Promise Me This (18 page)

“You should be glad that your aunt wrote, Annie,” Katie admonished. “Owen found his way to New Jersey. He’ll be writing himself, soon as he’s well.”

But there was something terribly wrong. By anyone’s standards Owen was a grown man and strong as the day was long. And what did Aunt Maggie mean that he’d “been ill-used”? Annie wrapped her arms about her and shivered, though the day was warm.

Michael heard the music, the far-off humming, broken occasionally by lyrics he recognized from childhood.

“Have you ever heard the story of how Ireland got its name?

Well, I’ll tell you so you’ll understand from whence old Ireland came. . . .”

It was the lullaby his mam sang to little Megan Marie; perhaps she had sung it to him, if only he could remember.

“Sure, a little bit o’ heaven fell from out the sky one day,

and nestled on the ocean in a spot so far away.

When the angels found it, it looked so sweet and fair,

they said, ‘Suppose we leave it, for it looks so peaceful there.’”

But Michael dared not dwell on the music. The music, he knew, would call him, wake him, and if he woke, he would have to face the singer. By peeking ever so slightly through his lashes, Michael saw the blurred singer bathed in candlelight, sitting by an open window, absently holding a book. It was the woman with the graying auburn bun, the woman who had answered the Allen door, the woman who’d called him Owen.

Michael closed his eyes, willing himself to fall off the edge of sleep. But the music, sad and sweet and lovely, so full of longing, remained.

“So they sprinkled it with stardust, just to make the shamrocks grow.

’Tis the only place you’ll find them, no matter where you go.

And they dotted it with silver to make its lakes so grand.

And when they had it finished, sure, they called it Ireland.”

Lyrics faded into humming. The humming wove a siren song, drawing Michael down, slipping him beneath blue-black waves of sleep, down into the land of dreams.

Fish, lit from within, in contrasts brilliant and softly hued, swam, gently floating round Michael’s head. As he sank, a pale-pink light flooded the depths until he could see the ocean floor beneath him, littered with outlines oddly familiar—telltale shapes of broken shoes, chipped porcelain doll faces, and dented pocket watches.

He glanced up as the blue and green and yellow iridescent fish of the sea began to hum in their goitered throats, to swirl a tight knot around and between his legs and arms, to melt his throbbing torso into new music—a grinding, pumping tempo that raced Michael’s heart and drew his breath.

The pulsating fish grew round. Stretched and stretched, their colors faded and finally paled to enameled white. Their beaded, glossy eyes wept blood, only to emerge as images of red flags. Michael recognized the new eyes as the White Star Line emblems stamped on each piece of third-class china—the first real china he’d ever eaten from.

Suddenly the heavens and the atmosphere and all the ocean itself were flooded with the fish-turned-china, falling, swimming, swarming around him. The grand piano, playing ragtime, the hundreds of bed linens that had never been used, and the thousand potted palms raced past him. Grains of sea salt, so small they could not be seen, magnified into millions of Bealing’s buttonholes—flowers picked and pricked to begin a journey—until they formed a liquid drape and filled his nostrils, sucking his breath.

The temperature dropped steadily. The pink light dimmed, and the cold of the ocean’s current seeped into Michael’s bones as a shadow passed overhead. Without looking, he knew
Titanic
’s great black keel swam above him.

Michael swore he would not look up but could not resist the pull of what he knew. He watched as the underbelly of the keel cracked—again—and as the forward funnel smashed into the water—again. He watched through the waves as a thousand souls leaped and fell and soared through the night sky into the waves, all over again.

Michael crouched and sprang, desperate to climb the rungs of china fish and grab the bodies, desperate to pull them down to safety beside him. But his fingers could not reach even the hems of their garments; the bodies, frosted, crusting in ice, could not sink for their bobbing atop the ocean.

“Owen,” he whimpered. “Owen.”

“Shh.” Cool fingers stole across Michael’s brow, through his hair, pulling him up through the liquid drapery of flowers, up beyond the grand piano that still played ragtime, up to the surface of the ocean, where the red morning sun glowered across an icy field to flash off the red-and-black funnel of a looming
Carpathia
.

Michael wrestled his head against the pillow, unable to push the images, the vivid colors, beyond his dreams.

“Wake up. Wake up, dear boy,” the singer whispered.

The music in her siren voice and the “dear boy” caught his brain off guard. Michael opened his eyes.

It was a week before Michael regained consciousness and another day before he had the courage to confess to Maggie Allen his true identity.

But Maggie already knew. In her worry and confusion, in her fear that she must soon bury another Allen before the earth had settled over the one she’d loved best, she had washed and ironed her patient’s clothes. In so doing she’d found Owen’s seeds and slips and roots, his notes and journal. And though she felt intrusive, she could not resist.

As she read, her dismay grew to alarm; alarm poured grief. Grief grew into anger and frustration. But by the end of Owen’s story—his precious story cut far too short—Maggie had grown not only to wonder over the nephew-man she’d never set eyes upon, but to love the pitiable boy he had saved. She prayed that Annie, by reading the journal in Owen’s dear hand, would come to love, or at least forgive, the boy too.

“I am glad you’re here, Michael. I would have hated setting only two plates at my table,” Maggie said while stirring the morning porridge.

“It should be Owen here, Mrs. Allen.” The misery Michael carried—for being alive, for bearing the dreams and wearing the clothes of his savior, while that savior, so needed and wanted, lay white in the deep—gnawed through his soul and bled from his eyes.

“Aye. Owen should be here; that is true,” Maggie Allen owned. “But not instead of you, Michael. He should have come with you.” She spooned porridge into a bowl and set it before him at the kitchen table. “See if you can manage this.”

She tipped her head to one side, critically observing the scrawny specimen before her. “But Owen did not come. And that was the Lord’s doing if it was anybody’s.” She straightened. “I do not understand it any more than I understand why my Sean should have gone when we loved and need him so. We need them both. No doubt there’s a reason for the way of things, though I make no pretense of knowing it . . . and neither should you.” She knocked her wooden spoon against the pot.

It can’t be that easy. It can’t be that whatever happens, you just keep going.
Michael was sure of it.

“That’s all there is to it,” she said as if she’d heard his thoughts. “Each morning, when we wake—if we wake—we pick up whatever it is we’ve been given to carry for that day, with the sweet Lord Jesus in the yoke beside us to tote the load. Each night we lay it down, giving it into God’s hands. If it’s still there in the morning, we pick it up and begin again. If the burden is gone or if there is something different, we know where to start.”

Michael did not answer, did not know how to answer, and was grateful when a man, tall and lean, strode in, puffing his pipe like the chimneys of Belfast.

“She’s an opinionated old thing, but only half a lioness, just the same. The other half is mother duck.” He nodded toward Michael. “Glad to see you in the land of the living, young man.”

“This is Daniel McKenica.” Maggie Allen ignored the man’s tease. “He’s hired man for Allen’s Run Gardens, and too much bluster by far and away. Still—” she straightened her apron—“he’s the oldest and dearest friend my Sean and I laid claim to, even if he does smoke his pipe where it is not wanted.”

Daniel McKenica passed the shade of a grin behind his mustache.

“Mr. McKenica.” Michael nodded.

“For a woman who’s never nursed a babe, she makes a good old hen, don’t she?” Daniel remarked with a twinkle in his eye and a
puff, puff
on his pipe.

Michael was confused by the good-natured banter that pranced and danced between the two. If he’d taken such a tone with Uncle Tom, he would have found himself staring into the hobnails of his uncle’s boots. But Maggie Allen didn’t seem to mind; she seemed to relish it.

Another week passed before Michael owned, just to himself, that he loved Maggie Allen. She was more mother than he’d known since childhood. Even when Michael’s feet found solid ground, when he was up and able to fetch water and carry wood, to sweep the porch and feed the chickens, Maggie continued to fuss. She poured into his thin body all the wholesome nourishment her garden and dairy could provide.

She handed him a glass of cold sassafras tea and told him to rest a moment just when he was working the hardest, but she chided him each time his weariness gave way to gloom. It was as though she could read his mind. Once he passed his hand across his forehead, wondering if his thoughts had somehow printed themselves there for all to see.

“There’ll be no wallowing about on this farm, Michael Dunnagan—not for me, who’s lost my dearest friend and husband of thirty-seven years and the golden nephew who was to work wonders for my heart and this land—and not for you, though you’ve lost your dearest friend and brother. There is no time and there is no gift in it.”

“Work wonders for the land, indeed! Save the farm, don’t you mean?” Daniel walked into the kitchen at that moment, pulling up his suspenders. Michael was glad for the interruption to another of Maggie’s sermons.

“Well, I don’t deny the farm and all there is be at risk. Without Sean and Owen, I do not know how we’ll make do.” Maggie sighed and looked, for the briefest moment, the picture of worry and despair. “But it simply means there’s a bigger, broader plan.” She held up her hand. “I know, Daniel McKenica, that you think my spectacles are rose colored—”

“No, Maggie Allen, I don’t think that at all,” Daniel protested, sitting down to the table. “I think you’re balmy and fooling yourself to high heaven! Just don’t be fooling this scrawny Belfast youngster along with you.”

“Shannon,” Michael said, wanting to defend Maggie, though he did not understand her. “And I’m fifteen, sixteen in September.”

“What’s that you say?” Daniel looked up from the newspaper he’d just opened.

“I come from along the River Shannon, not from Belfast. I only lived in Belfast with my uncle Tom.” He looked away. “And I’m nearly sixteen.”

“There, you see!” Maggie crowed. “A nearly sixteen-year-old lad from the River Shannon is worth ten of those from Belfast when it comes to growing a garden-and-landscaping business! You just put that in your pipe and smoke it, Daniel McKenica!”