The Fourteenth Hour

A bad omen presents itself at the dawn of New-year’s morning, for then the Dr’s sister died. — W. H., Emigrant, log of the ship Minerva, 1 January 1838

The First Hour

Ship STATESMAN. Whampoa Reach. Monday 11th August 1851.

Wind light from the S.E. Thermometer at noon 91°. Took in water from the chop boats. Surgeon reports himself unwell at 4 p.m. and goes below.

It begins in the belly, the way it always begins. A loosening. A cold that has no business in a place as hot as this, coming up through the gut as if I had swallowed a stone out of the Sliddery Water.

I know what it is. I have watched it come up through other men often enough to know its gait. I have written its name in my journal in my own careful hand, against the names of sailors and coolies and a Lascar boy whose name nobody knew, so that I wrote only boy, Lascar, about 14 yrs, and the date, and the hour, and closed the book on him.

So I go below. I tell the mate I am a little out of sorts. I do not tell him the word. If I say the word the men will hear it through the planking, the way they hear everything, and the ship will go quiet in that particular way a ship goes quiet, and I could not bear that quiet again. I have heard it before. I have been inside it.

My cabin is a coffin with a porthole. Through the glass the river is the colour of tea left too long in the pot, and on it the sampans go back and forth with their reed sails, and the women row standing up, and someone on the shore is burning something sweet. The air comes in thick as wet wool. I lie on my cot with my boots still on and I count my own pulse against my watch, because I am a surgeon and that is what my hands do when they are frightened.

A hundred and twelve. Thready.

Fourteen hours, I think. That is what I give it, in a strong man. I have seen it take a man between breakfast and the evening gun. I am forty years of age. I am not a strong man. I have not been a strong man since the winter of eighteen hundred and thirty-seven, when I came up out of the fever with my hair falling out in handfuls and everyone I had brought with me gone into the sea.

The Second Hour

When I was a boy at Kilmory my mother would say that a soul does not leave the body all at once. It goes out in pieces, she said, like peat smoke going up through the thatch, a little and a little, until the house is cold. She said it in the Gaelic, which I have not spoken aloud in fourteen years, and I find now that it is the Gaelic that is coming back to me, rising up through the English like water up through sand.

Mo mhàthair. My mother. Her hands that smelt of smoke and of the byre, red at the knuckles, cracked in winter so that she rubbed them with mutton fat. Her hands on my forehead when I had the measles, cool as a flat stone from the burn.

I am trying to see the house. Glenree, or the house before Glenree; I have lost the order of things. The low walls. The beasts at one end and ourselves at the other, and the steam coming off the cattle on a January morning, and my father sitting at the fire with the Bible open on his knee and not reading it, only looking at the fire. The way the light went from the hill in winter, early, early, three o’clock and the sky already the colour of a bruise over Bennan, and the sea below us beating on the shore at Sliddery as if it wanted in.

We were always being taken by the sea, on that island. That is what I remember. The sea took Donald Currie’s boys, my mother’s people, one and then another. The sea took men off the fishing and gave them back three weeks later on the sand at Kildonan with their faces gone. The women would stand at the shore, at the water’s edge, with their shawls up over their heads, not crying. Only standing. I thought, as a child, that this was what women were for: to stand at the edge of the water and wait for what it would give back.

I did not think then that I would be the one to give my mother to it.

The Third Hour

Married at Ardrossan, 26th August 1837, Alexander Cook and Jane Campbell. — From the register (as indexed).

Jane. I have not let myself say her name, even in my head, in years. It is a small name. It sits in the mouth like a pebble.

She was from Saltcoats, where the salt-pans steamed along the shore and the whole town smelt of brine and burning coal. She had freckles across the bridge of her nose that she hated and I loved, and a way of laughing with her hand flat over her mouth, as if laughter were something she had been told off for as a girl and had never quite been forgiven. She was seventeen. I was twenty-six and a surgeon and I thought I knew everything there was to know about the body.

I did not know anything.

We had three weeks on land as man and wife. Three weeks. I remember the bed at the inn in Ardrossan was too short for me, and that she laughed at my feet hanging off the end of it, her hand over her mouth, and I remember that on the last night before Greenock she lay with her head on my chest and asked me whether it was true that in New South Wales the birds were all colours, red and green and blue, like ribbons, like a fair. I said it was true. I had read it in a book. I had read everything in a book.

In the morning we went down to the quay and there was the Minerva, three hundred and eighty tons, lying against the wall with her yards black against the sky, and my father beside me with his good coat on, buttoned to the throat, and my mother with her shawl, and Mary and Margaret with their bundles, and Finlay at the back of us all with his hands in his pockets, whistling.

My whole family. I carried them aboard as if they were mine to carry.

The Fourth Hour

The cramps are come now. They take the legs first. The calf of the right leg knots like rope pulled wet through a block, and I cry out before I can stop myself, and there is a knock at the door, and the boy who brings my water puts his head in.

“Doctor?”

“It is nothing,” I tell him. “Fetch me the brandy and a basin, and go.”

He goes. He has a face like a small brown nut. He does not know yet what I am. He will know soon enough. They will all know. It is a thing I have observed, that a sickness in the surgeon is a terror out of all proportion, worse than a sickness in the master, worse than a fire. It is the thing men fear most: that the one who stands between them and the dark should himself be taken by it.

I know this because I have been that man before. In December of eighteen thirty-seven, south of the Cape, with the Southern Ocean running grey and enormous under the counter, and the fever going down the ’tween decks from berth to berth like a lantern being passed along a line of hands.

The Fifth Hour

19th. The Dr’s father died at 4 P. M.; he was buried instantly — stormy day.

20th. Boisterous day — sailing eight and a half knots per hour — at 1 o’clock P.M. the Dr’s mother died, and was thrown overboard at 2. — Dr’s sister taken to the hospital.

— Log of W. H., Emigrant, ship Minerva, December 1837

William Henderson wrote it all down. I did not know until afterwards, in Sydney, when someone showed me his log printed up for his friends at home, and I read my own life there in another man’s hand, in his flat, careful Scots way, and I put the paper down on the table and went outside and was sick in the lane.

He was buried instantly. That is true. There was a sea running that would have taken the boats off the davits, and the master would not wait, and I stood at the rail in the rain with my father sewn into his hammock, the last stitch through his nose the way the sailmaker does it, so that you are sure, and I said the words over him because the missionary was sick and there was nobody else to say them. The ship rolled. They tipped the board. He went into the grey water feet first without a sound, as if he were stepping down off a cart.

My mother did not see it. She was below, burning up, her lips cracked and black. When I came down she took my hand and said, in the Gaelic, “Is that your father gone?” and I said yes, and she said, “Good. He hated to be kept waiting.” And then she turned her face to the timber, and in the morning she was talking to her own mother, who had been dead twenty years, and at one o’clock in the afternoon she stopped.

An hour later. Thrown overboard at two. I used to think that a cruel phrase. I have come to think it only true. There is no gentle word for what the sea does.

The Sixth Hour

The basin is full. I have emptied it twice through the porthole into the Canton River and it has not mattered; the river is used to worse. My mouth is dry as a lime-kiln and my hands, when I hold them up against the lamp, are already beginning to wrinkle at the fingertips the way a washerwoman’s do. That is the water going out of me. I know the stages as I know the bones of the hand. Scaphoid, lunate, triquetral, pisiform. I say them over in the dark to keep myself from saying other things.

Here is a thing I have never told anyone. When Mary was dying, on the last night of the year, I was too sick myself to go to her.

I was lying in the hospital they had made for us between decks, a square of canvas and a lantern, and I could hear her on the other side of the curtain. Her breathing. I knew the sound. It is like someone dragging a sack slowly up a flight of stairs, a step, and a rest, and a step. I wanted to get up. I tried to get up. My legs would not carry me and I fell between the berths, and one of the German missionaries, Mr Eipper, picked me up like a child and put me back and held me down with his hand flat on my chest and said something to me in German, very softly, over and over, that I did not understand.

Towards morning the dragging stopped. And Henderson, who was well that night, went up on deck and saw the sun come up out of the sea, red, on the first day of the year, and wrote it in his book. A bad omen.

She was twenty-three. She had wanted to keep a school in Sydney. She had a slate in her bundle, and a box of chalk wrapped in a stocking, and after she was gone I found them and I did not know what to do with them, so I gave them to the McNeil children, whose mother was dead too by then.

The Seventh Hour

7th. M’C. died at 4 a.m. — sailors afraid to bury him — Elizabeth took the fever — it had been noticed that McC.’s chest was broken into, the Dr’s brother was one of the thieves.

8th. Irons were put on the Dr’s brother.

Finlay.

I think of him now, up at Sofala on the Turon, with his Irish wife and his children and his little bit of ground; I think of him swinging a pick in the creek-bed with his sleeves rolled, his arms burnt brown. He was always a better hand with a pick than with a pen. He was always a better hand at most things than I was, except being good.

They put irons on him on the eighth of January, on the main deck, in front of everyone, and I was too sick to stand. I heard it. The clank of the iron going over his wrists. I heard my father’s silence, which was louder, though my father was three weeks under the sea by then and could not have been silent anywhere but in my head.

Did he do it? A dead man’s chest. Watches, gold pins, a little money. A man in fever does strange things. A man who has watched his mother and father and sister sewn up in canvas one after another does strange things. I have asked myself whether I would have done it. I have asked myself whether I would have done worse. I never asked him. In Sydney he signed the letter to Dr Stuart in his big round hand, two names below mine, and three years later I gave him the shop on Brickfield Hill, the jars and the scales and the brass mortar, and we never once spoke of the irons.

That is a family, I think. A family is the things you agree never to say.

The Eighth Hour

Someone has opened the porthole wider. There is a smell of joss, and of the cooking-fires on the shore, and of the river mud, which is the same everywhere, I have found, Clyde or Hawkesbury or Pearl. The mud does not care what country it is in.

I am cold. In this heat I am cold. My teeth have begun.

I am thinking about Jane in the hospital, at the end, on the seventeenth of January, with Van Diemen’s Land gone by on the beam and everyone saying land, land, as if it were a prayer.

She was lying beside me. They had put us side by side, the doctor and the doctor’s wife, which was a kindness, or a joke. The fever had cut off her hair. Her head was small and round as a child’s, and the freckles stood out on her nose like flecks of rust on a blade. She was very calm. She said, “Sandy, will you tell me about the birds?”

And I told her. Red and green and blue, I said. Like ribbons. Like a fair. Whole trees of them, I said, so that when they fly up all together it is like the tree itself is flying. I had never seen one. I told her anyway.

At nine in the morning she put her hand flat over her mouth, the way she did when she was laughing, and she was not laughing, and then her hand fell away.

Mrs Dr C. That is what Henderson wrote. Not even her name. Mrs Dr C. and a man called C. expired at nine A.M. As though she belonged to me so completely that she had no name of her own left. As though I had taken even that.

The Ninth Hour

Dr. Cook has been the greatest sufferer from the devastations of the fever. He has lost his wife, father, mother and sister on the passage, and both himself and his brother have been dangerously ill, but have nearly recovered.

— Letter from the Quarantine Station, Sydney Gazette, 13 February 1838

Nearly recovered. I lay in a tent at Spring Cove for ten weeks with the yellow flag snapping on the ship in the bay and the bush coming down to the sand behind us, grey-green, stinking of eucalyptus, so strange that I thought at first it was the fever making it strange. And then one morning I woke and there they were. In the tree above the tent. Red and blue and green, a whole tree of them, screaming, tearing at the blossom, upside down, so many that when something startled them they went up all at once and it was the tree itself that flew.

I lay on my back on the sand and wept like a child. Margaret came running from the next tent. She thought I was dying. I was not dying. I was only alive, which was worse.

The Tenth Hour

I have stopped counting the pulse. There is no use in it now. I know what it is doing.

I want to say a true thing about Sydney. It was not a fair. It was dust and rum and lawyers and convicts with their irons rubbed bright as silver at the ankle. It was the Roberts business, and the coroner’s jury looking at me as though I had bled the man to death myself. It was Gillespie drunk on the stairs, and poor Mrs Johnstone, and the blood. It was Segerson’s men putting my chairs out in Parramatta Street in the rain with Anna Maria standing in the doorway with her hand on her belly, big with James, saying nothing, saying nothing, while the neighbours watched from behind their curtains.

It was the Sheriff’s cell, and the smell of other men’s debt.

And it was Anna Maria. Who knew all of it, the ship and the sea and Jane, and married me anyway, at Mr McGarvie’s church in Kent Street, with Margaret signing her name in the book in her careful schoolroom hand. Who never once asked me to speak of the Minerva. Who on the bad nights, when I sat up at the kitchen table with the lamp, would only come and stand behind my chair with her hands on my shoulders, and not say anything, and that was the best of all the things anyone ever did for me.

She is in Princess Street now, with the five of them, in the long Sydney winter. She will not hear of this for half a year. The letter will go home by Calcutta or by the Cape, and lie in a bag in some ship’s hold, and come at last up the harbour past Spring Cove, past the very sand where I lay and wept at the birds.

The Eleventh Hour

James. My second boy. Eight years old. He has her eyes and my long feet.

When I went to sea the first time, on the voyage before this one, he stood on the wharf and did not wave. He only stood there, with his hands at his sides, very straight, the way the women stood at Kildonan, at the edge of the water, waiting to see what it would give back.

I should have stayed. A man should not go to sea who has been taught what the sea is. But there was the debt, and the shame of Parramatta Street, and the ship’s surgeon’s pay was good and certain, and I told myself the sea had had its tithe of the Cooks and would leave me be.

That is the oldest lie on Arran. Every fisherman’s widow could have told me so.

The Twelfth Hour

The boy is back. He has brought the mate. They stand in the doorway with their hands over their faces against the smell. The mate says the master has sent for the surgeon off the Indiaman further down the Reach. I would like to tell him there is nothing a surgeon can do that I have not done, that I am the surgeon, that I have written this down already in a hundred other men’s columns. My tongue will not do it. It is a dry thing in my mouth, like a piece of leather.

I make the boy understand that I want my journal. He brings it, and the ink. My hand is shaking so that the pen spatters. I write the date. I write: A. C. Cook, surgeon, aged 40 years. I leave the rest of the line for someone else.

Fourteen hours. I gave it fourteen hours at the beginning and I was right. That is something, I suppose. To be right at the end about one thing.

The Thirteenth Hour

I am at Kilmory. It is quite clear. The wind is coming off the sea, off the Firth, with salt in it and the cold smell of the Ayrshire coast, and the cattle are steaming in the byre, and my mother is at the door with her shawl up over her head looking down the glen.

She is not waiting for the fishing boats. She is waiting for me. I have been away, I think. I have been to Glasgow to be a doctor, and I have come home, and she is at the door.

And my father at the fire, with the Bible on his knee, not reading it. And Mary at the table with her slate. And Jane, who never set foot on Arran in her life, Jane is there too, at the window, with her hand flat over her mouth, laughing.

Thig a-staigh, my mother says. Come in.

I am standing at the threshold. The floor is beaten earth. The fire is peat, and the smoke goes up through the thatch, a little and a little, the way she said. A soul does not go all at once.

The Fourteenth Hour

DIED, At Whampoa, on the 11th August, on board the ship Statesman, Alexander Currie Cook, Esq., surgeon, aged forty years, after an illness of fourteen hours.

— Sydney Morning Herald, 28 February 1852

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