POETRY | Richard Brait Reading the Spanish Flu, 2020

POETRY

Reading the Spanish Flu, 2020

By Richard Brait

(I)

Someone who works for me stays at home, washes his hands two dozen times a day. My wife sits in front of the TV, watches and worries. I hide in my den and read about the Spanish Flu:

Arthur Lapointe, his family gone. The tragic train from Quebec City to Vancouver. Grosse Ile, the quarantine island in St. Lawrence’s mouth. Okak, Labrador — winter — all the men dead, no one knew.

My great great aunt Margaret home from India, tending tirelessly to the distressed and dying.

Or should I join the herd and let it run — pick the best restaurants, the coppered bars, sing about the ruin of Troy while Rome burns?

(II)

Arthur Lapointe, Soldier of Quebec, 1918

1. Bramshott Camp, England: I’m an officer now — it’s a time to yelp, throw dirt like confetti, but my youngest sister visits me in my fevered dreams tonight, leads me to a row of graves,

names my brothers and sisters in turn. “I too am dead but God in his mercy has allowed me to spend this day with you.”

2. Bexhill-on-Sea, England: Gagnon insisted on being my nurse — bathed my temples when the influenza raged, dragged me through a mile of boggy trench.

His chest torn open, his lung gaping a hole, when all he’d wanted was a small wound to get him out. But here now and alive, reading me a letter from his family

that tells of the Lapointes — the youngest sister and two brothers taken. And then the other soldier from our village

who looks at me with such pity — “To have lost six to the flu,” he says. Death, it seems, just beginning her harvest when Gagnon’s letter was penned.

3. Mont-Joli, Quebec Leaving the train, I watch the station door creak open, not knowing who might greet me. Father, Mother, Alphonse all that I see. The rest ghosts.

In my room at night, thinking I have seen less than half my family — but no, I have seen them all! I remember France, my prayer of thanks to God

in the little church at Lignereuil. But all you can really pray for is the dead — they’re the thing that God delivers best.

(III)

The Plague Train – September/October, 1918

The Calgary Herald, October 2, 1918 — but for the first line it could be yesterday’s newspaper: “Epidemic Influenza (Spanish): … highly communicable … may develop into a severe pneumonia … Keep away

from public meetings … where crowds are assembled … mouth and nose covered … in a room by himself … well ventilated … put on a mask before entering.”

Quebec City, September, a diseased barracks — the healthy soldiers load onto a train. In the looming forests of Northern Ontario

the sickness starts. By Winnipeg several taken off, bedded in small town hospitals — deadly acts of mercy all along the route.

Waived through Regina, met at Calgary — 3 am, the health officer, the military. Fifteen soldiers are dispatched to isolation.

The train fumigated, but the flu’s consuming fever has caught fire. By Vancouver, a quarantine train — tinned food passed through the windows on long poles, no one on, no one off.

“Just drag to bed and have your chill, And pray the lord to see you through, For you’ve got the Flu, boy.

You’ve got the Flu.”

Those soldiers, those that lived, likely didn’t give it a second thought — that they’d killed more at home than ever in France.

Grosse Ile, 1919: The Irish

(IV)

They are ballast — ballast for the timber ships coming back empty from Ireland.

Do they know it’s an even bet they’re placing — a better life in Canada one side of the coin, the largest Irish graveyard in the world, the other?

Do they know how desperate on the ships? Crowding together and up to the ankles in bilge — the vessels lining up for miles at the harbour?

The great rocky sanctuary engaged too late — the grim mathematical progression already begun.

Blue flags on every ship show fever on board. Dragging the dead out of the holds with hooks, the sailors stack them like cordwood on the shore.

The ground so bare on that quarantine island that soil has to be brought in from Montmagny to create a thin layer for burial.

But the priests and clergymen are always there — the same mumbo jumbo, new world or old, the only consolation that they are dying too.

(V)

Okak, 1919: The women, the graves “They all expected to die and when they didn’t they did their best to live.”

The men all dead and the dogs wild, no way to get word to the outside world, and so they get on.

All move into the five biggest houses — the women care for the surviving children, sew one hundred rough bags for the perished.

Five barrels of fuel, twenty cords of wood. A week is needed — hot ash softening the ground, layer by layer.

The blackened bodies are laid down, calico-wrapped, in rows of ten, thirty yards long.

Fifteen dog teams arrive in late March to take the survivors.

More offers of marriage than women. More offers of adoption than children.

Okak, 1919: The dogs

(VI)

The sled dogs, their masters all dead, fend for themselves like the rest of us, wander in packs, nothing to be done — the flu among us and all undone. We can hear them tearing into the corpses as we struggle, sinking through the spring snow to the small house on the harbour slope — the door bitten through, the window smashed in.

Within range we set the lantern down, begin firing through the openings. Arms, legs, heads separated — strewn about — wounded dogs crawling through the mess, whimpering.

We take apart a table and bench, buttress and nail the door shut, board the window against we know not what.

Morning, we begin the hunt, kill forty more, the others fleeing into the barrens — like their masters, not to be seen again.

(VII)

Margaret Norris Patterson to her nephew Sam — Toronto, Women’s College Hospital, 1961 “After War Comes Plague” — it’s a Chinese proverb, Sam. Maclean’s said the Germans craftily named it the Spanish Flu, before it could acquire its true name of German Plague.

I don’t know Sam, always looking to blame the other. When the task was upon us though, there was none of that — just unending effort. I gave lectures several times a day in a room at Queen’s Park — a pin for those who completed, then dispatched to the battle — our Sisters of Service.

Three hundred nurses in all, and the lectures telegraphed across Canada, reprinted as pamphlets, and given to the troops —

not those so soon from Europe, but a new army, Sam. Their front lines not the trenches but the hospital wards and the back bedrooms.

And their weapons nothing more than your heart or mine.