The Last Storyteller (11 page)

At twenty past ten, I got out of the car and shone the flashlamp on the stream. I’d have to walk through the water to get at him, and I had only shoes on, not even rubber soles. But I went anyway. That’s what I mean by the cause. That water was freezing—a mountain river, I’d say, coming down into the lakes. The trouble was, if I went up on the road and the boyo had a light on him, he’d see me, and there was no bank to crouch on
.

Maybe half an hour, maybe more, I stood in that water in my good shoes. God, it was freezing. Then I heard the footsteps, a strong heavy step, coming toward me along the road. Up I step out of the water when he’s right near, and I says, “Is that you, Sammy?”

“Who’s that?” says he, and I says, “A friend, Sammy, a friend who thinks
you shouldn’t gouge out people’s eyes.” I shine the torch in his face, he shines a torch in mine, and I bring up the Webley and I squeeze off a shot. He dropped. I couldn’t see in the dark where I’d hit him but he was down at my feet and twisting
.

I stood over him to fire the second shot into his head and didn’t the gun jam? Now, I’d never fired it before. And that was a mistake, not to practice with it, learn it, because it had a heavy, slow trigger. The handguns weren’t all like that
.

So I was slow, and he was down and I heard shouts. So I was gone, running like hell back across the stream to the car. My shoes were ruined, never the same again, I had to get a new pair
.

Sammy Gilpin didn’t die. He took Jimmy Bermingham’s bullet in the side of the head, and it paralyzed him for life. Not elegant, was it? Nor heroic; not the stuff of history books.

The following day, a hundred and twenty miles to the south, I drove slowly along the short avenue into my parents’ farm. Regrouping? Certainly. Seeking advice? No. I wouldn’t have frightened my mother with such a tale, and my romantic father offered no reliable common sense.

My father was one of those men whose reaction you could never predict. He blew with the breeze. I’d hear him one day praise an acquaintance to the skies, swearing undying respect; next day, he’d damn the same man as a knave.

Did he hold his opinions to please others, or did he always tell us what he thought we wanted to hear? One thing I do know about him: he lived from jolt to jolt; he should have had his own private Jupiter sending him lightning bolts. If I wanted to thrill my father, I’d find a story of great drama or tragedy—a man isolated halfway down a cliff; a child in a well—and tell him slowly and carefully. His eyes would grow amber,
he’d run his hands through that mass of hair, the red now whitening but the waves still heaving, and say, “God-God-God above, boys.”

It took me many years to understand that this need for voltage had been the cause of his great truancy. Remember, children, that in 1932, when he ran away from home to pursue your mother, travel with her road show, I followed. And that deep infatuation notwithstanding, he still showed endless love for his own wife, my mother.

Venetia also told me that when he was with her he talked principally about me, his only child. I was then eighteen. So, in his mad mistake, my father had discovered that he was a family man, not some gallant from a Byronic age. In fact, you may recall that Venetia found herself first attracted to me
in absentia
because of the bonfire of talk Harry had built in my honor.

Alongside this need for lightnings, the other main feature of my father’s life drove me craziest of all. Whenever I visited them, I never knew what life-changing scheme to expect. For example, he had put the farm up for sale at least five times, and then withdrawn it at the first offer. Or I’d discover that he’d been buying racehorses, one of life’s more efficient devices for losing money.

Another time he was asking for a government grant to raise a statue to a blind poet who had stayed in our house two centuries earlier. The government, naturally, told him to pay for it himself. That brought on two years of Harry’s vituperation, red-hot letters and white-hot telegrams proclaiming “You disgrace us, sir”—and he once delivered his practiced tirade in full stammering volume to a politician passing by.

He sounds dreadful at my hands—but he wasn’t. Maddening, yes, and unsteady, and impulsive, yet superbly intelligent, and endearing, and funny, and sometimes so aware of his own shortcomings that he could, as he said himself, “Make-make-make God laugh” with tales of his mistakes.

Louise Hopkins MacCarthy, his wife, your grandmother, my dear and beloved mother—as a younger woman she was long and lean, and as neat and tight as a braid, and she took Harry in her stride. It needed many years and many tears to get her past the hurt he’d caused her by running away. And she never again allowed him to be alone with another woman.

His foibles, though, his schemes and opinions, his imagination and his brilliance as a self-sustaining farmer—that was her Harry MacCarthy, and, as far as she was concerned, when that Harry was on parade, there could be no better place than at his side.

By now, long after they’ve gone from the planet, it’s clear to me how their relationship worked. Each thought the other the best person they’d ever met. Their intimacy, a serene and bottomless lake, sent out signals. Touches and glances at breakfast, or at dinner after their Sunday afternoon nap—those two people had a skin-to-skin closeness. Who loved whom the most? I used to think that my mother was the lover and my father the loved; now I’m not so sure.

Children, you knew your grandmother, you got to spend more time with her than with your grandfather. You may not have seen—you may not have been allowed to see—the iron in her. Yes, she felt shattered when her husband ran off. She had no warning—and no precedent, national, local, cultural, or personal. In hard terms, what in God’s name was a middle-aged, settled, respected farmer doing pursuing an itinerant actress from a road show?

Her steel, however, still chills me. And her ferocious instruction: “Go out and bring him back. For me.”

That same morning she fell into a despondence that changed her very appearance, but even as I looked at her face, gray, taut, and strained during those bad days, I also sensed that a river of fire flowed deep inside her. That’s what kept her ferocity intact.

For a time in that fracas they lost everything—their farm, their marriage, their place in the world. And yet she was the one who led their march back to normal life. She never discussed it with me, not in depth; nor did she denigrate him to me.

Nor did I see her make any savage assaults upon his heart; she never, so far as I could see, plucked the strings of his considerable guilt. I suppose she didn’t need to; in a constant mode of making reparations to her, he danced to tunes she never had to play.

My memories of her change every day: her tears of helplessness when laughing, bent double and breathless, often at something my father had said; her urgency to bring baskets of food and fresh linen handkerchiefs to an ill friend; her tact at a frail bedside; her unreachable concentration as she scrubbed her pigs with a long-handled, heavy-bristled broom.

She had little vanity that I saw, yet when she died I found in her possessions more than a dozen kinds of hand cream and as many eyebrow pencils, though my memory holds no recollection of ever having seen a trace of makeup anywhere on that face, with its high cheekbones and ivory skin. Now, as the house appeared around the bend in the avenue, it was her face that rose like the moon in my mind.

My father had a way of scurrying that said, “Embarrassed.” As I climbed out of the car, I saw him do it. In the opposite direction. He crossed the stableyard and went into the house by the scullery door. Not a good sign; he usually hallooed me and came forward, talking already, in full spate, with some story: “Well, do-do-do you know what just happened?” or “Well, we were just-just-just talking about you.”

Now he ran away from me, and I knew he hoped that I hadn’t seen him. I also knew what would happen next: he and my mother would materialize on the front porch and walk out to my car together. When something difficult had to be said, she rode shotgun for him.

As she did now—and my heart plummeted. She embraced me—unusual in itself; this was not a demonstrative woman—while he hung back a little and said nothing.

“What’s wrong?”

“I’d say that ‘wrong’ isn’t the right-right-right word.” He beat her to it. “In fact, ‘right’ may very well be the right-right-right word. Heh-heh.”

Her face and eyes offered calm. “Come on in, Ben. When did you eat?” But she stopped in the hallway, put her hand on my arm, and said, “We’ve sold up.” He walked on.

“You what?”

He turned back. “We-we-we got a great price,” he said.

“Here?” I asked. “Not Ballycarron?” We had a second farm run by a manager.

“Both,” she said. “We sold both.”

They knew that I had no interest in carrying on the farm. The place would have given me too much pain. My memories of Goldenfields remained too imbued with recollections of Venetia, and our meeting in the woods, and my young husbandhood. Yet when they told me, the breath left my body, and tears surprised my eyes.

My father walked away, embarrassment daubing his face red. Mother stood in front of me, anxious and waiting.

“He can’t do it anymore, Ben. He’s not up to it.”

My first words, as I look back, still appall me. “But where will I stay?” I wailed. “Where will I go? I have nowhere else.”

Unbeknownst to myself, I had defined the word “home.”

Mother gave me a timeline. I agreed to come back for the auction of the effects and contents. The house still contained many of my childhood treasures. And their new abode had a small guest room. “Anytime, Ben. For as often and as long as you ever need.”

But that old and sometimes gilded life of mine was over, and I knew it.

My father never raised the subject with me. I stayed for two nights, the three of us ate our meals together, and the sale details never fell from his lips. I, perhaps sadistically, didn’t mention it either. Or perhaps the weight around my heart felt too heavy.

I left in the middle of a bright morning, promising to come back in good time for the auction. As Mother walked me to the car, she said in the tone of a confidante, “Do you know that she’s back?”

“Who told you?”

“Everybody around here went to see the show. Except your father.” She half-chuckled. I said nothing. We walked on.

By the car door, Mother took my arm, her typical move with grave issues.

“Ben, he hits her. That fellow she’s with.”

I looked at her with eyes of stone.

“Mother, what are you talking about?”

“Ally Carroll’s sister has a bed-and-breakfast in Mitchelstown. They stayed there. The police were called. She had a broken rib. He’s a drinker.”

For the next two hours I paced by the river.
A small guest room? No! I’m not seeing the water. I’m not looking for the flights of the birds. The children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the birds I first learned
to love here. Now I’ll be a bird, too, a bird of passage. He hits her. He broke her rib. How often do I have to be told? Failed again
.

As depression swept in like a tide of sludge, I took one last look at the house. Seen from the river, the chimneys stand up through the trees. That’s the view I knew best, the view that had given me security and the lessons in how to be free of it, the view that still means the most to me in the world.

In my earlier days, after such a painful time, and wearing a huge sense of loss, I’d have avoided people; I’d have sought quiet places such as woodlands or mountainsides and wallowed in bleak groves. This form of retreat had a curious side effect, in that I became able to identify the legends I collected with the undulations of the land.

This time, however, I didn’t seek the quiet places; I resumed work, went straight back into collecting, fulfilling the month of appointments I had made.

Indeed, that very day, I found a short tale in the next county. It’s a little piece of mythology that supports what I’ve observed about the connection between legend and landscape. Here it is, as I took it down from a retired farmworker in County Kilkenny (not far from Randall’s house).

Near Mooncoin, where the River Nore has a wide bend, there used to be a thick stand of trees on a height above the water. Long ago, the land was owned by an old Irish family, name of Riordan or O’Riordan. The farm was taken from them by a family of Scottish planters brought in by the English government. Jer Riordan, the oldest son, had to stand there and watch his parents carried out in a cart, the farm they’d worked on all their lives robbed from under them
.

Now Jer Riordan was a quiet fellow, born weak, and not able to fight. So he went up to the man who was taking over the farm, a man by the name of Langden, and says to him, “I’m going to curse your family for five generations
until we get our land back. Whenever you see a deer on that hill over there by the trees, a big buck with fine antlers, then you’ll know that a Langden is going to die.”

The following morning, Mr. Langden got up and went out his front door, and there, across the river, he saw a big stag, with a rack of antlers you could hang vestments on. And then he heard a shout above his head. He looked up and saw his small son waving out the window to him. But the boy leaned too far out and fell down at his father’s feet and broke his little neck and died. That kind of thing happened four more times in a hundred years—and there’s Riordans back on that farm again now
.

As long as I kept moving, I knew I’d begin to feel better. And Jimmy Bermingham wouldn’t find me. Five weeks had gone by since the shooting of Sammy Gilpin—five weeks since I’d shoved Jimmy out of the car in Dundalk, south of the Irish border, the town they’d later call “El Paso.” And then, calmer, resigned, and even making plans in my head, I went to watch the afternoon sunlight dancing through Randall’s long windows.

It was one of those days when a hush hangs everywhere, heavy as cloth. Nobody to be seen on the property, no workmen in the fields, no housemaid cleaning the brasses on the front door. The lake spread long and lovely, blue satin, to the tall red reeds on the far bank. I parked the car on the terrace.