The Last Storyteller Read online

  The Last Storyteller is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2012 by Frank Delaney, L.L.C.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House,

  an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group,

  a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered

  trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Delaney, Frank

  The last storyteller: a novel / Frank Delaney.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-679-64422-4

  1. Ireland—Fiction. 2. Ireland—Politics and

  government—1922–1949—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6054.E396L37 2012 823’.914—dc23 2011037154

  www.atrandom.com

  Title-page illustration: iStockphoto

  Jacket design: Olga Grlic

  Jacket illustration: Robert G. Steele

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Author’s Note

  Part One - The Living Legend

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Part Two - Gentleman Jack and His Friend

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Part Three - A Kind of Salvation

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Part Four - The Pursuit of the Past

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Chapter 99

  Chapter 100

  Part Five - A Carelessness with Death

  Chapter 101

  Chapter 102

  Chapter 103

  Chapter 104

  Chapter 105

  Chapter 106

  Chapter 107

  Chapter 108

  Chapter 109

  Chapter 110

  Chapter 111

  Chapter 112

  Chapter 113

  Chapter 114

  Chapter 115

  Chapter 116

  Chapter 117

  Chapter 118

  Part Six - The Passing of the Torch

  Chapter 119

  Chapter 120

  Chapter 121

  Chapter 122

  Chapter 123

  Chapter 124

  Chapter 125

  Chapter 126

  Chapter 127

  Chapter 128

  Chapter 129

  Chapter 130

  Chapter 131

  Chapter 132

  Chapter 133

  Chapter 134

  Part Seven - The Last Storyteller

  Chapter 135

  Chapter 136

  Chapter 137

  Chapter 138

  Chapter 139

  Chapter 140

  Chapter 141

  Chapter 142

  Chapter 143

  Chapter 144

  Chapter 145

  Chapter 146

  Chapter 147

  Part Eight - Epilogue

  Chapter 148

  Chapter 149

  Chapter 150

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Author’s Note

  The classical mythologies had conspicuous purpose—to teach us how to live. Not only that, it was to their design that we built the drama that entertains us on film, on the page, on the stage. Action, betrayal, murder, romance, politics—the gods had it all. Every archetypal figure known to us—for good or bad—had a legendary beginning: the sage, the hero, the villain, the virgin. Every plot that stirs our blood, whatever its technological sophistication or contemporary reference, can first be found in the antics of Zeus and all who sprang from his forehead (or elsewhere), or the deities of China, India, Indonesia, Peru, Scandinavia—gods put their feet everywhere. Every fictional ingredient that we relish today was first savored at the feet of those mythic figures—heroism and cowardice, deed and retribution, revenge, obsession, passion, unrequited love, gain, loss, remorse, grief, redemption. Mythology was a bible ever before there was a Bible.

  The Irish own an especially rich seam of mythic literature. If its themes consist in common humanity, it has a personality like no other. Warriors, naturally, play leading roles, as do impressive women, jilted lovers and wise men. Beautiful apparel features, and exquisite jewelry, and gorgeous horses, and food, and bards, and evil magicians—but to find where Irish legends differ from other mythologies, look for ambiguity, and a capacity to feel conflicting passions with equal force.

  And the Irish keep regenerating their mythology. In the middle of the twentieth century, as though to keep the warrior forces of their legends rolling onward, revolution broke out again, twenty years after most of the island believed that ancient matters with England had been somewhat resolved. The Partition, if not a wholly satisfactory result to many, had at least proved workable. Some gods, it seems, thought otherwise. And when matters turned bloody, the Irish saw, once again, the greatest and subtlest of all mythology’s ingredients—irony.

  PART ONE

  The Living Legend

  1


  He comes back to my mind when I smell wood smoke. We had a clear and crisp October that year, and a simple white plume of smoke rose through the trees from his fairy-tale chimney. The long, quiet lane ended at his gate. My nose wrinkled as I climbed out of the car. Applewood? Not sweet enough. Beech? Possibly, from the old mansion demesne across the road. Could it be elm? Twenty years later it would be, as the elms died everywhere.

  A white fence protected his small yard and its long rectangles of grass. He had a yellow garden bench and rosebushes, pruned to austerity. Around the side of the house I counted one, two, three fruit trees. If, on a calendar, a tourist brochure, or a postcard, you saw such a scene, with the golden roof of thatched and smocked straw, a pleased smile would cross your mind.

  Not a sound to be heard, not a dog nor a bird. My breathing went short and shallow, and I swallowed, trying to manage my anticipation. Somebody had polished the door knocker so brilliantly that my fingers smudged the gleaming brass.

  They said that he was eighty. Maybe he was, but when he opened the door our eyes came exactly level, and I was six feet three and a half inches. He shook hands as though closing a deal, and I was so thrilled to meet him at long last that my mouth turned dry as paper.

  “Do you know anything about houses like this?” he asked as he led me into the wide old kitchen.

  I knew everything about the house, I knew everything about him—but I wanted to hear it in his words, his voice.

  “It feels nicely old,” I ventured.

  He laughed. “Hah! ‘Nicely old’—I’ll borrow that.” Then, with some care, he turned to survey me, inclined his head a little, and smiled at me as though I were his beloved son. “I’m very pleased to meet you at last.”

  I said, “I’m more than pleased to meet you, sir.”

  He waved a hand, taking in the wide fireplace, the rafters, the room.

  “This was what they called a ‘strong farmer’s’ house. Now with ‘all the modern conveniences,’ as they say. I suppose you know what a strong farmer was?”

  “Wasn’t it somebody who supported his family from what he produced on his farm?”

  “The very man,” he said.

  He showed me the walls—two feet thick: “They keep in the heat for the winter, and they keep out the heat of the summer—those boys knew how to build. And look, I can put wide things on the windowsills.” He lifted a great bowl of jade, glinting with dragons. “Feel the weight of that. I carried it all the way back from Ceylon in 1936.”

  Looking up, he stretched an arm and patted a beam.

  “Did you know that people used to hide weapons in their thatch?” He had a habit of nodding when he made a statement, as though agreeing with himself.

  Such endearing pride: he drew my attention to everything—the floor of huge flagstones, shaped by a local stonemason; the handmade chairs from a neighboring carpenter, who had also built the long table dominating the middle of the room. He rubbed it with his hand. “In the original they’d have used a timber called white deal. I had to settle for pine.”

  “When did you buy the place?” I asked.

  “Twenty-eight years, two months, and four days ago. When I finally came in off the road.” He surveyed the walls. “There was only the shell here, it was burned out by the redcoats in 1848—there was that bit of a rebellion that year, and evictions everywhere. When I bought it you could still see the black streaks at the top of the walls where they’d burned out the straw on the roof.”

  He gave me the tour—but let me cut this short and give you the essential fact. This man, regarded (and jealously guarded) by the Folklore Commission as the most powerful remaining storyteller in the country, and possibly in the world, had restored fully an old farmhouse of considerable proportions. The conservationists, while allowing for the modern plumbing and electricity, had applauded him. “An elegant and authentic reconstruction,” they’d said, “solid, proud, and wholeheartedly traditional.” And that’s what I mean by “the essential fact”: the house was the man, and the man was the house.

  He stood with his back to the fire. “So I’m to be yours now, am I?” he said. “How’s James doing?”

  “I believe he’s holding on.”

  Mixed feelings were always going to leak into this visit. For years, my superior, my mentor, otherwise so good to me, had kept this man for himself, and I had not been allowed to visit him, write to him, have anything to do with him. But now my mentor had bequeathed him to me because he himself, the inimitable James Clare, lay silent and still in Dublin, his lungs closing down day by day to emphysema. That morning I had made a note in my journal: I think that James will die soon.

  “He won’t hold on long,” said Mr. O’Neill—full name, John Jacob Farrell O’Neill. “What color do you think Death’s face will be when it comes for James?”

  “Gray,” I said, without thinking, “It’ll be gray.” I knew that color. From the war.

  “That’s what I think, too.” He nodded, and turned his head around to look into the fire. When he turned back he said, “Then you’ll be ready.”

  My mind asked, Ready for what?

  Even though I didn’t speak the question, he answered it.

  “Ready for everything.”

  He couldn’t have known what “everything” would come to mean—or could he?

  2

  I wasn’t ready for anything—and in particular, not for the events of the next day, when I halted for a pub sandwich in the little town of Urlingford.

  It was the siesta time, and raining. Nothing should have been happening, and nothing was. Using no energy, I eavesdropped on the silence around me, punctuated by snatches of idle conversation.

  “They say she will.” This came out of the blue from an old coot at the bar, his nose hooked as Punch’s.

  “I bet she won’t,” said his drinking companion.

  “She told Midge Corcoran,” said the barman, “that all he wants to do is look at her.”

  “God, then he’s paying dear for that,” said Punch, whose pal had wide-open nostrils like little gun barrels.

  The pal said, “There’s fifty-two years between them.”

  To which Ted, the fat and fatuous barman, said, “One for every week of the year.”

  I knew these people well—not as individuals, but as a culture. Filthy old cords, worse boots, scant hygiene, no (you can bet on it) underwear. Every day of the week I saw men like them. Sitting at some bar everywhere, gossiping like knitters, stitching and bitching. Doing no work because there was no work, rarely a job that one could call a decent hire. Just sitting there talking. Talking, talking, talking. Or being silent. Silent in the hatred of their lives was what I’d always figured, until I realized that their emotions stood at zero. Their needles flickered only for sport or gossip.

  In their faces I could see the blue veins of perdition, lines on a map of the country. That’s why I listened but kept my distance: I didn’t want to be infected with their ruin or catch their low-rent banality. Shallow as a saucer, they had no value to me in terms of what I collected.

  Yet they caused some affect. For no reason that I could identify, I felt my chest tighten, and I heard the question in my mind: What’s making you anxious?

  Ted the barman had a smarm to him, aiming to please everyone. In the past, before I’d mellowed down, I’d have needled him, picked a fight. The frosted glass panel beside me hadn’t been cleaned in a generation.

  Most Irish pubs had a snug, a little room shuttered from the world, open only to the barman, where, typically, ladies were supposed to do their drinking because it was too indelicate for them to be seen in the public bar. Thus, I often found the snug a useful place to sit and listen.

  My anxiety climbed. I fought a pricking of my thumbs and turned my ears inward. A frigid Saturday in late 1956, in my struggling, depressed native land.

  Silence fell. We had a cough or two, a clink from a glass, a match being struck to light a cigarette. The rain no longer lashed the wi
ndow. Weak sunlight spread a mild and yellow fire on the roofs of the houses across the street. With a clang of a latch rudely lifted, the pub’s front door burst open. Jimmy Bermingham flew in, landed, and came straight toward me. Thus began the most dreadful part of my life.

  3

  Once upon a time, and it was a long time ago, when boys were boys, and girls were girls, and bears combed the fur on their coats, and the soldiers of the north carried spears of ice, and giant frogs who spoke in rhymes ruled our hemisphere, there lived a man who had a love as noble as the mountains, and as deep as the deep blue sea.

  The story John Jacob Farrell O’Neill told me on that night of my first heady visit to him took so long that we didn’t part until three o’clock in the morning. With the comfort of the chair by the fireplace, and the logs he kept heaping on the broad orange flames, I felt so safe.

  “What’s that you’re burning?” I asked.

  “Believe it or not,” he said, “cherry. For the aroma. I had an old cherry tree out the back—I tried for years to save it, but it wanted to go. And do you know what? When they took it to the sawmill they found a musket ball in the heart of the wood.”

  From the mantelpiece he took down a small white dish, in which, like a little iron eye, rested the old musket ball. We marveled together.

  He cooked for me. From a pot hanging over the fire he produced an excellent meal of lamb stew, with onions and carrots and potatoes. He moved around his large kitchen with the agility of a girl. The silver watch chain on his vest caught the light from the fire.

  His various tics interested me. I’ve mentioned the nodding, though he didn’t nod after everything he said, and soon it calmed down—perhaps it was a shyness response. Now and then he fiddled with his breast-pocket handkerchief, rebunching it. When listening to me (not that I spoke much), he pursed his lips into a small bow.

  I looked at him, thinking, but not saying, I wonder if he has always cooked, if he never married? And he said, “I’ve always cooked. You can’t have a wife if you spend your life on the road—’twould be unfair to a woman. So I never married.”

  Here’s a note I made that night: Such a practiced voice, educated by the universe, every word clear and warm. But—he’s an uncanny man. Don’t yet know how or why.

  James Clare had said to me: It all comes together in this fellow. He’s the culmination.

  This is what James meant: in his years and mine, traveling as collectors for the Irish Folklore Commission, James and I had heard all kinds of things: herbal cures, rambling ballads, family curses, jigs and reels played on fiddles and pipes, nonsense verse, riddles and recitations—and, above all, stories. Call them legends, call them fragments of mythology, call them, simply, “lore”; they had become my staple diet.