Redemption - Leon Uris [103]
Whatever bitter views Seamus held, he bent to them. The voice of his mother, though long departed, continued to command him to Sunday Mass more than he cared to admit.
Although this moment hardly reflected the simplicity and humility of Jesus, a people’s rabbi, Conor accepted the grandeur as a needed carnival to brighten the drab lives of the parish of Ireland. The cathedral was wrong and distasteful for the parish of impoverished Ireland, but somehow the Irish scarcely resented it.
Conor was satisfied that Dary had become a priest on his own and would have chosen priesthood with or without his mother’s obsession. And Father Dary would be the best of what priesthood had to offer, what with his gentle capacity to charm a mockingbird from its limb onto his shoulder, yet a man of Larkin steel, within.
At the altar the priests droned through the saints, A to Z, and Conor felt a contentment that Dary had found a higher value to life. Why not even envy Dary at this moment?
Conor’s separation from Shelley had all but ground him to dust.
As his brother was called forward and asked if he was ready and Dary prostrated himself, Conor felt bittersweet but with no reason to rail against the moment.
Brigid wept…Conor wondered. Seamus? Well, there were good priests and not such good priests. Seamus hoped the Church knew the value of the man giving his promise.
Things had been wobbly between Dary and his brother since Conor returned to Ireland and joined the Brotherhood. From his earliest days in the seminary, Dary was keen but cautious to try to sway Conor from active republicanism, not because of the rights and wrongs of it, but because Dary didn’t want Conor to end up reliving the Larkin legacy of misery or to end up hanging from the end of a British rope.
By the time Conor returned to Ireland, Dary had been singled out during those five years as a very special prospect. Early on, Dary had opted for a missionary order for life among the lepers in those places that only an Irish priest would go. He was among a half-dozen candidates chosen for special African studies under the mentorship of a brilliant priest, Father George Mooney, whose own health had been devoured in the tropics.
Father Mooney was suddenly named the new Bishop of Derry. The previous bishop had been installed a decade earlier to stamp out a rise of liberalism among Derry’s priests, but after the shirt factory fire, the place continued to wallow in despair.
It was believed that a bit of controlled liberalism might be in order again to get Derry and the Bogside back into the faith.
The loss of Father Mooney hit hard at Dary Larkin. The Father was a teacher painful to lose. Dary sulked a lot and, each time Conor visited him, took out his own frustration on his brother. On Conor’s last visit, a few months before the ordination, the brothers went at each other with verbal bombast for the first time in their lives.
“What good has eight hundred years of risings and bloodshed accomplished?” Dary demanded.
“And what good has eight hundred years of prayer done?” Conor retorted. “I’ll not have you passing judgments on what I’ve chosen for life any more than I’m passing judgments on you, Dary.”
“If you stay in the Brotherhood and keep up the way of the gunman, I’ll not be there for you,” Dary said, astonished at the furious rage of his own words.
“Well,” Conor had answered, “that’s a good old Irish family for you.”
The chilling Mass of Ordination was done. Brigid was off to see the sights of Dublin with Seamus O’Neill. Conor had been somewhat dazed throughout the whole ceremony, and now, his apprehension was clear.
Conor tilted his chair back as Dary packed his suitcases silently. Of course there was the faded photograph of their mother taken at some long forgotten county fair.
“She was sorely missed today,” Conor said.
“She was there,” Dary answered.
“Aye, so she was.”
Both of them ground their teeth. There had never