Redemption - Leon Uris [284]
Mother stretched her distraught body upward like a banshee and joined the night keeners, rending her clothing and hair and flesh through ten hours of darkness until the damp-chilled dawn finally broke and she crumpled.
Aye, all of Ireland now knew that the whisperings about Atty Fitzpatrick’s clandestine love with Conor Larkin were true. When my sister Rachael and I were able to pull her from his grave, she remained in the Larkin cottage until a week later, when the final revelers had exorcised themselves and drifted back to their own fields and villages.
* * *
During that week a disturbing scenario developed. To be direct, the mutual offerings of consolations between Rachael and Father Dary did not appear to be very ecumenical in nature to me.
As the waking week played out, I and others drank the public house and shabeen dry. Between hail-and-farewell toasts to the deceased, I did not know whether I should spend my time comforting Mother, who remained beyond my reach in any case, or to step in between an obviously budding forbidden romance.
Sorrow will out, and at last I was able to pack my two girls back to Dublin where Rachael went into a familiar role of becoming Mother’s older sister. I thought this no time to offer Rachael unsolicited advice about the problems of falling in love with a priest.
Father Dary…mind you, it is not possible to dislike this man…had blazoned a light of hope in hopeless Derry. He fronted for an ailing Bishop with great compassion. Father Dary was much loved and far too liberal and, thus, in constant and deep trouble with the hierarchy.
He had been aloof from the Brotherhood. He took me aside during the funeral and allowed that he might be amenable to listen to us on special occasions. Was this due to his brother’s death? Or, just possibly, my sister Rachael’s beauty? After we left Ballyutogue, Father Dary did seem to find an inordinate amount of church business to bring him down to Dublin.
As for Mother, after a lifetime of hard sledding in the movement, she “hit the wall.” The robustness that she carried off on the stage as “Mother Ireland” or that empowered her to blast her way through a meeting of the Brotherhood’s Supreme Council was no longer there.
Her grief for Conor Larkin seemed consummate. She had worked with and supported two great, powerful, and daring men. With them both in their graves, her own energies were spent. She wisely withdrew from the Supreme Council of the Brotherhood but continued a significant, though lesser, role of elder statesman.
It is to be remembered that the raid on Lettershambo Castle gutted the upper echelons of the Supreme Council. Although not a member by choice, Conor was a spiritual leader as well as our most brilliant organizer and tactician in a land lamentable for the lack thereof.
Long Dan Sweeney was the revolution that was. His legendary glories going back to Fenian times irrevocably evolved into myth.
We lost our dear Lord Louis De Lacy, a mystical Gael who gave his barony to train our people. Loss of Dunleer was devastating to us.
And God love him, little Seamus O’Neill, the author of brilliant, stabbing, mocking, logical words, was dead in Lettershambo and, after all, words were one of Ireland’s few weapons.
In the transition a tobacconist, a former bartender, a roving Irish soldier of fortune, an academic, a labor leader, and, depending on one’s definition, one, two, or three poets took over the Supreme Council. It was an Irish stew without a single substantial military ingredient.
I, of course, carried on the role assigned me at birth, to do my stuff in the Four Courts. They did not name me Theobald for nothing.
Part Two: Of Nobler Causes
As the year 1916 came into view, dark clouds lifted from a number of issues.
The war in Europe was going to come down to a numbers game. The side that could absorb their casualties best would be declared the winner.
The big fellow in the numbers game was American manpower. America was still not committed. Ireland, therefore, had to supply its share of