Redemption - Leon Uris [12]
But on this night of Conor’s death, the past became the present again and the present took on a sudden urgency. He must follow in Conor’s footsteps.
Even now he adored riding the station with his da, who was quiet and leathery and had wondrous ways with the soil and weather. They said that only pigs could see the wind, but Liam Larkin sure as hell could, he was that keen.
If containing one’s emotions were a kingly value, his father was a great king. His early longings to buddy up with his da had been turned back by Liam’s constant taciturn attitude toward him. Mom and Tommy, and occasionally the girls, got whatever there was of his father’s outward shows of affection.
If being taciturn were truly his da’s basic nature Rory felt he could find a rhythm to it, a good clean way that two quiet men can have respecting and caring for one another.
Rory had caught a drift as a child that the silence and later the snappishness toward him had a wrong rub to it. It was a special annoyance his da had for him from something that must have happened long ago and far away.
It was a dark night, but RumRunner knew the way. Rory dozed in the saddle knowing his horse would advise him if he were about to fall off. He jolted to wakefulness and snapped upright time and time again. Each time he did, he remembered his horror…UNCLE CONOR IS DEAD!
Rory, stop playing the game, he told himself. You’ve a rover’s bone stuck in your throat and you know it and your da knows it. The sourness between them had set in almost ten years ago to the day, when Uncle Conor came to visit.
Liam Larkin understood his son’s itch and he was unable to do the right thing about it. It boiled down to a single word, Ireland, and Rory had built his uncle into a deity. Liam’s fear was that the same curse-laden bedevilment would take his son away.
A word of comfort to his da that his love of New Zealand would keep him here, and things would have changed between them in a flick.
Liam saw his son become more like his brother, and it was beyond his scope to do anything about it. As for Rory, he could never bring himself to comfort his da about Ireland.
So, the malice and cancer grew.
UNCLE CONOR IS DEAD!
Tears stung Rory’s cheeks. His throat told him the bottle was empty. He tossed it and looked for the lights of Christchurch. They always seem to come up like the sound of a Protestant hymn. If New Zealand ever fell off the earth, Christchurch would be first to go. It was born dull and stayed that way without curiosity or anger, just a transplanted English garden in perpetual whispers and prayer. This was the Motherland once removed, the old royal and loyal outpost of empire. It was eleven o’clock and Christchurch drowsed. Christchurch always drowsed.
RumRunner trotted on through to the Lyttleton Harbour, where an oasis of levity from the outside world had filtered through the Christian ramparts.
Wally Ferguson’s Sheepmen and Miners’ Exchange was the lone sanctuary from all that goodness. Wally’s operation centered around the sheep and cattle pens by the docks. There was a bunkhouse hotel, warehouse, auction barn, and the most active pub on the South Island.
Wally’s greatest asset was an ability to size up men: good, bad, truthful, liar, fighter, coward…that one will fold up in one season…that one will make a go of it…that one’s a right yahoo.
In the beginning, when Mildred and Liam had been evicted from Bert Hargrove’s station, Wally had made an astute judgment and took the young and frightened couple in. What to buy, when to buy, how to buy, good land, bad land, safe ships, diseased ships, market up, market down, good ram, bad ram—all of this was shared with Liam Larkin, more so because he hated Bert Hargrove, but mostly because he knew a winning team when he saw one.
That kid, Rory Larkin, became a kind of alter ego, winning at the fairs, almost good enough to play rugby with the All-Blacks, and a fighter of devastating proportions.