Delaney. Part XXVIII

Alex Cosgrove helps his wife into the Oldsmobile, then, lifting a foot to the carriage he says to the driver, “Make haste, Mr. Vadik. We’d like to arrive within the hour if at all possible.”

Vadik touches the brim of his hat in acknowledgement and jolts the carriage into action the moment Mr. Cosgrove shuts the door.

A few minutes into the ride Mrs. Cosgrove begins to debrief their dinner conversation, “I’m so upset with Brother Frank. He may have proved a good friend up ‘til now, but he has no business spewing such nonsense at Delaney. She’s such a sensitive girl. Takes everything so seriously.”

“Now, Brigid, don’t be too hard on the boy. What is he, twenty-one? Twenty-two? His brain is still developing.”

“Yes,” she replies, “but so is hers! He knows Delaney is seventeen. I wish he’d wait until his brain finishes developing before saying such ridiculous things. Shouldn’t go confusing the girl as he does.”

“If you like, my dear, I can have a word with him the next time he stops by.”

“Oh, would you Alex? I’d feel better. Let him go ahead try his flimsy logic on you. He’ll find he’s met his match.”

But Mr. Cosgrove is not listening to his wife, he’s looking out his window.

“Why is Vadik taking the coastal road? He should take the interior road; it’s less torn up and can travel faster.” And Cosgrove raps his cane on roof as the horses begin to gallop.

“He can’t hear you above the racket, dear.” His wife says, and now she begins looking with grave concern upon the landscape flying by. Out the front windscreen and beyond the hood they see Vadik urging the horses faster and faster with his buggy whip. The knocking and bouncing inside the vehicle is terrific.

Mr. Cosgrove rolls down his window and shouts, “Vadik! Have a care!” but the sound of the horse’s hooves and the rattling over rough pavement is deafening. Then there is one great jolt as they fly over a piece of road heaved upward and the Cosgroves hit the ceiling of the vehicle and come smashing down onto the floor of the car.

“Are you alright, dear?” Mr. Cosgrove shouts as he helps his wife back to her seat.

“He’s a madman!” She exclaims, and Cosgrove yells out the window once again.

“Vadik! Vadik!” But the man is hellbent on getting as much speed as he can from the horses. The coastal road drops sharply on their left to the sea as they race along the derelict pavement.

“Your seatbelt dear! Your seatbelt!” He screams, and Brigid reaches to the belt and pulls it down to her lap. She does not know how to operate the thing as it has never been used before and she cannot find the receptacle for the metal tab.

Mr. Cosgrove searches between the seats frantically for it, but it is not there. Now terror fills the man as he screams out his window.

“Dammit Vadik! Stop the carriage!” But with another tremendous jolt the vehicle is airborne for a moment, then comes crashing down with a great snapping sound and the car and carriage frame are broken free from the harness and horses.

“My God.” Cosgrove cries as he watches a curve in the road up ahead and the cliff just beyond.

Vadik and the horses pull to the right while the Oldsmobile careens straight for the dropoff. The man is straining at the reins as the horses come to an abrupt stop. The carriage with the Cosgroves goes blistering past. Mr. Vadik observes with satisfaction the terrified faces of the Cosgroves peering out the back window as they head for the precipice. The car bowls over the edge and there is a full three or four seconds of silence while Vadik imagines the couple experiencing weightlessness and panic as they plummet toward the sea. Then there is the booming sound of metal on rock along the crashing of waves and the crying of gulls.

****

“My dear Mr. O’Brien.” Jackson says when he emerges from the carriage, Shelly stepping behind him as he moves toward a red-haired man in his forties.

“Jackson Rourk!” the man says as he approaches, arms drawn wide in welcome.

“Colin,” Jackson says. “This is Shelly. The relative from Ireland I spoke of.”

“Dia duit!” Collin says, extending a hand to Shelly.

“Dia Muire duit.”She says in reply gripping his hand firmly.

“She’s as lovely as you described.” Colin O’Brien says, looking to Jackson.

“Shelly, this is Colin O’Brien. Brother O’Brien’s brother. I mean his literal brother.”

“Did you know my brother?” He asks her.

“I did know him.” She says. “My family attends St. Mary’s church where he and the other Franciscans attend. We were sad to hear of his passing.”

“Tragic. Tragic.” O’Brien says. “He was a good man.”

“Colin here is Ambassador to the Tiocfaidh Ár Lá community for the City of London Corporation.” Jackson tells her. “Similar position as the one I hold with the Bengali Autonomous Region. We are the diplomatic link between the corporation and these free communities.”

“Indeed,” Collin says. “Turns out the corporation isn’t as all-sufficient as it makes itself out to be. Don’t know where they’d be without their trade relations with the free communities. But do come in. I’ve got a bottle of Old Bushmills reserve I’ve been waiting to crack open, and I can think of no better occasion.”

Colin O’Brien leads the couple into a single-story building. It is the Twickengham community center in front of which they have arrived from the east end of London. He brings them through an empty meeting hall filled with chairs and down a hallway into a small office. Then he inserts his fingers into three shot glasses and puts them onto a desk. He extracts a bottle from a small, wooden box which has been kept in a file drawer and pours the milk of Ireland into the glasses.

“Sit, sit.” He tells them, nodding to a few chairs positioned around a small table.

The room is simple. A high-backed chair sits before a desk strewn with papers. There is a bookshelf on one wall which is lined with books two deep, and an ornate rug with a glorious South Asian design woven into it. The walls sport a couple windows which allow the afternoon light to flood the room and a tricolor Irish flag hangs upon one wall. It has an emblem in the white center stripe depicting stalks of wheat in front of a grain silo.

“Shelly’s seen how the Bengali Autonomous Region is run. I think she’d be keen to hear the story of how the Tiocfaidh Ár Lá community got started.”

“Ah, a true Irish woman. Wanting to be regaled with tales of Irish breaking free of the English!” Colin says.

“We owe a good deal to the Bengali’s, and I reckon a wee bit to your cousin for helping us on our way.”

“Distant cousin.” Jackson corrects.

“Right. Well you’ve heard about the Bengali uprising ten years ago around the time of the plague.”

“I’m staying with the couple who led the rebellion.” Shelly says. “Mr. and Mrs. Banerjee.”

“Well, then, you’ve heard about the Ethiopian Orthodox crew that came to London from Africa ten years ago. They sent a delegation to England hearing we were experiencing famine. Mounted a relief mission to save the starving English! But low and behold, by the time they arrived here our famine had receded. So, while their relief mission was unnecessary, they brought with them agricultural, educational and governance practices employed in Ethiopia. That, and a variety of extremely hearty crops and highly developed steam engine technology.

“But the corporation was disinterested. I must say, to my shame, that I myself dismissed anything the Africans might have been able to teach us. I was Chief Agricultural Officer for the Corporation at the time and was introduced to a very delightful American woman. She was stranded in Ethiopia when the Struggles came. She attempted to convince me of the merits of their system.

“Unfortunately, plague also came to London aboard their vessel, and the corporation deported them. This was about the time my dear brother came visiting from Ireland.

Still, a few of the Ethiopians stayed to help the Bengali’s secede from the corporation. You may well have met some of them during your stay.”

“Would that be a man named Job?” She asks.

“Precisely. Emmanuel, Kassa, Job, Baba Moussa. They all stayed to train the Bengalis. Of course, Bengali’s forming their own government dried up the flow of labor, and so there was a migration from Ireland to fill the void. But you know the Irish. If there be a way to live free of English, we’ll find it. Some of the Bengali’s came and schooled us in the ways of independence from the corporation.

“And, how does that work?” Shelly asks. “I mean, how do you manage without corporate goods and services? Do you use their scrip?”

“Goodness, no.” O’Brien says as though he discovered a fly in his whiskey. “There is plenty of food and land for everyone. And there are formulas to manage their distribution. Most work at least ten hours a week in some agricultural capacity for our collective and manage private plots as well. Food, water, housing – the basics – they’re trifling matters. Turns out small communities can share these things with very little oversight if you set a culture which seeks the common good. The trickier thing are the specialized tasks of smithery, carpentry, the manufacture of steam engines or production of any number of goods. We use a point system for these things that allow people with these goods and services to barter. I suppose you might say it is a rudimentary form of capitalism, but with regulation to ensure generosity is a high value and selfishness is frowned upon.”

“And your handicapped,” Shelly asks. “How do you handle them?” Her mind is trying to digest how a place like the Murder Factor would fare in such an arrangement.

“Come again?” Colin asks in confusion.

“The people who don’t have hands or feet or can’t see. How do you care for them?”

“Oh, you mean our gifted community.” He says, and Shelly turns an ear to the man, unsure she is hearing correctly.

“We don’t take care of them. More like they take care of us.” Shelly’s confusion deepens.

“The roles they occupy are critical to our functioning. Our limb-different members, the ones, as you say, without hands or feet. They are the what we would classify as engineers. They have tremendous trouble-shooting abilities. Limb different people tend to have a great deal of ingenuity in knowing just how to overcome the laws of physics. Tremendous designers. Simply tremendous.

“And those who cannot see or hear serve valuably in all kinds of ways. Did you know there are varieties of blight on the soy plant which can be smelled by the discerning nose long before they are seen? Some in our deaf community have such acute eyesight that many work skillfully with very intricate pieces of machinery.

“I dare say we would never have advanced as far as we have without our talented and gifted residents. I’m trying to get Jackson’s brother and sister-in-law here to see how such individuals actually become indispensable.”

“I’m working on that as well.” Jackson says.

“So,” Shelly seeks to clarify, “you don’t have care homes for these people?”

“You mean Murder Factories?” Colin asks.

Jackson informs Colin that it was Shelly who helped Magdalene and Adrienne escape from a Murder Factor.

“She used to work for many years at the Drogheda Care Home.” He tells him.

“Good heavens no. We’ve no need of Murder Factories. Now, to be sure, there are ways we must help the elderly and those with various ailments. But ‘tis far more a mutual arrangement than in the corporate colonies. It’s a measure of a community’s strength to have an abundance of elderly and those without complete use of their bodies. Even those who have learning difficulties are wiser in a host of other ways. The ‘handicapped’ as you put it are the backbone of our society.”

Shelly is shaking her head in disbelief. But it is a disbelief of delight. One which inspires the imagination.

“But enough of this.” Colin says, raising his glass. “Let’s get to the order of business that brings you here today. The arrangements for your upcoming wedding.”