The Last Storyteller (43 page)

The next morning I returned to my roofing. At about noon I heard an engine. Determined. Not a sightseer. Not again! A different car stopped on the road outside, and another man in a suit came and stood in my gateway. He looked up at me, watched me for several minutes, then went and sat on the fence across the road, where he lit a cigarette and observed my work.

When I needed to come down, I walked across the road to him.

“May I help you?” He dragged on another cigarette, his third, and looked at me, then looked away. “Is there something I can do for you?”

He didn’t even bother to glance at me again.

All day he sat there, until long after darkness had fallen. Then I heard his engine roar into life, and he drove away—to be replaced minutes later by a different car. It sat outside the house all night. Last thing before I went to bed I saw the glow of the cigarette behind his window. In the morning, with the car still in place, a man walked up and down outside the gate. At eight o’clock he drove away, as another car arrived.

Two hours later, I went to get the newspaper and some groceries. As
I drove from the house, the car followed me. When I reached the shops, the car stopped behind me. In the shop, the car driver stood behind me. When I drove back, I saw him in my rearview mirror. He, too, stayed until night had fallen, and he, too, was replaced.

This procedure lasted three weeks. Wherever I went, they went. To the hospital to see Miss Fay. To the builders’ supply yard to buy planks and cement. To the newspaper shop every day. Did I panic? No. I saw this as part of my punishment, and I accepted it.

It all twisted again. At the evening changeover, the new car brought three men, none of whom I had seen before. Different, tougher fellows. They grabbed me in a way the others hadn’t. Had fewer compunctions. And a new plan.

They blindfolded me. I had no idea where they meant to take me, and I never found out. The journey lasted under an hour, ended in a tall, anonymous old room.

They sat me on a bench in the angle of two walls, and they set three chairs in a semicircle in front of me. Cornered, so to speak. They had no routine of any kind that I could detect—no kindly face to generate trust, no savagery to create fear. Fact. That’s what they relied on. Straightforward fact.

“This is what we know. You met two fellas out by a lake near Cavan. You gave them five thousand to kill a man called Jack Stirling. Who’d run away with your wife. And who’d kicked the shit out of you in Cork. Kill his pals, too, is what you asked for, because his two pals held you while he hammered you. You were in Cavan all the week before, wandering here and there. And you stayed in a B and B where you could see the job being done. The fellows you hired struck a bargain with us. They’ll get off and you won’t. And we’ll keep you in this room until you confirm all this.”

They made two errors—one they should have known about, and one
they couldn’t have known about. When they said, “They’ll get off and you won’t”—not possible. And certainly not in the climate of the times. Had I been arrested, and had the case come to court, the heavier weight would have fallen on the men who’d done the deed. So I knew they were bluffing to some degree.

And the error of which they had no knowledge? My conscience welcomed their attentions. Every accusation they hurled at me, every scowl, every glance, every scrap of contempt—these affirmed my sin, they became part of my penance.

I sat in that corner for hours, maybe days. Men came, men went, the same men, different men—it all blurred. They didn’t let me sleep—or tried to stop me. But if you wanted to bet, and if you knew about me what I know, you’d have put your money on me beating them. As I did. When they jostled me awake for the hundredth time, shook me by the head for the thousandth, and yelled in my face for the millionth, I finally spoke.

“Everything you’re doing is wrong.” And I said no more.

Since those amounted to the only words I had said in their custody, they had to consider them. Some of the men seemed as exhausted as me. I saw them retreat. Heads together, they whispered. And I knew they were saying, “What did he mean?” When they asked me, I wouldn’t answer them.

My next tactic finished them off; I went “senseless.” No feeling. No buoyancy. No nothing. They shook me. No resistance. They stood me up. I fell. As boneless as a rag doll. There was nothing more they could do.

They left. Someone brought a basin of water, food, a towel. In an hour or so, one of the men came back. He beckoned. I followed. Pitch-black and I could scarcely see. I fell asleep in the car—and was awakened at my own gate.

The next morning a new car sat outside my gate.

No matter which way I turn—blocked. A vise. I’m jammed in. Unfree. Getting frantic. No power in myself. No greater power to whom I can turn. No power to think. Not enough power to feel better. A time to listen. For instinct’s voice
.

I was down to that bedrock.

Although they followed me everywhere for weeks and weeks, I knew that I could shake them off on the back roads of the countryside. It took me that long, anyway, to think through the gamble I had in mind. I was wagering on the past, looking to myth, seeking lessons in legend.

You see how my mind had begun to work? You see how myth and its principles had worked in me? Any other man might have considered the stories that John Jacob O’Neill had told me no more than legend. Interestingly coincidental. Slightly magical. My configuration, though, and my daily intake of tales had led me to think otherwise. I trusted in them as I trusted in maps. Was there a risk that I might see things that weren’t there? Not at all.

I didn’t send him a telegram. That could have been traced. It didn’t matter. This time John Jacob had a warmer welcome, if that were possible.

He said, “But you can drop in anytime.”

“Intruding always concerns me.”

“You don’t know how to intrude,” he said. “That’s part of your problem.”

We sat outdoors, on his garden bench. Afraid to ask for help or guidance, I tried to frame a question—about the general principle of myth as teacher. No need; without comment or introduction, he began to speak; he gave no reason.

This is a Persian story. A woman from the mountains came down one day onto the plain to visit her married sister. She looked haggard and broken. Her sister took her to see a wizard who lived on the edge of town
.

When the sister had gone, the wizard said to the haggard woman, “You have two men desiring you, am I right?”

The haggard woman said, “You’re right.”

The wizard said, “And you don’t know what to do, and they’re both violent men, am I right?”

The haggard woman said, “You’re right.”

The wizard said, “And either man might kill you if you go with the other, am I right?”

The haggard woman said, “You’re right.”

The wizard said, “Well, I have powers greater than either of those two men, and I will use those powers on your behalf.”

He knelt on the ground, and, as the woman watched, he drew two circles in the dirt as a child might draw a pair of primitive eyes. He stood up and he did a little dance in which his feet erased the first circle. A wind came whipping in, and with it came rain, sharp as knives. In five seconds the wind and rain went away and the sun shone
.

With his feet in another little dance, the wizard erased the second circle. This time, a new wind came whipping in, carrying snow, huge and soft. In five seconds it had gone away, and the sun shone. The wizard stood with his head bowed, and as far as the haggard woman could see, he was muttering some incantation
.

Then he turned to her and said, “I have done this for you because you are a good woman and I know that. Go back to your mountain. Be safe. You will never see either of those men again.”

And that’s the story of the haggard woman
.

I didn’t stay much longer. John Jacob seemed especially fatigued. With his great courtesy, he declined my invitation to eat at a nearby hotel.

This time, no car waited for me at the top of his lane. Nobody knew where I was.

Within days I identified my wizard. Three days later, after a long drive, I called on him, unannounced. I didn’t know him, and he didn’t know me: perfect.

He had much to say. A learned man. And lonely. He wore darkish glasses indoors, as though light hurt him. On his feet he wore striped red-and-green socks that looked like slippers, and he peeled them back to show me his corns and bunions.

“Can you imagine,” he said, and it was a genuine question, “how difficult is my journey through life on these feet?”

I nodded in sympathy. “Have you seen anybody for them?”

“There’s a chiropodist in Ballylooby, but she always puts her hand on my knee, and to tell you the truth, I’d prefer that she didn’t. She has a very handsome husband.”

Within a short time it became clear that he didn’t subscribe to the sequential rules of conversation.

“What’s it like to be tall?” he asked me. “I’ve been five feet two and a quarter inches high since I was seventeen, and I’m sick of it. The shoes don’t help. Would you inspect them and tell me what you think, a big, good-looking man like you?”

He contorted, reached under his chair (from which his feet didn’t touch the carpet), and pulled out a pair of shiny, buttoned boots. They had lifts built onto the soles and heels.

I turned them over in my hands—a child’s shoes with wooden platforms. “Isn’t this what’s hurting your feet?”

“Oh, I have urine problems, too. And I’ve done a translation of the Apocrypha. Full of bloody heresy. Do you understand this fellow Einstein? I think he gets a lot of things wrong. Are you a chess player at all? No? Pity. But you read, don’t you, you have the eyes of a reader, haven’t you? I was looking at Kipling this morning—imperialist old bugger but a good poet.” He began a quotation: “You can go where you please, you can skid up the trees—”

I finished it for him: “But you don’t get away from the guns.”

Thank you, Harry MacCarthy, for your love of Rudyard Kipling, and for passing it on to me
.

Thus did my wizard warm to me. I had scored high on his tests—not shocked by feet or bladders, or possible mathematical genius, and well-read.

He was an ambitious man, hence my choosing him, and he went on to fulfill his drive. At that time, though, he’d been content to advise those higher than him: his local bishop, his archbishop, the cardinal in Armagh. Since they knew him to be clever above their reach, and shrewd beyond what his personality suggested, they had no difficulty accepting what he suggested. And he even did a two-year stint in the Vatican, where they prize shrewdness above sanctity.

He saw my strategy. In an instant. He might even have seen the innate hypocrisy of it, the end justifying the means. But he nodded.

“Good boy, good boy.”

I don’t think he believed me—but he recognized a sly thought process when he saw one. When I asked him his opinion, he nodded slowly. Thought some more. Then blinked.

“I suppose you know that I have a major building project under way; a smart man like yourself would have figured out that it needs donations. For the greater glory of Almighty God, of course.”

“Of course,” I said.

Here’s what I told him: I could deal with the gunmen. Their ire would cool, they had other problems, and they owed me favors, because I had rescued one of them from a life threat. But I had no way of handling the forces of government, who chose to misinterpret me. They had disrupted my reuniting with my wife, who had been through an American divorce and remarried. I had persuaded her to leave that man, on the grounds that we didn’t, in Ireland, recognize divorce. We had meant it when we said, “Till death us do part.”

Canon Sheridan bought the story. Or at least he entered the deal. He warned me that it would take some weeks:

“Big wheels move slowly. But we know a lot of things about people in power.”

A month later, on a fine morning, while one car sat outside my house, another arrived. They conferred, the men in the cheap suits. When they left, one after the other, I knew that they had gone forever.

We met, my wizard and I, many years later, when the canon had become a bishop. After our first greeting he whispered to me, “Wasn’t that good business we did?”

I said, “God has the power.”

“I prayed hard,” he said.

“Did you also rub out circles on the ground?” I asked him and, when I saw his bemused look, added, “I’ll tell you someday.”

So there I sat, on my hillside, overlooking the sea, exactly where I am now. I was in my midforties, and much of my life had closed down. Miss Fay had recovered, but she remained frail, and I saw her often. Sometimes she, Marian Killeen, and I went to a concert, or to dinner, or merely for a slow walk along the shore.

My parents flourished, though in a quieter way, and seemed to draw ever closer. I became obsessive about my house and, once the essential repairs were completed, embarked on a full, authentic restoration. I hired an architect who understood what I sought, and I lived the work, moment by moment, doing most of it myself.

Except the plastering. The architect found a genius. Plasterers have a reputation for lunacy. This man, Liam Jenkins, told me that he didn’t want me near the house while he was there.

“But I live here.”

“You’ll have to go somewhere else.”

“Any reason why?”

Liam Jenkins said, “I work naked. That’s why.”

He got his way, and I got my walls—to a perfect standard.

“Where did you learn your trade?” I asked him one evening over a drink.

“I’m an accountant by training. And one day I asked myself, ‘Is there any skill I admire more than any other in the world, and how would it benefit my country if I had it?’ So I set out to become the best plasterer that anybody ever knew.”

In the months it took to finish the house, his remark haunted me. I finished the plumbing, the electrical wiring, the flooring, the tiling, the painting, the wallpapering. Every room allowed me to take it up to a pristine state. I had been sleeping in a camp bed, in the smallest room—as close as I could get to replicating a prison cell. Now I retrieved from the warehouse in Cashel my own possessions, and those that Mother had
passed on to me. They and the house seemed made for each other. I had to buy so little.