What the Wind Knows(47)
When I pulled her from the lake, she answered immediately to her name, yet she didn’t call me by mine. I shudder to think what would have happened had I not been there. I’d been returning from checking on Polly O’Brien across the lough, the first time I’d been there in ages. A complete fluke that I was there at all. I heard a crack, unmistakable, and nothing more. Minutes later, she called out, leading me to her. She has been leading me by the nose ever since, and I have no idea what to do about it.
When she is out of my sight, I don’t breathe easy until I see her again. Brigid thinks Anne will take Eoin and run if given the chance. I’m afraid of that too, and though I am drawn to her like never before, I don’t trust her. It’s made leaving much harder. For Eoin’s sake, I don’t want to frighten Anne off. And if I’m being honest, I can’t bear to see her go.
I went to Dublin in June, making rounds to Dublin’s jails, using my medical credentials to check on the political prisoners Mick was negotiating to get released. Lord French has resigned from his duties, but the clearance he gave me during the hunger strikes still got me in almost everywhere. I was denied visits with a few prisoners, which most likely meant the prisoners were in rough shape, too rough for an official inspection. I threatened and waved my papers around, insisting I be allowed to do my job, which got me in a few more doors but not all. I made special note of where the men were being kept, gathered as much information as I could from their jailers, and made sure Mick knew which prisoners were in the greatest danger of not making it out again.
It took me three days to make my rounds, write up my reports, and draw my diagrams. Mick was already putting plans in motion for several breakouts when I left. I haven’t been back again. But with rumours of a truce—a truce Anne predicted would come—I need to see where Mick’s head is. He was shut out of the negotiations between de Valera and Lloyd George, though Mick ran the government and the war while de Valera sat in America for eighteen months, raising money, tucked away from the hell that is Ireland, from the front lines of a war fought without him.
T. S.
12
A FIRST CONFESSION
Why those questioning eyes
That are fixed upon me?
What can they do but shun me
If empty night replies?
—W. B. Yeats
“You’re very good, you know. These illustrations are delightful,” I said on Sunday evening, after Eoin had been coaxed into bed.
“When I was a boy, I was sick a lot. When I wasn’t reading, I was sketching,” Thomas replied, his eyes on the picture he was creating, a picture of a man looking out onto a lake where a tiny boat floated in the distance. The book was finished, but Thomas was still drawing. I had already stitched the finished pages together and glued the thick seam into the spine of a cloth-bound cover Thomas had removed from an old ledger. The cover was a plain blue cloth, which served our purposes perfectly. Thomas had written The Adventures of Eoin Gallagher across the front in his ornate hand and drawn a small sailboat beneath the title. We’d created three different voyages for Eoin to take—one back to the days of the dinosaurs, one to the building of the pyramids, and one to the future when man walked on the moon. Eoin’s boat had to sail through the Milky Way to return home, and Thomas was quite impressed with my imagination. With my input, his sketches of a rocket ship and a space traveler were unsurprisingly prescient.
“Did you live in this house?” I asked. I stood and began to tidy the space so I could wrap our gift.
“I did. My father died before I was born.” His eyes shot to mine, gauging whether he was telling me things I already knew.
“And your mother remarried an Englishman,” I provided.
“Yes. He owned this house. This land. My mother and I became part of the landed class.” His tone was wry. “I spent most of my childhood days staring out the window in the room where you now sleep. I couldn’t play or run or go outside. It would make me cough and wheeze, and a few times I even stopped breathing.”
“Asthma?” I asked absentmindedly.
“Yes,” he said, surprised. “How did you know? It isn’t a well-known term. My doctors called it bronchospasms, but I came across an article in a medical journal published in 1892 that introduced the term. It comes from the Greek word aazein, which means to pant, or breathe with an open mouth.”
I didn’t comment. I waited, hoping he would continue. “I thought if I learned enough, I could heal myself, since no one else seemed able to. I dreamed of running down the lane, running and running and never stopping. I dreamed of hurling and wrestling. I dreamed of a body that wouldn’t grow tired before I did. My mother was afraid to let me go to school, but she didn’t argue with me or dictate what I read or studied. She even asked Dr. Mostyn if I could look at his anatomy books when I showed an interest. I read them and then read them again. And sometimes the doctor would come and sit with me and answer my questions. My stepfather hired a tutor, and the tutor humored me too. He sent away for medical journals, and in between sketching and reading Wolfe Tone and Robert Emmet, I became a bit of a medical expert.”
“You’re not sick anymore.”
“No. I like to think I cured myself with regular doses of black coffee, which eased the symptoms immensely. But besides staying away from things that seemed to exacerbate it, like hay, certain plants, or cigar smoke, I think I mostly outgrew it. By the time I was fifteen, my health was good enough for me to go to St. Peter’s College in Wexford for boarding school. And you know the rest of that story.”