Frontier and pioneer life -- Québec (Province) -- Fiction; Historical fiction; Short stories
A man that was passing told me I’d find one in the next shed. It was
worse than the one I left, for it had one row over the other of
berths. At the far end I saw a priest, and found he was giving the last
rites to an ould man, whose white hair was matted with dirt. I waited
till he was done and asked the father to come with me. I left Gerald
and him alone, and the priest had no sooner said the last prayer than
there was a message for him to go to another poor soul for whom there
was no hope. When Gerald saw me, he said, despairin’ like, “Take me out
o’ here; ye can carry me. I want to die in God’s free air.” These were
his very words.
“That I will,” says I, “and you’ll be home wid me in Huntingdon afore
three days.” He smiled a sorrowful smile, and said nothing. I lifted
him in my arms and carried him out of the shed. I was powerful strong
when I was young, and tho’ he was tall and broad-shouthered he was
wasted to skin and bone. I laid him down in the shade of a tree, for
the sun was hot. He didn’t look at the river or the hills beyant, but
fixed his eyes on a spot that I took to be a burying-place. “Go back,”
he whispered, “and bring the bag below my berth.” I went, and found a
woman had already been put in the poor bed I had lifted him out of.
I reached for the bag and took it to him. Pointing to a spot in the
burying-place he told me to go there and I would see a grave with a
cross at its head and the name Aileen cut on it. “You can read?” “Yes,”
says I. I did his bidding and coming back told him I had found the
grave. “Promise me, you’ll bury me beside that grave.” I promised him.
“Open the bag and you’ll find in it a little book.” I reached it to
him. “Take it,” says he, “there are pages in it I would tear out were I
able. Let it go. Save the book; it will tell to those now unborn what
Irish men and women have suffered in this summer of sorrow.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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