Wild Geese

by Caroline Pignat

  Benoît pauses and stretches his mangled hand, staring at it as he flips it from side to side, as though seeing it for the first time. “After my accident, Mick took care of me. Sat by me. Made sure my bandages were always clean. I had to learn how to swing the axe and work the two-man saw all over again. And so I taught Mick. He’s a fast learner, him. A hard worker.” He closes his hand, crosses his arms, and smiles. “Mick, he is my right-hand man.”

  “But how did he end up in the river?” I ask.

  Benoît’s eyes grow serious. “Sometimes we get logjams up in the river narrows. Usually the drivers, they use their cant-hooks to break it up. Someone has to climb across the jam to find and free the logs that are causing the blockage. It’s so dangerous, the foreman can only ask for volunteers. Over the years, I have buried good friends and great lumbermen who died trying to free the key-logs.” He gazes into the floorboards for a moment. When he continues, his voice is hoarse. “I can’t volunteer anymore. I’ve lost my nerve. But it should have been me, not Mick, out there.”

  “Mick volunteered?” I didn’t think he’d be that foolish.

  “Non,” Benoît shifts in his seat. “From the bank, we saw the two volunteers coming back. They’d chopped the key-logs and we knew the jam would explode.” Benoît stares just over my head and I know he’s back on the riverbank, reliving the moment. “Then I see someone else is still out there on the jam. It looks like his foot is caught. Before I can stop him, Mick is running, log to log, jumping across to the mountain of sticks. It could blow at any second.”

  My heart is racing. I see it, too.

  “Taking the guy’s cant-hook, Mick pries it under the log and frees him. They start running back and I see the guy was only a boy. The cook’s boy. Trying to be the next Joe Montferrand tackling a jam.” He shakes his head in disgust. “Jacques, he can’t even split firewood right.”

  I swallow. “Jack?” I whisper, though I know before he nods.

  “Just then, the jam exploded; timber flies into the air like matchsticks. Jacques, he got thrown clear, landed near the bank, bruised but alive. But there was no sign of Mick.”

  He pauses and clears his throat. I can only imagine the panic he must have felt, watching the dark river. Searching for a sign of Mick.

  “The whole camp ran onto the rolling logs, looking for him in the rushing water. Every second counted. If Mick survived the blast, the logs would surely crush him or the freezing river would take him. But we found him.” He turns his watery eyes to mine. “We found him.”

  The door clicks and Dr. Van Cortlandt comes out, untying his bloodied apron. “We’ve given him something for the pain. He’s asleep now and he needs lots of rest,” he says.

  The news warms my heart more and more, as though a numb part of me has been pulled from icy depths.

  “Still,” he adds, slipping on his coat as Benoît stands, “he’s not out of danger yet.”

  When the men leave, Sister Thibodeau rests her hands on my shoulder. “Your friend, he’s a strong boy. I think he’s going to make it.”

  “Can I see him?” I ask.

  She nods.

  He’s sleeping under a pile of blankets, head bandaged. The blood has been washed from his face and arms. His skin is no longer a blue-gray. Though he’s covered in cuts and stitches like a patched rag doll, he no longer looks like a butchered corpse. He looks like my Mick.

  Sitting by the bed, I take his hand in mine. He doesn’t stir. His calloused hands are as rough as the bark they’d been stripping. His arms and neck are thick and muscled. Whatever he’d been doing these long months, it suited him. The boy from Ireland, the inept sailor, my lanky brother, the awkward friend—none are the man I see before me.

  I rest my fingers on his forearm, white and wrinkled from the burns he’d gotten the day we saved his mother, but my eyes are drawn to the newly healed scar just above it. I wonder how he got it. I wonder what has filled his life these past eight months?

  I wonder if there is any space for me in it.

  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 heal
ed 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?

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  Mick isn’t the same after that day. The harvest knot must have triggered a memory. The memory of her.

  He no longer asks to hear stories of our days together, and when I try to tell one, he says he’d rather rest instead. ’Tis as though the very sight of me causes him pain. I can make neither head nor tail of it.

  A hint of spring is in the air as winter melts and runs down gutters and muddy lanes. Everyone’s spirits lift at the thought of better weather ahead, but not Mick’s. And not mine.

  I try to get him to come out. “The sun will do you good,” I say. “You need to work your muscles.”

  But he won’t listen to me. Only Billy or Benoît, on the days he stops by, can get him up and out for a bit.

  Mick never speaks of remembering and I don’t ask. Maybe I just don’t want to know. It surprised me to think that he’d met a girl. Mick was never one for saying how he felt. But ’tis obvious he’s pining for someone. Heartsick, it seems. Though, truth be told, I’ve caught a case of it myself.

  How could he have met someone?

  There aren’t girls in the lumber camps, are there?

  Did she live in a nearby town?

  How serious can they be?

  Serious enough to make her a love knot.

  Serious enough to make him act like this.

  Serious enough that he wants nothing to do with you.

  My mind tosses like a ship at sea, lurching my stomach this way and that. I can’t eat. I can’t sleep. I can do nothing but wait.

  I arrive at the hospital that afternoon and hang my cloak in the hall. I want nothing more than to be with Mick, but how many more times can I bear his shunning? He won’t even look me in the eye. Even if he doesn’t remember loving me, he surely can’t forget the terrible way he’s been treating me these past few weeks. I spoke to Mother Bruyere about it that morning, for she could tell I wasn’t myself.

  “Be honest,” she’d said. “With him and with yourself.”

  She’s right. As scary as it is, I’ve made up my mind to tell him the truth. To tell him I love him and let him know he loved me, once.

  But when I round the corner, he’s not there.

  “He left with Billy and Benôit about an hour ago,” Sister Thibodeau says. “Did they not tell you goodbye?”

  Goodbye? What is she talking about?

  “They’re off to work on the lumber booms heading to Quebec.”

  “What?!”

  She must be joking.

  “They’re taking the one o’clock steamer from Entrance Bay,” she adds.

  Without even stopping for my cloak, I bolt out the door and over Sussex to the shore, past where Martha and I once washed clothes. My breath rushes out of me in huffs as I splash through the puddles, covering my skirts in mud and slush. The wharf is empty except for Captain Baker, the postmaster, who stands on the quay sorting through two large sacks of mail bags hanging from his horse.

  “The steamer,” I pant. “Has it come?”

  He takes in the state of me for a moment. “Uh, yes, miss. Gone about ten minutes ago.”

  I don’t believe him. I can’t.

  Running back to the path’s end at the base of the bluff, I enter the brush, yanking myself forward by stick and stump. Thorns slash my dirtied dress. My foot slips in the slushy mud and a branch cuts my cheek as I fall to my knees, but I keep going. Briars snag my bonnet. Ripping the ties, I leave it like a prayer rag on a rowan tree as I forge up the hill.

  Please, God. Please, Mick. Please, God.

  I have to reach the top. I have to see for myself.

  Cresting the bluff, I tear from the brush and run to the edge. Log booms and lumber rafts float downriver like little towns. A few men stand on the edge of their rafts, navigating them to the lumberyards on the other side of the hill, while others continue on, winding their way past Bytown to towns beyond. I hear them calling to each other. Waving goodbye.

  I raise my hand to the tiny curl of smoke on the horizon. To the steamer leaving. Maybe Mick will remember. Maybe he’ll look back. Maybe he’ll see me standing on the bluff and know I loved him.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  “You’ll catch your death of cold, and what good would you be then?” a voice says.

  I spin around to see him sitting on the rock.

  “Mick?” I can’t believe it’s him. “I thought ...” I glance at where the steamer disappeared. “Sister Thibodeau said you and Billy went with Benoît ...”

  He shrugs and fiddles with the harvest knot in his thick, calloused fingers. “I couldn’t leave.”

  “What are you doing here?” I finally say, walking over to him.

  “I might ask you the same thing,” he shakes his head. “Look at the state of you.”

  My dress is ripped, filthy with mud and wet from slush. Bits of my bun hang about my face in wet curls and my cheeks sting from where the branches cut. I’m a right mess. But none of that matters.

  “I had to see … I thought you ...” Catching my breath, I feel the anger ignite in me. Hand on my hip, I point my finger at him. “Why didn’t you tell me? After all I did for you … how could you leave me, just like that?”

  He droops like a scolded pup.

  “You’re a right heartscald, Mick O’Toole. Do you know that?”

  He looks up at me sideways. “B’jaysus, Kit, I swear you sound just like your mother. God rest her.”

  “Well, at least I—” the words catch in my throat. Awareness snuffs my anger. “You remember her? Mick? You remember my mother?”

  He nods sheepishly.

  “When did you start getting your memories back?” I wonder what else he remembers. I wonder if he remembers me.

  “The day Sister Thibodeau gave me this.” He hands me the harvest knot. “I made it in the shanty and kept it all this time.”

  I hold the knot in my shaking hands. “She must be special to you,” I say, though my heart aches to even think it.

  “She is,” he admits.

  And there it is. The truth of it. Mick is in love. But the words sadden him and his shoulders droop.

  “I think she is promised to someone else,” he adds.

  Knowing Mick, he surel
y hasn’t told the girl how he feels. Perhaps he has no chance with her. ’Twould be so simple to tell him to give up hope. But if anyone deserves happiness, ’tis Mick.

  I hold out the knot. “You should give it to her, then.”

  He sticks his hands in his pockets and stares at the ground. “I just did.”

  My breath snags. I can’t speak.

  “Kit,” he says, swallowing, steeling himself for the words to come. “I failed you. I tried my best to bring you Jack, but he wouldn’t listen. I know having your family together is the most important thing to you … and I couldn’t even do that. When the sister gave me this knot and I remembered, I remembered all I hadn’t done for you. And the guilt of it ate me up inside. That’s why I never told you I remembered.”

  I open my mouth to speak, to tell him I understand, to tell him I’d let Annie go and that Jack deserved his freedom, too, but he puts his fingers lightly on my lips.

  “Listen now, for I’ve only the nerve to say this the once. ’Tis one thing to long for you when I’m miles away in a lumber camp, for hope keeps me going. But to stand by you day after day and know that you’ll never be mine?” He shakes his head. “Kit, I can’t. I just can’t. It kills me, so it does.” He lowers his hands, slumping in defeat.

  “You still love me, Mick?” I ask. I have to hear him say it.

  “What does it matter?” He looks at me with tortured eyes. “If I couldn’t win you away from that fool Tom Lynch, what hope have I against God Almighty?”