13

The nurse tells Seamus she has to go and he’s to sweep the lint from under my bed and mop up a bit around the ward. Seamus tells me she’s a right oul’ witch for running to Sister Rita and complaining about the poem going between the two rooms, that you can’t catch a disease from a poem unless it’s love ha ha and that’s not bloody likely when you’re what? ten going on eleven? He never heard the likes of it, a little fella shifted upstairs for saying a poem and he has a good mind to go to the Limerick Leader and tell them print the whole thing except he has this job and he’d lose it if ever Sister Rita found out. Anyway, Frankie, you’ll be outa here one of these fine days and you can read all the poetry you want though I don’t know about Patricia below, I don’t know about Patricia, God help us. 

He knows about Patricia in two days because she got out of the bed to go to the lavatory when she was supposed to use a bedpan and collapsed and died in the lavatory. Seamus is mopping the floor and there are tears on his cheeks and he’s saying, ’Tis a dirty rotten thing to die in a lavatory when you’re lovely in yourself. She told me she was sorry she had you reciting that poem and getting you shifted from the room, Frankie. She said ’twas all her fault. 

14

It wasn’t, Seamus. 

I know and didn’t I tell her that. 

Patricia is gone and I’ll never know what happened to the highwayman and Bess, the landlord’s daughter. I ask Seamus but he doesn’t know any poetry at all especially English poetry. He knew an Irish poem once but it was about fairies and had no sign of a highwayman in it. Still he’ll ask the men in his local pub where there’s always someone reciting something and he’ll bring it back to me. Won’t I be busy meanwhile reading my short history of England and finding out all about their perfidy. That’s what Seamus says, perfidy, and I don’t know what it means and he doesn’t know what it means but if it’s something the English do it must be terrible. 


He comes three times a week to mop the floor and the nurse is there every morning to take my temperature and pulse. The doctor listens to my chest with the thing hanging from his neck. They all say, And how’s our little soldier today? A girl with a blue dress brings meals three times a day and never talks to me. Seamus says she’s not right in the head so don’t say a word to her. 

15

The July days are long and I fear the dark. There are only two ceiling lights in the ward and they’re switched off when the tea tray is taken away and the nurse gives me pills. The nurse tells me go to sleep but I can’t because I see people in the nineteen beds in the ward all dying and green around their mouths where they tried to eat grass and moaning for soup Protestant soup any soup and I cover my face with the pillow hoping they won’t come and stand around the bed clawing at me and howling for bits of the chocolate bar my mother brought last week. 

No, she didn’t bring it. She had to send it in because I can’t have any more visitors. Sister Rita tells me a visit to the Fever Hospital is a privilege and after my bad behavior with Patricia Madigan and that poem I can’t have the privilege anymore. She says I’ll be going home in a few weeks and my job is to concentrate on getting better and learn to walk again after being in bed for six weeks and I can get out of bed tomorrow after breakfast. I don’t know why she says I have to learn how to walk when I’ve been walking since I was a baby but when the nurse stands me by the side of the bed I fall to the floor and the nurse laughs, See, you’re a baby again. 

16

I practice walking from bed to bed back and forth back and forth. I don’t want to be a baby. I don’t want to be in this empty ward with no Patricia and no highwayman and no red-lipped landlord’s daughter. I don’t want the ghosts of children with green mouths pointing bony fingers at me and clamoring for bits of my chocolate bar.

Seamus says a man in his pub knew all the verses of the highwayman poem and it has a very sad end. Would I like him to say it because he never learned how to read and he had to carry the poem in his head? He stands in the middle of the ward leaning on his mop and recites,

17

He hears the shot and escapes but when he learns at dawn how Bess died he goes into a rage and returns for revenge only to be shot down by the redcoats.

Seamus wipes his sleeve across his face and sniffles. He says, There was no call at all to shift you up here away from Patricia when you didn’t even know what happened to the highwayman and Bess. ’Tis a very sad story and when I said it to my wife she wouldn’t stop crying the whole night till we went to bed. She said there was no call for them redcoats to shoot that highwayman, they are responsible for half the troubles of the world and they never had any pity on the Irish, either. Now if you want to know any more poems, Frankie, tell me and I’ll get them from the pub and bring ’em back in my head.

Making Meanings 
Typhoid Fever 



First Thoughts 

1. In your opinion, what was the saddest or most shocking episode in Frankie’s story? 

Shaping Interpretations 

2. The Kerry nurse asks sharply, “What is there to laugh about?” Find two examples of comic relief in McCourt’s memoir. How do you feel about the use of comedy in such a sad story? 

3. What do you think young Frankie discovered about himself in the hospital? Be sure to consider the role that language, and especially poetry, plays in this story. 

Challenging the Text 

4. McCourt’s mother called one of his stories “a pack of lies,” but one reviewer says Angela’s Ashes is “a truth-teller’s work.” Using examples from “Typhoid Fever,” discuss the writer’s credibility. Do you think parts of the story sound as if they were made-up?

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