Captains and The Kings Read Online Free PDF Page A

again. It was "best to wait." The Sassenagh was tiring of his vindictiveness. Then the little family was evicted for taxes and a cousin of Moira's in Carney took them into his crowded small cottage. For once Daniel was more discreet. He did not squander the passage money. He shared a portion of it with Moira's cousin for necessary bread and a handful of vegetables -half-rotten-once a week, and a slab of bacon. When that was gone, and the passage money in danger, Joseph had confronted his father. Moira had not told her husband that only yesterday an English soldier had accosted her in the main street of Carney, that little village, and that when he had dragged insistently on her shawl she had struck him in the face with her last strength. He had punched her, then, in the breast until she screamed in agony, and then had kicked her to the stones, and had left her, shouting with mirth and execrations and foul epithets. Moira's cousin's wife had seen this, and had assisted the weeping crouched woman home, and Moira had begged her not to tell Daniel, and Joseph had heard. The shawl was moved aside, and the buttons of the ragged bodice opened, and Joseph saw the black and purple bruises on his mother's young white flesh, so shrunken with starvation now, and he had clenched his fists and he had known his first lust to kill. So Daniel, packing his few clothes in a black cardboard portmanteau, had left his country with tears in his eyes, and had glanced for the last time at his son, Joseph, who seemed to him to be an old and unrelenting man and not a child, and the innocent reproach in Daniel's eyes had not touched Joseph at all. For fear that his father might turn back at the very last Joseph had accompanied Daniel to the pub in the stark cold wet dawn, and there had waited with him for the coach to Queenstown, and the ship. The rain struck their faces and Daniel had tried to whistle, but it was a sad sound. When the coach rumbled up, and Daniel had thrown his luggage on the roof, the father had turned to his son and said, "Ye will be the father to your mother and Scan, Joey, and bring them to me in America." "Yes, Dad," said the boy. He looked at the four great horses, steaming and stamping in the half-light, their hides agleam with water and sweat, and at the white faces staring through the running windows at the new passenger. The coachman cracked his whip and it was a cutting sound in the village silence, and Daniel had hesitated for a final word, and then had smiled his radiant smile, climbed into the coach, and was gone. It was as if, to Joseph, a charming but incompetent older brother had departed, and he shook his rain-wet head and smiled a little in love and reluctant indulgence. He knew that the charming and the lovable had their place in life, but it was a trivial place and the first to be shattered when disaster struck. It was a village of gingerbread, where they lived and had their uncertain being, and the roofs were only sugar-icing. They were like flowers, the adornment of gardens, and so were not to be despised, except when life demanded that food be planted in their place for sustenance. If they were then uprooted, it was sorrowful but inevitable. Joseph did not fault them. They had been born so. Now, as he sat with his little brother, Scan, who was fitfully sleeping, he feared that Scan was too like the father and he vowed in his desolate and emptied heart that he would teach Scan to face truth without fear, and despair with resolution, and to despise false words of hope. The world was an evil place, and did not he, Joseph, know it surely? It was a dangerous place. Only courage and will could conquer it or at least cow it so that it withdrew from a man's throat with a snarl and crawled away for a time on its belly. But it always waited and lurked for a moment of weakness on the part of its victims, a moment of expansive optimism and buoyancy and belief in a rainbowed future. Then it struck the fools to the death.