Leon Uris (2 page)
Authors: Redemption
Tags: #Europe, #Ireland, #Literary Collections, #Historical Fiction, #Fiction, #Romance, #Sagas, #Historical, #Australian & Oceanian, #New Zealand, #General, #New Zealand Fiction, #History
If the earth were flat, New Zealand would have fallen off it a long time ago, it’s that far from Ireland.
Can ever a man be more stricken and disoriented than a penniless immigrant, out of steerage, upon arrival in a land so far removed?
The canvas cots in the passenger hold of the tramp steamer
Nova Scotia
were stacked so tight a man could not roll over or even sleep on his side. Heat from the adjoining boiler room often drove him on deck in any weather to keep from fainting. After he forced down the slop fed him in a zoolike manner, he’d head for the railing, often as not.
When the hills behind Lyttelton came into view ninety-two days after departure from Derry, Liam Larkin dropped to his knees and thanked the first thirty or forty saints who came to mind.
He wobbled down the gangplank, one of God’s forgotten miseries, where he presented himself, pale and trembling, to his sponsor, Squire Bert Hargrove. A lot of the lads landed skinny and shaken from the long voyage, but as Bert looked Liam over, he thought he’d bought himself a bad nag. At least Liam Larkin and Bert Hargrove shared enough of a basic language so they could understand one another…barely.
Certain he was in for three years of Caribbean-like
slave labor, the anxiety ebbed from Liam into a state that resembled euphoria.
Liam shared a clean bunkhouse with a wooden floor and a heating stove with six other station hands. Three of them were paddies like himself, contracted for forty months’ labor to pay off their passage. In actual fact, Liam was replacing one who was about to strike out on his own. So, by God, maybe it wasn’t going to be total slavery.
He knew he was going to be worked hard, but he had never known much more than hard work. Bert Hargrove was pleased. He’d bought himself a good horse.
Some of the changes dawned on Liam subtly while others crashed through. The vast and incredible difference was that this land was not fueled by anger…or fear…or hatred. Was this an actual place? he asked himself every night.
Take the scroggins. Indeed, the station house and the bunk house were fed from the very same kitchen and the food was served to the men by the three Hargrove daughters. And a man could eat all he could hold. Liam thought back. Maybe six times back in Ireland in his village of Ballyutogue he had left the table with his belly bulging. He ate here this way every single night. The cook knew fourteen ways to prepare mutton, which was a hell of a lot better than fourteen ways to cook potatoes. There were vegetables he had neither seen nor heard of.
Food was only one matter. In the beginning New Zealand reminded him of Ireland, it was that green and hilly, and likewise the weather was either dirty, going to be dirty, or had just been dirty.
The hills were grander than hills, they were wondrous white-haired old mountains. Where they sloped toward the sea, they plummeted as fjords so fearsome as to shock a man’s breath away. Not only did this land run higher, it ran deeper with black earth.
New Zealanders were a stoic lot, not unlike the dour Ulstermen of County Donegal. Like the Ulstermen, loyalty here was to the Crown. Yet the tone of New Zealand patri
otism was placid. Could it be such that he would never again have to hear the terrorizing rattle of the Lembeg drum and the hysterical rantings of the Orangemen and their preachers?
As with Ulster, New Zealand’s union with Britain was the centerpiece of its existence. But how could two places, islands…green…with mountains and sea…be so different and share the same planet? There were no whipping posts here, no hanging tree, no agony of the oppressed, poor little sheep rustling, smuggling, and moonshining, and he never saw an eviction, not one, not once.
Even the native Maori had apparently been subdued rather easily and were left with their culture and their dignity. Or so it seemed.
Aye, New Zealand was Protestant country, but an absence of game and fishing wardens in the bountiful streams told the whole story.
Fortunately, there were enough families, runholders, and miners around of the True Faith to hold Mass twice a month in one of Methven’s three public houses, otherwise padlocked on Sundays due to stringent “blue laws.”
Their priest, Father Gionelli of Eye-tallion extract, wended his way up from Christchurch on the second and fourth Sundays of the month in a three-donkey train. His arrival seemed so Joseph-and-Mary-like.
Confessions were dispensed with first, but there wasn’t too much to sin about in the mountain stations of the South Island, except for the drinking of the previous night, impure thoughts, and occasional fornication between man and sheep, a practice that never appealed to Liam.
With the Mass and sacraments finished, Father Gionelli read and wrote letters to and from home and transferred funds and consoled homesickness. His fractured English and their fractured English developed a melody all its own.
Liam Larkin was never truly homesick, only pained and angry over his dismissal from Ballyutogue and Ireland. He liked it here, to the utmost.
The pastures of New Zealand’s South Island gave a wonderful soft feel under his Wellington boots—in comparison to the back-breaking rocks and fragile topsoil and constant torment of wind, laws, weather, and omnipresent loathing of the oppressors that afforded the Irish hill farmer his marginal existence and lifelong suffering.
Back in Ireland in Ballyutogue, high in the heather, Liam had dug alongside his daddy, Tomas Larkin, since he had been a chip of a lad, and when one carries seaweed up from the lough to make it into a crust of topsoil, he damned well better know what he is doing.
In the beginning Bert Hargrove thought Liam Larkin a dullard with a broad back. Given this kind of land in this kind of atmosphere, Liam Larkin, in his quiet manner, inched his way into acceptance as an extremely knowledgeable farmer and sheep man. His wise observations, keen suggestions for logical changes here and there, and the penchant for a long day’s work caught the squire’s eye.
At the end of the first season Liam was made assistant to the station foreman. Free at last from constraints, Liam blossomed, took on responsibility, organized and had no qualms in running a crew. Tilted shears invented by his brother Conor in the blacksmith forge speeded the wool cropping by ten percent.
Things never stand still, not even in paradise.
Bert Hargrove was the most successful Catholic runholder hereabouts and was blessed with two fine young sons. On the minus side of the ledger, he was burdened with three daughters. As the inheritors, the squire’s sons would be adequate. Women, as they always do, presented the problems that caused him sleeplessness.
The Hargrove girls were a bovine lot, and endowed with the stout requirements for a future life as runholders’ wives, they seemed to have excellent breeding possibilities. Bert’s wife Edna made the mainstay of her life the future respectable and nearby placement of her daughters. She was bloody well determined that she would have a large
family around her to comfort her during her declining years.
This was no simple matter. There were not enough eligible Catholic lads who fit into her scheme. By eligible, one would consider the inheritor of a station, an independent merchant of means, or perhaps a professional—a doctor or solicitor down in Christchurch. Beyond Christchurch was out of bounds.
The girls were off limits to the hands on the station. Edna Hargrove had the precision of a Prussian field marshal in her mind, knowing at every instant where each troop was. One pat on the rump and you were off the Hargrove Station, the debt for your passage auctioned to another runholder.
As an English-born lady, Edna was confronted with the fact that most Catholic lads in the region were Irish station hands, working off their passages or eking out a life on forty acres. She was reminded every second and fourth Sunday at the Mass when the paddies would stagger in, legless, shaking from a night’s drinking and hell-raising, lying and slothful as they were.
Certain forces of nature were too powerful even for the steel of Edna Hargrove, as powerful as the waters atop the fjords plunging into Milford Straits.
Her oldest daughter, Mildred, was not what one would call a comely maiden, but pleasant from the inside and good and sturdy otherwise. It was most important that Mildred make a good match to serve as an example to her sisters. Edna’s vulture eye picked up on the first glances exchanged by Mildred and Liam Larkin. One time they were looking at each other across the stable. Edna walked between them and could
feel
their vibrations going back and forth.
She suggested to Bert that Liam’s contract be auctioned to another station, preferably one up on the North Island.
“He’s too damned valuable,” Bert responded. “And he still owes us more than two and a half years’ work. Talk to Mildred and explain her about things.”
“I’ve been explaining her about things since she was
four years old, Bert. We simply can’t risk some illiterate paddy to destroy all our lives.”
“That paddy is a good investment, old girl. It’s your job to keep them out of the breeding pens.”
“Don’t be vulgar, Bert. Two and a half years?”
It was a bit much. The Hargroves decided to make Liam sign his name to a nonfornication oath. Although he could sign his name, he couldn’t read a word on the paper, even though Bert explained its meaning, precisely.
Edna Hargrove should have known that a mere sheet of paper was not going to stop certain powerful natural forces. She had her work cut out for her.
It was at the district fair during the wool-shearing contest that what was apparent, was apparent. Stripped to the waist, Liam Larkin represented the Hargrove Station. Odds against him were delicious. No newcomer held a prayer, even with the saints on his side. Twenty-to-one odds against Larkin put him close to the bottom of the heap. Of course, no one at Hargrove spoke about Conor’s newly designed shears.
Mildred could scarcely conceal her delight at the sight of Liam’s upper body. The shears did the rest. After due deliberation by the judges, Conor’s tilty, grindy-toothed instrument was declared legal in Liam’s hands and the squire and all the squire’s men went home with a hat full of silver.
In the beginning, when working out artful dodges from Edna, Liam could scarcely believe that a girl of English descent, schooled at a convent in Auckland, would consider him worthy. Liam didn’t know all that much about birds. What he knew he found out back in Ballyutogue tagging along with his brother Conor.
What was there to say about Conor? Conor could get a shag any time he whistled. On such occasions Conor always sought out Protestant girls so he wouldn’t have to get seriously involved afterward. A couple of times at fairs on the other side of Donegal or down in Derry, Liam had the opportunity to latch on to the extra girl, and he wasn’t too
awkward, so long as Conor was nearby. He figured that he would be equal to the occasion, should it occur.
The occasion occurred at the celebration of the Queen’s birthday, no less, which also marked the first time Liam ever mouthed the “forbidden” words to “God Save the Queen” praying that certain ancestors were not beholding him from above.
No greater catastrophe could have befallen Edna Hargrove than Mildred’s pregnancy, which destroyed half a lifetime of delicate manipulation. Bert raged because something had been put over on him and there was a balance due on Liam’s obligations. When the Hargrove cloudburst was dry of rage, Liam and Mildred were presented with a monstrous ultimatum.
The pair would be broken up permanently. Liam’s labor indenture would be sold to a station elsewhere. Mildred would be slipped out of the country to Australia to a convent. Since abortion was unthinkable, the child would be put up for adoption in Australia.
The alternative was uglier. Bert Hargrove had legal recourse both on Liam’s debt and a number of “sexual” offenses that could put him in prison for years.
Liam and Mildred had backed themselves to the edge of a cliff and seemed to have no choice but to submit or hurl themselves over the edge, when the hand of Providence stretched out clear from Ireland in the form of a cable. It was opened with shaky hands because a cable almost always announced a death. Mildred read it to him:
DEAR LIAM STOP I HAVE COLLECTED A SMALL FORTUNE IN ADVANCE ON A COMMISSION TO RESTORE THE GREAT SCREEN IN THE LONG HALL OF HUBBLE MANOR STOP I HAVE PAID OFF YOUR PASSAGE IN FULL STOP CERTIFICATE IS ON THE WAY STOP FURTHER FUNDS ARE BEING TRANSFERRED FOR YOU TO START A HOMESTEAD STOP DADDY UNAWARE STOP YOUR BROTHER CONOR
Well, Conor’s cable changed the manner of doing things. The couple departed the Hargrove acres with only the mutilated suitcase Liam had arrived with. Mildred left everything, every stitch of clothing, her hope chest, her show horses, and her private possessions.
However, since young womanhood she had been in control of a bank account of earnings. Much of the money she had acquired was by shrewd trading on the various agricultural markets. It would serve as a down payment on something.
Father Gionelli, who had heard both of their confessions over a period of time, had been expecting them. He agreed to marry them provided they agreed to invite Bert and Edna to the christening. They agreed, reluctantly. The Hargroves felt one-third betrayed, one-third guilty, and one-third enraged, and they declined to come. A bitter seed had been planted.
Liam chose a strange and oblique name for his son: Rory. No one in the Larkin line had been named such and to name the first born outside of family was rare and uneasy. Liam reckoned that Rory had been a great Irish king and that was sufficient.
Rory was christened immediately after birth and dubbed “wee” Rory to indicate he had probably been born premature. Rory was hardly “wee” but hardy and quite beautiful.
It almost seemed impossible he was born out of the two of them. “Wee” Rory had been hung about his neck like an invisible pendant. It was not that he was born in disgrace but that “an unusual child should have an unusual name.”
Bert Hargrove had always said that if Mildred had been a boy she would have been the best runholder in the South Island, she was that certain of the skills she needed. Her leaving was another cruel blow for Bert, for she had kept the ledgers, the payroll, the taxes, the contracts for land purchases, and knew the buy-and-sell game of the wool market keenly.
With Mildred’s head operating Liam’s instinct and knowledge of farming, they made a team that went from humble homesteaders to important runholders in a few years. The government of New Zealand at the time was intent on building a cattle and wool industry able to trade with the world and become an important cog in Britain’s wheel. Privileged terms on land and animal stock were backed by the government and the Larkins knew how to grab them.
There was additional support from Conor Larkin, who was faring well with his foundry in Derry. Mildred’s whipsaw mind knew exactly what to do with the windfall funds from Conor. When the thousandth acre was acquired, mortgage free, Liam hung up a sign:
BALLYUTOGUE STATION, LIAM LARKIN, ESQ.
“Squire Liam, mind you,
a commoner of stature demanding respect by his achievement.
” Ballyutogue Station—Liam Larkin, Esq. How many times did he repeat it? Mildred knew. She knew that “Squire” look in his eyes and how she loved it.
Why did he name his station, Ballyutogue, after his village in Ireland? The word itself meant “a place of sorrow” and sorrow is what he had gotten from it. Sweet…sweet revenge. “I’ll show all of you Liam was not the bumbling fool of the Larkins. The Ballyutogue Station I created will remind me of my victory every time I enter its gates.”
For a landless croppy it was far more than burgeoning
boundaries of his land and far more than a country that wanted and accepted him. It was Mildred.
“My husband is not going to be an illiterate,” she commanded, and taught him how to read and write far beyond ordinary requirements. He’d think to himself when he had solved a difficult passage in the Bible or one of Mildred’s novels—What would Conor think if he saw me now! Aye, he remembered well how Conor always had his nose stuck in a book, taught by his little friend Seamus O’Neill. Someday, he’d read as well as Conor himself.
Oh, Mildred, what a dear! He loved every plump round feel of her. They may have been plain and rough hewn but there was nothing plain about the way they loved each other.
Mildred was the first thing that ever belonged to him, not counting the required love of certain family members. Mildred was the first person and the only person to love him alone.
Liam was the first person to love Mildred. The first person who belonged to her. They were the first to be tender to each other. They wallowed in each other, gloriously, never passing without a touch to make up for a lifetime of touches never before given or felt.
It took a third of a lifetime of misery and a journey halfway around the world, but his salvation from purgatory was felt every day of his life after he awakened to the realization that New Zealand was true.
Edna Hargrove’s anger lasted only until the second child, Spring, was christened. A proper English mother forgives and Spring
was
named after her own mother. Certainly Mildred had sent a signal in naming Spring that she wanted Edna’s forgiveness. At least things could be mixed around so no one really knew who was forgiving whom.
Bert held out for one more baby, Madge.
Through this ordeal Liam realized that a certain unplanned sense of exaltation was being awarded the victor. Continuing kindness to one’s former crucifier can be the most delicious and artful form of revenge. Had he and
Mildred become belligerent, the Hargroves would certainly have found justification for their obnoxious behavior.
By accepting them with open arms, Liam had laid guilt and shame everlasting on Mildred’s parents. The terrible thing they had done was the Hargroves’ subject of many hours with Father Gionelli, but they could never erase it fully. The Aussies had a saying about the evil hunter missing his prey and getting whacked with his own boomerang. The Bible was a catalogue of “what goes around comes around.”
Of the other Hargrove boys, King Hargrove, their oldest son, grew into a first-rate lout with a penchant for gambling losses and the kind of irresponsibility that Bert Hargrove formerly attributed only to Irishmen. Bert was delighted when King stayed on in South Africa chasing a gold rush after serving in the Boer War.
Gilbert, the younger son, was a good bloke but he would not be dissuaded from being educated in England with aspirations of becoming an engineer.
There came a divine moment for Liam Larkin when Bert stood, hat in hand, and tolled off a litany of failures, bad investments, things on the turn with his sons, unforeseen sweeps of sickness through his flock and herd. None of this was Bert’s fault. Land had been easy to get and greed was his undoing. Bert’s overextension had no plan for a reserve in the event of failure. Hell, Liam knew when he was ten years old that a man doesn’t try to plow a thousand acres without a tractor.
He smiled and shook his head sympathetically and did not say aloud but Bert could read the silence in Liam’s face…What would you give for another stupid paddy like me to come off the ship and bail you out, you fuck-faced monster?
“Ah glory, Bert, let me and Millie sit down with you and see how we can get you through this little muddle of yours.”
Goddamned! Liam’s kindness damned near killed Bert Hargrove, but the terms, rather generous under the
circumstances, saved the station, which would now be distributed on an equitable basis among his three daughters.
Actually, kindness as the ultimate revenge had begun to evolve in Liam’s mind years earlier when he and Millie and the baby struggled through that first winter in their first home, a leaking, clapboard, one-room, windblown misery of a shack. It was like the nightmare of Ireland all over, but they endured until spring and from that moment on never looked back.
His careworn daddy, Tomas Larkin, had driven him out of Ireland instead of giving him the careworn Larkin acres, which were rightfully his and which he craved. With springtime came a letter from Tomas pleading for Liam to return to Ireland and take over.
After a first rush of joy, Liam realized what lay behind the letter. After four generations, the Larkin land would not have the Larkin name on it unless Liam came back.
Conor had left the village of Ballyutogue and had established himself as a great ironmaster. Dary, the younger brother, was on the way of fulfilling his mother, Finola’s, dream of his becoming a priest. That left Brigid, who had given up her only love because he had no land and was forced to leave.
Brigid would now have to marry some old run-down bachelor because she was beyond the age of youth and loveliness and it was doubtful that she would ever bear a child.
“I treated you sorely,” Tomas’s letter pleaded, “but come home, the farm and all I have is yours.”
Liam could imagine both the agony and hope in his father’s pen. He could also imagine Tomas at Dooley McCloskey’s public house waving the return letter that his boy, Liam, would soon be coming home.
Too bad, Daddy, too damned bad. Keep your hair on. Me and Millie were never part of anyone’s plan because
nobody ever loved either of us…except my brothers, Conor and Dary.
Liam was not yet literate enough to compose an answer and he did not want to introduce Mildred by way of the family brouhaha. He went to Father Gionelli and together they crafted a letter that oozed with compassion and concern. Between the compassion and concern he dropped little mouse turds…“Conor has paid off my passage…I’ve a lease with option to purchase of six hundred acres…the government is helping me with a thousand head of sheep…the land in New Zealand is rich and black…tell Ma I still say the rosary and Angelus.…”
Then Liam stroked a razor’s edge of kindness across his daddy’s throat. He wrote about Mildred. Liam did not mention that they were already married and had a son but…“Mildred is from an English family and convent-educated and we will marry soon and I’m not coming back to Ireland.”
Liam held his tongue until the letter was mailed then went to the priest again. “Father, I feel no anger toward my daddy but I must confess that the letter filled me with a tremendous thrill of happiness, and I know that’s wrong because I know how much I hurt him. I know the hurt because that is the way he hurt me. I’m sorry for my joy, but I cannot deny it.”
“I comprehend you, Liam,” Father Gionelli answered. “Your letter is the story of my own childhood.”
“Have I sinned?”
“Sin? What is sin inside the dynamic of family relationships? It is a mystery that began with man. No one can solve it except through his own unique experience. How you feel is human. But do not think it will leave you alone. We are never free of our blood.”
Tomas Larkin was struck down with the diabetes shortly after receiving Liam’s letter. He passed on through as the sun inched up along the horizon of a new century. Tomas died, deep in consternation over the way he had treated his son.