Redemption - Leon Uris [100]
“For your first ride, you should have the window view all the way, miss.” He placed her suitcase in an overhead bin.
“Bless you, sir.”
Every sound and movement of it was new as the Great Northern belched and grunted from the station into a smooth clickety-clack…clickety-clack.
A dozen deep sighs quelled her uneasiness and she became mesmerized by the sway of the train and the way the fields and cottages fleeted past her. Alone in the compartment, Brigid dared open the wicker basket, take a slice of soda bread, and nibble on it.
With Myles McCracken dead, her mother’s crusade was half done. She had saved Brigid from a pauper’s marriage to a landless boy. She would never live to see the second part of her conspiracy of having Brigid marry a man with land, even a widower with kids, or, mainly, Colm O’Neill with the adjoining farm.
Finola’s deeply honed sense of sin crept up on her. When Dary had been born, her physical state for child-bearing was wrecked. She obeyed the priest to live as “brother and sister” with Tomas, with no further fornication. This sense of sin was triggered again by the tragic fate of Myles McCracken. She hid her guilt from Brigid and only in the end did she confess to the priest, but the rest of her life was an attempt to atone for her sin of sending Myles off. Finola held on to her secret as she took her last breaths looking into Brigid’s eyes.
Clickety-clack…clickety-clack…clickety-clack…
The door to her compartment was flung open. “Strabane!” the conductor called.
Brigid became caught up watching a family on the platform, obviously a mom and da trying to say good-bye to an awkward clod of a son. He seemed to be a bit like Liam. All three of them were ill at ease. Da was rigid. Ma was holding back tears. The clod shifted feet, and then good solid handshakes and a flashlike peck on the cheek from son to mother.
Two new passengers invaded her compartment diminishing her space. One of them was the clod, who seemed wanting to weep but not exactly knowing how. He roughly jammed his suitcase in the overhead next to hers. He’d better not mess up my ordination dress, Brigid growled to herself. It had been sewn with devotion for Dary.
The train bolted unevenly, tossing the clod into her. He said, “Sorry,” and she said, “That’s just fine” and later, “I’m going to Maynooth. My brother is going to be ordained.” The clod was a Catholic and would know just how important that was. The clod had a brother who was a priest as well. That’s all they said for the next several hours.
“Tickets, now. Next stop, Omagh.”
God, Brigid thought, look at the land out there, would you! So smooth and rolling. So Protestant. Why, she might as well be halfway around the world it was so different from the hill farms of Ballyutogue. Liam probably had land of this sort. I hope the dress is not rumpled, she thought. Does it really matter?
Brigid was never a beauty, but she had enough Larkin in her to be very pretty at times. And she had a spark, so long as Myles was around. When he left, she spent her remaining love on her baby brother Dary. But Dary left as well. Most men leave. After Dary she was alone in the cottage with Finola and the lovelessness of her life crashed down. She slipped into drabness. She hated herself for entertaining a persistent and nagging thought that life would be much better if her mother simply up and died. Brigid confessed to this time and again and after each admission, her rancor toward her mother deepened.
The cycle of wanting her mother dead, the guilt of it, the confession, and the penance became a treadmill of existence.
Clickety-clack…clickety-clack…clickety-clack…
“Omagh! Yer next stop is Omagh!”
The clod was replaced by a mom and two squawking wanes and a grinning old nun. Every time Brigid saw a nun, the notion passed through her that she might have missed her own calling. But she would have never felt how Myles made her feel…even though it always stopped short of total and absolute