The Last Storyteller Read online

  “He did so attack me,” said Sammy. “He bit me, didn’t he?”

  They slung the young corpse into the van and drove away, back to Brookbridge.

  The local doctor, a Protestant, name of Henderson, a decent man, concerned for all people of all persuasions on his rounds, examined the body that evening. Later, in the safety of his own home, he looked at his wife and sighed, “How can anybody think that such things don’t have consequences?”

  That was in November 1956.

  18

  Louise and Ben, I wish I’d told you more about the land in which you were conceived. I know this country as intimately as I know my own body. And, yes, I’ve talked to you about all kinds of interesting places—mine shafts and riverbanks and old abbeys; high villages, remote and forgotten; empty castles where they left the plates on the racks, the books on the shelves.

  But I’m talking now about the spirit of the land, and in particular about a dimension of violence that was close to spiritual in its intensity. It took decades to build, and much of it had already lodged deep within me and, I submit, most Irishmen by the time these incidents occurred. The police and the screwdriver; the painter’s eye—they didn’t feel strange or untypical (and there will be more).

  You’ll think that I may have made the violence seem too commonplace. Well, it was. When I was on the road I saw it everywhere—ordinary, local, everyday brutality. All over the country. Ask the old-timers, they’ll tell you. Scarcely a day ended without some row, brawl, or riot somewhere. And casual fisticuffs in many a bar and pub.

  The week before I met Jimmy Bermingham, I watched a fracas in the little County Carlow town of Tullow, involving forty or fifty people. A farmer accused a tinker of trying to peddle a lame horse at the fair (the tinker limped while walking the dud animal toward the farmer), and everybody piled in. The fighting Irish; that was us.

  I know you still struggle with this reality, because you grew up in Florida, where Venetia gave you an Emerald Isle view of Ireland, all castles and cottages and glossy brochures. As you know, I’ve tried to see it through your eyes and explain it to you, but I don’t think I’ve done so particularly well—so let me try again.

  The word I reach for is “adolescence.” We were, in the south of Ireland at any rate, a new state. With notable violence we’d broken from England in 1922, and we severed the last ties when we declared our republic in 1948. Then, and on into the 1950s, we still resolved our difficulties as children and adolescents do: by violence. If guns had been freely available, we’d have been killing each other wholesale.

  Our political immaturity contributed. We had two major factions who stood poles apart. One side, the republicans, believed that we should never have signed the treaty with England. Fight on, they said, until we get back our last six counties. Become a nation once again. The other side, traditional conservatives and peacemakers, shook its collective head and said we still needed England. They’re our allies. Our neighbors. Our chief trading partners. Don’t anger them.

  That polarization trickled down and by the middle of the century was damaging us every day—because with it came poverty. The governing republicans banned exports to England—our biggest customer. Result: no jobs anywhere; we were fighting what our rulers called an “economic war” with vastly richer England. Laughable.

  Do you have any idea how poor we were? I remained the only one of my graduating class who hadn’t emigrated to England or the United States. If you stayed behind, you barely ate. We had a national culture of need.

  As to the general quality of life, think of the simplicities you children took for granted in Florida. Most rural dwellers in Ireland had neither electricity nor running water, nor did the large villages, nor even some small towns.

  Few people drove cars. We rode bicycles. Country buses helped; so did the train service installed by the Victorian English. Even though that was worse than ever. We used to have a joke: What are the two things you know about the Dublin-to-Cork train? Answer: That it’ll break down on the way to Cork. And that it’ll break down on the way back to Dublin.

  We were a makeshift people. In a makeshift nation. We were a curious hybrid; we came from a glorious ancient past, and yet we looked and acted like a recently discovered tribe, settling our disputes with our fists and eking out, for the most part, an existence with few comforts. No wonder the Catholic Church throve—as do all major religions where affluence has not yet arrived.

  Our food, too, reflected our state of undeclared poverty. The national diet continued: centuries of meat and starch, either bread or potatoes, with little variation. Some housewives cooked excellently, but from their mothers’ and grandmothers’ recipes, not from any new, cosmopolitan information.

  And this island nation still hadn’t discovered fish—which would have saved its people during the famine of the 1840s. On Fridays, when meat was forbidden by the church, eggs took over. Baking flourished: soda bread, pastry for pies, “shop bread” for sandwiches. Little else. The term “health food” had yet to reach Ireland—or perhaps even to be coined.

  In the clothes of the adults you’d have found not a ribbon of chic. A handful of women, from old money, shopped in London. The rapacious nouveaux riches, the green greed crowd, hadn’t yet been spawned, and if Dublin stores carried outfits for the wife of the surgeon, the barrister, the company man, they were rarely haute and never couture. In any case, fine dressing earned disapproval, because display of the body might lead to what the priests called, with a sinister grunt, “other things.”

  Those clergy—they had an absolute grip. They took command of the crucial arena between thought and feeling. Controlled both. Thomas Aquinas was the moral gold standard, with brides told, “No sex unless you’re trying to conceive. Otherwise you’re committing sin.” The subtext was “Have as many little Catholics as you can, and to hell with the family economics.” I visited a family once out in Barna, beyond Galway, the Quinlans—twenty-five children in a two-bedroom cottage.

  The bishops called it “faith,” but they told us what to believe in: heaven and modesty; the infallibility of the pope; transubstantiation. And of course all non-Catholics went to hell. “The big H,” you’d probably have called it. Yes, that truly was what it was like, a revolution waiting to happen.

  The politicians went along with it. They allowed a kind of social power vacuum, which the church filled. And as the church controlled most of the education, so the priests patrolled that fence, too.

  Some of the support for them came because people felt they owed the church a debt. After Irish Catholicism was decriminalized, in 1829, the priests seized the moment. They rallied the people. They led the campaign to take back the land. On ramshackle village streets they gave fiery, dog-collared speeches. When they had condemned the English landlords, the priests then carried the fight to the parliamentarians. And won—and in 1956 the Catholic Church still held that intangible but real power.

  Signs, though, had begun to appear, stirrings from the caves of the sages. The poet Yeats, the exile Joyce—even though dead by now, they had been pathfinders; they’d shown an entire people that the world of ideas belonged in the light of the sun and not in the dark of the pews.

  To retaliate, the bishops increased the pressure for censorship. The government censor banned Irish novelists as a monthly routine. Newspapers published the lists, and we laughed out loud, because the works of serious writers appeared alongside Playboy, or Madam Lash, or Lurid Girls in Wet Rubber: Issue 14. Yes, we were makeshift all right.

  You could see it everywhere. Consider that bunch of us in Randall’s house. He came from the old world of Ireland, and everything in his presence and his possessions and his properties showed it. Fiercely anti-clerical, a committed and militant atheist, he represented the bridge from the ancient, mythological glories of kingship and chieftaincy to a brave new dawn that so many of us hoped might lie ahead.

  I had come from the ancient MacCarthys, with my branch a well-to-do farming family that had held on to its land for centuries. That farm was mine anytime I wanted to return to it. My parents still lived and worked there, and they had no great passion for prayer.

  Elma Sloane came from the beleaguered and impoverished peasantry. The children in her house couldn’t all go to school on the same day because they didn’t have enough clothes to go around. At mealtimes they had to take turns with the few spoons.

  In Duff House that evening, we represented such class differences as Ireland could define: the old money of Randall; the safe farming of my clan; the savagely reared Elma Sloane; and the thugs throwing rocks to force her into marriage so that they could grab another man’s fortune. Yes, we had it all that day.

  As for Jimmy Bermingham—you may well ask. He dressed like a poor man from a rich country or a rich man from a poor country—which was it? He professed undying love for one girl, yet proved ready to jump on another. In short, Jimmy ran ahead of us all. He also ran guns.

  19

  When Randall felt strong enough to walk, we returned to the small drawing room. He rested on a sofa, again holding Elma’s hand—a gesture she didn’t contest. Jimmy Bermingham examined Randall’s eye once more and said that the stone hadn’t connected with the eyeball. Annette found a spare pair of spectacles and another warm, damp towel, which Jimmy held to Randall’s eyes. We made small talk, seeking ease.

  In time we went in to dinner, to a long dining room with its own echo. Randall kept testing the left eye, opening, it, closing it, fluttering the lashes.

  Such a curious evening: the conversation drifted in bits and pieces; here, from my journal, are some snatches:

  Randall: “Will I be blind, I wonder? They say if you lose the sight in one eye, you often lose the sight in both. But, of course, I haven’t lost the
sight in one eye.”

  Elma Sloane: “How did they follow us? Or did someone see us driving in here?”

  Jimmy Bermingham: “Did you think he’d fire the gun at you?”

  Randall: “Girls aren’t often so beautiful so young.”

  And then we heard the drama of Elma Sloane. In its way, it counts as something I collected; does that widen the definition of “folklore”? In a hundred, a thousand years, might it not be legend, if preserved?

  She lived, the oldest of twelve siblings, in what was called “a council cottage”—every county in Ireland tried to build affordable housing. A typical cottage had two bedrooms, a kitchen, and some kind of living room; the roof over their heads at a nominal rent gave people some self-respect.

  Her father worked for the county council as a roads laborer; her mother jobbed for farmwives. Elma quit school at fourteen, though her teacher called her “highly intelligent and well-behaved.” She chose not to emigrate—if she stayed she could help her mother, and even bring in some money.

  “I always liked shoes,” she said about having gotten hired in the local shoe store. “And there’s something nice about helping people ease their feet. Most people who come in, their shoes don’t fit them, and their feet are sore.”

  “Good girl,” said Randall.

  Her father came to the shop one day and crooked his finger, saying, “C’mere you.” She winced as she mimicked him.

  Out on the street, “a tall old man” waited. Her father said, “This is your husband. His name is Dan—he’s a great man, a great hero. Shake hands with him.”

  The man put out his hand, and Elma took it. “Because,” she said, “I was afraid my father would hit me.”

  That evening her mother smiled a thin smile and asked, “And are we to have a bride in the house?”

  The father came home, sat down at the table, and said, “We did a good day’s work today. This house will never again want for things.”

  That night Elma began to weep. Her mother said not a word—but Elma did: “I’m not marrying that old fellow.” Elma told us, “My mother collapsed onto a chair, and she said, ‘Oh, Jesus. Your brother, your brother.’ ”

  Elma, again frightened, finished her tale:

  “I had a young brother who died a few years back. He had an argument with my father, and he ran out of the house and my father ran after him. My father came back, but my brother never did, and we found him that night under a tree. His head was all crashed in, and my father said he must have climbed the tree to hide and then fell out of it.”

  20

  As the fire began to die, Randall said to me, “You and I have unfinished business, Ben.” Mystified, I walked with him down a long passageway. “Somebody,” he remarked, “should scare the life out of that beast of a father. Why don’t you do it?”

  I said, “Randall, I’m only around here once a year or so.”

  “Avoidance again?” he said. “Old habits die hard.”

  My heart lurched from annoyance to shame. Why don’t you ask him what he means by “avoidance”—and “again”?

  He had converted the large old stables, replaced stone walls with glass. Dozens of finished canvases leaned in stacks against every wall of the studio. I counted six easels, all with work in progress. On the largest and most central stood a nearly finished nude study.

  He means, doesn’t he, that I have no guts, that when it comes to the crunch, any crunch, I sidestep? Or run? That is what he means, isn’t it, by “avoidance”?

  “Randall, why is this portrait familiar to me?” I asked, looking at the nude.

  “You’ve just praised her cooking.”

  Annette! I hadn’t known. Are the locals aware that she poses for him? They’d drum her out of the village.

  “Good models are so difficult to find,” he said. “I trained her. She now understands how to concentrate with her body.” Then, as Randall always could, he surprised me further. “And I suspect that’s a good model you brought with you.”

  “Which of them?”

  He laughed. “Well, not Jimmy. Not that little narcissist.”

  “How do you know Elma could?”

  Randall said, “Natural to her, dear boy.”

  And then he unfolded a plan, taking, as he always did, great leaps of life in a few sentences.

  “Tell everybody she’s gone to England. Let her stay here in seclusion with me. We’ll teach her to model. She can always go to Paris then and make some kind of living.”

  Randall said all this while standing before a small canvas on a wide easel. I watched as he took a brush and scratched at the paint with the handle. On tiptoe I half-circled him. He peered at his work and blinked, blinked again, wiped his eyes with great care, closed the unbruised eye, peered with the other, then blinked again. In a moment his face began to rest; he had dismissed his anxiety.

  I tiptoed away. He left the easel, looked around for me, and called.

  “Our unfinished business, Ben.” He beckoned, and I followed. At the large canvas of the nearly completed nude, he paused, and with a gentle fingernail adjusted one of Annette’s eyes.

  On a table nearby, next to an antique leather chesterfield, lay months of magazines, art gallery catalogs, newspapers. Randall picked up a thick folder leaking with press clippings and crooked a finger to draw me in close. He opened the folder and searched, then opened it wider and showed it to me: an old newspaper report of Venetia’s disappearance in 1932.

  “That’s what I meant by avoidance.”

  And still I said nothing. Don’t answer. If you don’t answer, you can’t make a mistake.

  “She’s back, Ben. Did you know that? She’s touring the country. But I’m sure you know it. And you’re avoiding it.”

  I nodded, shaken. “Why did you clip that?”

  “Painters never forget beauty. I saw her traveling show back then.” No words came to me. “D’you want to read it again?”

  “No,” I said.

  Randall detached the old clipping and handed it to me.

  “Put it in your wallet,” he said. “Go after her. I saw her on the stage again three nights ago, and she’s more beautiful than ever. But she’s not happy.”

  “Where was she?”

  “They’re in Templemore.” He turned to face me. “Go on, Ben. She’s with a bad fellow.”

  Several hours later, restive under the gray fingers of dawn, I thought with some bitterness, Thank you, Randall.

  21

  Do you know the word “pusillanimous?” I enjoy it now, even if it still makes me uncomfortable. It literally means “being of small mind.” Therefore of tiny spirit. How well I’ve known that word.

  In my defense, I’ll say that I’d had the stuffing kicked out of me long ago by losing Venetia. At least that’s my excuse. Being pusillanimous is one of those conditions that you promise you’ll fix in yourself one day, put right. But you never do.

  Randall rises at six; so does everybody else in that house. Jimmy and I left after breakfast. My head bulged, my heart quailed, as the word “avoidance” tormented me.

  On the doorstep I spoke to Elma.

  “Randall says I’m to stay here. Anyway, my father knows I was threatening to go to England.”

  “You’ll be all right here.”

  She shrugged. “Will I be all right anywhere?”

  “Is there anything you need, clothes and things?”

  “Annette is going to bring me shopping.”

  I gave her some money, and she flung her arms around my neck.

  Jimmy announced in the car, “I told Randall we’re going to talk to her father. Elma told me where he’ll be.”

  Four miles from Urlingford we turned down a side road, until recently a muddy lane. Two men labored at a roadside wall. They had just begun their day’s work.

  “What are we going to say to him?” asked Jimmy Bermingham.

  “The stone in Randall’s eye?”

  “Water off a duck’s back,” said Jimmy. “You heard what he did to his own son.”

  We drove past the two workers. In those days, cars drew attention, especially on small country roads. The two men stopped working and stood erect to stare after us. I turned the car, came back slowly, and parked fifty yards short of them.