CHAPTER FIFTY

Day after day, I do my visits to the families in the morning and the sick in the afternoon. They move Mick into the room where Billy is, but still Mick hasn’t woken up. He’s breathing all right; his heart is strong; his color is good; and Sister Thibodeau says his wounds are healing well, no sign of infection. But whatever hit his head hit him hard. Be patient, Sister Thibodeau tells me. But how can I? What if he never wakes up? What if I’ve kept him from death only to have him live in that nothingness between awake and dreaming? The guilt of it weighs upon me.

And then one day, as I sit by him, spooning in drops of his broth and wiping his chin, Mick opens his eyes.

“Mick?” I set down the bowl and lean in.

“He’s awake?” Billy asks from the other bed and pushes up on his good arm to see.

Mick’s eyes try to focus as he frowns and looks at the room.

“Can you hear me, Mick?”

“Where … where am I?” His voice is hoarse and I pour a drink of water.

“You’re at the hospital.” I tilt the cup to his lips and set it back on the side table. “You were in an accident on the river.”

He raises his hand to his head, and notices the bandage around it.

“You got a good clatter. Twenty stitches. Your side was badly damaged, too.”

Lifting his head and wincing with the pain, he looks down at his side’s black stitches, its purpled flesh, swollen, squished to near bursting between the bandages, like a plum in a vice.

“Dr. Van Cortlandt said it should heal well, though it may take a while.”

“You’ve been out for nearly a week now,” Billy says, from the other bed. “Not much of a roommate,” he chides.

I rest my hand on Mick’s; it makes him blush.

“I’m a bit confused,” he says, rubbing his eyes. “So, I’m in the hospital?”

“In Bytown,” I add. “God, ’tis good to see you, Mick.” I squeeze his hand. “I’ve missed you so much.”

“Give him some breathing air,” Billy scolds. “He’s barely awake.”

I laugh. “I know, ’tis just I’ve so much to ask. So much to tell.” I smile at Mick, but he doesn’t smile back.

“I’m sorry,” he says, frowning at me. “But do I … do I know you, miss?”

Mick doesn’t remember anything before the accident, not yet, anyway. Sister Thibodeau says that happens sometimes, but often something triggers the memories, cranks open the mind like the locks of the canal, and soon they come flooding back.

“So we were neighbors?” he asks, slurping his stew. His appetite is back, a good sign to be sure. I tell him then of our life in Killanamore, the rolling hills, the village, the people. I tell him of Lord Fraser and the Big House. I tell him of the time we kids battled like the Fianna, running wild on the hillside, how we hunted for lugworms and caught fish in the river; tell him of the day when Mam caught him and Jack throwing stones at the hen and how her look sent him bolting home like a jackrabbit.

“Sounds like I was a right scallywag!” He laughs.

When he asks, I tell him about his family. About his dead father, about how his mother and his two sisters, Meg and Nan, perished in the workhouse. I tell him how Kenny was killed working with my Da in England. His eyes fill with tears, for truly ’tis like losing them all over again.

“But you’ve an older brother in New York,” I say. “Joseph.”

Day after day, I pass him our tales of home, as though the breath of my memories will knock upon his heart and help him to find his own. I tell him all our stories, all but one. I never tell him how he loved me.

For if I have to tell him that, then surely he doesn’t anymore.

Billy tells him stories, too. Old yarns every Irishman knows; well, every Irishman but Mick. I can hear them laughing as I go about my chores in the house. ’Tis the best medicine for them both. What a gift for Billy to find fresh ears for all those well-told tales. For even after Billy is healed and sent home, he comes back every couple of days to visit Mick.

Sister Thibodeau soaked Mick’s shirt and pants in wood ash and soda to get rid of the blood stains. She patched and stitched them back together as painstakingly as she had Mick himself. “Here, Mick,” she says, laying them on the foot of his bed one afternoon. “I thought you might like to get out of that sleeping shirt for a change, maybe even walk out on the stoop for a bit of air. Kathleen can help you.”

His eyes light up; he’s right eager to be free from the tiny room. Though I don’t blame him. After all those long months in the woods, he must be getting antsy cooped up like this.

“Oh,” she says, coming back into the room as I help him sit on the bed’s edge to change into his clothes. “I forgot to give you this. I found it in your pocket.” She hands him a small Celtic knot of braided straw. He studies it in his palm, deep in thought.

“A harvest knot,” I whisper. I’d know that pattern anywhere, for I’d seen that tight weave, those interlacing loops once before. I’d found one just like it on my sitting stone back home. My heart tingles like thawing fingers. All this time, I thought that love knot was from Tom. I never realized Mick made it.

Mick looks up at me as though seeing me for the first time. His eyes widen and his mouth hangs open. Then, red-eared, he closes his fist and shoves the knot back into his pocket.

“Thanks anyway, Kit,” he says, lying back down. “But I’m not feeling well. I think I’ll have a rest instead.”

Without another word, he turns his back to me.

I stand there for a moment, stunned, and then it dawns on me, slow and aching like the throb of chilblains.

He’d made that harvest knot in Ireland for me.

But who, who did he make this one for?