by David Rees
Michael struck him in the face. He could have been knocked unconscious to the deck by one blow of that massive fist, but Jack, looking confused, merely rubbed the place on his cheek where he had been hit.
Why haven’t I caught it, Michael asked himself; why am I not dead too? It was a reasonable question. Anthony had contracted typhus by inhaling the dust of louse excrement when he visited the last dying O’Leary, though no one then had even guessed it was possible to catch the disease that way. Anthony had no lice on his body, and none, therefore, were passed on. Hence Michael’s deliverance. But it seemed totally incomprehensible that one of them should have been singled out for death and not the other, unless it was some quirk of an inexplicably malevolent Fate. It was easy for him, his agnosticism being so recent, to think Jansenist thoughts.
He could have asked another passenger to share the cabin with him now, and thus liberated some poor creature from the miseries of the hold, but the idea did not occur to him. His offer would have been refused: a corner of the hold still free from disease, disgusting though it might be, was preferable to a place where typhus could lurk. Only Jack — stupid or reckless — was not worried on that score. Michael spent hours in the cabin, alone, reliving every memory of Anthony he could summon to mind: the afternoon they had met, the occasions they had quarrelled, laughed, been companionably silent together, strolled on the beach, drunk too much, praised each other’s beauty and goodness, made love. He was mentally at Eagle Lodge much more than he was aware of himself on the ship, and America he gave no thought to.
Dr Coffey observed him, and tried to engage him in conversation, but Michael answered distractedly or not at all, as if other people did not exist, or were figments of his dreams. “He is like some widow mourning her lost husband,” the doctor remarked to his wife. Michael’s grief puzzled him. The reason for it did not enter his head as a possibility; he thought as the inhabitants of Clasheen did: Michael-and-Anthony was not one of the permutations human beings indulged in. Like Dr Lenehan, he would not have been greatly censorious had he been told; there would have been a little sympathy as well as scientific curiosity.
But Michael did not tell him, even though the chances presented themselves and he had reached the point where he needed to decant his pain onto somebody. That would have to wait, he decided. Madge was in New York; Madge would remove some of this intolerable burden.
He could not sleep without Anthony’s touch. He would doze off at ten or eleven, then surface at two a.m.; he is not here, he would say to himself; then be wide awake for the rest of the night. It was the trauma of the death all over again; sleep had dulled the knowledge and waking brought back the full horror of it: himself alone. Sometimes he just lay there and cried, exhausting himself in the process, but not enough for sleep to return. Dr Coffey, who never slept well, and who found the rolling of the ship created almost total insomnia, heard him through the thin wall of the cabin.
At other times Michael would get up, dress, stand by the ship’s rail, and stare at the moonlit water. One night, the doctor, thinking that a chat would help to relieve the boredom of sleeplessness, followed him.
“The pair of us surely have unquiet consciences,’’ he said. “No,” Michael answered.
“Insomnia has causes.”
“I just can’t sleep, is all. And the tiredness is there the whole day. Is worse each day! I am a lump of lead on two legs. I wish I could collapse. Keel over like a weary plant.”
“What is the problem?”
“It is obvious. I cannot sleep.”
A peculiarly circular conversation, the doctor thought. “I could give you drugs,” he said. “They might cure the symptoms, but they would not remove the reasons… whatever they may be.”
“It would help. Thank you.”
“I understand your requiem for him, but you are too hard on yourself. It was not your fault.”
“No. It was not my fault.”
“Then… ?”
Michael looked away, down at the sea. The water was dark green, the moon in it glittering gold, chill and uninviting. “That was then; this is now,” he said, enigmatically.
Dr Coffey sighed. “I think I will take a walk round the deck. If you want some laudanum, come to my cabin before you turn in. May you rest in peace.”
Drugged, Michael lay in bed listening to the sounds of the ship ― snatches of talk from the watch, sea slapping wood, a man laughing, the timbers: creak-creak, creak-creak, creak-creak. It is rocking me, he said to himself, as if I were a baby.
DR Coffey was working from dawn till bedtime; the fever cases had grown to epidemic numbers. “Dr Moylan and I require some help,” he said one afternoon. “Will you help us?” He thought work would take Michael’s mind off whatever was troubling him. Michael agreed; if it led to catching typhus, then well and good. What he had to do, mostly, was to take water casks on deck and fill them, then return them to their owners, people too sick to climb up the few stairs into the daylight. But it was still difficult ― even more difficult as conditions had worsened ― to force himself down into the hold.
When the hatches were opened, it was not only the smell that was disgusting, but a cloud of dank air could be seen rising, thick like a fog; all the stale breath, effluvia, and germs of the diseased and starving. He covered his nose and mouth with a handkerchief, but, after a while groping about in the gloom, stumbling over limp, exhausted bodies, it was possible to breathe more freely; he got used to the noisome atmosphere.
It was surprising, though he didn’t know why he should be surprised, to witness in the hold scenes of compassion and generosity. He had imagined human beings in this state of degradation were beyond the ability to feel for their fellow men, that it was each person for himself. He saw a grandmother gently cradling a howling child, women with stalk-like limbs and racked with fever trying to comfort their babies, old hollow-cheeked men close to death saying another day gone was another day nearer salvation, the good life in the Land of Liberty. It made him ashamed of his despair, though it did not diminish it, let alone drive it away. He still hoped contact with the hold would give him typhus.
Jack saw him with the water casks. “The angel of mercy, aren’t you?” he sneered. “Why do you never come to me now? I miss you … I miss …”
“I would if I wanted to,” Michael answered. “But I do not.”
“Why?”
“If I had the desire, I’d come.”
“The voyage is not over yet,” Jack said, almost as if he were the soothsayer announcing that the Ides of March were not gone.
“I doubt I’ll change my mind.”
“I’m leaving the ship in New York; there are better ways of earning a living than this drudgery. Why don’t you and me go into partnership? America means opportunity. We could be rich!”
“Doing what?”
“A handsome fellow can make as much as a pretty girl.”
“On the streets?”
“Yes”
Michael laughed, for the first time in days. Emigrating to New York to sell his body was a grotesque joke, about as distant from his thoughts as flying to the moon. The man was crazy! “I don’t think we’d suit each other,” he said. He laughed again, and was glad to do so: it released something.
He helped the doctors every day. The jobs began to involve more than just fetching water; people began to know him, to look out for him. He attempted to comfort the sick, not with medicines, for the supply was nearly gone, but with words: he was not good at it, but he did try. He wrote letters for those who could not read or write, who were determined that friends and family back in Ireland should hear of their sufferings; he even considered writing a letter about it himself. To whom? Noreen? There was little point. Richard? He should tell Richard of Anthony’s death, but that could wait.
He helped to distribute the food supply. Indian corn was running low; it was supplemented by a little salted meat and salted fish. The quality of this was so bad and the salt so strong that it was inedible. Those who ate it
were racked with thirst. Most of it was thrown away.
Dr Coffey, who was pleased with him and liked him, said “You told me you wanted to farm a piece of land in America.”
“Alone?” Michael answered. “There would be no point in it.”
“So what will you do?”
He thought for a while. Then shrugged his shoulders.
“I’m hoping to buy a practice in New York,” the doctor said. “I need a reliable, honest assistant. There is always a quantity of pen-pushing … and I could teach you to mix drugs … What do you say?”
“Thank you. I … I don’t know. Perhaps … I should try and find myself first. Find …”
“How to go on?”
“Yes.”
Dr Coffey frowned, and said: “You should find yourself a wife.” Very difficult to read this man, he thought. Servant and secretary to the manager of an estate, the dead Englishman; that was the only fact he was sure of. Why they had decided to emigrate he did not know, but the hunger, of course, had ruined landlords as well as peasants.
“I am not looking for a wife,” Michael said. “Why does everyone tell me to get married? It is not the sole reason we exist.”
“What are you looking for?”
He smiled. “Purpose,” he said.
A very pleasant fellow, the doctor said to Mrs Coffey, hard-working, thoughtful, trustworthy, but a terrible queer fish: as well as being a grieving widow, he was a philosopher.
“Perhaps he has some guilty secret,” she said. “Perhaps he is running away from some crime he has committed.”
“A crime? Him? Nonsense!”
ANOTHER twenty-four hours and the New World would be visible. Miraculous, Michael thought ― or was it a great pity? ― that he had not been infected with any disease, not even the chronic diarrhoea that everyone in the hold had to live with. The Cedar of Lebanon had started the voyage with four hundred and forty-four passengers; one hundred and fifty were arriving in New York with fever, and one hundred and eight had died at sea. Michael had helped to shroud bodies in sail-cloth, and dragged some of them up to the deck for burial.
The food ran out on that last day, and, because of the wine-soaked casks, the water ration had been cut a week previously to a quart per person. Despite the conditions in the hold, the tenacity of people was astonishing. They still had hope: a day more to endure, then dry land. Some, even though near death, were jubilant.
Michael was not, but he was certainly looking forward to the end of the voyage. The ship was as enclosed as a prison; dreary, unchanging, a living Hell. The same words applied to himself: the utterly depressing loneliness after Anthony was a living Hell. There was Dr Coffey of course, and the passengers in the hold, but he always had to return to the cabin. It was filled with Anthony ― his books, his Indian sourvenirs, a dried splash of his vomit that had not been washed off the wall, even the smell of him on the bedding. But no Anthony. Not a day passed without Michael just sitting for hours, eyes full of tears.
Jack did not disturb him again. Curious to know the reason, Michael kept watch : the sailor had found somebody else. Michael was glad, but a little part of him felt a prick of annoyance; though sexual activity was the last thing he wanted, he felt, in a way, rebuffed.
On that last morning the decks were crowded as they had not been since the passengers had waved goodbye to their relatives and loved ones on Galway quay. Only those too ill to move kept below; everyone else came up to see the United States of America. How long would it be now, they wondered; how long after that till they disembarked in New York? This was America ― no landlords, no hunger, no fever, no British. The atmosphere was one of intense excitement. But the crowd was half the size it had been in Galway. The dead and the sick accounted for that; many of the rest had altered from the starving, emaciated, ragged scarecrows they were at the beginning of the voyage to even more ragged, colourless, spectre-like skeletons, feeble beyond belief.
When Michael saw the American coast on the horizon ― a long, thin, grey thread much like his last view of the west of Ireland ― he forgot for a moment, and turned to say “There it is!” But Anthony wasn’t with him. He choked on his words, and the light in his eyes died.
An hour later The Cedar of Lebanon took on board the port physician of New York, who, on discovering that there were over a hundred cases of fever, directed the ship to Staten Island, where it would be held for a month’s quarantine. The sick would be transferred to the hospital on the island; the rest could stay on board or disembark, but nobody was allowed to proceed into New York itself until thirty days had gone by. This was a staggering blow, almost devastating to people whose only wish was to be on the American mainland: a tiny island was as much of a prison as the hold they had travelled in. The excited atmosphere evaporated immediately, and the gloom increased when it was learned that there was nowhere for the healthy to stay at night; they would have to sleep on the ship.
Staten Island was a wholly unsuitable place for a quarantine station, it was so dose to New York that a great number of people, who had no connection with the hospital, lived there and went by ferry into the city to work. They hated the presence of the hospital and the quarantined ships, and complained frequently of the risks they were subjected to. The stench blown on the wind from the holds, they said, was a hazard to their health; filthy, revolting garbage thrown overboard got washed up by the tide and spread disease.
But the real health hazard was caused by the ferry. Crowds of people came to see their relatives in quarantine, and there was little to prevent those who were ordered to stay on the island for the statutory month from returning with their families to the city, and therefore disappearing for good from the reach of the authorities. Typhus inevitably crossed the water. When The Cedar of Lebanon anchored, New York was suffering from an epidemic every bit as severe as that raging in Ireland.
Michael was determined to slip away on the ferry; like the other passengers he found little difference between being on the ship and being quarantined ― both were intolerable checks on freedom. He was curious, now that he was so near, to explore New York, and his desire to find Madge was overwhelming. She, of course, would not be among the citizens coming over to look for relatives; she didn’t know he was there. He had left Clasheen so soon after her that they had had no time to exchange letters. A letter, he thought, from Madge was probably even now waiting for him at Eagle Lodge, if Richard had not mailed it back or destroyed it. Eagle Lodge! It was so far distant and lost in the past; in another age. Another Michael.
Dr Coffey begged him not to leave for New York at once. He was himself needed at the quarantine station, he said; it was overcrowded and desperately short of medical staff. Michael could earn good money there, a great deal more than he had ever earned in Ireland; nurses, porters, and auxiliaries of every kind were wanted. Michael hesitated. What would happen to him, alone in New York? He did not have many skills to offer. He could read and write, which was more than most of the emigrants were able to do, but it wasn’t much: New York might well have an abundance of literate employees. He went to the quarantine station and volunteered his services.
The pay was good, but what he saw at the hospital sickened him. Conditions were almost as bad as in the hold of The Cedar of Lebanon. The buildings were supposed to house four hundred patients, but there were three times that number, many of them herded together in flimsy wooden shacks that had been thrown up when the authorities grew alarmed by the size of the Irish influx. The roofs of all the buildings leaked, and sanitation was virtually non-existent. Proper beds were few; nearly everyone lay on iron grids thinly covered with straw, which, as their occupants were mostly skeletons of skin and bone, were as agonizing as the thirst the fever produced. The food was no better than on board ship, and the doctors and nurses more unsolicitous and ill-trained than Dr Moylan. At least he had not abused those in his care. Every single case of fever on Staten Island, Michael noticed, was an emigrant from Ireland.
Such was the welcome th
e victims of the Great Hunger found in the Land of the Free. Not that it made any of them wish to return; nothing could be as bad as that. But, Michael realized, Britain was not responsible for all famine and fever deaths; American dislike of being made the receiving ground for the sick and the impoverished contributed to the total. In 1847 “Give me the wretched refuse of your teeming shore” was not exactly a heart-felt sentiment in the United States.
An old woman, lying inert in the hospital, Michael thought he recognized. Her skin was yellow, and so loose he felt if he touched it it would peel off like the skin of a hot potato. She had long grey hair, as wild and twisted as a tree tormented by the wind in winter. He had last seen her screaming at him on the other side of a pane of glass.
“Surely you are from Coolcaslig?” he said. She nodded. “From the workhouse?”
“Yes.”
“I remember.”
“I remember a well-dressed, well-fed young fellow sitting on a cart. I took you for the gombeen man. And I on the rack with thirst, shrieking for water.”
He hung his head, ashamed. “I could not help,” he muttered.
“I know. It is what you stood for I hated. Why should some suffer the tortures of the damned and others grow fat?”
“I’ve thought of you often, since. You seemed to me to be yelling for … all of us. The whole disaster.”
“I’m a poor widow. I buried my husband and all the five little ones. I may look an old hag of eighty, but I’m thirty-two. Cathleen McGillycuddy from Cahemane Cross. Not Cathleen ni Houlihan.”
“Which ship did you come on?”
“The Free Slave. A good name, isn’t it? But the crossing was worse than the worst weeks I spent in Coolcaslig poorhouse. Hell has no room like it.”
“What happened?”
“The yellow fever. I nearly despaired each time I relapsed, but I fought it, fought it, and, please God, I am better now. There is purpose in everything. I have survived.”
“You have beautiful hair.” He touched it.