The Law of Dreams (47 page)

Lying in his upper berth, none of the talk could touch him, it was
insubstantial, it had no grip or feel. It was just noise. What was real was the pressure
singing in the steam boilers and the crazy throbbing of the wheel.

His engine of days was bust, somehow. The world no longer convincing.

AT THE
breakfast table the captain said eighteen fever
cases had developed overnight among the deck passengers. Even the two English officers
sipping coffee looked seedy and disarrayed, coats unbuttoned and hair unbrushed,
whispering
if you please
and
thank you
to the little steward filling
their cups.

“I'll tell you what's wrong with
them
,”
Ormsby said as he walked the cabin deck after breakfast, clutching Fergus's arm
like an old, powerful bird, a hawk with talons. “I beat 'em! Beat 'em
all night and something ferocious. Losing a hundred at cards will give any young fellow
a poor color, especially on his way to joining a regiment the dear old pater can't
afford in the first place.”

From the rail they looked down at the fever cases
lying out on the main deck, wrapped in their blankets in the bright, hot Canada sun.

“God have mercy,” Ormsby shivered. “All my life, Fergus,
I have watched people die, of broken necks, plague, fever, cold. Never understood what
to make of it, or if there's anything there. Only that it's a ruthless sort
of a business, and the secrets are all buried.”

THEIR FIRST
death was off the town of Three Rivers. The
victim had no friends aboard, his wife and children having died on the Atlantic
crossing. From the cabin deck Fergus watched the bos'n sewing the dead man into a
piece of oilskin with chunks of iron for ballast, then the deckhands picking up the
shrouded corpse on a board, lifting it to the rail, and letting it fall into the
river.

Three more of the fever cases died that afternoon between Three Rivers
and the St. Mary's current. He heard the captain tell the hands to put them over
quickly, but this time their relatives refused to let crewmen near the bodies, insisting
the dead be left in peace until they could be carried ashore at Montreal and buried in
the ground like Christians.

Water's always moving, you can't lie there. There's no
ending, down there. Perhaps for fish.

A body wants the ground.

FROM THE CABIN DECK
, he watched a collection of iron
roofs and steeples panning white in the evening sun, and the hump of a mountain rising
behind the gray stone buildings of Montreal town.

The captain had told Ormsby steamers were not permitted to land emigrants
at the city quays; instead they would be put ashore at Windmill Point, where fever sheds
had been erected. “Montreal certainly don't want the Irish,” Ormsby
remarked.

The current at Windmill Point was awkward and
William Molson
,
coming in with steam up and paddle wheel flashing, banged into the quay with such force
that passengers were knocked off their feet. The deckhands were already throwing lines
ashore, making fast, and before the gangway was run out he could see people pitching
their baggage onto the quay, and lodging-house runners seizing it up and throwing it
into their carts.

Everyone screaming.

Fear, haste, thievery.

They had arrived.

THE OLD
man paid the deckhands to carry his boxes and
trunks onto the quay, then hired a horse cart and told the driver to deliver his baggage
to
Donegani's Hotel on Notre Dame Street.
William
Molson
's fever cases were being carried off to lazarettos, long wooden
sheds exactly like those on the quarantine island. The English officers had hired a
carriage and were offering a lift to town. “No, we'll walk, gentlemen, thank
you kindly,” he told them. “I want to find my land legs.”

The fever sheds were newly built and stood in a midden of mud and sawdust.
In a sheep meadow out beyond, long fresh ridges of brown soil had been planted with
whitewashed crosses, and gravediggers at work in a trench were so deep that only their
hats showed, and the bites of soil flinging off their spades.

A blinkered horse stood placidly harnessed to a cart with six yellow
coffins stacked aboard.

“They have come a long way to die,” Ormsby remarked.

You imagine her heat inside one of them boxes, nailed shut.

IN THE
open fields that lay between Windmill Point and
the town, emigrants were sheltering in hundreds of shebangs made from scraps of lumber,
tin, and sailcloth. Traffic of drays and carts, wagons, and barrows began thickening as
they came into Montreal. At every street corner were emigrants perched on piles of
baggage, men sucking their pipes, women nursing red babies. All wore the same bewildered
expression.

“I always expected to die in a river,” Ormsby's voice
sounded small, or perhaps it was just the noise all around, teamsters cracking whips,
wagons groaning. Fergus looked at him. Something had lit inside the old man, a yellow
energy burning. He gripped Fergus's arm. “The North River, the French, Rainy
River,” he gasped, “the Winnipeg, the Churchill, the North Saskatchewan.
Columbia herself. We used to take any kind of chance, run any kind of a chute, to save
ourselves a carry.”

“You'd be clean in a river,” Fergus said.

“Yes. You'd be clean.”

Fergus looked at him closely. His face had flushed pink. “Are you
not well?”

“A little bit of a heat.” Ormsby began to laugh, the laugh
became a sputter, then Fergus had to support him while coughing racked his body.

“I'll tell you what it is,” the old man sputtered.
“My knees . . . ache. Something dreadful. They do.”

That was fever.

Of course it was.

“How far is it to go? Shall I hire a cart?”

“No, no. I must walk it . . . walk it out. Dreadful cramps,
that's all. 'Tis all those weeks aboard . . . not natural. Come along,
Fergus, come along, I ain't stopping here.”

Wind fluttered the scent of hay through the muddy street. Horses and muck.
Stone buildings with iron shutters. Flies humming.

The old man had halted again, this time on a little iron bridge humped
over a canal; the canal lined with factories, their chimneys smoking. In the factory
yards he could see organized stacks of yellow lumber and ash heaps big as houses. Dozens
of workmen swarming over a steamboat that was being constructed.

“Busy is money,” Ormsby wheezed. “This is all upriver
trade.” Taking a handkerchief from his pocket, he mopped his brow.
“Sometimes the world resembles an animal, Fergus. A bull. A lost sheep. A gray
wolf. I've seen the world at Red River looking like a fox in autumn.”

Fever talking.

He watched a timber raft, sculling along the canal.

Thinking of Molly's smell, touch, noise.

He remembered lying on his back in bracken on top of the world, hearing
cattle, knowing every sound. Shadows of clouds speeding across the mountain.

But the past is nothing.

The world cuts you open. You don't close.

“Plenty of Irishmen working in the timber.” Ormsby's
voice had a low, strained urgency. “The Canadians fight 'em . . . the
work's in winter . . . flooding out of the backwoods now. Drink up their pay . . .
we'll have a few of 'em for the brigade.”

Talking for the courage. Talking to hear himself alive.

“Here, you'll need something in hand.” Taking out his
purse, Ormsby withdrew a gold sovereign and held it out.

“What do you want out of me, mister?”

“You'll need money for the town. Tomorrow we'll get you
a decent suit of clothes.”

“What do you care what happens to
me?”

“You must learn to accept a gift. There is fortune as well as
misfortune, you know.”

Fergus took the coin. “I'm a loose rock, mister. I'm a
ribbonman for all you know —”

“You put me in mind of my boy, Daniel. Many Gray Horses, in the
Blackfoot language. The Constant Sky of the Crow. Not in looks. In spirit,
perhaps.”

“— I might get a gun and shoot you in your bed.”

“You might. That's a British sovereign, mind,” the old
man whispered, “worth six Yankee dollars at least. Put it away — don't
flash your money — don't let the quackers cheat you. If they offer French
louis
take fifteen at least. As for Spanish dollars, I wouldn't touch
'em.”

Peering down through iron grillwork, Fergus watched the raft sweeping
underneath the bridge. “I like money.”

“It's very useful,” Ormsby agreed. “Here give me
your arm again, Fergus, I'm not the fellow I was.”

They kept walking. The old man was stringy, rocky, tough. The fever
hadn't smothered him yet.

A red-haired girl passed, carrying a duck in a basket. He heard
Molly's voice

I've wanted to be a wheel

and then her whole shape — sleeping, disordered, sexual —
was plangent in his mind.

Late-afternoon sun skipped off the river. Iron roofs stuttering light. In
Notre Dame Street a small barefoot girl in a shawl and muddy skirts grabbed at his
sleeve. “Come along,
a ghrá
, have a suck, only a shilling,”
but he put her off and kept walking, the old man saying nothing but leaning heavy on his
arm. He saw a horse dealer leading a string of black ponies and a pair of pretty girls
swinging sacks of turnips off the back of a cart. Smoke of coffee leaking from
somewhere.

The world is hard and real, the world is not private.

D
ONEGANI'S
H
OTEL

Wines Baths and Carriages

to

Pleasure Travelers

&

Men of Business

“No good comes of no good, Mr. Ormsby,” said Donegani the
innkeeper, a thick man in a black jacket, wearing cowhide slippers. His small black eyes
studied Fergus. “I don't like the look of this fellow, Mr. Ormsby, to tell
you the truth. Town is thick with Irish come up the river. Pack of wolves. It's
not the trade I'm used to in my house.”

A weak fire of logs sizzled in the grate — Donegani had been working
his accounts when they arrived, and a ledger was spread open on the high desk, with a
sheaf of bills alongside, a pot of ink, and a steel pen.

Ink's aroma recalling the shack where he'd scratched his mark,
before walking up the hill to Muldoon's.

Seeing her outside the shanty boiling wash.

“I told you, man, if you would listen: we are shipmates, traveling
together from Liverpool.” Ormsby signed the register with a flourish. “He
goes out a clerk with our spring brigade. Are you saying a young gentleman in the
service of the Hudson's Bay Company ain't custom for your hotel?”

Ormsby was holding himself together but Fergus could see the flush on his
cheeks.

You could fight fever for a while but it couldn't be renounced.

“With the Company, you say?” The innkeeper smiled. “Well
that's another matter, of course.”

Perhaps they didn't see the fever on Ormsby because he was a
gentleman.

“Put him in one of those small rooms at the front,” Ormsby
ordered. “Fix him a bath. Give him a fire if he wants one. Myself as well. And
he'll dine with me.” Taking a sovereign from his purse, he flipped into the
air. The innkeeper snatched it like a frog grabbing a bug.

A man has to lie down and die somewhere, doesn't he.

* * *

A BRASS
bed, made up with linen sheets and clean
blankets. The servant girl, after opening the window and thumping the pillows on the
bed, asking if he wished the stove to be lit.

A shock to find yourself alive in a new country.

Standing at the window, listening to birds clicking on the iron roof, he
could see a narrow piece of the river.

“Mister! Will you have a fire, or won't you?”

“No, it's warm enough.”

“We had snow on the ground last week. Have you only just come
over?”

“I have.”

“From where?”

“Liverpool.”

“But where in Ireland?”

“Dublin.”

“Aughnish, in Fánaid, that was our country. Do you know
it?”

“No.”

“I come out four years ago with my father and brothers. Taken up
farms on the front, they have.”

“Is it good land?”

“Good for bears. Did you have a rough cross? They say it's
always rough, so early in the season.”

“I don't know, I suppose it was.”

“Fever aboard?”

“There was, yes.”

“They dropped them into the water?”

“Yes.”

“Who's the old fellow?”

“I met him on the ship.”

“He's money, he is. Are you going for the states?”

“For the fur trade. For Rupert's Land.”

“What is it? Do they pay wages?”

“I reckon so. If your people have a farm, why aren't you with
them?”

“What business is that of yours?”

“None I suppose.”

“I could tell you a dozen different stories,” she said,
beating the pillows with her fist, “and most of them would be true. I'll
tell you this. My father, the old pincer, wasn't the man to leave alone what he
could easily take. What he figured was his own. Do you get me?”

“He was jumping you.”

“I was nine years old when we come out of Fánaid. Our mother
died on the crossing. That was leaving me with three caustic brothers and Father, who is
just a big jug-eared dish of a man. They've been hacking, chopping, and sawing for
seven years up there on the last range, in the township of Rixborough, country of
Megantic. You'd barely call it a farm.”