The Brightest Day, The Darkest Night. Brendan Graham

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      ‘Is there anyone you want me to write to?’ she asked.

      ‘Divil a one – bar the Divil himself – to say I’m comin’!’ he said. ‘Just sit a while and talk the old language to me!’

      She looked around the room. Everywhere, a chaos of bodies. Most of them incomplete. Most needing care and comforting – before or after the surgeon’s saw.

      Ticket Finnegan hadn’t long left, probably less than most.

      ‘All right!’ she decided, and began to talk to him of the old times and the old places.

      ‘Tír gan teangan, tír gan anam – A land without a language is a land without a soul,’ he whispered as she spoke to him in the ancient soul-language of the Gael.

      How true it was, and she thought of the ‘niggers’, as Ticket – and most of the Irish – called them. Most too, like him, believed the black people had no souls, were just ‘heathens’. So what then, if the heathens were also slaves?

      Demonisation and colonisation.

      The same thinking had demonised and colonised the Irish. Depicted them as baboons in the London papers; blaming the Almighty for sending down a death-dealing famine on them. When all He had sent was a blight on the potatoes. It was the English who had sent the famine. Stood by. Did nothing. Let a million Irish die. But what harm in that? Sure weren’t the Irish peasants only heathens … had no souls, only half human, somewhere between a chimpanzee and Homo sapiens … the missing link? Now she saw those self-same Irish peasants here being blown to Kingdom Come for Uncle Sam and they couldn’t see that it was the same old story all over again. Slavery had taken the black people’s language, their customs and traditions, their music. It had taken their country away from them – this new one – as well as those previously stolen from them. Slavery had tried to take their souls. Ellen O’Malley hoped it hadn’t.

      Now she talked to this half a man, in the voice previously reserved for her children – a kind of suantraí or lullaby-talk. ‘I ain’t never been baptised!’ he said, surprising her. When she said she would send for a priest, he glared at her. ‘I don’t want no priest mouthin’ that Latin gibberish over me!’ Then his look softened. ‘Would you do it for me, Miss Ellie – you’d be as good as any of them … you and the Sisters?’

      She called Mary and Louisa to be witnesses, and fetched a tin-cupful of water. Then, his head in her arm, like a new-born, she sprinkled on it a drop of the water. Having no oils with which then to anoint him, she moistened her thumb against her mouth. With it she made the Sign of the Cross on his forehead, his ears, over his good eye and on his lips saying, ‘I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghos … There now, you’re done … ready for any road.’

      He was soothed now. His pain must have been intense. A miracle he had survived at all. Better he hadn’t. He shook free his hand from hers, reached over to where his other hand would have been. Forgetting.

      ‘I still feel it there, Ellie, but sure it’s only the ghost of it … only the ghost of it! If only I could wrap it round a lady’s waist,’ he said wistfully.

      She took his hand again. ‘Will you pray with me, Jeremiah?’ she asked, still in Irish.

      ‘Sure isn’t what we’re doin’ prayin’?’ he replied, the good eye darting wickedly at her.

      And she supposed it was.

      ‘I can feel the Divil comin’ for me, even after you sprinklin’ the water on me,’ he said, gripping her hand more tightly. ‘He took the one half of me and now the wee bollix is comin’ for the other half!’

      He raised up his head, as if to see. ‘G’way off to fuck, ye wee bollix ye!’ he roared, startling her and the whole ward into silence. They were all well used to death by now – in its many guises. The sudden rap, the last rattle of breath, the gentle going – and those who roared!

      She said nothing, just gripped his hand.

      He raised his head again. ‘Who made the world?’ he shouted at them all.

      ‘Gawd did,’ a Southern voice called back.

      ‘Who made America?’

      ‘Paddy did!’ the Irish roared back, as Jeremiah Finnegan handed in his ticket. Leaving both God’s world and Paddy’s America behind him.

      She waited a few moments. Disengaged her hand, shuttered close the one mad eye on him.

      ‘He died roarin’, ma’am,’ a gangrened youth in the next cot said.

      ‘That he did, son! That he did!’ she said, to the frightened boy.

       TWELVE

      Mary watched Ellen move among the men. The transformation in her mother since first she and Louisa had found her was nothing short of miraculous. Ellen’s hair tied back from her face, accentuating her finely chiselled features, seemed to strip away the years. Modesty prevented Mary from ever using a looking glass but now, involuntarily, she put a hand to her face, fingering the high cheekbones, the generous span of mouth, the furrow between lips and nostrils. Upon her own face, Mary found replicated every feature of her mother’s. She smiled as she watched Ellen go about her duties with an enthusiasm that further belied her years. In her plain blue calico dress – its only adornment a neat white collar – Mary’s mother had a word for everybody.

      ‘God never closes one door but He opens another,’ Mary said to Louisa, marvelling how, after their banishment from the convent, the three of them had found such a fulfilment in their work here on the battlefields. Such an all-enveloping joy at being together again after all those years.

      ‘Her heart still longs for Patrick and Lavelle,’ Louisa answered. ‘She will not remain here forever, Mary.’

      ‘Oh, I know, Louisa …’ Mary answered, ‘but whatever the future holds, I will always hold dear these memories, these beautiful moments, of Mother bending to comfort a departing soul, writing out a letter to a loved one … of just being restored to us. I would happily depart this world with such images graven forever on my heart.’

      Louisa, too, had witnessed the change in Ellen, the re-blooming; the coming of joy. All of which was a source of similar joy to Louisa herself!

      She could not love Ellen more. Their time together here had been restorative for each of them in its own way. It was a privilege to serve those fallen in battle, to bind up their wounds – a rich and rewarding privilege. So, that when word had come down, from the Surgeon-General’s office, through Dr Sawyer, asking her to accept the role of matron, Louisa had wholeheartedly accepted.

      She now spoke to her sister. ‘Well, before you take your leave of us, Mary, we have a St Patrick’s Day celebration to organise!’

      

      Not that St Patrick’s Day was anywhere near in the offing. Nor that this mattered to those Irish currently under the care of the Sisters. Now, in the midsummer of 1862, the Irish had decided that ‘this little skirmish’ here in America should not prevent them from celebrating the national saint’s feast day … even if some three СКАЧАТЬ