Leon Uris (10 page)

“No, but she is and she has two children.”

“Oh, shyte, isn’t that always the way? Is this person in Toronto?”

“Nearby.”

“How sad for you.”

“It’s not sad at all. It’s very joyous.”

“How can it be joyous? Love, maybe…but joyous love under those conditions?”

“We make it joyous. We are more-grateful for the time together than we are mournful for the time apart.”

“I suppose I see.”

“No, you don’t see, Atty. With you it’s either possess him or send him packing. There are a million variations on the love theme, darlin’.”

“Like subtleties that I don’t have,” she said, turning her back.

Jack gripped her softly and turned her around. She wished he had gripped her hard and spun her hard into him. Not Jack.

“Beloved little Atty,” he began.

“I’m not so little.”

“Beloved little Atty. Your great flirtation in life is your sporting for tragedy. As far as tragedy is concerned you’ve found the pot at the end of the rainbow here in Ireland, and it suits you fine. You don’t have to look very far here…just down the road to the next village…into the Dublin Liberties with their open sewers. Death by cholera. Even your poor old dad finally found his plush chair and sat down and died in it. Tragedy is always at hand…open a letter and find it…or it may hit from the sky as lightning. Or you may be standing at the crossroads and some mes
senger will come up to you and tell you someone you love is desperately sick or that your house is burning down or that a ship has sunk in midocean. Tragedy, over which we have absolutely no control, is never far away. And it’s the place you’ve chosen to live.”

She put her hands over her ears. He brought them down.

“Now joy is another matter. We can create joy any time, any place. Joy comes from our inside, and it’s ours if we’ve the will to find it. Tragedy is a human legacy. Joy is a human creation.”

“Am I that grim?”

“Grim enough to have slammed a steel door and locked your joy in you so that it can’t escape.”

“I’ve never felt any joy like that,” she whispered.

“I know.”

“You’ll be amused to know that I have had sex a number of times,” she said suddenly.

“I’d be shocked if you hadn’t,” he replied.

“I mean, being in the theatre with all those mad actors and writers. They die for my body. Well, actually it was four times…five if you count having it twice with the same fellow. It wasn’t all that grand, Jack. In fact it was lousy. But I like men, you know. There seems to be a sticking point.”

“Could it be that you can’t memorize lines of a new play, run a rents strike, write an editorial, and make love at the same time between meals or acts of a play?”

“I’d like it better if you shouted at me, Jack, rather than slice me up with your bloody delicate razor.”

“Sorry, Atty. But—”

“But what!”

“Your magnificent breasts and all the rest can sorely inhibit a poor fellow who is doing it by the numbers on command, probably too petrified to perform decently.”

“I hate your ugly fucking mouth, Jack!” she yelled.

“So, don’t ask me about sex I didn’t bring the subject up.”

“Don’t you even know how to curse! Get mad, Jack!”

“Atty, love, we both knew this conversation was going
to come up. So let’s finish it off and enjoy our few days together.”

That was always the way that bloody Jack Murphy handled things, she thought. Unflustered! Thoughtful! Why doesn’t he wilt like other men? No stutters, no awkward shifting of feet, no dropping of eyes. Just a dead-on answer and “If you don’t like it, little girl, pack your butt out of here.” Goddamn you, Jack Murphy.

She found herself slumped in old Darby’s armchair feeling stripped. “Jack,” she whispered, “I’m always so damned alone.”

“I know that, darlin’.”

“Why can’t I create joy? Why can’t It feel it? Do you think I like it this way? Jack, good God, what’s the matter with me?”

He knelt and took her hands, “You’ve the curse of being a great person, Atty Moore. You’ve been walking dead on into a storm since I’ve known ye and you’ve got no choice. There are very few who can walk alongside you and keep up. You just keep pressing forward and the storm drenches you and your hair is strung down like a wild banshee and the cloth of your dress is bolted against your body, but you keep shouting in rage, violent with anger when you are forced to take a half step back. You can’t help yourself. You’re Atty. That’s what Atty is.”

She slipped from the chair and let him hold her and rock her back and forth, and Atty wept. Atty weeping? Oh, what a hurtful sight.

Jack found the guitar and strummed above her.

He pulled her to her feet and saw tears, so strange on that magnificent face.

“I have a fear, Jack. I fear I might go to my grave without ever knowing the joy you speak of. And now having heard it so clearly from you, I fear it more because there is nothing I can do about myself.”

“No, you’ll find it,” he lied.

“Jack, did you know you get a little tic on your right cheek when you lie? I’ve known that since I was ten. I deplore my loneliness almost as much as I deplore the men I’ve invited in.”

“There’s one out there for everybody.”

“Not for me. I have no ability to give myself and I cannot be taken.”

She made herself erect and cut off further weeping and blather.

“Jack, I have another fear. I want you to show me what it is like outside this prison I live in. I want only one short moment of your time and you’re on your way. I do not want to go on for fifty more years and never know what it was like, even for a moment. Jack, I am terrified you’ll turn and walk out on me now.”

Jack Murphy’s lips kissed her face and Atty’s eyes lowered as they had never lowered and she let herself be drawn against him and felt something unearthly in the wrap of his arms.

“I really don’t know what to do,” she said softly. “I suppose I’m not good at this at all.”

“Jack and Atty,” he said, “are going to lie down beside each other. As the sun dies and the night grows we will stand up from the bed for a moment and I will undress you and you will undress me and we will look at each other. Then we will lie down again and spend the night only playing our fingers and our lips over one another, everywhere. There will be nothing more for now until we understand each soft warm path the other likes and each place that makes us thrill. In the morning I’ll pack two saddlebags and
we’ll ride up to the fishing lodge and start again the same way. And then we’ll make love. All your fire will turn into intense control. We will make love softly, perhaps many times, until we have finally driven each other mad, and then we’ll let go, angry and abusive. And then we’ll sleep and start again until we are too exhausted to go on. And we’ll lie there with the tenderest and softest touching and we’ll stay that way until you say it’s all right for me to leave.”

“Oh Jaysus, I’ve been waiting for you, man. Does it really work that way?”

“We’ll find out. Aye, it works if we don’t lose control. Unvarnished lust and orgasms really destroy quality lovemaking.”

“You bastard! I’m shaking-from head to foot.”

How many days? Who cared? She knew she would not have to go to her grave without having known it. It was part of her now, the knowing that she was capable of it, the knowing that she could always think back to it…with joy.

Atty’s back was to him and once more he wandered and wondered over the magnificence of the line from her shoulder to her perfect soft back without a bone poking to mar it and down the spine and over that line of hip.

“Jack Murphy…go you now,” she said.

“Aye, lass.”

“How can I tell you, man?”

“Well, you’re anything but a sterile little bird. It may sleep but you’ll know what to do when the time comes.”

“God, I’m happy. Jack?”

“Aye.”

“Can it keep on growing from a place like this?”

“Aye, it’s never ending…and he’s out there, Atty…and you’ll find him.”

On the third day of this fine month in 1873, Mairead O’Neill, the midwife of Ballyutogue, spanked life into the firstborn son of her next door neighbors, the Larkins. Wee Conor was drowsy and the story goes that he came into the world as a dreamer and never changed his ways.

One year later, almost to the hour, Finola Larkin returned the compliment by midwifing the birth of Seamus O’Neill, who needed no whap but made his entrance with flaming red hair and temper to match.

Seamus O’Neill and Conor Larkin could have been fraternal twins, they were that close. The boys spent as much time in each other’s kitchens as their own, just as their daddies worked side by side high up in the heather farming their reluctant acres.

Seamus O’Neill came in short and would remain so. His brother Colm, the eldest, was heir-designate to the thirty-five O’Neill acres. The middle son, Eamonn, emigrated to America where he was a fireman in Baltimore.

Seamus was spoiled by his mom, and by his sisters until they married and left the cottage, and his intellectual curiosity soon surpassed his parents’ and the village priest’s ability to fill it. It was his deep and abiding friendship with Conor Larkin, who likewise had a boundless
curiosity, that kept him on a quest for knowledge. A third party, a Scottish schoolmaster named Mr. Andrew Ingram, came to Ballyutogue when the new National School opened, and Seamus was allowed to attend.

Conor Larkin had no such luck. The Larkin men were of a separate stripe, chieftains as far back as the Wolfe Tone Rising against the Crown in 1798.

Grandfather Kilty was a legendary legend. Of the twenty-some Larkin’s in three, families who farmed in Ballyutogue in 1846 when the potato crop had failed for five straight years, only Kilty and his oldest son Tomas survived.

One family died on a death ship on the way to Canada. Another of the Larkins was killed by the British when they came to tumble his Cottage and evict him, and his wife and wanes all croaked in the workhouse!

As Kilty fought bare knuckles in the London alleys for pennies and bets, young Tomas buried his own mother and sister and brothers and had dug his own grave when Kilty returned.

Later, Kilty went on to ride with the Fenians, and for his troubles was a guest of the Crown at Strangeways Prison, forced to eat on his hands and knees like a dog. He called the first hunger strike and otherwise immortalized himself to all of western Ireland.

Tomas Larkin was a chieftain of a different color. He was the master of the possible, in contrast to Kilty, who chased a wild Irish fantasy to his death.

With all his common sense, wit, and feel for the situation, Tomas came face-to-face with the most fearsome decision of them all. In 1885, the Catholic peasant, for the first time in five or six centuries of British rule, had won the right to vote.

Kevin O’Garvey, a Land League Catholic lawyer, decided to stand for Parliament against the Earl of Foyle’s candidate.

After the Earl’s man used every real or imagined threat possible, it all boiled down to Tomas Larkin. If Tomas voted, the croppies in the peninsula would follow him. If
Tomas stayed away from the polls, the meaning was clear.

With a thick cloud of fear hovering, Tomas was given two messages. If he stayed away from the polls, his bread would be baked for life, by a cleverly conceived bribe. If he attempted to vote he was faced with a savage reprisal that would evict dozens of his neighbors. He didn’t want to go near the fecking polls, and that’s a fact. It was his son Conor who, but a young boy, half-shamed his father into it and walked into an Orange mob at the polls holding Tomas’s hand.

Kevin O’Garvey won. Tomas became the reluctant chieftain and Conor Larkin, obviously, the chieftain apparent.

You’d think a couple of men who loved one another as fiercely as Conor and Tomas did would have shared a long life of mutual admiration. They were more like two comets on a collision course.

It started the year of a flax crop failure. A bad planting and worse harvest spelled debt. Conor, it seemed, had been hanging around Mr. Lambe’s forge from the age of five or six. Mr. Lambe, though a Presbyterian and Orangeman, was affectionately regarded by all the croppies.

The Larkins sorely needed Conor’s wages and Tomas let him apprentice. Liam, the middle son, was a farmer and utterly happy going up in the heather with his da and working alongside him. This arrangement, like all arrangements thereabouts, born of too many sons and too little land with hostile soil, opened the way to Larkin family intrigue and conspiracy.

As Conor clearly showed unusual talent at the forge, Tomas began to lie to himself. Conor had to have the land and Conor had to stop trying to educate himself about things beyond Ballyutogue. Liam was odd man out and foredoomed to emigrate.

*  *  *

The boyhood pals, Conor and Seamus, went into a few conspiracies of their own. When school was done for the day and as soon as Conor closed down the forge, the two repaired to a secret place where Seamus taught Conor to read and write.

The conspiracy widened when Conor met the teacher Andrew Ingram, who, although a Presbyterian, was a man of the likes of Mr. Lambe.

The conspiracy widened once more. Seamus wrote to his brother Eamonn in Baltimore and confided his longing for books which were unobtainable. Eamonn was a bachelor fellow with a great love for his baby brother and he began to pipe the forbidden books through Mr. Ingram.

Tomas Larkin wasn’t behind the door when brains were passed out. Now it was books, books with ideas, books about places that would lure his son beyond the horizon.

Tomas suddenly sentenced Conor to spend the summer shepherding the flock in an isolated high meadow, without contact with the village for nearly three months.

Seamus O’Neill saw the way to convert disaster into good fortune. He talked his parents into letting him go up to the booley house, the shepherd’s shelter, with Conor for the summer. When they agreed, the boys planned to hide two dozen books among the provisions and read the nights through by the midsummer’s sun.

Tomas found the books and threatened to destroy them, when Conor swore he would run away. Tomas struck Conor a blow that would stay with him until his end, but he would not back down. Tomas was forced to relent. The battle lines were now drawn.

In the high meadows that summer a powerful bond was forged between the boys and Andrew Ingram. The teacher came up to the booley house with his sweetheart, Miss Enid Lockwood, also a teacher at another village. The
kind of intimate relations Mr. Ingram had with Miss Enid could scarcely be accepted by the codes of the day. Yet, he knew his two croppy scholars would keep his secret as, indeed, they did. They were like four wild, wondrous scholars, alone on a mountaintop seeking out the puzzles of the human race.

Discovered by Caroline Hubble, Andrew Ingram gave her own sons, Jeremy and Christopher, early tutoring. His intellect and scholarship impressed her so that she became his patroness and, after Ingram’s marriage to Enid Lockwood, sponsored him to the position of school superintendent of a large district that included Londonderry. His departure from Ballyutogue fell on the boys sorely.

The love and joy that once marked the Larkins no longer existed. Tomas and Finola had once enjoyed a grand old sex life, but because of her ailments following childbirth, the Church forced them to live as brother and sister rather than let them make love during safe times.

Young Dary, the last of the Larkins, was seized by his mother and earmarked for priesthood.

Liam became a sad boy, with only Conor’s love keeping him from tearing apart.

Brigid was manipulated away from Myles McCracken, a boy she loved, because he would be landless.

Eamonn O’Neill, Seamus’s and Conor’s early conduit for forbidden books, died in a fire and left a small insurance policy with the proviso that it be used to further Seamus’s education. Seamus moved down to Deny, where Enid and Andrew Ingram tutored him so he could take the entrance exams for Queens College in Belfast. Thus Seamus O’Neill became the first Catholic to attend college in Ballyutogue’s long and anguished history.

Conor’s happiness for Seamus was stifled by his own
terrible loneliness. The intensity of the silent war under the Larkin roof became short-fused when Conor won his ironmaster’s certificate. Conor’s hunger for the world beyond was close to consuming him.

The hour, the moment, the second came. Through Kevin O’Garvey, now a member of Parliament, Liam arranged passage to New Zealand. When Conor learned of it, he was thrown into a frenzy of fear that Liam’s departure would chain him to Ballyutogue.

Conor begged his father to let Liam inherit the land. Tomas refused. Both of the sons left Ballyutogue that night, Liam forever to New Zealand and Conor down to Derry’s Bogside.