River City (64 page)

“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.

They hugged and kissed the little ones, and assured the girls that their mother dwelled happily in heaven, that she gazed down upon her lovely children.

“Will we be in heaven soon?” one child asked. She was about eight. Her symptoms had only recently commenced.

“Yes, my child, you will be with your mother soon.”

Hand in hand, the four returned to the sheds.

Later, the two old friends talked during their supper hour. “Some time ago now, Father, yet less than twenty years, starving English arrived in Montreal by ship. The bishop felt beset by pressures. He didn’t know what to do. The French wanted the English moved along. So did he, I might presume. Yet the bishop also suffered from an affliction of conscience, for under the robes of his office he remained a man of faith. The first migrants, he did pass along to Ontario. Many died on the journey, and those who survived were not well received. Others, he transported to your New York State. Alas, the Americans were generous, but they had no intention of receiving them all, for the arrivals were a feeble community in need of great personal care. The bishop did not want to keep them here, for as you know, the Church is responsible for distributing all lands, and it’s understood that land is to be distributed only to the French, not to the English. Still, the English were dying and more ships were sailing to our port.”

“A tragedy. What did your bishop do?” Father O’Malley inquired. Acquainted with the Church in Canada, he knew it to be unlike any other. In France, the hierarchy of the Church was interested in the high affairs of state, as well as in ecclesiastical issues. In Germany, the Church was a body politic, actively working behind the scenes as an institution of influence. In other European nations, the Church was accustomed to living amid or adjacent to a Protestant authority, whereas in Quebec, the Church had become the dominant power—entrusted, really, with all matters of vital concern to the populace. The power of a bishop was never slight, nor were the consequences of a decision without reverberation and import.

“At first, nothing, although he might prefer to dignify the period as his time of reflection. Then he did something quite extraordinary, Father. He
made a deal with an English company—a pact with the devil, some would say, but I am not one of those—an agreement with the Sun Life Assurance Company.”

The priest, who taught both American history and New Testament studies, while leading discussion groups among candidates for the priesthood on such esoteric concerns as the nature of the soul and the meaning of free will, original sin and the manifest attributes of the Trinity, inquired in the dim candlelight, “What sort of deal could that have been, Mother?”

“If the company were to undertake the dispersal of certain lands—such as the lands across from the Mohawks at Oka, where no parish had been established—if these lands were to be reserved for starving English settlers, he would bequeath the company the right, and the land, to do so.”

The priest nodded, and lightly drew a hand through his beard. “I see. So it is not the Church giving land to the English, but the Sun Life Assurance Company, and only land that does not impinge on the authority of an existing parish. Then it becomes the Sun Life Assurance Company that confers land to the English.”

Mother McMullen nodded. “If you are French,” she opined, “and you desire land, you must attend to your good relations with the Church. It is the path to God, to a godly life. That will mean, as a rule, that one of your children, preferably the first born, will enter the priesthood, if a boy, or a convent if she’s a girl. If your family is large, the Church may anticipate that at least two of your offspring will choose the vocation of the Lord. Often it is more than that, as we know.”

Father O’Malley cleared his throat. “Something in what you are saying sounds—how shall I put this, Mother McMullen?—I won’t say heretical, but—” “The proximity of death, Father, causes one to be fearless.” “I understand,” he said gravely.

“But my point is not subversive. The English are here and we have given them land. Now the Irish are arriving, and we are giving them a chance to live, or at least to die, with some measure of human sympathy. If circumstances were different, Father, we’d probably be killing one another, firing cannon, engaging in swordplay. Men do that sort of thing, you know.”

He agreed. “Men have been known to do that sort of thing.”

“And many citizens, if they had the chance today, would drown us all in the river. Nevertheless, if we are willing to die for one another, Father, as so many have shown at the Irish sheds, why are we so less willing to live with one another?”

“Ah. A true question on the mystery of life, Mother McMullen.”

“Sadly, Father.” “Sadly?”

“Is it not a question with no known reply? Is that not sad, Father?”

He nodded. He wished his students could be sitting alongside him, listening and absorbing this. Later, they would have so much to discuss. Yet he knew that he would never see his beloved students again.

The next morning, Father O’Malley reported his first symptoms.

Surviving children numbered in the hundreds, cared for by the strapped Grey Nuns, and a renewed appeal to the surrounding parishes brought country-folk into town. Each of these rural families took one, or two, or, if they were bereft of children of their own, many more, and the Irish offspring, allowed to maintain their surnames to honour their dead parents, slipped away into the countryside to live with their new families and become French themselves.

Finally, the ships from Ireland ceased arriving. The dying died. Those who were to recover did so, and knew that they’d been saved.

Almost no one spoke of the horror again. Few could utter its name.

A dozen years later, new Irish immigrants arrived to build a bridge to traverse the St. Lawrence River from the island of Montreal to the mainland, and in their travails the men dug into what appeared to be long trenches of bones. Upon their inquiries, they were informed that the bones belonged to their countrymen, who had died the most terrible of deaths.

Bridge-builders dug a great black boulder, somewhat pear-shaped, out of the muck of the St. Lawrence River, and placed it in the path of the road to the
bridge. The workmen commemorated their predecessors and marked their bones with the boulder, which would become known as the Irish Stone. On it, they inscribed:

TO
PRESERVE FROM DESECRATION
THE REMAINS OF 6000 IMMIGRANTS
WHO DIED OF SHIP FEVER
A.D. 1847–48
THIS STONE
IS ERECTED BY THE WORKMEN OF
MESSRS. PETO, BRASSEY AND BETTS
EMPLOYED IN THE CONSTRUCTION
OF THE
VICTORIA BRIDGE
A.D.
1859

Six thousand dead.

Depleted, the Grey Nuns returned to their vocation, and soon enough recruited a full complement of devout women again.