The Sea Between Us by Sue Monkress

1417

               Ain’e gazed at the ship, far down below the rocky cliffs, swaying on the Irish Sea. Before today, she would take such pleasure in this breath-taking view from her precarious perch; she’d always longed to take a voyage – a long one, somewhere to the other side of the world. Today, she grieved. O Keegan! The British flags on the tall mast fluttered, she imagined, in a personal farewell to her.  Though the fierce north wind forced her to clutch her shawl tightly around her, she watched until the ship was a dot on the horizon, nearly out of sight. 

               As her bright copper-colored hair fluttered in the breeze, suddenly wrapping forcefully around her neck in a foreboding gesture, Ain’e remembered the tearful hymn the towns-folk sang that morning over the grave of a local sailor: “Go ye, now, into the heaven. Peace to you, beloved one, who gave your life for others.” One of few who had lately returned, but even he was too ill for recovery. So many had perished, on voyages just such as the one she watched. She visualized unmarked graves on a foreign shore. This fight with France had taken a mighty toll already. And why must Irishmen be taken to fight for the British?  T'aint right!

               A lone tear accompanying her disheartened thoughts; she spoke out loud: “O, our dear, good Lord, please bless this voyage. I am so a’feared I will never see me love again.” 

---

2020

           Annalee woke, looking around the room, initially confused. Light peeked through the sheer curtains on the windows. The familiar pictures on the dresser and her pink housecoat lying across the end of the bed where she’d laid it the night before suddenly clarified where she was. Just then, her newlywed husband, electric razor in hand, peeked his head around the doorway from their bathroom and, seeing her awake, enthused:  “Mornin’, babe.”

           “Good morning to you.” She glanced at the clock on the nightstand and quickly jerked her legs over the side of the bed, sitting up.  “Oh my, it’s nearly seven o’clock! Why didn’t you wake me, Honey?”

            “You were sleeping so soundly, I hated to disturb you. Especially after all the long days you’ve had lately. I wish you didn’t have to go into work, but was about to rouse you.”

           Annalee rubbed her eyes. “I just had the most vivid dream!”

           Matthew laid the razor down and sat on the edge of the bed, staring into Annalee’s sleepy eyes. “I hope it was good and … about me. You moaned just a few minutes ago.” He slid his fingers through her silky, strawberry-colored hair, combing it away from her shoulder. He pulled down the strap of her nightgown and kissed her shoulder, tickling her skin with the unshaved area of his chin. “We could make it so now,” he teased.

           “Well, that would be lovely, but as you know, I need to get around.” She pecked his cheek and pushed herself out of bed. “If you’ll share your space, I’m heading to shower to wake up this sleepy head. The dream was about a lovely Irish woman. I’ll have to tell you all about it … and maybe more … tonight.” She grinned mischievously at this man she adored.

           “I’ll be waiting!” He winked and went back to his shaving.

---

           Annalee thought about her dream off and on all day. Normally she wouldn’t even be able to recall images from her sleep cycle, but this one was so real, it stayed in her head. It seemed like … perhaps she’d dreamed it before but couldn’t remember it like she was remembering now. It did give her a nice brain break when she was having a hard time concentrating on accounts ledgers. So much to do since accepting this marketing rep job. She loved her job; after all, she was a people-person. But when her manager talked about lots of travel, she didn’t envision driving around and around the state in a tedious circle of her territorial responsibility, checking gasoline stations’ inventories and bathroom cleanliness!  Not the glamorous, intriguing job she imagined, with journeys across the oceans, beautiful scenery, and meeting lovely people from other countries! Oh well … it was a living and took some of the financial pressure off Matthew. She chided herself: I need to be thankful. Maybe a better job will materialize later … 

---    

               Ain’e spoke with the few battered soldiers who’d returned from war. But no one remembered her fiancée, Keegan. She finally decided to book passage to England, in route to France. She had a rough journey, but arriving in Cornwall, she must ask many more questions before someone will finally tell her that many English (and Irish) prisoners may still be held in the Bitche prison, “the place of tears,” all but forgotten.  Hearing the terrible details of their torture, Ain’e was determined to find him. 

---

           Annalee woke, unnerved again about her dreams – they were becoming so real, so vivid, Annalee believed are are seeming more her reality than the present. Like such strange ‘déjà vu’, she sometimes felt as if she was going a little mad. She wondered if this dream could possibly be a past life? Or DNA from a distant ancestor embedded in her memories? She can picture Ain’e so distinctly, feels as if she is Ain’e, and worries about the lost fiancée, Keegan. But strangely, she cannot picture Keegan’s face.  

           This latest dream showed her terrible visions of the treatment accorded to prisoners of war, on both sides. Maybe it was that movie I watched last week. I had to get these details somewhere. In her dreams, in England, French captives were confined in the hulks, floating prisons, obsolete men-of-war converted into places of containment. Some were brutally thrust into the midst of a wretched, hideous crowd; among corpses resembling those as if just risen from the grave, with their hollow eyes, deathly complexions, bent backs, ragged beards, emaciated bodies scarcely covered with rags. In containers one hundred, forty feet long, by forty feet wide and five feet high, some six hundred persons or more slept in hammocks, two tiers of them, each hammock containing a flock mattress and one thin blanket. 

           Annalee shuddered. But at Bitche in France, the commander of the French army's retribution confinement to the English dogs was even worse ...

---

           Aine learned from sympathetic country folk that both at Verdun and at Bitche prisons, indeed everywhere, escapes were attempted and often successfully achieved. Imprisoned soldiers had, with or without outside help, bored through walls, or iron doors undermined, or even made descent into deep ditches by cords prepared from bedding and clothes. In more than one case a tunnel was driven from the lowest cave into the outside ditch. She was encouraged by this news of their industrious escapades as she traveled into France. 

               With the help of a local Frenchman and the funds she carried from her family and Keegan’s, Ain’e located and gained covert access to Bitche prison. She wandered through the bodies, her heart crying for all the inhabitants. Just as she was about to give up hope, she heard a desperate voice call out: “Ain’e!!” She turned back and found … Keegan? Oh yes! Lying on a pile of rags, filthy and very ill, but he was alive! His appearance so terrible, were it not for his weak voice, Ain’e would not have recognized him; would never have found him.  She fell to her knees on the floor, pressing his sagging head to her chest. Below his ragged pants worn off at the knees, she spied that he had a festering leg wound, which she bound up with her neckerchief. She pressed him to try a bit of food that she had smuggled in, under her dress.  

               Later, with the help of an inside guard she'd enticed, Ain’e dragged Keegan to the front gate of the prison. The bribed guard spoke a few commanding, hasty words of French to the keeper of the gate, and after the gate closed, they laid him in a cart wagon pulled by an old plow horse, where she hid him beneath straw and pumpkins. 

Ain'e drove the cart by day, stopping only to fetch water to give Keegan a drink and a bite of bread. She poured a bit of water over the wound and re-tied it, wishing she had medicine for him. Each night, she warmed him by clutching him close to her under the straw. After a grueling three-day journey, they arrived at the dock of a ship with counterfeit French flags temporarily hoisted, destined for England. 

               Once on the channel, the stormy water jostled the ship roughly to and fro, and Keegan wretched up every little morsel that Ain’e could coax him to eat.  She begged a bottle from a passenger and gave Keegan a few draughts she hoped would warm him and numb his pain. She also poured a bit of the alcohol onto the ugly gash in his leg. She stroked the greasy dark curls, remembering how beautiful they were, wishing she could make him comfortable.  Soon, love.

               He slept only a short while, then weakly touched her face with his dirty fingers. “Thanks be to you, me dearest one. Jest one more glim'se of ye is mor’an I dared ever hope fer.” 

               “Shhhh, rest. We’ll be ‘ome soon,” she consoled.   But in the night, before they arrived to shore, Keegan’s lack of medical attention and starvation took its terrible cost.  In her arms, he succumbed to the sick infection that was just too heavy for his war-weary heart.  He closed his eyes for the last time, feverishly murmuring “I's ome now. With me Ain’e, me angel.” She cradled his head on her lap, softly crying, stroking his face, and desperately holding onto him, all through the long night. She lamented she’d not even time to properly wash his precious frame – and especially that terrible wound -- only his dear dirty face.  

               The next morning, Ain’e watched, trembling, as the ship’s crew gently disposed of Keegan’s body over the side of the ship.  As the men turned back to their tasks, quietly murmuring condolences, Ain’e, overcome with grief, climbed over the edge of the ship and hurled herself into the sea to join her Keegan. 

                                                              ---

           Light glinted through the window early that morning, waking Annalee from her last dream about her Irish friends from the past. She gasped, remembering all that happened to them, her heart physically aching for Ain’e and her lost love. Tears began to trickle down her face. She stretched out her hand to gratefully clasp her husband’s, ever so gently, so as not to wake him. Only now, after finally seeing a clear view of Aine’s love’s face as it was washed does Annalee realize: it is that of her husband, Matthew, peacefully asleep next to her.  

~Sue Monkress~