The Last Storyteller (15 page)

And so we would talk, every time we met. Mostly, in recent years, we met in Miss Fay’s kitchen, with her slinging in toothy observations from across the floor by the stove.

That night I would go to bed, regretting once again that James had retired, and that the Irish countryside no longer got the visitations of his great wisdom, from which so many people—they told me themselves—had benefited so much and so often.

Now I pushed the door of the bedroom with care and in silence. The doctor, blond as a young Viking, sat on the edge of the bed; the nurse, firm and starched, prowled.

James had been raised on the pillows, and even from the doorway I could hear that rasp that I so hated from his battered chest. His eyes were closed and his hands were joined, as if he were already making the undertaker’s job less difficult.

Miss Fay whispered to the doctor, “He’s here. Is James awake?”

The nurse looked at me, then reached in and stroked James’s hands.

“Your son is here,” she said. “What’s his name, James?”

James, scarcely able to breathe, said, “His name is Ben.”

The nurse and the doctor both beckoned to me at the same time, and I walked around the nurse, reached in, and laid my hands on James’s folded hands.

“What are you doing?” I said. “I come all the way up from Limerick to see you, and this is what I find.”

“I’ve decided to travel on, Ben,” said James, and he opened his eyes.

“Not your best decision, James.”

“What are you complaining about? I waited for you. How’s the road?”

I said, “Up and down.”

He tried to laugh; that was our old joke.

“Wouldn’t we have the finest job if it wasn’t for the hills,” James used to say. “And the hills would be fine if it wasn’t for the hollows.”

The effort to laugh nailed him. He laid his head to one side and stopped. But his fingers tightened on mine, and I knew that I would be there, in that position, for several more minutes. So did Miss Fay, and she brought a chair from the far side of the room. I sat down and James said no more. Ever again.

The skin on his face had become rice paper. Thin lines I had never seen before ran down his cheekbones, small, ice-blue veins. His hair, dense as scrub, stood up, as uncombed as ever. Against the pallor of the skin, the insides of his nostrils seemed almost to glow red. And I saw, not for the first time, his deerlike eyelashes.

It’s fair to say that I had long envisaged a scene such as this: James at last beaten back by the poor respiration he’d had since infancy; and we know nowadays that his sixty cigarettes a day didn’t help.

I had long planned all kinds of words for this occasion.

“James, tell me what I should be collecting.”

“James, are there great untold stories in the countryside that I should now be looking for?”

“James, tell me how to run the rest of my life without you.”

Within those imagined sentences lurked slices of our history together. James was the one who had sent me on the road, who had first directed me into a world where people had strange and interesting chores, habits handed down through generations of their families, family cures efficacious for all kinds of ailments. James was the one who from time to time told me a great legend or a major slice of mythology that he had uncovered in some corner of some parish in some remote county somewhere in Ireland. Notably, he usually revealed it to me after he himself had collected it; however kind, James did not allow sentimentality to interfere with his competitiveness.

As for running the rest of my life without him, if I’d stopped to think about it I wouldn’t have been able to do it. Knowing James was like walking down a staircase; hesitate—that is to say, imagine what life would be like without him—and you fall.

Time stood still in that room. Forgive the cliché, but that seems to me a truth that has stayed with me ever since. Four people, two of whom he loved and who loved him, Miss Fay and I, and two who were clearly impressed by him, the nurse and the doctor, stayed with James Clare until he quit the planet. We should all go like that.

He scarcely had enough breath to address the effort of dying. No movement came from him; now and then his throat rasped, or his head lolled into an uncomfortable position and was righted by the nurse. Miss Fay came around to the other side of the bed and laid her hands on top of mine, on top of his.

It seems to be the case that we have no rational thoughts at such moments. I was aware that something fabulously important was happening to me, but I feared too much the selfishness of the thought. And yet, I should have given the idea free rein, because I was losing one of the major components of my life, inside and out. From the moment he
heard what had happened to Venetia, and how brutal had seemed the kidnapping, and how savagely our young, innocent lives had been wrecked, James had watched over me. No parent, no teacher, no priest could have been more vigilant.

I’ve known all my life the fabled difficulty of defining the precise, the exact moment of death. How we debated it in religion classes in school! When does the soul leave the body? How long may a soul linger here on earth? By and large, we were taught that the soul continues to dwell in the fading cadaver for up to twenty-four hours. Who determined that span of time has always been a puzzle to me, and it produced enjoyable debate. Now, though, I found myself unable to say the precise moment at which James left us, taking his great, informed soul with him.

Miss Fay, however, knew exactly. She withdrew her hands from mine and cupped James’s face. Then she leaned in and kissed the dry line of his mouth, and pressed her forehead to his.

“Dear man. Dear man.” She said it over and over. “My dear man. My dear, dear man.”

For the next several hours—no, years—Miss Fay and I sat in that room, on side-by-side chairs. We said little; we ate nothing; we drank water. Eventually, Miss Fay remarked that we should get some sleep.

I rose; she reached for my hand.

“Ben, what do we do now? The two of us?”

Frozen to her chair, she removed her spectacles; I had never seen her without them, and the nakedness shocked me. So alone did she travel into her grief that, when she waved me away, I did exactly as she wished and went to what they’d both called “Ben’s room.”

And by the way, it is true that somebody’s death can change your life forever. It was Christmas Day.

James Clare is buried on a hillside overlooking the sea at a place named Howth (rhymes with “oath”), north of Dublin. He chose the place himself, Dora Fay told me: “He said, ‘History and mythology meet there.’ ”

The cemetery slants up along the hill, and on a clear day, especially in the diamond brightness of a frosty morning, I can see its whitened stones like a mouthful of small teeth across Dublin Bay from my front door. I’m pleased to be within sight of James’s last resting place.

Thousands of people turned out. Dublin had no traffic problems in those days—not enough cars—but for James’s farewell they bought, they hired, they begged and borrowed. Most came from distant counties, by bus, by train, by car, some on bicycles. Every taxi in the city, it was said, disappeared that day, following the hearse along the road by the sea north of the city.

At the neck of land they call Sutton Cross, the funeral stopped. Everybody climbed out of every conveyance, and for the last few miles we walked behind a lone piper. Hundreds of men took turns carrying the coffin. They made changeovers so smooth that not a pace did we misstep.

When my pall-bearing stint was done, I slowed down to let Miss Fay catch up with me. She was the only female member of the cortege; in Dublin, the women tended not to go to the graveyard, but try telling that to Dora Fay. She wore a deep black veil that fell from her hat.

“If he could only see it,” she said. After a pause she added, “And thank you for not saying something stupid and platitudinous like ‘I’m sure he’s watching.’ ”

The name “Howth” derived from the Scandinavian, from the Viking settlers who lived here in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries, and meant simply a headland or clifflike promontory.

We climbed up the slope, stumbling among bleached headstones. Ahead stood a crippled tree, also white as bones. We stork-stepped over
the old mounds until we reached the brown grave where men still dug, their heads level with our feet.

I looked back at the road to Dublin. And nudged Miss Fay. For miles behind us stretched a long line of people, a tapering black snake.

“But they’ll not all get in here,” she fretted, anxious in her courtesy.

“The piper will stay until everybody has visited,” I said. I’d been to funerals like this in the north and west.

“Then so will we,” she said. “I have something to say to you, Ben, and this is the place to say it.”

With my head bowed toward her, I waited. Nobody as yet had come to stand near us.

“James always wanted you to go back to Venetia.”

I said, “I know.”

“She’s in Dublin. I’ve seen the posters.”

“In the Olympia Theatre.”

“Why don’t you go, Ben?”

Never did I encounter a circumstance where it felt possible not to answer Dora Fay. I always spoke candidly to her—partly out of fear of her disapproval, but wholly to honor the deep role she played in my life.

Now I answered, “I’m afraid.”

“Of?” The one-word question—always her best shot.

“I’m not sure.”

“Then look for sureness. Find the true reason.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because you won’t find it. There is no reason. James said you were a natural couple.”

Why now, at such a moment? Why whisper this monumental thought over the deep rectangular hole in the ground that would shortly receive the body of her best beloved, the man of whom she’d once said to me, “I have only one god”?

“But I so wrecked my chances in Florida.”

How that meeting haunted me. And, children, your mother had never looked more wondrous, and I, who had tracked her to Jacksonville, and had stalked her along the wide, wide sands, and watched her swim in the ocean, and then had come face-to-face with her, my heart pounding in my ears, couldn’t stay and listen to what she so frantically wanted me to hear.

“There’s no such thing as a wrecked chance with someone who loves you,” Dora Fay said.

“But I stormed off. Full of my own injury.”

“Yes, and the fact that you know you did—that enables you not to do it again. What did James say to you one night long ago in my kitchen?”

“He said so many things.”

“I mean about fear.”

I remembered and smiled. “When you’re afraid, stand on your tippy toes—in your mind as well as your boots.” She murmured the final sentence with me: “Make yourself taller and the fear will be afraid of you.”

The priest and the acolytes arrived, in their black soutanes and white surplices.

“Oh, and there’s this,” Miss Fay told me. “James said you’d read it well.” She pulled a sheet of paper from her pocket, her pointed nose now wind-tipped to blue. “It was his favorite piece that he’d ever collected.”

The piper ceased. Voices rose and fell in the muttered and stuttered litanies of obsequy. Some of the prayers ran away with the breeze. Dipping a round-knobbed silver pestle into a small silver bucket, the priest scattered holy water on the coffin. Now the loss began to bite.

Miss Fay tightened her hand on my arm. We had one last chanted incantation, one last attempt to persuade “the Almighty to welcome the soul of thy humble servant, James Clare”—who’d been nobody’s servant and never humble. The priest stepped back, Miss Fay nudged me, and I opened my mouth to speak.

To my surprise, my throat and my lips worked. I heard myself say, “James had one famous and favorite piece of folklore that he collected, and I’ll read it now; it’s very short.”

Eyes blue as flowers, eyebrows blue-black and shining bright as the shell of a beetle, teeth as twin rows of pearls in her mouth, gold abundant hair woven into two tresses, each tress woven into strands, the point of each strand rounded by a little golden ball. Eyes dancing like stars. Each cheek glowing rosy as the berries of the rowan tree, lips gleaming red, each slender arm white as the may blossom, shoulders soft and high and white, wrists tender, polished, and white, nails pink and delicate. Neck arching long as a swan’s and smooth as silk and white as the foam of a wave, thighs smooth and creamy, legs as true as a carpenter’s measure, feet slim and dainty and white. Such
was the beauty of the beautiful Princess Etain. And so we celebrate the beauty of the world, and beauty has no time limits
.

I finished, and, all around me, people nodded their heads and I could almost hear them say, “Yes, that was James, all right.”

Miss Fay said, “Well done.” She tightened her grip on my arm. “He gave me that after one year together. He said it made him think of me.”

I folded the paper.

Miss Fay murmured, “Keep your eyes closed and your head down. Do you know why?”

“Respect?” I said.

“There’s more to it. At the funeral of a good man, the sky fills with angels. But we don’t look up in case we don’t see them,” said Miss Dora Fay.

I escorted Miss Fay to the university hallway at Earlsfort Terrace. Music, stories, more music. Not too much to drink, just enough for hospitality’s sake, because James, for all his conviviality, for all his ability to get the best stories out of people, felt uncomfortable near too much alcohol.

I didn’t enjoy it much. James’s friends hassled me. It didn’t matter that I’d been doing his job—and my own—for the two previous years, since James had been off the road.

“You’ll never be the man James was.”

“You’re not in James’s league.”

“You’re wet behind the ears.”

“James knew the world.”

How James would have fumed. Miss Fay, when by my side, countered them for me. She didn’t catch the worst of them.

I left the hall to take a break. And heard the voice behind me. “Well now, Captain.”

Uninvited.

“What are you doing here?”

“I’m sorry for your trouble,” he said, using the traditional condolence phrase in Ireland.