‘She lives Séamus,’ was all the man said. ‘Maggie survived. She is recovering in a New York hospital.’ He tightened his grip on Séamus’s shoulder and then turned and walked away to allow Séamus to process this news in private.
Séamus nodded and let the tears fall as he continued to sit in silence. The girl he loved with all his heart was alive; had survived the most terrible tragedy. He wished he could feel joy, elation, but those elusive emotions were stifled by the overbearing knowledge that she did not want him to be in her life anymore. Don’t wait for me, she’d said. Don’t wait for me.
He sat watching the clouds gathering on the horizon, watched as each solitary one drifted lazily across the sun, casting everything into shade before moving off to let the warmth and brilliant light of the sun settle on him momentarily again. As the rhythms of nature moved constantly between light and shadow, so, it seemed, did the young man’s heart.
*
The next few weeks were taken up with grieving and comforting those who had lost their loved ones. Séamus tried his best to help where he could, feeling a terrible guilt at receiving the news he had prayed for every night, while others had had their worst fears confirmed. With only a few hundred bodies of the fifteen hundred lost souls recovered, there were no funerals to be held, so it was without the body of their loved ones that the grieving families held their wakes.
For two days and two nights, wakes took place across the Parish for those who were lost at sea. Séamus visited each home, removing his cap to approach the bed where the victim had slept just a few weeks ago, the photograph of them placed carefully on the crisp, white pillow, dozens of candles burning all around the room. In home after home he visited, the same dark scene of unimaginable grief was played out and he looked at the black and white faces staring at him from the photographs, unable to believe that these people were lost forever.
‘It’s the not knowing where she is that’s so hard to accept,’ one mother told him as she gripped his hands so tightly he thought she would never let go. ‘Not knowing where her little body lies and what with her being so a-feared of the dark and it will be so dark down there won’t it. I just cannot bear it, truly I cannot.’
The rain fell steadily over the parish for those few weeks, as if the very sky itself was mourning along with those whose hearts lay broken in their chests down below.
*
The last of the blossom had fallen from the two remaining trees by the time the newspapers stopped reporting the news of the Titanic and the findings of the enquiries and of the aftermath in the parish of Ballysheen.
Séamus took some small comfort by visiting the sixth blossom tree every Wednesday. He would sit a while under the dappled shade and remember. He wondered often how different things might have been if he had travelled with Maggie on that journey as she had so wanted him to. If his father had died a few weeks earlier, what then? Perhaps he would have gone with Maggie. Perhaps he would have drowned in the Atlantic Ocean too and then what good would have come of it all?
When he felt stronger in his mind, he gave up remembering and sat under the blossom tree planning. He would write to Maggie one last time. He would somehow find the address of the aunt she was travelling to stay with and he would write to tell her how his heart had leapt with joy when he heard she had survived the disaster, but that it had sunk again with utter despair to learn that she did not wish him to wait for her. He would tell her he was glad that she would be able to live her life, as he knew how much she would make of this chance God had given her and that he hoped hers would be a very happy and long life – with all his heart, he wished her the best life possible, even if he could not be the one to share it with her.
As the spring months gave way to summer and the first leaves of autumn started to fall from the trees by the lakeside, he resolved to sell his father’s house and their small plot of land and travel to England with the money to work at the cotton mills. At least there he would have no reminders of the love he had known and lost. There, he might stand a chance of putting Maggie Murphy and the horrors of the Titanic from his mind. Fate had decided his path in life and he now had to walk that path, wherever it might lead him.
CHAPTER 33 - New York, 1912
New York,
19th April, 1912
Dearest Mammy,
It is with the deepest, deepest sadness that I write these words. I do not know if news of the awful event will have reached you yet in Ballysheen, but there was a terrible tragedy Mammy and the mighty Titanic is sunk in the Atlantic and there has been the greatest loss of life ever imaginable.