The Last Storyteller Read online

  Some descended from family traditions—a handed-down account, say, of a row over an inheritance. (Such tales, a few generations old, customarily began with the droll comment “Where there’s a Will, there’s a lawsuit.”) Others, probably most of the stories I collected, came from the deep and ancient past, from prehistory.

  Frequently they had fused, and I’d heard many contemporary versions of tales first scribed by holy men of the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries. These clerics had been taught to write so that they could copy psalms and church doctrine, but they hadn’t been able to resist preserving the ancient stories they’d heard around their childhood firesides. (And perhaps they’d even invented a few.) Those epics became the basis of our literature in Ireland.

  Most of the storytellers I’d visited hadn’t known or fussed over the provenance of their tales; they cared only for the telling. My man, though, had spent a lifetime drinking from all the fountains. He had, naturally, pored over the monkish volumes, but he had also heard many of his stories in the old ancestral way, in his own home.

  Furthermore, he truly did have tales from everywhere: material picked up during his travels in Burma, or Peru, from old men in Australia, or anecdotes of local history told to him here and there across the world.

  Most exciting of all to me, I had always heard that he was from a mold cast in Ireland before the Romans had an empire. Meaning that John Jacob Farrell O’Neill was a fireside storyteller in the “old style”—he narrated in the ancient way: his voice orotund, his words full of ornament and color. He was a true, performing descendant of the bards who had entertained kings and chieftains long before Christ was born.

  For that, and all the other reasons I’ve listed, he was, indeed, “the culmination.”

  4

  Children, you have asked for this final account of my life, and eagerly I give it to you. As you already know the terms of my Will—“I leave everything I possess to my beloved twins, Ben and Louise”—therefore we can, I suppose, call this a Last Testament. There’s no fear in me that I shan’t live long enough to finish it; I have more than enough energy.

  In advance I ask your forgiveness for a somewhat jagged beginning to this, the final phase of my confessio. Yes, my tongue is in my cheek as I use that pompous old medieval term, but I think you’ll come to see why I chose it, and I think, I hope, you’ll also come to understand this early jaggedness you might feel; it is deliberate—because this is a sharp-edged and dark side of my life that I have to tell.

  Already you know the essence of your father’s story, and that of Venetia, your dear mother, but there’s so much that you don’t know. For instance, John Jacob O’Neill: I placed him at the very beginning of this account. The reasons, as we go along, will become plain to you.

  If you ask why I’ve never mentioned him in our conversations, I’ll confess the selfish truth. I feared that were I to share him—with anybody—I’d have dissipated his power over me. Even after my involvement with him had long ceased, I was afraid that I might lose the spirit of him in me, like those legends where the magic figure must disappear before dawn. And I was the mortal in that legend; in my middle years he put the final shape to my life.

  There are other things I haven’t told you: the shadows that lay ahead of me, and the vile dealings and revelations; the fear, the awfulness of what I did, the loving strangers, the glorious light that also shone on me. In greater detail, I haven’t given you, for instance, a full account of Jimmy Bermingham, and his role in your sad and appalling bereavement.

  Nor have I ever told you in true depth my own loneliness and desolation when, having first lost your mother, I walked the wet roads of Ireland, mistaken for a young tramp, laboring for any farmer who would hire me, or often without work and therefore with no bed for the night.

  In those days, and many times since, I kept myself alive by self-interrogation. For example: How should I be kind? How does one grow kind? How might I learn to be loving and watchful? I asked such questions when I had nobody for whom to care, but always, I admit, with Venetia, your mother, in mind. Yet I also said to myself, You failed. She’s gone. You didn’t protect her. And I’d fight back from that melancholy fact with But one day, I believe it in my bones and my blood, one day we’ll be together again.

  It didn’t matter how futile my hope. It didn’t matter whether she was dead or alive. It didn’t matter, even after I’d met her again, that she had married another and was raising the two of you with him. The life-giving hope endured; the dream lived on.

  Every day, imagining a great moment when she and I would once again belong to each other, I planned all sorts of caring things. I invented promises and anticipated the time when I could put them into practice. Those thoughts—they warmed me, I wrote them down, and I could always hear them, even above the never-ending drums of accusation.

  I can hear them still. For our winter fireplaces I will have a woodpile. And a workbench for fixing things. I will be impeccable in my hygiene and my manners. You will never see me looking as decrepit as I do now. I promise to shave every day. I will never leave the house with unpolished shoes. And never, never will I go out without telling you where I’m going. I will be so kind to you, tender beyond your most romantic dreams.

  How I will spoil you. Buy you things. Make you laugh, and never make you cry, unless through the telling of a touching story. I will come home to you with news of the outside world, and the strange things I hear in my daily work, and I will watch your eyes widen in wonder and delight and awe as I tell you. I will love you for being my finest audience, and for the talk we shall have, and the thoughts we shall share.

  There the fantasy ended and the bitter reality took over, because I had long known what I wanted and had never had the courage to do anything about it. Here’s the colder fact: I stood back from it. A coward. In depth. Constantly ashamed. And rightly so. For many reasons.

  5

  First impressions of Jimmy Bermingham: thin like a dancer; quicksilver flicks and twitches; seedy hint of the gambler. A long time after these blood-spattered upheavals, a friend of his said to me, “Do you remember the clothes he wore?”

  I do indeed—and the guns he carried.

  He had a camel coat on him that day, draped across his shoulders like a cloak, brown velvet tabs on his collar, and a pink shirt and a pink striped tie. Pink? In the Irish countryside?

  Jimmy Bermingham looked me up and down. Can you believe—can I myself believe it?—that this man would lead me around my own country by the nose? He was twenty-eight then, fourteen years younger than me, in his shiny black shoes, socks with clocks on them like a bandleader, and the sultry dark eyes of Marlon Brando.

  He sat down on my bench and drew the skirts of the camel coat loosely about him, like a young emperor arranging his cloak. “Now, Captain? I’m Jimmy Bermingham.” He offered a hand, slim, quick, and cold as a fish. “And I know who you are. Ben MacCarthy. By God, I do, and I have a ton of respect for you.”

  Surprising? Not entirely. I had traveled around this island; many people knew me, and many more had heard of me.

  “Captain, you collect stories.” (He was often going to call me “Captain,” regardless of my never having fired a shot. At least not a shot that I’d ever tell him about.) “D’you want to hear a real good one? Actually, I suppose it’s more of a joke, really.”

  “Jokes can be stories,” I said, in a soothing, hushing tone, “and I’m always in the market for a good joke.”

  He leaned back. His hands had been manicured, something I had never seen in an Irishman at that time (except doctors). I had met a German officer during the war who had also had impeccable fingernails, but back then in rural Ireland, daily soap and water still challenged some folk.

  Jimmy Bermingham squared his shoulders and prepared for his little performance.

  “There was a man up in Galway one night, and he was just getting ready for bed when a knock comes to the door. He goes back downstairs muttering, Who the blazes is thi
s at this hour of the night?, and when he opens the door there’s a snail on the doorstep. A big snail, nice shiny shell, and the little gray, greasy horns sticking up. And the snail says to the man, ‘Good evening to you, sir. I’m sorry to disturb you, but could I interest you in buying a set of encyclopedias?’

  “Well, Jesus God, the man is only livid and he still has his boots on, and he kicks the snail off the doorstep. Big strong kick. Snail goes sailing through the air, hits the far ditch. And the man closes the door, and he goes back up the stairs, and goes to sleep.

  “Two years later, two years nearly to the day, the man is getting ready for bed again, and again the knock comes to the door. So he goes downstairs, and he opens the door, and who’s there only the snail, on the doorstep again, big shiny shell on him, little sticky-up, greasy-gray horns, and the snail looks up at the man and says, ‘What the hell was that for?’ ”

  I laughed and laughed, so much that I had a coughing fit, and then I laughed some more. Jimmy Bermingham looked as pleased as a child. In his three-piece chalk-striped suit and his pinks, he seemed somewhere between an executive, a young con man, and a doubtful bookie.

  “That’s my test of people,” he said. “Most of ’em don’t laugh because they don’t get the bit about how it took the snail two years to get back up on the doorstep. But they’re buck stupid. What are you drinking, Captain?”

  I said, “I’ve had enough for today.”

  He said, “In that case, I’ll only have lemonade.” He stood and called to the barman, “Ted! Lemonade for the cripple in here.”

  When he sat down beside me again, he said, “Now, tell me about your name. I’ve a great interest in what we have to call people.”

  He savored each detail, interrupting me as I told him.

  “Ben? That’s a nice name. Is it ‘Benedict’ or ‘Benjamin’? No, not Benjamin, I’d say, there’s not that many Jews down around here, is there? So it has to be Benedict.” Then he said, “But MacCarthy, though? Ah, God. Great old name, great old Irish tribal name. Decent people, the MacCarthys. What does ‘MacCarthy’ mean if you translate it from Irish?”

  I told him, “It means ‘beloved’ ” (I’ve always enjoyed saying that), and he clapped his hands in delight.

  “Great! And are you beloved yourself, Captain Ben?”

  I said, “That’s a long story.”

  6

  In every family there’s the shrub under the oak, the one who gets overshadowed. Here’s what I mean. How do you carve out a champion’s place in your own life if your brother is the most daring hunter, the most fearless warrior, and the most eloquent lover since the day the plates of the earth parted and Ireland rose to the surface of the sea, already green and beautiful, with sheep dotted like white mice on the faraway hillsides and birds singing long, melodious songs in the trees? Did you know that there are certain birds that fly just for their own delight? They whirl about the air above us in their slow and flitting dances of mystery.

  John Jacob O’Neill’s pipe glowed, his hands lay folded across his tweed vest with its watch chain. The flames leaped to a steady height. My cheeks grew warm. For reasons of length, I can’t reproduce here the entire tale he told me that night; it lasted six hours. I hope, though, to give you the main thrust of that legend, and at the same time convey some idea of John Jacob O’Neill’s power and narrative glamour.

  Well, in my story of the man whose love was as fathomless as the deep blue sea, with all her silver shoals and floating tendrils, the overshadowed fellow has the name Malachi, or Mal MacCool. He was the younger and only sibling of the mighty Finn MacCool, the greatest man who ever lived, Finn MacCool, a fellow so egregious and remarkable that from the time he was eight years old the gods had been eyeing him as a recruit. Do you know what the word “egregious” comes from? It comes from “grex, gregis,” the Latin word for “flock,” and “e” or “ex,” meaning “outside of.”

  So, in the MacCool family, Malachi became the one who stayed at home and worked the farm. He was the boy who gave his parents their dutiful due and made their sun rise every morning. Unlike his famous brother, Malachi was a shy fellow, grateful for the long, shiny eyelashes that birth had given him, because they helped him to keep his gaze downcast. They had named him perfectly—“Malachi” is an old word meaning “the messenger of the gods.”

  He had his own gifts, though. Many a time his bare white hand swooped down and scooped a pink-and-silver salmon from a fast-flowing torrent. His slingshot became an object of muttering and fear among the bad and the mad. His smile, they said, could melt the ice from the mountain streams when spring was overdue.

  And Mal had his own talents as a warrior. When rapscallion neighbors tried to steal fields from him, he turned into a reluctant though nonetheless rousing fighter. He didn’t want to go to war, but when he did, bravery became his signature, fearlessness his stamp, and valor his seal, and he grew famous throughout the land. For seven long years he waged the fight for his green fields, and when the war ended he went back to his farm and his parents.

  When they passed away, Mal stood alone. Some men weaken under the pressures of solitude, some prosper; it’s a matter of character. Mal strode the land, burgeoning in his spirit, a gentleman respected and admired. He built a great house, and he modeled it on the mansions you see in the morning when you look up at the cities and towns in the clouds above your head. The clouds, after all, were the first castles in the air.

  Mal’s house had colonnades and architraves and clerestories and cloisters. So marbled did he make it, and so brightly did it gleam, that people came from far away to see it. And they also hoped to catch a glimpse of this fine and famous man, so handsome, so tall—in his robes, with his neat, trimmed beard and his big jeweled bracelet and his great rings—in this mansion fit for the gods. They went away swooning with wonder.

  Among those who came to view were the women of the world. “But look,” they said, “he’s all alone in that big house, and he has no wife, he hasn’t chick nor child.”

  Such a vacuum gives offense to every woman. Mal might have been a mighty landowner, with rolling acres and woodlands barbered like a bishop’s jowls, and he might have been as handsome and as rich as the man who owns the sun, but he was all alone.

  He would dearly have liked to marry—but a chap who has been on the battlefield gets to know himself very well, and Mal knew that he had not yet seen the woman who would take possession of his heart and hold it in her soul.

  And then one day, a day of sun and roses, a mercenary blacksmith came by with his beautiful daughter, Emer.

  7

  How should I describe the inside of my mind the next day? It rang with the music of John Jacob’s voice, it lit up with the brilliance of his word-pictures, it thrilled to the antiquity of his tale, first noted down, perhaps, in some long-ruined, limestone abbey, Mellifont, Durrow, Clonmacnoise.

  Yet there I was, sitting in a pub, a lower world, and thus robbing myself of the previous night’s elevation. On a damp and slovenly day I had subscribed to a cliché: I had allowed myself to be drawn into a classic Irish conversation, random talk, half an inch deep, about everything and nothing, where strangers exchange snatches of knowledge and gossip and faux intimacy.

  So I told Jimmy Bermingham about Venetia. Because he asked. He said, “Listen, you can’t say to a man, ‘That’s a long story’ and then not tell it.”

  How many times had I told it? In love when I was eighteen with a beautiful actress named Venetia Kelly. Whom I married on a ship in Galway Bay, when she wore flowers in her hair on a day of bliss. Stolen from me by her ruthless, murderous family. I searched high up and low down for her. Long thought her dead. Murdered. I dug woods and mountainsides looking for her grave.

  And then I found her again. Met her many years after, on a beach in Florida. She’d had twins by me, Ben and Louise, one named after me, one after my mother. I walked away. Away from Venetia. Couldn’t handle it. Away, therefore, from my children, too. And thus I’d
never met them, never even seen them. That’s the story I told him. A true story.

  “Never even seen them?” he echoed. “Jesus, that’s bad. How old are they?”

  “Their mother is back in Ireland now.”

  He twisted toward me on the bench. “Where is she?”

  “They’re in their twenties. Not small children anymore. Born 1933.”

  “Ah, shag it, Captain, go look for her,” said Jimmy Bermingham. “Go on. I’ll come with you. Moral support.”

  Since that day I’ve shunned “moral support” with all my strength.

  I said to him, “There’s a show going around—Gentleman Jack and His Friend.”

  “Oh, yeh, I saw posters on a lamppost somewhere. Catchy name.”

  “Jack Stirling is his real name,” I said. “She’s with him now.”

  “So is she the ‘friend’?”

  I hope you never know pain such as the anguish I encountered because of Gentleman Jack. And I don’t mean mere jealousy.

  “Yes,” I sighed. “She’s the friend, all right.”

  Jimmy Bermingham said, “I’ll kill him for you if you like. And nobody’d know.”

  Next, in this newfound ersatz profundity, Jimmy Bermingham told me about his own deep and abiding love.

  “My pet name for her is ‘Dirty’ Marian,” he said.

  “Well, that’s some term of endearment,” I remarked. He ignored it.

  “Wait till you meet her, Captain—you’ll see what I mean. But, God, she keeps me at a distance. She’s as haughty as a cat.”

  “Is that because you call her ‘Dirty’ Marian?”