The Celtic Knot

Miracles

Kathleen can hardly bring herself to open her eyes the next morning. The full nine days are up. She made an enormous promise, and surely God can’t fail to answer prayers like that. She lies still a moment, willing a costume into being right there on the end of the bed, as if wishing hard enough might make it appear.

Madge leans over her and pries one eyelid open with a finger. She teases that she thought Kathleen had died in the night, since Kathleen is usually up so early these days. Kathleen pushes her hand away and retorts there’s no fear of that happening to her, sitting up and glancing around the room as casually as she can manage. She doesn’t tell Madge that the real reason she hasn’t been leaping out of bed lately is that she’s done with her novena. There’s no sign of the dancing costume anywhere. How can that be?

Could Sister Eucharia be right after all? Could God be angry with her for asking for something so trivial? Surely God would understand how important it was to her, and surely He’d be more broad-minded about it than Sister Eucharia. Or maybe it’s worse than that. Maybe God has decided He doesn’t want Kathleen for a nun after all, and she simply isn’t worthy. Worse still, the feis is only three weeks off, and she still has no costume and no sign of one coming. With a heavy heart, she gets dressed. She decides, too, that Saint Bernadette can’t have been much of a miracle worker after all, and resolves to leave her out of her prayers from now on. She reasons, anyway, that any friend of old Yuki’s can hardly be much of a saint.

Kathleen drags herself down to the kitchen for breakfast, disappointment weighing on her feet like lead. Mam is at the stove ladling out the porridge. She doesn’t say her usual good morning, did she sleep well, just a sharp “Kathleen!” that makes Kathleen’s stomach drop. She wonders for a moment if she’s in some kind of trouble, though she already has so much weighing on her that one more scolding barely registers.

But Mam only tells her that she heard Kathleen was picked for the feis, and that Kathleen never breathed a word of it to her. Mam beams at her. Kathleen isn’t sure how to take this, but she manages a small smile back. Mam asks why on earth she didn’t say anything. Kathleen starts to answer, gets no further than “Well… well…,” and Mam, not waiting to hear the rest of it, sweeps straight on.

Now Mam declares, turning brisk and businesslike, that Kathleen will need a dancing costume for the feis. These Irish dancers get all dolled up in those Gaelic League clothes, with harps and shamrocks and goodness knows what stitched all over them, and Mam means to see Kathleen dressed every bit as well as the rest of them. She states she’ll go straight over to Frawley’s that morning to see what remnants they have that might do.

Kathleen stands up on a kitchen chair while Mam turns her round and about, sizing her up with her eye alone. Mam wonders aloud whether six yards would do it. Then she gropes for the word, that shawly thing that goes over the back, and Kathleen supplies it: the brat. Mam nods, and then there’s the skirt to think of, too, which has to be full. She supposes pleats, or maybe just half pleats, since a full pleated skirt is desperately hard on material. But Mam says that if she cuts carefully, she thinks she can manage the whole costume out of six yards.

Kathleen’s heart lifts. Mam doesn’t seem the least bit worried about what any of this will cost. She should have told Mam about the costume from the very start and spared herself the whole miserable row with Sister Eucharia and all the worry that came after it.

Kathleen spends the rest of the morning glowing, delighted at how things are turning out. It feels like a true miracle. Then it strikes her, all at once, that of course this is exactly what a miracle looks like. She should have known better than to expect God to conjure a costume out of thin air by magic. That only happens in storybooks. This, Mam bustling off to Frawley’s with six yards in mind, was His way of doing it all along.

The only trouble now is that Kathleen has gone and promised to become a nun when she grows up in exchange. Perhaps she should have held her fire before striking a bargain like that at all, or, better yet, simply told Mam about the costume in the first place, rather than going through the whole business of the novena and the bargain and the nine days of dread. She has, she realizes, probably signed away her whole life for nothing. It was a very childish idea to think it would work that way at all.

But there’s no time to be fretting over that now. There’s a costume to be planned, and Kathleen is going to be gorgeous in it. Mam will see to every bit of it. Kathleen is, for once, in perfectly safe hands.