Under the Electric Sky Read Online Free

hands and feet, dehydration and the inability to urinate before collapsing and expiring with their arms and legs twisted up in contorted terror. It was hard to fit them in coffins after that and cleaning up the feces that poured out of them on collapse was a burden, too.
    Fearing an outbreak in the city, port authorities ordered the ship to anchor in McNab’s Cove on the Halifax side of the island. It was on its way from Liverpool, England to New York but was forced to detour after passengers and crew felt the first rising waves of the illness. The infected passengers were transferred to a surplus naval ship and quarantined off Findlay’s wharf, while the remaining eight hundred passengers were detained on the island, where some took up residence in buildings used for workers constructing Fort Ives while the ship was fumigated and the sick treated. A lot of passengers and potential cholera carriers camped out on land that would eventually become the site of Findlay’s Picnic Grounds and that little island paradise. But in April of 1866, that land was a hellish purgatory where the strong fought the sick and elderly for food when it arrived from the mainland. The shelters proved inadequate and the passengers’ clothing not sufficient for spring in Nova Scotia. Eight hundred mean, half-crazed and cold cholera carriers running around McNab’s stealing food and beating the weak was enough incentive for most of the island’s dozen or so inhabitants to flee. Some didn’t come back. Eventually, soldiers were dispatched to the island to restore order. The passengers were moved to the southern tip of the island where they were guarded from trying to make a break for the city. Within two weeks, the ordeal was over and an estimated two hundred cholera victims were buried on the island in different locations. One gravesite is located at the south end of the island at Little Thrum Cap and the other graves were dug by criminals from the city prison on land overlooking Findlay’s.
    All of this was not heavy in the minds of the revellers who would show up for a good time at Findlay’s near the turn of the century. The brush had grown over the unmarked graves burying the stink and the gnarled limbs. That kind of gloomy stuff could make a person introspective and Findlay’s was certainly not the place for solemn contemplation. It was a place where human desires were satisfied, if only for a few beautiful hours.
    The raging parties caught the attention of the local temperance movement, who protested the consumption of alcohol on the island. In a tidy bit of fire-and-brimstone hyperbole, one member of the temperance movement, a man by the name of John Wesley, condemned McNab’s and anyone who set foot on the pleasure grounds in a local religious newspaper.
    A curse is in the midst of them: the curse of God cleaves to the stones, the timber, the furniture of them! The curse of God is in their Garden, their Walks, their Groves; a fire that burns to the nethermost hell! Blood, blood is there: the foundation, the floor, the walls, the roof, are stained with blood!
    He went on to conclude:
    McNab’s Island is more frequently a place of Drunken Riot than any other place in the vicinity of Halifax; therefore, Churches & Temperance men should not patronise it either as individuals or societies.
    Although the threat of eternal damnation was spelled out for them in capital letters and exclamation marks, people continued to take their lonely, tired, bored souls to the island for revitalization. There was something liberating about celebrating life in wholly secular, fleshy abandon.
    In any case, greater atrocities than drinking had taken place on McNab’s if anyone was willing to remember. About a kilometre south from Findlay’s cove was Sherbrooke Tower on Mauger’s Beach, a strip of beachfront that juts out from the rest of the island. On the other side is the infamous Hangman’s Beach where