Redemption - Leon Uris [99]
This was to be her first train ride. Thoughts of going clear down to Dublin was enough to make even the most educated of travelers tremble.
She asked about the arrival of her train twice and then a third time to make absolutely certain. She could tell the stationmaster was a Protestant, but kindly to her situation, having seen a number of first-time riders come down from the hills over the years.
“Your first trip, now, is it?”
“Aye,” she answered bashfully.
“I’ll see you safely aboard, miss,” the trainman said.
“That’s very kind of ye, indeed.”
“How far are you traveling?”
“Dublin.”
“That’s a few yards down the road.”
“Actually I’m going to Maynooth. My brother is going to be ordained this Sunday.”
Just what the fucking country needs, the stationmaster thought, another fucking R.C. collar. “Ah, that will be a big day for you. The Great Northern will be along in fifteen minutes. It’s never late in or out of Londonderry.”
Brigid sat gingerly on the genuine imitation leather suitcase loaned to her by the Widow Dougherty. Fifteen minutes passed. It was announced that the Great Northern for Dublin would be a half-hour late, more or less.
From the train platform in Protestant Waterside, Brigid could see across the River Foyle to Catholic Derry and its waterfront lined with piers and shirt factories.
The old Witherspoon & McNab factory destroyed in the fire was no longer on the skyline, leaving an ugly gap like an extracted tooth.
Brigid had been down to Derry twice before. Once, when the linen crop failed, she and hundreds of other farm girls had to hire themselves out as domestics to earn tuppence. They stood like herded cattle in the Guildhall Square with prospective employers feeling their muscles and examining their teeth as if they were horses.
“We expect you to put in an honest fourteen hours a day, Brigid. You don’t steal, do you, Brigid? And no fornicating with the help, Brigid.”
Bogside was the place where all dreams tarnished.
After a lifetime of conniving, her mother, Finola, had succeeded in breaking her up with her only true love, Myles McCracken. True, part of it was Brigid’s own fear of leaving Ballyutogue to go with him to Derry.
As she had told him on that sorrowful day, “Once a lad leaves Ballyutogue, he never returns.” Myles’s family was so poor, they couldn’t give you the dirt off their necks, they’d need it for topsoil. He was landless, and that wasn’t in Finola’s plans for her daughter.
Myles might have stayed because all the other Larkin boys were gone or going, but her daddy Tomas clung to the fantasy that Conor might return so there could be a Larkin name on the farm.
Myles followed Conor down to Derry and later worked for Conor in his forge. Brigid had come to fetch Conor when Daddy was taken to the sickbed.
Brigid lowered her eyes for an instant from the waterfront view. She recalled, as she arrived in Derry, how impure thoughts had entered her head. If Daddy died and she married Myles and he made her pregnant right away, Finola would have to accept them because there was no other Larkin to run the farm. Dary was now in the seminary, Conor in his forge in Derry, and Liam all the way gone to New Zealand….
Brigid began to breathe unevenly as the door of memory was kicked open…. She had come for Myles McCracken too late. He had married and was on his way to fatherhood. Over there, across the river, was the gaping hole where the factory had stood. It was where Myles’s wife, Maud, leapt from the burning roof and their unborn child and its mother were splattered all over the cobblestones….
Myles degenerated into a Bogside drunk, and later Conor had to commit him to the asylum. Myles hanged himself in a moment of sanity when he clearly remembered Maud jumping from the roof….
The trainmaster picked up the genuine imitation leather suitcase