Ship Fever (26 page)

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.”

Outside birds were speaking. Lauchlin was aware that he could no longer move his legs, that his spirit and his body were coming unglued from the feet up, like a pair of black-paper silhouettes separating. But it's all right, he thought. The people moving around him would glue his two parts back together; no harm would come to him because what mattered was not his legs or the lack of feeling in them but all he knew and thought and felt. Of course nothing could happen to him, he loved Susannah and had told her so and she had acknowledged it. That she had never loved him, and never would, mattered not at all. What mattered was that he had understood that he loved her, and also his life and the world; what could happen to him now?

His memory turned and burrowed through the places he had loved. First it brought him the foothills of the Pyrenees, through which he'd tramped with Nicholas Benin one July, during a break in his studies. Then the upper reaches of the Ottawa—oh, he had hated being with his father, hated the business and the noise, but after all the place had been beautiful, the massive rapids and the unclouded sky and the smell, overwhelming and everywhere, of the trees. The white sails in the St. Lawrence, fluttering below the cliffs. His mother's hair, the fragrance of the stables, the lobsters Annie had split and broiled, the market at the height of harvest, the weight and smoothness and promise of books—the cadavers, even, cool and preserved on a slab, slowly yielding the secrets beneath the skin.

What had he been doing these past years? What had he been so worried about? Fussing and struggling to build a practice, continue his research, establish himself—if he died now his life would have been only that, almost nothing, a chain of meaningless accomplishments and struggles. Why had he wasted so much time? When he was a boy, before his mother's death, he had understood the beauty of daily life. Somehow this had slipped his mind, and if he died now—but of course he would not die now, he was very sick but it was all right, he was young and
strong and outside the sun shone on the meadows and gulls plunged into the river, emerging with fish in their beaks—if he died now it would be ridiculous, because all these years he had not been living but readying himself to live, stuffing himself with knowledge that would help him live later. All this time he'd been learning to live, and now he was ready to start his life.

He opened his eyes. The room was dusky and no sun streamed through the window; he understood for the first time that these people he'd been caring for were, if not exactly him, extensions of him, as he was an extension of them. It was life, simply life, that they had in common, and if he could have his life back he could be happy with anything. That was Nora bending over him, sweet Nora who had shared a berth with death, and in his imagination he said to her: Isn't it lovely, this life? Didn't you love being on that ship, despite the horrors you endured? Didn't you love the clouds and the sun and the rain, the smooth rolling waves and the leaping dolphins and the sight of the moon at night? From Telegraph Hill, he reminded her, we saw groves of silky white birch.

What was this shadow that lay over him now, if not the shadow that had lain over her and all the others? He smelled his own body, he had a slight erection, he remembered a young woman in Montreal, the grey wall next to him loomed. He became aware of a large, echoing space beyond the small space confining him. That space was filled with other beings, turning, murmuring, plucking their blankets as he plucked his; he knew his hands were doing this, but he could not control them. Those beings dreamed, like him. Count me, he thought, remembering a phrase he had once said in anger to someone he could no longer remember. Count me, count them, count us.

Nora meant to leave the island, but she couldn't seem to find the right moment. Early in September the flood of ships began to slow, and the number of patients to drop, but the staff well enough to care for them diminished correspondingly. There was a flurry of work in mid-September, when the new sheds at the eastern end of the island finally opened—twelve hundred patients to transfer, and so few people to help. For days she traced the muddy streets in carts, struggling to keep a few flaps of blanket over the sick and to cushion their heads against the jolting ride. Then the tents had to be struck, and the old sheds and the church had to be fumigated. Numb and exhausted, she did whatever Dr. Douglas asked.

All through October the number of patients decreased daily, but still there always seemed to be more work than people able to do it. One of the hospitals was closed, and then another; two of the physicians were discharged and with them their staffs. She might have left the island then, but there were children to comfort and old bedding to burn and floors to be scrubbed. The weather grew cold very rapidly; she did what she could to distribute the blankets and cast-off clothes sent by relief committees in the city. Slowly the island emptied. There were 500 patients the first week of October, and only three ships waiting at anchor. By the third week of October, all the convalescents had been sent upriver to Point St. Charles and only 60 patients remained.

The first snow had fallen by then. Dr. Douglas found some extra stockings for her, and a discarded coat, but at night a skim of ice began to form on the St. Lawrence and she was still cold much of the time. In a warehouse near the wharf were hundreds of boxes and trunks left behind by dead emigrants, along with a vast heap of their clothes, but she would not go into that room, she would rather freeze to death than touch those things. It was not fineness of feeling that stopped her, but fear of carrying
the contagion. Along with the nurses and other attendants, she guiltlessly appropriated the money she found on the bodies of those who died without relatives. But she swept those shillings and occasional sovereigns into a leather purse with a stick, and before she touched them she boiled them in a saucepan of water.

She got a proper set of warm clothes only on October 30, the day the quarantine station was formally closed. That day a last, late ship limped into anchor; the
Lord Ashburton,
from Sligo, carrying tenants from the estates of Lord Palmerston. She thought she had seen everything by then, but this ship was the worst of all. Dr. Douglas was in a fury over it. Under a stunted pine on shore he stood shouting and waving his hands, arguing with another official she didn't recognize; he had aged terribly in the few months she'd known him and his voice was hoarse and cracked. She had no way to comfort him. He was nothing like Lauchlin and kept her at a distance, although he seemed grateful for her hard work.

Dr. Jaques, who'd finally recovered, returned from his tour of the
Lord Ashburton
to report that over a hundred passengers had died on the voyage. Sixty were sick with fever and the crew was so debilitated that five passengers had worked the ship up the river to Grosse Isle. Had she not kept her grandmother's training firmly in mind, she might have expired with rage and grief over the medical staff's inability to help her fellow travelers. Their supplies were gone and the authorities declared that this last shipload was to be sent directly to Montreal. Among the surviving passengers, all were destitute and half were nearly naked. They could not disembark in any decency until clothes were provided for them.

Dr. Douglas asked Nora to help distribute among them the last shipment of cast-off garments rounded up by the Catholic women of Quebec, and in one of those relief parcels she found a blue woolen dress in surprisingly good shape, which she set aside for herself. Boots turned up as well, and a cloak and a
kerchief. On the morning after the long day during which the
Lord Ashburton's
passengers were clothed and sent upriver, Dr. Douglas called her into his office and dismissed her.

“It's time for you to leave,” he said. “Where will you go?” Not a word to acknowledge the days they'd spent working side by side. She could almost hear his brain whirring, ticking off all he had yet to do. On his desk, next to the money box, was a long list of what looked like names—attendants and other staff, she guessed, to be paid off and sent on their way. After he counted out her wages he made a small mark by the line that represented her. He was very tired, she knew.