Oatcakes and Courage by Grant-Smith Joyce

Author:Grant-Smith, Joyce [Grant-Smith, Joyce]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9781927443323
Publisher: Quattro Books
Published: 2013-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

PERHAPS IT WAS THE stale bread and water. Perhaps it was the gut-clenching fear and seasickness brought on by the storm. Perhaps it was the fetid air of the hold.

By nightfall, six of the settlers took to their bunks with dysentery. Four of them were children.

Mothers sat by their sick children, sponging their faces with water. The hold was quiet. Everyone spoke in whispers. The loudest sounds were the moans and cries of the sick, and the sympathetic creaks and groans of the Hector.

The stench in the hold was unbearable. Although the women laboured to keep the buckets clean, the putrid smell of illness hung in the air like a heavy curtain.

The first one to die was poor little George MacLeod. The smallpox took him late at night while his parents sat helplessly holding his limp fingers. James wordlessly bent and kissed his son’s cold forehead. Then he wrapped George’s body in his blanket, covering the harsh pox-marked skin. James silently walked from the hold. Mary stayed at her child’s side, weeping, her face in her hands.

James climbed woodenly to the deck. He found the captain at the bow, a sextant in his hands, checking their course.

James MacLeod said dispiritedly, “Captain, my son is dead.”

Captain Spiers put a hand on the settler’s shoulder. “I am sorry, Mr. MacLeod.”

James nodded once. “Would you be good enough to perform the service…?”

The captain said, “Yes, yes. Of course.” He did not wish to upset this good man needlessly, but Captain Spiers knew that having the body remain on the ship any longer than absolutely necessary was a risk he could not take. “At dawn, perhaps?”

James MacLeod looked ready to protest for a moment. Then he simply dropped his eyes to the deck and murmured, “Yes, at dawn.”

As James turned to go back to his grieving wife, the captain heard him whisper, “What did I ever come on this cursed journey for?”

As a gray dawn lit the eastern sky, John MacKay assembled everyone upon the deck with the call of the bagpipes. Lily Sutherland’s wiry husband, John, and John Stewart helped James carry his son’s body on deck. Mary followed, bent with grief, Lily Sutherland at her elbow for support.

The men rested George’s body upon the deck, wrapped in a blanket and woolen cloak. When they set the body down, Mary’s knees buckled. She collapsed and threw her arms around the shrouded child. She wept, her tears falling on the cloak she had lovingly woven and sewn for him.

Captain Spiers read the funeral service on that still morning in a voice that carried easily over the ship and its passengers. When it was time to commit the body to the sea, James had to lift his sobbing wife from her dead child and hold her tightly. John Sutherland and John Stewart gently picked up the body and allowed it to slip from their arms into the waiting waves.

Mary screamed as George’s body hit the water. Then she crumpled in a faint. James held

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