The two of them nailed down the basic idea of the story. Mick listened and marveled at how chunks of the story was gently wiggled and rearranged, or ignored. And here he always thought plain truth was important.
Timona finished by saying Solly really should talk to the Tuckers and Lex and Eddy. “They might still think I’m Miss Cooper, by the way. Poor Jenny is mourning right now, but she’ll talk about her husband, Lester. I didn’t know him well, but he sounds like he was a grand person, worth a paragraph or two at least.
“When you do be write it up, be sure to emphasize the fact that they are not poor because they are lazy, Solly. Pure bad luck. And emphasize their generosity. They didn’t have much but they shared everything they owned with me. Their, um, last cup of tea. But mind, Solly, if you throw in one cliché, such as a drunk Irishman,” she flashed a sly grin at Mick, “you shan’t get a farthing out of me. Oh, and end the story in New York. There are some people I do not wish to meet up with.”
“Always are,” Solly grumbled.
Timmy ignored him. “You can say I am in the process of rejoining Papa, and that is enough.”
“I’ll get the rest in later copy? Yes?” Solly said hopefully.
“We’ll see, dear.” She picked up her bag and handed Solly some money. “Eat as many desserts as you like. I shan’t ask for a receipt.”
“Charming company you keep,” Mick said as they made their way up the train’s aisle back to their own car. “A blackmailer who writes lies as fact and a . . .” he almost said “killer,” thinking of Griffin but at once changed it to, “an Irish fancy man.”
Timona frowned at him. “Do you feel like a kept man? Truly?”
“I feel mostly dizzy around you,
a ghrá
. You keep turning the world upside down.”
“Not upside down, really? I prefer to think I occasionally turn things right side round. Speaking of which, do you know I was thinking about you?”
“Ach no, I don’t like that tone. I would rather you’d leave me out of your circus, love. I prefer to be a spectator.”
“It’s just that you said you wanted to work on a farm, but I, um, wonder if you . . .” She shook her head and laughed. “It’s so wonderful to be with you, Mick. You’re tolerant even when you want me to go to the devil. Another man would have stormed and carried on, but you . . .”
“Yes, and don’t ye bother to sweet-talk me, Timmy. Go on. I know you well enough by now. You have a plan in your mind and it’ll eat away at you until ye speak of it in your sleep. What is it?”
“A veterinarian. Or maybe a regular doctor. Mick you’d be perfect.”
“No.”
“But you already know—”
“No.” He dropped into his seat and shifted to look out the window.
He could feel Timmy’s eyes boring into him. She couldn’t hold back, of course. “Why ever not?”
“Damn it, Timmy, it’s my life, and I do have some control, I believe.”
“Of course. But do tell me why the idea upsets you so?”
He took a deep breath. Here was the moment he showed her another of the chasms between them. “Timmy, love, I told you I left school early. I didn’t say . . . well, here ’tis. I don’t have so much as a basic education. I was seven years old when I quit.”
“How did you manage that?” She sounded interested, and not in the least shocked.
“I had a disagreement with the teacher.” Mick said.
Mr. Thurman had flailed the young Mick’s behind every time he spoke Gaelic, which he did just to annoy the pompous old stick of a teacher.
Mick went on. “’Twas actually more to do with my family. My father was grateful for the extra help. And in the evenings, Da taught me to read and do sums. He didn’t know much more than that, since he left school when he was nine. He did enjoy reading in the English. The doctor my Da worked for had died, and left him some volumes of Shakespeare. That’s where I met with
Timon
. But Da’s teaching me was a case of blind leading the blind.” He laughed without a trace of amusement. “We loved reading ’em, but we didn’t know half the words in those plays. Had to invent meanings to fit. And Mam—she can barely write her name.”
Timmy was shaking her head. Mick wondered if she was at last appalled until she spoke. “Griffin will be wildly jealous to hear that you just up and left school. He hated school. I don’t think it ever occurred to him to simply walk away from boarding school, or even university.”
“Nay, Timmy you can’t go around telling people I’m an ignorant git.”
She stared at him, her eyes wide. “You’re seriously upset, aren’t you?”
“Timmy!”
“Does it help to know that I never spent a day in a school? My teachers were Griffin and Papa when I was lucky, and governesses when I was less lucky. The governesses attempted little more than improving my manners and handwriting. You’ve got more formal education that I do.”
He laughed, astounded and entertained by her, as usual. “You have an answer for everything.”
“Aha! Indeed I do. Mick, I just recalled that your background is better than mine. Did you know that my parents are actually divorced? My mother is still alive, but I think I told you, she is not interested in acknowledging the fact that she has children.”
“Oh, poor girl.”
“No, no need to sound so mournful. Don’t waste pity on me. Papa and especially Griffin, were enough family for me. If anyone suffered, I imagine it was Griffin, for he has memories of Mama. Sometimes that’s why I think he occasionally laughs, but so rarely smiles and why he is . . . well, who he is. But don’t you understand? You come from a better family, and you’ve stayed in school longer than I did. Time to knock off the chip on the shoulder, McCann.”
She scooted her bottom across the seat to lean close to him. “About becoming a doctor now.”
He groaned. “No, no, Timmy. Leave be, woman.”
She answered cheerily. “Fine. As long as it’s a real no, I’ll leave it be. It is the ‘I’m-not-good-enough’ noes that I disdain.”
She was quiet for a long minute. Then she spoke in an unusually grave and hesitant tone. “Forgive me for saying this, and I swear I will leave it be, Mick, but . . but you aren’t your father. You are strong. I- I would help in anyway I could.”
A reference to her damn money, no doubt. She looked up at him, her large eyes concentrating on him as if she could use her gaze to pour her conviction into him. Casting another of her spells. “I think you should go ahead and dream, Michael McCann,oot she whispered.
Later as he gazed out the window and she dozed on his shoulder, he began for the first time to imagine life as a country animal doctor.
He didn’t have to be a laborer or farm hand. He could fix his mind to something larger.
She must have some kind of power, he reflected, as he felt stirrings of ambition. He knew he could manage it. Even if he did not touch her damn money.
Timona discovered that traveling with the young children and the large entourage was more interesting and a great deal more fun than with her father. And it was a positive pleasure to travel with the capable Mick. Not only did he know what had to get done, he’d do the worst of jobs without comment.
He’d change the baby’s diaper, then bound off the train during a half-hour stopover to wash the collection of dirty ones in the pail he’d found, whistling all the while, or laughing at Rob and Lex’s jibes about women’s work.
As they left the city farther behind, he grew lighthearted.
His mouth quirked into an easy smile, even when he dozed. He opened the window and risked getting cinders in his eyes as he leaned his forearms against the polished wood frame of the train to watch the countryside of hills and forests roll by.
In the middle of the first night, the train stopped to take on water and more coal. Around them everyone slept. Mick disentangled himself from Timona and Eddy who leaned on him as they dozed. Timona watched him leave the train. She followed and found him standing in a copse of trees a few hundred yards from the train, breathing in the soft night air and scent of pine.
He turned and gathered her close. “I had no notion I missed it so much. The fresh green world outside New York. Perhaps I would have lived and died in that city if . . .” his voice petered out. “Thank you,” he said and fell silent.
They stood together wrapped in darkness, watching the moon play hide-and-seek behind the clouds and trees, and listening to the sleeping countryside and the hiss and rumble of the train, until the conductor’s bell and the shriek of the train summoned them.
Days of train travel made the tightly coiled Solly more like a crazed rodent than a man. He bounded off at stations and barely made it back to the train in time. Timona was used to Solly, but the others screamed encouragement and laughter as they watched his long legs whipping down the platform. From long practice, he managed to fling himself after the train and swing aboard as it slowly pulled away from the station.
Rob, who’d taken a liking to Solly after their interview, reported that he seemed to have picked up a strong interest in the blonde woman.
Timona knew what would come next. She only wished she had seen a good version of the article first. The one he showed her had too much “Timona, Victim of the Cruel Streets of New York” for her taste.
In Chicago, Solly watched from the station window and muttered something that might have been poetry about “a piece of heaven marching amongst them.”
Timona looked up from a book she was reading. Solly gazed after the blonde woman who swished her way down the wide, sunny platform followed by a porter pushing a cart loaded with baggage.
Timona leaned over and whisperd to Mick, “It has been at least six months since the last girl, and so it is time he fell in love again.”
Solly’s plans, which never stayed solid for long, would change. Would he require cash, she wondered or would a cheque work?
Within five minutes, he was begging Timona for a wad of cash and jumped up to trail after the mysterious blonde.
“I’ll catch up with you in the frozen north.”
“It is summer, Solly. Even Minnesota has a break from ice in the summer. You have my father’s address. Send me my rewritten copy or you won’t get that rent money,” she added sternly.
“Right.” He nodded absentmindedly and then took off after his prey.
“Alas, yet another broken heart in store for Solly.” Timona sighed as she watched Solly stride down the station platform. “The first one I met was a Russian girl who wanted him to live in Moscow. Solly couldn’t bear that idea. He’ll be a wretched boy soon, but he tells me he tends to write better when his soul is in anguish. He was in love with me for a few weeks.”
“I don’t want to know.”
“It ended when I bit his tongue. I suspect he thought it was a friendly kiss, but he is such an enthusiastic person.”
Mick growled something incoherent or Gaelic or both.
At Uncle Dave’s, Mick was the only one who expressed any interest in the flocks of chittering, smelly birds.
Timona asked the dubious Lex to stay behind to help the Tuckers. She pressed cash into his hand.
“Escape funds for you and the Tuckers,” she told him privately. She gave him a paper with an address. “And here is where we will be in Minnesota, for a little while, anyway, if you decide you don’t want to go back to the city.”
“I’m not staying here. I’m gonna be a railroad man,” he informed her. “As soon as I can, I’m getting me a job with the railroad.”
She nodded, unsurprised. He had spent most of the trip talking to the brakeman, the conductor, and any other trainman he could corner, including the person Lex described as the greatest man he’d ever met: The locomotive engineer.
She hoped Lex wouldn’t disappear with all the money and, after thinking it over, secretly pressed a similar amount into Rob’s hand. And then Jenny’s hand, too. She gave copies of her father’s Minnesota address to all of them, admonishing Henry to write, even if his handwriting was wobbly.
Timona disliked the turkey farm, though she could not help admiring the vast skies and wondering to herself how long an exposure she’d need to capture the scene of clouds with a camera. Only those clouds could convey the wide sprawling emptiness of the flat land.
Jenny stood in the yard and watched, even more grim-faced than usual, as Mick and Timona left her and the children.
At least Uncle Dave looked cheerful. He looked over his dead brother’s brood and widow as proudly as if they were already his.
There had been brief talk of leaving Eddy with the Tuckers, but when Timona had seen the terror in the boy’s eyes, she knew he still needed Mick, the only adult he seemed to trust.
Eddy wasn’t certain how old he was but said he guessed he was about eight. Sallow and thin, the quiet boy with the too-mature face was theirs now. Timona hoped Mick didnt mind that she’d landed him with Eddy, but she didn’t want to ask.