O'hara's Choice - Leon Uris [150]
Zach just stared down.
“Then you could smell Henry, reeking from rum. Your da said Henry was a master at sneaking booze from his deliveries and stealing off the free lunch table. I’m sure every bartender of Eighth Avenue will confirm that.”
Burke waited.
“I read myself to sleep,” Zach said.
“You slept? With this heat, through the storm, no beer, and a hundred Irishmen needing a drink?”
“I often nod off no matter how loud things get. I sort of sleep with one eye open.”
“So the saloon emptied, and later on, Henry comes in dead drunk and mad and you kept sleeping.”
“I didn’t see Henry come in.”
“Indeed. What woke you up?”
“My da had a fierce stomach pain and shrieked to high heaven.” Zach broke into a sweat and took another nip at the whiskey. “It gets blurred,” he said.
“You have to corroborate your da’s story. Henry was on the floor and your da was kneeling over him. You never saw any blows struck.”
“Old Henry was Temperance. He never drank,” Zach rasped. “I saw what happened.”
“He was at Henry’s side, right?”
“No, sir.”
“Go on.”
“I awakened by Da’s scream. He was reeling around gagging and all doubled over. It sometimes annoyed Da the way Henry ate with his fingers, sometimes half starved. Da come out of his pain raging and hit Henry,” he said, and pointed to his temple. “You’ve seen how fast he is with the blackjack. Split the man’s skull.”
“You liked old Henry?”
“Aye.”
“Paddy told me you oftentimes walk around in Harlem, totally without fear.”
“Aye.”
“What attracts you?”
“I never understood why the Irish, with our own desperate and tragic history, don’t have a penny’s worth of compassion for black people.”
“Indeed, Zach, keeping the niggers down is a high priority. It is going to remain that way until our people feel they are first-class Americans and not threatened. Maybe one day down the line, when we’ve made our way in as equals, our fears will diminish.”
Zachary knew what was coming and felt trapped and horrified. Burke flipped his notepad closed.
“If that is your story, then there will be a formal inquest, son testifying against father. The penny press will distort this into a monumental scandal. It is not even August yet and this city will boil over. We can’t pass it off as a common barroom brawl. Paddy O’Hara is a great hero to us. His Congressional Medal of Honor tells the Irish they can rise and achieve and be proud and respected as Americans.”
In that moment, Zachary thought of running without stopping, clear to the Mississippi.
“Paddy’s had a hard life, what with the famine and digging his family into the ground and the butchery of the Civil War, and just as he was looking at a moment’s peace, he lost your mother.”
“They say I look like her.”
“Aye, that’s true.”
“And I’ve seen him look at me a thousand times and in that instant he saw her, but it was only me, who had killed her.”
“So here we are,” Burke said. “Your father is a great man with common flaws. He lost his head for one moment of his life, because he has the cancer.”
The unspeakable word had been spoken.
“How can you know that! No doctor has told him.”
“I’ve seen too much of it, Zach. He’s a powerful man, but he’ll have to give in and learn it from a physician soon enough. They’ll juice him up and keep him going for a year or two.”
“He shouldn’t have!”
“But he did,” Burke said. “Consider the race riots. Consider the rest of your own life after you send your da to die in prison. You hear me, boy. The fall of such a hero will humiliate the United States Marine Corps, forever, and the Irish community will never live it down.”
“I want to see a priest!”
“No. Either way you choose, you’ve a burden on you for the rest of your life. What will it be, Zachary? You either bury the lie in old Henry’s coffin or you rat on your father.”
February 1892—Tobias Storm’s Mansion—Washington
As Gunny Kunkle related the story and Zachary told the ending himself, he felt a lovely lightness coming over him as the demon fled his body.
Tobias Storm and Ben Boone were chalky numbers, close-eyed,