The Last Storyteller Read online

  He said, “What chance has a fellow but to fight back?”

  Now the asteroids began to crash.

  First, a girl walked in. We’d kept our snug door wide open, so Jimmy and I retained a full view of the pub’s general space. The girl, pretty as a rosebush, glanced all around.

  Hmm. She’s hunted-looking. Searching for somebody? But hoping not to find them?

  We all stared at her tight red sweater.

  Whatever she sought, she didn’t find it, and she bit her lip. She stood back against the closed door, her hands behind her back. As adrift as a loose boat, she began to cry. She dragged a toe back and forth, drawing marks on the sawdust floor.

  This is wrong. There’s something bad here. Is this why I’ve been feeling anxious, this damned prescience again? And last night’s names are bells in my head: Malachi MacCool, Finn MacCool, the beautiful girl’s name, Emer …

  Beside me, I felt my new friend freeze. Through the door of the snug she saw Jimmy, too—insofar as she saw anybody. As quickly as she’d arrived she wanted to go, and she reached for the front door’s latch.

  Jimmy called out. “Come over here and talk to us.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t. Honest.”

  “Of course you can.” This, as I would learn, was Jimmy’s response to every difficulty. He stood up. “This is my great friend Ben,” he said, as though we’d trekked the Himalayas together. “What’s your name?”

  The girl hesitated. I thought, She’s between heaven and hell—and I figured it more accurately than I yet knew.

  Looking all around the bar, she took a half step forward.

  “He’ll kill me this time—he’ll kill me stone dead.”

  Jimmy said, “Well, I’d better do something,” then whispered to me, “Isn’t she a trigger, Captain?”

  I stood and thrust an arm across him. “I’ll do it.”

  In two strides I was with her.

  “They’re following me,” she whispered from a chalk-white face.

  I opened the pub door and pointed.

  “See that car over there? That’s mine. Go and sit in it.”

  “No. They’re here in the town. They’ll see me.”

  I insisted: “Keep your head low. I’ll be out in a few minutes. You’ll be fine.”

  “Come with me.”

  “No, they’ll notice two people. Run.”

  I watched until she had opened the car door, clambered in, and ducked down.

  Said the barman, ponderous as an ox, “Her name is Elma. Elma Sloane. She’s twenty.” He slavered a little and repeated her name. “Yep. Elma Sloane.”

  Jimmy said, “She looked terrified.”

  We sat down again. The barman closed the snug door, and we didn’t stop him. But the door ended four feet from the floor, and minutes later, looking under it, we saw the boots.

  Three pairs. They tramped in, heavy with menace, and stood. Big boots, brown-gray dirt on them. Boots that could kick a man to death. Two of them were outfitted with gaiters, the cut-off tops of Wellingtons sheathing the leg from knee to ankle. The third pair of boots shone with polish and rain.

  Hook-nosed Punch, and his old-coot pal, and Ted the barman—they all fell silent. Then Ted said, “Hallo there, lads. Damp class of a day, huh? Whatchyou havin’?”

  The boots stood side by side, a tiny, powerful regiment. Not a shift. Not a move. And no answer. We raised our eyebrows: What do you think of this, eh? How the boots hadn’t seen Elma Sloane cross the street to my car, I just don’t know. Jimmy Bermingham hunched his shoulders and half-sniggered.

  How long did they stand there? A minute? Longer? I can’t say. The door of the snug crashed open, a Neanderthal face looked in, as fierce and tangled as a briar bush, retreated from its glimpse of us, and closed the door again. They left. And closed the door behind them.

  8

  Malachi MacCool took one look at the girl and reeled back like a man kicked in the chest by a stallion. He had seen his heart’s desire. Twice he had to look at her, because the first time a flash of forked lightning came down from the sky, got under his long, shiny eyelashes, and blinded him for a moment.

  But when he opened his eyes, the girl hadn’t gone away. Emer was her name, and she stood there like a pillar of the gentle light you see on a summer dawn. She was as sweet as cane sugar, thoughtful and serene, and yet playful, and of a fond nature.

  Mal couldn’t speak, except in his head, where he kept saying, “Oh.” At last he took the girl’s hand and welcomed her. She wore a green gown down to her ankles, the neck of it bound in gold embroidered braid. She had fingers as long and white as the lilies of the field. She was so lovely that Mal’s heart tumbled like an acrobat inside his broad chest, and he smiled that innocent smile of eternal love that men smile only once in their lives. If they’re fortunate.

  Now and then John Jacob paused, carried on some business with his pipe, or gazed into the fire, his demeanor as peaceful as a child’s. He had the countryman’s face, his cheeks red as a pippin apple. Earlier he had put a match to the wick of an old oil lamp at the far end of the kitchen, and when he turned off the electric lights, we had only the lamp’s yellow glow and the red power of the fire.

  The blacksmith, looking on, believed that it would take very little work to secure this lucrative bridegroom. Knowing that the appetite increases when it is denied, he whisked his daughter away, taking their leave with courtesy. And no sooner were they up on their cart than the blacksmith, as gleeful as a songbird, said to his daughter, “There’s your husband for you. We’ll be important people yet.”

  But the girl, who had great spirit, retorted, “I’m not marrying any man as old as that.”

  Like so many Irish legends, the tale grew into a love story. The brother of Finn MacCool, in his advanced middle years, at last fell in love—with the daughter of a scheming farrier, “a ree-raw of a fellow,” as Mr. O’Neill called him, meaning a rambunctious and hostile man, who set up his beautiful daughter as an asset to be cashed in.

  Well, the blacksmith flew into a rage as high as a cat’s back. When they got home, he hauled the girl down off the cart, dragged her into the house, lashed her with a swishing ash stick, and locked her in a dark closet until, as he said, she’d come to her senses. The poor mother never said a word—she was tired out anyway, having so many children to cook and wash and sew for.

  As the tale developed, John Jacob sat up straighter and firmer, leaning and thrusting, in rhythm with the drama, hurling lines of the story like bolts across the gap between us.

  The world took its turns that night, as the world always does, its clouds swirling around the moon, its blue oceans churning from pole to pole. Though Emer sobbed and wailed, the blacksmith’s house quieted down, more in fear than from any other feeling. Later that same week, a messenger came to the door, a fellow spry as spring, with green eyes, and he said that Malachi MacCool, the great warrior, the great farmer, the great landowner, brother to Finn MacCool, the greatest man who ever lived, wished to visit.

  Now the house turned upside down. The angels of heaven never polished the golden staircase so brightly, and the twelve children had their teeth brushed and their noses pointed. Yet Emer stood as distant from all this as a tree above a river.

  9

  We walked across the wide main street of Urlingford to my car. Jimmy Bermingham had bandy legs like a jockey. With his coat draped across his shoulders and his thumbs deep in the pockets of his vest, he whistled a tune. Inside, I twisted. My anxiety is so high. What’s happening to me?

  When I opened the car door, Elma rose from her hiding place on the back seat and reached for my hand like a child. Jimmy Bermingham pushed up the passenger seat and climbed into the rear seat beside her.

  “Why aren’t you getting into the front?” she asked, shivering. Jimmy Bermingham took off his coat and wrapped it around her; she huddled into it like a mouse into cotton wool.

  I looked back at her and smiled. “You’ll be all right.”
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  Little sting to the heart: Venetia had a smile as innocent as that.

  And so three people, complete strangers to one another, set out on a coldish rainy afternoon in County Kilkenny in the year 1956, not knowing what on earth lay ahead.

  I said, “Listen, I don’t exactly know what’s happening here.”

  “They want me to marry a man out the road here; he has a big farm of land. My father’s after whipping me twice.”

  “Whipping you?” I said.

  “Look.” She twisted in the seat, leaned forward, and took down a shoulder of the red sweater. A broad weal, mauve with evil, ran under her straps.

  “He’s over fifty years older than me,” she said. “But he has pucks of money.”

  “Did he whip you, too?” asked Jimmy.

  “He says that when he looks at me he gets tears in his eyes. He says ’tis pure joy. But I think he has stomach trouble.”

  “Probably always had a bad bag,” said Jimmy, sounding full of wisdom. “The stomach gets at you early in life.”

  “I take it you don’t love him,” I said.

  “If I knew what love felt like, I’d tell you,” Elma said.

  “Hah, we’re the boys to teach you that,” said Jimmy Bermingham. “Aren’t we, Ben?”

  10

  Emer turned Malachi MacCool down in favor of a younger man. Thus the drama sharpened. I thought that I heard an owl in the trees outside. Or was it the wind in the chimney?

  “He’s the son of a chieftain,” Emer said to Malachi. “I hope you understand. He’s nearly the same age as me, and he will be the chieftain himself one day.”

  Mal, though stricken to the heart, nodded his head in agreement. Not so the farrier, who raged and ranted. He grabbed his daughter by the arm and began to shake her like a child shakes a doll. Mal, ever the gentleman, intervened. Holding the blacksmith at arm’s length, he said to Emer, “Go to him, go to your young man.” She kissed Mal on the cheek and stepped away from him.

  Malachi MacCool locked himself in. He never again came out to walk his fields or inspect his beloved cattle. He kept his rooms dark, because he never again wanted to distinguish night from day. His cook left meals for him outside the door. Mal didn’t eat the meals. He saw nobody, spoke to nobody, not even his trusted steward. Inside his chamber, he pined away, and if you do not believe that a man can die of a broken heart, then you do not understand the story of Mal MacCool and his love.

  John Jacob drew near the end. His telling, though it had rambled across seven counties, never for a second lost the original thread. As he described Mal’s decline, he powered up and grew more urgent. His voice cracked just enough, his eyes gleamed with tears, his shoulders reflected all the mourning of a great man brought low by love. This was grand opera, in solo recital.

  One morning, after days of silence, the steward and his men broke down the door of the bedchamber, and they found Mal dead on his great gold chair. They buried him in his highest field standing up in a stone cairn. From there he could look out over the valley—a valley he had owned from horizon to horizon.

  There was no inheritance, because there had been nobody to whom he wished to bequeath anything. His property was raided the day after the funeral and the house ransacked. Adjacent farmers staked claims to his fields and fought over them, killing men in their land hunger. Eventually they settled it all, and when their greed had subsided, every trace of Malachi MacCool and his estates vanished from the land as water seeps into the earth.

  Now, in the final stages of the telling, John Jacob sat taller in his chair, and as his hands and upper body grew ever more animated, his voice took on a freight of regret.

  Emer married the chieftain’s boy, and they had three sons and three daughters. But, as some women do, she realized over the years that she had married a bad egg, a worthless man who would rather talk than work.

  She lived for her children, though now and then she allowed herself to think of Mal and his proposals of marriage, and his frantic words of love to her. And sure enough, bit by bit, she began to spend the rest of her life pining for him. By the time her own journey to the next world had begun, she was more in love with Mal MacCool than he had ever been with her. Whether they reunited in the mighty and bright hereafter, I cannot tell. We are not permitted to draw aside that curtain that reaches from the sky to the earth, and from pole to pole, because we are not gods.

  And so that has to be the end of my story of Malachi, or Mal MacCool, the brother of Finn MacCool, the greatest man who ever lived. And as long as I keep a clean heart and an open mind, another story will come along presently to fill that story’s place.

  11

  The rain slapped down, wide and flat, forcing me to reduce my speed. Elma leaned far into her corner and closed her eyes. My good and familiar feeling of insulation returned. In my car I felt safe and sealed from the world, and that activated an orderly side of myself that I liked. On this “traveling desk” I had retrieval of all my pens, notebooks, and address files, the tools of my trade.

  Nothing ever cluttered the seats, in case I took aboard unusual travelers, such as the pair now dozing in my rear seats. Or gave a lift, as I often did, to some walker on a country road, such as the man who suddenly flagged me down in the driving rain.

  Naturally, I stopped for him. That’s what we did in Ireland in those days—we gave lifts to hitchhikers in all their variety: students, housewives shopping in the local town, home-going drunks. I kept the passenger seat beside me covered with a special waterproof cover from a mail-order firm in England.

  And I needed it that day. The man, tall and angular as a long shadow, had been walking into the driven rain. It had soaked his coat, his hat, every cubic inch of him. In the wide, flat land around us now, no trees cushioned the skyline; he had no shelter or protection from that drenching gale.

  I leaned across and opened the door. He scrambled in, knocking his hat half off. He’s exhausted. He’s too old to be walking the roads in this rain. He’s too well-to-do. What the hell’s he doing?

  Lowering his sodden hat to his sodden knee, he pinched the water from his eyes.

  “Thanks, oh thanks, thanks for stopping. There wasn’t a soul on the road—you’re the first car I saw. Thanks, thanks.”

  I said, “You’re all right.”

  “Oh, thanks, you’re my good luck today.”

  “Did you come far?”

  “D’you know Urlingford?” he said, and as the words left his lips and hung there between us, I knew what was coming next. I glanced in the mirror and saw a frozen, wide-awake face, horror alive in her aghast young eyes.

  The rain-soaked gentleman either caught my expression or felt the mood. He half-turned, looked back over his shoulder, and I thought that he would forever hold his head in that position. High drama may last for no more than a moment, but in our memories it lives on as an hour, an aeon. On impulse I slowed the car.

  “God,” said the stranger.

  “Oh, God above,” said Elma.

  “What are you doing to me, Elma?” he asked in half a whimper. “What are you doing to me?”

  “Dan, you’re after me, aren’t you?” she wailed. “Aren’t you?”

  “What-what?” said Jimmy Bermingham, also waking up—at which moment the stranger clasped his hand to his own upper body and said, “Elma, I think ’tis the case that you’re after poisoning me.”

  At those words he turned back to face the windshield and began to convulse. He grabbed his left biceps and fought for breath as his face turned first red and then ash-gray. Twisting in the seat, he scrabbled a hand toward his door, as though to escape. Then he slumped. His head, heavy as a rock, fell onto my shoulder.

  12

  At a later time, I asked Mr. O’Neill where he had learned his trade. He gave me a curt answer: “It’s not a trade, it’s an art.”

  I could tell that he had read Homer. Where Homer repeats phrases such as “Dawn came with rosy fingers,” he, in that first story, repeated three
or four times, “Finn MacCool, the greatest man who ever lived,” and “The world took its turns, as the world always does.” I once noted down some tales from a man up in Mayo, out in the wilds of Bangor Erris, who repeated the phrase, no matter what the story, “Now a woman would never say that, especially a woman who had chickens to feed.”

  They did it, those ancient storytellers, to give our minds—and their voices—a tiny respite. Mr. O’Neill (his name, he said, means “descended from champions”) followed his recurring phrases with a little pause: to fill a pipe, throw a log on the fire, or rub down fresh tobacco with the heel of his hand. And when he’d finished, we neither of us spoke until a log shifted in the fire and broke the spell. I thanked him—and my few words sounded meager.

  He stood with me outside his door. The moon had reached the west and was quitting the sky.

  “I’m glad you got here,” he said.

  All my life I have looked for leadership. I am drawn to those who lead, especially if they show a benign nature. By now I knew that I would have done anything for this man, any task he might have set me. I didn’t yet know why.

  “Mr. O’Neill, may I come to see you again?”

  The pause he took made me panicky: Have I done something wrong?

  Then he spoke: “I think you’ll find that you have to.”

  I had no idea that night what he meant; I do now.

  13

  Elma Sloane ran her hands through her hair, then slapped them to her face like placards. She moaned without stopping for breath.

  “Oh-God-oh-God-oh-God.”

  Like a taskmaster I said, “Elma!”

  “It’s-all-my-fault-it’s-all-my-fault-it’s-all-my-fault.”

  I snapped at her again: “Enough.”

  “Ben, turn the car around,” said Jimmy Bermingham, “Cashel hospital.”

  No dramatics. No histrionics. Just find a gate and make a calm, three-point turn.