CHAPTER 16

1847 ~ 1859

MOTHER MCMULLEN ASKED TO BE LET OFF, TO STEP free from the carriage a fair distance before her return to the Grey Nuns Convent. She needed time for reflection. Pale, stricken Sister Sainte-Croix was instructed to ride on ahead without the mother superior and not to speak of the day’s events to a living soul. She acquiesced, wiping a tear from the corner of one eye, a sniffle from a nostril. For both women, their knowledge was nigh unbearable. Their souls felt rent. What they had witnessed that morning had left both too staggered to properly think, let alone speak of the disaster, and holding the reins in her hands felt like a great weight to Sister Sainte-Croix. And yet, upon Mother McMullen’s shoulders lay the burdens of responsibility and decision, and while the younger nun wished that she could do more to assist her mentor, she knew to grant her this solitary hour. A stroll through the streets of Montreal on one’s own did not constitute proper form for a mother superior. Nevertheless, Sister Sainte-Croix pulled on the reins and quietly called the white mare with the black rump patches to a halt.

The older woman stepped down from the carriage and commenced her walk.

All her life, she had been a student of war. Until that very morning, she had harboured a secret belief that her life would someday be defined by war, that actions undertaken in the grip of battle would mark the measure of her devotion to her Lord and so mark the intersection of her life with its true destiny. Now she knew that she had been prepared for a different battle, one no less valiant, and perhaps more gruesome. She needed time to steel her resolve, to thank her God and to prepare herself to ask others to do as she would, to humbly sacrifice their lives.

Mother McMullen had left herself a hill to climb, and did so with supreme sadness. Still, the act of walking and climbing touched her as a pleasure, one that she was enjoying for the last time, perhaps, as she stepped off the main road onto a footpath. Often she had wandered these woods as a young nun in the company of others, never alone, and always she had adored the carefree splendour of the trees, the dapple of sunlight underfoot. As her sadness weighed upon her, she fell to her knees, prayed, wept for minutes and recovered by giving thanks for the joys of her life in the service of her Lord.

She gave thanks also for this final act of devotion placed before her.

Struggling to her feet again, she walked on, pausing to touch the blossoms of the June wildflowers, to feel speckled sunlight upon her face.

Her visage was lean, longish and pale, the eyes small and seemingly sunken beneath the impressive arch of her brow. Mother McMullen readily smiled. Anyone in her company soon felt at ease, despite her considerable authority. She rose to the disciplinary responsibilities of her position when necessary, but generally her nuns endeavoured to please her, to reward her good graces with humility and friendship. None who knew her were accustomed to the heaviness of her current mood, and they would perhaps be taken aback by the fall of skin around her mouth and the stricken countenance behind her eyes.

Death loomed.

She had studied war. For her, the astonishing movements of peoples into and out of battle portrayed the epic journey of the earth, for it seemed that all the building and planning and commerce of peaceable times would be transformed by the foolishness and accident, terror and spite, of battle, and as often by the absurdity of the Acts and Treaties that followed military conflagrations. Lord Shelburne, for example. Few Canadians were aware of his name, yet he had committed a grave travesty against the whole of the nation. To Mother McMullen’s mind, he had committed one of the foremost deceits in history—in all the world’s sordid panoply of political deceptions.

After the American War of Independence, Quebec existed under the governance of the Quebec Act, which had expanded the western border to include the lands of the Ohio, the southern shores of the Great Lakes, onward to the Mississippi and southward across the Great Plains. Indeed, the vast expanse of the continent was, essentially, Quebec. After England had ceded the thirteen colonies in its disastrous war, one Lord Shelburne of London drew a line that cut the continent in half, into a north and a south, for no reason other than colossal stupidity, and through a naïve belief that being nice to the Americans would cause the Americans to be nice, in return, to the British. He bequeathed to the thirteen colonies the southern half of North America, land the revolutionaries had never requested. The gift of half a continent was presented to the recent enemy on a whim. Perhaps he feared, when examining the map, that Providence behooved him to restrict the progress of the French language overseas. In any case, the British were obliged to man the western garrisons of Michigan, and down the Mississippi, and further west for thirteen years before the Americans made the trek out from their Atlantic seaboard cubbyholes to visit the land that had been delivered to them with the stroke of pen—a vast commonwealth they had neither earned, nor cared for, nor admired, nor visited, nor desired.

How that edict, the Treaty of 1783, had cost the merchants of Montreal. Their consternation had been immense. Why be loyal to England when England beheaded her devout subjects and cut off their limbs? A preponderance of merchants were English themselves, having moved up from the thirteen colonies to live among the French as a gesture of fidelity to the king. Yet these English loyalists had been equally betrayed, robbed blind by the bewildering buffoonery of Lord Shelburne, a man who had never set foot across the sea. Trading routes traditional to Montreal had been sliced in half. The northern part of the continent had been deprived of its well-earned opportunity to become the dominant of the two fledgling nations, due solely to a civil servant’s idiocy. Why fight on the battlefield for anything, when fate could be determined by such louts?

Yet the merchants of Montreal, obliged to develop alternative, imaginative forms of commerce, persevered, egged on by the last fraternity of British merchant adventurers, and the city grew despite its ungainly dependence upon England. Partnerships were developed that exploited both the French ability to trade through the Indian lands and the English acumen for capital investment. The two languages intermingled and intermarried, and the alliances forged a new prosperity despite the restrictions on territory.

Then came war.

What a colossal blunder.

Mother McMullen still became infuriated whenever the American attitude to the War of 1812 reared up. Visiting friars, priests or nuns from the United States might inadvertently extend their condolences to the Canadas for having lost the war, and Mother McMullen would surge onto a verbal rampage, reciting records and illuminating battle scenes. Her audience would eventually disband, amused, for most of these engagements had been staged to playfully provoke her ire and watch her spark. Every so often, she’d catch on, discover for herself that the arguments had been an entertainment enjoyed at her expense. She’d laugh along. Only to continue her tirade with renewed vigour.

President Madison had declared his war, yet unbeknownst to him he was about to receive faint support from New Englanders, and New England formed the adjacent border with what were now being called Upper and Lower Canada. After the American War of Independence, fifty thousand loyalists had left the United States to re-establish themselves in the Canadas, most of these in the newly settled lands of New Brunswick, while a majority of the remainder chose to dwell along the Niagara Peninsula and the St. Lawrence River, creating the beginnings of Upper Canada.

“Madison,” Mother McMullen recited, “miscalculated.”

“How so, Mother?” a visiting Jesuit from the College of St. John in Fordham, New York, one Father O’Malley, inquired, for he held to the prevailing American view of the war, which dismissed the mother superior’s account.

“His own people did not want to fight. The first incursion into Quebec occurred in 1812, and the rascal Americans turned tail without a shot being fired.”

“Turned tail?” the visiting theologian inquired. This did not align with his own recollection, although he had to concede that the Americans had advanced, and then retreated, and he had never heard mention of casualties.

“Then in 1813, the American army advanced to Châteauguay, where it was crushed.”

“Crushed.” Again, his own interpretation of history had not allowed for a crushing American defeat.

“Madison was informed that the British garrisons were absent, which proved true. What he did not count upon was the response of the people. Three thousand volunteers joined the militia from Montreal alone, another three thousand from Quebec. The Eastern Townships sent enough men to fill six battalions, and that knowledge was enough to dampen the enthusiasm of your General Dearborn’s advance. His men grew disinterested—and, Father, turned tail.”

“I see.”

“Then our General Brock defeated the American invasion at Detroit. Your General Hull and his men were paraded through the streets of Montreal. I was on hand to witness the event—they were marched right past our gates. Right under my nose, Father. This is no invention.”

“Surely, from your perspective, Mother, it had not all been good news.”

“To learn that York had been burned by the Yanks—no, that was not good news. And to learn that the people were being harried up and down the St. Lawrence Valley in Upper Canada proved worrisome. I can tell you, Father, that I and a number of the novitiates visited our Montreal militia while they were waiting for the American advance.”

Her eyes gleamed when she revisited the history she so adored, even when she had to relate bad news.

“What did you find, Mother?” He puffed upon his pipe.

“A high morale, Father. I doubt that any army—and I have carefully studied the progress of armies, Father, it is a hobby of mine—has moved towards its destiny in such splendour. I witnessed with my own eyes the long lines of carts carrying the best wines, along with venison, turkey and ham. Cheeses from the countryside in fine array, butters and syrups. Fruit and vegetables, fresh and in colour. The ordinary private, Father, sat down to a table more glorious than did the governor himself. The king of England, I daresay, eats only as well, never better.”

This was hard to believe, but she would speak further of the glories of the militia’s mess, and the father from Fordham conceded that this had apparently been a military service of a higher order than the norm. “But could they fight, Mother, so well fed as that?”

“Fight they did. Let me tell you about the Voltigeurs Canadiens. They were regulars, raised for wartime home service, and among their numbers were eight hundred French, some English and two hundred Indians. They went against General Hampton’s five thousand men and ten cannon. Fifteen miles from Montreal the battled commenced, and there, on the plains of Châteauguay, the future of our city would be decided. The Canadians, though, had only about three hundred of their militia in the field, against that formidable force of five thousand.”

“And ten cannon,” the priest interjected.

“And ten cannon. One could easily predict our doom.”

“The Canadians held?” Father O’Malley of Fordham assumed.

“Held?” Mother McMullen admonished him. “Held? Again and again, the Americans returned to the attack, their five thousand against our three hundred, and the battle terminated only with the complete disgrace and defeat of the Americans. They fell back across their border, a testament to Madison’s sad folly.”

“But, Mother McMullen, surely you are aware of the Canadian attack on Plattsburgh? Or do you call that a victory also?”

“British attack, Father. British. You Americans sank a British supply ship, so the British elected to pull back. The Americans had been defeated at Châteauguay, defeated also at Crysler’s Farm near Cornwall, defeated by Brock at Detroit. You had been defeated. Consequently, the British considered that perhaps the Americans were now vulnerable to invasion, and foolishly they set forth. Losing a ship, they reconsidered their strategy and retreated to Montreal. Somehow, I don’t know how, Americans I meet seem to turn that one rather unimportant event into victory in the overall war. Madison declared war, Madison attacked, the American invasion was repelled, your large army was crushed. How can that possibly be considered an American victory?”

She had a point, and Father O’Malley sucked on his pipe. He might have to alter a portion of his teaching at Fordham to accommodate her viewpoint.

“And yet,” Mother McMullen proposed.

“And yet?” the priest asked.

“It would happen again.” She sighed. “The war was won by the Canadians, for history shows that when we truly want to win, we win. Nonetheless, instead of giving the victor the spoils—instead of offering us, I don’t know, Vermont, let’s say—a dimwit in England gave the Americans the state of Maine. Someone in England believed the American claim, that the sinking of a supply ship meant victory in the war. Balderdash! If this is how we are rewarded for winning a war—being stripped of our territory once again—imagine what might have occurred had we lost. On the other hand, I know a merchant who quipped that he hoped we’d be defeated one day, and when I expressed my surprise, and, I might say, my outrage, he laughed, and declared that he wanted to keep our homeland intact. ‘Victory,’ he claimed, ‘has been far too costly.’”

“I suppose,” Father O’Malley mused, “that this is why we Americans believe we won. We gained a state. For Maine, we thank you.”

She nodded in agreement, then turned philosophical. “War is such silliness, Father. Montrealers, though, did manage to gain something from the adventure. English, French and Indian—everyone fought shoulder to shoulder to achieve victory. We came together as a people. What vestiges of feeling that remained among the French for France, which you might think would only be natural, dissipated. Madison’s war was a Napoleonic war—we all felt that way. The Americans were doing what they could to help the French engage the English, and if that meant invading Quebec, so be it. We all lost sympathy for France. And the misjudgments of the British were leading us to understand that perhaps someday we must come together to rule ourselves, notwithstanding our growing fidelity to England. So you see, the war has been a significant part of our maturation process, I would say.”

“Not that you advocate war.”

“As little as possible. My nuns are expressly forbidden from shooting one another, although on occasion, I’m sure that they’d like to.”

He smiled. Father O’Malley concluded that whatever Mother McMullen might wish to say to him would be of interest, for clearly she was a keen and perceptive student of history. She had convinced him long ago to revamp his perspective of the Plains of Abraham, the day that Quebec fell to the British. The cause of the defeat by the French, she had contended, was horsemeat.

“Horsemeat?” Father O’Malley repeated.

“Mother d’Youville, our founder, said so herself. She had gone with Sarah Hanson Sabourin, a wonderful woman from the Ottawa River, who had brought along the Cartier Dagger—a relic said to have mystical powers, Father—to a meeting with the governor of Quebec. This was Pierre de Rigaud de Vaudreuil. We were so proud—our first Quebec-born governor. Madame d’Youville and Sarah Hanson Sabourin, with her dagger—she brought it along to lend authority to their mission—requested that Vaudreuil stop feeding horses to his army. The country was in famine. People were eating whatever they could find, and the army was seizing horses. The governor denied their request. Moreover, he informed the ladies that if they did not leave his presence and cease their petition, they would both be hung.”

“So much for the mystical qualities of the dagger,” Father O’Malley noted.

Mother McMullen raised her chin. “Not so fast, Father. Vaudreuil would have his comeuppance. First, Quebec fell to the British. The people had no reason to fight for the sake of France. They were uncared for, hungry, dispirited. Their own army ate their horses. Why fight for that? Second, when the British marched on Montreal and the city capitulated, Vaudreuil was banished to France, a country he had never even visited. He should never have gone up against the Cartier Dagger, Father.”

“Not to mention Mother d’Youville or Sarah Hanson Sabourin.”

“So true.”

The next battles for Canadians were amongst themselves.

The time was one of high anxiety for Mother McMullen and the Grey Nuns, for they were close to people on both sides of the Patriotes Rebellion of 1837 and 1838. The marshalling of animosity was severe, and she contended against the public displays and private ruminations of hatred.

“Let the arguments be given free expression,” she commanded, “while keeping your emotions and the harsh attitudes of your fellow citizens at bay.”

The political arguments could only have been expected in a landscape so rapidly changing. Quebec was French, yet had suffered conquest by the British. The arrival of loyalists from the United States after the War of Independence created a separate political entity growing in size and power. Louis-Joseph Papineau, a man Mother McMullen had had the opportunity to meet on frequent occasion, captured the essence of the challenge to those in Quebec. He determined that French-Canadians, to use a term then coming into common usage, required independence from England to properly fulfill their destiny.

Mother McMullen considered Papineau quite a complicated man. She appreciated his influences, Thomas Jefferson being one. He idealized the small, independent farmer and foresaw a nation built upon an agrarian backbone. The maintenance of French common law was important so that Lower Canada could develop according to its own traditions. On these issues, Mother McMullen was sympathetic. Yet she detected contradictions in the man. He was decidedly anticlerical, no particular friend of the Holy Church. That didn’t stop him from supporting the seigneurial system, in which the Church alone dispensed farmland. A great advocate of democracy, he was less interested in the American experiment regarding capital, and so believed the power of the Church to dispense land to be an important check on capitalist speculation. The equal distribution of property among the French protected them from English expansion and from the arrival of disparate foreigners, which buffered Quebec from the new wave of capitalist venture being developed to the south. Papineau’s nationalist roots, then, were born both of his conservative underpinnings and the democratic forces of his time. When he proved, in battle, to be unstable, Mother McMullen had not been surprised.

She had been surprised, though, by the rhetoric of his proclamation, by its call to shed blood. Mother McMullen had been searching for some way for her and her order to help the situation—some manner of enlightened intervention that might shed light on the conflicts as they churned through the public mind. British business opposed the French will to remain agricultural. British expansion opposed the French desire to become a nation unto themselves. These were diametrically opposing positions, and when the Church issued an edict to its flock to engage in no activity against the political and legal authorities, priests fled for their lives from those communities where patriote fever ran high. Mother McMullen was certain that she had a destiny to embrace as the outbreak of hostilities seemed increasingly inevitable, yet she found the disputes too difficult to forge any form of reconciliation. Pamphlets called upon the French to arm themselves, to count on the support of their fellow French and the Indians. The English formed what they called the Doric Club—a paramilitary group preparing for a fight. The Patriote Party formed a military wing, known as Les Fils de la Liberté. Young men placed their hands on a liberty pole and vowed to keep faith with the fatherland, to conquer or die.

Rebellion was imminent.

Papineau’s proclamation included a call to behead Jews. Mother McMullen did not herself know any Jews, yet had often noted a certain discernible loathing towards them among her fellow citizens. A few lived in the city, she’d been told. From time to time, hateful things were mentioned in the papers and repeated in meetings with the bishop, but neither he nor Mother McMullen felt that such a poor reputation warranted beheadings. For all his fiery oratory, she doubted that Louis-Joseph Papineau had met a Jew either. While Jews did not acknowledge her Lord, to imagine their heads being stripped off their bodies seemed the more horrible wrong. In her studies, Mother McMullen had long since decided that grown men were capable of being infatuated with blood, of being riled by blind hatred. Killing begat more killing. Beheadings would only ignite further atrocities.

Her own Lord had been a Jew. The bishop, distraught, brought up the point himself: how could anyone instigate such an affront to the people of their Lord?

She did not trust men at war. She certainly did not trust the conflicted, unstable Papineau to behead Jews in the name of liberty, or in the name of God, or in the name of Quebec.

The fighting commenced humbly, limited to running street battles between Les Fils de la Liberté and the Doric Club, one rabid mob chasing another, only to see the tide turn as the pursuers became the pursued. Even the bloodied found the contests comic. Then fights took to the countryside, and, perhaps due to the rural setting, became brutal and deadly. The English had might on their side, the French their passionate intensity, but the death of an English courier, one Lieutenant Jack Weir, so inflamed the hearts of the English that they swiftly grew impassioned for the confrontation as well. Their anger instigated pillaging and the burning of whole villages. Repeatedly, the poorly equipped, poorly led patriotes suffered devastating losses, in separate battles losing forty men, thirty in another, then seventy more, while English troops lost only a few.

Papineau himself scampered across the border to the United States.

That action demoralized the rebels. Their leadership had not supplied them with proper or sufficient arms, and, when the fight progressed badly, had fled. The rebels’ one hope, that the United States would enter the fray on their side, never came to pass.

The rebellion put down, Montrealers were obliged to learn how to live peaceably again, this time wearing the scars of combat and holding within themselves an egregious sentiment, the humiliated and the victorious nursing their hatreds both openly and amongst themselves. Men had killed one another. Men who had killed a husband shopped at the widow’s bakery. Men who had killed a son travelled the same roads as the fathers. No talk, no sermons, no quiet counsel by the Grey Nuns did much to alleviate the grievances or the open wounds.

Now, ten years on, Mother McMullen knew that she would be asking her nuns, who were primarily French, to set aside any lingering sense of injustice that they might feel and lay down their lives in the service of others. These others were not French—they were immigrants. She’d ask them to do so for the sake of no cause, only to respond to the spirit of their vows, to follow the charitable instinct of their hearts and to serve their God.

She came upon them at play, for in the spirit of their founder, Mother d’Youville, they continued to enjoy an hour of recreation each afternoon. The sisters stood to honour her presence, and quietly, still composing herself, Mother McMullen sat down and indicated that the others should join her. The nuns gathered chairs and formed a circle. One of their number, Sister Sainte-Croix, who had been with Mother Superior that morning, repeatedly dabbed the corners of her eyes.

“Sisters, today I visited the docks, having heard a most disturbing report. I elected to see for myself the conditions among certain Irish immigrants who have, for the past while, been landing at Montreal by sea. They arrive sick, with what is known to them as ship fever. A physician today told me that the correct name is typhus. Sisters, we have an epidemic in our midst.”

The nuns remained silent. A few had already turned inward in prayer, while others waited for Mother Superior’s full assessment.

“When they arrived, it became apparent that these Irish—men of all ages, I should tell you, recruited for their labour, and many have brought their families with them, intent on returning to Ireland no more—it became apparent that they must be segregated, not admitted to our city lest the entire population perish. Sheds were constructed for their habitation. These continue to be built upon the docks, for the ships carrying the sick keep coming. This morning, at our peril, yet always in God’s hands, Sister Sainte-Croix and I entered the sheds.”

Mother McMullen paused. She had been doing fine, she thought, secure in her composure, but the rancid memory of the stench and misery inside the first shed returned to her, and she swayed with an unwelcome dizziness. She took several deep breaths, and those who now felt fearful did so as well, to prepare themselves for what might come.

“Sisters, I have today seen a sight most dire. Hundreds of men, women and children—children, also—sick, dying, huddled together among those who are long dead. The strongest constitution is unfit for the stench that emanates from their foul quarters. The atmosphere is impregnated with the odour, while one hears only the groans of those who suffer so grievously. Death resides there in its most appalling aspect. Sisters, those who thus cry aloud are strangers among us, yet their hands are outstretched—to us—for relief. Lest there be a doubt, I am speaking of a plague most contagious.”

The words were all that she could manage for a moment, for the sounds of the men and women, and of children, pleading for a moment’s respite, raising hands to beg for death, overcame her once again, and Mother McMullen fell to a momentary fit of sorrow. The nuns watched her, fretful, or kept their heads bowed. They looked up when Mother Superior cleared her throat to speak again.

“In sending you there, Sisters, I am signing your death warrants, but you are free to accept or refuse.”

As one, they accepted.

Standing before Mother McMullen, some in unison, others on their own, each woman repeated, “I am ready to serve my Lord. Accept me for this service.”

The first task they gave themselves was to drag out the dead.

Bodies were so intricately intertwined, the living among the dead, that no step could be taken in any direction without physical contact with another figure moaning and writhing in the dark, or with a stiffened corpse. Sleeping men bawled as they were pulled free from the entangled clutch of others. The very sound of their murmured complaints secured their release, and they were left to lie among the living. Those who no longer responded were pulled across a floor sodden with excrement, urine and vomit, blood and pus, and deposited outside. There, stinking and rotting, the bodies were lined into tight rows to make room for more.

Only from a safe distance did living men watch the women work.

Mother McMullen had chosen a contingent of eight nuns for the first foray into Pointe St. Charles, and they repeatedly returned inside each shed to locate more dead, to extricate them from those who suffered still, to haul them outside into the sunlight. For those of great weight, three nuns were required to heave the body, their progress difficult and minimal. When they thought they had finished their arduous task, a final tour of the premises revealed that one of the men who had been alive when they began that morning, and with whom they’d shared cogent conversation, had since died, and they pulled him outside to place him at the end of the putrid line of the dead.

“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.

When she heard what the workmen had done, an aging, frail Mother McMullen asked to be taken down to view the Irish Stone for herself. There she knelt in prayer, and in time, despite her resources of will and devotion to God, in apparent indifference to her firm faith in the afterlife, she wept, remembering what she had tried so stubbornly to forget. There, she welcomed to mind the return of the faces of those who had perished in such anguish and incomprehension, and recalled the lives of so many good friends who had died in their faithful service.

The souls of the dead had passed on, yet she felt the spirit of the bones stretching forth to address her. Upon that hallowed ground, Mother McMullen experienced what she would later describe to a friend as “an inestimable grace.” Through her tears, although she could not understand it, she felt a joy abide within her that she would call, in her search for a satisfactory language, “a resilient elation. Almost as though,” she told the friend, a sister in her convent too young to know of those days, “not that we deserved it, for we were there in God’s service, but almost as though we were all, each one of us, being summoned by name and being thanked. I find the measure of that affection and of that grace, Sister, the depth of that bond between the living and the dead, fully all that I can bear, and speak of it now only to gain a corresponding measure of human relief.”