasted so much time? When he was a boy, before his mother’s death, he had understood the beauty of daily life. Somehow this had slipped his mind, and if he died now—but of course he would not die now, he was very sick but it was all right, he was young and strong and outside the sun shone on the meadows and gulls plunged into the river, emerging with fish in their beaks—if he died now it would be ridiculous, because all these years he had not been living but readying himself to live, stuffing himself with knowledge that would help him live later. All this time he’d been learning to live, and now he was ready to start his life.

  He opened his eyes. The room was dusky and no sun streamed through the window; he understood for the first time that these people he’d been caring for were, if not exactly him, extensions of him, as he was an extension of them. It was life, simply life, that they had in common, and if he could have his life back he could be happy with anything. That was Nora bending over him, sweet Nora who had shared a berth with death, and in his imagination he said to her: Isn’t it lovely, this life? Didn’t you love being on that ship, despite the horrors you endured? Didn’t you love the clouds and the sun and the rain, the smooth rolling waves and the leaping dolphins and the sight of the moon at night? From Telegraph Hill, he reminded her, we saw groves of silky white birch.

  What was this shadow that lay over him now, if not the shadow that had lain over her and all the others? He smelled his own body, he had a slight erection, he remembered a young woman in Montreal, the grey wall next to him loomed. He became aware of a large, echoing space beyond the small space confining him. That space was filled with other beings, turning, murmuring, plucking their blankets as he plucked his; he knew his hands were doing this, but he could not control them. Those beings dreamed, like him. Count me, he thought, remembering a phrase he had once said in anger to someone he could no longer remember. Count me, count them, count us.

  [VI.]

  Nora meant to leave the island, but she couldn’t seem to find the right moment. Early in September the flood of ships began to slow, and the number of patients to drop, but the staff well enough to care for them diminished correspondingly. There was a flurry of work in mid-September, when the new sheds at the eastern end of the island finally opened—twelve hundred patients to transfer, and so few people to help. For days she traced the muddy streets in carts, struggling to keep a few flaps of blanket over the sick and to cushion their heads against the jolting ride. Then the tents had to be struck, and the old sheds and the church had to be fumigated. Numb and exhausted, she did whatever Dr. Douglas asked.

  All through October the number of patients decreased daily, but still there always seemed to be more work than people able to do it. One of the hospitals was closed, and then another; two of the physicians were discharged and with them their staffs. She might have left the island then, but there were children to comfort and old bedding to burn and floors to be scrubbed. The weather grew cold very rapidly; she did what she could to distribute the blankets and cast-off clothes sent by relief committees in the city. Slowly the island emptied. There were 500 patients the first week of October, and only three ships waiting at anchor. By the third week of October, all the convalescents had been sent upriver to Point St. Charles and only 60 patients remained.

  The first snow had fallen by then. Dr. Douglas found some extra stockings for her, and a discarded coat, but at night a skim of ice began to form on the St. Lawrence and she was still cold much of the time. In a warehouse near the wharf were hundreds of boxes and trunks left behind by dead emigrants, along with a vast heap of their clothes, but she would not go into that room, she would rather freeze to death than touch those things. It was not fineness of feeling that stopped her, but fear of carrying the contagion. Along with the nurses and other attendants, she guiltlessly appropriated the money she found on the bodies of those who died without relatives. But she swept those shillings and occasional sovereigns into a leather purse with a stick, and before she touched them she boiled them in a saucepan of water.

  She got a proper set of warm clothes only on October 30, the day the quarantine station was formally closed. That day a last, late ship limped into anchor; the Lord Ashburton, from Sligo, carrying tenants from the estates of Lord Palmerston. She thought she had seen everything by then, but this ship was the worst of all. Dr. Douglas was in a fury over it. Under a stunted pine on shore he stood shouting and waving his hands, arguing with another official she didn’t recognize; he had aged terribly in
the few months she’d known him and his voice was hoarse and cracked. She had no way to comfort him. He was nothing like Lauchlin and kept her at a distance, although he seemed grateful for her hard work.

  Dr. Jaques, who’d finally recovered, returned from his tour of the Lord Ashburton to report that over a hundred passengers had died on the voyage. Sixty were sick with fever and the crew was so debilitated that five passengers had worked the ship up the river to Grosse Isle. Had she not kept her grandmother’s training firmly in mind, she might have expired with rage and grief over the medical staff’s inability to help her fellow travelers. Their supplies were gone and the authorities declared that this last shipload was to be sent directly to Montreal. Among the surviving passengers, all were destitute and half were nearly naked. They could not disembark in any decency until clothes were provided for them.

  Dr. Douglas asked Nora to help distribute among them the last shipment of cast-off garments rounded up by the Catholic women of Quebec, and in one of those relief parcels she found a blue woolen dress in surprisingly good shape, which she set aside for herself. Boots turned up as well, and a cloak and a kerchief. On the morning after the long day during which the Lord Ashburton’s passengers were clothed and sent upriver, Dr. Douglas called her into his office and dismissed her.

  “It’s time for you to leave,” he said. “Where will you go?” Not a word to acknowledge the days they’d spent working side by side. She could almost hear his brain whirring, ticking off all he had yet to do. On his desk, next to the money box, was a long list of what looked like names—attendants and other staff, she guessed, to be paid off and sent on their way. After he counted out her wages he made a small mark by the line that represented her. He was very tired, she knew.