The Banished Children of Eve (10 page)

Squirt pulled the curtains closed around Mulcahey's cubicle. Mulcahey looked at himself in the mirror.
Hello, Jack.
Veins of red in those flashing blue eyes. Got to start keeping a cork in the bottle until the performance is over. Mulcahey always did his own makeup. It was bad luck to let somebody else do it for you, but he let Squirt lay out everything he needed, he depended on him for that. The kid never failed. The burnt cork was there and a small dish of water and a piece of cheesecloth.
Jack made up the paste, rubbing the cork around the dish until the residue of water and ash became thicker and thicker.

In the mirror, Squirt's brown face came into view. “Jack, you keep getting here later, pretty soon they gonna go on without you.”

“No way, kid, I'm the show.”

“You the show until you don't show and somebody else gonna be the show.” Squirt pulled back the curtain and went out.

Mulcahey pushed back his hair and dipped the cloth into the paste. He drew a black line across his forehead. “So long, white man,” he said. He drew a great black circle around his face, picked up a small brush, dipped it, and leaned toward the mirror, circled his mouth beginning an inch above his lips, holding his right wrist with his left hand, whispering to himself, “Steady there, white man, steady.” He rested his elbows on the table and worked on his eyes, leaving a small white area around them, getting as close as he could to the mirror and dabbing away with his brush.

He leaned back. “Squirt,” he yelled, “Come here.” Squirt appeared in the mirror once again.

“How's that?”

“Perfect.”

Mulcahey picked up the cloth again and in broad strokes filled in the rest of his face, down his neck, behind his ears. He put on a wig of black curls. The curtain opened again, as if on cue, and Squirt came up behind Mulcahey with a hand mirror. He held it up as Mulcahey pulled and tugged on the wig, picked up the cheesecloth and went over a few spots on his neck and ears. Squirt moved the mirror to give Mulcahey the view he needed.

Mulcahey rolled his head back and forth, from left to right, and the curls danced. He picked up a second brush, dipped it into a small, flat metal tin, brushed on the pink greasepaint, filling in the space around his lips, and gently rubbed them with a swab of cotton. He smiled at himself, and
his teeth looked white and large in the black oval of his face and the pink ellipse of his mouth.

“You're all set,” Squirt said as he ran out.

Mulcahey put on his white gloves, held them at each side of his face, with the palms toward the mirror, the fingers spread out like fans. Mulcahey, “The Ethiopian Impersonator.” His name at the top of the bill. The blackened white man stared back at him, frowning, smiling, the gloved hands waving. “Why, you ol' darkie,” Mulcahey said to himself in the mirror, “what would da ol' folks at home think of you now?”

It was twenty years since Mulcahey's first performance, the first, that is, he could remember. He couldn't have been more than ten. He stood with the others on the great stone pier. The lord's yacht was late. The lord had stopped in view of Cruit Island, off the Donegal coast, to watch a flotilla of small leather boats filled with people on the way to the
Leacht Mór,
the Big Stone blessed by Saint Columcille himself. The yacht stayed for an hour as the people came ashore to touch the stone and pray for a cure, a procession of idiots, the old, cripples, the dying. The lord's agent for his Irish estates was on the deck with his employer. “They do it once a year, my lord, on the feast of Saint John the Baptist. It's a kind of crusade.”

“Crusade? I think you mean a pilgrimage.”

“Pilgrimage, yes, that's it, that's what they call it.”

“Is it efficacious?”

“Pardon, my lord?”

“Is anyone ever cured?”

“Some have claimed to be.”

“Good God, I suppose one would have to travel to the Ganges to see anything as bizarre.”

The tenants were drawn up in rows on the pier. Jack stood next to his father in the first rank. In front of them, seated on a milking stool, was Jack's granduncle, Malachi, who had wept bitterly when the agent came to their cabins with news of the lord's first visit to his
estates. “He'll evict us all, that's what he's come for, so he'll have the land for his cows.”

Like most of the other tenants, Malachi had no English. But Jack's father was proficient at it and translated for them. “They want you to play for his lordship, Malachi, that's all. They want him to hear our music and feel welcomed. They don't want your cabin.”

Malachi was unconvinced. “Why would a great lord the likes that lives in London want music from an old blind man? No, he wants the land. Mother of God, he wants the land.”

The white yacht sailed into the harbor, its rigging ablaze with flags. The lord stepped out of the boat that had rowed him ashore and slowly mounted the steps of the pier. Two other boats followed with his luggage. The agent rushed ahead and tapped Malachi on the shoulder. “Play, man. Play.” Malachi's sightless eyes stayed fixed ahead. His pipes rested on his lap. Jack's father stepped forward. “Malachi,” he said in Irish, “they want a tune.” But Malachi sat rigidly, not moving.

The lord was in front of them. “What seems to be the problem?”

“No problem,” the agent said. “It's simply most of these people, my lord, don't understand the language.”

The lord gestured at the pipes on Malachi's lap and the bag that was strapped under his arm. “These are different from the Scottish pipes?”

“Yes, my lord, they are called
‘uileann'
pipes and played manually, the piper using these bellows strapped to his arm, instead of blowing with his mouth, as is done in Scotland.”

“This seems more primitive.”

“Many things here are, my lord.”

The agent turned to Jack's father. “Speak to him in his tongue. Tell him it would greatly please his master if he could hear a song on these pipes.”

“Malachi,” Jack's father said, “the man here says there'll be whiskey and tobacco for all the tenants if his lordship can only hear the music that even the
people of London speak about so highly, the music of Malachi the piper.”

Malachi began to play. The lord stood and listened. “What is he playing?” he asked.

The agent said to Jack's father, “Ask him the name of the song.”

“Malachi,” Jack's father said, “the lord wants to know the name of the tune.”

“It's the ‘Lament for Red Hugh O'Donnell.' It was taught me by my teacher Moriarty, who learned it from McDonnell, the piper from the Isles. When Moriarty taught it to me he was an old man, nearly eighty, and McDonnell himself was an old man when he taught it to Moriarty, who came here from Kerry to learn the pipes from McDonnell.” Malachi was relaxed now. The story of the music came easily to him: “McDonnell himself was the pupil of Patrick O'Malley, and it's said that O'Malley's father saw the O'Donnell himself ride out against the English and that he was there when the earls, O'Donnell among them, set out from Lough Swilly for Spain, and O'Donnell was still strong and young and swearing vengeance, and there was little doubt he would have had it but the English poisoned him, as is their way.”

“This must be the longest song title in history,” the lord said.

“He is giving the history of the song, my lord,” Jack's father said. “It's a long story.”

“Most stories here are, my lord,” the agent said. “You become accustomed to that.”

When Malachi finished, the lord dropped a large silver coin into his lap, a thing so heavy, the engraving so fine to his fingers, so intricate and so interesting, that Malachi refused to let it out of his hand, feeling the crown and the profile of a face and the letters that no one could understand except for the English name “George.”

It was two weeks later that Jack performed for his first audience. He led his granduncle, Malachi, by the hand to the Great House he had seen from a distance but never visited. The piper's hand was wet with perspiration, and Jack could sense his nervousness and it added to his own
excitement. “Don't ye move so fast,” Malachi said to him. “Ye cost me my breath.” Jack walked alongside him, and the small pebbles of the carriageway felt strange under his bare feet, a tingling feeling on the rough, hardened skin of his soles, mysterious, a carpet of fine stones.

At the end of the carriageway, Jack could hear the hubbub of voices ahead, the
woo-woo
sound of English. There was a group of people on the stone porch, round men in red and blue and green coats, their boots all shined and bright, and women in long dresses, long curls around their faces, red circles on their cheeks. Jack described them to his uncle. “What are they doing?” Malachi said.

“They're staring at us, Granduncle.”

“O Holy Child Jesus, have mercy on us.”

Malachi slowed down, but Jack was in a hurry to see these people up close and he began to move faster and drag Malachi with him, and as his granduncle tried to restrain him, a tall man in a blue coat saw them and came down the stairs. It was the lord. There was a servant behind him.

“The piper!”

“I led him here as I was told,” Jack said in English.

The lord rubbed Jack's head. “You're a good boy.” He gestured to the servant behind him. “Get two chairs ready. Put them here, by the window, not too close to the food.” He walked back up to the porch and clapped his hands. “The treat I promised you is here. The music, purely played, of a former age, the savage, plaintive tunes of the instruments that once called this island's natives to war.”

The guests gathered around them. “Tell your uncle,” the lord said, “to play the ‘Lament for McDonnell'; tell him to start with that.”

“O'Donnell, you mean, sir.”

The lord looked down at Jack and smiled. “Yes, boy, you're quite correct. O'Donnell it is.” Jack spoke to his granduncle in Irish, and Malachi played. He finished that and immediately started to play a reel, and Jack got up and began to dance, as he always did when Malachi
played his song. He stood on his toes, his knees pumping up and down, his feet moving in the intricate patterns he had learned by heart. Not a touch of stage fright. The crowd began to clap, and some of them laughed with delight. The lord began to tap his foot and beat time with his hand against his thigh. One of the guests, a short, stout man, stood next to the lord. He roared with laughter. “This is rich,” he said, “too rich.”

When Malachi and Jack finished, the lord sent them around to the back of the house and they were given food on plates so white, Jack told his granduncle, that they must never have been eaten off before. They each got a breast of chicken and a great mound of potatoes with a thick gravy over it. And for all the years since, Jack never lost the taste of that debut dinner, the association of the stage with a full stomach and the Great House and the handsome people, the carriageway of white stones, so watch out, you minstrel boys, because here comes one Paddy who, jump Jim Crow, is out to have it all.

Mulcahey stood in front of the dressing-room mirror. He went up on his toes, the muscles in his calves tightening. He walked on the tips of his toes toward the door, arching the upper half of his body backward, strutting across the floor. “Jesus,” Tommy Rice told Mulcahey that night they met in the New England Hotel, “I could dance before I could walk, wasn't any step I couldn't get the hang of in no time, because it all came naturally from listening to the sound of my old man's fiddle, and dancing in the middle of Bancker Street with all those other Irish kids.”

Squirt came back into the room from the direction of the stage. “You is crazy, Jack. The show is about to start and you not even finished dressing.” Mulcahey heard the twang of banjos, a chorus of voices. He sat down, and Squirt wrapped a paper collar around his neck, did it slowly, carefully, while Mulcahey held his chin high in the air.

“How's the crowd?”

“The house is half full.”

“That's a nice way of putting it, Squirt.”

Mulcahey slipped the red ribbon around the collar and tied a big bow. He stood, and Squirt held up the
silver jacket with the satin lapels and Mulcahey put his arms into it. He picked up his banjo and walked to the door. The smell of stage lights filled the corridor, calcium heated to incandescence, a sharp, acrid, familiar odor. At the end of the corridor the half-moon of shining darkies was in place on the stage.

Mulcahey went ahead. The curtain was going up. He drew a deep breath and sang softly to himself as he went: “The minstrel boy to the war is gone, in the ranks of death you will find him.”

“Y
OUR MASTER
, I suppose, don't keep no dogs?”

“Heaps of 'em. Thar's Bruno—he's a roarer, he is, and why ‘bout every nigger of us keeps a pup of some natur' or uther.”

“I don't want no nigger's dog.”

“Ours is good dogs, Mr. Haley, and I don't see no use cussin' on ‘em, no way.”

Eliza stood in the wings and adjusted the shawl on her shoulders so she could toss it over her head quickly. The slave-catcher was getting ready for the chase. A stagehand knelt next to her, holding a big red dog with one hand, stroking it with the other. He had his face next to the dog's ear and was whispering into it. Eliza took her handkerchief out of her sleeve and pressed it lightly against her forehead to absorb the perspiration. The dog was panting, drops of saliva dropping from its mouth onto the floor. “Here, Bruno,” the black-faced actor yelled. The stagehand took his hand off the dog's collar and slapped it gently on the rump. The dog ran into the center of the stage.

“We're off!” the slave-catcher yelled.

The stagehand ran back to a trunk by the wall and took out a doll wrapped in a plaid blanket. He came back and put it into Eliza's arms. “Don't throw the little nigger,” he said. She had once, accidentally. Tripped on the wooden blocks painted to look like ice, the doll careening away from her down between the blocks.