The Last Storyteller (20 page)

In a gap at the bar I ordered a whiskey. A mistake; whiskey never let me drink slowly. I took it like a shot, up and down, then called for another. Always got up to three or four too fast.

“Hard at it?” asked a man beside me.

“Ah, and why wouldn’t you?” said his friend. “Isn’t the night young?” If Greece may be considered the birthplace of the rhetorical question, call Ireland the country that robbed it of all meaning.

As the harshness of the whiskey kicked in, I felt eyes on me. Hard, keen, focused eyes. As though they knew me. Which they did. Long afterward, I grasped that they had been staring at me for some time.

He’d banked on the fact that I wouldn’t see him in the crowd. When I’d first eased my way forward to ask for a drink at the mile-long bar, he’d stepped back. Hid behind the heads at the far end.

He waited. Cat with mouse. On my fourth whiskey, he moved. Sidling through the throng of men. No women to be seen; maybe they had taken over the snug. I downed the shot. He tapped me on the shoulder.

“Well, hello, Little Boy.”

I turned, belligerent with the liquor. “So it was you?”

“And whatcha doin’ here, Little Boy?”

“Was it you?”

“Aren’t these waters too deep for a little fella?” he said, laughing. Actually laughing.

“Come on, was it?” I asked. “Was it you following me? Or are you ashamed to say?”

“It’ll always be me, Little Boy.” He stood maybe six inches shorter than me but weighed heavier, a chunk of a man. “I told you that, didn’t I? Where you go, there I’ll be. You don’t listen, Little Boy, do you? Shake yourself. Take the wax out of your ears.”

“Go away and leave me alone.”

I turned back to the counter, held up my glass, handed over the cash.

“Did you enjoy the show, did you?”

Ignore him. Look straight ahead. Go slowly on this. Wait. Hold it before drinking. Must gather myself. Clear the head
.

He leaned in close. “She looks good, doesn’t she? Great tits on her. Shame you’ll never get your hands on ’em again.”

Pretending to lift my drink, I swung my elbow in a wide arc and caught him, not hard enough, on the cheekbone. Spilled his drink.

The man beside me, who got jostled a little, said, “Hey, lads, go easy there.”

“Little Boy” jerked his head, and two of the uniformed drinkers rose as one.

“Well now, Little Boy,” said Little Boy, and stepped aside.

The first uniformed man grabbed my hair, the second my collar. No resistance from me. They marched me to the door, which the man in the brown mackintosh opened wide. As they pushed me into the street, Little Boy stepped after me.

“See? See what it’s going to be like?”

He slapped me across the face twice, as though I were a girl. I can remember the rending split between a surge of rage at being humiliated and a leap of anxiety to get away. I lunged at Little Boy but drew back when the uniformed men stepped forward.

“Nighty-night, my little patriot,” said Little Boy. “Don’t let the bugs bite. Except that we will.”

The closing door swallowed them.

Let me rest a moment, after the violence of that memory. Across the bay I can see Howth Head, a slumbering beast. There’s a particular time of day, around four o’clock in the afternoon, when an angle of sunlight falls exactly on the little hill cemetery where we buried James. Nearer to me, the windows in the houses on the top of my hill shine like diamonds.

When the weather gets fine again, I’ll see the children who live up there come out to play. Pleasantly for me, they appear in the midafternoon, home from school. I’ve seen a lot of them lately, because I’ve been here, at my desk, for such long hours. Trying to get it all down. Trying to make sense of it.

I believe that I now have a clear understanding of how it all finally resolved itself. So unpredictable it was, with so much of it so harsh and unexpected.

If you’d asked me before I began to make the notes for this account of
things,
Why do you need to do this? Why recapture all that pain?
, I’d have said,
Look, I loved Venetia from that day we first kissed under the trees at Goldenfields; I’ve already told you that. And I never, never ceased loving her, not for a moment, in all the years apart
. And I’d have clinched my argument with
Who has that happen in their lives? Who gets to experience that drama, that power of feeling?

I’d even have admitted what a fool I’d been in Florida.

Love, though, isn’t strength. That was my greatest error, just as it’s a mistake to confuse kindness with weakness. And it was never enough, children, to mope about your mother. Never enough to say to myself,
But you love her
—and then do less than nothing about it. That was another definition of “weak.” In those days, though, that’s how I was. Like bad music, I seemed to have only two speeds, fast and slow: sudden rage or sad cowardice.

My head hurt where they’d grabbed my hair. My arm throbbed from their grip. My heart cringed at the humiliation. Kicked out into the street.

At about three o’clock in the morning, I got to Miss Fay’s house, a long trudge. Light showed around the kitchen door, and from the hallway I caught the smell of baking: Miss Fay’s insomnia again. If she didn’t sleep, I ate the next day—glorious apple pies, raisin scones, fruitcakes.

She didn’t wish to talk; I knew from her glance.

“If you want to take a bath,” she said, “you won’t wake anybody.”

I soaked for an hour, lost in black, painful thoughts. But I forced them out and made it to the other side and a brighter mood. I decided to get myself right again; in other words, to go back to the place I knew best, the open road.

In the morning, Miss Fay had returned to work. The housekeeper, May, made my breakfast.
Little Boy might not necessarily be following me
.
He’d have been watching the theater because he expected that I might have gone there. Simple as that
.

Into my thoughts broke May, polishing my boots and making nonstop commentary.

“Your feet must be only like an elephant,” she said. “You should be paying rent, boots the size of them. If you ever need to walk on the water, you’ve a right pair of canoes here; they’ll think you’re Jesus all over again, and all you’ll need is a couple of loaves of bread, and was it five fishes he had? You’ll be able to feed the city on that, although nobody in Dublin likes fish. How many holes for your bootlaces, is it ten on each side? You must have rheumatism from bending down to tie them. Isn’t it a good job you went to school and learned the black knot, or you’d be walking around, your laces flapping, and they wrapping theirselves around the ankles of passing strangers and tripping them up, and you’d be getting sued for malicious injury and broken bones.”

James used to call them “May’s monologues,” and we had debated whether we should be noting them down as genuine vernacular.

I sat on after breakfast, planning my next weeks. The Folklore Commission had some cures they wanted me to collect. I wanted to interview a woman near Galway who had been wooed by three brothers. The ghost of a Spanish sailor had been appearing in North Clare. There was a healing stone somewhere in the same area.

By noon I had rearranged all my schedules. I repacked my bags and my car. Several weeks on the road faced me—such a delight, and I would end with John Jacob O’Neill. Perhaps we might reconstruct a week, or at least a few days, of his past life on the road.

But the newspaper arrived, with a headline shouting, “
THREE MEN KILLED IN BORDER ATTACK
.
” In an instant, not quite knowing why, I altered my plans.

The director of the Folklore Commission knew how much I liked the road. I think he liked me, too; he had paid me some compliments. My report “Matchmaking in Rural Ireland” had gone down well, which had helped his annual budget deal with the government. And I was James’s protégé.

After the necessary conversation—the funeral, the obituaries, James’s history in the field—the director sat back and listened. He had boot-brush eyebrows and smoked a pipe big as a toilet, incongruous for a man so small. Without filling in too many details—such as the presence in my life of Little Boy—I outlined the idea that had sent me hot-footed to him. He listened—that was his greatest asset; he made one feel well regarded. And then he summarized:

“I agree with you that what’s happening has an element of interest for us. But it’s awkward. I think you should take your planned trip now. But if you bumped into one of the two funerals—I see from the newspapers that they’re being held tomorrow—that’d be fine. We might not need these records to appear for years. In fact, we won’t ask for any reports from you on this topic. Don’t break the law. I can’t give you any official papers—by which I mean I can’t give you a letter saying, ‘Ben MacCarthy is covering this campaign of violence along the border on behalf of the Irish Folklore Commission,’ can I?” He smiled at his own irony.

He counted on his fingers. “Read every newspaper report. Make your own assessments as to what you can and cannot research. Note down what’s safe to observe. Be more discreet than you ever imagined possible. And keep us out of it.”

As I left, I asked him, “What would James say?”

He laughed. “James could be a bit nefarious himself when he wanted to be.”

And so I changed course. I went back to Miss Fay’s with as many different
newspapers as I could find. All day long I read. Measuring what was happening. Trying to see where I could work. I told myself,
If you can prove that your interests are objective, you’ll keep yourself from harm
. And now I had something powerful that I needed: the moral backing of my own job.

I’ll summarize it for you. “Three Men Killed in Border Attack” rescued me. I saw a way out. Make official a record of this new political violence. Somebody should do it. Excellent alibi; I felt that I had hit something of a jackpot.

First, it kept me safe. From all sides. To the police I had an official role, like a journalist, and to the activists I was recording their effort. Second, I placed a prime value on the idea of “records”: notated observations of the life of my country as seen from the fireside, from the kitchen chair. That’s where you discerned the shape of a nation, the history and the dreams. Now I had made it the instrument of my safety. Or so I hoped.

The three deaths took place on the night of New Year’s Day 1957. One man was a police officer, and two came from the south, both of them Irish republican activists carrying guns. A raid on a police barracks in County Fermanagh collapsed. Doorstep bombs didn’t explode. Police opened unexpected fire and hampered the attackers’ escape.

The two IRA men became heroes and martyrs. In front of its own eyes, the country’s emotions changed. This had happened before. When the rebellion of Easter 1916 broke out, the public jeered the insurgents and threw cabbages at their marching columns in Dublin. But some weeks later, when fifteen of the leaders were summarily executed, opinion swung one hundred and eighty degrees, and thus did the Easter Rising become Ireland’s most iconic moment of history.

One headline said, “
TWO DEAD RAIDERS IDENTIFIED
,
” and reported
them as “Feargal O’Hanlon of Park St., Monaghan, and Sean South, Henry St., Limerick. Yesterday their bodies lay in the Royal Ulster Constabulary barracks in Enniskillen.”

On the next page, the fashion reporters of the wire services listed “eight of the world’s best-dressed women according to the New York Dress Institute. Heading the poll was Mrs. William Paley; the Duchess of Windsor second, Princess Grace of Monaco, third.” Also-rans included Marlene Dietrich and Audrey Hepburn.

Such was the life of the moment.

The newspapers were forecasting huge attendances at the funerals of O’Hanlon, aged twenty, from Ballybay, County Monaghan, and South, aged twenty-eight, from Garryowen, in Limerick.

And then I tightened my focus to a paragraph lower down.
What?!

Alongside a speech condemning the IRA action by the Irish premier, Mr. Costello, ran a report stating that “several men, believed to have been involved in the raid, had been treated for injuries in the Mater Hospital, Dublin. One of them had discharged himself, although rumors that he had disguised himself as a woman in order to leave the hospital could not be confirmed. The police continued to question the others.”

Of course it’s Jimmy. Must be! Who else would do it? I can see Jimmy in a skirt; he certainly has the figure for it. Won’t Randall chuckle? And don’t I need to record this?

Here, from 7 January 1957, is one newspaper report:

My instincts felt right. Something was again happening down among the people: note the “business premises” draped with black. Maisie had said it. It wasn’t over. For many people, especially in the southern counties, the War of Independence had never ended.

Their long memories still held fast to the dispossessions and humiliations of occupation, the loss of land, the servile roles. They, too, were the people who had believed in rejecting a border; they, more than most, had said, “Fight on.”