“Jewel? She’s all right,” I told him because that was the answer she’d sworn me to give.
“You’re not a stupid girl. You know better than that.” He shook his head slowly and his voice was grave. “She’s very sick. I can see it and so must you.”
“What about you?” I said. “Are you all right?”
He seemed unprepared for the question, but he nodded, and while I still had my nerve, I spoke again. “What will you do now that—well, now that you can’t work anymore?”
He sighed. “I’ll be getting some money from the accident. It’ll be enough to live on for a while and when I’m ready, I’ll go home.”
“Home? I thought this was your home.”
“No,” he said, in way that made me think he’d given it great thought. “Once, it might have been. Not now.”
He looked away from me and continued as if he was directing his words to someone else in the room. “…All I’ve known here is death and pain and strangeness. I want to go back where there are people who know me, who speak my language and understand me.”
“I thought you didn’t have any family left in Italy.”
“An uncle. A few cousins. But there are others, people who knew my father who will welcome me when I get there. Had you never thought of that, Darcy?”
His voice was even but I could tell that something had made him angry. I didn’t answer directly. “Well, don’t let me keep you from going home to all those people who are waiting for you with open arms.”
He looked at me. “It’s not you who keeps me here.”
“I never thought it was. Probably one of those tarts in that house in the woods you were always visiting.”
“No.”
“Then who? Don’t keep me in suspense.”
“Jewel, obviously. I’d have thought you’d have known, but I forget how insensitive you are about anything other than food or shelter. She’s the one I stay for.”
“Jewel?”
“She was the only one in Galen who was ever really kind to me. Now that she’s dying, I won’t leave her. At the end, she may need me.” He inclined his head. “I don’t see Caroline or Jolene coming back here for anything. And even you may need me at the end— Oh, don’t be so quick to refuse. You think you are so strong. And maybe you have been, but it was only because you had her behind you.”
“Behind me? Jewel never once—”
“She didn’t have to,” he anticipated me. “You always knew she was there, whether you called on her or not. And when she’s not there anymore, you’re going to need someone.”
“I wasn’t the one who needed a wife to stay in this country. You were. Jewel and me got along fine long before you came and we’ll get along fine long after you’re gone.”
“Just the same,” he said, the anger gone out of his voice, “I’ll stay until the end…for her.”
Then, Jewel called us in to dinner.
It took her months to die, her lungs rotting away slowly in her chest, and even then, when she got back a little of her strength, she’d ask me for a cigarette. I always lit it up for her. It was too late to matter now, but I thought that I had never seen anything more obscene than the sight of her using her last bit of wind to suck on it. Then again, at least she’d never chewed.
Luca went in to see her every day, but he could never force himself to stay for long. He was the kind who could stand pain, but not to watch it. Having to watch it takes a different kind of fortitude. Soon, he would always leave her room, white-faced, to go back to his chores. Hard work seemed to purge him somehow, and the exhaustion that followed dragging that bad leg around with him all day, I suppose, gave him some kind of peace.
My conversations with Jewel went down some peculiar byways in those last months and it drove the point home to me how much we are ever to remain strangers to each other on this earth, no matter how close the connection. But some of the mystery that was Mary Margaret Willickers was solved for me. For one thing, I’d always assumed she was the only child of the reverend and his wife simply because she had never talked about any brothers or sisters. Turns out she’d had a brother all right.
“His name was Henry,” Jewel told me, “but we called him Joss. He was five years older than me. I adored him. So did my mama before she died, and I guess that was what the reverend had against him. When he was sixteen, he left home and stowed away on a ship for England. There were some of Mama’s people still in Cornwall and he wanted to know them. He promised one day he would send for me and we’d be together again. He said he would write to me and I should be sure to meet the postman first because the reverend was sure to tear up the letters if he got his hands on them. He didn’t write for a long time and when he did it was to tell me that he’d joined the army with some cousins we had over there. He thought it was going to be a wonderful adventure, going to war. He’d just been in a big battle in Belgium in August, his regiment and a French one. He’d gotten hurt bad and was in a hospital in Paris. But he wasn’t really writing to me about that. He wanted me to know about something that had happened to him in case he died. He said that they’d been retreating because they were being slaughtered by the Germans, and being overrun, they didn’t see any way out. But that was when they
