Leon Uris (5 page)

“That’s still cowardly, isn’t it?” Wally asked the bartender. The big Maori nodded.

“Tell you what. Twenty on Rory Larkin and I’ll give two-to-one odds he lays out the four of you. Even money on the side says that one or more will require hospitalization. Clear back a few tables there to give them room to fall.”

“Bullshit, Ferguson,” Oak roared and brought a punch up from his boot tops that caught Rory directly between the eyes. Rory fell back, shook his head, and stared at the giant who groped, bewildered.

“If that’s the best punch you’ve got, Oak, you’re fucked!” Rory’s fists blazed fast into the miner, who was stunned long enough so that a knee to the groin, elbow to the Adam’s apple, and hand chop behind the neck caused the entire room to shake as he thudded to the floor, clapped out.

“Gentlemen,” Rory said to the others, “who wishes the honors?”

There was a total loss of enthusiasm among those burdened with dragging Oak’s hulk from the place.

Rory banged his mug on the bar and glared at the room. “My name is Rory Larkin and I’m a New Zealander! I love my country! I loved my uncle and I think the Brits got what was coming to them!”

He snatched a bottle off the bar and barreled for the door. Wally caught him outside and spun him around.

“Jesus, I hate to see this thing happen in New Zealand. Two Irishmen fighting each other. This is not the place for it, Rory. Now, God rest your uncle’s soul, but this is your country!”

Rory backed away fighting for breath, trying to unscramble the whirl of torment so that words could form off his lips, somehow. Wally backed up and there was fear involved. He had never seen such a blaze of eyes and Rory shaking from top to bottom.

“Can’t you see,” Rory screamed. The veins bulged from his neck and his forehead. “I’m haunted, man!”

“Jesus, boy, you’re not yourself now. Come on, calm-like. It’s me, Wally, talking. Go to my office and drink yourself to sleep.” Wally reached out, but Rory swung his arm.

“You’re scared of me, aren’t you, Wally?”

“No.”

In a time Rory’s control returned and he told Wally he was really, painfully sorry. He turned to leave.

“Where the hell you going?”

“You know,” Rory answered.

“All right, then. Stay with her till you’re ready to come out and when you come out, you come straight to me. Will you shake hands on it?”

“I promise.”

Rory found himself wandering past the docks and along the base of Mount Pleasant, a hill that afforded a triple vista; Christchurch to the north and its omni-dim lights and whispering hymns, the Lyttleton Harbour below and Taylor’s Mistake at land’s end luring the ships to crash in the wrong inlet.

Rory crossed the road and sat on the grass and drank from the bottle. Who was Admiral Taylor to have such an insult heaped upon himself? How many ships piled up aground in that shallow treacherous cove?

That’s good, Rory thought. God has a way of disconnecting a man’s brain when it is too mashed up to contend with tragedy. When you can bear no more you can think of silly things like Taylor’s Mistake. Why am I here sitting on the wet grass and drinking when the Sheepmen’s Exchange is down there? Oh yeah…Oak Kelley. Bastard’s jaw hurt my fist.

“Oh, Uncle Conor,” Rory mumbled. “Since you left I’ve wanted nothing more in life than to see you again. God, the joy of it when I learned you’d busted out of prison! Over the years only precious letters, read till the words almost disappeared from the paper.”

He lay back and fell into a stupor.

Ugly, gray, wet, windy, chilled dawn told Rory either to wake up or die frozen in the grass. His infallible youth and
strength won out. He crawled up from hands and knees and stood wavering like a tall ship’s mast in a hurricane.

Oh yes…that’s it…Georgia. Sister Georgia Norman, Chief Matron of the Christchurch Presbyterian Hospital. Several months earlier Rory had been taken down to the hospital with ribs cracked in a fall during the cattle muster. The war had swept a great number of the physicians into the army, including Dr. Calvin Norman, who was now on the way from somewhere to somewhere else.

In five months of hostilities, Rory Larkin had, by serendipity, found an unexpected windfall of unfaithful wives. Even as he rendered them and himself pleasure he disdained them. Wives were supposed to hunker down and wait it out in abstinence. Well, Rory concluded, one had to accept one’s fate. There were two kinds of women about. Those who were married and those who wanted to be. The married birds were in no position to complain too loudly about his lack of attention. He could come and go as he pleased and they were most grateful.

Except for Georgia Norman. She was more mature, at thirty, and a woman of accomplishment and experience. She was English-born, like his mom, and a bit plump like her as well. As a young woman she trained and spent more than eight years nursing in the Medical Corps, including outstanding service during the Boer War.

It seemed the war did her in. She ran to the farthest place not in permanent ice fields, where she met Dr. Norman, a physician probably better suited to be a law clerk. Georgia craved peace and lacked great beauty. Calvin Norman was an acceptable compromise with life. Her desire for motherhood was soon derailed as she learned of her husband’s overly solicitous examinations of his female patients.

Then came the war that so many New Zealand men felt had arrived as a blessing. Dr. Norman saw it as an excellent job opportunity, an advancement. The war would be short, no doubt, and he would return with a shoulder full
of pips, a chest with at least two rows of medals, and the command of any hospital or practice of his choosing.

Georgia was unlike any woman Rory had encountered, and for a man of his tender age his conquests numbered quite a few.

No weeping, no jealousy, no laying on of guilt. Her code with Rory was humor and lovemaking. As a lady who had been in the company of the military for nearly a decade and a highly informed nurse, Georgia was a most knowledgeable and creative lover. No questions asked, no demands made. Easy come, easy go. She had no other lovers but she was clever and patient. Rory would always find his way back to her. And she kept her secret from him.

Her cottage had a wild look to the sea around the bend from Taylor’s Mistake. As she gazed at the windswept horizon, a loud knock sounded. She responded to the knock and saw before her a drenched, battered sot with sour breath.

“Cor, blimey, what a gorgeous sight you are. Are you begging for alms or do you want to come in?”

Rory staggered into the room, shrugged, and shook his head several times.

“I read about it in the newspapers,” she said.

“Please,” he cried, and opened her robe and buried his face in her bosom and they slowly slipped to the floor and she held him and rocked him, her breasts soon salty from his tears. There are needs a strong man can’t speak of. A need like this from him had never been considered. He allowed himself for the first time in memory to completely cave in.

When at last he disengaged, his jerky loud breathing continued as she ran her fingers through his hair. “You’re soaking wet.”

“I didn’t know it had been raining. My da is up in the hills. It’s raining on him, too. I need a jar, Georgia.”

“To hell you do,” she answered, “you need to hold your head over the toilet and stick your finger down your throat. Now, in with you.”

Her strong nurse’s hands pulled him to his feet and he obeyed. She soaked him afterward in a hot tub and dried him and wrapped him in her husband’s ponderous wool bathrobe. Tea, bitters, and a drop of cognac calmed his tummywobbles.

Having felt that great surge of compassion from her flesh to his, he was desperate for more.

“Georgia,” he said in nearly a whimper, “would you just lie down with me and hold on to me, I mean, real tight like…just that.”

“What a grand idea,” she said.

Liam unglued his eyes to an unlikely tattoo of sun rays on the tent. His hand reached under the quilt and fished for the poteen bottle. It had died and gone to heaven hours ago. He berated himself for leaving the station in such haste that he had not thought to bring more.

The trashy taste in his mouth and the need to relieve himself overtook his dread of the morning chill. The stream brought him back to life in a hurry.

Liam puffed on the embers of the fire until they fanned, and when tea was made, he wrapped his hands around the cup and let the heat bake through to his leathery skin. The sun was winning its dawn skirmish with the elements. “Thanks God, for that,” he said.

Hunger pacified, he strung up his fishing rod automatically and selected a likely fly from his hat, hoping not to hook up seriously. He had yet to contemplate, to mourn, to allow flashes of memory to run through. He could never do that down off this hill because there were people around and things to do. What he wanted to ponder was not for sharing, even with Millie.

Liam commenced a long conversation with himself. In these kinds of discussions he could argue his case with utter clarity and dazzle the nonpresent adversary with his infallible logic. These arguments he always won. The fellow on the receiving end was almost always Rory.

The goddamned problem was that whenever Liam attempted to argue the case with Rory present he botched it. Rory would never give him the answers he had so positively anticipated.

After a time Liam stopped holding these conversations with actual persons, particularly Rory. He held them with himself up on the hill against the oak. It seemed that life between Liam and his son became a long trail of conversations that never took place.

It was like that in the old country, Liam thought. If you’re Irish enough, you can go an entire lifetime filled with conversations that never took place, like those between himself and his own father, Tomas.

Up here on the hill by the stream, Liam would even allow himself to journey inward deep enough to inflict upon himself the hurt of Ireland.

How many pricks must a man endure before he becomes numb? Liam knew early on his place in life was set. He learned the futility of trying to win his father over or to change his lot in life. Liam realized a short time after he was born that he was a small matter in a field of giants. NOT ANYMORE! Squire Liam Larkin was no small matter anymore.

“Dear Lord, must I go to me grave without Rory once having a taste and touch of my true feelings? All our conversations end in ruin. After a time, one stops even thinking about having them, it becomes that futile.

“What am I guilty of, son? Building this magnificent life here? What have I done wrong, Rory? Saved you from the blistering misery of Ireland and the hanging tree? Because of me you’ll never know the terror of going up a gangplank and down into the second hold of a tramp steamer on a voyage in purgatory with less than a quid in your pocket. I saved you from fear, boy, from puking over the rail and praying God for the strength to throw yourself into the sea!”

Liam’s face knotted as he recalled the ugliest incident between them that had taken place two years earlier.
June MacPherson was sixteen, the daughter of Protestant farmers. They had a small but decent holding of about three hundred acres of crop with a few animals. June was a good-looking lass but in a state of perpetual heat with a reputation of being loose with her knickers.

Rory became the pot of gold at the end of her rainbow. Determined to become Mrs. Larkin, she seduced him without qualms on numerous occasions by methods that would have been considered rape, were she a man. Rory took responsibility for the pregnancy.

The Larkin household flooded with bitter memories. Unlike the acrimony shown them by Mildred’s parents, the Larkins decided to be real Christians about it. Moreover, Junie-girl was an answer to Liam’s prayers. With a wife and child, Rory’s roving days would be cut off at the knees. Now, he would have to remain in New Zealand!

June and all four parents seemed to be reveling in the plot, but Rory threw a wrench into it. He liked June very much. So had many other boys. She was not precisely the Virgin, but many girls had married after affairs with other partners and their marriages worked. It was a plain, simple, unfettered matter that he did not love her. There was more of this going on than the pious of the South Island were willing to admit. To be precise, June’s sister had been in the same condition a few years earlier and did not marry.

Rory seemed to have three choices: flee, marry, or go to prison. He did none of them. Thus the unthinkable came into play. June made the short trip to Wellington, as two other girls had done this particular year, and had an abortion.

Liam and Mildred had consented to the most hideous of all crimes and sins. The Squire now had to bear the added guilt of his son’s wretched behavior.

Thank God he had his own shining behavior with Mildred to show himself as the loftiest of men while his
son was a scum. Liam cozily sloughed off the pertinent fact that he loved Mildred, and Rory and Junie did not really care for each other.

In another year, June MacPherson became pregnant again, this time with a lesser character than Rory, a lunker who marched off peacefully to the altar.

“Aye,” Liam sighed, “if I couldn’t get through to Rory in a matter of such moral magnitude, how can I get through to him at all?”

That’s the bitter twist, he thought. “If we only had one golden conversation, one in which he would understand everything I told him and probably I had to hear a few things myself.

“But nae, the silence goes into the churchyard and the truth, never heard, is shoveled over by the grave digger. And another generation takes up a life of unspoken anger.”

Suppose, Liam thought, everyone in a family were priests three days a week. On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday half the family, the priests, would be sitting in the confessional box and the other half of the family had to confess to them. Then on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday the confessors would become the priests and the priests would be hearing the confessions from them. On Sunday, they’d all go to Mass together.

“I’ll wager there are Irish family debating societies in heaven, hell, and purgatory, and the misunderstandings could be argued century after century.”

Or was it that there were always too many children and not enough land in Ireland? That boys lived in fear of forced marriages or married as toothless old bachelors or emigrated? Was it the absence of gracious wealth, or was it the damnable British stranger among them? Was it the Holy Church who force-fed a fear of sin like it was mother’s milk?

“All of the bloody things that made the Irish heap wreckage on one another had brought grief upon grief, departed sons and daughters, shut out shows of compassion and
affections from us…. Never touching…made us great fighters in other men’s armies.”

Could any of this have been averted, Liam wondered, with that one golden conversation?

He contemplated where Rory might be. Here was a lad twenty years old bedding down half the grass widows in Christchurch. One of these days some soldier was going to come home on leave unexpected and blow his head off. Jaysus, Liam thought, that boy draws women to him like nails to a magnet.

He draws them like Conor used to. Every other bird in Ballyutogue had broken a wing from flying too hard at Conor. Mr. Lambe’s forge, where his brother worked since his apprenticeship, always had girls hanging around, Protestant and Catholic alike…“just happening by.”

Rory was not much different. He had cornered all the good looks of the Larkin family and left crumbs for the rest of us.

Down the trail he’d go, asleep on RumRunner, who knew the route to Wally’s better than most drovers.

Jaysus, that boy could hold a tank of booze, like his grandfather Tomas. Ah, he could count on Wally to keep the peace, then spill Rory into a bunk when his tank overflowed. Good old Wally. He and Mildred owed Wally for taking them in in the beginning and helping them get started. Wally was the only one who Rory had really taken to and could keep the boy from going on a tear.

Liam switched images as his hand poked through his kit more in hope that some faerie may have slipped in another bottle of poteen.

His thoughts ran to the homestead, now fourteen rooms large with a big and little lorry and a Model T like the one he bought for Father Gionelli. The gem of the Ballyutogue Station was a family chapel, with its awesome silver candlesticks.

Maybe the worst hurt of all was that his mother and father never saw his Ballyutogue Station. Every time he
added land or new heads of cattle and extended his fences, Liam would play over and over in his mind that he was showing Tomas around. “See there, Da, picked up that hundred acres because of phosphate content, a natural for growing potatoes and American corn.” Huh! A hundred acres, just a wee corner of this spread…but larger than all the Larkin fields together. Old Tomas would squint as he looked over his son’s “barony” and the cut would be deep. Tomas would know how wrong he had been. And there, Liam’s own private trout stream, like a lord, and electricity in the house and new combines in the fields.

Probably the greatest part of his mourning when his dadied was the fact he’d never see Ballyutogue Station in New Zealand. The game was on to get his mom, Finola, to take the trip to New Zealand and with damned better accommodations than had been the case with him. She’d swoon from the sight of the place and go back to Ireland and spend her life bragging about Squire Liam to the respectful and awed neighbors.

Getting Finola to move out of Ballyutogue, except for the occasional county fair or the pilgrimage up Mount Patrick, took some years of convincing. By the time she agreed to come for a visit, she had gotten too old and, like Tomas, never saw the place.

Somehow, this grated on Liam almost more than anything in this life, almost more than Rory’s behavior.

It hurt too much so he once again shifted images to Mildred, Madge, and Spring in the chapel, on their knees lamenting the death of Conor with his photograph bathed in candlelight. Tommy was nowhere, doing nothing. Tommy was like Liam had been in Ireland, doing nothing but mending harnesses or pitching horseshoes.

In another day the women would have spent the first cannonburst of grief and he’d come down. There was no use going sooner, even for another bottle of poteen. Liam knew he’d be somewhat less than nothing around three wailing females.

Liam thought of Millie. “What a horrible time to think of my wife laying naked in bed,” he blushed aloud. Back in Ireland when a girl went up the pole and the guilty young man was shuffled in shame to the altar, it signaled the end of his dreams, the ultimate life sentence, the closing of the door to the outside world, adventures, the rover’s itchy feet. Passion that ended bachelorhood had its dire consequences. Thank God for Millie, he had said a million times, thank God she defied her parents and had guided him through killer turbulence to land, to a homestead, to acceptance as one of the mighty.…Sheep Baron. By God, aristocracy, in a manner of speaking.…All fears of inadequacies, either on the land or with his woman, were vanquished.

The deliberate predating of Rory’s birth to make him seem months younger was done mostly to preserve Mildred’s honor. There were snickers and whispers, probably emanating from Bert and Edna Hargrove, but time would take care of it.

Or would it?

Try as he might there was a flicker of guilt every time he looked at Wee Rory, a trait that seemed to continue on through Rory’s boyhood. The first time he saw the baby at Mildred’s breast, he felt the infant had invaded their love. He never had the same problem in sharing Spring, Madge, and, particularly, Tommy when they nursed.

Rory was his son, all right, but it was Tommy who solidified the Larkin name in New Zealand. Tommy was named after someone from the old country. In a strange way, Tommy had more legitimacy.

What the hell! Rory didn’t know, even at this time! Or did he, and did he take his rage inward? At one point, Mildred suggested they tell Rory about his early birth and their dire situation at the time, but Liam would not hear of it. Too much honor was involved, too much of his deepest Catholic beliefs had been willfully ignored by his lust.

Rory sensed friction from the start. Liam always went out of his way to give the boy a paternal pat on the shoulder or even a rumple of the hair. Something about it was always forced.

Affection was mainly for Mildred and some for the girls. All a real man like Rory needed was a slap on the back and a “job well done.”

Rory used me, Liam thought. Running to Mildred’s lap for an embrace just to annoy him. Damned kids can play parent against parent before they can walk, and Rory was a master of it because attention from mom always brought a secondary attention from Liam. Other routes to his father were through bossing around his sisters. Liam gave him angry attention for that in short order.

At last came Tommy, the real Larkin. But alas, it became apparent that Tommy was not going to be very tall in the saddle. Tommy had no natural sense for ranching.

Liam needed Rory, and knowing he needed Rory intensified the spite and arid spirit between them.

Conor came, and when Conor departed the rift was permanent. Liam’s son had become his brother. Liam was again contending with the great Conor Larkin and all the fears he attributed to Tomas were now being done by him to Rory. Memories, so carefully controlled, had gotten out of hand as he fell back in time.

Of the four Larkin kids back in Ireland, Tomas’s arms were most readily open to embrace Conor. Liam had to annoy the hell out of Tomas to get even pale recognition.

Liam believed the angels had smiled on him when Conor went to work at Mr. Lambe’s forge as an apprentice farrier and blacksmith. Now Liam alone could go up to the fields every day with his daddy, digging lazy beds, pulling rocks, planting, slaning turf, harvesting alongside.

From the age of nine he worked without complaint in fair or dirty weather until he was knackered, waiting only for that grand moment when Tomas would lay a hand on his shoulder and say, “There’s a good lad, now.” No boy
worked for his reward more earnestly. “There’s a good lad,” and maybe even a rumple of the hair.