Leon Uris by Redemption Page B

called. “It’s a rare night. Stars are coming up.”
    They found the rockers. Rory put his feet on the rail and listened for a time to the sea and watched the breakers throw off sprinkling phosphorescence.
    “My brother Tommy didn’t solve the problem. Tommyonly enhanced it when my da realized he wasn’t much good for working anything larger than a potato patch.”
    “He was forced to come back to you?”
    “Cursed, because he had to have me. He saw me every day becoming more and more like my Uncle Conor.… Why are you so good to me, Georgia?” he asked suddenly.
    “I’ve a long career of healing warriors.”
    Rory took her hands. “I love you in a very strong way. I’d do anything in the world for you. Sometimes, I wish we could go out together in the daylight and take a ride up in the hills.”
    “Ah, you wouldn’t want to be seeing me in full daylight. I’m more than slightly your senior.”
    “You’re my beautiful friend. I wish I were more comfortable with our situation.”
    “Those lady friends of yours. You want them to fall madly—madly and stomp out on them, like getting even with your parents?”
    “Shyte, Georgia, you’re too bloody smart. Truth be known, you’re better than the lot of them combined.… I want to talk some more.”
    “As long as you need.”
    “My da was afraid Conor would infect me with Ireland, but Conor avoided telling me about it. He taught me about books and searching for love and the beauty of beauty. Your kind of beauty. You see, let me make myself clear…knowing that my uncle was such a splendiferous man I realized that if he was obsessed with Ireland, there must be something there that explains the mystery of life itself.”
    “What was the lesson?”
    “In order to be the most total human you’re capable of you must serve something other than yourself.”
    “He must have been a melancholy man, too, to have Ireland as his mistress. Rory, I felt that patriotic once. Glory is tin. When the band stops playing the shooting begins. Soldiering or playing the patriot’s game is filthy and disgusting work, humiliating and boring, mutilating and inhuman….” Her voice trailed off to another continent. “During the Boer War, Kitchener—I was on his staff—ordered tens of thousands of women and children behind barbed wire at Bloemfontein—he called it a concentration camp—and while he burned down the countryside he neglected untold thousands of kids and their mothers and let them die of starvation and disease.”
    “Like they did to us in Ireland.”
    “‘Us’? Us?”
    “I guess I said us, didn’t I?”
    “What is taking you to battle is the same thing that drove me out of it. It is easy to make fun of a black man and paint him as an inferior and, God help me, I went for it. I believed in the empire. But in the Transvaal, Afrikaaners were white Christians being murdered by the most civilized white Christians in the world.”
    “Like they’re doing in Ireland. That’s why Conor died.”
    “You’ve got to get there, don’t you, Rory?”
    “Aye.”
    “Enlisting?”
    “Aye.”
    “What about your father? You’re not quite of age. If he stops you now, it could be a problem for you to join later.”
    “I’m going up to the North Island. They say you don’t even need proof of age. If it doesn’t work there, I’ll get aboard a ship to Australia. Light horse cavalry regiments are forming up both places.”
    “The way you ride you’ll end up being their colonel.”
    “So long as it gets me on the road to Ireland. And yourself, Georgia?”
    “No more war for me. I’ve seen too many young men never live to fill their promise. How many great men went, never knowing of their greatness? No more war for me. But I’m glad we passed each other by.”
    “So you’re here, waiting for Dr. Norman. Or is that it?”
    Georgia paled. “You’re too damned smart as well, Rory.”
    “You weren’t happy when we met. Not the way you are now,” he