O'hara's Choice - Leon Uris [144]
“Do I have permission to leave?” Zach asked quietly.
“Bastard!” Ben cried, throwing his fist. Zach turned his head so the blow glanced. Tobias backed up against the door and threw the bolt.
“You have broken the Fifth Commandment to love your father!” Tobias cried.
“That’s enough, both of you,” the Gunny said. “The Fifth Commandment doesn’t say anything about loving your father. It says you will honor your father.”
“Don’t get cute, Gunny,” Ben warned.
“Zachary O’Hara has given his life to defend Paddy’s honor and the honor of the Marine Corps.”
Tobias was about to come on shouting when Ben held his hand up, trying, trying to get into what the Gunny was saying.
“What are you talking about?” Ben rasped.
“I was at Paddy’s bedside as he lay dying. A day before he got away, he asked me to take his confession and he told me everything.”
“No! You be quiet!” Zach demanded.
“Sorry, sir,” the Gunny answered.
“I did not know you were aware of it, and I command you to remain silent,” Zach said.
“Sorry, sir. We have to deal with it now.”
The Gunny had puzzled the accusers into silence.
Zachary continued to protest weakly as the Gunny pressed him down into a chair.
“I’ve watched Zachary O’Hara bear it year after year in silence. He wrote the book on courage.”
• 45 •
HELL’S KITCHEN
1884—New York
Had Paddy O’Hara remained in Ireland under livable circumstances, he would have become a self-ordained clan chief as powerful as the priest.
He was of great strength, a boy like a man, working the fields with his da and brothers from a tender age. No man dared challenge him, even as a teenager, lest he get starched.
There was a learning side to him. When a traveling bard or illegal hedgerow teacher came to the village, he’d slip off to the hidden classroom to fill a longing. As the sole member of the family and village, including the priest, who could read and write English, he got to read the viscount’s dirty edicts aloud as well as quote a line from Shakespeare.
Paddy was fifteen when the Terrible Hunger struck and over those years he buried his mother, father, two sisters, and four brothers, victims of starvation and disease. Two other sisters died at sea fleeing Ireland on a famine death ship.
When it was done, only himself and his older sister Brigid had survived.
The two of them landed in New York in 1852 into a chaotic scene. The Irish shanties of New York, tin and clapboard shacks with yards that held a chicken or two, were cluttered up along the Hudson River at midisland, then segued into tenement up to Seventh Avenue near Times Square.
New land, old story of survival. Immigrants were dumped at a fort, the Castle, at the bottom of Manhattan. No one forgot their first night in America, sharing the place with hundreds of cats and the devastating smell of cat urine.
The Germans had come from higher social orders—tradesmen, craftsmen, stone masons—and even the Italians had seen great art and had a true cuisine, giving off vast aromas.
Every waterfront dumped coolies. The Chinese banded together in mysterious alleys of high suspicion.
Already they were stepping off boundaries of ethnic enclaves; Germantown and Chinatown and Little Italy, and the blacks fleeing north jammed the Upper West Side in Harlem.
For the Irish it was picking shit with the ducks, shoveling holes and ditches. Their place was a bawdy land near the bottom of the pole.
The first Irish immigration, a generation earlier, had come to build the Erie Canal. They had improved their lot very little.
The coming of the young Irish women fleeing the famine gave a first true grace to their community. In the eyes of affluent New Yorkers, the Irish women spoke a variety of English, were severely Catholic, and thus honest, and were of special value to those who could afford a nanny or domestic. The Irish