Redemption - Leon Uris [3]
Their priest, Father Gionelli of Eye-tallion extract, wended his way up from Christchurch on the second and fourth Sundays of the month in a three-donkey train. His arrival seemed so Joseph-and-Mary-like.
Confessions were dispensed with first, but there wasn’t too much to sin about in the mountain stations of the South Island, except for the drinking of the previous night, impure thoughts, and occasional fornication between man and sheep, a practice that never appealed to Liam.
With the Mass and sacraments finished, Father Gionelli read and wrote letters to and from home and transferred funds and consoled homesickness. His fractured English and their fractured English developed a melody all its own.
Liam Larkin was never truly homesick, only pained and angry over his dismissal from Ballyutogue and Ireland. He liked it here, to the utmost.
The pastures of New Zealand’s South Island gave a wonderful soft feel under his Wellington boots—in comparison to the back-breaking rocks and fragile topsoil and constant torment of wind, laws, weather, and omnipresent loathing of the oppressors that afforded the Irish hill farmer his marginal existence and lifelong suffering.
Back in Ireland in Ballyutogue, high in the heather, Liam had dug alongside his daddy, Tomas Larkin, since he had been a chip of a lad, and when one carries seaweed up from the lough to make it into a crust of topsoil, he damned well better know what he is doing.
In the beginning Bert Hargrove thought Liam Larkin a dullard with a broad back. Given this kind of land in this kind of atmosphere, Liam Larkin, in his quiet manner, inched his way into acceptance as an extremely knowledgeable farmer and sheep man. His wise observations, keen suggestions for logical changes here and there, and the penchant for a long day’s work caught the squire’s eye.
At the end of the first season Liam was made assistant to the station foreman. Free at last from constraints, Liam blossomed, took on responsibility, organized and had no qualms in running a crew. Tilted shears invented by his brother Conor in the blacksmith forge speeded the wool cropping by ten percent.
Things never stand still, not even in paradise.
Bert Hargrove was the most successful Catholic runholder hereabouts and was blessed with two fine young sons. On the minus side of the ledger, he was burdened with three daughters. As the inheritors, the squire’s sons would be adequate. Women, as they always do, presented the problems that caused him sleeplessness.
The Hargrove girls were a bovine lot, and endowed with the stout requirements for a future life as runholders’ wives, they seemed to have excellent breeding possibilities. Bert’s wife Edna made the mainstay of her life the future respectable and nearby placement of her daughters. She was bloody well determined that she would have a large family around her to comfort her during her declining years.
This was no simple matter. There were not enough eligible Catholic lads who fit into her scheme. By eligible, one would consider the inheritor of a station, an independent merchant of means, or perhaps a professional—a doctor or solicitor down in Christchurch. Beyond Christchurch was out of bounds.
The girls were off limits to the hands on the station. Edna Hargrove had the precision of a Prussian field marshal in her mind, knowing at every instant where each troop was. One pat on the rump and you were off the Hargrove Station, the debt for your passage auctioned to another runholder.
As an English-born lady, Edna was confronted with the fact that most Catholic lads in the region were Irish station hands, working off their passages or eking out a life on forty acres. She was reminded every second and fourth Sunday at the Mass when the paddies would stagger in, legless, shaking from a night’s drinking and hell-raising, lying and slothful as they were.
Certain