Redemption - Leon Uris [162]
“God figured out when he separated us from the rest of the creatures that if we have the power to reason and justify and make decisions, then we are going to make a lot of mistakes passing through. Big, big, big mistakes. God understood that, then gave us the ultimate human power, the power of redemption.”
Liam lay his head on his hands and down to the desk and let his anguish flow to softness.
“It’s a shocking discovery that a deep wrong has to be righted and it might take the rest of your life to do it, so don’t try to do it overnight.”
“What can I do? What can I do?”
“Keep the fields of Ballyutogue Station green and let him know how the land longs for him. And, in time, it won’t be all that hard to tell him you love him.”
They were interrupted by an urgency in one of the wards.
“I have to go, Squire. I’m sorry about your brother, Conor.”
54
Camp Hobson, North Island, New Zealand, January 1915
Johnny Tarbox was an upscale artful dodger whose reputation for daring was as large as he could make it. He was a sometime independent drover, hired on for big sheep drives. If the station was moving a flock of several thousand, Tarbox would often be contracted to run a crew.
Likewise, he showed up at the Agricultural and Pastoral shows and was often the man to beat in the challenge horse races. For years he had been counted a Gun Shearer, one of the men who could shear a hundred sheep in an eight-hour stretch.
He boxed a little as well, at the A&P shows, demonstrating his dodger skills. In fact, Johnny Tarbox had droved at the Ballyutogue Station and did the A&P contests in their shows. That is, until Squire Larkin’s punk kid Rory whipped him in the big race on RumRunner when the kid was only thirteen. When Rory was sixteen, he took Tarbox in a shearer contest, which he protested because the kid was using a new shear invented by his uncle.
Johnny made the final mistake of getting into the ring with eighteen-year-old Rory and never got past the first half of the first round.
Otherwise they were friends.
To hear Johnny Tarbox tell it, and he was never at a loss, he had done a lot of things: did a four-year hitch in the Royal Marines when he was a kid, ran rum and other articles in the China Seas, prospected, and other endeavors that would come to mind at the moment.
Above all, Johnny Tarbox considered himself a sort of consummate lover and authority on female flesh. Marriage was something to be beaten off like the plague.
This was made even more so as Johnny Tarbox found the perfect niche in life. New Zealand was pretty far away from anything. It was not even on a way from place to place—you had to go out of your way to get there. Nonetheless, there were the half-dozen to dozen times a year some royalty or governmental mainstay or other notables landed at Wellington or Auckland.
They were greeted by a New Zealand Mounted Honor Guard led by none other than Serjeant Johnny Tarbox. Though the post was ceremonial, Johnny made the most of it with the ladies.
When the war broke out Johnny was a living recruiting poster, what with his smashing figure in uniform aboard his mount with the gorgeous broom moustache and a merry twinkle in his eye.
So, when a wee country gets involved as a wee participant in a very great war whose meaning is vague and whose battlefields are beyond the horizon and the equator, Tarbox was put to work enticing young men yearning for travel and adventure.
Johnny went from honorary serjeant to actual serjeant and was given the sweet job of going around the country giving tests and grading men for cavalry units. The war in France quickly settled into static lines and, by the time Johnny reached Camp Hobson outside Auckland, the cavalry was being put on hold in favor of infantry and artillery.
A last cavalry battalion, the Seventh Light Horse, was being put together up north. Five lads would be riding for each opening. When the complement was formed, Johnny Tarbox himself would become the battalion Serjeant Major.
Rory wasn’t overly concerned, knowing