Redemption - Leon Uris [177]
“The Squire is something, all right,” Johnny said.
“You liked him, didn’t you?” Rory asked.
“I wasn’t his son,” Johnny said quickly.
“What’d you like about him?” Rory pressed.
“What he made out of nothing but his two hands. That was respect. I liked him as well. All my crew liked him. He cared about us. Our food was from your mother’s kitchen and any hurt man was taken care of. He did a lot of quiet favors. He was so proud of Ballyutogue Station. And…he was fun to stand up to the bar and drink with and a joy to fish alongside of up at that trout stream of his. Like| said, I wasn’t his son so I don’t know why you two didn’t get on, but it’s mostly the same in every family.”
That was the case, all right. Everybody wanted to deal with Squire Larkin. Drovers, shearing crews, the church the auctioneers…everybody liked the Squire.
“Did you get along with your old man?” Rory asked.
“We had a rough life together, Rory. My father was never much more than a roustabout, the wandering prospector looking for that one lucky strike. Me and my sister spent our whole childhood living in a caravan, prospecting the South Island with him. We never had our own home.”
“How’d you learn to read and write? Mother?”
“No!” Johnny said abruptly. Then he softened. “I picked up my schooling on my own. There was always someone in the mining camps teaching the kids. You know, those guy who get sick of civilization and run off looking for the bonanza. We had some smart people around.”
Johnny had gone off like an alarm at mention of his mother. Rory knew the woman was off bounds, from then on.
“My mother,” Tarbox said with another voice, “was an actress…like a music hall song-and-dance girl, and New Zealand was too small for her. She was a great theatrical success in the west of America in the gold and silver rush towns.”
The quiet fell again. A long time quiet.
“You asleep?” Rory asked.
“Not anymore.”
“Why is my father rattling around on this ship, now?”
Tarbox laughed. “What better place to think about your old man than on a troopship?”
“You liked the Squire?” Rory asked.
“Yeah, he is right out of the earth,” Johnny said.
“But you didn’t like prospecting with your old man.”
“I hated it, Rory. I hated him for what he gave me. I hated watching my sister grow into a mining camp girl. So, I quit when I was able and did my hitch in the Royal Marines. You know what? For four years I grew hungry for my old man. I realized that he was doing what he was doing because it would have killed him to sit in one place and be without a dream, and I realized he had put a lot of good things into me. Every soldier on this ship is pissed off at his parents for screwing up their lives, and every soldier who lives through the war is going to spend the second half of his life getting over the first half. That’s the way it goes down. We all blame our parents, all of us…then we never seem to see ourselves doing the same things to our own kids.”
Johnny was annoying him. He didn’t know what the hell Squire Larkin had done to him!
“So, I came back from the Marines,” Johnny said, “and I saw my old man for what he was. A sweet man who did the best he could. But, you see, he always accepted me as a kid and I was pretty rotten. I never accepted him for what he was. After the Marines, we saw each other for what we were and not what we wanted the other to be. So, he started riding with me as one of my drovers and those four years were the happiest of my life.”
It sounded like his Uncle Conor and the grandda he never knew, Tomas Larkin. Conor and Tomas gave each other bad, bad turns in the beginning, but in the end, there was love.
Oh Jaysus, Rory thought, there are too many mountains to cross with the Squire and the valleys are too deep. He never knew how to quit picking on me. He never stopped making me feel unwanted.
Could I have done something about it?