Redemption - Leon Uris [9]
It made sense and Liam knew it. The British Empire was calling in its dues and debts. Without Britain there would have been no New Zealand. Without Britain they might well be speaking German and toasting the Kaiser.
For a thriving farmer on the South Island of New Zealand the war had put words into their language. Squire Liam Larkin was now a “sheep baron.” All the product the farmers could induce from this fertile soil was loaded aboard ships at prices never to be seen again and steamed away to try to fill the ultimate bottomless pit, war.
Sheep barons and their key personnel would be exempt from military or other war service. Every hand was desperately needed on the station. Surely, Liam could operate Ballyutogue Station himself, but if Rory had a sniff of the outside world it posed a danger to everyone’s future.
Rory had indeed inherited his father’s penchant for holding rage deep inside him. The fact of the matter being that father and son spoke an equitable station language to each other as far as sheep, cattle, and crops went, but were otherwise angry strangers.
Liam had deceived himself into believing that Rory loved Ballyutogue Station so much he would never consider leaving it, even if the two of them were never truly mates.
He wondered now if there were any way to catch up and reverse the past, even though he was not quite certain of what he had done wrong. What? When? How? Rory seemed angry, almost from birth. Why?
“I know when it started,” Liam said one night to Mildred. “It started ten years ago when Conor came to visit us. The boy changed from that moment on.”
* * *
It was another battle of silence between Rory and his father. The boy had gone up to Wellington to see the New Zealand All-Black rugby team defeat the Aussies, a game that ended in a piss-up to end all piss-ups.
When aroused, Rory was a battler of fierce proportions who could fight his way through almost anything with fist, foot, bite, or with any weapon available—chair, lamp, beer bottle.
Rank nationalistic remarks occurred from a bunch of Aussies crying in their cups. A Chinese brothel, permitted in this Christian land to service lonely seamen, was dismantled. Liam went north to pay the bill and get his son released. The rest was silence, utter silence.
In times like this Liam would go to the crown of his land, a high hill site by a trout stream, and communicate with himself, reliving his own epic.
Liam had laid claim to victory over Ireland by making his immigration a stunning success. Despite it, he was never free of hovering ghosts, the men who had created the Larkin legacy. Each, for generations back, was the big fellow in his own times. And he, Liam, lost and unheard among them. Every time he thought himself free, they reached out from their graves in the family plot in Ballyutogue.
His great-grandfather Ronen, beaten with the cat-o’-nine until the bones poked through his flesh during the Wolfe Tone rising of 1798. His grandda Kilty, who brought them through the great famine by fighting bare knuckles for pennies in the alleyways of London and later rode with the Fenian rebels. And his daddy, Tomas, the silent warrior, the man who made the Orangemen part like the Red Sea when they tried to block his way to the first vote given to the Catholic croppy.
Conor! He was the Larkin of them all. Conor had left Ireland after a tragic shirt factory fire in Derry and roved for five years. Ten years earlier he had stopped off in New Zealand. Liam tried to make him stay, but he returned to his life in dubious battle.
Conor joined the illegal Brotherhood and masterminded a gunrunning scheme, was caught, imprisoned, escaped, and now lived life on the run.
“Cripes,” Liam mumbled to himself. “I’m going down and talk to Rory, this time without anger. This time we’ll get to the bottom of what is hurting us. Oh God, I dare