In the kitchen, Nora sat in silence while Annie prepared the tea. “I’m sorry,” she said finally. “I’m sorry about Mrs. Rowley. I didn’t know. You should have said.”
“I should have,” Annie said. “I don’t know what got into me.” She thought about the vomiting and the delirium, the inability of the doctor to ease Mrs. Rowley’s pain, her own fear and terror during the two weeks before Arthur Adam’s arrival, when Mrs. Rowley had cried out in the night and there was no one to help but her. About Arthur Adam, who for all the good he might have done with his articles, had not arrived home in time. Now his wife didn’t recognize him. “It’s a hard sickness. You know. What was it like, on that island?”
Nora told Annie a little about Grosse Isle. “My brothers were taken from me,” she said. “They were well, and I wasn’t, and the doctors took them away and wouldn’t let them join me on the island.” She told Annie about her days in the church, what little she could remember; and about how Lauchlin Grant had saved her and become, almost, a friend. She spoke briefly about the work she’d done when she’d recovered, and about all she’d seen, but she didn’t dwell on this; she could tell from Annie’s face that the news was unwelcome. Finally she described Lauchlin’s last days. “He was such a gentle man,” she said. “He worked so hard, right up until the last. Even when he was dying, you could tell he tried not to be any trouble.”
“I hardly knew him,” Annie said. “But the Rowleys were very fond of him.” Neither of them said anything about the attachment of Lauchlin and Susannah, but the fact hung in the air between them. And when Annie told Nora about Susannah’s work among the emigrants at the hospital, and the way she’d fallen sick despite Annie’s best efforts, Nora shook her head and said, “It’s one thing I am thankful for, that Dr. Grant never knew she was sick.”
The afternoon lengthened as they spoke. “What are your brothers’ names?” Annie asked, and Nora found herself telling tales about Ned and his love for beetles, Denis snatching fish from the stream with his hands. Annie served tea and seed-cake. On the boat, Nora said, the boys had conspired to steal extra water for her. Her description of their passage over led Annie to talk about her own, which had been marked by the same crowding and insufficient supplies but was much easier to bear, as the weather had been fine and all her companions had been in good health. “But I’ve seen sickness,” she said. “As bad as anything this time around. In ’32, when the cholera came, I was in service down in Lower Town when I was taken with it…”
She’d been a girl then, she told Nora; just turned twenty-one and only a few years off the boat from Leitrim. One day she’d felt hot and peculiar and then had fallen unconscious down the stairs she was scrubbing. She had only the haziest memory of being carried out of the city on a sick cart. When she’d woken she’d found herself in a tent on the Plains of Abraham, surrounded by the dying.
“It was a miracle I survived,” she said, and she told Nora how the cholera burying-ground had swallowed her friend Mary MacLean, and with Mary their shared dream of making their way to the States together. Around them the shadows gathered in the kitchen. And in a corner, occupied with a bushel of beets, Sissy listened open-mouthed to their tales.
“Where will you go?” Annie said finally, echoing Arthur Adam. “What will you do?” She had changed her mind about Nora, and thought that after all there might be a way to find her a position in the Rowleys’ house.
But somewhere in the course of this long day, Nora had reached a decision. “If I can’t find my brothers,” she said. She stopped and swallowed and started again. “If I can’t find them, and I probably can’t, I’m going to the United States. It’s beautiful here. A beautiful city. But I could never live here after all that’s happened.”
“You could,” Annie said. “You could stay. It gets better.”
“There’s a place called Detroit,” Nora said. “I heard about it on the island; it’s off one of the huge lakes that this river runs into.”
Sissy, unnoticed until then by Nora, set down the beets and her knife and crept closer to the table. “I’ve heard about that place too,” she said.
Because she had company, and because she was abashed by her earlier outburst, Annie restrained herself from snapping at the girl and only motioned her back to the corner with her chin. Nora, thinking of Denis and Ned, registered Sissy’s shining, curious face before she turned. This one had lived, like her, somehow escaping the trail of bodies littered across the ocean. And like her was all alone. She said, now speaking to Sissy as well as to Annie, “A man who has some family there told me it’s easy to sneak over the border, and that the city is lively, and there’s lots of work. I’d like to be in a new place,” she said. “Start fresh.”
“Wouldn’t we all,” Annie said. “Didn’t we all of us think that was what we were doing, leaving our homes for here?” She put down her saucer as Nora rose and grasped her satchel. “You’re leaving already?”
“I am,” Nora said.
Acknowledgments
I am indebted to Cecil Woodham-Smith’s The Great Hunger, from which I first learned about the events on Grosse Isle. Robert Whyte’s journal of his passage from Ireland to Quebec (published in 1848 as The Ocean Plague) provided key eyewitness descriptions of conditions on the ships and on the island.
The Grosse Isle Tragedy and the Monument to the Irish Fever Victims, 1847 (compiled by J.A. Jordan and first printed on the occasion of the dedication of a monument honoring the victims of ship fever as the Quebec Daily Telegraph’s “Grosse Isle Monument Commemorative Souvenir”; later reprinted as a book by The Telegraph Printing Company, Quebec, 1909) is the definitive source for details of the typhus epidemic on Grosse Isle during 1847. The chapter “Medical History of the Famine” in The Great Famine: Studies in Irish History (edited by Dudley Edwards and Desmond Williams) provided much useful information about the diseases—particularly typhus—that follow in the wake of famine.
Drs. Douglas and Jaques are historical persons, as are Buchanan and the doctors and clergymen Lauchlin Grant records as having died on the island. The remaining characters, including Lauchlin Grant, are fictitious.
About the Author
Andrea Barrett lives in Rochester, New York. As well as Ship Fever – which won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1996 – she is also the author of five novels, the most recent of which was the much acclaimed The Voyage of the Narwhal.
Praise for Ship Fever:
‘An exceptionally stylish book, stylish in the true sense.’
PENELOPE FITZGERALD
‘Beautiful stories…In Barrett’s hands, science is transformed from hard and known fact into malleable, strange and thrilling fictional material.’
Boston Globe
‘Barrett’s men and women seem to rise from the page to stare into one’s face. “The English Pupil” concerns an afternoon in the life of botanist Carl Linnaeus who, by 1777, is an old man. Linnaeus, who discovered and named thousands of plants, now finds it virtually impossible to even remember the name of his most beloved daughter. The melancholia that pervades this story, which is set in the wintry Swedish landscape, is not easily forgotten.’
Time Out
‘With its assumptions of logicality, science highlights the tension between harsh reality and human emotions. “The Behavior of the Hawkweeds” is typically resonant, where the tale of a botanist thwarted by a jealous rival is folded into a story which, while on the surface a portrait of a woman’s disappointments in marriage, also encompasses national enmities and the life-struggle of immigrants. An elegant and powerful story collection.’
Sunday Telegraph
‘Andrea Barrett’s work stands out for its sheer intelligence. The overall effect is quietly dazzling.’
New York Times
‘The range of Barrett’s settings, tones and treatments is impressive…[But] however well executed the first seven pieces, nothing in them can really prepare the reader for the concluding title story. Nearly a hundred pag
es long, and perfectly capable of standing as a short novel in its own right, this supplies extraordinarily vivid and ghastly accounts of the death ships fleeing the Irish famine and the personalities involved…Andrea Barrett’s British publishers are apparently in hot pursuit of the rights to her other early titles. On this evidence they should be worth the wait.’
Literary Review
‘Thrilling and provocative…Each story is more engrossing than the last. It must be said, however, that the title story in particular is a masterpiece. It is so vividly expressed, that the reader can almost see each sight described.’
Big Issue
‘An extraordinary story collection. Barrett blends a sure grasp of the history and method of science into each of her evocative tales.’
Chicago Tribune
‘Barrett builds her fictions like stones thrown into prose ponds: science is the stone, while human dramas, personal and social, are the concentric rings that radiate beautifully outward.’
Newsday
Also by Andrea Barrett
THE VOYAGE OF THE NARWHAL
THE FORMS OF WATER
THE MIDDLE KINGDOM
SECRET HARMONIES
LUCID STARS
Copyright
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First published by W.W. Norton & Company 1996
Copyright © Andrea Barrett 1996
Andrea Barrett asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
These stories are works of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in them are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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