‘It’s a shockin’ awful thing, Patrick,’ Mother of Sorrows said. ‘A shockin’ awful thing to see one cut down in the flower of youth. That poor boy would be better off if he’d never set foot outside of the ould dart. Mixin’ with them quarter-grained hoctroons is not a good thing for an Irishman: not a good thing for a young innocent Irish fella. An’ then him havin’ such a quare name. Oxy … what were the parents thinkin’ at all? Ah, he was a shockin’ nice lad. God rest him. A shockin’ nice lad. You’ll miss him – an’ you havin’ to be the one to put a bullet in him. I wouldn’t a’ liked that at all meself. An’ then not knowing whether I got the loaded gun or what. Lyin’ awake thinking about it, not gettin’ any sleep. That insombia is not a good thing for a battle. But then too much sleep can make you slow. You could collect a bullet bein’ slow. Maybe cash in your chips. What would you say, Patrick?’
Patrick wished Mother of Sorrows would just be quiet. The man could put talk out of fashion he had so much of it. Patrick himself was still in shock over Oxy’s death – and the revelations leading up to it. He was also grappling with his own mixed emotions – his loyalty towards Lavelle; his once hero-worship of Stephen; and a bitterness towards his mother – and indeed for her being the cause of this very flux in his emotions.
Love was a dangerous and debilitating thing that it could exact such strange and punishing behaviour from human beings. There was Stephen and Lavelle whose lives his mother had burdened with such trouble. Yet they both loved her. She herself must have loved both of them … after her own kind of fashion.
Patrick couldn’t fathom it. Emmeline was the sole object of his affections and would continue to be so. That he could entertain a notion of simultaneously loving someone else was beyond his comprehension, repulsive to him. Love was singular in its affection and then absolute in its singularity. To be ‘in love’ with one person ipso facto meant not to be in love with everyone, or anyone, else. The two were mutually exclusive. Then Emeritus Labiche, did he ‘love’ the young slave girl, Jewel? Yet he had branded her with an iron. Or did duty over-rule love? What then of Lucretia Labiche – her husband in every other respect dutiful to her? Duty did not exclude love nor did it include it. It was superior to love. Yet from where did duty itself derive – if not from love?
And Oxy and Kizzie? Who was to say that this was a lesser love because it was between two women? To ease his mind Patrick read from Donne’s Holy Sonnets. ‘Death be not proud … One short sleep past, we wake eternally, And death shall be no more, Death thou shalt die.’
Life and death he concluded, were much more simple concepts with which to grapple than love.
And more certain.