Andrea Barrett - Ship Fever - Stories

Then, after much thought, he wrote a letter to Arthur Adam as well. He praised Arthur Adam’s articles; he confirmed Arthur Adam’s suspicions that there would be sickness on the emigrant ships; he described conditions at the quarantine station briefly. He would not say outright what Susannah was doing, but finally he added this paragraph:

Of course by now you have heard that there is fever here in the city as well. I am worried about this; I fear very much for Susannah’s safety, exposed as she is to contagion. There is much going on here worth writing about, and no one better than you to do it. Perhaps you would consider heading home?

Lastly he wrote to Susannah: the simplest, shortest note of all. Thank you, he wrote. You cannot know what last evening meant to me, nor how it helps to have the memory of you to carry back to Grosse Isle. I will write from there, when I can. [V.]

Nora hardly recognized Lauchlin when he returned from his trip to the city. When he’d left the island, his thatch of reddish hair, uncut for weeks, had been matted and dry, while his skin had had a greenish tinge. Everything about him had faded: even his eyes, even his beard. The mouse-colored patches beneath his eyes had looked permanent.

But here he was ruddy and smiling, almost sleek, after such a brief stay away. Perhaps he had slept. He fairly ran up to her, where she was bent over a patient. “Nora!” he said. “Nora!”

The way he said her name made her catch her breath, but still she finished dipping her rag in water and wiping the woman’s face. Dirty bedclothes, dirty skin, foul breath: Margaret O’Connell. One of the people whom, since she’d been well enough, she’d applied herself to helping. Mostly her help amounted to doing battle with the filth that coated everything. At least Margaret’s face was clean. She put down her rag and led Lauchlin away from the pallet. Was it possible he had news of her brothers?

But he said nothing about them. “Nora!” he said yet again.

“What is it? What’s happened?” There could be no news yet of Denis and Ned — unless, perhaps, they had made inquiries themselves, and Lauchlin had seen them…but he would have said. Perhaps he brought some other good news: more doctors, some nursing nuns, better food.

“Nothing,” he said. “Only…”

He wanted to tell her something; he was as eager as Ned had once been, on discovering a beetle he wanted to show her. Then his face changed, and she watched him decide to keep whatever it was to himself. He said, “It was so strange there, Nora. In the city. The fever’s there too. And I couldn’t get anything Dr. Douglas wanted, and then the steamer was so slow coming back, and I saw how many more ships were anchored, and the two big steamers headed upriver: somehow I thought you were on one of them. I thought you’d gone to Montreal. I’m glad you’re still here.”

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.