Redemption - Leon Uris [98]
Dan reacted as though he had been struck. His old eyes turned teary, a weird sight. “Her name was Aileen. Aileen O’Dunne. I don’t remember exactly what she looked like, but I’ll never get over how she felt. The Brits stashed me away the first time when I was sixteen. I met her right after I got out. I was twenty-some thing. We all march through the same ten miles of shit…weeping at O’Connell’s grave…reciting speeches from the dock as kids…even writing more bad poetry…. See, we all walk the same ten miles of shit.”
“Weird breed, aren’t we, Dan?”
“If you love a woman, you cannot take her into a life of her waiting with every tick of the clock to find out if your head’s been blown off…then creeping through alleys to a room in a hideaway…smelling of the damp. And oh, the fucking tears you have to stuff inside until the next glorious meeting. It didn’t work then and it won’t work now. It’s a decision we all have to come to. Later makes it that much more desperate. With the kind of commitment a Conor Larkin makes, keeping a girl he loves so much is a one-way dead-end road to tragedy.”
“What can I say, Dan? He doesn’t see her anymore.”
“When the hell is he going to get over it? We all got to get over it, you know.”
It was Seamus’s turn to feel the grief. “You’d better know the man you’re dealing with in Conor,” he said softly.
“Who is this Larkin anyhow, Jesus?”
“He’s no Jesus. He’s used the Hubbies to a fare-thee-well, and he’ll pull the trigger when he needs to. Don’t question his steel.”
“What then? Irishmen’s poems to their colleens are a large load of bullshit. It’s putrid, childish sentiment, that’s what.”
“You’d better know the man you’re dealing with,” Seamus repeated.
“There is obviously something I don’t understand. Would you be after telling me about it, Seamus?”
“Conor and I go back forever,” Seamus said. “And forever, nothing of beauty has ever escaped his eye. No leaf, no sound, no drop of rain, no sweet word, no scent. He finds beauty in thunderheads and raging seas, and never a woman has he seen or touched did he not find beauty in. Along with his ravenous craving for knowledge and his fury against injustice, this man has gathered in beauty more fully than any human being I know or have ever heard of. Aye, he’d match Jesus in that department.
“All his life he has held that beauty, giving some to everyone, but never finding the right woman to entirely lavish it on.
“Shelley MacLeod is a wonderment of her own. She has the capacity for this man. I suppose what the two of them discovered was something beyond our universe of comprehension. Don’t you know, Dan, I’d chop off ten years of my life to know ten minutes of what they had for each other. It was so intense, it’s small wonder the both of them didn’t shatter like a smashed glass…that the man came back to us needs no further comment on his loyalty to the movement.”
“Can a man really love so?” Dan pondered.
“Conor Larkin can, and I’d rather see them take their death vows and be together for whatever time is in it for them than kill each other this way.”
“Is the lad ever going to come back to us, really?”
“Never fully. Never even partly until something fills some of the void in him.”
Strange, Seamus thought, how delicately Long Dan holds his teacup when he is thinking deeply. Why, even his little finger is curled.
“Do you think it’s time he was introduced to Atty?”
“In actual fact,” Seamus said, “I’ve been pondering along the same lines. Atty Fitzpatrick can never replace Shelley. But, by God, there’s a woman of his power, and perhaps, praise Mary, she can find the capacity to receive love. She never had it from Des, you know.”
“I thought as much.”
“Even if his void…and her void…can be partly filled it might be something awesome to behold.”
“I never been much in this area,” Dan said, “but it seems something like this has to work or we’ll lose him. Even your man Conor, Jesus or no, can’t keep going like this.”
37
For the greatest occasion of her life Brigid Larkin was garbed in store-bought clothes from Derry