Leon Uris (24 page)

The cairn was over her mother’s grave and the last prayer intoned and the last wail of the pipe faded. Brigid stood before the cottage door for an eternity before she opened it, ever so slowly. It was hers now. The farm was hers. After all the manipulation and hells and wars. It was hers now, every lace spread, every gleaming pot, every featherbed, creepie, jug, harness, and even the recollections.

Her eyes played over the room. The seat closest to the fire would be her own, and all the pans would be scrubbed to a shine they never owned before. The benches and crane in the fireplace and the churn and weaver’s light-holders were her own. Tomorrow, she’d walk through the fields counting up all that was hers.

Brigid made from room to room, touching, fondling her possessions, patting down the quilts, brushing away specks of gathering dust, nipping off lint.

She came to her parents’ bedroom and stood at the foot of the birth bed of herself and her brothers, edged onto the side of it, lay back, and buried herself in the softness of the great comforter and closed her eyes as tears filled them.

“Oh Myles,” she whispered, “if only you’d have waited… .”

“Dublin, next stop Dublin, Aimens Street Station. Wake up, miss.”

“What!”

“We’ve arrived in Dublin, darlin’. We’ll be at the station in a blink.”

The mighty chapel of St. Patrick’s in Maynooth was a hymn to Roman Catholic grandeur, crafted by thousands of hands over a half-century. The Stahluhut organ vibrated the grounds announcing the parade of young men in blinding white robes as five hundred voices of the choir crescendoed the omnipotence of the Almighty. The bishop enthroned called for the deacon to summon forth the candidates.

Brigid wrung her already soppy handkerchief, ill at ease so far from Ballyutogue, feeling insignificant in the majesty of the surroundings, yet filled with a sense of euphoria she had never known, not even with Myles McCracken. She had traveled far for this walk in God’s splendor, and vengeance against her mother had not even entered her head on this day.

Seamus O’Neill, though a republican journalist and secret member of the Brotherhood, was not cynical. The O’Neill family had not suffered the wrath of the Church as had the Larkin men.

Seamus had an off-view of the Church, but like many who held an off-view, he remained a slave to childhood rote and superstitions—“Don’t take God lightly, just to be on the safe side.”

Whatever bitter views Seamus held, he bent to them. The voice of his mother, though long departed, continued
to command him to Sunday Mass more than he cared to admit.

Although this moment hardly reflected the simplicity and humility of Jesus, a people’s rabbi, Conor accepted the grandeur as a needed carnival to brighten the drab lives of the parish of Ireland. The cathedral was wrong and distasteful for the parish of impoverished Ireland, but somehow the Irish scarcely resented it.

Conor was satisfied that Dary had become a priest on his own and would have chosen priesthood with or without his mother’s obsession. And Father Dary would be the best of what priesthood had to offer, what with his gentle capacity to charm a mockingbird from its limb onto his shoulder, yet a man of Larkin steel, within.

At the altar the priests droned through the saints, A to Z, and Conor felt a contentment that Dary had found a higher value to life. Why not even envy Dary at this moment?

Conor’s separation from Shelley had all but ground him to dust.

As his brother was called forward and asked if he was ready and Dary prostrated himself, Conor felt bittersweet but with no reason to rail against the moment.

Brigid wept…Conor wondered. Seamus? Well, there were good priests and not such good priests. Seamus hoped the Church knew the value of the man giving his promise.

Things had been wobbly between Dary and his brother since Conor returned to Ireland and joined the Brotherhood. From his earliest days in the seminary, Dary was keen but cautious to try to sway Conor from active republicanism, not because of the rights and wrongs of it, but because Dary didn’t want Conor to end up reliving the Larkin legacy of misery or to end up hanging from the end of a British rope.

By the time Conor returned to Ireland, Dary had been singled out during those five years as a very special
prospect. Early on, Dary had opted for a missionary order for life among the lepers in those places that only an Irish priest would go. He was among a half-dozen candidates chosen for special African studies under the mentorship of a brilliant priest, Father George Mooney, whose own health had been devoured in the tropics.

Father Mooney was suddenly named the new Bishop of Derry. The previous bishop had been installed a decade earlier to stamp out a rise of liberalism among Derry’s priests, but after the shirt factory fire, the place continued to wallow in despair.

It was believed that a bit of controlled liberalism might be in order again to get Derry and the Bogside back into the faith.

The loss of Father Mooney hit hard at Dary Larkin. The Father was a teacher painful to lose. Dary sulked a lot and, each time Conor visited him, took out his own frustration on his brother. On Conor’s last visit, a few months before the ordination, the brothers went at each other with verbal bombast for the first time in their lives.

“What good has eight hundred years of risings and bloodshed accomplished?” Dary demanded.

“And what good has eight hundred years of prayer done?” Conor retorted. “I’ll not have you passing judgments on what I’ve chosen for life any more than I’m passing judgments on you, Dary.”

“If you stay in the Brotherhood and keep up the way of the gunman, I’ll not be there for you,” Dary said, astonished at the furious rage of his own words.

“Well,” Conor had answered, “that’s a good old Irish family for you.”

The chilling Mass of Ordination was done. Brigid was off to see the sights of Dublin with Seamus O’Neill. Conor had been somewhat dazed throughout the whole ceremony, and now, his apprehension was clear.

Conor tilted his chair back as Dary packed his suitcases silently. Of course there was the faded photograph of their mother taken at some long forgotten county fair.

“She was sorely missed today,” Conor said.

“She was there,” Dary answered.

“Aye, so she was.”

Both of them ground their teeth. There had never been friction between Dary and Conor, as there had been between other factions within the family. The two were always strongly together. They had no unspoken conversations, for they had set down their innermost secrets of each other and spoke openly and decently of their differences.

Now the chill of Irish family acrimony was about to settle unless they could head it off.

“How long before you’re off to England to get your doctorate?”

“I’m not going to England,” Dary answered.

“But your African studies, now?”

“That’s all changed.”

“When did this come about?”

“When George Mooney was named Bishop of Derry. I didn’t need much convincing that there was enough misery in Bogside without going halfway around the world to find it.”

“Aye, that’s a fact. But, so sudden a turn?”

“Maybe it wasn’t all that sudden. We all come back to Ireland, don’t we, Conor? So why bother to go in the first place if I’m only coming back? Bishop Mooney needs me badly.”

“You told me once a long time ago you were sporting to become a Bogside priest.”

“Obviously I revere the man. Poor old dear is in wretched health. Anyhow, things have not been right in Derry for all those years since the fire. Some sort of eternal ugliness has fallen over the place.”

The news hit Conor like a sudden rumble of thunder on the horizon. He shook his head. “If you’re thinking of
changing things,” Conor said carefully, “you might be in for a bitter experience. If Bishop Mooney fosters any such notions, he could have a short reign.”

“Bogside and Derry have bottomed out. They need a temporary liberal there now. They know Mooney’s not going to last very long in his state of health.”

“And you realize this, and you’re still willing to go?”

“Let’s talk, Conor,” Dary said suddenly, and it meant what it meant. Dary’s eyes were not those of an eager young novice ready and willing to be flailed and stuffed out there. Father Dary was a man, years ahead of his time.

“I was hoping to God we’d break our logjam, Dary.”

“My big problem was that I had a big brother whose eagerness to fill his mind drove him so that he became no man’s fool. I always wondered what you were reading, where you were hiding your books. But I also knew there was a fork in the road for us and I would not tempt myself.

“The first four years of seminary went diligently into the creation of the robot. But I came to Maynooth realizing that a huge void had formed in me as I became more and more disciplined. We make that transition from the child who can never be wrong about anything to the young man converted into blind obedience…and then…we come to a manhood of inquiry. This is a dangerous moment for the Church and the priest alike. We’ve a threshold, where a dweller lives and the dweller demands to know. Is the dweller a demon, a monster, or just a fine old fellow? And here we run into the mightiest of power, our teachers, who are watching each student’s dweller to see to it the dweller does not cross the threshold.”

“Why?”

“That something might have been lost in translation between God’s lips and the Pope’s ear. There are things that the Church knows but will not tell us. If our faith is so weak we cannot be trusted to know, then we will be weak priests. I believe I am strong enough to know any truth and become a better priest.”

“For God’s sake, Dary, you were just ordained today.”

“Aye, Conor, aye. I must follow unanswered questions to their resolution and that will only make me stronger.”

“Don’t you know you can’t beat the system?” Conor said.

“You’re a fine one to be telling me that,” Dary retorted. “I know the moral code God intended for man. I also know that things have been imposed to fit the human politics that have nothing to do with God’s morality.”

“Mooney taught you that?”

“What Mooney taught me was that when we go to Africa as missionaries we must give up the notion of being strangers imposing our civilization on theirs. Look what the British have tried to do—destroy our Celtic translation of Catholicism and superimpose their own version of it. Each Catholic society—black, yellow, brown, white—has its own version of Catholicism, some of it a blatant blend of Christianity and paganism. It is not absolute, because it changes and bends and yields throughout history against a Vatican entrenched to maintain the status quo.”

“Status quo.” Conor laughed. “Now, there’s a line our daddy used to describe the British plans for Ireland. And just what do you think you’re going to do about it, wee Dary?”

“Oh, Rome is the largest and oldest and most powerful game the world has ever known, and my presence will not be remembered. But my people will love me as a wise and compassionate priest.”

“You were so certain that the dogma was infallible, once. What changed you, Dary?”

“You changed me, Conor. The deeper I went into the priesthood, the louder your words called to me. The shirt factory fire changed me. I went to Derry as a novice to help after the carnage and I saw their private hells, but I was unable to do anything about it. For two years now, I’ve asked myself over and over, how can I give up earthly things without even knowing what they are…what is it
that I’m to be giving up? I must be able to confront earthly matters on the other side of the threshold. Isn’t that really what God wants of me?”

Where would this awakening take him, Conor wondered. Would he become a paragon among his fellows or a pariah to be cast out? Once a priest takes the forbidden fork in the road, it is near impossible for him to retrace his steps. Few do.

“Conor, you must never forget the fact that I am a priest and I am not going to be involved in republican matters. I told you that if you did not leave the Brotherhood I would not be there for you. I’ve never rested well since those words. I am a Larkin and an Irishman and your brother. I’ll be there for you.”

“You don’t know how much that means to me.”

“You see, man, I do have faith. Our father and our grandfather needed to come to God in the end. I’m not counting on you. However, I’m not counting you out.”

“I understand,” Conor said, loving his brother more profoundly at this moment than ever.

“Well, now,” Dary continued, “what about yourself? That Shelley girl still has her spell over you, hasn’t she?”

“I forget about her more each day.”

“To hell you do. If you could see the look on your face, they grew better-looking potatoes during the famine.”

Conor leapt from the chair, jammed his hands in his pockets, and paced, turning abruptly at the confines of the small room as though it were a cage. Dary knew his brother was about to burst.

“We’re a hell of a lot alike, you and me. We’ve both taken sacred vows to unyielding institutions where marching orders are to be obeyed. Our lives cannot be normal lives with normal aspirations. We’ll spend them in barren little rooms like this trying to infuse a spark of hope in the hopeless. And we both travel farther and faster without human baggage. You see, the Irish Republican Brotherhood all but demands an army of celibates as well.”

“This sounds like your decision, not hers.”

“What decision was there to make? To have her follow me to her death?”

“It could be that that is all she desires from life. From the looks of you, life holds no hell worse than the two of you being apart. If she is as miserable as you are, and I suspect she is, then you’ll both die early from longing for each other. You must take what pleasure there is for you and hold on to each other while it lasts.”

Conor was stopped cold and for the first time he was the younger brother in need of Father Dary’s strong hand.

“The way you’re flirting with it, it could happen to you, Dary.”

“No, it won’t,” Dary answered firmly. “I’m daring to venture because I am determined to know the difference between what God means and what man distorts. This much I believe entirely. Celibacy is a truth of the Church. I cannot serve a woman and divide my commitment to God. I know that.”

“Aye, so you do, and you’re strong enough to stop that temptation at the threshold.”