THE HEART NEVER LIES
Chapter Ten
Jack
I stayed on in St. Jude’s Charity
Mission long after I recovered physically, but my brain stubbornly refused to
release any memories. The hospital staff were very kind and offered me a
low-paid position as an orderly in return for hard work fetching and carrying.
I had nowhere else to go.
I did not know who I was. If I
looked in the mirror, I saw a slim young man of about twenty with sleek blond
hair, very blue eyes, and a firm mouth. My hands and fingers were surprisingly
long, tapered, and not work-worn for one of steerage class, but did not yield
what I had done for a living before. I felt like a walking enigma. I could not
even remember being on the Titanic, the unsinkable ship. How had I gotten
tickets for such a grand liner? Was I married? Where was home? Just blanks, no
nearer to discovering anything.
I worked hard all day cleaning,
pushing patients around, and lifting them. I collapsed onto my small cot at
night in the storeroom, exhausted.
Six long weeks had passed.
Slowly, I discovered by picking up the newspaper that I could read, and read
well. I scanned the list of the dead and the alive off the Titanic lists, but
nothing rang a bell.
One afternoon, the hospital
laundry returned the homespun rough clothes I had been wearing that night after
discovering them by accident in the spare pile of clothes they had. I had been
wearing borrowed stuff.
I put my hand in a trouser pocket
and pulled out a screwed-up piece of paper. Opening it, frowning, I saw that it
was thick paper and there was a partially washed out--the charcoal had
smudged--small picture of the head and shoulders of a girl with wide, haunted
eyes, a wry smile on her full lips, and tumbling, rich curls. Her dress was one
of an upper class girl--elaborate. She was very beautiful. Was she a key to my
past? There was also a smudged signature on the piece of paper. I could make
out the initials J something. Was this my artwork?
Trembling, I ran back to the
nurses’ station, asked for pencil and paper, and went back to the storeroom. I
started to let my mind wander and the pencil skimmed across the paper. I looked
down and saw I had drawn a single flower. A rose! I could draw. That was
something new I had discovered. I could draw.
"Boy! Boy!" I heard one
of the nurses calling me. I came out to find her, the drawing in my hand still.
The nurse stood in the corridor. Standing next to her was a portly woman,
obviously with money, in a warm, stylish gown with a hat worn jauntily to one
side. "This is Mrs. Brown," the nurse said in awe. "She has
kindly agreed to be a benefactress of St. Jude’s. This is a young boy who came
off the Titanic with amnesia. He gives us a hand."
Mrs. Brown did not say anything.
She was staring at me with large, wide, brown eyes.
"Jack," she said.
"Jack Dawson, you’re alive? I thought you’d drowned."
We sat in a side room and talked.
She was concerned about me. She seemed like a generous, caring lady, and she
knew me as Jack Dawson.
"What do you remember,
Jack?"
"Nothing," I said.
"I have only discovered that I can draw." I passed her the smudged
picture of the girl.
She looked at it intently. Tears
filled her eyes. "Jack," she said simply, "this is Rose."
I looked at her in puzzlement.
"I don’t remember any Rose. I wish I could," I said.
She took a long, hard breath and
announced that I would have to come back home with her and she would take care
of me. She wanted to, and could explain what had happened on the Titanic.
So, I left St. Jude’s with the
doctor’s blessing and went home with Molly Brown.