The Last Storyteller (7 page)

Elma Sloane came from the beleaguered and impoverished peasantry. The children in her house couldn’t all go to school on the same day because they didn’t have enough clothes to go around. At mealtimes they had to take turns with the few spoons.

In Duff House that evening, we represented such class differences as Ireland could define: the old money of Randall; the safe farming of my clan; the savagely reared Elma Sloane; and the thugs throwing rocks to force her into marriage so that they could grab another man’s fortune. Yes, we had it all that day.

As for Jimmy Bermingham—you may well ask. He dressed like a poor man from a rich country or a rich man from a poor country—which was it? He professed undying love for one girl, yet proved ready to jump on another. In short, Jimmy ran ahead of us all. He also ran guns.

When Randall felt strong enough to walk, we returned to the small drawing room. He rested on a sofa, again holding Elma’s hand—a gesture she didn’t contest. Jimmy Bermingham examined Randall’s eye once more and said that the stone hadn’t connected with the eyeball. Annette found a spare pair of spectacles and another warm, damp towel, which Jimmy held to Randall’s eyes. We made small talk, seeking ease.

In time we went in to dinner, to a long dining room with its own echo. Randall kept testing the left eye, opening, it, closing it, fluttering the lashes.

Such a curious evening: the conversation drifted in bits and pieces; here, from my journal, are some snatches:

Randall: “Will I be blind, I wonder? They say if you lose the sight in one eye, you often lose the sight in both. But, of course, I haven’t lost the sight in one eye.”

Elma Sloane: “How did they follow us? Or did someone see us driving in here?”

Jimmy Bermingham: “Did you think he’d fire the gun at you?”

Randall: “Girls aren’t often so beautiful so young.”

And then we heard the drama of Elma Sloane. In its way, it counts as something I collected; does that widen the definition of “folklore”? In a hundred, a thousand years, might it not be legend, if preserved?

She lived, the oldest of twelve siblings, in what was called “a council cottage”—every county in Ireland tried to build affordable housing. A typical cottage had two bedrooms, a kitchen, and some kind of living room; the roof over their heads at a nominal rent gave people some self-respect.

Her father worked for the county council as a roads laborer; her mother jobbed for farmwives. Elma quit school at fourteen, though her teacher called her “highly intelligent and well-behaved.” She chose not to
emigrate—if she stayed she could help her mother, and even bring in some money.

“I always liked shoes,” she said about having gotten hired in the local shoe store. “And there’s something nice about helping people ease their feet. Most people who come in, their shoes don’t fit them, and their feet are sore.”

“Good girl,” said Randall.

Her father came to the shop one day and crooked his finger, saying, “C’mere you.” She winced as she mimicked him.

Out on the street, “a tall old man” waited. Her father said, “This is your husband. His name is Dan—he’s a great man, a great hero. Shake hands with him.”

The man put out his hand, and Elma took it. “Because,” she said, “I was afraid my father would hit me.”

That evening her mother smiled a thin smile and asked, “And are we to have a bride in the house?”

The father came home, sat down at the table, and said, “We did a good day’s work today. This house will never again want for things.”

That night Elma began to weep. Her mother said not a word—but Elma did: “I’m not marrying that old fellow.” Elma told us, “My mother collapsed onto a chair, and she said, ‘Oh, Jesus. Your brother, your brother.’ ”

Elma, again frightened, finished her tale:

“I had a young brother who died a few years back. He had an argument with my father, and he ran out of the house and my father ran after him. My father came back, but my brother never did, and we found him that night under a tree. His head was all crashed in, and my father said he must have climbed the tree to hide and then fell out of it.”

As the fire began to die, Randall said to me, “You and I have unfinished business, Ben.” Mystified, I walked with him down a long passageway. “Somebody,” he remarked, “should scare the life out of that beast of a father. Why don’t you do it?”

I said, “Randall, I’m only around here once a year or so.”

“Avoidance again?” he said. “Old habits die hard.”

My heart lurched from annoyance to shame.
Why don’t you ask him what he means by “avoidance”—and “again”?

He had converted the large old stables, replaced stone walls with glass. Dozens of finished canvases leaned in stacks against every wall of the studio. I counted six easels, all with work in progress. On the largest and most central stood a nearly finished nude study.

He means, doesn’t he, that I have no guts, that when it comes to the crunch, any crunch, I sidestep? Or run? That is what he means, isn’t it, by “avoidance”?

“Randall, why is this portrait familiar to me?” I asked, looking at the nude.

“You’ve just praised her cooking.”

Annette! I hadn’t known. Are the locals aware that she poses for him? They’d drum her out of the village
.

“Good models are so difficult to find,” he said. “I trained her. She now understands how to concentrate with her body.” Then, as Randall always could, he surprised me further. “And I suspect that’s a good model you brought with you.”

“Which of them?”

He laughed. “Well, not Jimmy. Not that little narcissist.”

“How do you know Elma could?”

Randall said, “Natural to her, dear boy.”

And then he unfolded a plan, taking, as he always did, great leaps of life in a few sentences.

“Tell everybody she’s gone to England. Let her stay here in seclusion with me. We’ll teach her to model. She can always go to Paris then and make some kind of living.”

Randall said all this while standing before a small canvas on a wide easel. I watched as he took a brush and scratched at the paint with the handle. On tiptoe I half-circled him. He peered at his work and blinked, blinked again, wiped his eyes with great care, closed the unbruised eye, peered with the other, then blinked again. In a moment his face began to rest; he had dismissed his anxiety.

I tiptoed away. He left the easel, looked around for me, and called.

“Our unfinished business, Ben.” He beckoned, and I followed. At the large canvas of the nearly completed nude, he paused, and with a gentle fingernail adjusted one of Annette’s eyes.

On a table nearby, next to an antique leather chesterfield, lay months of magazines, art gallery catalogs, newspapers. Randall picked up a thick folder leaking with press clippings and crooked a finger to draw me in close. He opened the folder and searched, then opened it wider and showed it to me: an old newspaper report of Venetia’s disappearance in 1932.

“That’s what I meant by avoidance.”

And still I said nothing.
Don’t answer. If you don’t answer, you can’t make a mistake
.

“She’s back, Ben. Did you know that? She’s touring the country. But I’m sure you know it. And you’re avoiding it.”

I nodded, shaken. “Why did you clip that?”

“Painters never forget beauty. I saw her traveling show back then.” No words came to me. “D’you want to read it again?”

“No,” I said.

Randall detached the old clipping and handed it to me.

“Put it in your wallet,” he said. “Go after her. I saw her on the stage again three nights ago, and she’s more beautiful than ever. But she’s not happy.”

“Where was she?”

“They’re in Templemore.” He turned to face me. “Go on, Ben. She’s with a bad fellow.”

Several hours later, restive under the gray fingers of dawn, I thought with some bitterness,
Thank you, Randall
.

Do you know the word “pusillanimous?” I enjoy it now, even if it still makes me uncomfortable. It literally means “being of small mind.” Therefore of tiny spirit. How well I’ve known that word.

In my defense, I’ll say that I’d had the stuffing kicked out of me long ago by losing Venetia. At least that’s my excuse. Being pusillanimous is one of those conditions that you promise you’ll fix in yourself one day, put right. But you never do.

Randall rises at six; so does everybody else in that house. Jimmy and I left after breakfast. My head bulged, my heart quailed, as the word “avoidance” tormented me.

On the doorstep I spoke to Elma.

“Randall says I’m to stay here. Anyway, my father knows I was threatening to go to England.”

“You’ll be all right here.”

She shrugged. “Will I be all right anywhere?”

“Is there anything you need, clothes and things?”

“Annette is going to bring me shopping.”

I gave her some money, and she flung her arms around my neck.

Jimmy announced in the car, “I told Randall we’re going to talk to her father. Elma told me where he’ll be.”

Four miles from Urlingford we turned down a side road, until recently a muddy lane. Two men labored at a roadside wall. They had just begun their day’s work.

“What are we going to say to him?” asked Jimmy Bermingham.

“The stone in Randall’s eye?”

“Water off a duck’s back,” said Jimmy. “You heard what he did to his own son.”

We drove past the two workers. In those days, cars drew attention, especially on small country roads. The two men stopped working and
stood erect to stare after us. I turned the car, came back slowly, and parked fifty yards short of them.

“He’s the tall fella,” said Jimmy.

“I saw him yesterday,” I said. “Him and his gun.”

As we walked to him, Elma Sloane’s father leaned across the wall and picked up a short crowbar. The forked hook on it could rip out a man’s throat.

“Keep walking,” said Jimmy, to my surprise.

Small country road. Pillows of snowy cloud drifting across the powder-blue sky. Fields bare in the wintry morning.

Sloane’s coworker stepped away, then grabbed his bicycle and rode off in the opposite direction. He halted at a distance, his back to us: this was a man who didn’t want to be a witness to anything. We walked closer to Sloane.

You could see the skull beneath the skin. He had a spider’s web of veins on his cheekbones. The hand that held the crowbar—so relaxed. He’d done this before.

His eyebrows met, like a pair of black, dangerous insects. Calm as a candle he watched us. No flaring of nostrils. No chewing. None of fear’s flinching. Boots square on the ground, perfectly apart for fighting. His hair was as short as barbed wire. Prominent forehead of a Neanderthal. Note that I haven’t mentioned the eyes—because I couldn’t look at them.

A sour taste rose in the back of my throat. I kept my hands in the pockets of my coat. He had fists as big as bowling balls. After the frozen moment in which we stopped and stood some yards from him, he spoke first.

“Will you look at the two fools,” he said.

“How d’you make that out?” I already knew Jimmy Bermingham well enough to hear the tremor in his voice.

“Sticking your nose into other people’s business.”

“Mr. Sloane, I thought we might—”

I got no further. He didn’t at that moment feel like talking.

“
Mister
Sloane.” As he sneered the words he slammed the crowbar’s fork down into the new tarmacadam of the little road and hoicked up a chunk. He spiked it on his crowbar and lunged it at us, as a caveman might offer meat on a stick.

“In a minute that’s what your brain will be like,” he said to me. He swore, blue and raw.

Jimmy Bermingham once asked me why I never used four-letter words. Answer: they unleash something nasty in me.

The crowbar gunslinger sneered again. “
Mister
Sloane. When everybody knows I’m Jody.”

“Jody,” began Jimmy Bermingham—and got no further.

With a downward whip of the crowbar, Jody Sloane flung the black knuckle of tarred road to one side, lurched across the gap between us, and hooked the forked iron tongue of the bar into the lapel of Jimmy’s camel coat. He twisted, and the fabric began to tear.

My work across the Irish countryside took me through open fields, along farm avenues, unmade roads, small town lanes—therefore, I wore boots. Heavy, black, and laced high, they had rows and rows of glistening hobnails on the soles, as did Jody Sloane’s, and I knew that he could stamp his daughter to death with those boots, jump up and down on that sweet and eager face, trample those breasts.

It will become clear to you as we go along that my cowardice, my pusillanimity, had a natural override. There was an automatic response that sometimes arose in me, and over which I had no control. If it happened once in a day, it tended to happen more than once, as though uncaged—and then didn’t appear again for months.

It lit my mind in black and red, the black of savagery, the red of blood. And usually produced terrible results: brawling, shouting, mad violence, danger.

With the forked crowbar, Sloane dragged Jimmy up to his face and held him like a butterfly on a pin. To do so, he had to pull Jimmy to one side. That gave me a clear road to Sloane’s knees.

My eyes went red from the inside, and I kicked him. Twice. Hard. Each knee. God, I kicked. With all my rampaging force. If you’re hunting badgers or otters, you must put sticks down your boots, because if they grab your leg they won’t let go until they hear the crack. I heard the crack. I heard two cracks. And a scream.

Jody Sloane fell to the road and lay on his back. He had no choice. You can’t actually stand upright if your kneecaps are broken.

And he screamed at us all the way to the hospital. Jimmy turned to him at one moment and said, “Two against one, Jody. Your word against ours.”

We told the nun who greeted us that Mr. Sloane had suffered a bad fall, hurt his knees.

The nun had a dry way. “From praying, I suppose,” she said. After a moment’s thought she added, “We know all about this gent—we get his wife and children in here from time to time.”