The Last Storyteller (25 page)

Only when he had the process under way did he speak again.

“I hear James’s funeral was a grand business.”

“So you didn’t get there yourself?”

“No. I had a Japanese visitor, and he’s afraid of crowds and doesn’t speak English.”

“Most of the government turned out.”

“Was that such a good thing?” said John Jacob O’Neill, and laughed. He concentrated again.

“Now,” he said, “why did you ask me such a question?”

I told him my second experience: first, Ballyneety, followed by the raid on the British convoy at Larne. He went on mixing. I sat, expecting a pronouncement. None came.

When he had mixed and melded and molded, he had created a loose egg of dough. With both hands he raised it from the large yellow bowl and rested it like a patient on a patch of flour that he had sprinkled on the table. There he shaped the dough into a pale flying saucer.

He went to the fireplace and brought to the table a large black pot with three short legs and a long iron handle.

“Did you ever see one of these, Ben?”

I said, “Is it a bastible oven?”

“The very thing.” He lowered the dough cake into the pot, which he then took to the fire. A hook swung from an arm that looked like a little black crane. He suspended the pot from the hook, and satisfied himself that the pot hung at the most suitable height. From beneath the burning logs he then plucked, with a long pair of tongs, several glowing embers, which he distributed all over the lid of the pot. He would do that many times, as they burned out.

“It’s not true,” he said eventually, “that a watched pot never boils. It certainly bakes.” And then he told me a new story, quite short, about a haunting, but of a kind I had never heard before.

I was in Macao. Have you ever been to China, Ben? Macao is a tough old town. It gets all the flotsam and jetsam, all the dross of the South China Sea, and therefore it’s a great place for sailors and their stories and people who get lost. There’s a quarter of a million people packed tight into that old town. It’s a place of shadows and knives and people who weep
.

My story is about a woman who called me from a doorway as I walked by. The time was two o’clock in the afternoon. I was wearing a white suit and a Panama hat
.

She said to me, “Come here, stranger, come over here.”

I walked to her door, and she said, “Come in, stranger, come in here.” In I went, and she said, “Sit down, stranger, sit down here.” And I sat down
.

“Did you see a man up there on the street,” she said, “a sad man, with a long mustache drooping down?”

I had seen such a man, so I said, yes, I saw him, and yes, he did indeed look sad
.

“That man,” she said, “is haunted by a ghost. A ghost that comes to him every night.”

She said to me, “Move closer. Not everybody’s ears are pure enough to receive what I’m about to tell you.”

Truth be known, my own ears struggled a little. Her dialect lacked the music that had helped me learn the easier ways of Mandarin, and a few more of the Chinese languages. There are three hundred of them, but don’t we all have to smile and frown, language or no language?

So I moved closer, because she also directed me; she had fingers of ivory, long and tapering, and her fingernails curved a little in their length, and she had rubbed a kind of rosewood paint on them, so that they seemed like little flowers on long stems
.

As I looked at her, I began to perceive that whatever her age—and it’s difficult to tell with some Chinese people; she could have been sixty or ninety—she had retained a remarkable beauty. Imagine a small face, of a
kind you might see painted on a jar from a faraway dynasty, or on a doll for an emperor’s daughter
.

In truth, she might have been Japanese, though when I later asked her if that was possible, she gave me an answer as blunt as it was brief, I can tell you. And she wore her hair in a great, thick cascade around her head and neck, to her cheeks on both sides
.

I complimented her on her beauty, and she looked at me as though I suffered from fits of idiocy. As calm as candlelight she pursued her theme, and told me the story of the haunting. I believe I have remembered it much as she told me, although you, Ben, must, of course, suffer my translation. I’ll speak now as she spoke. Am I going too fast for your notes?

I shook my head; I wanted to say that the translation didn’t matter, since I spoke none of the three hundred languages of China and thought that the word “mandarin” signified either a dignitary or an orange—but I would have cut out my tongue rather than interrupt him.

Here she is speaking: We have had pirates for centuries in the South China Sea. Macao being a port, they come ashore here when the fruits of the shipping fail, as they do from time to time. One year, when all the big vessels and the rich cargo freighters were keeping away from the South China Sea, a pirate named Wong Kiu came ashore
[I asked him to spell it].
Wong Kiu had so much power and seemed so frightening that not even the dogs would bark at him
.

From his ship, he swaggered along the quays as you’d expect a pirate to swagger, with his drooping mustache and a black bandanna around his head, his knife in his belt. Behind him walked his pirate crew, the cutthroats everybody imagines pirates to be. They commandeered provisions here, liquor there, tobacco and cigarettes somewhere else, grabbed girls and kissed them, and when they had supervised the carrying of all their contraband goods back to their ship, Wong Kiu decided to give his men a drink
.

Down on the port there was an old tavern whose name when translated from the Chinese means “Time to Rest from the Sea,” and they made for this place. Now, the tavern was closed for business that day because the owner was giving his daughter her wedding party. Wong Kiu and his pirates knocked on the door and were waved away, like everybody else who tried to get in. The pirates, though, unlike everybody else, kicked down the door
.

A hundred and one people, the luckiest number, were attending the wedding, and most of them knew who Wong Kiu was: the most feared buccaneer
on the sea, whose ships came like arrows out of Bias Bay. The owner, a decent man, and prudent, explained that it was his daughter’s wedding, but that the pirates were welcome to stay and have a drink. Instead, Wong Kiu saw, over the owner’s shoulder, the bride. She had flowers in her hair and looked as pretty as the summer
.

Wong Kiu walked over to the girl, took her by the wrist, and dragged her from the wedding. His pirate gang followed. Not one man, not a single one, of all the men there that day attempted to stop him, not even the bridegroom, a big, hefty fellow. He just stood there, weeping
.

They took the bride to the pirate ship, and they sailed away with her. Her husband languished ashore. Oh, yes, he went to the authorities, but they told him that they could do nothing, and that unless he were to charter a shipload of even more bloodthirsty pirates, there was no chance that they could see of him ever getting back his bride
.

A few days later, a messenger came to the bridegroom’s door. He gave the weak fellow a package. It contained the left ear of his bride, with a note from Wong Kiu: “You need not mourn. Now she is not so beautiful anymore. She will be my servant for the rest of her life.”

Again the authorities said they couldn’t help. And again the bridegroom, who could well have afforded it, did nothing—he didn’t charter a ship and muster his own pirate gang. And his bride, the prettiest girl on the coast of the South China Sea, was never again seen in the port of Macao
.

Or was she? The bridegroom grew old and sad, as weak and indecisive men do. As his energies declined, so did his industries. He took to sitting on the street corner, hoping to see his bride one day, hoping that she would come back to find him
.

Did she? He said she did; he said that she had begun to haunt him, that every night she came to him in dreams, that she stood across the street from him and called to him, but that he could never hear what she was saying. And so he sits where you saw him, sad and despondent, and I expect that you will now go and look at him again, now that you know his story
.

Throughout his telling, John Jacob tended his baking. He refurbished the fire, and heaped its new embers on the lid of the bastible pot. More than once he took his great watch from his vest pocket and checked the time.

Again my eyes devoured him. He had indeed lost no height on account of age; my first impression had remained accurate. And the quality of his clothes: certainly he dressed like an Irish countryman, as did my father, in tweeds and brogues, but not even Harry MacCarthy, who believed, he said, “in put-put-putting money on my back,” had as good a tailor. Or taste; this man dressed like an aristocrat.

That day, he wore a three-piece suit of brown herringbone tweed, a silver watch chain, a shirt of soft gray wool, and a cream tie with brown pheasants. In his breast pocket he wore a great gray handkerchief with white polka dots. And, over thick-knit gray socks, brown brogue shoes with enough strength to march him to Antarctica.

“The funny thing is,” he said, as he sat down one last time, “I have a story that was told to me in North Clare, up near Ballyvaughan, that has all the echoes of that story. About a woman who was kidnapped the week after her own wedding and taken out to sea, where she lived on a fishing boat for the rest of her life. Never came ashore. Never wanted to come ashore. And when she was an old woman and they brought her to the hospital in Galway, and the nurses got to talking to her and one nurse began to realize who the woman was, she asked her about having been kidnapped and why she didn’t ever want to come ashore, and the woman said that she’d always been waiting for her bridegroom to come and get her.

“And you find that kind of motif in stories all over the world. Although the other one is the more common—the girl being married against her will, and her true love gallops into the church or the castle and whips her up onto his saddle and they ride away, happy ever after. I
have dozens of those stories. And I was in a village in Sweden one year where they assured me that the very same thing had happened there the year before.”

Those bushy white eyebrows—he looked like a cartoon professor.

“Mr. O’Neill, why did you select that tale now? Out of all the stories you could have told me?”

“Didn’t James teach you? ‘Never ask the poet, always ask the poem. Never ask the painter, always ask the picture. Never ask the storyteller, always ask the story.’ ” He rose from his chair. “I think our staff of life is ready.”

He took the bread from the oven, stuck a knife in it, peered at the blade, and smiled. Then he turned to me and said, “The Macao story didn’t end there.”

I had put away my notebook; I retrieved it.

“Was there a ghost?” I asked.

“I’m glad you believe in them.” He shook his head. “I can’t say. Tell me what you think.” He smiled at the puzzled look on my face and completed his story:

I thanked her for her tale and rose to take my leave. There was a red sun going down into the water. She said to me, “Will you?” I looked as though I didn’t know what she was talking about, and I said, “Will I what?” She said, “Will you now go and look at the sad man?” and I said that I didn’t see how my curiosity could be stopped. She held up a hand to halt me, she leaned forward into the fullness of the light, and she pushed her hair to one side to show where she had lost an ear
.

We ate the bread, with butter and honey melting on it. I complimented him—and tried to drag him back to the Macao story and his reason for telling me.

“James didn’t tell me,” he said, “about your tenacity.”

“You find me tenacious, Mr. O’Neill?”

“I think you should now begin calling me ‘John Jacob,’ ” he said. “After all, we’re not going to fall out.”

I wanted to say “Thank you” but couldn’t find the words. So I ate some more bread.

“This is delicious.”

“Good,” he said.

We cleared the dishes from the long table in the kitchen. In the renovation of the house he had kept the more aggressively modern sights away from the traditional. The sink, the electric stove, and all other such conveniences lived in a scullery, what he called “the back kitchen.” Together we washed and dried cups and plates and knives with butter and honey on them, and I felt so comfortable beside him.

“Macao,” I said, thinking aloud. “And you speak Chinese. And I don’t.”

“But you know a special language,” he said.

“English. Like everyone. And I still have a lot of my Irish.”

“No,” he said. “Always look to the words. And the great language that you know is
seanchas
.” He pronounced it twice; the second time he dragged it out: shan-a-kuss. “It means ‘knowledge of the old ways.’ That’s a language unto itself.”

“Hence, naturally,” I offered. “
Seanchai
—shan-a-key. One who knows the old ways.”

He laughed. “Others give it different nuances.”

Controls fail. Even my delay mechanism crashes. And then I drink. Hard. Unless I can grab myself in time. I came away from his house with two reactions: annoyance and fear. The old sorcerer—he had bamboozled me again. How did he know the life I was living?

When good advice makes you afraid, you’re in trouble. James’s mantra came hurtling back:
Stories are where you go to look for the truth of your own life
.

The tale of Macao had splayed me. John Jacob O’Neill had just told me a story about a weak man who wouldn’t or couldn’t reclaim the woman he loved. I needed help. But from whom? Following a blind instinct, I drove to Dublin and knocked on a door.

“Have you been expecting me?”

She said, “No,” but the word had some room in it.

“Meaning?”

“You didn’t ask me if I’m surprised,” she said.

“All right. Are you surprised?”