Redemption - Leon Uris [6]
Oh, Mildred, what a dear! He loved every plump round feel of her. They may have been plain and rough hewn but there was nothing plain about the way they loved each other.
Mildred was the first thing that ever belonged to him, not counting the required love of certain family members. Mildred was the first person and the only person to love him alone.
Liam was the first person to love Mildred. The first person who belonged to her. They were the first to be tender to each other. They wallowed in each other, gloriously, never passing without a touch to make up for a lifetime of touches never before given or felt.
It took a third of a lifetime of misery and a journey halfway around the world, but his salvation from purgatory was felt every day of his life after he awakened to the realization that New Zealand was true.
Edna Hargrove’s anger lasted only until the second child, Spring, was christened. A proper English mother forgives and Spring was named after her own mother. Certainly Mildred had sent a signal in naming Spring that she wanted Edna’s forgiveness. At least things could be mixed around so no one really knew who was forgiving whom.
Bert held out for one more baby, Madge.
Through this ordeal Liam realized that a certain unplanned sense of exaltation was being awarded the victor. Continuing kindness to one’s former crucifier can be the most delicious and artful form of revenge. Had he and Mildred become belligerent, the Hargroves would certainly have found justification for their obnoxious behavior.
By accepting them with open arms, Liam had laid guilt and shame everlasting on Mildred’s parents. The terrible thing they had done was the Hargroves’ subject of many hours with Father Gionelli, but they could never erase it fully. The Aussies had a saying about the evil hunter missing his prey and getting whacked with his own boomerang. The Bible was a catalogue of “what goes around comes around.”
Of the other Hargrove boys, King Hargrove, their oldest son, grew into a first-rate lout with a penchant for gambling losses and the kind of irresponsibility that Bert Hargrove formerly attributed only to Irishmen. Bert was delighted when King stayed on in South Africa chasing a gold rush after serving in the Boer War.
Gilbert, the younger son, was a good bloke but he would not be dissuaded from being educated in England with aspirations of becoming an engineer.
There came a divine moment for Liam Larkin when Bert stood, hat in hand, and tolled off a litany of failures, bad investments, things on the turn with his sons, unforeseen sweeps of sickness through his flock and herd. None of this was Bert’s fault. Land had been easy to get and greed was his undoing. Bert’s overextension had no plan for a reserve in the event of failure. Hell, Liam knew when he was ten years old that a man doesn’t try to plow a thousand acres without a tractor.
He smiled and shook his head sympathetically and did not say aloud but Bert could read the silence in Liam’s face…What would you give for another stupid paddy like me to come off the ship and bail you out, you fuck-faced monster?
“Ah glory, Bert, let me and Millie sit down with you and see how we can get you through this little muddle of yours.”
Goddamned! Liam’s kindness damned near killed Bert Hargrove, but the terms, rather generous under the circumstances, saved the station, which would now be distributed on an equitable basis among his three daughters.
Actually, kindness as the ultimate revenge had begun to evolve in Liam’s mind years earlier when he and Millie and the baby struggled through that first winter in their first home, a leaking, clapboard, one-room, windblown misery of a shack. It was like the nightmare of Ireland all over, but they endured until spring and from that moment on never looked back.
His careworn daddy, Tomas Larkin, had driven him