Redemption - Leon Uris [15]
“Bullshit, Ferguson,” Oak roared and brought a punch up from his boot tops that caught Rory directly between the eyes. Rory fell back, shook his head, and stared at the giant who groped, bewildered.
“If that’s the best punch you’ve got, Oak, you’re fucked!” Rory’s fists blazed fast into the miner, who was stunned long enough so that a knee to the groin, elbow to the Adam’s apple, and hand chop behind the neck caused the entire room to shake as he thudded to the floor, clapped out.
“Gentlemen,” Rory said to the others, “who wishes the honors?”
There was a total loss of enthusiasm among those burdened with dragging Oak’s hulk from the place.
Rory banged his mug on the bar and glared at the room. “My name is Rory Larkin and I’m a New Zealander! I love my country! I loved my uncle and I think the Brits got what was coming to them!”
He snatched a bottle off the bar and barreled for the door. Wally caught him outside and spun him around.
“Jesus, I hate to see this thing happen in New Zealand. Two Irishmen fighting each other. This is not the place for it, Rory. Now, God rest your uncle’s soul, but this is your country!”
Rory backed away fighting for breath, trying to unscramble the whirl of torment so that words could form off his lips, somehow. Wally backed up and there was fear involved. He had never seen such a blaze of eyes and Rory shaking from top to bottom.
“Can’t you see,” Rory screamed. The veins bulged from his neck and his forehead. “I’m haunted, man!”
“Jesus, boy, you’re not yourself now. Come on, calm-like. It’s me, Wally, talking. Go to my office and drink yourself to sleep.” Wally reached out, but Rory swung his arm.
“You’re scared of me, aren’t you, Wally?”
“No.”
In a time Rory’s control returned and he told Wally he was really, painfully sorry. He turned to leave.
“Where the hell you going?”
“You know,” Rory answered.
“All right, then. Stay with her till you’re ready to come out and when you come out, you come straight to me. Will you shake hands on it?”
“I promise.”
6
Rory found himself wandering past the docks and along the base of Mount Pleasant, a hill that afforded a triple vista; Christchurch to the north and its omni-dim lights and whispering hymns, the Lyttleton Harbour below and Taylor’s Mistake at land’s end luring the ships to crash in the wrong inlet.
Rory crossed the road and sat on the grass and drank from the bottle. Who was Admiral Taylor to have such an insult heaped upon himself? How many ships piled up aground in that shallow treacherous cove?
That’s good, Rory thought. God has a way of disconnecting a man’s brain when it is too mashed up to contend with tragedy. When you can bear no more you can think of silly things like Taylor’s Mistake. Why am I here sitting on the wet grass and drinking when the Sheepmen’s Exchange is down there? Oh yeah…Oak Kelley. Bastard’s jaw hurt my fist.
“Oh, Uncle Conor,” Rory mumbled. “Since you left I’ve wanted nothing more in life than to see you again. God, the joy of it when I learned you’d busted out of prison! Over the years only precious letters, read till the words almost disappeared from the paper.”
He lay back and fell into a stupor.
Ugly, gray, wet, windy, chilled dawn told Rory either to wake up or die frozen in the grass. His infallible youth and strength won out. He crawled up from hands and knees and stood wavering like a tall ship’s mast in a hurricane.
Oh yes…that’s it…Georgia. Sister Georgia Norman, Chief Matron of the Christchurch Presbyterian Hospital. Several months earlier Rory had been taken down to the hospital with ribs cracked in a fall during the cattle muster. The war had swept a great number of the physicians into the army, including Dr. Calvin Norman, who was now on the way from somewhere to somewhere else.
In five months of hostilities, Rory Larkin had, by serendipity, found an unexpected windfall of unfaithful wives. Even as he rendered them and himself pleasure he disdained them. Wives were supposed to hunker down and wait it out in abstinence. Well, Rory concluded, one