“Gospel” Smith raised a bandaged head and leveled piercing eyes at Sheila. “You know what the Gospel says about the stars singing in the morning—all together like? Well, Jamie was the lad who could outsing them. You know how it feels at that gray, creepy hour o’ dawn, when a man’s heart jumps to his throat and sticks there, and his hands shake like a girl’s? Often’s the time we’d be waiting orders to attack just like that. The stars might have shouted themselves clear o’ the sky, for all the good they’d have done us; but Jamie was different. He’d make us a couplet or a verse to sing low under our breath, something you could put your teeth into. And when the orders came our hearts were always back where the Lord had put them.”
“Granny” Sullivan plucked nervously at his blanket. “An’ now, when we want to hearten him, we’re hurtin’ instead. Seems as if the devil took hold of our tongues an’ spilled the wrong words off.”
“Shall I tell you what I would try to do, if I were one of you Irish lads who had fought with him?” Sheila’s face was as drawn as any of the twelve.
“In God’s name tell us!” Johnnie, the piper, spoke as reverently as if he were at mass.
“You heard what he said just now about seeing nothing but mud and dying men? Well, that’s the trouble. He can’t see any longer things he loves, the things he has always carried in his heart. All the beautiful memories have been lost, and all he has left are the horrors of those last days. He’s got nothing left to make into songs any more. Don’t you see? You’ve got to bring that back to him, that power to see—here.” The girl’s hand pressed her heart.
“Aye, but how?” Patsy asked it breathlessly.
“Bring him back his memories—memories of Ireland, of the things he loved best to sing about. You have eyes; make him see.”
A hush fell on Ward 7-A. Then Timothy Brennan muttered as a man alone: “’Tis the words of a woman. God’s blessin’ on her!”
All through the day there rang through Sheila’s ears the last words Jamie had said to her that morning. He had turned his face back, as Harrigan had wheeled him away, to answer her “All right, Jamie?” with “As right as ever I’ll be. Do ye know, the O’Haras are famous for their long living? My grandfather lived to be ninety-eight, and his father to be over a hundred. That leaves me seventy-five years, maybe. Seventy-five years! And already I’m fearin’ the length of a day.” She was still hearing them when she came back to the ward at day’s end to find Jamie in his old accustomed place by the window. His face was as masklike as ever, and Larry was talking:
“Sure, I mind often an’ often how the neighbors used to tell me if I’d lie asleep with my ear to a fairy rath I’d be hearin’ their music an’ seein’ their dancin’. But I never did. But I saw a sight as grand, the flight o’ the skylark at ring-o’-day. Many’s the time I’ve seen them leave the marsh an’ go liltin’ into the blue.”