Redemption. - Redemption. Part 9
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Redemption. Part 9

"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.

She was torn by the cruel stones of Connemara, And she wept for the dear peasant's plight, So to hell with you Brits, In your bright shiny castles, I'll end the hard sorrows, Of Ireland's long night.

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."

15.

Ballyutogue, August 1885 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.

16.

Dublin, 1895 Dublin was a he-man's world, new pubs lined three deep at the bar, the sporting scene, and the new volatile Gaelic politics of Griffith's Sinn Fein Party. Ladies of the Anglo-ascendancy-English-born but rising in Irish society-had their saloons, flower shows, and the theatre. Most Catholic girls learned their catechisms, bore the babies, and remained docile about all the worldly matters exploding around them.

Nonetheless, the Gaelic revival was giving birth to a number of extraordinary women cut from different cloth. Among the leaders were a group of Anglo-Protestants whose families had been in Ireland for generations and who finally came to a turn of conscience over British misrule.

None among them was more stunning or daring than Atty Moore, who, barely out of her teens, was fast turning into an Irish Joan of Arc.

On her twenty-first birthday Atty inherited the Barony of Lough Clara. No sooner had the ink dried on the documents than she renounced her title and canceled the debts of the tenant farmers. She sold the manor house and a few hundred acres that surrounded it to a retired British general.

Atty kept the cottage of Darby Murphy and the grounds of the horse-breeding operation, which had always been profitable.

The balance of the barony was given to the peasants along with an office of agricultural experts to help modernize operations and increase yields.

She spent the bulk of her estate to set up scholarships to Trinity College for worthy scholars among the peasants and villagers, and she established a unique girls' school in Galway to teach job skills from which females had formerly been barred.

The last major grant was made for research into the scourge of tuberculosis in western Ireland.

Atty was ever on the run. If a rent-and-rate strike had been declared in Waterford, she was there. If an epidemic struck Cork, she was there. If unjustified evictions surfaced, she was there. She was there in the scummy cobblestones of Dublin's Liberties to help abate hunger.

More and more she defied the Crown, speaking at rallies where patience was short and anger was great. At last she was jailed and it caused such an uproar she was released immediately...only to lead another illegal march and be jailed again.

Each time she came through the bridewell gate, she did so defiantly, as though it were her intention to be a guest of the Crown in every prison in Ireland.

After months of nonstop skirmishes or a stretch in prison, Atty would fall out of the scene, retreating to her cottage at Lough Clara. She could lose the Gaelic revival for a time, riding far up into the hills and bens, but the movement soon came after her.

In the cottage, often alone, she would allow herself memories of Jack Murphy and a rereading of their correspondence. Jack had been able to marry his lady after her divorce and he worked his way into an editorship and daily column for his newspaper. Sometimes he wrote columns about Atty, as her fame crossed the waters. Their relationship continued until his end. Jack joined a group of explorers on an expedition to Canada's Northwest Territory. It turned into a disaster when an unexpected spring blizzard struck above the Arctic Circle. Everyone died. Although she and Jack were an ocean apart, there was a safety net for her so long as he was alive. Her closest intimate contact, her only real lover, was no longer to be dreamed about. With that illusion gone, Atty felt mercilessly alone.

Dublin was a provincial place. The inner circle of the revival was counted in a few dozen who were constantly rubbing elbows with one another at meetings and saloons.

Atty had met Desmond Fitzpatrick, a formidable barrister who worked a great deal in London. It wasn't until he moved permanently to Dublin to take on a series of court cases and she took the lead in a long-running new play that they had a chance to extend their time together.

Desmond Fitzpatrick, an early follower of Parnell, was in his late twenties, the scion of an old Norman Catholic family from the genre who had conquered Ireland for the English in the twelfth century. After a time the Normans integrated to become "more Irish than the Irish." The Fitzgeralds, Barrys, Roches, Burkes, Joyces, and Plunketts became the mighty Earls of Ireland before they, too, were ground down under the Cromwellian heel. They had fared better than their poor Gaelic coreligionists, the croppies.

As the Catholics emerged from generations of darkness in the nineteenth century, those of Norman ancestry made up a large part of the Catholic middle and upper classes.

Desmond was a long fellow, some six foot four, and joked that he and Atty should be together more often because they were the only two who could see each other over the heads of a roomful of Irishmen.

He was deeply moved by her performance in the new play Elvira the Hackler. The drama decried the horrors of the linen mills of Belfast. Atty ranged from a gallant and spirited rebel to a wasted drunk with tuberculosis, made worse by the linen dust and slimy wet floors of the mills where the hacklers-worked barefoot.

Atty owned this play and her audience. Nothing onstage could take the focus from her, she was that dominating. On that special night Desmond Fitzpatrick leapt to his feet leading the chorus of bravos as Atty, bowing low, arid the curtain fell to the stage floor simultaneously. Desmond fancied himself a bit of an actor, as did most barristers. They balanced one another marvelously as players offstage. Atty had the raw rage and power of a warrior while Desmond Fitzpatrick had the wit and cunning of a Shakespearean conspirator.

His early career was as a Land League lawyer, defending the tenant farmer with notable success. Even when Desmond lost a case, he shook things up.

Then came a stint in Parliament as a member of Parnell's "Pope's Brass Band." When he returned to Dublin and the revival, he worked for years as the political liaison for the Irish Party until it became stagnant.

Dublin was it, now. Desmond reckoned he could take nips and bites out of the steel web of legal entanglement by which the British controlled the Irish.

He pressed a theory called "Victor's Validation," which claimed that one nation could not own another nation either under God's Law or, more appropriately, under British Common Law. Using British precedents and landmark cases of Common Law against the British proved a nightmare for the judges. Each time Desmond won a point, he weakened the British legal position just a mite but meanwhile laid monumental groundwork, not only for the Irish, but for all colonized peoples.