Redemption. - Redemption. Part 18
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Redemption. Part 18

"Aye, it was our work together. I didn't make love to her...."

"But you loved her. And you used the grandeur of your commission to further your floating away from the real world."

"Aye."

"Welcome to Bogside, Conor. I don't know what Kevin did and I don't give a damn. Everything in Ireland is a deal. Our politicians have a monumental reputation for it. I do know I've taken him home night after night in agony from the pain of Bogside. He was burned out from looking at skinny kids filled with sores, old men and women by the age of ten, and drunks pitching pennies against the wall who never had a job from birth to death, and factory girls too tired to smile, much less make love. He was done in and you were his white knight... and you made your bloody deals by not demanding to know what you suspected because you wanted to stay in your dream with Caroline Hubble and with that screen."

"Is that why Kevin called off the investigation of the factory? Did Roger Hubble pay him to set me and the others up in business? Is that it?"

"I don't know," she croaked.

"Say what you will, I've been betrayed by Kevin O'Garvey and probably Andrew Ingram as well. Well...I'm not taking their path. Kevin will tell me, the minute he returns from London, if he made the deal with Roger Hubble. We are going to close that fecking factory down. As for you, Maudie, stop, quit. Don't go work there another day. I'm bloody sick of Conor Larkin!"

He felt her hand on his bowed head.

"That's the way they do it, mon. If a golden one like yourself or Garvey shows you mean to take them on, they merely ease you into their system."

"Maudie...Maudie...don't go back into that factory." "Soon, Conor, soon."

28.

What force, what combination offerees, could generate enough power to drive Conor Larkin out of Ireland?

Was it the fire at the Witherspoon & McNab shirt factory?

What was overdue to happen, happened. In the mining towns and out on sea you're struck numb with fright when the disaster whistle screams ugly. As the whistle pierces over and over and over you move into desperate action gravitating in a run toward the trouble, gasping prayer, heart close to a burst, the most vile of fears consuming yourself.

The first thin spirals of smoke eked through the cracks into the air. Then came the blasts like cannonades shattering glass for a mile around, felling the on rushers, covering their ears as a hundred tongues of fire leapt from the factory windows.

There! On the rooftop! Women and children had gathered screaming their terror, dropping to their knees in prayer.

Fire bells! Whinnying, frothing horses!

Neither ladders nor water horses could reach the roof.

"They're jumping!"

Conor and his mates pinned Myles McCracken to the ground as Maud leapt. Conor rushed over to pick her up. She broke in half. Myles and Maud's unborn child splattered like a broken egg on the paving stones.

A blue and orange ball billowed over the top floors in an all-consuming inferno. Within the building, the hollow cast-iron pillars splintered, cracked, then burst apart, and the factory gave up quickly and collapsed.

With the broken corpses laid out on a streetside morgue, another hour and another of water, pumping the River Foyle dry, poured in on the sizzling remains until the firemen could inch in.

Human fragments, skulls, a braid of hair, charred rosary beads, a shoe, bits, pieces, teeth, glasses, rings. Forty children under teen age...sixty pregnant women...a hundred and fifty-four, maybe more, maybe a few less...

Hail Mary...

Too few positive identifications. A common grave. Perhaps God would recognize them.

What could drive a Conor Larkin from Ireland? Was it the sudden and unexplained disappearance of Kevin O'Garvey?

Where did Kevin go? Why? What did Kevin know? Did they do away with him? Did he flee? We have to have Kevin O'Garvey or there is no chance of justice in Bogside...if there ever was, anyhow. Kevin man, where are you, now?

Would disgust over the cover-up have driven Conor Larkin out of Ireland?

Martin Mulligan, a vagrant, was picked up for arson. Mulligan had worked at the factory stables years earlier, had been fired, and had sworn he was going to wreak vengeance. Mulligan signed a confession that several Catholic constables swore to at the inquiry. The next morning, after confessing, Mulligan was found hanged in his cell. It was deemed a suicide.

Twenty witnesses at the inquiry testified that Mulligan had made the threats. What never came up was that he was an illiterate and therefore could neither read nor sign the confession.

Another two dozen witnesses-municipal inspectors, architects, factory owners-testified to the safety of the building.

No mention was made of toilets that did not work for years or windows stuck shut with grime or sand buckets whose bottoms had rotted out or fire hoses that had not worked in a decade or that no fire drill had taken place in ten years because the stairs and landings were too crammed with bolts of linen to move past...a building whose very design all but guaranteed a disaster....

So, the Earl of Foyle went his jolly way and grieving families had a few quid tossed to them.

That's it! Myles McCracken was admitted to the insane asylum and killed himself. That might have driven a Conor Larkin from Ireland.

Or was it that night after Conor had finished his rounds trying to tend the broken men of Bogside?

Conor climbed up to his flat, a wave of deep sighs holding back some of the pain. Four months had passed, but still there came the rain of ashes after every wind, and it seemed that the smell of rotten corpses found a way out of the rubble. He sensed the presence of someone.

"Who's here?" he rasped.

"Caroline."

He lit the lamp and saw her huddled on the settee, cloaked in a monk's cloth hooded cape so as not to attract notice. On sight of Conor she saw the toll that had been taken on him. He slumped into his reading chair.

"I've written you a dozen letters," she said.

"I've not received them," he answered.

"I never sent them. I tore them up. They were all inadequate to set my feelings down. I don't feel very good about myself," she said voice trembling. "I have an overwhelming need to face you."

"Why?"

"I am torn by a terrible notion about us."

"Caroline, there is so much confusion and guilt about what happened. That factory did not burn down because you and I fell in love."

"Part of the reason it burned down was that I am the Countess of Foyle and part of the establishment that allowed it to happen."

"Good God, Caroline, if there was ever an aristocrat out here who made some efforts to better things, it was you. You couldn't have known."

"I didn't know because I didn't want to know.... I didn't know because I never went above the first floor of that wretched place. There was conspiracy on the wind and I made it a point not to find out."

It was all too far gone to play at games. "Nor did I," Conor said. He said what he had held in till this moment. "All right. I smelled something wrong the first time Kevin O'Garvey postponed the investigation. His whole life was pointed to bringing the Earl up before his committee and exposing that factory. When he called it off, I did not challenge him because...I didn't want to know, either! I didn't want to have to face my hero and have him confess to me that he had made a deal. Not hard to figure out what the deal was, is it? I had my forge, I was on the way. I didn't say a word when the second postponement came. And then," he croaked, "nothing was going to take me away from the great screen, and no one except you could understand that. So, we didn't want to know and we joined the conspiracy by our silence."

"Conor, hear me. I cannot rationalize this, but there is a reason for our behavior. No man has ever taken on a great work of art without paying a terrible price and creating terrible pain for those he loves the most. But nothing...nothing...nothing could have kept that building from collapsing after my husband and Kevin went into some kind of deal."

"I keep trying to tell myself that..."

"Hang on to that belief," she said. "We were both trapped by the system. I came here to plead forgiveness for my part and beg you not to hate me."

"I believe you. I never went above the first story, myself. God, woman, I could never hate you."

She arose and came to him and mussed his hair and kissed his forehead. "Take care," she whispered.

"Aye."

And she was gone, into a snowfall of ashes.

What was it that drove Conor Larkin out of Ireland? Was it the terminal lethargy of the men of Bogside? They were worse than dead for they were living dead with no spirit of rage, not even the instinct for survival.

They had accepted the system of birth-to-death unemployment, birth-to-death poverty, birth-to-death humiliation.

Where in the name of Jesus were the Kilty Larkins!

For a year and a day Conor took to the roads of Ireland seeking the old Fenians, men who had done battle, Gaelic warriors of old. He found them. One or two in wee villages sitting at the end of the bar stool. The living legends were glassy-eyed drunks repeating their imagined valor one more time for one more pint.

What few Irishmen remained worthy of a rising were away in South Africa fighting the Brits. Seamus O'Neill was among them. They were all gone, Tomas and Kilty and Seamus and Andrew Ingram and Kevin O'Garvey and, in the most heart-wrenching sense, Caroline Hubble.

The thin thread of keeping Conor Larkin fell to his younger brother Dary, a seminary novice. Dary was able to transfer to the diocese of Derry in temporary service to help contend with the tragedy of Bogside. Wee Dary became a rock, a healer, and man of God in the ultimate sense. And, he was his brother's keeper.

One more bombastic drunk, one more bombastic hangover. Conor sat dizzy in the middle of his forge, which had not seen the glow of the fire for over a year.

"I have to return to the seminary and my studies," Dary announced abruptly.

Conor anguished. "How can I do without you, wee Dary?"

"It's nigh on to springtime," Dary said. "I saw some daisies pushing through the rubble. Enough time has passed, Conor. You and I have to have our go at it, now."

"Ah, what do you want of me, Dary? I've prostrated myself before your throne. I'm awash in guilt! You know my dark secret. Maybe the Lord took vengeance on me for loving Caroline Hubble?"

"Stop babbling, you're wracked with pity."

"You want me in a monastery talking this over with Jesus, don't you?"

"Tell you what I want, Conor. I want you to get on the next ship out of Ireland."

Conor gnarled and tried to weep at the same time. But the tears were all long spent on poor dear Myles. That was the last time he'd cried. "Go to hell, Father Dary."

"Well then," Dary pressed, "you've a few choices. You've done your year and a day looking for stout-hearted fighting men to no avail. You can take on the British singlehanded or take a shortcut and rip Roger Hubble's Adam's apple out with your bare hands."

"You're a kid and you're talking like a Jesuit. Say what you mean and mean what you say."

"I'm also a Larkin," Dary said. "I've a drop or two of republican blood in my veins, but I'll not go the way of the gunman. I'm also an Irishman. What I am now most of all is your brother. I know you better than you know yourself. You're very fuzzy, and what I see clearly is a man who is fast becoming a danger to himself."

Conor stopped battling his brother long enough to allow Dary's words to make their way in. "You really want me out of Ireland, don't you, Dary?"

"Aye, I do, until you can get reacquainted with yourself."

Conor was always baffled by Dary. He grew up liking skirts and bosoms well enough. Had he taken a stand against the priesthood, Finola could never have forced him. He was his own lad and he chose the priesthood. He made a deliberate choice that there was something better in the world than what he saw around him. Who could argue? He alone, among the Larkins, was at peace with himself.

"Dary..."

"You're almost to the point where you'll go to the bottom of the wall in Bogside and pitch pennies and never draw a sober breath again. Or, you'll go killer. You're a promise that will never be fulfilled. Look at this forge-it's desolate. Myles and Maud are not coming back and you " can't take on the British presence in Ireland by yourself.

"Sail the seas, Conor," Dary went on. "Take control of 1 the memories of Caroline Hubble and tuck them away. There is a woman somewhere who wants to come in to you, but you'll not find her until Caroline stops blocking her way. What you need is space. You'll know when it's time to come back."

"I know I have to fight."

"Aye, you'll have to fight. I know I won't be able to stop you. But fight, man, when you have your wits and mind keenly focused. What you seek now is revenge, and revenge for the sake of revenge. Revenge is not to one man. Kill Roger Hubble and the miseries of Ireland will still be there. Don't give your life away. Make it count."

The two brothers walked through the Bogside, then to the quay and the shipping office. A likely vessel was due in in a week.

Conor hitched up his livery horses to the small buck-board and rode out into the countryside, over the Burntollet Bridge and to the gates of the seminary. Somehow, it still burned Conor to see his brother disappear behind the wall. Dary smiled.

"I'm ready," Dary said.

"I'm ready as well," Conor said.

Dary soon vanished from his sight.

29.

1904.

Conor Larkin slid shut the door of the wheelhouse behind him and set down a cup of tea for Bojo at the helm. He sipped on his own as Bojo gave him the headings for his watch.

The S.S. Famagusta moved flat out at twelve knots on a smooth tabletop of windless water and a big show taking place up in the sky.

"Christchurch tomorrow," Bojo said. "You got a brother there?"

"Aye, he has a station somewhere in the middle of the island up in the hills."

"A real spread?"