Leon Uris (23 page)

For the greatest occasion of her life Brigid Larkin was garbed in store-bought clothes from Derry that might never come out of the closet again. Brigid and what she was wearing were strangers giving one another no comfort at all. She crossed the bridge from the old city to the train station arriving with a limp from the pinch of her new shoes.

This was to be her first train ride. Thoughts of going clear down to Dublin was enough to make even the most educated of travelers tremble.

She asked about the arrival of her train twice and then a third time to make absolutely certain. She could tell the stationmaster was a Protestant, but kindly to her situation, having seen a number of first-time riders come down from the hills over the years.

“Your first trip, now, is it?”

“Aye,” she answered bashfully.

“I’ll see you safely aboard, miss,” the trainman said.

“That’s very kind of ye, indeed.”

“How far are you traveling?”

“Dublin.”

“That’s a few yards down the road.”

“Actually I’m going to Maynooth. My brother is going to be ordained this Sunday.”

Just what the fucking country needs, the stationmaster thought, another fucking R.C. collar. “Ah, that will be a
big day for you. The Great Northern will be along in fifteen minutes. It’s never late in or out of Londonderry.”

Brigid sat gingerly on the genuine imitation leather suitcase loaned to her by the Widow Dougherty. Fifteen minutes passed. It was announced that the Great Northern for Dublin would be a half-hour late, more or less.

From the train platform in Protestant Waterside, Brigid could see across the River Foyle to Catholic Derry and its waterfront lined with piers and shirt factories.

The old Witherspoon & McNab factory destroyed in the fire was no longer on the skyline, leaving an ugly gap like an extracted tooth.

Brigid had been down to Derry twice before. Once, when the linen crop failed, she and hundreds of other farm girls had to hire themselves out as domestics to earn tuppence. They stood like herded cattle in the Guildhall Square with prospective employers feeling their muscles and examining their teeth as if they were horses.

“We expect you to put in an honest fourteen hours a day, Brigid. You don’t steal, do you, Brigid? And no fornicating with the help, Brigid.”

Bogside was the place where all dreams tarnished.

After a lifetime of conniving, her mother, Finola, had succeeded in breaking her up with her only true love, Myles McCracken. True, part of it was Brigid’s own fear of leaving Ballyutogue to go with him to Derry.

As she had told him on that sorrowful day, “Once a lad leaves Ballyutogue, he never returns.” Myles’s family was so poor, they couldn’t give you the dirt off their necks, they’d need it for topsoil. He was landless, and that wasn’t in Finola’s plans for her daughter.

Myles might have stayed because all the other Larkin boys were gone or going, but her daddy Tomas clung to the fantasy that Conor might return so there could be a Larkin name on the farm.

Myles followed Conor down to Derry and later worked for Conor in his forge. Brigid had come to fetch Conor when Daddy was taken to the sickbed.

Brigid lowered her eyes for an instant from the waterfront view. She recalled, as she arrived in Derry, how impure thoughts had entered her head. If Daddy died and she married Myles and he made her pregnant right away, Finola would have to accept them because there was no other Larkin to run the farm. Dary was now in the seminary, Conor in his forge in Derry, and Liam all the way gone to New Zealand….

Brigid began to breathe unevenly as the door of memory was kicked open…. She had come for Myles McCracken too late. He had married and was on his way to fatherhood. Over there, across the river, was the gaping hole where the factory had stood. It was where Myles’s wife, Maud, leapt from the burning roof and their unborn child and its mother were splattered all over the cobblestones….

Myles degenerated into a Bogside drunk, and later Conor had to commit him to the asylum. Myles hanged himself in a moment of sanity when he clearly remembered Maud jumping from the roof….

The trainmaster picked up the genuine imitation leather suitcase and led Brigid to a compartment much fancier than her ticket price. He slipped her an extra coupon.

“For your first ride, you should have the window view all the way, miss.” He placed her suitcase in an overhead bin.

“Bless you, sir.”

Every sound and movement of it was new as the Great Northern belched and grunted from the station into a smooth
clickety-clack…clickety-clack.

A dozen deep sighs quelled her uneasiness and she became mesmerized by the sway of the train and the way the fields and cottages fleeted past her. Alone in the compartment, Brigid dared open the wicker basket, take a slice of soda bread, and nibble on it.

With Myles McCracken dead, her mother’s crusade was half done. She had saved Brigid from a pauper’s marriage to a landless boy. She would never live to see the second part of her conspiracy of having Brigid marry a man with land, even a widower with kids, or, mainly, Colm O’Neill with the adjoining farm.

Finola’s deeply honed sense of sin crept up on her. When Dary had been born, her physical state for child-bearing was wrecked. She obeyed the priest to live as “brother and sister” with Tomas, with no further fornication. This sense of sin was triggered again by the tragic fate of Myles McCracken. She hid her guilt from Brigid and only in the end did she confess to the priest, but the rest of her life was an attempt to atone for her sin of sending Myles off. Finola held on to her secret as she took her last breaths looking into Brigid’s eyes.

Clickety-clack…clickety-clack…clickety-clack…

The door to her compartment was flung open. “Strabane!” the conductor called.

Brigid became caught up watching a family on the platform, obviously a mom and da trying to say good-bye to an awkward clod of a son. He seemed to be a bit like Liam. All three of them were ill at ease. Da was rigid. Ma was holding back tears. The clod shifted feet, and then good solid handshakes and a flashlike peck on the cheek from son to mother.

Two new passengers invaded her compartment diminishing her space. One of them was the clod, who seemed wanting to weep but not exactly knowing how. He roughly jammed his suitcase in the overhead next to hers. He’d better not mess up my ordination dress, Brigid growled to herself. It had been sewn with devotion for Dary.

The train bolted unevenly, tossing the clod into her. He said, “Sorry,” and she said, “That’s just fine” and later, “I’m going to Maynooth. My brother is going to be ordained.” The clod was a Catholic and would know just
how important that was. The clod had a brother who was a priest as well. That’s all they said for the next several hours.

“Tickets, now. Next stop, Omagh.”

God, Brigid thought, look at the land out there, would you! So smooth and rolling. So Protestant. Why, she might as well be halfway around the world it was so different from the hill farms of Ballyutogue. Liam probably had land of this sort. I hope the dress is not rumpled, she thought. Does it really matter?

Brigid was never a beauty, but she had enough Larkin in her to be very pretty at times. And she had a spark, so long as Myles was around. When he left, she spent her remaining love on her baby brother Dary. But Dary left as well. Most men leave. After Dary she was alone in the cottage with Finola and the lovelessness of her life crashed down. She slipped into drabness. She hated herself for entertaining a persistent and nagging thought that life would be much better if her mother simply up and died. Brigid confessed to this time and again and after each admission, her rancor toward her mother deepened.

The cycle of wanting her mother dead, the guilt of it, the confession, and the penance became a treadmill of existence.

Clickety-clack…clickety-clack…clickety-clack…

“Omagh! Yer next stop is Omagh!”

The clod was replaced by a mom and two squawking wanes and a grinning old nun. Every time Brigid saw a nun, the notion passed through her that she might have missed her own calling. But she would have never felt how Myles made her feel…even though it always stopped short of total and absolute fornication.

After a time it became more and more difficult to remember what Myles even looked like. She all but forgot the sweet sensations that flooded through her when she
dashed over the bridge into his arms at their secret meeting place by the Norman keep. As the years passed it was as though Myles never really existed, because the pain of his loss was gone as well. As Myles faded, hatred for her mother faded.

Brigid Larkin became resigned to spinsterhood, being able neither to love nor hate anymore with any notable passion.

At this very moment she felt a twinge as she remembered that Dary was going to be ordained Sunday!

Dary becoming a priest was the centerpiece of Finola’s life since his birth. Now, Finola was being cheated from the great moment. Was it God’s vindication? Brigid would be in her mother’s place and her mother would be looking down with bitter envy.

Eight miles out of Derry where the bridge crossed the river Burntollet, a side road wound up onto a wooded crest to the walled confines of the Sacred Heart Seminary of the Holy Order of the Fathers of St. Columba.

“He’s so tiny,” Finola had wept, “so tiny and frail.”

Dary Larkin was among eight novices passing through forbidden gates. For the most part they were smooth of cheek and soft of hand, indicating they had been lorded over by their adoring mothers. Some, like Dary, had come eagerly to begin a twelve-year road to priesthood.

Dary gave up all his possessions save his rosary beads and was assigned to an eight-by-eleven-foot cell in an isolated building that housed twenty other novices. It would be his home for the next four years: stone floor and musty odor, with only the crucifix on the wall and a faded picture of the Sacred Heart as his companions.

On the novices’ first day they met the consecrated brothers who were teachers from the Christian Brothers Order. They were issued a terse command to genuflect as the wizened old monsignor entered the assembly room.
In uninspired monotone, he told them why they were there and what would be expected of them, never really seeing the faces that held an august glow or were frozen with apprehension. Dogmas of poverty, chastity, and obedience were imparted, equally void of passion, stringent rules clipped out, and a chronicle of long hours and complete devotion tolled.

The machinery that moved the seminary operated on few spoken words, and these spoken in hushed tones. The nod and the beckon gave all movement in the place a sense of flotation.

The rosary was recited with fervent ejaculations; the menu varied by season, not much, always bad; the hours of classical education were an endurance battle and humility incarnate. God was beseeched in states of barefooted prostration with limitless prayer.

The young lieutenants of Christ were being exquisitely cloned and honed in ancient tradition. While traditional, accepted, and unchallenged knowledge was being poured in, at the same time the desire for inquiry beyond Church teachings was being masked off. Once the mind was completely trained to be obedient within the framework of the teachings, and curiosity outside the framework shut down, the image of the priest began to be created.

Evil thoughts are no less a sin than evil deeds. The good priest must know the line where dogma forbids questioning and never cross it. When approaching that line, the mind must automatically switch off further adventuring. Thought control imposed so that one controls one’s own thoughts…aye…that’s the game….

At first Dary Larkin’s small size caused both novices and the Brothers to attempt intimidation. The lad had Larkin steel and was soon singled out as the strongest among them.

Dary had told Conor that he could never be a Conor, to wade through life’s battles slashing and fighting the republican cause. Yet, he was a Larkin and had to find the way to
help alleviate the misery of the people with his own kind of strength.

Why, Dary wondered, does part of the family consider it a tragedy when one enters the priesthood?

“There are no locks on the seminary gate,” he told Conor. “I want to be here. I am at peace.”

Dary, impassioned, told his beloved brother that he boiled just as much over the injustices of Ireland and intended to do something about it in his own way.

And Conor snarled, “Someday, Dary, you’ll walk through Bogside with me and understand.”

“Someday, God willing,” Dary answered, “I’ll be a Bogside priest.”

Clickety-clack…clickety-clack…clickety-clack…

Outside the train, the sun failed. It was always in a battle in Ireland and generally lost. Mists and shadows and dew framed the landscape like spider webs. The Great Northern engine shifted into a slowing mode, squealing and hissing, then inched into a lay-by and stood.

Beyond the lay-by was a village church and a graveyard. Brigid became transfixed by the tombstones. There was nothing there to compare with the Larkin plot in St. Columba’s in Ballyutogue, always fresh with flowers and crowned with magnificent, highly polished stones she had bought with money sent from Liam and Conor. Why, everyone said that Brigid kept the finest family plot in Donegal… .

For years Brigid and Finola invoked a ghastly emptiness on the cottage as each went to their separate corners, as if each had taken monastic vows of silence. Later, Rinty Doyle became the hired hand and slept in the byre and made himself as inconspicuous as possible.

Brigid’s heart pounded with a sudden rush from a westbound train, terrifying her with its abrupt appearance. Faces in the passing window blurred…then, quickly as it had arrived, passed…again revealing the village graveyard.

The Great Northern inched out of the lay-by, the tombstones seemed to remain reflected on the window.

Of the Larkin sons, only Dary was in Ireland and able to come up from Maynooth Seminary for his mother’s funeral.