Frontier and pioneer life -- Québec (Province) -- Fiction; Historical fiction; Short stories
aside for a minute or so, there was a gurgle and a drawin up of the
legs, and all was over. “Oh, my brother, my brother, hev you died afore
me,” moaned the poor girl as she tighter clutched his body. “Come wid
me,” I said, stooping over and trying to lift her, “I am Irish like
yersilf, and will spind my last dollar if need be to bury your brother.
Lave him, and I will take you where you will find friends.” I could not
loosen her hould on the body. The policeman said he would go for the
ambulance and left me. I stroked her hair, I talked to her as if she
had been my own daughter; I tried to comfort her. Never a sign or a
word. There was a sound of wheels and I looked and saw the ambulance.
The men came and I grasped the girl to lift her off the corpse. I
caught a look at her face--she was dead too. The ambulance men said
that was nothing, that fever patients dropped dead every day without
a sign. I looked at the poor colleen as I helped to lift her into the
ambulance beside her brother’s corpse, and I knew it was not of the
fever alone she had died, but of a broken heart. Och, och, to come to
Ameriky to die on the quay. “Drive to the cimitry,” says I, “and I will
pay all expinses,” trying to get up beside the driver. “Have you lost
your sinses,” says he, “they wad not bury them in the cimitry; they
go to Point St Charles, and if yer wise ye’ll tell nobody you handled
faver patients and go about your business.” Wid that he cracks his
whip, and rattles aff at a great rate. “Well, well,” I said to myself,
“at ony rate they will be united in burial as they were in life and
death,” and they rest in the field where a big stone tells more than
3000 were buried. I turned with a heavy heart to the steamer, which
was ringing a warning bell to get on board and lying down on a pile of
bags fell asleep. It was afternoon when I awoke and soon after we were
at Three Rivers, where I went ashore and got something to eat. When we
had left it a while a steamer hove in sight, coming up the river. We
crowded to see her in passing. It was a sight that sunk like a stone on
my heart. Her lower deck was chuck full of women and childer and men,
all in rags, and with faces as sharp as hatchets from starvation, and
most all of them white or yellow from the fever. She passed between
us and the wind and the smell was awful. A sailor told me steamboats
passed every day like her on their way from quarantine, and never a one
reached Montreal without a row of corpses on her upper deck for burial
and a lot of sick to be carried to Point St Charles.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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