Redemption - Leon Uris [312]
“Mom said she understood. She told me how to be careful and also said, for God’s sake, be joyous, laugh a lot at yourselves and be very, very glad afterward.”
“She told you that!”
“Of course. Once Mom had broken down the barriers of pain and sorrow for Conor, it was a wonderment watching the two of them rush toward each other down a path. They could make each other out a mile away and Conor would always whisk her off her feet…and she’s no little lamb…and twirl her around. Sometimes they’d throw off all their clothing and leap into the icy lake screaming and howling for joy. It might have been a day when ten Brotherhood men were captured or some other disaster was on their necks…but when they saw each other, oh, did they go for each other. So, when she told me it was all right to be with Ned that way, she said…‘Make it be happy.’”
Dary stopped his own pouting and studied her. For the first time he realized a woman’s love was not a one-time gift…an ultimate sacrifice to be borne with regret that she would never be the same. Love from a woman like Rachael could be given over and over to a man, with great wonderment.
She took his hands. “Ned was happy. He went away happy. He was killed in the first month. I’m glad he went away happy.”
The stranger had been sitting, sitting, sitting in his threshold for a score of years, and him holding in his powerful habitude, and now it was seeking a way out and the stranger was seeking its way in with the rush of feelings of an ordinary man.
“Did you enjoy it?” Dary asked the most pedantic question of all.
“Truth?”
He said, “Of course,” but he didn’t really mean it.
“It was clumsy and painful. But it was joyous.”
“Oh.”
He felt her soft fingers touch his face, then her lips. “Dary, Dary,” she whispered, “I was waiting for you.”
As they held each other she whispered meekly, “I was hoping you’d get jealous.”
“Well, you hoped correctly, lass.”
“What are we going to do, Dary?”
“I was about to ask the same question.”
“Are those tears, Dary?” she asked.
“Only tears of joy,” he said.
“Mine as well. I was waiting for you, mon, I was waiting for you…I was waiting for you.”
81
Clonlicky Crossroad, Near Baltimore—June 1916
Ireland, as an island, has ninety-four corners to it where you can go no farther without getting wet. Clonlicky Crossroad was one of them. It serviced farms nearby and had a milk collection station, a provisions store, a pub on the left side of the road, and a church on the right.
It was never known as a dangerous place insofar as republican activity went. However, to it fell the dubious distinction of being made an example, in the post-Rising order of things.
Quinn’s Pub, a meager hard-assed Guinness bar, was owned by the Widow Quinn and boasted the normal bent of a lot of republican talk but very little action.
Like every woebegone public house, republican oratory and song was part of the menu for Saturday night and after Sunday Mass. Well, some fecking informer, the bane of Irish life, had reported to the Royal Irish Constabulary that the Widow Quinn was hiding a Brotherhood lad in her cellar. He’d been on the run since the Rising. The Constabulary turned the informer over to the local Army barracks.
No less than General Llewelyn Brodhead drove all the way from Dublin to observe the new order of things. A full-scale attack was made on Quinn’s Pub, loaded with drinkers of a Saturday night. The Brits came in as though they were attacking Gibraltar.
The Brotherhood lad was nabbed in the cellar, taken to the barracks and, after a ten-minute court-martial, put against the wall and shot by a firing squad.
The next day as the parishioners were leaving church after Mass, the British leveled every building at Clonlicky Crossroad, save the church.
The tumbling was done by a pair of tractors driving parallel about thirty feet apart dragging a chain and steel beam. One went on the right side of the building, the other went on the left side, and the chain