O'hara's Choice - Leon Uris [134]
Zach moved into serious competition, challenged one by one by the Nebo team (who were mighty fine baseball players in the spring and summer).
With Ulysses Green the anchor for Nebo’s arm-wrestling squad, they’d not lost in years. Well, this was as far as Mr. Zachary Captain O’Hara would go. First left-handed. Then right-handed. Fourteen to nothing.
Nebo seized Zach. The church seized him. A man and a woman holding the wee hands of a child between them.
. . . one day as a little boy he stood beside his da at a pond in Central Park where a papa swan led a squad of cygnets and the mama swan tended the rear. “That’s a family,” Zach had said to his da, and Paddy choked up . . . even at Onde la Mer, there was a distance between Zach and the Barjacs, who were overlords at play. Not totally real, was it?
. . . Nebo was real, with the boys walking alongside Daddy, guns on shoulders, in from the hunt, slim pickings.
Women so black and beautiful that the movement of their hands with needle and thread was dance.
Well, hell, the United States Marine Corps supplied him with brothers, dozens of brothers. But not one brother of his own. It only gave him men to emulate.
Life began with a cursed bugle and cold-water shower by day and a lonely taps by night in a cot not known by anyone but himself.
Aunt Brigid gave him a place to sleep and took him to a place to kneel.
Now Amanda, now Nebo. It rushed into him and filled that barren space, this village which had taken over Amanda as a young girl.
How can lovers compare? Any two lovers who have discovered the ultimate intensity, then gone beyond, believe that they are the first lovers since time and no one has ever felt such remarkable love.
Their lovemaking, from fierce to subtle glance across the room, did not begin or end but was in motion all the time. Sometimes, barely breathing, sometimes, tied to a post, shrieking.
. . . until each knew every print . . . every scent . . every detour . . . and sight . . . and anticipation . . . and taste . . . and sweet voice and vulgar voice and places wandered into that suddenly opened a new flood of sensations.
. . . until such exhaustion left their only half-opened eyes to gaze and their ears able to hear the birds jabber.
And sleep easily.
Bold and shy, they answered the curiosities of rich minds. Bold and shy, they loved each other’s raw naked beauty. Wisely, they probed not of each other’s past encounters because they were not disturbed by them.
The weather had been fine for a few days. They put on mud boots and walked beyond the fences, along a creek where there was no road and it seemed that no one had ever been this way before.
An eagle graced their view, hovering on a dead limb intensely, gathering up for a swoop into a movement of trout.
Amanda and Willow had gathered mushrooms in the summer, and at times, Ned would let them on one of the skipjacks to go rock fishing. They weren’t too good with the lines, but they stayed out of the way, and after a time, Ned let them steer the craft.
“That big rock over there is filled with mussels in late springtime. We’d wade out and cut them off for bait.”
Amanda’s eyes opened widely, suddenly. She froze and put her finger to her lips for him to be still. A low, mysterious grunting: bup-bup, bup-bup, bupbup. She knelt, trying to stifle the sound of her breaths darting into the cold air.
The grass moved. Snake? Frog? Turtle?
As deftly as she could manage, she moved the matted grass and gasped! A henlike creature, a bird all rusty-feathered with a long beak, was startled.
It was gone!
“Did you see it?”
“Yes.”
Her heart was racing as she grabbed his hand. “Did you see it? It’s a king rail. Willow and I spent hours looking for one. We began to think Ned was playing a trick on us. During my last summer here, we found a nest. Ned’s only seen three of them since he was born. They live deep in the marsh grass.”
She said “Oh