Leon Uris (6 page)

But his daddy’s gesture of recognition was soon submerged by the love he showed for Conor. Each day he and his daddy would trudge down from the fields, and at the village crossroads Conor would be waiting in his blacksmith leathers. Conor would run up to Tomas, who would swoop him up in his arms and ride him home on his shoulder.

His older sister, Brigid, and Dary, the baby, were not in the struggle for Tomas’s affection. As the sole daughter, Brigid belonged to her mother, who made her girl religious and acutely aware of sins of the flesh. Thus, Brigid was able to control those amorous moments with her sweetheart, Myles McCracken. Poor Myles had to bumble around, never being able to court Brigid properly because he was born with the gravest curse, no land to inherit. Finola was more than up to the task of keeping Brigid half daft with fear until Myles was forced from Ballyutogue to find work in Derry.

Whatever affection Brigid and Finola might have shown Liam was gone with the winds after Dary was born. The two women smothered Dary, fierce-like. Ma had the wee wane kneeling and making the sign before he could even walk properly, preening him for the priesthood from the day she popped him.

Tomas had one obsession and that was to keep Conor in Ballyutogue to inherit the Larkin acres as well as own the forge. Tomas raged against Conor’s equal obsession to read and dream of the world beyond Ballyutogue.

Their grandda Kilty, a Fenian hero, enchanted young Conor with the fires of Irish republicanism.

Conor wanted to go and Liam wanted nothing else but to stay and inherit the farm, but Liam was in no one’s plans. He was just an extra bowl at the table.

The Larkin house was divided in long-established Irish tradition. Conor alone loved everyone and fought everyone.
He stood up for Brigid and Myles McCracken. He challenged Finola in making Dary a priest. And oh, the deep love between Conor and Tomas was as fierce as their never-ending warfare.

Aware of Liam’s awkwardness and shortcomings, Conor became his brother’s keeper, teaching him the ways of girls, playing football, drinking like a man, protecting him from unfair treatment by Finola and Tomas. Conor taught him how to use his fists. And Liam was awed how Conor stood up to everyone and more awed by his brilliance as a scholar.

“Oh, how I hated myself because I wasn’t you,” the Squire mumbled aloud.

All the early stuff with Rory were merely skirmishes. It broke into warfare the day that Conor left New Zealand and Rory began walking in his uncle’s footsteps.

Rory awakened to instant remembrance. As he connected the threads of events, his groan filled the room. The light was gray. He hated dead light.

“There’s a lad,” Georgia whispered.

“Georgia. Thanks to God.”

He sat up on sheets wet from sweat and torn from clawing. It was difficult to hold his head straight, so he let it fall into his hands like a heavy boulder. “I never knew any kind of pain like this.”

“It’s called a broken heart, Rory.”

She sat beside him and pulled his head down onto her lap with the stern gentleness of a nurse.

“What’s going to happen to me? I don’t know how much I can take.”

“It’s near impossible to die of grief, even though you might long for it. God has worked out a blissful fog to envelop you. In a month, when you have accepted your uncle’s death, the fog will begin to lift, very slowly. Come each dawn, along with the stab of pain will come a new sliver of light. One morning you’ll wake up and life is on again, the pain has become manageable.”

“I can’t forget him.”

“No, but you’ll transfer him into a memory chamber. For a time he will come out by night and invade your dreams. Then even your dreams come under control. I’ve
seen men off the battlefield with the life force and men without it. You’ll not go under.”

Georgia moved him to the armchair, stripped the bed and put on clean linens, ordered him on his stomach, and massaged him with alcohol.

“Glory! No one should have a body like yours,” she said slapping his bottom and ordering him to roll over. She set the bottle down and took him in hand and played with him until he responded.

“I’m in deep mourning. How can you be arousing me at a time like this?”

“Just checking to see if you’re still alive and if a sense of humor existed. Grief transformed to lust is not a matter to be overlooked.”

Rory suddenly got off the bed to curb his own rising passion and draped himself in a towel. Georgia fixed tea.

“Where do we start?” she asked.

“Hard to say. My da must have been squashed like a bug when he was a kid. He rarely talks of his past except for the occasional bitter reference. What drive he must have had to win the title of Squire and put the sign Ballyutogue Station over the arch of our gate. Powerful force, rage—but inside him, always inside him.”

“We all seem to spend the second half of our lives getting over the first half. That’s what the winners in this world lust for, to beat their parents’ ears back,” Georgia replied.

“My da can’t accept his own victory over Ireland and his father. It’s merciful that he’s such a strong Catholic. He can only venture so far into his own mind. When it starts to hurt too much he lights the old candle and takes the ‘mystery’ route. Strongly religious that he is, there is one black mark on him he can’t shake.”

“What black mark?”

“Me,” Rory answered. “My mother was four months’ pregnant when they secretly married. I was christened immediately and the records were altered to prove I was
actually born nine months and two seconds after they exchanged vows.”

“But what’s it about? He loves your mother. He wanted to marry her.”

“My grandparents, the Hargroves, rained unmerciful damnation on them. I don’t know how to say it, Georgia, but I always knew there was something wrong about me.”

“Your father has never told you?”

“God no. He’d light a billion candles first.”

“How did you find out? How old were you?”

“Hurled in my teeth from a so-called friend when I was about eight. I learned it in a way that made me hide in a closet. What does it matter? When your mother and father perpetuate a lie, somewhere, somehow, sometime there is going to be a slip, or maybe I knew anyhow, an innate feeling I was born with. From the time I realized he had always looked at me differently, the child who had dishonored his mother by being born and whose secret must be kept from those in Ireland at all costs. We got along after my sisters came, but from the minute I really knew the truth, everything between us took on a double meaning.

“Da tried doing the sporting things with me, training the dogs, fishing, riding. Somehow, whatever we did together turned into a contest. Jesus, Georgia, I had to deliberately lose to him at checkers. Well, when Tommy came, things seemed better for a time…the legitimate heir had been born…hallelujah…. The sin of Rory’s birth was now buried…not atoned, but buried.”

The screen door banged with the wind. Georgia went to the porch where an invigorating breeze passed through. “Come on out, Rory,” she called. “It’s a rare night. Stars are coming up.”

They found the rockers. Rory put his feet on the rail and listened for a time to the sea and watched the breakers throw off sprinkling phosphorescence.

“My brother Tommy didn’t solve the problem. Tommy
only enhanced it when my da realized he wasn’t much good for working anything larger than a potato patch.”

“He was forced to come back to you?”

“Cursed, because he had to have me. He saw me every day becoming more and more like my Uncle Conor.… Why are you so good to me, Georgia?” he asked suddenly.

“I’ve a long career of healing warriors.”

Rory took her hands. “I love you in a very strong way. I’d do anything in the world for you. Sometimes, I wish we could go out together in the daylight and take a ride up in the hills.”

“Ah, you wouldn’t want to be seeing me in full daylight. I’m more than slightly your senior.”

“You’re my beautiful friend. I wish I were more comfortable with our situation.”

“Those lady friends of yours. You want them to fall madly—madly and stomp out on them, like getting even with your parents?”

“Shyte, Georgia, you’re too bloody smart. Truth be known, you’re better than the lot of them combined.… I want to talk some more.”

“As long as you need.”

“My da was afraid Conor would infect me with Ireland, but Conor avoided telling me about it. He taught me about books and searching for love and the beauty of beauty. Your kind of beauty. You see, let me make myself clear…knowing that my uncle was such a splendiferous man I realized that if he was obsessed with Ireland, there must be something there that explains the mystery of life itself.”

“What was the lesson?”

“In order to be the most total human you’re capable of you must serve something other than yourself.”

“He must have been a melancholy man, too, to have Ireland as his mistress. Rory, I felt that patriotic once. Glory is tin. When the band stops playing the shooting begins. Soldiering or playing the patriot’s game is filthy and dis
gusting work, humiliating and boring, mutilating and inhuman….” Her voice trailed off to another continent. “During the Boer War, Kitchener—I was on his staff—ordered tens of thousands of women and children behind barbed wire at Bloemfontein—he called it a concentration camp—and while he burned down the countryside he neglected untold thousands of kids and their mothers and let them die of starvation and disease.”

“Like they did to us in Ireland.”

“‘Us’? Us?”

“I guess I said us, didn’t I?”

“What is taking you to battle is the same thing that drove me out of it. It is easy to make fun of a black man and paint him as an inferior and, God help me, I went for it. I believed in the empire. But in the Transvaal, Afrikaaners were white Christians being murdered by the most civilized white Christians in the world.”

“Like they’re doing in Ireland. That’s why Conor died.”

“You’ve got to get there, don’t you, Rory?”

“Aye.”

“Enlisting?”

“Aye.”

“What about your father? You’re not quite of age. If he stops you now, it could be a problem for you to join later.”

“I’m going up to the North Island. They say you don’t even need proof of age. If it doesn’t work there, I’ll get aboard a ship to Australia. Light horse cavalry regiments are forming up both places.”

“The way you ride you’ll end up being their colonel.”

“So long as it gets me on the road to Ireland. And yourself, Georgia?”

“No more war for me. I’ve seen too many young men never live to fill their promise. How many great men went, never knowing of their greatness? No more war for me. But I’m glad we passed each other by.”

“So you’re here, waiting for Dr. Norman. Or is that it?”

Georgia paled. “You’re too damned smart as well, Rory.”

“You weren’t happy when we met. Not the way you are now,” he said.

“Like all places of great beauty, when you see the South Island from a distance, you must say, this is the place. That’s what I said. Peace is here. But up close, we all have pimples on our arses. Behind the hymn singers and pulpit thumpers of Christchurch are some sanctimonious savages. Knock on any door…but you know that, Rory. You’ve knocked on a few of them these days yourself.”

“Don’t tell me your old man played around on you. Not on you, Georgia.”

“With a minister’s wife, among others.”

“Bleeding Jesus, a preacher’s wife!”

“Tight-arsed and wearing a quivering potted plant on her head. The tip of her nose wiggled when she talked, like there was a fly on it.”

“I don’t understand it. Not to a woman like you. Georgia, you’ve forgotten more about loving a man than any woman knows. You were just too much for him to handle, that’s what.”

“He never found out what I could give him. And he was no Rory Larkin. Once I was collected and in place, loving him was like trying to love a preening peacock.”

“But a woman like you…”

“Men like Calvin Norman are only interested in the head count. Numbers to stroke his vanity. Conquest of no-matter-who reassures his virility. Have any idea how many desperate women fling themselves on a doctor during an intimate examination? Well now, I’m asking the wrong lad. You’re doing a bit of head hunting as well. All of you like it when the girl says, ‘Let’s go to it.’ Few refuse.”

“Now wait a minute. I’m generally faithful to you,” Rory blurted. “That’s not what I meant to say. I meant to say, if you were mine, I wouldn’t be doing that. But you aren’t mine and it’s almost as if you want me to go out and find women so I won’t think of you as a jealous sort. Right, love?”

“I’d never put pressure on you. I can’t because I’m married. I wouldn’t because I’d run you off.”

Rory reached for her, but she backed up a bit, out of reach and their rocking chairs stopped.

“Anyhow,” she went on, “he got his cheap thrills with a minister’s wife. Afterward he used up all the hot water taking baths to clean the itch off his skin.”

“Want him back?”

“When the war came I gave him amnesty,” she lied, almost spilling the secret. “Stitching up men with their guts hanging out and cutting off arms and legs could have a positive effect on him about what really matters.”

“Had your husband been straight with you, would we have happened?”

“No,” she answered. “I’ve seen my share of glorious bodies. There was one boy I loved desperately who died in the Boer War. The few other lovers until Calvin were part of growing up in the colonial service. I’ve never been cynical. I’ve cared for them all. It was what it was, but I neither lied nor cheated.”

“Were they all bad numbers in the end?”

“They were soldiers. I was a nurse. And boys will be boys. But, the fact of the matter was, it was I who wanted to be free. I settled on Calvin because he was part of the illusion of the South Island.”

“Could you have loved me?” Rory asked suddenly.

“Don’t be foolish. We’re an odd couple.”

“We’re not that odd,” Rory said. “Could you have loved me?”

Georgia shrugged. “It’s a moot question. We are uncomplicated. I want it to stay that way.”

“I’ve been thinking,” Rory said, “of the three things I’ll miss the most. I’ll miss the Ballyutogue Station and I’ll miss RumRunner, and yourself as well.”

“I’m in fine company,” she said. “Now, go find your wars.”

Rory suddenly lifted her into his arms, and she was not
precisely weightless. He edged the screen door open with his toe first, then his backside, and carried her to the bedroom. Georgia did not stop screaming and laughing and beating at his shoulders until he dumped her on the bed.

Then, he wrapped himself around her to still her like a calf he had just roped and they grabbed each other’s hair and exploded into a new furious kind of lovemaking that told each they both had held back words, thoughts, commitments. The raw rush of man and woman answered it all.