Redemption - Leon Uris [42]
Kevin O’Garvey won. Tomas became the reluctant chieftain and Conor Larkin, obviously, the chieftain apparent.
You’d think a couple of men who loved one another as fiercely as Conor and Tomas did would have shared a long life of mutual admiration. They were more like two comets on a collision course.
It started the year of a flax crop failure. A bad planting and worse harvest spelled debt. Conor, it seemed, had been hanging around Mr. Lambe’s forge from the age of five or six. Mr. Lambe, though a Presbyterian and Orangeman, was affectionately regarded by all the croppies.
The Larkins sorely needed Conor’s wages and Tomas let him apprentice. Liam, the middle son, was a farmer and utterly happy going up in the heather with his da and working alongside him. This arrangement, like all arrangements thereabouts, born of too many sons and too little land with hostile soil, opened the way to Larkin family intrigue and conspiracy.
As Conor clearly showed unusual talent at the forge, Tomas began to lie to himself. Conor had to have the land and Conor had to stop trying to educate himself about things beyond Ballyutogue. Liam was odd man out and foredoomed to emigrate.
* * *
The boyhood pals, Conor and Seamus, went into a few conspiracies of their own. When school was done for the day and as soon as Conor closed down the forge, the two repaired to a secret place where Seamus taught Conor to read and write.
The conspiracy widened when Conor met the teacher Andrew Ingram, who, although a Presbyterian, was a man of the likes of Mr. Lambe.
The conspiracy widened once more. Seamus wrote to his brother Eamonn in Baltimore and confided his longing for books which were unobtainable. Eamonn was a bachelor fellow with a great love for his baby brother and he began to pipe the forbidden books through Mr. Ingram.
Tomas Larkin wasn’t behind the door when brains were passed out. Now it was books, books with ideas, books about places that would lure his son beyond the horizon.
Tomas suddenly sentenced Conor to spend the summer shepherding the flock in an isolated high meadow, without contact with the village for nearly three months.
Seamus O’Neill saw the way to convert disaster into good fortune. He talked his parents into letting him go up to the booley house, the shepherd’s shelter, with Conor for the summer. When they agreed, the boys planned to hide two dozen books among the provisions and read the nights through by the midsummer’s sun.
Tomas found the books and threatened to destroy them, when Conor swore he would run away. Tomas struck Conor a blow that would stay with him until his end, but he would not back down. Tomas was forced to relent. The battle lines were now drawn.
In the high meadows that summer a powerful bond was forged between the boys and Andrew Ingram. The teacher came up to the booley house with his sweetheart, Miss Enid Lockwood, also a teacher at another village. The kind of intimate relations Mr. Ingram had with Miss Enid could scarcely be accepted by the codes of the day. Yet, he knew his two croppy scholars would keep his secret as, indeed, they did. They were like four wild, wondrous scholars, alone on a mountaintop seeking out the puzzles of the human race.
Discovered by Caroline Hubble, Andrew Ingram gave her own sons, Jeremy and Christopher, early tutoring. His intellect and scholarship impressed her so that she became his patroness and, after Ingram’s marriage to Enid Lockwood, sponsored him to the position of school superintendent of a large district that included Londonderry. His departure from Ballyutogue fell on the boys sorely.
The love and joy that once marked the Larkins no longer existed. Tomas and Finola had once enjoyed a grand old sex life, but because of her ailments following childbirth, the Church forced them to live as brother and sister rather than let them make love during safe times.
Young Dary, the last of the Larkins, was seized by his mother and earmarked for priesthood.