The Last Storyteller (5 page)

At a later time, I asked Mr. O’Neill where he had learned his trade. He gave me a curt answer: “It’s not a trade, it’s an art.”

I could tell that he had read Homer. Where Homer repeats phrases such as “Dawn came with rosy fingers,” he, in that first story, repeated three or four times, “Finn MacCool, the greatest man who ever lived,” and “The world took its turns, as the world always does.” I once noted down some tales from a man up in Mayo, out in the wilds of Bangor Erris, who repeated the phrase, no matter what the story, “Now a woman would never say that, especially a woman who had chickens to feed.”

They did it, those ancient storytellers, to give our minds—and their voices—a tiny respite. Mr. O’Neill (his name, he said, means “descended from champions”) followed his recurring phrases with a little pause: to fill a pipe, throw a log on the fire, or rub down fresh tobacco with the heel of his hand. And when he’d finished, we neither of us spoke until a log shifted in the fire and broke the spell. I thanked him—and my few words sounded meager.

He stood with me outside his door. The moon had reached the west and was quitting the sky.

“I’m glad you got here,” he said.

All my life I have looked for leadership. I am drawn to those who lead, especially if they show a benign nature. By now I knew that I would have done anything for this man, any task he might have set me. I didn’t yet know why.

“Mr. O’Neill, may I come to see you again?”

The pause he took made me panicky:
Have I done something wrong?

Then he spoke: “I think you’ll find that you have to.”

I had no idea that night what he meant; I do now.

Elma Sloane ran her hands through her hair, then slapped them to her face like placards. She moaned without stopping for breath.

“Oh-God-oh-God-oh-God.”

Like a taskmaster I said, “Elma!”

“It’s-all-my-fault-it’s-all-my-fault-it’s-all-my-fault.”

I snapped at her again: “Enough.”

“Ben, turn the car around,” said Jimmy Bermingham, “Cashel hospital.”

No dramatics. No histrionics. Just find a gate and make a calm, three-point turn
.

I’ve always looked beyond the idea of illness to the place of that ailment in the sufferer’s story. For instance, my father kept falling and breaking limbs, and he had made so many missteps in his life. My beloved mother, always timid before the universe, suffered rashes on her face and hands.

I wish I had collected stories to illustrate my theory. Was there some legend—of some king, say, an unaware man with no insight who went blind? My friend Trigger McGowan, he had a sister who criticized him every time she saw him; he married a wife of similarly abusive gifts. And slowly, over the years, Trigger went deaf—for no diagnosable reason. But he could still play the concertina like a genius.

Here, in front of my eyes, my theories rose again. Sitting beside me, with Jimmy Bermingham trying to reach forward and stabilize him, was an old man convulsing within reach of the young girl to whom he had lost his heart.

I drove quickly enough to hurry, slowly enough to handle the rainstorm. Elma’s weeping wasn’t as silent as she thought.
Keep the old gentleman stable. He’s still breathing. Jimmy Bermingham seems remarkably confident
.

“His name is Dan?” he asked Elma Sloane.

“Yes. Dan. Oh God.”

Jimmy said, “Dan, if you can hear me, cough and keep coughing. Cough. Deep breath. Cough. Right?”

“Do you know what you’re doing?” I said.

“Medical student. Nine and a half years.”

Jimmy let go for a moment to stabilize his own crouching position, and the old man’s head swung toward my jaw; spittle flew from his mouth and landed on the back of my hand. He breathed in rasps and gasps.

How many miles to Cashel? Thirty? Twenty? I’ve walked it often enough, I ought to know
.

“Okay, Dan, okay?” Jimmy reclaimed the head, held it straight. “Dan, cough again, right? Keep coughing. Deep breath. Cough. Right?”

Good fortune defused our panic. In the short driveway of a farm I saw an ambulance with its doors open. The paramedics were unloading someone into the farmhouse, hurrying the wheelchair through the rain. I reeled the car off the road.

Minutes later, we were transferring our old gentleman from the car as though he were a frail child.

“Shouldn’t maybe somebody go with him?” Elma asked.

The ambulance driver said, “I know who he is—his niece is a nurse with us in the hospital. He’ll be fine.”

As he closed the door I heard the old gentleman moan, and I knew whose name he called, but I said nothing.

Back in the car, Elma said, “Now look at me. Now look at what I’m after doing.” Weeping openly, she was lost again.

“You did nothing wrong,” said Jimmy Bermingham. He put his arm around her, took out his flashy handkerchief, and wiped her tears. She gave him her face like a child.

I said, “You can’t be responsible for how he feels.”

“But I never led him on,” she said. “This is all my father.”

Don’t tell me that your father is a blacksmith. And that your name isn’t Elma but Emer. And that the old gentleman’s name isn’t Dan but Malachi
.

Jimmy Bermingham said, “We’ll definitely have to hide you now, Elma, won’t we, Ben?”

Silence again. And still came the rain, so heavy that I could have sucked it off the windshield.

Presently I saw from my rearview mirror that Elma had turned her head in against Jimmy’s shoulder and closed her eyes. He tightened his arm around her.

To me she said, “Ben? Is that your name? I don’t know you at all.” She gave that involuntary snuffle that signifies the end of tears.

“Ben collects music and stories for the Folklore Commission up in Dublin, don’t you, Ben? He had a lovely wife one time, and she ran away and left him. And now he’s looking for love.”

He shouldn’t be telling her this. He’s using information from my life to give himself power. I loathe that
.

“Why is everyone too old?” murmured Elma.

Soon the rain began to ease. A lemon-colored light from the watery sun ran like a child across the bogland. Somewhere in that calm after the storm, Jimmy Bermingham leaned across and kissed Elma Sloane, and she made no move away.
Is Jimmy Bermingham a chieftain’s son?

Children, you know the name Randall Duff, don’t you? You’ve seen the photographs: head like a hawk, eyes of fire. And you know that he’s a very fine painter, and you immediately recognize him. You’ve seen two of his canvases on the wall of my workroom. Louise, I think you may have copied one of his pieces in your National Gallery classes.

I asked him once why he mainly painted fish, and he said, “See this lake? I’ve lived my whole life beside it. The Derga River comes into one end, and flows back out the other end—what more could any artist want?”

“Why did they call it the Derga? It doesn’t seem red,” I commented.

“Wait till the sun’s going down,” said Randall.

And when I said to him (this is all recorded in my notebooks), “Why do you use such a style? You paint the fish as if it’s sitting on a platter, or lying on a table, or some clean surface, and then you rub and rub and
rub, and what we see is a faint, gray image of a fish. Why do you do it like that?”

He didn’t answer until late that night, the time when he calls forth the ghosts of his favorite philosophers; Aquinas, Hume, Bishop Berkeley, Voltaire all stand around the fireplace waiting for Randall’s thoughts. And then he said, “I’m trying to get as close as I can to my own existence. There’s a million colors kaleidoscoping inside me, and I’m trying to subdue them to match my actual life. Which is quiet, and rather still. And sometimes bleak. Don’t misunderstand me—that’s how I want to live. So I’m always trying to balance the two things, the excitement of the inner colors against the calm of the lake and the house and all these tall old rooms.”

Randall loved company. He’d had an excellent education, Jesuits and Oxford, and he’d never had to struggle for money, though now the estate was difficult to keep up. All the older men of his father’s time, trusted and respected, had begun to retire or die. The new help, he said, was “shiftless.” And they always wanted more money.

No family—his beloved wife, Callista, had died during their first childbirth. One Sunday, full of whiskey and confidences, he told me, “I went to the hospital with her as a prospective father, and I came home childless and widowed.”

One thing about Randall puzzled me; still does. He always had a dog, and, like me, he preferred big dogs—Bernese mountain, Newfoundland, Irish wolfhound, Great Dane. But their life span rarely exceeds seven, eight, nine years. They often die younger. Yet he gave each successive dog the same name, Callista. So that each time a dog expired—as many did while I knew him—his Callista died all over again. Randall kept no secrets. I could ask him anything. Yet I never managed to inquire why he had established and maintained this mournful cycle.

In the car not far from Duff House, some handiwork commenced between Jimmy and Elma. Elma saw me looking at them in the rearview mirror. She pushed Jimmy’s hand away (but not too far) and said to me, “Ben, you must think I’m awful callous.”

I shook my head and said in my pious way, “We should never judge others.”

Jimmy said, “Ben doesn’t jump to confusions,” and cackled at his own joke.

“But you’ll listen to me, won’t you, Ben, you’ll hear my side of the story, won’t you?” The pleading in her voice almost hurt.

“Let’s get you safe first.” And safe we did get—well, up to a point.

Randall greeted us as though royalty had arrived. Like all people of good breeding, he seemed not one jot put out at three people descending on him unannounced, in teeming rain and howling gale, and asking for beds for the night. Or the week. Or forever.

I loved that wide hall with its large black and white tiles. And that great broad fireplace in which I often stood and looked up the chimney at the stars. Huge logs burned there this stormy day.

Randall blurted, “My, my, what a pretty face!” He kissed Elma’s hand, and she giggled. He then put an arm around Jimmy Bermingham’s shoulders.

“Ben, dear boy, how do you know this rascal?”

Jimmy said, “He’s my friend for life.”

When Randall stroked his beard I knew to expect a pronouncement. He pointed one of those skeletal, paint-stained fingers at me and pronounced, “James, you’ll be lucky to have Ben for a friend. Come on, we’re in the small drawing room.”

Elma and I walked behind them. Randall kept his arm around Jimmy’s shoulders, and they laughed at remarks we couldn’t hear. He owned
a Canaletto, and a small Veronese. As we walked past I showed them—and others—to Elma.

She asked, “Has he a son by any chance?”—and then gasped as we followed Randall and Jimmy though a wide, mahogany doorway.

“If this is the small drawing room,” she said, “what’s the big one like?”

Annette, with red, billowing hair, and plumping out now in her forties, had been with Randall for as long as I’d known him. She appeared with a tray of amber decanters and sparkling glasses. Wind hooted in the chimney, causing the fire to leap and flare. The rain, heavier now, lashed the windows, making the room feel safe.

No, it wasn’t safe. As Annette lowered the tray to a wide, low hassock, one of those crystal tumblers shattered.

I remember thinking,
The knot has come back to my chest? A bigger knot. Is this what I’ve been waiting for? But why? And from where? What have I been waiting for, anyway? Is it my imagination or did John Jacob O’Neill tell me the real-life story of Elma Sloane, a mere day before I witnessed it?

I looked around that beautiful room, puzzling hard.

Elma had just told Randall her age: “I’m twenty next month.”

He was saying, “But you’re so poised” and looking at us, hands spread. And in that dramatic silence of Randall’s speechless wonder, I saw something. Too fast to tell. A brick. A flying brick. Shattered the tall windowpane. Struck the silver drinks tray. Skittled a cut-glass tumbler. The shards fell on the rug like angry diamonds.

Nobody spoke. That’s how we first heard the shouts. Vicious. Even in the distance. Even in the lashing rain. On Elma Sloane’s face the chalk-white fear reappeared.

She whimpered, “Oh, Jesus, they followed us.”

Randall rose to his feet.

Jimmy said, “I’ll stay here with Elma.” He crossed to the sofa and put his arm around her.

Then came the hammering. On the door. Randall strode from the room. I caught up with him just as he opened the great front door. Outside, two tall lumps of men backed away. Both shouted. One of them kicked the rear fender of my car. The other had a shotgun.

“What are they saying?” Randall asked me.

“It’s just yelling.”

“The habitual eloquence of the lout,” said Randall. “What do you want?” he called.

“Where is she?” one of the men shouted.

Randall called, “Who?”

“You know who.”

Randall stepped out of the house and moved toward where they stood. Rain slanted across him. He walked tall and slowly, like an old high priest. To the men he made a “calm down” gesture, pressing the flat palms of his hands downward.

The rough pair stepped back a little farther. I watched.
How did they get here? No car. Or did they park it down the avenue?

Each man was bigger than me. Each one shabby. Thuggish. The one with the gun cocked and aimed it. He had old-fashioned whiskers, jet-black hair slanting in thick wedges along his cheeks. Randall continued his stately walk, looking at the gun.

The other fellow, the more vocal, had gathered some fist-sized stones at his feet. He picked up one. Threw it the five or six yards between him and Randall. Such aim. The rock hit Randall’s glasses on the left lens. Randall recoiled. Jerked sideways. Then fell.

The men ran away. At the entrance to the avenue that would take them out to the road, one stopped, turned, shook his fist. Shouted what sounded like “We’ll be back.” The gunman fired a shot in the air, and the crack reverberated in echoes across the lake.