Andrea Barrett - Ship Fever - Stories

It had frightened her to see him that way but it was normal: tragedy had come among them, and it was right to mourn. What was wrong and from the devil was the strangeness that came on her father that winter, after her mother and sister and brothers had died. He rose one day from the floor, laughing, cursing, and he drove her and Denis and Ned to the river, searching for cress where every living thing had long since been stripped. “We’ll not lie down in this cottage and starve like cattle,” he said. Nor would he let them join the crowds around the huge iron boilers where the stirabout was cooked and served by the government relief workers. “The feeding of dogs in a kennel is more orderly,” he said bitterly. “They treat us as though we were creatures not made in the image of God.”

Up the hill he drove them instead, looking for fiddleheads and dock leaves; down the hill, looking for carrion. He found a dead dog and dove on it exultantly, roasting it over a fire he made right there. For days he was like that, full of a frenetic, useless bustle; then he set off for town, where a crowd had gathered demanding work on the roads. When he was denied he threw a rock at the head of one of the members of the relief committee. He was shot, she heard from the men who carried his body home. Shot dead there in the street, still cursing and demanding.

She’d seen others go the same way, men and women both, though more often men. Pretending courage and strength could save them, when salvation was clearly only a matter of luck. The passive waited for death, which came; the active fought and cursed and railed and death came anyway. It was fate, which could not be defeated. Fate was starvation and fever back home, and humiliation and fever here, and in neither case could fate be fought but only tricked a bit.

That was what she’d learned from her grandmother, during the days they’d cared for the sick together. You ought not lie down and let your fate roll over you, her grandmother taught her; neither ought you stand unbending, as her father had, and wait for fate to lop off your head. There was a bending, weaving, cunning way, in which you appeared to give in but rolled aside just slightly, evading the blow at the last minute. The way of eating whenever there was food to eat, sleeping whenever a stray minute came; never angering anyone stronger nor harming anyone weaker. “Make your mind like a pond,” her grandmother had said, when she found Nora weeping at night. “Push away longing and fury and make your mind still, like water.”

That’s what she’d done when Lauchlin had first brought her to Dr. Douglas and said he wanted her hired as an attendant. That first minute, when Dr. Douglas had looked her up and down — she’d begun to tremble. And when he’d said, as if she didn’t have ears to hear, “Can she follow instructions?” she might have struck him had she not remembered her grandmother’s training and stilled her mind until it resembled the lake near her lost home. While Lauchlin had argued on her behalf and reminded Dr. Douglas of their desperate shortage of help, she’d stood calm and quiet, waiting. She had even been able to bob a small curtsy when Dr. Douglas agreed.

Here there was water wherever she looked — and Lauchlin, humming like a sail under too much wind. Frenetic, like her father, though surely not useless. She feared for him. One day, crossing paths on the porch, he seized her arm and said, “Nora. Are you all right? Are you taking care of yourself? I’m so tired I don’t know what I’m doing half the time, I forget to ask how you are.” His hands were dry and cracked and his knuckles were dotted with blood where the skin had split.

“I’m fine,” she told him, although in the last few days her bowels had loosened and she feared she had a mild case of the flux.

He patted her arm and then disappeared. He was admirable, if mad. Dr. Douglas called on Lauchlin one evening, and the two of them holed up in Lauchlin’s converted closet. As she bathed the patients and tidied bedclothes she overheard them drafting indignant letters to someone named Buchanan, to someone else named Lord Elgin: Canadian officials, she understood, powerful people who might have sent more help but refused. “A petition,” she heard Lauchlin say to Dr. Douglas. “To Earl Grey, Secretary of State for the Colonies — we’ll demand he take action to stem the flood of immigration.”

“These half-naked, famished paupers,” she heard Dr. Douglas dictate. “Sick or aged or too young to work — are you writing this down, Lauchlin? — shipped off to our young country with promises of clothes and food and money on their arrival, when in fact there is no one here to greet them, and no prospect but further starvation or private charity: Where is the humanity in this? Where is our common decency?”

It was her and her kind they were talking about; Nora shivered. Of course she was grateful to them, to everyone working on this island. Yet it was horrible to hear herself described this way: a “pauper,” a “half-naked pauper.” Before the blight fell on the potatoes, her family had been hard-working and decent; if they had no savings it was only because the landlord took everything in rent. What kind of new world was this, where the rich blamed the poor for their poverty?

But still, the physicians were admirable, even Dr. Douglas; despite his brusqueness he worked very hard, and was fair with her and the other attendants. No one worked like Lauchlin, though. She watched him draw up a list of healthy orphaned children and then sit down with a group of six priests and convince them to divide the orphans among their parishes for adoption. She saw him bathe patients with his own hands, when the attendants were too busy. She saw him carry out armfuls of filthy straw he had no business touching, and make new beds from fresh straw he’d gotten who knew where. And at night she saw him reading and writing, reading and writing, as if in his papers he might find an answer to this nightmare afflicting them all.

July 28, 1847. A break in the weather; three days of blessed coolness and light breezes. No word from Susannah, although I have written her twice. No word from Arthur Adam. Perhaps this is because he’s already on his way back.

We have been forced to abandon quarantine entirely. Dr. Jaques is down with fever; his replacement now simply calls at the ships and instructs the passengers to file past him while he looks at their tongues. Those in fever are carried here; those appearing even remotely well are given clean bills of health and transferred immediately to steamers headed for Montreal. The steamers move from ship to ship, collecting their cargo. In the prow of these steamers, fiddlers scrape away with a horrible gaiety.

In this month of July we have entered 941 persons in the death-register under the description of “unknown.” Dr. Alfred Malhiot died July 22, of fever. Dr. Alex Pinet died July 24, also of fever. Twelve other physicians are sick, including Dr. Jaques.

At night I write letters to officials of our government; it is as if I’ve turned into Arthur Adam, but without his skills of persuasion. At night I lie on the pallet in this room for a few hours and listen to the sighs and cries and moans around me, and I wonder how it is I spent my whole life with so little understanding. In Paris, I thought of medicine as a science. I thought that by understanding how the body worked, I might cure it when diseased. What’s going on here has nothing to do with science, and everything to do with politics — just what John Jameson tried to tell me. Jameson has the fever now. I look out at the harbor and all I can think is: Stop the ships. Stop the ships. This although I know, from talking to Nora, that to forbid further emigration from Ireland would be to condemn those people absolutely.