Authors: Margaret Atwood
My Aunt Pauline had given my mother three lemons, worth their weight in gold, as she said it was well known they were good against the scurvy; and these I carefully preserved in case of need. All in all we had enough to keep strength in our bodies, which was more than some, who had spent their main money for the passage; and we had a little to spare, or so I felt, since our parents were not in a condition to eat their share of the food. So I gave several biscuits to our next neighbour, who was an elderly woman by the name of Mrs. Phelan, and she thanked me very much and said God bless you. She was a Catholic, and travelling with her daughter’s two children, who had been left behind when the family emigrated; and now she was taking them to Montreal, as her son-in-law had paid their passage; and I helped her with the children, and later I was glad I did so. Bread cast upon the waters comes back to you tenfold, as I am sure you have often heard, Sir.
And when we were told we might do a washing, as the weather was fair, with a good drying wind – it was much needed by then, because of all the sickness – I did a coverlet of hers as well as our own things. It was not much of a washing, as all we could use were the buckets of sea water provided, but at least it got off the worst of the mess, although the things smelled of salt after.
A week and a half out we were overtaken by a ferocious gale, and the ship was tossed around like a cork in a tub, and the praying and shrieking became ferocious. There was no question of cooking anything, and at night it was impossible to sleep, as you would be rolled out of your bed unless you held on, and the Captain sent the First Mate to tell us to stay calm, as it was merely an ordinary gale and nothing to become worked up over, and also it was blowing us in the direction we wanted to go. But water was coming down the hatchways, and so they closed them; and we were all shut up in the pitch darkness with even less air than we had before, and I thought we
would all be smothered. But the Captain must have known this, because the hatches were opened from time to time. Those near them became very wet, however; it was their turn to pay for the better supply of air they had enjoyed until then.
The gale blew itself out after two days, and there was a general thanksgiving service held for the Protestants, and there was a priest on board who said a Mass for the Catholics; and it was impossible to avoid attending both, in a manner of speaking, due to the cramped conditions; but nobody objected to it, for as I have said, the two sorts tolerated each other better than they did on land. I myself had become very friendly with old Mrs. Phelan; and she was brisker on her feet by this time than my own mother, who continued weak.
After the gale it grew colder. We began to meet fog, and then icebergs, which were said to be more numerous than usual for the season; and we went more slowly for fear of running into them; for the sailors said that the biggest part of them was under the water, and invisible, and it was lucky there was not a high wind, or we might be driven onto one, and the boat crushed; but I was never tired of looking at them. Great mountains of ice they were, with peaks and turrets, white and sparkling when the sun lit on them, with blue lights in the centres of them; and I thought, this must be what the walls of Heaven are made of, only not so cold.
But it was amongst the icebergs that our mother fell gravely ill. She had been in her bed most of the time because of the seasickness, and had not eaten anything except biscuit and water, and a little gruel made from oatmeal. Our father had not been much better, and if you had measured by the size of the groans, he was worse; and things were in a sorry state, as during the storm we had not been able to do any washing or airing of the bedding. So I did not notice at first what a bad turn my mother had taken. But she said she had
such a violent headache she could scarcely see, and I brought wet cloths and laid them on her forehead; and I saw she had a fever. Then she began to complain that her stomach hurt very much, and I felt it. There was a hard swelling, and I thought it was another little mouth to feed, although I did not know how it could have come on so quickly.
So I told old Mrs. Phelan, who’d told me she’d delivered sixteen babies, nine of her own included; and she came at once, and felt the thing, poking and prodding, and my mother screamed; and Mrs. Phelan said I ought to send for the ship’s doctor. I did not like to, because the Captain said he should not be pestered over trifles; but Mrs. Phelan said this was no trifle, and no baby neither.
I asked our father, but he said I should do whatever the Devil I liked, as he was too sick to have any thoughts about it; so at last I did send. But the doctor did not come, and my poor mother was getting worse by the hour. By this time she could scarcely speak, and what she did say made no sense at all.
Mrs. Phelan said it was a shame, and they would treat a cow better, and she said the best way to get the doctor was to say it might be the typhus, or else the cholera, as there was nothing on earth they were more afraid of, on board a ship. And so I did say that, and the doctor came straight away.
But he was of no more use – if you’ll excuse me, Sir – than tits on a rooster, as Mary Whitney liked to say, because after taking my mother’s pulse and feeling her forehead, and asking questions to which there were no answers, all he could tell us was that she did not have cholera, which I knew already, having made it up myself. As to what she did have, he couldn’t say; it was most likely a tumour, or a cyst, or else a burst appendix; and he would give her something for the pain. And he did do that; I think it was laudanum, and a great dose of it, because my mother soon became quiet, which was no
doubt his object. He said we must just hope she would pull through the crisis; but there was no way of telling what it was, without cutting her open, and that would kill her for certain.
I asked if she might be carried up on deck, for the air, but he said it would be a mistake to move her. And then he went away as quickly as possible, while remarking to no one in particular that the air was so foul down here he was half choked. And that was another thing I knew already.
My mother died that night. I wish I could tell you that she had visions of angels at the last, and made us a fine deathbed speech, as in books; but if she did have any visions she kept them to herself, for she did not say a word, about them or anything else. I fell asleep, though I had meant to wake and watch, and when I woke up in the morning she was dead as a mackerel, with her eyes open and fixed. And Mrs. Phelan put her arm around me, and folded me in her shawl, and gave me a drink from a little bottle of spirits she had by her for medicine; and said it would do me good to cry, and at least the poor thing was out of her sufferings, and in Heaven now with the blessed saints, even though she was a Protestant.
Mrs. Phelan also said that we had not opened the window to let out the soul, as was the custom; but perhaps it would not be counted against my poor mother, as there were no windows in the bottom of the ship and therefore none to be opened. And I had never heard of a custom like that.
I did not cry. I felt as if it was me and not my mother that had died; and I sat as if paralyzed, and did not know what to do next. But Mrs. Phelan said we could not leave her lying there, and did I have a white sheet for her to be buried in. And then I began to worry terribly, because all we had was the three sheets. There were two old ones that had been worn through and then cut in two and turned, and also the one new sheet given to us by Aunt Pauline; and I did not
know which to use. It seemed like disrespect to use an old one, but if I used the new one it would go to waste as far as the living were concerned; and all my grief became concentrated, so to speak, on the matter of the sheets. And finally I asked myself what my mother would prefer, and since she’d always placed herself second best in life, I decided on the old one; and at least it was more or less clean.
The Captain having been notified, two sailors came to carry my mother up onto the deck; and Mrs. Phelan came up with me, and we arranged her, with her eyes closed and her pretty hair down, because Mrs. Phelan said a body should not be buried with the hair knotted. I left her in the same clothes she had on, except for the shoes. I kept back the shoes, and her shawl as well, which she would have no need of. She looked pale and delicate, like a spring flower, and the children stood around crying; and I had each one of them kiss her on the forehead, which I wouldn’t have done if I thought she’d died of anything catching. And one of the sailors, who was an expert at such things, tucked the sheet around her very neatly, and sewed it up tight, with a length of old iron chain at the feet, to make her sink. I had forgotten to cut off a lock of her hair to keep, as I should have done; but I was too confused to remember it.
As soon as the sheet was over her face I had the notion that it was not really my mother under there, it was some other woman; or that my mother had changed, and if I was to take away the sheet now, she would be someone else entirely. It must have been the shock of it that put such things into my head.
Fortunately there was a clergyman on board, who was making the crossing in one of the cabins, the same that had done the thanksgiving service after the gale; and he read a short prayer, and my father managed to totter up the ladder from the hold, and he stood there with his head bowed, looking rumpled and unshaven, but at least he was there. And then with the icebergs floating around us and the fog rolling in, my poor mother was tipped into the sea. I
hadn’t thought about where she was going until this moment, and there was something dreadful about it, to picture her floating down in a white sheet amongst all the staring fish. It was worse than being put into the earth, because if a person is in the earth at least you know where they are.
And then all was over, so quickly, and the next day went on as before, only without my mother.
That night I took one of the lemons and cut it up, and made each of the children eat a piece of it, and I ate a piece of it myself. It was so sour that you felt it must be doing you good. It was the only thing I could think of, to do.
And now I have only one more thing to tell you about this voyage. When we were still becalmed, and in the thickest of the fog, the wicker basket with Aunt Pauline’s teapot fell off onto the floor, and the teapot broke. Now, that basket had stayed where it was all during the storm, through the tumbling and the pitching and tossing; and it had been tied to the bedpost.
Mrs. Phelan said that no doubt it had come untied when someone was trying to steal it, but they’d stopped when in danger of being seen, and it wouldn’t have been the first thing to change hands in that way. But this is not what I thought. I thought it was my mother’s spirit, trapped in the bottom of the ship because we could not open a window, and angry at me because of the second-best sheet. And now she would be caught in there for ever and ever, down below in the hold like a moth in a bottle, sailing back and forth across the hideous dark ocean, with the emigrants going one way and the logs of wood the other. And that made me very unhappy.
You see what queer ideas a person can get. But I was only a young girl at the time, and very ignorant.
I
t was fortunate that we were not becalmed any longer, or else our food and water would have run out; but a wind sprang up and the fog cleared, and they said we had passed Newfoundland safely, although I never got a glimpse of it and was not sure whether it was a city or a country; and soon we were in the St. Lawrence River, although it was a good while before there was any land. And when we did see it, on the north side of the ship, it was all rocks and trees, and looked dark and forbidding, and not fit for human habitation at all; and there were clouds of birds that screamed like lost souls, and I hoped that we would not be compelled to live in such a place.
But after a time there were farms and houses visible on the shore, and the land had the appearance of being more placid, or tamer as you might say. We were required to stop at an island and to undergo an inspection for cholera, as many before us had brought it into the country on the ships; but as the dead people on our ship had died of other things – four besides my mother, two from consumption and one from apoplexy, and one jumped overboard – we were allowed to proceed. I did have the chance to give the children a good
scrubbing-off in the river water, although it was very cold – at least their faces and arms, which they were very much in need of.
The next day we saw the city of Quebec, on a steep cliff overlooking the river. The houses were of stone, and there were peddlers and hawkers at the dock in the harbour, selling their wares, and I was able to buy some fresh onions from one of them. She spoke nothing but French, but we conducted the business with our fingers; and I believe she made me a better price because of the children and their thin little faces. We were so thirsty for these onions that we ate them raw, like apples, which gave us wind afterwards, but I have never known an onion to taste so good.
Some of the passengers got off the ship at Quebec, to take their chances there, but we continued on.
I cannot think of anything else I need mention about the rest of the journey. It was more travelling and most of it uncomfortable, sometimes overland to avoid the rapids, and then in another ship on Lake Ontario, which was more like a sea than a lake. There were hordes of small biting flies, and mosquitoes as big as mice; and the children were in danger of scratching themselves to death. Our father was in a bleak and melancholy mood, and often said that he did not know how he would manage, with our mother dead. At these times it was best to say nothing.
At last we reached Toronto, which was where they said the free land could be obtained. The city was not in a good situation, being flat and damp; it was raining that day, and there were many wagons and men hurrying, and quantities of mud, except for the main streets which were paved. The rain was soft and warm, and the air had a thick and swampy feel to it, like oil clinging to the skin, which I was later to learn was usual for that season of the year, and productive of many fevers and summer illnesses. There was some gas lighting but not as grand as Belfast.