Ellis Island by Kate Kerrigan Page B

somewhere at the center of me was that calm, cold place where I had known all along this was going to happen. From the moment John had told me about the dying boy, on the first day we had kissed, I had feared losing him. The waiting was over—the worst had happened. It was almost a relief. “Where is he, Liam?”
    Liam was panting and pawing the air with exhaustion.
    “Where is he?” I grabbed the stupid boy by his collar.
    “Up beyond Pat Sweeney’s bog . . .”
    “Show me!” I pulled him up on his feet and thrust him, stumbling, along in front of me. At the road, he pointed across Sweeney’s fields. “Go for the doctor!” I screamed at him, then lifted my skirts and scrambled across the ditch, into the open field, and ran faster than I had ever run in my life. I ran through two fields and would have run a dozen more when I saw two men coming rapidly toward me down the slope. It was Padraig and three other lads, and they were carrying a body with them.
    As soon as he saw me, Padraig started shouting, “Go back, Ellie, get back to the house! Get a bed ready! Go back, go back!”
    But I flew on, tripping over my petticoats. “John! John!” I ran beside the men screaming his name. He was unconscious, silent, swinging limply between them. From the waist down his body glistened black in the bright sun, dripping blood. Then I knew Padraig was right—there was nothing I could do here. I had to make things ready in the house. I raced back home ahead of their procession.
    I covered the bed with our cleanest, crispest sheet, and when they brought him in I had them lay him down. The cotton turned red in an instant. They all stood around, caps in their hands, shocked, white faced, like around a coffin. I wanted to howl at Padraig, “This is all your fault!” Instead, I ordered them from the room to lay a fire, to boil water, to watch for the doctor. The wound in my husband’s side was a mess of pumping blood. I ripped the skirts from my one good dress, which was hanging on the back of the bedroom door; I thrust the material into the wound and pressed tight. “John, John—wake up!” Maybe he was better unconscious, out of pain, but I feared he was falling into the sleep that comes before death.
    Suddenly Doctor Bourke was beside me. “Here’s a nasty business, Ellie.” The familiar understatement of our family doctor’s voice sucked relief out of me, and despite my best efforts to restrain myself, tears started pouring down my cheeks. As the doctor removed the wadding I had made with my skirt and checked the wound, John’s eyes flashed open with the shock of pain. Doctor Bourke said to me, “This won’t be nice, Ellie. I have to get that shot out. You can go into the kitchen, I can manage this.”
    “No. I’ll stay and help.” I put my arm round the back of John’s head and held him as firmly as I could. As the doctor prepared his instruments, I talked and talked to my husband—whatever came into my head poured out of my mouth in a stream of stupid, cheery words. “Do you remember the day I wore the trousers and climbed that tree?”
    “You were the talk of the village, Ellie,” Doctor Bourke joined in. “A living disgrace.” But his voice was detached as he concentrated on the job in hand. “Mind yourself now, John . . . get yourself ready . . . here, Ellie . . .” He handed me an ether-soaked pad. When he parted the wound, John jerked bolt upright in the bed and shouted out in pain. I pushed him back down gently and held the ether to his face, and carried on talking, talking. I mimicked the nonsense of the local gossips.
    “I saw Peggy Geraghty in town yesterday in a new blue coat and carrying a brace of pheasant—that husband of hers is surely a poacher . . .”
    “Oh, for the love of God,” John cried out and shook his head and grimaced a kind of smile at me, so that I didn’t know if he was cursing the pain or the inanity of my chatter—so I kissed his face and stroked his hair, and kept