The Hunger

by David Rees

  Typhus had not been found in Clasheen until Tom O’Leary went sick. Its organism lives in the excrement of lice, and it can enter the human body through the smallest of skin abrasions; or when the excrement has crumbled to a microscopic dust it can settle on the eyes or be inhaled. There were never so many louse-ridden bodies in Ireland as during the Famine. To heat water for washing was beyond the ability of the starving, and they were unable to change their clothes, as everything except a few basic rags had been sold.

  Vast numbers of people were on the move as never before; evicted paupers and beggars, infested with lice, tramped the roads in search of work or food, bringing the disease with them. The cruel winter had led to people clinging to each other for warmth, and traditional Irish hospitality allowed friends, neighbours, even strangers, to sleep round the same turf fire. Tom caught typhus because the O’Learys let a man and his son, evicted from a cabin on Lord Smithers’ estate, share their fire for three nights. One louse, riddled with the disease, transferred itself to Tom and bit him: he scratched the bite, and the organisms passed into his bloodstream.

  The first symptom is a sudden rise in temperature ― it can go up to one hundred and seven ― which is followed by delirium, then the red blotches on the chest, abdomen, and wrists that gave typhus its ancient name, spotted fever. The blood circulation slows, which leads to facial swellings and a darkening of the complexion; hence the other old name, black fever. The victim raves, twitches, vomits and can develop gangrene, leading to the destruction of his toes and fingers, and he smells quite revolting ― not the stench of blighted potatoes, but just as malodorous. Death, fortunately, is fairly rapid. Dr Lenehan took Tom to the fever hospital in Galway where he died a few days later, surrounded by people already dead or dying from the same disease.

  Anthony was thinking he should visit the O’Learys, but Michael implored him not to. “You have done enough! Reduced yourself to penury! Are you looking for martyrdom as well? What kind of man do you think you are? Some latter-day saint?” Anthony smiled. “I, persuaded by the Book of Mormon?”

  “Don’t evade the issue! You know perfectly well I was not talking of Mormons, ridiculous pagans! What will I do if you catch the black fever?”

  “I shall not go so close; I’ll ask the O’Learys to come outside. That way I shan’t breathe the smell of their cabin, and I’ll stand at a distance, six feet or more. Impossible for a lousy louse to jump six feet.”

  “Who says it is a louse? Who is it knows the germs aren’t spread on the air? Like potato blight. Thousands and thousands of poor souls have the black fever; was it lice in every case?” “I have read the medical journals, and in their pages a few of the more enlightened physicians argue that it may be lice. Dr Lenehan is of that opinion too.”

  “Anthony, don’t go! If you love me at all you will not go!”

  “This is absurd.”

  “I don’t care what it is!” He was beside himself. “I shan’t touch you again; I shan’t allow you to make love to me! I won’t be here when you come back!”

  “Michael… be an adult.” He left. Michael, furious and frustrated, hurled a saucer to the floor; it smashed in little pieces.

  Two more of the O’Leary children ― there were six living ― now had symptoms of typhus. They were hot as an oven, Mrs O’Leary told Anthony, their eyes unnaturally bright, their poor little brains addled so that they raved like mad things, screaming for water to quench their thirst. “Oh, God! The hardest heart would melt to listen to them!” she said. “Mr O’Leary has gone for Dr Lenehan, though what good will that do? The doctor will send them to Galway just as he did with my darling Tom, and they’ll die there as sure as if they stayed in the cabin. You only go to a hospital to die. It’s not that we care for ourselves, me and my husband; you will understand that ― it’s for the other ones still sound.”

  From which Anthony deduced that she realized death was certain, and that, sensibly, she was trying to save what she could. Someone in the cabin began to scream. “Listen to him! And I with only a jug to fetch water. We need a pail, a huge pail!”

  “I will bring you one from the house,” Anthony said. “Immediately.” He walked off, but a great commotion from the cabin made him stop and turn. A boy, perhaps ten years old, ran out, shrieking that he was burning alive, and, with the energy that only the overwhelming impulse to fly from the clutches of some appalling horror can give, he raced at extraordinary speed down to the stream and threw himself in it. Mrs O’Leary dashed after him.

  Anthony hesitated: he felt he should go to her assistance, but he had promised Michael not to venture close. As he watched, it became obvious that Mrs O’Leary did not need help. She dragged her son out of the stream, his energy ― he had achieved that coolness he wanted ― utterly spent. He was half-pulled, half-propelled back to the cabin; limp and exhausted, soaked to the skin. Trails of wet lay in the dust where he tottered, like water splashed from a water cart.

  When Anthony returned to the house, Michael ran up to him and embraced him. “I’m sorry!” he said. “It was selfish ― but what would I do if you died?”

  “You see I am living and uninfected,” Anthony said, and kissed him. He removed Michael’s arms. “I have to take the O’Learys a bucket.”

  “How are they?”

  “Two more of the children have it now.”

  “Put the bucket outside the cabin, then come straight back home! Please!”

  Anthony did not answer. At the cabin he found Dr Lenehan about to drive the two sick children to Galway. They already looked like corpses. Mr and Mrs O’Leary stared, speechless. The doctor’s courage, Anthony said to himself, was a marvel, an example to everyone; he was not afraid to go close, to touch even: he was shifting the two little bodies on the waggon into a more comfortable position.

  Dr Lenehan died a few months later from typhus. The death rate among physicians during the Famine, mostly of fever caught from their patients, was very high; in Connemara two thirds of all the doctors were victims. Their mortality was only equalled by clerics. Mr Peacock and Father Quinlan, however, survived to argue theology down the years; in Father Quinlan’s case ― and he was no more fearful than Dr Lenehan to touch the sick ― it was, Mrs Peacock said, the luck of the Devil.

  During the next few days more tenants of Anthony’s contracted typhus: Mrs Scannell and her eldest son (the boy Ty Keliher knew for a thief), three of the Cronins and Dan Leahy’s two sisters. The Kelihers escaped, as did the Sullivans, the Widow O’Gorman and Patrick O’Callaghan. The widow and the old man shut themselves up in their cabins and would not answer a knock, not even from the Altarnun himself; they only went out when they were absolutely sure there was nobody in the vicinity.

  The Kelihers’ and the Sullivans’ survival was probably due to accepting Anthony’s advice. He lent pails to all his tenants and told them to wash their clothes as often as possible, to heat water over their fires and keep themselves scrupulously clean; to search their bodies, constantly, for lice. With the Scannells, the Cronins and the Leahys, it was already too late, which brought Anthony near to despair. He had done everything he could to see them through till better times; now they were being struck down by an agent totally beyond his control. Famine he could fight, but disease was an invincible adversary.

  His relationship with Michael, the one sure anchor in this long period of hell, was suffering too. The illnesses of the Scannells, the Cronins, the Leahys and the O’Learys were the cause of the problem; for Anthony refused to listen to pleas not to visit the tenants. He could cope when Michael begged or complained or shouted, but attempts to make love being rejected, sullen silences that went on for hours, or being told to sleep by himself, were intolerable. One night, awake and restless, he went into Michael’s room and said “You know I can’t sleep without you.”

  No answer.

  “Would you prefer to go back to your father’s house?”

  “What in God’s name should give you that idea?”

  Anthony
sighed. “Because you’re unhappy,” he said.

  “I will never leave you. You know that. But I wonder at times, risking your life as you do, if you love me at all.”

  “I am not risking my life!”

  “I read in the paper today of some great lord in Wicklow, a marquess it was; he has died of the black fever. Do you think he huddled up with his peasants in their cabins and caught their lice?”

  “Perhaps he had a mistress. One of the girls in the house. Perhaps he seduced a dozen of them.”

  “Oh, that is nonsense and you know it!” Michael said. “If you died … I should go. mad.”

  “That is nonsense too.”

  “What would you do if I died?”

  “I wouldn’t go mad.”

  “I am sure you would not! You would look about you for some other man.”

  “Maybe in time.”

  “Why don’t you look for him now?”

  “I’m going back to bed,” Anthony said, crossly. “Standing here in the dark, not a stitch of clothes on … I’m freezing cold.”

  He went out of the room.

  Michael followed him a few minutes later. “Here I am, oh Lord High Hickory Dickory Dock,” he said as he slipped under the sheets. “You may work your evil way with me.” He threw his legs wide apart, hands holding his buttocks open. “One that converses more with the buttock of the night than with the forehead of the morning. Shakespeare. Coriolanus.”

  “You feel like acting the whore?”

  “Why not? When love has gone. It will cost you a shilling, sir. Cheap at twice the price. Sir!”

  “I will punch your face in a moment.”

  “That will cost sixpence.”

  Anthony laughed, then grabbed hold of him. Michael struggled fiercely with fists and feet, and bashed Anthony about the head with a pillow. “You will not be touching me!” he shouted, several times.

  “I will. I am!”

  Michael could not win; his lover was much too strong. Soon Anthony’s legs were wrapped round his, rendering them powerless, and the thicker, more muscular pair of arms had his twisted up behind his shoulder-blades. “I won’t give in!” Michael cried.

  “Then I will.” But Anthony didn’t slacken his grip. “I’ll take more precautions. I’ll only see the tenants in cases of dire emergency. Will that satisfy you?”

  “It will have to,” Michael said, after he had thought about it. “Anthony, my anxiety has not been so unreasonable.”

  “I understand it.”

  “Will you let me go now? My legs are bruised and my arms almost dislocating themselves out of their sockets.”

  “I’m enjoying myself.”

  “You enjoy inflicting pain on me? How very typical of a man that is!”

  Anthony freed him. “You’re no less of a man,” he said.

  “I’m aware of that. I’ve asked myself would I be happier being a woman? Never is the reply to that question. I would not wish to wear their clothes, have babies … be a housekeeper. I don’t know why I am the way I am, but I’ve ceased to worry about it. I do know that I haven’t been put in the wrong body.”

  “I think we should stop talking and make love.”

  “Can you spare a poor girl one shilling, kind sir? It’s cold and wet and I’m… aaagh!” He could not continue, for Anthony was kissing him.

  Afterwards, Michael said “You’ve given me what I required.”

  “What we’ve just done?”

  “Your promise to be more cautious.”

  But word came to Anthony at breakfast that Mr Scannell had been taken seriously ill during the night. When he had finished eating, he walked down to the infected cabin.

  CHAPTER NINE

  ________________________________

  A WARM, wet, blustery day three weeks after Easter, dull columns of rain smudging the land. Mountains were lost in cloud. Out at sea a black storm loomed. Grass was so wet and emerald it looked new-made, as if it had just been put there. I shall miss all this, Michael said to himself as he walked into Clasheen, to Mass. The third Sunday after Christ had risen; in a fortnight Pentecost, the celebration of the tongues of fire. The Church’s seasons, the land’s seasons: the same on another shore? He presumed they were.

  He had thought little recently about America; events had blotted it from his mind: it was just a date to come. But he would tell his parents after Mass that he and Anthony were going. Too much of the here and now had been holding his attention: the discovery, disease, Mr Scannell’s death, worries that Anthony, who had taken more precautions, had not taken enough.

  He enjoyed the wet on his skin, the soft needles. This could only be in Ireland, he felt sure. Rain in New York would be different. No vivid greenness, no freshness of colour. These fields, now uncultivated and barren, stretched up a mountain that looked, with the cloud swirling above its summit, remarkably like a volcano: there would be nothing like this in Ohio or New Jersey, or wherever it was they would settle. New York would be buildings. As Dublin was? No. Nor Galway. But famine, typhus, dependence on potatoes, unfeeling brothers to evict their next of kin; that would all be left in a far country.

  Introibo ad altare Dei, ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meum. The ancient words flowed by him as usual, a chant, a spring bubbling: sheep blethering. The Epistle was from chapter two of the first Epistle of St Peter. “Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul; having your conversation honest among the Gentiles: that, whereas they speak against you as evil-doers, they may by your good works, which they shall behold, glorify God in the day of visitation.” And so on. The notices: remember in your prayers the soul of our dear brother, Roger Scannell.

  A few men slipped out when the sermon began, but most stayed; last Sunday Father Quinlan had said that this habit, though not unlawful, was irreverent. “By your good works, which they shall behold.” He liked to preface his homilies with a text from the day’s Epistle or Gospel. “We have all of us seen his good works,” he went on, “and it would be unpardonable not to remember them. Indeed there are people here present who will not forget, for the rest of their lives, the good he has done.” (What on earth, or rather, who on earth is he talking about, Michael asked himself. He rambles more and more every week: is above the heads of most of us. It is his age. Or the hunger.)

  “The apostle Peter, as you have heard, said we were to honour all men, and to love the brotherhood. In saying so, he emphasizes that he does not mean love in a carnal sense. ‘Abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul,’ he writes. ‘I beseech you.’ Brethren, when these two things, the pursuit of right action and the pursuit of fleshly lusts, join together in a man, then the good is undone: his soul is no more saved than if he were the greediest, most grasping, most tyrannical of landlords!”

  Michael began to feel uncomfortable.

  “When there is evil in the community it must be destroyed. Brethren, if there is an abomination in the eyes of the Lord so vile that it cries out for punishment, we must pluck it from us! We may not notice it for years, not hear of it, meet it, smell it; but it may be there all the same. The fleshly lusts are wicked. The woman who sells her body, the man who takes a woman who is not his wife: such people are manifestly wicked. Not so manifest, but just as wicked, are lewd thoughts, salacious glances, impure desires; others may not see them, but God sees them all! All are sins of the mortal kind, which, if they are not confessed, will send the soul of the man or the woman who commits them straight to Hell!

  “You may think these sins have the excuse, the explanation, of being natural. It is in us, you will say, to be as the beasts of the field. But this does not mitigate the sin, nor lessen the torment of the soul in the fires of Hell. It merely reminds us that we can understand the sinner, that there, but for the grace of God, go we.”

  Tension in Michael slackened; Anthony did not seem to be the object of Father Quinlan’s invective. But who was this sinner? He looked about him, as did sev
eral other members of the congregation, for the guilty person. There were too many candidates ― men mostly ― gazing defiantly ahead, not meeting anyone’s eye, and some who were staring hard at the ground or the ceiling. Ty Keliher, he noticed, was fidgeting in a torture of embarrassment.

  “Worse and much more offensive to God, dearly beloved, than those sins I have called natural, are sins unnatural. There are crimes against nature so horrifying that we hardly ever think of them ― the crime of the man who fornicates with his own daughter, the mother who seduces her own son. But most heinous of all ― and for these sinners the hottest fires of Hell, the most exquisite agonies, are reserved ― are the men and women who pursue with lust their own kind! I am speaking of the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah, which so angered the Lord our God that he rained down brimstone and destroyed those cities in the twinkling of an eye.”

  Nothing in Genesis about the twinkling of an eye, Michael said to himself as he looked at his shoes, and felt the scarlet rise in his face. I must not seem guilty. I must stop myself shaking. The pit of his stomach lurched, and his heart banged more painfully than on the morning Father Quinlan told him he had been found out. I can get through this, just, if he does not name names, if Anthony Altarnun and Michael Tangney are not words left floating on the air like black ravens! He would not, could not name names! Dear God, give me strength! He must not!

  “There are two men in our parish who have committed the sin of Sodom. Not just once in a guilty moment of sudden lust, but repeatedly over the years; who know it for a sin and who love and relish that sin, who are without shame or repentance, who indeed have every intention of continuing in their practice of that sin! It behoves me to perform a very solemn duty, one that in my twenty-five years as an ordained priest of God I have never had to perform. But I would be shirking my responsibilities if I did not do it. I have to denounce these men in order that you should know who they are. I am speaking of Anthony Altarnun and Michael Tangney.”