Redemption. - Redemption. Part 67
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Redemption. Part 67

"Yes, sir."

"Your name?"

"Private Shannon, sir."

"You and your mate better work together. Line up the right side better or the pack will start sliding. Are both sides equal in weight?"

"I suppose not, sir."

"Wake up, Shannon."

"Yes, sir."

When the packer took the train out, Yurlob watched intently. "What I have tried to do is give the same train the same set of trails. The mules adapt quickly. Rotation was putting too many over the side in strange places. We're saving quite a few animals."

"How about Sikhs?" I said. "Let me explain something to you. You're going to be dead in a week if you don't get out of here. What I mean is, go to Lemnos and get off your feet for a fortnight. Deal? Just a fortnight?"

"Ah Rory, you are like a rapier with your words. I like you." He started to walk away. I turned him around.

We went into a starting contest which I lost. He put an extremely weak hand on my shoulder. I could not bear to look. The man was all but rotting away before my eyes.

"There are certain things in my culture more important. For me, things are in good order. With my years of service, my family will receive a fine pension. Landers, my old battalion is up in the hills here doing the real fighting. My family and the people of my village must know I died on Gallipoli and not in a hospital bed. Are we clear?"

"Clear," I said, "but off your feet. You schedule the loads at the office. I'll send the trains out. And one more thing, you move in with Jeremy, Goodwood, and me."

"I prefer here...it's closer to the latrine. Be of good cheer, the Sikh religion makes all kinds of convenient delusions for the moment of death."

Days and night passed. Nothing got better. Wounded filled up Widow's Gully every night. We shelled, they shelled. Feints, patrols, small probes, ambushes, broken piers, trains going out, mules executed, bully beef, lice, flies, teeth falling out from the biscuits.

Jeremy came in early one evening. Lovely. We hadn't had much time to talk since I'd come down. He started at his boots. "To take off or not to take off," he recited. "haven't had a swim for six nights."

"Let's go. We'll leave one shoe off and one shoe on."

"Isn't there an old nursery rhyme about that?"

Oh...the water felt good...oh, center of the universe...

"Ohhhhh."

"Ahhhhh."

"Ohhhhh."

"Ahhhhh."

Blast! The Turks were firing Farting Ferdinand. Good, Farting Ferdinand was firing way up to Taylor's Hollow.

We crawled into our hovel.

"Where's Chester?"

"Chewing some colonel's ass out. We're short on hay and .303 ammo."

I laughed. They were scared of little Chester. He exuded a hundred and thirty-five pounds of Tasmanian Devil authority.

Jeremy produced a bottle of rum from his kit.

"Jesus, should that be going to the lads on the line?" I asked.

"It's all right, I deducted it from Godley's personal stash."

We partook. Jesus, wouldn't it be great if old Sonya was fixing us up a hash pipe? Wonder if she ever got to the continent.

"The Major greeted me like he had sand up his ass," I said.

"He's angry because you had all the fun during the Turkish counterattack."

"Men," I grunted, "are fucking crazy. Why would any sane human being want to get his stomach carved out?"

"E gloribus bellum," Jeremy said.

"Why?" I asked again. "I wanted to be at Quinn's."

"I suppose we all want to prove something to Daddy, what? With Christopher, it's very important. Father came home from some doings in the Northwest Territory with a medal pinned on him. The lingering finger of family."

Swig.

Swig.

"Ahhhhh."

"Ahhhhh."

"Yurlob's gotten to me," I said.

"He got to me a long time ago," Jeremy answered. "This is his entire dignity, his Sikh mountain artillery. He sees the hour of his death clearly. It's difficult to retain dignity when dysentery is killing you. He's a beautiful man."

"Yeah...all he wants is that his departure goes down honorably in the eyes of his battalion."

"Did you know he has four kids?" Jeremy asked.

"No."

"It came out at the odd moment. He has three sons and one of those other things. I don't think they treat their women too kindly. He prays that his sons will become Punjab fighters."

The contents of the bottle evaporated before our very eyes. Our conversation segued into Ireland and Conor Larkin because Jeremy wanted to talk about Conor and knew I wanted to hear. Jeremy wondered how Conor would have viewed these blood-soaked fields.

"Conor was the complete opposite of Imperial Man," Jeremy said. "He saw war only in terms of fighting for freedom. He viewed the American Revolution as man's foremost justification for war. I don't think he would view Gallipoli as a noble calling for New Zealanders and Aussies. He would have seen the greater war as stemming from Ireland's birthright to bear arms against the British. Namely, if Britain is in Turkey fighting for the freedom of Belgium, then Irishmen certainly had the right to fight for their own freedom."

Our tongues became gloriously loose.

"Something here must make sense," I said. "Gallipoli can't just go down as a forgotten page in history."

"I think all of us have to come through it with our own meaning. Wouldn't you say Christopher is evolving from something mucky to something fine?"

"Aye. I know the power I have to love a woman. Now I know I can love men."

"How about knowing the magnificence of being a New Zealander?" Jeremy asked. "Quinn's Post has defined the stuff of the men of your country."

"At what a fucking price."

"Everything comes with a price."

"What happened after your last contact with Conor?" I asked. "After he escaped prison? Was he in Ireland all the time?"

"The rumor was that he was in America for a few years, then slipped back to Ireland."

"Did he ever fall in love with another woman?"

"Very much so. It was a secret but quite an open secret."

"How was that, now?"

"Well, him living underground. There was a woman named Atty Fitzpatrick. She was Anglo-Protestant ascendancy. That means Irish-born, but with British ancestry. My family is the same. We are the generations of inheritors after our English ancestors divided up the country. Many Anglos became republican patriots. Atty Fitzpatrick was somewhat sainted in that she distributed her family barony among the tenants and gave virtually all her money for humane causes. Actually, I saw her several times. She was a great actress on the Dublin stage. Tall, glorious bosom, stately in a Joan-of-Arc way, very commanding. She was a widow with a family. When Conor was imprisoned she was a one-man army in his cause doing street rallies from one end of the country to the other."

Ah, that was my Uncle Conor with a woman like that, I thought.

"So, Conor was able to love again after the tragedy of Shelley?"

"We don't know for certain. He was a diamond with many facets. I think he had the capacity for many kinds of love. My mother never got over him. Yes, I think he could love again because he could trust again."

All I was hearing now made me very warm. No doubt he blamed himself for Shelley MacLeod's murder. It meant that I might get over Georgia some day.

"She went from Dublin all the way back to his village with his funeral cortege with crowds gathering and weeping at every town along the way. They say she lay on his grave for days. Hard to believe that this all happened just a few months ago."

Jeremy became terribly pensive and gave me a look to say, "We are brothers."

"You asked for a meaning about Gallipoli," he said slowly. "I think I've found my meaning."

"What did you find, Jeremy?"

"Maybe there are justifications for this war, that the other side is uglier in their intent than we are. But Gallipoli is wrong. Imperialism is wrong. Empire is wrong. It's Conor's voice saying to me that no one has the right to send men to places like this when the final objective is greed. Oh, we cloak ourselves in democracy, but the war here is not about democracy." He waited a long moment, never taking his eyes off me. "Rory, when I return to Ireland, I am going to join the republican cause."

"That's awesome," I whispered. Jeremy had gone from pitiful drunk to a man of worth onto a path of clarity.

"If I were Irish," I said, "I hope I'd come to the same conclusion."

"You're as Irish as I am," he said.

We stared at each other.

"I wanted you to know of my deepest secret because I want no further secrets between us."

"You know, don't you?" I asked.

"Rory Larkin, is it?" he said.

"God, I've wanted to hear the sound of my name for a long time. How did you learn?"

"From the first, I suppose. I knew there was a Rory Larkin in New Zealand. Conor had spoken to me about you. You have used the word Ballyutogue inadvertently a half dozen times. I didn't think it right to question you until you were ready to tell me and mostly, until I was ready to say out loud that I am going to be a republican."

"Gallipoli is filled with secret meanings," I mused.

"As my mother is wont to say, aye mon, indeed it is."

Chester Goodwood, the best of us all, entered. "Yurlob is gone," he said.

Modi followed in a moment, carrying Yurlob's body. He was not very heavy, anymore. "I didn't want to send him out on the boat," Modi said. "I thought, maybe, we'd like to bury him."

"Aye."

"Here, have a drink, first."

"I'm drunk already enough," Modi said.

"Don't they put their dead on pyres and burn them?" Jeremy asked.

"I don't know," I said, "but I think it's a good idea. That way the bloody flies won't get him."

We put on our shoes. Damn! I knew I shouldn't have taken the goddamn shoes off! Fuck it!

"You going to be all right, Rory?"

"No, I'm not all right. Let's send the lad off in a blaze. There's another bottle in my kit. Bring it."

I pushed into my boots but couldn't see to lace them. No matter. I lifted Yurlob Singh, fucking raghead Buddha-worshiping bastard...oh God...he doesn't weigh a thing now, does he...he doesn't weigh a thing.

III.

The Surgeon I actually enjoyed my hangover. We had given Subaltern Yurlob Singh a send-off fit for the Maharajah of Lahore.

I was doing a hoof check at the railing when I saw a new officer, a light colonel, followed by an entourage of a half-dozen Ghurkas, leave Corps and go to battalion headquarters.

Chester came over with a list of the morning's shipments.

"Who's the new man?" I asked.