The Last Storyteller (24 page)

“Do-do-do you know how much I paid for them?” he said.

We all knew; he told us every week of our lives.

“Yes, Harry,” said Mother.

“I-I-I p-paid three hundred, seventy-five each.” And away he wandered, singing, “Kay-said-off, said-off”; no matter who told him, or how often, that Doris Day was actually singing
Que sera sera, whatever will be will be
, he sang what he heard. He had picked up a few of the other hits too, and mangled them likewise. How did Pat Boone, Perry Como, and Frank Sinatra sleep easy in their beds at night?

Mother surprised me. I had expected melancholy to match my own. No. Skittish and excited, she trotted here and there: “I wonder what we’ll make on the auction?”

“Do you want this?”

“Ben, who should I give this to?”

“That awful vase, your father must have hidden it.”

From cupboards and the tops of closets, we retrieved. Things she’d forgotten she owned. Ancient wedding gifts she’d never used. Useless objects bought by mail. She had a memory for everything and one hundred percent accurate recall. Every item had a story.

As I watched and listened, I felt cheered. I was seeing a woman glad to get away from a farm that had been hard work for many years, and had had one patch of indescribable terror and pain when she’d lost everything. Now I saw a woman fulfilled, and as happy as she might ever have expected to be.

As a teenager, your grandmother drove a neighbor’s cows to be milked. She got to know each cow on a personal basis and spoke to them more than to any humans. That was how she managed her own red-hot shyness.

Harry, my father, your grandfather—he, on the other hand, became
opaque as the sale drew near. Today, long years after his death, I know what that signified: intense depression and disappointment.

In some ways, he had done it again—he had leaped before he looked. Now that all had been settled, he wished he hadn’t. I’m certain that he’d felt the same about Venetia after he spent some weeks on the road with the show—but he couldn’t find a way out of it, no way home.

Oddly, though, he had it right this time. He mightn’t have liked it, but neither he nor she had been cut out for dying in harness. If they’d gone on living there and trying to farm, using as much local hire as they could, their frustrations would have mounted. Perfectionists both, they’d have been distressed beyond endurance by any increasing slowness or infirmity that prevented them from doing the chores they’d always done. Both controlled their own domains and could never have given them over to anybody else.

The morning of the auction dawned clear. On the auctioneer’s instructions, we had closed and locked the eternally open front gate the night before. Yet at half past six, as dawn broke, three men in suits and rich coats stood on our lawn. They’d parked down on the main road and trudged up through the river fields, past the well and by the woodlands.

All English, they made gracious and humorous apologies—and then tried to cut deals for individual items. Their offers, they said, wouldn’t be bested when the sale began. (They lied.) Mother, knowing Father’s propensity for being sold to, took over. She invited them in, and sat them to an early breakfast—in the kitchen, because I had taken so many tables to storage.

Mother made it clear: “No deals; everything goes under the hammer.” The “Three Wise Men,” as they called themselves, relaxed and sang for their breakfast. They vied with great tales: eccentric owners, dream finds—including, they said, a Vermeer in a County Wicklow cottage and a Stradivarius cello in Belfast.

Just before nine o’clock, the auctioneers arrived. An hour later, scores of people surged through the opened gate.

“Gawk-gawk-gawkers,” declared my father, “burn-burn-burning with curiosity to see what we have.” He appointed himself patrolman for the day. “They-they-they’d take the milk out of your tea and come back for the sugar,” he said. And he said it often.

My spirits must have been improving. I must have been getting stronger. Maybe my adventures in the Shannon flood strengthened me. Why do I say this? Because without angst or mood, I emptied my own bedroom bare. Down to the boards. Even unhooked the curtains. So that no feet could trample through, I then locked the door, hid the key, and stuck up a notice: “This room is empty and is closed off to protect it.” Did that mean my old room or my own soul?

We had a day of amazement. So much went for six, ten, or fourteen times above appraisal or expectation. Everybody was bidding. As the crowds grew, it got ridiculous—heated escalations for a wallplate, a pitcher, a watering can.

Mother, nervous and astonished, presided over the day. She walked here, halted there, greeted old friends, recalled past acquaintances, bent to small children like a queen at an orphanage. Which is how she used to inspect her flowers in the garden. The distress I feared never surfaced. Rather, she kept an eye on my father, as though he might be the one who combusted.

Harry, though, held himself together. I watched him, too, and when, late in the afternoon, he wandered off in the direction of the kitchen garden, I followed him at a distance.

I’d been a child spy; I still knew all the places to hide. Where ivy congealed on the walls, some bricks had long broken loose. Through these I could peer into the garden and not be seen. My father went down the seed beds, looking at earth in which he would never again dig.

I gave him several minutes. The wooden garden door had a noisy hinge. He waved and beckoned. His face seemed both strained and flushed.

“Do you think-think-think the new crowd will till it as well as we did, Ben?” he said.

“Are they gardeners?” I hadn’t met them—a family from Carlow, with a horde of children.

“They’ll be able to teach the little ones how to grow radishes,” he said. “Do you re-re-remember?”

I smiled. “And lettuce. And onions.”

“And-and-and you even managed to grow carrots,” he said.

We paused. “Do you see that spot over there?” I pointed. “That’s where you knocked down Mr. Kane.”

“God above! How do you know that?”

I said, “I was hiding up there, behind those black-currant bushes.”

“What? Why?”

I said, “I was afraid you’d get hurt, and I wanted to be ready to run for help—I was too small to attack him.”

He laughed. “I-I-I got him a good one, didn’t I?”

We walked on. Saying nothing. Multiple feelings never to be spoken.

The lower gate led to the meadow adjoining Mr. Treacy’s field.

“Will-will-will you be all right, Ben?”

“I’ll be all right.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Are-are-are you—I mean, will things change for you?”

“Dad, things are always changing.”

He knew what I meant. I knew what he meant. And there we left it.

Back at the auction, Goldenfields was closing down in front of my eyes. People I had never seen before bustled away hugging intimacies from my
life. The large copper pan—how often had I stirred plum jam or apple jelly? Two men carried the mangle. I’d built my childish biceps turning that handle to squeeze the water from the towels, with our housekeeper Large Lily telling me, “That’ll put hairs on your chest.”

Her husband, Billy Moloney, who ran our farmyard, and who couldn’t speak without profanity, came over to where I was standing. I would report to Mother later what he said, and I would make sure to use the euphemism we had long, long ago agreed on.

“The whole thing’s flocked, Ben. And I’m flocked with it. Nothin’ll ever be as flockin’ good again.”

Even though she laughed and laughed—how it touched her.

That night they drove away, Harry MacCarthy and his wife, Louise; they drove all of eight miles to Goold’s Cross, but it might have been to Moscow or Atlanta or Cádiz.

And I? I stayed in a bed-and-breakfast place in Mitchelstown, the first place I’d ever stayed away from home, where I’d lodged when I went looking to bring my father home the day after he ran away with Venetia.

Broken ribs, broken ankle, fractured skull, severe lung infection—did he look shaken? But he still had the seducer’s grin.

“They’re saying to me here, Captain, How did you survive at all? And I says to them, Ah, I have good friends, I have a guardian angel.” He looked at me with his usual cheek. “And I’ve learned how to answer to ‘Liam.’ ”

“I bet that confused you for a while.”

“It wasn’t till someone called me ‘Mr. MacCarthy’ that I figured it out.”

“I said you were my cousin. Our car went into the river.”

“Actually, Ben, it was the river went into our car.”

“You’re in good form—‘Liam,’ ” I said.

“The fellow in the next bed keeps telling me jokes all day.”

“You like jokes.”

“I do, Ben. But his jokes are very bad.”

“What does a bad joke sound like?”

“No. I’m not telling you. It’d make me worse.”

“So—tell me a good joke.” I sat down, put the bunch of grapes I’d brought on his nightstand.

He reflected for a moment, a lock of his black hair making a fat comma on his forehead.

“Okay. I have one. There’s an old farmer. He’s out in his field looking at his cattle, he’s smoking his pipe leaning on a gate, and he hears a little voice saying, ‘Help me. Sir! Please help me.’ “I laughed; Jimmy mimicking a small voice was, in itself, sidesplitting. “The farmer looks everywhere and finally, as the voice keeps calling, he looks down and he sees this frog on a clump of grass near his feet. And sure enough, ’tis the frog that’s talking.

“So he bends down and he picks it up and the frog says, ‘Sir! Kiss me and you’ll discover wonders. I’m actually a beautiful young girl who was trapped in a spell by my cruel and jealous stepmother. In true life I am tall and slender and eternally loyal, and if you kiss me and restore me to human form I will be your loyal and loving and very beautiful companion for life.’

“So the farmer takes the pipe out his mouth and says, ‘Would you mind repeating all that?’ And the frog says, ‘One kiss. That’s all it’ll take, and I’ll be your adoring love, always young, to take care of you forever.’

“The farmer says, ‘One kiss?’ The frog says, ‘One kiss,’ its little eyes bulging, its little green chest heaving. And the farmer says, ‘And that’s all?’ And the frog says, ‘That’s all.’ So the farmer thinks for a minute and then says, ‘D’you know what? At this age of my life I’d rather have a talking frog.’ And he puts the frog in his pocket and goes on smoking his pipe.”

A nurse came by and said, “Shush!” When I’d stopped laughing, I had an idea.

“What are you going to do when you get out of here—‘Liam’?”

He said, “I was hoping you’d drive me to Marian’s. But maybe I can stay with you?”

I said, “My parents have just sold up. I’m homeless.”

We sat quietly for a while.

“Thanks for the grapes,” he said. “I knew you’d come in.”

“Any other visitors?”

“No. I’m sure everybody thinks I got swept away. Which I nearly did.”

“You nearly did.”

“Any idea what happened to the others?”

“I wasn’t exactly looking out for them,” I said.

“Why did you look after me?” Jimmy asked. “Especially after we all threatened you?”

I shrugged. “That’s a stupid question.”

“Well, thanks anyway.”

“Now,” I said, “you have to make your life a good one.”

“Listen to Bishop Ben.”

In acting mode, I pretended to start, as though with a sudden thought. “I have an idea. Randall is very fond of you. And nobody will know you’re there. If you go to Marian’s, you’ll be in Dublin. All those cops.”

I swear that I actually saw his mind working,
click-click-click!
, like the tumblers on a safe being burgled, a lock being picked.

He said again, “Thanks for the grapes.” Jimmy repeated himself when he was thinking. I didn’t draw attention to it. “Will you drive me there? When they let me out?”

I nodded and said, “I have a question.”

He looked at me. “I think I know what it is.”

“What is it?”

“No, Ben, you have to ask it.”

I took a deep breath. “That day, the day of the flood. Would they have killed me?”

He looked away. “No, Ben. They wouldn’t.” But I sensed that he hadn’t finished. And he hadn’t. He said, slow as a funeral, “They wouldn’t have killed you—I would.”

I said nothing. What was there to say?

Did John Jacob O’Neill understand that he’d told me two tales and each had foreshadowed events of which I had later heard? A few moments after I arrived, he decided to bake.

He cleared a quarter of the long table, rapped it with his knuckles, declared it “the Territory,” and laughed. “Now the Right Order.” He assembled his ingredients, one above the other: flour, baking soda, sour milk in a blue-and-white pitcher, eggs, salt, and sugar. “The Weaponry,” he said, and another laugh: sieve, wooden spoon, an old-fashioned scale, a knife, and a large yellow bowl. He fetched an apron, long, wide, and blue, and tied it at his waist in front with the awkward commitment of a little boy tying a shoelace. Into the apron’s cord he stuck a clean dishcloth. “Let Life Commence,” he said and smiled at me.

Before he began to mix he paused and, with fingers touching each item, checked to see that he had everything: the eggs, the flour, the baking soda, the salt cellar, the little sugar bowl (“A Souvenir of Galway”), the sour milk, on which curds floated like tiny blue-white ice floes. Satisfied, he weighed the flour, tipped it into the bowl, and shook the bowl, from side to side. Then he sifted, letting it flow like powdered fog through his fingers. The afternoon light through the window turned the flour to magic dust; he might have been caressing a beloved woman’s long hair.

He made a well in the flour, a deep socket, and lowered in some of the sour milk. Then he cracked the three eggs and dropped them into the milk in the well, and began to mix with the wooden spoon. It looked like a tiny canoe paddle in his large, boyish hands.

Is this why he has no age spots, no liver marks? Because he bakes? And has his hands stuck in ingredients all the time?
Children, do you know how unusual it was in those days to find a countryman in Ireland who cooked and baked?