Andrea Barrett - Ship Fever - Stories

We have very few nurses — how could this surprise anyone? For three shillings a day they are obliged to sleep amongst the sick and have no private rooms where they may rest or change their clothes. They receive the same food as the emigrants, and are granted no time in which to consume it; I see them crowded outside the sheds at mealtime, gobbling on their feet. It will be a wonder if they do not all succumb to fever. Dr. Douglas asked one of the priests to try to persuade some of the healthy passengers to volunteer their services. Even with the enticement of high wages, very few came forward.

Buchanan has issued an order compelling all the servants at present on the island to remain, until and unless they can provide substitutes for themselves. They are surly, nearly useless, retained as they are against their will; they taunt us, trying by outright misbehavior to provoke us into dismissing them. The woman whose job it is to bring afternoon tea to me and my assistants yesterday spilled it deliberately. She looked me right in the eye as she let the tray tip, the teapot slide forward and crash to the ground. Her name is Millie. If I dismiss her, there will be no replacement. There is talk of freeing prisoners from the city jail and bringing them here to care for the sick. Meanwhile the police appointed to maintain order wander the streets drunkenly.

On occasion I have longed to join them. I long for many things. Privacy, quiet, sleep, decent food. Susannah. I wonder how she is. If it were not for her and my own fear of appearing weak, I might run away.

Nora is in the little church, which has turned out to be the best of our makeshift hospitals — the bedding stays dry because of the floor, and the large windows allow for good ventilation. Last night, when I stopped by to see her, her skin was cool, her pulse almost normal. She asked me where her brothers were and I told her they were fine. What use would there be in telling her that they have already been carried against their will at least as far away as Montreal? In fact they may be much farther, as we hear that the residents of that city are in an uproar about the condition of the emigrants, and have insisted on pushing many on to Kingston and Toronto.

When I woke this morning, I could not at first remember where I was. I heard hammering — a sound one never escapes from here — and the sounds of carts rattling down the streets, and for a moment I was back at home during the season my mother died. Then I heard the bustle of Mrs. Caldwell below, fixing breakfast for the crowd of us. Besides Dr. Stephenson and Dr. Holmes and Dr. Black, with whom I have been working and who share the second floor with me, we were joined two days ago by Dr. Pinet of Varennes, Dr. Malhiot of Vercheres, and Dr. Jameson of Montreal — a quiet, well-bred man with a passion for bees and some real understanding of physiology. Mrs. Caldwell has arranged makeshift beds for them in the attic above me. Rapidly, this is coming less to resemble a boarding house and more one of the sheds where our patients lie. The other physicians are similarly lodged, the attendants and servants lodged much worse. Food is becoming a problem for us, as it is for the passengers. The beef and mutton Mrs. Caldwell can obtain are sometimes inedible. She bakes, and so we usually have bread except on the days when the local storekeeper runs out of flour. We hear that the bread his wife turns out in large batches is purchased at exorbitant prices by the ships’ crews, who are running low on provisions.

June 19, 1847. Still hot; thunderstorms. Today, after finally obtaining Dr. Douglas’s grudging permission, I moved my books and supplies to this closet at the front of the church we’ve converted into one of the hospitals. I will continue to sleep at Mrs. Caldwell’s, and have left most of my clothes there. But now I have one small space where I may read and write in relative silence, without the snores and sighs and throat-clearings of Mrs. Caldwell’s.

A number of my patients are arrayed in rows in the main chapel. Nora Kynd lies among them; she continues to improve. Last night she felt well enough to walk about, and as she begged for some fresh air I escorted her out to the porch, bringing two chairs from inside. She regrets the loss of her hair, which had to be cut during the worst of her sickness.

She is from a rural area in the west of Ireland, not far from where Arthur Adam traveled. In the years just before the murrain struck, when the potato crops were so abundant that no one knew what to do with the surplus, potatoes were stacked in heaps in ditches and fields, buried in huge pits and never used, fed to animals, plowed back into the fields. The famine is a punishment, she believes, a scourge come from God to punish her people for waste. I was not able to convince her that this was a superstitious view, that the blight is a biological phenomenon and unrelated to the earlier surplus.

Most of her family is dead now; only she and the two brothers I saw on the bark survive. Her account of their passage differs in detail but not in substance from the stories I’ve heard again and again this month. Later she backtracked and spoke of fever in her village. She sometimes refers to the fever as an droch-thinneas, which she tells me means “the bad sickness”; sometimes she refers to it by the name Arthur Adam used, fiabhras dubh. Of course it’s difficult for me to be sure, but based on her description of symptoms I would guess that in most cases her neighbors suffered from typhus, as defined by Gerhard and Wood. Some clearly had famine dysentery as well — she described the ground outside the huts of the sick being marked by clots of blood. Her grandmother was an Irish nurse—“nurse Gaelacha, ” Nora called her; a local woman with some knowledge of traditional remedies. She seems to have practiced something very close to the quarantine procedures we’ve tried and failed to employ here.

At first I tried to stop Nora from speaking of this time, but she wouldn’t stop and I came to believe it was of some help to let her talk. I found it interesting to hear how the disease process manifests itself elsewhere.

“There were houses in the district next to us in which first one person died and then another and another, and all were so weak and sick that none could do anything until the last person died,” she said. “The bodies lay in the houses and the dogs came. When the fever passed by, those neighbors who had come to themselves a bit would go to the houses where everyone had died and find nothing but bones lying there on the floor. The neighbors would gather the bones and bury them and then burn the houses to the ground, so as to burn the sickness out.”

She wept quietly for a while; I went inside and returned with a note pad, a handkerchief, and a small glass of brandy, which choked her when she sipped it but brought a little color to her face. Her skin is remarkably white; I still can’t tell whether this is the result of her illness, or her natural color. Around the irises of her eyes is a fine line which appears bronze in some lights, dark brown in others — normal?

“In my village half the people died, including my parents, two brothers and a sister, my mother’s brother and sister, and many of my cousins. My grandparents, too. But others were spared, because my grandmother on my mother’s side helped them before she got sick herself.”

This is what I drew as she spoke. Lines of writing, little arrows and crosses; as she watched me draw she said it looked like a misshapen tree hung with apples:

The circles with the small crosses beneath indicate the women in her family; those with the arrows are the men. Each generation on a separate line. Those darkened represent the dead — grandparents, parents, her aunt and uncle on her mother’s side, her brothers. When I had explained the figure to her, she took the pen from my hand and added to the bottom row an apple I’d missed; then she darkened it. Robbie, the youngest. She found it hard to say his name.