Leon Uris (12 page)

“Shouldn’t we be a couple?” Des asked forthrightly. “That is to say, I detest short women, particularly ones who like to kick big men around. And your good self? I’ve watched you incinerate the chaps as though they had been struck by lightning.”

“Well, I always thought that when the right lad came along there had to be more to it than my height,” she said.

“We have much more than height,” Des said. “We have Ireland.”

“Good Lord, you are such a romantic, Des. What girl wouldn’t tremble at your words.”

Des took her hand softly. “I didn’t think you cared for sentimental shenanigans.”

“I suppose I don’t,” she agreed. “I once knew a romantic Irishman, but he had to find true love in Canada. The others only seem to get romantic when they are blasted.”

Des kissed her hand and tilted his head so as to look into her eyes, not directly, but obliquely. “I’m blasted. I’m blasted from the trimming I gave his lordship today. I’m also blasted from four divine Bushmills. And, alas, I am blasted from the sight of you, Atty. You are ravishing beyond fantasy. Besides, everyone in all branches of the movement think we make a smashing couple. So, what about it?”

“Why, Des,” she cooed, “give me some time to think about it.”

“How long? I’m very busy.”

“That’s long enough,” she said.

“Settled. Then, we’re a couple, or some such.”

“Yes, I think that’s what they call it.”

“By Jaysus, that calls for champagne.”

“How about a kiss, instead?”

“How about both?”

There was a kiss, a fine, stalwart kiss. Irishman to Irishwoman. In later days there would be lovemaking, Irishman to Irishwoman.

Since Jack Murphy had gone, Atty had chatted up the occasional lad and left her bedroom door open. She knew it was not fair to compare a new lover to those four days with Jack at the fishing lodge. However, the experience did tell her what was attainable. She had the range, the substance, and the daring, and she tried to make the best of the man she had to work with. No one could ever again take her like Jack Murphy, she believed, not even Desmond Fitzpatrick.

Atty pondered why two people, otherwise so intelligent and attractive, could reduce themselves to clods when it came to lovemaking. Was it an Irish affliction, the subject of barroom banter, that an Irish lad would crawl over ten women to get to a bottle of Guinness? What about intelligent people? How could a man like Desmond Fitzpatrick, so utterly profound in a courtroom, so literate, so worldly, reduce himself to perfunctory shallowness in a bedroom? How could this aspect of life be so horribly mismanaged in an entire society?

Atty also pondered Atty. Did she excite more than superficiality? Had she sniffed too much religious smoke of sin? What were the forces that combatted nature itself, that made a man and a woman who loved each other become strangers in that moment?

Desmond and Atty did make a smashing couple. The apparent lack of a wild and wondrous sex life seemed to be compensated by what they really craved, the electric
charge they set off that played from one to the other, that bucked up their resolve as they plunged into battle as Celtic warriors.

They were two self-contained gladiators, gamecocks, always at the ready. They did not want to be caught without their swords, shields, body armor, and helmets…not even in bed. Except on the odd occasion.

Had not Ireland disdained all things of a royal nature, surely Desmond and Atty Fitzpatrick would have been crowned the king and queen of the republicans.

They had a private sanctuary on the fourth story of their Georgian home at 34 Garville Avenue, a warm and even sensuous library with a turf stove where they spent endless time, often until daylight, speaking of the next day’s tactics and long-term strategies.

There were, indeed, small affections, patting of hands, perfection of behavior in public, the occasional adoring stare. And the bed. Somehow the bed was a place to collect all the thoughts properly before falling off. He didn’t like to hold her, and she never melted into him. Des sprawled, she wrapped up mummylike. When they did meet, the touches were kind and automatic but from distant planets. Each could almost hear the other thinking of tomorrow, at times almost with a smell of smoke coming from their grinding minds.

There were times when Des needed her comfort, her mind, her words. Comfort didn’t include her beautiful round, rich body.

To be sure there was a bit of lust. Quick and meaningful, but once done, never dwelt upon. A pause to release those stuffed-in mystery feelings. Once the compulsion was satisfied, they regrouped for the rent-and-rate strike in Cork or Kerry and the joust at Four Courts.

They seemed content. Their long talks in the library were at the heart of what really mattered. If either sensed something lacking, they did not seem overly concerned. Both gloried in each other’s victories, shared each other’s
sorrows, enjoyed each other’s stunning good looks, and supported the combined focus of their life’s worth.

Atty had not met a man like Des. The memory of Jack Murphy remained vivid, often at the most unusual times and places. Maybe, she pondered, Jack Murphy didn’t even really happen. As the passage of time defused reality, her memories became more misty. She realized that the simple experience with Jack would never be repeated. Life was nearly complete now, except for that one void, but it was overcome by the zeal of the mission. And God knows, Atty did adore Desmond Fitzpatrick.

As there were legendary people in Derry and Donegal and also legendary mythological people, the mothers of Ballyutogue and all up and down Inishowen Peninsula and surrounding counties as well had a saying for their sons. “When you are old enough to support a beard, may you be half the man as Kevin O’Garvey.”

During the famine, his da was caught stealing food and hanged, and the O’Garvey cottage tumbled. Kevin’s ma, with five young wanes including himself as the oldest, tried to get into the workhouse in Derry, even though the workhouse terrified them. After the fourth straight potato crop failure, there was no room even at the workhouse.

The entire family, save Kevin O’Garvey, died in the fields with their mouths green from eating grass, and he became an orphan. It was said, not totally in jest, that you could count all the orphans who survived the great hunger on both hands and toes and have three fingers and a toe left over.

As fortune had it, Kevin O’Garvey was twelve and the Earl of Foyle’s agents took him and a number of other orphan boys to a poor farm, integrated into the grand scheme of things.

The grand scheme, never spoken, was to turn the famine into a means of thinning out the Catholic population through emigration, disease, and hunger. Once a family
was evicted, the cottage was destroyed by a team of eight horses dragging a huge tree trunk through it.

The boys on the poor farm were sent to clear rocks and prepare the old fields for cattle pasture. During the height of the famine, cattle and many crops poured out of Ireland from the large estates.

The boys on the poor farm were given ether to sniff so they could labor long hours in a state of euphoria. By age fourteen, Kevin O’Garvey was also familiar with the taste of poteen, and he was an accomplished thief and smuggler.

Toward the end of the famine, O’Garvey escaped to the misery of Bogside in Derry and became a crafty pickpocket, like a player in a Dickens novel.

He was in and out of the borstal a number of times and realized that his life would soon be over unless he educated himself out of trouble.

Mr. Henry, a keen Protestant solicitor and barrister, had to take his turn representing the young Catholic criminals and was impressed by Kevin’s knowledge of law and his sharpness of mind. On a flyer, Mr. Henry convinced the court to allow him to take O’Garvey as his apprentice.

It was a brilliant move on Mr. Henry’s part, because O’Garvey’s wizardry lessened his own work. On the other hand, Mr. Henry lived to regret his apprentice’s talent. Over time, Kevin O’Garvey became one of the few Catholic solicitors in the region and a festering splinter under the Crown’s fingernail.

Kevin O’Garvey became a tireless battler for Catholic rights both on the land and in the city. He became head of the Land League in that part of Ulster and was instrumental in slowing down the indiscriminate evictions and some of the outrageous practices against the croppies—one hundred percent interest on loans…impounding the livestock of a debtor…inflated seed prices for planting. Aye, the peasants were hostage to a catalogue of injustices refined over a half-dozen centuries.

In his work in the Land League, O’Garvey saved God
knows how many farms. He caught the eye of Charles Stewart Parnell, who was at the head of a rising new Irish Party bent on divorcing Ireland from England.

O’Garvey’s urban base was the Bogside of Derry jammed with the overflow of those who had fled the land and were too weak to emigrate. Most of the large Anglo land owners had more decent pig sties than the Bogside.

Loaded to the gills with unemployed, Bogside fed cheap female labor into the shirt factories. Of these hellholes, none was more terrible than Witherspoon & McNab, owned by the Earldom of Foyle. This place and the linen mills of Belfast were the sewers of the Industrial Revolution.

In 1885, the great breakthrough came allowing the Catholic farmer to vote for the first time, and, with Parnell’s prodding, O’Garvey stood for the House of Commons. This was a most dangerous time because Kilty Larkin, the old chieftain of the croppies on the peninsula, croaked right before the election. A last-second decision by Tomas Larkin to go to the polls with his boy Conor at his side gave O’Garvey the victory.

Over the years Kevin O’Garvey continued his wonderful work from his office in a rundown but proud Celtic Hall where a Gaelic revival was budding. As his power grew in the British Parliament, Kevin O’Garvey lived for a single moment…to be made chairman of a select committee that could investigate the Witherspoon & McNab shirt factory and blow its stench over the British Isles.

On the other side of town Andrew Ingram had an equally impressive rise until he finally ran a school district from Strabane to Dungiven, including Londonderry.

To the establishment, Ingram was a pain, with his Scottish Presbyterian liberalism. His daring selection of curriculum and books kept the preachermen in a righteous tizzy and the Orangemen gnashing their incisors.
Ingram had the necessary ingredients going for him to spike their noise. He was courageous, moral, brilliant, and had the Countess Caroline Hubble as his chief supporter. On matters of culture and education, Caroline Hubble was a major force in the west. Many a time Roger Hubble was simply overruled by his wife in these matters.

Andrew Ingram’s eye-opener came with nothing less than a compact with a superconservative churchman, Bishop Nugent, in charge of the diocese of Derry. The Bishop was embedded in concrete in the protection of his monopoly over Catholic education. Nor did the Bishop care much for Kevin O’Garvey. Nonetheless, people with dissimilar views had to get along with one another as a matter of mutual survival.

Ingram, with the support of O’Garvey and Caroline Hubble, convinced the Bishop to allow higher education to the brightest of the Catholic students. In the dim future, they hoped to be able to found a public college in the region and wanted it filled with as many Catholics as Protestants. It was so stunning an idea that Nugent put his toe in the water and gave it a try. It was the first viable move to give equal advantage to girls and to keep Bogside children in school before they became child labor in the factories, and soon Andrew Ingram had forty of the brightest youngsters in Bogside being trained for college.

School budgets and a raft of mutual interests brought Andrew Ingram and Kevin O’Garvey into an intimate and enlightened relationship, one enjoyed immensely by both men.

When Conor Larkin left Ballyutogue, he ended up in Derry and was taken in by Kevin who, among other things, was his godfather. When the ugly realities of Derry became apparent and Conor planned to move on, a desperate Kevin O’Garvey sought out Andrew Ingram.

The Londonderry Guildhall, a Neo-Gothic frosted cake of a building, lived in two worlds. It was set between the River Foyle and Foyle Street. From the south window in Andrew Ingram’s office one could see two of the Earl of Foyle’s principal enterprises, a distillery and the infamous Witherspoon & McNab shirt factory. From Andrew’s rear window he saw the Earl’s control over shipbuilding, repair, and ironwork, the Caw & Train Graving Yard.

Directly over Foyle Street from the Guildhall was Shipquay Gate leading into the old city, the most perfect example of a medieval fortified town in the British Isles. The wall was beautifully intact, complete with its double bastion holding the old Roaring Meg cannon. The walkway atop the wall was a veritable Reformation Via Dolorosa with platforms for pitching pennies down on the Catholics in Bogside.

The problem for Roger Hubble was that all this Foyle business and the city itself had a Catholic majority and lay in County Donegal.

Ulster started over the river in Protestant Waterside. Roger Hubble’s most pressing political problem was either to finesse or crowbar the city into Ulster in any
political settlement, and to do so he had to create utterly ridiculous boundaries.

That’s how it was in the colonies. The majestic, jewel-walled city physically and by population in one country, the colonizer wanting it in another.

This was the strain of tug and haul that ran through every facet of life in Protestant Londonderry or Catholic Derry, which were one and the same.

Andrew Ingram welcomed Kevin O’Garvey into an office bending under the weight of loaded bookshelves. The two billowed up, Ingram with a blend in his pipe, a honeyed mixture whose aroma monogrammed his office, and O’Garvey with the Irish politician’s trademark, a stout cigar.

Andrew knew right off that Kevin was on serious business. He gave himself away. When relaxed and jovial he turned his cigar slowly clockwise with his right hand. When it was serious stuff, Kevin’s thumb reversed the direction. Kevin tried to form his thoughts carefully to his friendly adversary.

“Conor wants to up and leave Derry,” Kevin blurted with a sudden absence of guile.

Andrew nodded his head and sighed. “What’s it been, six months, seven months? He hasn’t seen much of me since he’s been here, fierce pride mostly. I offered him a room and whatever. It was natural that he stayed with you, of course. I’m still an oddity in his life; you are his godfather.”

“You’ve a powerful sway over him, Andrew,” Kevin said, slipping open a few buttons on his vest to allow his belly to rove a bit. O’Garvey dressed like a dandy, but of the tattered variety, frayed collar, all of it slightly ill-fitted and rumpled.

“The first time he ventured into my classroom after school in his smithy leathers, I never before or since witnessed such bottomless hunger for knowledge as when he stared at the books, unable to read. It was the hunger of
five hundred years of Irish spiritual starvation determined to break free,” Andrew remembered.

“When the blow-up came with Tomas, Conor wandered the countryside with a foggy mind and only came in to Derry when Liam’s ship was due to sail,” Kevin continued. “He pushed Liam up and cried,’You’re not the first Irishman to walk up the plank,’and looked about aching for the sight of Tomas to come and save the situation. So he bedded down over my stable and then a kind of a queer experience happened. Bit by bit he inched into the Bogside and began to change life there, despite the indignity of only being able to work making barrel rings and shoeing nags at the brewery. He began teaching people Gaelic in Celtic Hall, and young wanes after Mass would run to the place to hear out ancient legends. He mesmerized everyone with the tales of our history and our martyrs, producing every speech from the dock by heart. His talks were often behind drawn shades in candlelit rooms, with guards outside. Then he took to the football field, and you know that part—the old men pitching pennies at the base of the wall compared him to Ducey Malone, the greatest Gaelic footballer in Derry’s history.” Kevin knocked his fist on the desk sending ashes down his shirt.

“You see, Andrew, he is a light. I go off to Parliament these days without fear that something horrible may happen in my absence…because Conor is here. You see, when Parnell was alive, this disturbed us the most, always having to give up our brightest and most vital young people. It’s an Irish curse worse than whiskey. Every time I see a brilliant young man or woman I just start counting the days till they leave. Andrew, I’ve got to draw the line with Conor.”

“You know as well as I,” Ingram said, “if he tries to rove the world, he’ll never get far from Ireland. He is sealed into a life in dubious battle, we both know that. Trouble is, Kevin, he is a master of a great craft. Where can he go in Ireland?”

“Andrew, I know a thing or two about my visits to England and you know it as well. When Conor was in Ballyutogue at the wee village forge, the Anglos in two or three counties around were already seeking him out to do gilded ironwork. In Derry, they’d be coming from half the country….”

“You’re dreaming and you’re desperate and I ache for you, Kevin, and I am pained for myself. But Conor cannot ever grow in stature in the Bogside without running head on to Roger Hubble’s yard at Caw & Train.”

Out came the bottle from the bottom drawer and two glasses were glugged half full and clinked, for Andrew knew that O’Garvey was close to saying what he had come to say.

“Can’t lose him, Andrew,” Kevin said, with the whiskey and sincerity bringing water to his eyes. “I’m so bloody fucking tired of the agony of Bogside. I’m done in, man. I can’t bear to see the wanes playing in the gutters all covered with sores, and husbands beating up wives, and old people dying of the cold in winter because the Bishop’s fuel fund is empty, and the drunks without jobs from birth to death warming their hands over the fire at the base of the wall, and the factory girls, most of all, dragging home too tired to laugh, much less make love.” His voice lowered to a weary rasp. “You know, Andrew, Conor has ethereal qualities about him. A light shines about him sometimes, like he’s the Holy Ghost, himself. You’ve a powerful sway over him, Andrew.”

“And you want me to convince him to stay? Aren’t we doing the same kind of manipulation that Tomas did?” Andrew asked.

“Fuck, no. They were a family filled with love until the rocks and debts and privation ground them down. What happens if a Conor Larkin is driven out of Ireland? I want to give him the place to follow his destiny and his dream.” Kevin held up his hand as he brought himself under control and took another gulp with trembling hand. “Andrew,
as you know, I’m a member of the Parliament and opportunities have shown up in the natural course of events… but I’m clean. I’ll take and I’ll deal, but only for Bogside. We’ve gone through a half-dozen schemes to try to get some enterprise started there, some male labor to create dignity. For one reason or another nothing has really ever come together. In the past several months I’ve been talking hard to a group of Irish-Americans who have scored big, some very fat cats. I’ve convinced them to set up a fund that can actually start changing things. We need everything, a decent livery stable, a girl’s secretarial school, all kinds of stores, our own dairy. I can get together the money to put Conor into a first-class forge and foundry.”

Andrew Ingram gnawed on his left forefinger, his thinking finger.

“I’ve got twenty enterprises in mind right off the bat, and more—the funds to buy fifty apprenticeships. I must have Conor lead off with a forge. If he can’t make it, no one can.”

“What is Roger Hubble going to say about all this?”

Kevin emptied the glass and leaned over the desk. “After all, Andrew, I also represent the Earl of Foyle in Parliament. We owe each other a lot of favors and, in actual fact, a word from you to Caroline Hubble wouldn’t hurt a thing. What I mean is, I think I can work it out with Hubble to leave us alone.”

“This American money…”

“It’s in the bank in England.”

“I want to see the names of your contributors,” Andrew countered.

“I can’t. I’ve gotten the money only on the condition of anonymity. Otherwise every member of the Irish Party will be after these fellows to do the same in every village in Ireland. I was able to convince them that Bogside was the most desperate situation in Ireland…and that’s our pact.”

“Is that it?” Andrew asked.

“No, there’s something in it for you. I have the votes to pass a bill to open a new public college in your district.”

Now it was Andrew Ingram’s turn to lose his icy composure. A new college! Almighty! What a jewel in the Crown! “You’re glinking yourself, Kevin. All Roger Hubble has to do is give a nod and the House of Lords will veto the bill.”

“Not if you convince Lady Caroline to have her husband support it.”

It came to pass that a fine new forge and foundry was opened in the Bogside by Conor Larkin. His quick success led to a number of new businesses taking root and that was followed by a flurry of apprenticeship purchases in a number of trades that were formerly unavailable to Catholics.

Conor had soon figured out that not only did Caw & Train have a monopoly on all ironwork in the region, but its municipal bids were corruptly inflated. With the daring that only the ignorant are blessed with, Conor entered a bid against the Earl’s company. His forge was burned out shortly thereafter.

A new string of events came one after the other. Conor rebuilt and was actually subcontracted by Caw & Train to work on the restoration of Lettershambo Castle across the river.

Part of the Lettershambo reconstruction called for installation of a new central heating boiler. Sir Frederick Weed had sent a marine boiler from Belfast, which he used on his larger ships, and the engineers to set it up. Problem was the pipes were small because it needed to heat small spaces such as the ship’s cabins, and these were done following meticulous blueprints.

The small pipes could not heat the great stone rooms of Lettershambo and the project staggered until Caw & Train came to Conor in desperation.

Conor knew the elements of whitesmithing, the use of thinner metals. No sooner had he opened his forge than
he quickly filled a vacant market making pots, pans, and a variety of light tools for a hundred purposes.

Conor solved the problem at Lettershambo by making large pipes of thinner metals, more malleable to the quirks of the uneven walls, and lined them with asbestos. It threw out ten times more heat than the ship’s small pipes.

Now on working terms with the establishment, Conor remained not only ignorant of the secret maneuverings that had taken place but unaware that he was deliberately being integrated into the Roger Hubble system in which Hubble controlled his competition.