by John Farrow
“Not to mention Mother d’Youville or Sarah Hanson Sabourin.”
“So true.”
The next battles for Canadians were amongst themselves.
The time was one of high anxiety for Mother McMullen and the Grey Nuns, for they were close to people on both sides of the Patriotes Rebellion of 1837 and 1838. The marshalling of animosity was severe, and she contended against the public displays and private ruminations of hatred.
“Let the arguments be given free expression,” she commanded, “while keeping your emotions and the harsh attitudes of your fellow citizens at bay.”
The political arguments could only have been expected in a landscape so rapidly changing. Quebec was French, yet had suffered conquest by the British. The arrival of loyalists from the United States after the War of Independence created a separate political entity growing in size and power. Louis-Joseph Papineau, a man Mother McMullen had had the opportunity to meet on frequent occasion, captured the essence of the challenge to those in Quebec. He determined that French-Canadians, to use a term then coming into common usage, required independence from England to properly fulfill their destiny.
Mother McMullen considered Papineau quite a complicated man. She appreciated his influences, Thomas Jefferson being one. He idealized the small, independent farmer and foresaw a nation built upon an agrarian backbone. The maintenance of French common law was important so that Lower Canada could develop according to its own traditions. On these issues, Mother McMullen was sympathetic. Yet she detected contradictions in the man. He was decidedly anticlerical, no particular friend of the Holy Church. That didn’t stop him from supporting the seigneurial system, in which the Church alone dispensed farmland. A great advocate of democracy, he was less interested in the American experiment regarding capital, and so believed the power of the Church to dispense land to be an important check on capitalist speculation. The equal distribution of property among the French protected them from English expansion and from the arrival of disparate foreigners, which buffered Quebec from the new wave of capitalist venture being developed to the south. Papineau’s nationalist roots, then, were born both of his conservative underpinnings and the democratic forces of his time. When he proved, in battle, to be unstable, Mother McMullen had not been surprised.
She had been surprised, though, by the rhetoric of his proclamation, by its call to shed blood. Mother McMullen had been searching for some way for her and her order to help the situation—some manner of enlightened intervention that might shed light on the conflicts as they churned through the public mind. British business opposed the French will to remain agricultural. British expansion opposed the French desire to become a nation unto themselves. These were diametrically opposing positions, and when the Church issued an edict to its flock to engage in no activity against the political and legal authorities, priests fled for their lives from those communities where patriote fever ran high. Mother McMullen was certain that she had a destiny to embrace as the outbreak of hostilities seemed increasingly inevitable, yet she found the disputes too difficult to forge any form of reconciliation. Pamphlets called upon the French to arm themselves, to count on the support of their fellow French and the Indians. The English formed what they called the Doric Club—a paramilitary group preparing for a fight. The Patriote Party formed a military wing, known as Les Fils de la Liberté. Young men placed their hands on a liberty pole and vowed to keep faith with the fatherland, to conquer or die. Rebellion was imminent.
Papineau’s proclamation included a call to behead Jews. Mother McMullen did not herself know any Jews, yet had often noted a certain discernible loathing towards them among her fellow citizens. A few lived in the city, she’d been told. From time to time, hateful things were mentioned in the papers and repeated in meetings with the bishop, but neither he nor Mother McMullen felt that such a poor reputation warranted beheadings. For all his fiery oratory, she doubted that Louis-Joseph Papineau had met a Jew either. While Jews did not acknowledge her Lord, to imagine their heads being stripped off their bodies seemed the more horrible wrong. In her studies, Mother McMullen had long since decided that grown men were capable of being infatuated with blood, of being riled by blind hatred. Killing begat more killing. Beheadings would only ignite further atrocities.
Her own Lord had been a Jew. The bishop, distraught, brought up the point himself: how could anyone instigate such an affront to the people of their Lord?
She did not trust men at war. She certainly did not trust the conflicted, unstable Papineau to behead Jews in the name of liberty, or in the name of God, or in the name of Quebec.
The fighting commenced humbly, limited to running street battles between Les Fils de la Liberté and the Doric Club, one rabid mob chasing another, only to see the tide turn as the pursuers became the pursued. Even the bloodied found the contests comic. Then fights took to the countryside, and, perhaps due to the rural setting, became brutal and deadly. The English had might on their side, the French their passionate intensity, but the death of an English courier, one Lieutenant Jack Weir, so inflamed the hearts of the English that they swiftly grew impassioned for the confrontation as well. Their anger instigated pillaging and the burning of whole villages. Repeatedly, the poorly equipped, poorly led patriotes suffered devastating losses, in separate battles losing forty men, thirty in another, then seventy more, while English troops lost only a few.
Papineau himself scampered across the border to the United States.
That action demoralized the rebels. Their leadership had not supplied them with proper or sufficient arms, and, when the fight progressed badly, had fled. The rebels’ one hope, that the United States would enter the fray on their side, never came to pass.
The rebellion put down, Montrealers were obliged to learn how to live peaceably again, this time wearing the scars of combat and holding within themselves an egregious sentiment, the humiliated and the victorious nursing their hatreds both openly and amongst themselves. Men had killed one another. Men who had killed a husband shopped at the widow’s bakery. Men who had killed a son travelled the same roads as the fathers. No talk, no sermons, no quiet counsel by the Grey Nuns did much to alleviate the grievances or the open wounds.
Now, ten years on, Mother McMullen knew that she would be asking her nuns, who were primarily French, to set aside any lingering sense of injustice that they might feel and lay down their lives in the service of others. These others were not French—they were immigrants. She’d ask them to do so for the sake of no cause, only to respond to the spirit of their vows, to follow the charitable instinct of their hearts and to serve their God.
She came upon them at play, for in the spirit of their founder, Mother d’Youville, they continued to enjoy an hour of recreation each afternoon. The sisters stood to honour her presence, and quietly, still composing herself, Mother McMullen sat down and indicated that the others should join her. The nuns gathered chairs and formed a circle. One of their number, Sister Sainte-Croix, who had been with Mother Superior that morning, repeatedly dabbed the corners of her eyes.
“Sisters, today I visited the docks, having heard a most disturbing report. I elected to see for myself the conditions among certain Irish immigrants who have, for the past while, been landing at Montreal by sea. They arrive sick, with what is known to them as ship fever. A physician today told me that the correct name is typhus. Sisters, we have an epidemic in our midst.”
The nuns remained silent. A few had already turned inward in prayer, while others waited for Mother Superior’s full assessment.
“When they arrived, it became apparent that these Irish—men of all ages, I should tell you, recruited for their labour, and many have brought their families with them, intent on returning to Ireland no more—it became apparent that they must be segregated, not admitted to our city lest the entire population perish. Sheds were constructed for their habitation. These continue to be built upon the docks, for the ships carrying the sick keep coming. This morning, at our peril, y
et always in God’s hands, Sister Sainte-Croix and I entered the sheds.”
Mother McMullen paused. She had been doing fine, she thought, secure in her composure, but the rancid memory of the stench and misery inside the first shed returned to her, and she swayed with an unwelcome dizziness. She took several deep breaths, and those who now felt fearful did so as well, to prepare themselves for what might come.
“Sisters, I have today seen a sight most dire. Hundreds of men, women and children—children, also—sick, dying, huddled together among those who are long dead. The strongest constitution is unfit for the stench that emanates from their foul quarters. The atmosphere is impregnated with the odour, while one hears only the groans of those who suffer so grievously. Death resides there in its most appalling aspect. Sisters, those who thus cry aloud are strangers among us, yet their hands are outstretched—to us—for relief. Lest there be a doubt, I am speaking of a plague most contagious.”
The words were all that she could manage for a moment, for the sounds of the men and women, and of children, pleading for a moment’s respite, raising hands to beg for death, overcame her once again, and Mother McMullen fell to a momentary fit of sorrow. The nuns watched her, fretful, or kept their heads bowed. They looked up when Mother Superior cleared her throat to speak again.
“In sending you there, Sisters, I am signing your death warrants, but you are free to accept or refuse.”
As one, they accepted.
Standing before Mother McMullen, some in unison, others on their own, each woman repeated, “I am ready to serve my Lord. Accept me for this service.”
The first task they gave themselves was to drag out the dead.
Bodies were so intricately intertwined, the living among the dead, that no step could be taken in any direction without physical contact with another figure moaning and writhing in the dark, or with a stiffened corpse. Sleeping men bawled as they were pulled free from the entangled clutch of others. The very sound of their murmured complaints secured their release, and they were left to lie among the living. Those who no longer responded were pulled across a floor sodden with excrement, urine and vomit, blood and pus, and deposited outside. There, stinking and rotting, the bodies were lined into tight rows to make room for more.
Only from a safe distance did living men watch the women work.
Mother McMullen had chosen a contingent of eight nuns for the first foray into Pointe St. Charles, and they repeatedly returned inside each shed to locate more dead, to extricate them from those who suffered still, to haul them outside into the sunlight. For those of great weight, three nuns were required to heave the body, their progress difficult and minimal. When they thought they had finished their arduous task, a final tour of the premises revealed that one of the men who had been alive when they began that morning, and with whom they’d shared cogent conversation, had since died, and they pulled him outside to place him at the end of the putrid line of the dead.
“We did him a service,” Mother McMullen advised the sisters, for his death seemed the most demoralizing. “He lived long enough to know that his remains would be treated with dignity. In the comfort of that knowledge, he has passed into the arms of our Lord.”
They covered their faces with cloths, so foul were the fumes of death, of rot and excrement, increased by the summer heat and the interiors of the dark, airless sheds. Usually, they emerged gasping, clutching their stomachs, their own vomit mingling with the ripened attack of odours, the indictment of death like a gas both inhaled and absorbed through their skins.
The sickest were placed together. Those in the earliest stages of plague were given a respite from the many who moaned with abject abandon, segregated as well from the ones soon to die in silence. Then the quarters were mopped clean. Inches of sordid excretions were shovelled into the river, the floors and walls washed down. The foul clothes of the wretched, in which many had lived for weeks during the passage and ashore, were cut from the infirm, and clean garments were brought in to cover them. The sick would now lie upon the comfort of straw, their faces, backs, chests, bellies, genitals, hands, arms, legs, feet and bottoms washed clean with gentle cloths, their open sores sopped and covered.
As they spread the straw upon the floors of the sheds, the women whispered encouragement to one another in the words of their founder, Mother d’Youville, who, after death, on her way up to heaven, had taken time to admonish a farmer who worked for the order not to waste the hay. “Don’t waste the hay!” they’d say softly to one another, and smile, secure in the comfort and purpose of their tradition under God.
The women could not protect the ill from the plague, but they spared them the vile fumes and comforted them with words, and to the less ill they bequeathed an aspect of dignity. They absorbed their sorrow.
They also gave a few of the Irish who were not sick a chance to survive, and a few would do so. Among those who were already suffering the plague, a few would survive also.
“We must have priests,” Sister Angélique mentioned. “For their confessions.”
Yes. Priests needed to be brought in.
Mother McMullen noted, “Those who come will surely die.”
Babies were taken from the nipples of their dying or dead mothers, then isolated to determine whether they had contracted the disease. The number of orphans escalated, and the call went out to the countryside for families willing to adopt them.
Husbands were lost to their wives, wives lost to husbands. Whole families vanished.
“Trenched” became the common word. To say of someone, “He’s been trenched,” indicated that the man in question had been placed in one of the long common graves dug to receive the dead.
Priests arrived to hear confessions. They had to dip their ears low to a penitent’s mouth to catch the last words, at the same time receiving the typhus onto their own skins and into their lungs from the breath of the dying. The disease would lie hidden within a new host for twelve days before symptoms emerged, and those fresh to the sheds worked hard to make the most of their usefulness in the time allotted to them.
The Grey Nuns pulled back for a while to tend to those among them who had fallen ill and, subsequently, to bury their own dead. Thirty of the convent’s forty nuns fell ill to the plague, and no one knew how many might die. When they could not answer the matins bell, the Sisters of Providence assumed their places. When these replacements could not continue, Bishop Bourget granted a petition from the Sisters of Hôtel-Dieu to leave their cloister and work among the immigrants. When they fell, the Grey Nuns returned. Only seven of their number had died. The remainder of those ill had recovered, and they resumed their work on the docks.
More ships arrived. The nuns carried the women and children off the vessels, placing them in horse-drawn ambulances to be taken to the sheds. Then they hauled the sick men outside also, pulling them along, inch by inch.
English-speaking clergy were either dead or had succumbed to the plague’s ravages, prompting Sister Sainte-Croix to tell Mother McMullen—after both had fallen sick but subsequently recovered—“We need more priests. The few who are left cannot keep up with all those who are dying.”
Mother McMullen sent a message to her old friend in Fordham, a call that was promptly answered. A band of Jesuits travelled north from New York State to serve in the sheds of Pointe St. Charles, including Father O’Malley, who in time would die there with the other priests.
Anglican clergy, particularly useful as they spoke English, arrived also. One of these, Reverend Mark Willoughby, the first rector of Trinity Church, mobilized members of his congregation to supply necessary food and materials. The rector himself went from bed to bed, distributing milk and comfort and listening to the last words of the dying. He would contract the disease himself and die.
Citizens of Montreal sought to plow the sheds into the river. They plotted to burn the ships of plague-ridden Irish before the sick came ashore, riled by the report of a sea captain, quoted in the newspaper, who’d admitted that
he had knowingly embarked from Ireland with cases of plague aboard. His masters had told him to sail forth or die.
Later, the paper would report that the captain now suffered the disease. Still later, it noted his death.
Local passions were further ignited when a ship sailed into harbour weighed down with the sick tenants of the Irish estates of Lord Palmerston, the British foreign secretary. A riot ensued, for it seemed an act of war, a British lord sending the plague across the sea to wipe out Montreal. Unable to extend their hands to the neck of Lord Palmerston, citizens sought to finally burn the sheds to the ground and drive any survivors into the river, to be rid of the plague once and for all and let the crime rest upon the soul of Palmerston, if he had one.
The new mayor of Montreal, John Easton Mills, an American who had journeyed north from Leland, Massachusetts, under curious circumstances to make a home in the French city, learning the language and becoming a model citizen, appealed to the mobs for restraint and a more caring attitude. He also served the community as president of the immigration commission, and upon first hearing of the plague had had the sheds constructed. Now he stood fast before the rioters, police loyal to him forming a firm line. In so doing, he kept the dying alive. Then he volunteered to be a nurse in the sheds, and on the twelfth day of November, 1847, he died.
Every day, older children tried to escape the sheds, desperate to find the mother or father who had been taken away during the night and trenched. The authorities would corner them, then call for the nuns to fetch them, as the police did not want to touch them or even breathe the same air they breathed. Mother McMullen went along on one such dreadful mission, with her friend, Father O’Malley. Two Irish girls were pinned against a farmer’s low stone wall, rifles aimed at their eyes, dogs snarling and barking if they dared flinch. The priest and the nun fell upon the terrified children and swept them into their arms, fully embracing them.