Andrea Barrett - Ship Fever - Stories

Harry is kind. Harry helps me understand. But I’m not in love with him, and Bianca knows it. She writes that yes, she finds it odd that our father’s widow has vanished from our lives without a trace. And yes, she thinks of our old life sometimes, and of our father and his last days, and of the talk we did or didn’t have with Suky. But she doesn’t think about these things often, she says. Not very often at all. In her new life, in her new country, she never speaks about our past.

Do I believe her? Sometimes; sometimes not. Often I wonder if she hasn’t told Oscar all I’ve told Harry and more; if she doesn’t lie tangled in sheets at night, talking the darkness away. But all the rest of Bianca’s letter was about her daily life. Oscar paints her nude, she writes. In their house on a cliff in Costa Rica, both their old lives left behind, he poses her on white sheets strewn with flowers and then works furiously on a gigantic canvas. It’s steamy, she says. Impossibly sexy. The things he says, the things he does; she has never had such wonderful sex, she has never been so in love. Around them are orchids, iguanas, bananas and parrots, howler monkeys and coatimundis and frogs the size of salad plates.

At night, she writes, they make love outside, in the jungle, in the rain. The here and now, the moment, she says. This, when for years she chided me for leaving our history behind. I can hear her voice in my study, as clear as an equation. Why dwell on the past?

[ I. ]

January 27, 1847

Skibbereen, County Cork

Dear Lauchlin:

Does this find you well, my friend? For myself I am well enough in body but sick at heart: small excuse for not writing sooner. All has been confusion since our arrival. I have been traveling from county to county with two Quaker relief workers, an American philanthropist, a journalist from London, and various local authorities. Matters are worse than I expected.

At Arranmore, in County Donegal, the streets swarm with famished men begging for work on the roads. At Louisburgh, in County Mayo, the local newspaper reports between ten and twenty deaths a day, and I myself saw bodies lying unburied, for want of anyone to dig a grave. In a hut that had been quiet for many days we found on the mud floor four frozen corpses, partly eaten by rats. That same day, a dispensary doctor told me he’d seen a woman drag from her hovel the corpse of her naked daughter. She tried to cover the body with stones.

Does this give you some idea? Here at Skibbereen, I saw in one cabin a man, his wife, and two of their children, all emaciated beyond belief, sitting around a tiny fire and mourning a young child dead in her cradle, for whom they had no way to provide a coffin. In some places, men have constructed coffins with movable bottoms, in which the dead may be conveyed to the churchyard and there unceremoniously dropped. Those lucky enough to be buried at all have no mourners, often no more than a handful of straw for a shroud.

I see no hope of this situation changing; the British Government continue their benighted policies and say they’ve spent vast sums. Yet we hear reports that the people, having eaten their seed potatoes and cattle and horses, are reduced to eating frogs and foxes and the leaves and bark of trees. Dysentery rages among those who eat the unground Indian corn passed out so grudgingly by the Relief Commission. To the complaints of Parliament, that the land lies unworked and that the lazy Irish refuse to fend for themselves, I would only ask that they visit here and see with their own eyes the terrible apathy brought on by starvation and despair. Or let them hear the horrifying silence lying over this land. We travel for miles and never hear a pig’s squeal, a dog’s bark, a chicken’s cluck, or a crow’s caw.

As you might imagine, I’ve been writing articles, the first of which I am sending to the Mercury by this same post. The American with whom I travel has also undertaken to arrange publication of some of these in the New York papers. Anything to counteract the London papers, which are enough to drive one mad. Yesterday I read a column stating that the cause of the “potato murrain” is a sort of dropsy. Others contend that the rot arises from static electricity generated in the air by the puffs of smoke from locomotives, or from miasmas rising from blind volcanoes in the interior of the earth. Always the potatoes; not a word about the ships that sail daily for England with Ireland’s produce, which might have been used to feed the starving.

I wonder what you would make of all this? You are busy, I imagine. But I know you are keeping an eye on Susannah, as promised. Do try to visit when you can, and keep her in good spirits; I expect she is lonely but I cannot be both here and there and I know you will help her understand this. With luck I will leave here in April, but it is possible I may go to London and do what I can to influence matters there. There will be a vast emigration this spring, for which you should prepare yourselves. Forgive my haste and this scattered letter. AA

Dr. Lauchlin Grant paused, after reading most of this letter out loud to Susannah Rowley. They were in the Rowleys’ handsome house on Palace Street, in the city of Quebec, behind a door carved with a pair of As intertwined with an S. Susannah’s husband, Arthur Adam Rowley, had built the house and arranged for the decoration of that door. So confident was he of his place in the world that he signed everything, even his newspaper articles, solely with those initials.

But even Arthur Adam could not control the weather, and his sitting-room, with its windows still sealed against the Quebec winter, was overheated on this unexpectedly warm day. It was April already; winter had delayed the mail even longer than usual. The letter increased Lauchlin’s discomfort, and he removed his jacket as he finished reading.

He had not read the lines about watching over Susannah, because they would have infuriated her. Nor had he read the part about the corpses devoured by rats. Now, as he draped his jacket on the chair, he spoke two lines that did not exist: Please ask Susannah to forgive me for writing so infrequently to her. She is in my mind always, but I cannot bear to subject her to all I’ve seen.

Susannah made no response, but Lauchlin felt the sweet, easy mood in which she’d welcomed him disappear. Annie Taggert, the Rowleys’ parlormaid, set the tea-tray down on the claw-footed table by the fireplace, and still Susannah said nothing more than, “Thank you.” Only after Annie’s departure did she turn to Lauchlin to ask, “Do you suppose Annie heard you reading that?”

“Annie?” Lauchlin said. “How could she?”

Susannah shrugged. “She hovers, you know. She stands outside and pretends to dust that cabinet in the hall. She’s been with Arthur Adam a long time — I’m still new to her, and she doesn’t entirely trust me.”

“With…me, you mean?” His face grew so hot that he moved toward the sealed window. “Can’t we get this open? ” he said, pushing irritably at the latch. At night he dreamed of women he’d glimpsed during the day, and in his dreams their garments fell away, revealing milky skin. But his dreams were no one’s business.

“With anyone, I suppose. She thinks my manners are appalling. She thinks I’ll say something that will prove I’m not a lady.”

That was all she meant, then. He leaned his forehead against the window, but the glass was hardly cool. Then he said, “I’m sorry about the letter — I shouldn’t have read it to you.”

“Why not?” she said. “How else would I know what’s going on? Maybe he’s on his way home already.”