Andrea Barrett - Ship Fever - Stories

She did not resent this; the medical staff on the island were not to blame for what had happened to her and the others on the ships. Perhaps the authorities in Quebec were at fault, for not making better arrangements. Certainly the landlords back home had acted badly, and the passage brokers, the ships’ captains, the government in England that had encouraged emigration and then closed its eyes to conditions on the ships.

But these people here, the few remaining physicians and nurses and attendants still well enough to work — weren’t they all doing what they could? And if they gathered outside in knots sometimes, smoking and talking bitterly about the filth and poverty of her fellow travelers, their ignorance of the most elementary principles of hygiene and the way their habits contaminated the entire province, certainly they didn’t mean for her to overhear them. They were exhausted, she knew. They had no understanding of what the people they treated had been through, no ability to imagine the hardships that still lay before those who survived and tried to make a life in this new country. She overheard one attendant say, both puzzled and outraged, that he had yesterday seen a woman land whose only piece of clothing was made from a scrap of a biscuit bag. And how, he said, could a woman let herself come to that?

But they meant well, and they risked their own lives, and whenever she felt bitter she reminded herself of this. Thirty-six people died on the island the first two days Lauchlin was sick, among them another attendant and three emigrants she’d tended herself in the chapel: Jane Quinn, Peter Hogan, Caspar Fitzpatrick. She grieved for them, as she grieved for everyone. But Lauchlin had raised her from the dead, and while she did not neglect her other duties she bent herself to returning the favor.

Her hands cradled Lauchlin’s head, but although he was vaguely aware of her touch his mind slipped and turned like a sturgeon in the river. He was in Paris, peering into a microscope and examining the infusoria he’d scraped from his own tongue. He turned and he was deep in his first cadaver, dissecting the muscles and nerves of the upper arm; he turned again and saw a famous physician demonstrating mediate auscultation with a stethoscope. Dum-DUM…swooosh; dum-DUM…swooosh: the sounds of disease in the heart. In his chest something raced and leapt like a heart gone wild, but it didn’t belong to him. Someone said, in French, a sentence that in English defined nephritis associated with dropsy and albuminuria as Bright’s disease. As a girl Susannah’s face had been severe to the point of plainness, but he had loved her forehead even then. Dilatation of the aortic arch was named after Hodgson; transposition of the great vessels was rare but possible. In a café not far from the university, he and Gerhard had toasted each other with rough red wine and eaten omelettes and fried potatoes. Morphine, strychnine, and quinine were among the first alkaloids isolated; in Ireland, just a few years ago, a doctor had successfully given morphine by hypodermic needle. Why was it he had never gone to Ireland? Nora said he looked Irish. He saw the fingers of his left hand plucking at the sheet that lay over him; he gathered a fold between two fingers and saw in it a map.

Nora, watching his fingers twitch, was filled with fear. His fever was very high; although she sponged him again and again his skin still burned and the words that burst from his mouth now and then were not in English, except for a woman’s name: Susannah, he cried. She had boiled some milk, which she’d obtained only at frightful expense, using money Dr. Douglas gave her himself. She trickled a spoonful of the cooled liquid into Lauchlin’s mouth.

And he thought, I have done something wrong. I have come here out of envy and wounded vanity and have acted without understanding. And so of course I am to be punished. Something ran down the back of his throat; he tried to swallow and gagged. Then he saw a woman’s face recede from his, as if she’d been lying beneath him, passed through him and risen, and he said to himself: But everything’s fine. Somewhere, not far from here, Susannah sits in a chair before an open window, basking in the smell of roses as she bends her head over some sewing. He sighed and turned his head until his right cheek was buried in his pillow. The cloth was cool and clean. In his own bedroom, when he was a child, he had pressed his face all the way into his pillow, folding it up over both cheeks with just a small cleft for his nose and mouth. In that cleft he had hidden the evidence of his grief for his mother. That cloth had felt like this cloth; that sun, which came through his window in a low dusty beam, was like this sun. But this sun burned his eyes and brought tears to them and he had a pain in his head, such a terrible pain, and he was extraordinarily cold. A hand came up before his eyes: his hand? The skin was gray and mottled and damp. Whoever owned this hand had typhus; tuphos , a mist. Very clouded was the mental state of such a patient. Once he’d had no patients, and then Susannah had chided him and he had been childish and had gone to a place where he had too many patients. Now all the patients were gone. The face appeared again: Susannah? The features could not be distinguished; he saw a pale oval, dark hair, teeth. Something moist and horrid pressed against his mouth and he pushed his lips out and spluttered and blew, trying to push the object away with his breath.

“Patience,” Nora said. “Just a little patience, my dear. I beg you. Take a few drops.” Had she ever been so tired? Lauchlin’s lips were so dry that they cracked when he pursed them and tried to roll the lower one outward. The faintest stream of air came from between them, no more than a sigh. Was he trying to speak? She held the moistened sponge to his lips again, but he would have none of it. She stripped his shirt, kicked it away from her, and eased his arms into a clean one; she had found his spare clothes, and each night she rinsed out a set for him and hung them to dry in the wind, so that he might have fresh things to sweat through the next day. While the clothing dried she stood at Lauchlin’s makeshift desk and piled his books into towers that she then dismantled and built again, moving the books from hand to hand and place to place as if, through handling them, the knowledge contained in the words she couldn’t read might be absorbed into her blood.

Very early on the sixth day of Lauchlin’s illness, with the sun just up and no one watching, she walked into the forest and gathered herbs resembling those her grandmother had taught her to recognize in Ireland. She steeped them in brandy she begged from Dr. Douglas and hid the bottle behind the books; twice daily she dripped the infusion into Lauchlin’s parched mouth. All this time, she believed that Lauchlin recognized her and was grateful for her care.

On the eighth day, Dr. Douglas came by for his morning visit and examined Lauchlin briefly. When he stood his face was grave. “Worse, I’m afraid,” he said to Nora. “He has a friend in the city who has been inquiring after him. I must write her.”

“Annie?” Nora said, remembering a conversation with Lauchlin that might have taken place a year ago. Somewhere, in the city she had not yet seen and might never reach, he had a life she knew nothing about.

“No,” Dr. Douglas said. “Susannah, it was.” Nora recognized the name Lauchlin had cried. “Although perhaps that’s a nickname for the same person. You’ve been sponging him?”

“Every hour.”

“Good.” He gave her a small bottle containing solution of ammonia and cayenne pepper, with instructions to rub it along Lauchlin’s legs and spine. “Hot bricks, too,” he said. “To help stimulate diaphoresis. If you can find them, if you can find the time…I’m so sorry, I have to go.”