Redemption - Leon Uris [21]
“Oh, how I hated myself because I wasn’t you,” the Squire mumbled aloud.
All the early stuff with Rory were merely skirmishes. It broke into warfare the day that Conor left New Zealand and Rory began walking in his uncle’s footsteps.
8
Rory awakened to instant remembrance. As he connected the threads of events, his groan filled the room. The light was gray. He hated dead light.
“There’s a lad,” Georgia whispered.
“Georgia. Thanks to God.”
He sat up on sheets wet from sweat and torn from clawing. It was difficult to hold his head straight, so he let it fall into his hands like a heavy boulder. “I never knew any kind of pain like this.”
“It’s called a broken heart, Rory.”
She sat beside him and pulled his head down onto her lap with the stern gentleness of a nurse.
“What’s going to happen to me? I don’t know how much I can take.”
“It’s near impossible to die of grief, even though you might long for it. God has worked out a blissful fog to envelop you. In a month, when you have accepted your uncle’s death, the fog will begin to lift, very slowly. Come each dawn, along with the stab of pain will come a new sliver of light. One morning you’ll wake up and life is on again, the pain has become manageable.”
“I can’t forget him.”
“No, but you’ll transfer him into a memory chamber. For a time he will come out by night and invade your dreams. Then even your dreams come under control. I’ve seen men off the battlefield with the life force and men without it. You’ll not go under.”
Georgia moved him to the armchair, stripped the bed and put on clean linens, ordered him on his stomach, and massaged him with alcohol.
“Glory! No one should have a body like yours,” she said slapping his bottom and ordering him to roll over. She set the bottle down and took him in hand and played with him until he responded.
“I’m in deep mourning. How can you be arousing me at a time like this?”
“Just checking to see if you’re still alive and if a sense of humor existed. Grief transformed to lust is not a matter to be overlooked.”
Rory suddenly got off the bed to curb his own rising passion and draped himself in a towel. Georgia fixed tea.
“Where do we start?” she asked.
“Hard to say. My da must have been squashed like a bug when he was a kid. He rarely talks of his past except for the occasional bitter reference. What drive he must have had to win the title of Squire and put the sign Ballyutogue Station over the arch of our gate. Powerful force, rage—but inside him, always inside him.”
“We all seem to spend the second half of our lives getting over the first half. That’s what the winners in this world lust for, to beat their parents’ ears back,” Georgia replied.
“My da can’t accept his own victory over Ireland and his father. It’s merciful that he’s such a strong Catholic. He can only venture so far into his own mind. When it starts to hurt too much he lights the old candle and takes the ‘mystery’ route. Strongly religious that he is, there is one black mark on him he can’t shake.”
“What black mark?”
“Me,” Rory answered. “My mother was four months’ pregnant when they secretly married. I was christened immediately and the records were altered to prove I was actually born nine months and two seconds after they exchanged vows.”
“But what’s it about? He loves your mother. He wanted to marry her.”
“My grandparents, the Hargroves, rained unmerciful damnation on them. I don’t know how to say it, Georgia, but I always knew there was something wrong about me.”
“Your father has never told you?”
“God no. He’d light a billion candles first.”
“How did you find out? How old were you?”
“Hurled in my teeth from a so-called friend when I was about eight. I learned it in a way that made me hide in a closet. What does it matter? When your mother and father perpetuate a lie, somewhere, somehow, sometime there is going to be a slip, or maybe I knew anyhow, an innate feeling I was born with. From the time I realized he had always looked at me differently, the child who had dishonored his mother by being born