Emma Donoghue Two-Book Bundle (27 page)

Gulf of Saint Lawrence

1849

J
ane Johnson grips the rail of the
Riverdale,
watching the estuary water heave and sink below her. She reckons the dates: nearly five weeks since she boarded at Belfast, and the city of Québec is only one more day west. The provisions might almost have lasted, if it hadn’t been for the heat and the maggots in the ham. The same journey took Henry eight weeks last year, when the seas were high. Tomorrow she will be beside him.

Today she is beside herself. On this voyage Jane has discovered herself to be a most imperfect creature. For all her weather-dried red hair and her two children, she is restless as a young goat that butts the fence. What has appalled her the most on this little floating world of the
Riverdale
is not the squalor, nor the hunger, but the dearth of news. No one has left their company, except for that old man who died of dysentery last week. No one has arrived, unless you count a stillbirth down in steerage. The only gossip is the rumble of clouds and the occasional protest of gulls. The passengers have to spend their time guessing what is happening in the real, landlocked world, now split in two for them like an apple, where on one side people weep for them and stare into the horizon that has swallowed them up, and on the other side, others stare back, waiting for the first glimpse of them. Or at least so these passengers must believe. Unless they are longed for, why are they here, cribbed in the rancid belly of this wooden whale?

Jane reaches into her pocket for her cache of letters and loosens the ribbon. They’re too few: crumbs to her appetite. The first, bearing the postmark, Henry didn’t send till he’d been there a fortnight. He wanted to wait till he had good news to tell,
something encouraging,
he wrote, the eejit, as if she needed any message but his living scribble on the paper, between the edges that are black from a month crossing the Atlantic to her.

Henry Johnson leans against a wall in Montréal.
I am thinking great long to see you,
his wife says at various points in the creased pages. Her grammar makes him want to slap her, and take her in his arms, and cry.

He should be in the shop, helping with the dinnertime customers, but he had to step out to get a little air. Maybe the sunlight and the long shadows of the trees will settle him. Maybe he is just nervous because of the trip he must take tonight, down the sinewy St. Lawrence to Québec. When he gets back, at the end of the week, it will be with Jane and the little ones: he will be a family man once more.

Dear Henry when you and me meet we will have many an old story to tell each other.

Such weakness is slackening his limbs today. His stomach churns; he leans against the wall. Its timber frame bears the claw marks of last winter’s ice. A carriage clatters by; the crack of the whip rings in Henry’s ears. His nerves are spiders’ webs beneath his skin. Have the months of vagabonding and working hand to mouth taken such a toll? Henry is an older man than the brash grocer who fled Antrim and debts last year. But a stronger one, surely. The bad times are over; he is going to be the husband Jane has always deserved.

She clambered onto the ship at the warm end of May, with Alex behind her, small fists full of her skirt, and Mary heavy on her hip. By the first week in June, the air had thickened. Jane had begged from everyone who shared any of her names to make up the twenty pounds for this cabin. She and the children are sharing it with two aged clergymen. The air is fetid, but anything is better than Antrim. At least on ship she doesn’t have to jam the door against whoever might knock.

In such a famine year it is better not to think about home. The town of Antrim has lidded its eyes. Most of those who are not dead have been evicted; the rest count farthings or starve in private. What overwhelms Jane, when she lets herself dwell on it, is the sense of anticlimax: the Johnsons held themselves together through four years of blight, but where is their happy-ever-after?

Down in the steaming gloom of the cabin, she hunches on the bunk with her eyes squeezed shut, and tries to find her better self. At least they have some bedding, not like some of the passengers, who sleep in the spare sails. Besides, what right has she to make a fuss about leaving for a faraway country when her uncle did it years before her, and her nephew, and her brother, and her two sisters? And her husband. Against her better judgment she let Henry go on ahead; thirteen months without anyone to wash his shirt. What kind of wife is she? She jolts the crying girl on her lap, watching dark water punch the glass circle. What kind of a woman would be more loath to go than to part, more afraid of the crossing than the separation?

Sometimes Henry’s letters are so obstinately cheerful that they hurt her throat.
I have had rather a rough time of it,
he remarked after the storm off Liverpool. The paper was stiff with salt; the water had spewed in and nearly sunk the ship. Is his bravery a fiction, Jane sometimes wonders? When he wrote to assure her that he had not panicked like the papists who threw holy water on the waves, was it her or himself he was trying to convince?
I knew if we were to go down I might as well take it Kindly as not as crying wouldnt help me.

They all think him a cheerful character: the other fellows in the shop, his Frenchie landlady, and before that, the farmers he lodged with in exchange for kitchen work, down by the Great Falls. Henry Johnson cultivates a reputation for cheer. The way he sees it, it is only civil to Providence to seem grateful.

It would surprise him to be told that he is eaten up with anger. Or rather, that anger serves Henry, devours whatever stands in his way: tiredness, inertia, despair, and loneliness. Plowing though six-foot snowdrifts, anger has burned in his gut and kept him warm, or warm enough to keep walking anyway.

Henry credits Providence with bringing him so far, but it could be that it was anger that did it, anger that dragged him away from Antrim in the first place. Anger has carried him halfway across the world; he hopes to seed a little patch of the soil of this vast country with it.

Something is burning in his guts now. His fingertips ache; he presses them against the wall outside the shop where he should be serving customers. He fixes his thoughts on Jane; everything will be ordinary again the minute she disembarks. Lying in Carrickfergus gaol, he used to conjure her up in the shadows: her stiff apron, her sandy hair coming out of its net, her huge laugh.
Dear Henery. I hope your not reflecting on the past but always looking forward.

His letters make casual mention of
six weeks walk
and
five hundred miles.
Some of the places he writes of or from have a familiar ring—Lucan, Hamilton, New London, where Jane’s sisters are—but others are like strange fruit in her mouth: Niagara, Montréal. Québec is her destination, but she had no idea how to pronounce it until she asked the clergyman on the opposite bunk. All she knows of this new world is words scattered on a page.

The river is beginning to narrow around the ship. Jane stares at the green hills, the fields dotted with cottages and the occasional spire that hooks the light.
I felt almost as if I was getting home again,
Henry wrote in an early letter. But other times the strangeness of the place shows through his lines. He speaks of vast waterfalls, Indians, juice leaking from the trees. He assures her they need bow to no one in this country:
The Servant eats at the Same table with his master.
But on the outside of one envelope he scrawls,
Bring the gun.

The afternoon has dimmed around him and still Henry cannot move from the back wall. He has never felt this queasy since the days when he used to be a drinker.

There is doubt in his wife’s letters, tucked between the lines of devotion. Jane reports that his mother hopes he will come back to the old country; that her parents advise her not to make the crossing yet; that she only wishes he had found a permanent job and could send money. She offers with one hand and takes back with the other.
If you fall into your mind and would wish me to go to you I will, let the end be what it may.

He turns and is sick into a bush. Its dark leaves quiver. Some foreign species; he doesn’t know its name.

Wringing out the children’s rags in a bucket of seawater, Jane tries to imagine the country ahead of her. The ship sways, and brown water slops from the bucket onto her skirt. She wants to howl. But she will go up on deck and let it dry in the sun, then brush the worst of it out. She has no time to be weak. She is resolved not to be a burden. What is she bringing Henry, if not a capacity for endurance?

The hard fact is, she needs him more than he needs her. For the past year, he has been an adventurer; she has been paralyzed, a wife without a husband. Sometimes she hates Henry for going on ahead, for being able and willing to do without her in a strange land. But this is how Jane knows her kin, by an occasional flash of a resentment so intimate that she never feels it for outsiders: the maddening itch of the ties that bind.

Henry wipes his sour mouth on the handkerchief Jane embroidered for him two Christmases ago. He leafs through the worn letters for some magic phrase to calm him. But what his eyes light on is
You might write to me far oftener than you do.
Can she imagine what it is like to be here so many thousand miles from home, with no one to offer him a cup of tea or a word of sympathy?

The hard fact is, he needs her more than she needs him. He suspects Jane of enjoying her new independence; more and more, she writes to him after making decisions, not before. Anger swells in his throat now; he can taste gall all the way down. But he recognizes this rage as a symptom of distance, the lengths love has to go to, the tautness of a marriage stretched like a tendon across a wide ocean. It costs them one and fourpence, paid in advance, to send each page.

The children are clamoring for some biscuit, despite the weevils. She has none, but she tells herself it will not kill them to wait just one more day. Jane squats down and holds them tightly round their waists, as if to squeeze the hunger pangs away. Alex and Mary both have her pale red hair; their three heads like a litter of foxes.

Across the deck she sees those two women who came on at Liverpool, clinging to each other mutely as if they expect to be washed overboard at any moment. One of them bends over the water to be sick; the other one waits with a cloth to wipe her mouth. Jane envies them each other. She is so weary of the feel of children, even her own beloved children; she wants a shoulder high enough to lean on, arms as hard as her own.

Henry has told his boss he is too sick to work, and now he is trying to walk back to his lodgings. He bends and retches onto the dusty ground as if voiding himself of thirteen months of self-pity. A passing lady withdraws her skirts. A priest tells him, in broken English, to go home. Henry is too weak to answer. He lets his head hang, and skims Jane’s letters through blurred eyes.

Excuse bad writing and inditing,
she wrote, as if every word were not a gift.

Henry averts his face from the page and throws up again, though there is little left but bitter air. If he purges himself of all his past errors, maybe there will be space for happiness to come flooding in.

His bowels have begun to churn. He tries to run. When shit sprays into his breeches and he doubles over, he is ashamed. But no one is paying him any attention; those who rush by are on business of their own. The streets are beginning to darken. Henry tucks the letters into his shirt and pulls his braces and trousers down, squatting to empty his bowels on the cracked ground. Pain spears him: the dark water keeps exploding. His solid flesh has become a bag of filth.

At some point he fastens up his trousers for decency, for some kind of containment, and staggers down the street. But the cramps bend him in two, like low blows from an invisible enemy.

Twilight finds him lying in a puddle of his own fluids, too weak to excuse himself when a woman stoops over him. She backs away, shouting something in French. He thinks he recognizes the word for anger. Who is angry? Then the woman shouts it again, and he recognizes the word like his own name.

As the light fades, Alex chatters of hunters and bears; Mary kicks at the railings and wriggles as if she wants to slip through into the sea.
You and them has never once been out of my mind and heart since I left you:
that is from Jane’s favorite of the letters. She has taught the girl to say
Dida,
the first name Jane knew for her own father. Mary has no idea what the word means, and plays with the sound as a bird would. Neither child is old enough to understand that they have left the only country they have ever known, to settle in a new one. They will be Canadians; Jane mouths the word to herself. It is not a matter of choice. What choice have any of them made, when all they know is what they are running from, when Henry with his exasperating enthusiasm is leading them into the dark?

Cholera, that’s what the woman said. Henry nods slightly. He is folded into a hospital bed like a leaf pressed in a book. The diarrhea is finished, and so is the vomiting; he has nothing left to offer up. He has given every drop in his body to this alien soil.

Cholera, anger made flesh, the dull burning fuse in the guts, the bile spewing through the bodies of those who stay and those who go. A disease familiar to those who are herded from country to country, from city to city.

This ward is filling up; the nurses run like messengers bearing secrets. Each new arrival is doled out forty drops of laudanum. Henry can tell, by looking at the cadaverous faces around him, that his cheeks are concave, his eyeballs are sinking in their sockets, and he too has taken on a blue tinge, as if they are all part of the same boiling sea.

He closes his eyes. He shuts his ears to the moans and retchings and convulsions all around him. In his mind, he reads fragments of letters.
Our best Days are before us.

It occurs to him for the first time that he may be dying.