Brendan Graham - The Brightest Day, The Darkest Night

You walk the meadows green;

Or hear your song run through the fields

Like yon mountain stream …’

She looked at the boy as she sang, something fiercely ominous in her, some darker shade of meaning she had not noticed before, now present in the words.

‘So take my hand and sing me now,

Just one last merry tune …’

His clear blue eyes never left hers as she sang her tune in answer to his.

‘Let no sad tear now stain your cheek,

As we kiss our last goodbye;

Think not upon when we might meet,

My love my fair-haired boy …’

They were all her fair-haired boys, all the crippled, the crutched, the maimed and the motherless. Some called her ‘Mother’ – and even when they didn’t, she knew she was their mother in-situ, the comforting words, the tender touch.

‘If not in life we’ll be as one,

Then, in death we’ll be …’

She did not mean to sadden them with thoughts of death but to comfort them. Death indeed would come to many here … maybe to Hercules O’Brien … maybe by the hand of Ol’ Alabarmy, his dancing partner. Perhaps death would dance with the shy Rhinelander. He had danced with her, as if it were the last waltz on this wounded earth. Or death could call time on the young fiddle player from East Tennessee. Or even, Ellen kept her eyes on the beautiful boy, to Jared Prudhomme, in love with her Louisa … and she with him.

How, Ellen wondered, could anything other than the boy’s death solve Louisa’s dilemma?

‘And there will grow two hawthorn trees,

Above my love and me,

And they will reach up to the sky Intertwined

be …’

She was singing not to death … but to hope. Hope that after death love might still survive, but hope none the same.

‘… And the hawthorn flower will bloom

where lie,

My fair-haired boy and me.’

The boy came to her, held her arms, looked deep into her eyes. ‘Thank you, Mrs Lavelle – Mother! Everything will be all right now – you’ll see!’

She didn’t know how to reply to him. Just squeezed his arms … let him go slowly, a certain sadness creeping over her. Maybe it was the song.

Then the Tennessee fiddle player called for a ‘last fling of dancing’ – ‘I Buried My Wife and Danced on Top of Her’.

Ellen was glad to be shaken out of her thoughts and as well didn’t want to send the men to sleep, morose about tomorrow. Though, even jigs and reels sometimes didn’t prevent that. She remembered Stephen Joyce wondering to her once about ‘how the Irish could be both happy and sad – at the same time!’

She entered joyfully into the spirit of the dance, lilting the tune, swinging and high-steppin’ it with her boys; Hercules O’Brien roaring at the top of his voice, reminding them all to ‘Dance, dance, dance all you can, Tomorrow you’ll be just half-a-man!’

Then a new sound – the stentorian voice of Dr Sawyer cutting through the din. ‘Stop it! Stop it at once!’

He looked the length of the hospital at them, withering them with his gaze, reducing them back to what they previously had been – men of rank, diseased and disabled.

‘It’s madness, sheer irresponsible madness! Sister,… you are in charge here?’

Louisa stepped forward: – ‘Yes, Doctor.’

‘These men, half of them at death’s door and look at them – lungeing about like lunatics … limbless lunatics.’

The men huddled back at his onslaught.

‘Feckless nuns and jiggers of whiskey – against my better judgement from the start. This won’t go unanswered!’ And he turned and marched out, killing all joy.

‘You won’t best us!’ Hercules O’Brien shouted after the retreating figure. ‘Even if it’s our lastest Paddy’s Night … it was the bestest.’ Then he turned, went down to where Ol’ one-armed Alabarmy now stood, all crumpled and defeated.

All watched as Hercules O’Brien bowed to his foe.

‘Thank you, sir, you’re a gallant soldier.’

Then Ellen, Louisa and Mary watched, the splendour rising in them, as each of the lame and the limbless, the Southron and the Northman, bowed to each other, offering gratitude for the frolics now finished and solicitude for whatever the morrow might bring.

In turn then the men thanked Ellen and the Sisters – especially Sister Mary for ‘The jiggers of whiskey and one helluva party for a nun!’

Those that could fight would want to be up and bandaged by five o’clock. That meant four for Ellen and the others. If they weren’t called on during the night and Ellen suspected they might well be. Dr Sawyer had been right … up to a point, and damaged limbs could only take so much. Still, they settled the men down as best they could and changed any dressings, oozing from the evening’s exertions.

And it was all worth it. The night’s fun was worth it.

The fiddling was furious, the band of fiddlers flaking it out. Ellen recognised them. There was Hercules O’Brien mummified for death. His head bandaged; blood plinking from his bow.

There too, was Ol’ Alabarmy thwacking his bow madly across his instrument. Where was his other hand? Grotesquely, the fiddle stuck out from Alabarmy’s neck, there being no other visible form of support. And Herr Heidelberg, atop a giant barrel. Like the others, he held a bow. To it was fixed a bayonet. When, each time, he drew his bow across the strings, it sliced a collop of flesh from his face. She cried out to him, but he seemed not to hear.

Ellen and the boy, Louisa’s boy, were in front of the fiddle band, dancing ‘The Cripples’ Waltz’ but the timing was wrong … all wrong. The fiddle band played one tune, they danced to a different one, the boy whispering loudly to her to ‘Listen! Listen, Mother! D’you hear it – in the floor – the skulls?’

She didn’t know what he was talking about. But he persisted at her to ‘Listen!’ Again calling her ‘Mother.’

Then, at last she could hear it. The amplified sound of their feet exploding on the floor, driving up her legs, shivering into her body.

‘It’s the skulls!’ he whispered, with a mad glee that she had at last understood him. ‘That’s what gives it the sound – the skulls, goat skulls and sheep skulls and … and … listen to the walls!’ he then demanded, pulling her close to the wall, pushing her face against it until she could feel the wild music entering the hollowed-out eyes and ears … and the slit of the nose. Coming back louder than when it went in. They did it in Ireland he told her. Buried the skulls of dead animals in the floors and the walls. To catch the sound of the wicked reels and the even wilder women who splanked the floor to them.

The music came thick and furious. She recognised the tunes – ‘I Buried My Wife and Danced on Top of Her’, then ‘Pull the Knife and Stick It’.

The only dancers were the boy and her. She wanted to ask him about Louisa … about … but he kept telling her to ‘listen!’, like she was the child. She obeyed him, the skull sound all the time rapping out its rhythm like a great rattling gun. It got louder and louder, until frightened, she looked at the floor. There, reaching up from beneath, were hands without arms and arms without hands.

If she could only dance fast enough, she could avoid them. Keep one step ahead. She shouted at the Cripple Band to play faster. But the faster they played the more Herr Heidelberg’s bayonet slashed his face, the more the bow of Hercules O’Brien splinked blood onto his face, his tunic, and his instrument. Ol’ Alabarmy smiled dreamily through it all.

The boy seemed not to notice, not to see. Only to hear. ‘Isn’t it beautiful?’

She tried to fight him off – make him see. He must be blind, crippled as the rest of them. Now, he caught her roughly by the shoulder, again trying to face her towards the wall.