Leon Uris (18 page)

“Thanks, Des, thanks awfully. I really needed to be primed up on this. I’d all but forgotten.”

“Atty,” he croaked, “have mercy. Up till now, with all our shenanigans we have been able to live without fear in our daily lives. As of the minute you put your hand on the gun and Bible, fear is in. Fear for Theo, for Emma, for Rachael. Fear of who is looking at our house from over the road. Fear of who is stalking us.”

“Then say no, Des.”

“No to what? Exit the Fitzpatricks, finest fair weather soldiers Erin ever had. Soon as we tried to stuff a few pistols in Atty’s brassiere, they cut and run…live in London or some such, don’t they?”

“Stop beating up on yourself. Both of us were heading for this from the day we were born.”

“Stop…think…. It boils down to one thing and one thing alone—is it worth our three children?”

“Shall we wake them up and ask them?”

“Well, why bother to ask me? Your mind is made up.”

Atty burst into tears, a strange sight and sound. Des let her alone and paced. “The Irish Republican Brotherhood,” he moaned. “Well, won’t I be a busy old scut working out legal defenses for that crowd.” He stopped and held the thick velvet drapes whose feline texture somehow managed to soothe him during his storms. “Two thousand rifles in a Bradford colliery pit. Good God, it’s come to this, has it? And the illusions I’ve lured myself into, prancing
about in the old courtroom, spitting out hemlock-laced words at those wigged clowns. One could almost talk himself into the feeling we’d be able to run the Brits out of Ireland without bloodshed.”

Atty stopped her crying abruptly. “Well?”

“If I were Long Dan Sweeney, I’d sure as hell want you on the Supreme Council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and that’s for a fact, now.”

“Will you give me your blessings?”

“Of course,” he said quietly. “But I have new doubts and new fear.”

“So do I. Des, I’ll tell you what I believe. If the children were to learn in later life that I turned down the Brotherhood out of concern for them, they’d never forgive me. We have raised them to stand for something.”

“Aye,” Des said, “so it is.” Des then plunged darkly into his stack of briefs and Atty excused herself.

She lay awake torturously counting off the minutes, listening to Des mumble aloud in the adjoining room, scratching away on his legal pad. She wanted so strongly for him to sidle up next to her, put his arms about her, pet her a bit, and tell her everything was going to be grand. God, she wanted to be held!

That was not Des and Atty. He worked into exhaustion, filled to the brim with whiskey, and dropped into bed with a thud. Atty reached for him, but he was already turned away from her, and, in a moment, was dead asleep.

When Conor Larkin first came down to Deny from his village of Ballyutogue, he took a fancy to Maud Tully. Maudie was a Bogside lass of generations’ standing, determined to escape the “life sentence” at the shirt factory that had consumed her family and friends.

She became an early daughter of the Gaelic revival, learning the ancient language and spending hours she could scarcely spare in the uplifting environs of Celtic Hall.

The hall was long the office of Kevin O’Garvey as head of the Land League, people’s solicitor, Member of Parliament, and political healer to an endless line of impoverished petitioners. With all his titles, Kevin O’Garvey never knew the surplus of a pound sterling. If he had tuppence in his jacket, he always found someone who needed it more than himself.

After factory hours and a quick meal, Maudie worked for Kevin as an unpaid assistant, secretary, or whatever help she could render to him.

Maudie, like the rest of Bogside, was enamored with Conor Larkin’s arrival, as he became a saint without wings. A great lad on the football pitch, he lectured to turnaway crowds and lifted the hopes of the wanes of Bogside.

Conor and Maudie became truly fond of each other, but he was just putting his toe in the water and she was
well launched on the mission to escape Bogside. Setting romantic fervor aside, they remained as “brother and sister.”

It was an entirely different circumstance when Maudie laid eyes on the handsome Myles McCracken, who had the voice of a songbird, and gentle and honorable ways. Myles had followed Conor from the village of Ballyutogue and gone to work in Conor’s forge as an apprentice. Maudie figured that with Myles she could follow her dreams out of Deny. Love, marriage, and pregnancy, not necessarily in that order, befell the devoted couple.

To pinch every penny so they might buy a forge in a few years, she contined to work at the shirt factory, and to save rent they moved into an already overcrowded wee house and slept on bedrolls in an alcove in the kitchen.

Brigid Larkin arrived to claim Myles too late.

Myles was a good lunker, but it was Maud, with her smarts born of Bogside, and her compassion that drove her to work for Kevin. She was there for Conor when he needed it most.

Maudie helped Conor work his way through the death of Tomas Larkin. She was there for him when the sudden departure of his boyhood hero, Andrew Ingram, left him puzzled and pained.

She was there when, in a fury of defiance, Conor’s wee forge entered a bid against Caw & Train Graving for an array of ironwork around the country. Caw & Train belonged to the Earl of Foyle, and Conor Larkin was burned out.

Aye, the burnout. That was the moment of challenge and decision. Now, a strange thing happened. Conor’s forge was rebuilt instantly with “secret funds from America” and, stranger still, subcontract work began to fall his way from Caw & Train.

Maudie counted the minutes until Conor would demand to know some of the smoky things happening behind him…but Conor never made the demand.

Instead, he was swept up with the restoration of the great screen in Hubble Manor, and a changed Conor Larkin began to emerge.

Although he still showed up on the football field and drank at Nick Blaney’s with the lads and had a viscount as a water boy for the team, there was a definite drifting away from the hot spot of history, ideals, and ideas that emanated from Celtic Hall.

He complained from time to time that he was so consumed with the great screen that his mind was limp to everything else. Yet he wooed and won a number of ladies, all without the power or ability to win him.

Maudie wondered, was Conor Larkin destined to remain a dreamer, or hadn’t the woman showed up yet, or…was she there in Hubble Manor?

When the great screen was done and Conor eased back into Bogside life, it wasn’t quite the same. Maudie saw him spending less time at Celtic Hall, growing acrimonious with Kevin O’Garvey, and otherwise haunted and ill at ease with himself. Had Deny itself grown too small for him? What was left to do there?

Then came the blow that shocked them all. Kevin O’Garvey indefinitely postponed his Commission of Inquiry into the tinderbox Witherspoon & McNab shirt factory.

Maudie was eight months pregnant and planning to leave the shirt factory in a week or two. Myles had sped up his apprenticeship so quickly working on the great screen that Conor felt Myles was ready to take over his own blacksmith shop, and one was coming up for sale.

Late one evening in Celtic Hall, Maudie was tidying up Kevin’s office when Conor arrived and parked himself at Kevin’s desk.

“We have to talk, luv,” Conor said.

“Indeed, we do,” she said locking his door and pulling
down the shade and taking a seat. “The answer to your question, before you ask it, is that I don’t know why Kevin is calling off the investigation of the shirt factory.”

“Then let’s try to think of a reason,” Conor said. “There are questions I should have asked months, nae, years ago, but I stuck my conscience in a dark corner and said, ’Stay there, conscience, things are going too well for me and I don’t want you hovering over me until I’m ready to come back and get you.’ But my fecking conscience didn’t listen. It refused to stay where I tried to hide it.”

“Glory be, it’s nice to know, Conor. I was wondering if you had become totally comfortable up at the manor.”

Conor ignored the barb and banged at the question he had avoided.

“How come I was able to rebuild so fast after I was burned out? How come his Lordship starts sending me more work than my shop can turn out?”

“Well, the story goes that her Ladyship had already spotted you as the man to rebuild her screen and to get you into the system.”

“That’s a fecking lie, Maudie. Where did Kevin O’Garvey get the money? And the money for a dozen Bogside enterprises? Who are the Americans supporting him? Why haven’t they even shown up quietly to see the results of their good works? ”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, Kevin knows, and he’s going to tell me the minute he’s back from London. I should have fecking demanded to know from day one instead of allowing this conspiring behind my back.”

“Are you all that innocent, Conor boy?”

“Maybe.”

“Yeah, yeah,” she said, “in a way you are. There was blood and heartbreak on the land and Kevin ran the Land League, but you only saw it in terms of the Fenian Rising and the hanging tree and glories of the past. Yes, even the famine had its romantic aspects. And here in Bogside,
Conor lad, let’s go into Celtic Hall and purge our pain with tales of Wolfe Tone and Emmet. You’re a bloody dreamer…you see us behind the veil of republican words to die by rather than to touch the pain with your own hands….

“And when you did get involved, you got a reprieve in Hubble and had something really heavenly, really ethereal, to keep republicanism tucked away in a fantasy corner.”

“Am I that naive?”

“Perhaps your greatest charm, Conor.”

“Unless you’ve twisted iron,” he cried, “you cannot understand what it means to a self-made anvil thumper like me to have a chance to create something of greater glory. I was consumed, Maudie, consumed.”

“And you wanted Caroline Hubble, plain and simple.”

As the wind oozed from him, Maudie’s eyes were on him, and not with a great deal of sympathy. No use trying to work around that girl.

“Aye, it was our work together. I didn’t make love to her….”

“But you loved her. And you used the grandeur of your commission to further your floating away from the real world.”

“Aye.”

“Welcome to Bogside, Conor. I don’t know what Kevin did and I don’t give a damn. Everything in Ireland is a deal. Our politicians have a monumental reputation for it. I do know I’ve taken him home night after night in agony from the pain of Bogside. He was burned out from looking at skinny kids filled with sores, old men and women by the age of ten, and drunks pitching pennies against the wall who never had a job from birth to death, and factory girls too tired to smile, much less make love. He was done in and you were his white knight… and you made your bloody deals by not demanding to know what you suspected because you wanted to stay in your dream with Caroline Hubble and with that screen.”

“Is that why Kevin called off the investigation of the factory? Did Roger Hubble pay him to set me and the others up in business? Is that it?”

“I don’t know,” she croaked.

“Say what you will, I’ve been betrayed by Kevin O’Garvey and probably Andrew Ingram as well. Well…I’m not taking their path. Kevin will tell me, the minute he returns from London, if he made the deal with Roger Hubble. We are going to close that fecking factory down. As for you, Maudie, stop, quit. Don’t go work there another day. I’m bloody sick of Conor Larkin!”

He felt her hand on his bowed head.

“That’s the way they do it, mon. If a golden one like yourself or Garvey shows you mean to take them on, they merely ease you into their system.”

“Maudie…Maudie…don’t go back into that factory.” “Soon, Conor, soon.”

What force, what combination offerees, could generate enough power to drive Conor Larkin out of Ireland?

Was it the fire at the Witherspoon & McNab shirt factory?

What was overdue to happen, happened. In the mining towns and out on sea you’re struck numb with fright when the disaster whistle screams ugly. As the whistle pierces over and over and over you move into desperate action gravitating in a run toward the trouble, gasping prayer, heart close to a burst, the most vile of fears consuming yourself.

The first thin spirals of smoke eked through the cracks into the air. Then came the blasts like cannonades shattering glass for a mile around, felling the on rushers, covering their ears as a hundred tongues of fire leapt from the factory windows.

There! On the rooftop! Women and children had gathered screaming their terror, dropping to their knees in prayer.

Fire bells! Whinnying, frothing horses!

Neither ladders nor water horses could reach the roof.

“They’re jumping!”

Conor and his mates pinned Myles McCracken to the ground as Maud leapt. Conor rushed over to pick her up. She broke in half. Myles and Maud’s unborn child splattered like a broken egg on the paving stones.

A blue and orange ball billowed over the top floors in
an all-consuming inferno. Within the building, the hollow cast-iron pillars splintered, cracked, then burst apart, and the factory gave up quickly and collapsed.

With the broken corpses laid out on a streetside morgue, another hour and another of water, pumping the River Foyle dry, poured in on the sizzling remains until the firemen could inch in.

Human fragments, skulls, a braid of hair, charred rosary beads, a shoe, bits, pieces, teeth, glasses, rings. Forty children under teen age…sixty pregnant women…a hundred and fifty-four, maybe more, maybe a few less…

Hail Mary…

Too few positive identifications. A common grave. Perhaps God would recognize them.

What could drive a Conor Larkin from Ireland? Was it the sudden and unexplained disappearance of Kevin O’Garvey?

Where did Kevin go? Why? What did Kevin know? Did they do away with him? Did he flee? We have to have Kevin O’Garvey or there is no chance of justice in Bogside…if there ever was, anyhow. Kevin man, where are you, now?

Would disgust over the cover-up have driven Conor Larkin out of Ireland?

Martin Mulligan, a vagrant, was picked up for arson. Mulligan had worked at the factory stables years earlier, had been fired, and had sworn he was going to wreak vengeance. Mulligan signed a confession that several Catholic constables swore to at the inquiry. The next morning, after confessing, Mulligan was found hanged in his cell. It was deemed a suicide.

Twenty witnesses at the inquiry testified that Mulligan had made the threats. What never came up was that he was an illiterate and therefore could neither read nor sign the confession.

Another two dozen witnesses—municipal inspectors, architects, factory owners—testified to the safety of the building.

No mention was made of toilets that did not work for
years or windows stuck shut with grime or sand buckets whose bottoms had rotted out or fire hoses that had not worked in a decade or that no fire drill had taken place in ten years because the stairs and landings were too crammed with bolts of linen to move past…a building whose very design all but guaranteed a disaster….

So, the Earl of Foyle went his jolly way and grieving families had a few quid tossed to them.

That’s it! Myles McCracken was admitted to the insane asylum and killed himself. That might have driven a Conor Larkin from Ireland.

Or was it that night after Conor had finished his rounds trying to tend the broken men of Bogside?

Conor climbed up to his flat, a wave of deep sighs holding back some of the pain. Four months had passed, but still there came the rain of ashes after every wind, and it seemed that the smell of rotten corpses found a way out of the rubble. He sensed the presence of someone.

“Who’s here?” he rasped.

“Caroline.”

He lit the lamp and saw her huddled on the settee, cloaked in a monk’s cloth hooded cape so as not to attract notice. On sight of Conor she saw the toll that had been taken on him. He slumped into his reading chair.

“I’ve written you a dozen letters,” she said.

“I’ve not received them,” he answered.

“I never sent them. I tore them up. They were all inadequate to set my feelings down. I don’t feel very good about myself,” she said voice trembling. “I have an overwhelming need to face you.”

“Why?”

“I am torn by a terrible notion about us.”

“Caroline, there is so much confusion and guilt about what happened. That factory did not burn down because you and I fell in love.”

“Part of the reason it burned down was that I am the Countess of Foyle and part of the establishment that allowed it to happen.”

“Good God, Caroline, if there was ever an aristocrat out here who made some efforts to better things, it was you. You couldn’t have known.”

“I didn’t know because I didn’t want to know…. I didn’t know because I never went above the first floor of that wretched place. There was conspiracy on the wind and I made it a point not to find out.”

It was all too far gone to play at games. “Nor did I,” Conor said. He said what he had held in till this moment. “All right. I smelled something wrong the first time Kevin O’Garvey postponed the investigation. His whole life was pointed to bringing the Earl up before his committee and exposing that factory. When he called it off, I did not challenge him because…I didn’t want to know, either! I didn’t want to have to face my hero and have him confess to me that he had made a deal. Not hard to figure out what the deal was, is it? I had my forge, I was on the way. I didn’t say a word when the second postponement came. And then,” he croaked, “nothing was going to take me away from the great screen, and no one except you could understand that. So, we didn’t want to know and we joined the conspiracy by our silence.”

“Conor, hear me. I cannot rationalize this, but there is a reason for our behavior. No man has ever taken on a great work of art without paying a terrible price and creating terrible pain for those he loves the most. But nothing…nothing…nothing could have kept that building from collapsing after my husband and Kevin went into some kind of deal.”

“I keep trying to tell myself that…”

“Hang on to that belief,” she said. “We were both trapped by the system. I came here to plead forgiveness for my part and beg you not to hate me.”

“I believe you. I never went above the first story, myself. God, woman, I could never hate you.”

She arose and came to him and mussed his hair and kissed his forehead. “Take care,” she whispered.

“Aye.”

And she was gone, into a snowfall of ashes.

What was it that drove Conor Larkin out of Ireland? Was it the terminal lethargy of the men of Bogside? They were worse than dead for they were living dead with no spirit of rage, not even the instinct for survival.

They had accepted the system of birth-to-death unemployment, birth-to-death poverty, birth-to-death humiliation.

Where in the name of Jesus were the Kilty Larkins!

For a year and a day Conor took to the roads of Ireland seeking the old Fenians, men who had done battle, Gaelic warriors of old. He found them. One or two in wee villages sitting at the end of the bar stool. The living legends were glassy-eyed drunks repeating their imagined valor one more time for one more pint.

What few Irishmen remained worthy of a rising were away in South Africa fighting the Brits. Seamus O’Neill was among them. They were all gone, Tomas and Kilty and Seamus and Andrew Ingram and Kevin O’Garvey and, in the most heart-wrenching sense, Caroline Hubble.

The thin thread of keeping Conor Larkin fell to his younger brother Dary, a seminary novice. Dary was able to transfer to the diocese of Derry in temporary service to help contend with the tragedy of Bogside. Wee Dary became a rock, a healer, and man of God in the ultimate sense. And, he was his brother’s keeper.

One more bombastic drunk, one more bombastic hangover. Conor sat dizzy in the middle of his forge, which had not seen the glow of the fire for over a year.

“I have to return to the seminary and my studies,” Dary announced abruptly.

Conor anguished. “How can I do without you, wee Dary?”

“It’s nigh on to springtime,” Dary said. “I saw some daisies pushing through the rubble. Enough time has passed, Conor. You and I have to have our go at it, now.”

“Ah, what do you want of me, Dary? I’ve prostrated myself before your throne. I’m awash in guilt! You know my dark secret. Maybe the Lord took vengeance on me for loving Caroline Hubble?”

“Stop babbling, you’re wracked with pity.”

“You want me in a monastery talking this over with Jesus, don’t you?”

“Tell you what I want, Conor. I want you to get on the next ship out of Ireland.”

Conor gnarled and tried to weep at the same time. But the tears were all long spent on poor dear Myles. That was the last time he’d cried. “Go to hell, Father Dary.”

“Well then,” Dary pressed, “you’ve a few choices. You’ve done your year and a day looking for stout-hearted fighting men to no avail. You can take on the British singlehanded or take a shortcut and rip Roger Hubble’s Adam’s apple out with your bare hands.”

“You’re a kid and you’re talking like a Jesuit. Say what you mean and mean what you say.”

“I’m also a Larkin,” Dary said. “I’ve a drop or two of republican blood in my veins, but I’ll not go the way of the gunman. I’m also an Irishman. What I am now most of all is your brother. I know you better than you know yourself. You’re very fuzzy, and what I see clearly is a man who is fast becoming a danger to himself.”

Conor stopped battling his brother long enough to allow Dary’s words to make their way in. “You really want me out of Ireland, don’t you, Dary?”

“Aye, I do, until you can get reacquainted with yourself.”

Conor was always baffled by Dary. He grew up liking skirts and bosoms well enough. Had he taken a stand against the priesthood, Finola could never have forced
him. He was his own lad and he chose the priesthood. He made a deliberate choice that there was something better in the world than what he saw around him. Who could argue? He alone, among the Larkins, was at peace with himself.

“Dary…”

“You’re almost to the point where you’ll go to the bottom of the wall in Bogside and pitch pennies and never draw a sober breath again. Or, you’ll go killer. You’re a promise that will never be fulfilled. Look at this forge-it’s desolate. Myles and Maud are not coming back and you ” can’t take on the British presence in Ireland by yourself.

“Sail the seas, Conor,” Dary went on. “Take control of 1 the memories of Caroline Hubble and tuck them away. There is a woman somewhere who wants to come in to you, but you’ll not find her until Caroline stops blocking her way. What you need is space. You’ll know when it’s time to come back.”

“I know I have to fight.”

“Aye, you’ll have to fight. I know I won’t be able to stop you. But fight, man, when you have your wits and mind keenly focused. What you seek now is revenge, and revenge for the sake of revenge. Revenge is not to one man. Kill Roger Hubble and the miseries of Ireland will still be there. Don’t give your life away. Make it count.”

The two brothers walked through the Bogside, then to the quay and the shipping office. A likely vessel was due in in a week.

Conor hitched up his livery horses to the small buck-board and rode out into the countryside, over the Burntollet Bridge and to the gates of the seminary. Somehow, it still burned Conor to see his brother disappear behind the wall. Dary smiled.

“I’m ready,” Dary said.

“I’m ready as well,” Conor said.

Dary soon vanished from his sight.