Redemption - Leon Uris [41]
“Jack Murphy…go you now,” she said.
“Aye, lass.”
“How can I tell you, man?”
“Well, you’re anything but a sterile little bird. It may sleep but you’ll know what to do when the time comes.”
“God, I’m happy. Jack?”
“Aye.”
“Can it keep on growing from a place like this?”
“Aye, it’s never ending…and he’s out there, Atty…and you’ll find him.”
15
Ballyutogue, August 1885
On the third day of this fine month in 1873, Mairead O’Neill, the midwife of Ballyutogue, spanked life into the firstborn son of her next door neighbors, the Larkins. Wee Conor was drowsy and the story goes that he came into the world as a dreamer and never changed his ways.
One year later, almost to the hour, Finola Larkin returned the compliment by midwifing the birth of Seamus O’Neill, who needed no whap but made his entrance with flaming red hair and temper to match.
Seamus O’Neill and Conor Larkin could have been fraternal twins, they were that close. The boys spent as much time in each other’s kitchens as their own, just as their daddies worked side by side high up in the heather farming their reluctant acres.
Seamus O’Neill came in short and would remain so. His brother Colm, the eldest, was heir-designate to the thirty-five O’Neill acres. The middle son, Eamonn, emigrated to America where he was a fireman in Baltimore.
Seamus was spoiled by his mom, and by his sisters until they married and left the cottage, and his intellectual curiosity soon surpassed his parents’ and the village priest’s ability to fill it. It was his deep and abiding friendship with Conor Larkin, who likewise had a boundless curiosity, that kept him on a quest for knowledge. A third party, a Scottish schoolmaster named Mr. Andrew Ingram, came to Ballyutogue when the new National School opened, and Seamus was allowed to attend.
Conor Larkin had no such luck. The Larkin men were of a separate stripe, chieftains as far back as the Wolfe Tone Rising against the Crown in 1798.
Grandfather Kilty was a legendary legend. Of the twenty-some Larkin’s in three, families who farmed in Ballyutogue in 1846 when the potato crop had failed for five straight years, only Kilty and his oldest son Tomas survived.
One family died on a death ship on the way to Canada. Another of the Larkins was killed by the British when they came to tumble his Cottage and evict him, and his wife and wanes all croaked in the workhouse!
As Kilty fought bare knuckles in the London alleys for pennies and bets, young Tomas buried his own mother and sister and brothers and had dug his own grave when Kilty returned.
Later, Kilty went on to ride with the Fenians, and for his troubles was a guest of the Crown at Strangeways Prison, forced to eat on his hands and knees like a dog. He called the first hunger strike and otherwise immortalized himself to all of western Ireland.
Tomas Larkin was a chieftain of a different color. He was the master of the possible, in contrast to Kilty, who chased a wild Irish fantasy to his death.
With all his common sense, wit, and feel for the situation, Tomas came face-to-face with the most fearsome decision of them all. In 1885, the Catholic peasant, for the first time in five or six centuries of British rule, had won the right to vote.
Kevin O’Garvey, a Land League Catholic lawyer, decided to stand for Parliament against the Earl of Foyle’s candidate.
After the Earl’s man used every real or imagined threat possible, it all boiled down to Tomas Larkin. If Tomas voted, the croppies in the peninsula would follow him. If Tomas stayed away from the polls, the meaning was clear.
With a thick cloud of fear hovering, Tomas was given two messages. If he stayed away from the polls, his bread would be baked for life, by a cleverly conceived bribe. If he attempted to vote he was faced with a savage reprisal that would evict dozens of his neighbors. He didn’t want to go near the fecking polls, and that’s a fact. It was his son Conor who, but a young