Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show: A Novel of Ireland

  Brutally, I had to look back on my time with Venetia as dreamlike, which, as you will recall, is how I described it. And I knew that I couldn’t stay suspended in this half-dream, whole tragedy. If I wanted to honor Venetia I had to become a functioning human being; the greater the functioning ability, the greater the honor.

  Those were not my words or ideas; they came from James. On a late October evening of the third year that I’d been there, when the weather—as can happen on the west coast—had gone all Mediterranean for an entire week, he invited me to walk out to Kildoney Point.

  He said, “I like looking at the ocean. It tells me what the human spirit can encompass.”

  His sister’s husband, a pale and likable man, had now fully recovered, and although they wanted me to stay with them for the winter, they no longer needed the help.

  “They’re very fond of you,” James said. “But they worry about you. You’re too quiet for your age.”

  I said, “I suppose so.”

  “If I could wave a magic wand, Ben, what would you want me to do?”

  I thought for so long that he had to ask me again. Then I said, “In the legends that you love so much, what does a hero do if he’s lost somebody?”

  James quoted first a snatch in Gaelic, and then the translation.

  “He searches north and south and east and west, but they’re the north and south and east and west of his soul. He searches up and down and in and out, but they’re the up and down and in and out of his heart. He searches back and forth and hither and yon, but they’re the back and forth and hither and yon of his spirit. And then he finds what he seeks.”

  “But,” I asked, “he only searches his heart and his soul and his spirit?”

  “Take it as metaphorical. They’re the four corners of the earth. They’re the sun, moon, planets, and stars. They’re the four winds.”

  “And,” I asked, “at the end—is he healed?”

  “Always.”

  James and I sat looking at the sea at Kildoney Point, and I knew that we would go on sitting there until I answered him and his magic wand.

  “What I say might surprise you.”

  He laughed. “A surprise is as good as a meal.”

  I took a deep breath and said, “I think I’d like to be a spalpeen.”

  He didn’t flinch. “All over the country?”

  “The four corners.”

  James said, “Wait ’til the fine weather comes in. And we’ll make sure we meet on our travels.”

  I didn’t ask the terrible question “Does the hero find what he’s looking for?” because I had long known the sad answer.

  Or thought I had.

  We walked back from the point. As we reached the house James said, “May I ask you a favor?”

  I looked at him. “If I can.”

  “Try to stop drinking.”

  I hear you asking, “What’s a spalpeen?” Let me give you some context. Outside that farm in Donegal, that room above the cows, that house and those decent people, the world still turned. Looking back on it now with some (not much) objectivity, I was at least engaged by the politics. The new Parliament was up and running in Dublin because of Mr. de Valera’s talks with the members of smaller parties. His absorbing horse-trading had continued.

  In Scotland they have a good word, outwith—meaning “all things considered,” or “notwithstanding.” Outwith the turbulence in my own life, I knew things had changed nationally—and everybody in the country knew, whether they liked to admit it. It continues to fascinate me that something that seems as megalithic and remote as government machinery can have so intimate a reverberation.

  Though serene at the fact that he was back at home, I missed my father. With his gifts of explanation, and his instinct for involvement in momentous things, he could be at his best at a time like this. I needed somebody to explain to me why I felt that the entire country had changed; in other words, that it wasn’t just me.

  People still walked about the streets. Farmers continued to take their milk to the creamery. Housewives went on shaking the bread crumbs from their tablecloths out into the world. And yet—things were different.

  Perhaps the newspapers had something to do with it. They were alive with politics. Every speech, every utterance of every tinker and tailor, every Tom, Dick, or Harriet who had any political thought in his or her head was reported. You may think that the endlessness of political comment today is new. Not at all. Page after page of the newspapers reported from every one of the country’s thirty constituencies and 153 seats.

  What was it, that powerful interest in how we might govern ourselves? I’ve seen this country at ground level and I think I know, and it’s an inspiring story.

  To begin with, a large percentage of the Parliament members now representing the people of the country had come from nothing. From less than nothing. Is there a word abjectitude—meaning a state of being permanently abject? If there isn’t, let’s make one: abjectitude.

  Abjectitude in Ireland meant, not many generations ago, mud huts. Deep in fields, masked by mounds and hedgerows, people lived, raised families. They cut sods of turf from the ground and, the grass side turned out, built igloos for themselves. Inside—earth above them and earth below them, raw, brown soil, always damp and dank, always unhealthy.

  On the level above these mud caves, some families lived in houses. But that’s all they did—“lived.” A wretched existence it was too; we had them in our village. In one family, the food, to use Mother’s word, “rotated”—that is to say, not everybody in the household ate every day of the week.

  Clothing rotated too; when the children all stood within the age brackets that required them to go to school—from ages four to four-teen—not every child could emerge from the house every day, because such clothes as they had needed to circulate.

  Dole. Social welfare. Child support. None of that existed or penetrated. The rural Ireland in which I grew up had permanent strata of poverty. If you looked you’d see it, the deep, wide band of gray-and-black grime just beneath the brighter surface of “normal” society. Except that there wasn’t a normal society. What’s “normal” when you have families who might eat a full meal on Friday or Sunday, or might it be Tuesday? With scraps in between.

  They didn’t wash—no soap and no knowledge of how to wash. My father often told how, when Billy and Lily first came to the yard, Billy had to be shown how to wash his neck; he had never done so. When she saw on Mother’s dressing table that other shapes, scents, and varieties of soap existed, Lily began to cry. Such soap as she had seen came in thick yellow bricks, and always smelt of damp newspaper.

  Nor did they know anything about forms of clothing. For years Mother badgered my father to tell Billy about underwear. My father went carefully on the subject—he knew that Billy, when he grasped the concept and the hygiene it implied, would blush red as a radish for days, and not speak to anybody, and swear even more than he usually did. Once, late in her life, I asked Mother about Lily and hygiene.

  “Don’t,” she said, so pained and anxious that I never raised the subject again; I was interested from a folklore point of view.

  As to behavior—my father had to slow down or otherwise make intelligible many of the workmen from around and about the place who came to our yard, especially the migrants. And now, in my roundabout way, we’ve come to the word spalpeen.

  In those days we still had a spalpeen system. From early childhood, the spalpeens fascinated me and also wrenched at my heart; I knew even then that they warranted deep compassion, if not outright pity.

  They were migrant workers, wandering the countryside, especially at the heights of farming seasons, looking for work. Haymaking, grain threshing, picking apples in County Armagh, harvesting potatoes in the big market gardens near the cities—they drifted on and on, often returning to the same farmer year in year out, a place where they’d been treated well before.

  Many of them had families—somewhere, anywhere, and I remember t
rying to ask them about their children, and getting sparse replies not much above the grunt level. My father could translate; he took them slowly, as he did the local men, and he often said to Mother that he hoped, when they went back to their homes, they would pass on to their children the slower, clearer methods of speech he had tried to impress upon them. Some of them, native Gaelic speakers, spoke poor English.

  I remember one spalpeen, though, who spoke clearly and rather beautifully. He came from Mayo, a county of great and longstanding poverty, but he seemed not to have a western accent, nor indeed any notable speech influence. I’ll call him “Tom”—a man older than my father, or so I thought. Many years later, to my astonishment, I discovered that Tom, when he first came to our house, was no more than twenty-five years old; he looked fifty.

  Over Tom hung a cloud of great sadness. His eyes seemed moist all the time; he had a sonorous tone, tending to the somber. Every year Tom left home at the spring season and came down to the south or went east from Mayo, drifting from farm to farm, doing without food if he hadn’t found work, sleeping in ditches if he hadn’t found lodging—and I know that cold spring wind, I’ve mentioned it before: Ireland’s whipping scirocco.

  Every year too, for many years, he left a pregnant wife behind him in a house that was no more than a shed—I’ve seen it—a lean-to, with a corrugated steel roof. And every year when Tom returned, expecting to see a bonny pink infant, he found that his wife had miscarried again. Nine times she went to various stages along her term, nine times she failed to give birth.

  On the tenth pregnancy she died, and when Tom went home they had buried her and her stillborn baby in a pauper’s grave. He then showed them the biscuit tin that he kept hidden in the wall of his cottage for a decent burial for his wife, should they ever have needed one, and he’d never told his wife it was there in case she got upset.

  Here’s the point about all this and that 1932 election: The previous government had undoubtedly an elite clique at its head, merchants and city men, who came from comfortable lives. Now, and for the first time truly, these people from the mud huts of the past, and the houses where food and clothing rotated—they had representatives. Many of the men who now spoke in Parliament, some still in the Irish language that had so long been criminalized—they knew the lot that they wished to improve.

  They knew it because they came from it themselves. Poverty had burned into them. It had changed the pigment of the skin all over their bodies. Like fire victims it had scarred them forever, and they had sworn profound vows to change it in each and every way that they could.

  Along the way, as is human nature, they would feather their own nests first. The sea beneath all the boats that rise on the tide of democracy is as full of filth and sludge as of clean water.

  We saw Tom for only one year after his wife died. He never came back again. The spalpeens continued to appear in time for the haymaking in July, the grain in August. They didn’t know one another and we’d gain nothing by asking about Tom. We assumed that he’d taken a job somewhere or gone to England or the United States.

  All of us agreed that he’d do well wherever he went. Another definition of the word spalpeen has connotations of roguery, slick and underhanded dealing, probably because, when they were on the road, the itinerant workers often stole out of sheer hunger. None of that ever touched Tom.

  And so, a few days after the election, a photograph appeared in one of the newspapers of all Mr. de Valera’s new governing party, the seventy-two winning members, or “deputies.” In the third row, third person in from the left, stood “Tom”—I looked and looked, got a magnifying glass; there was no doubt. Later I verified it easily—because his maiden speech in Parliament addressed “The Problems of the Migrant Rural Worker.”

  Isn’t it clear to you why I became a spalpeen? For all its intensity, my mourning was incomplete. I had none of what today they call “closure.” No corpse, no wake, no funeral, no grave—none of the essential comfortings of death. And I had three deaths to mourn: Venetia; our unborn child; and poor Mrs. Haas. Now I could visit every place where Venetia had performed, I could ask about her everywhere, and ask everybody I met whether they had ever seen her.

  I had a photograph of her; I’d taken it from the house. How it stayed in one piece God only knows. I showed it in the four corners of the country. To my delight—short-lived but no less real—some people said, “Oh, yeh, I remember her.”

  They spoke of the show, and how they loved it and laughed about Blarney. In halls of all kinds, in shanties and shebeens, in castles, cabins, and cottages, wherever I worked, wherever I heaved a forkful of hay, or milked a cow, or shod a pony, I brandished this picture. It also kept me close to her—some might say too close.

  Nobody had ever seen her since. There must have been times when I seemed demented, a wild-haired young man with a photograph of his missing wife. They all said the same: “What about the police?”

  And I’d shake my head and say, “They never found her body.”

  I went everywhere in Ireland. The years I spent on the road, the years of draining the grief from my system, I worked for gentlemen and bullies, I worked for widows and women of means, I worked farms that had two hundred acres owned by farmers who wouldn’t work them.

  The frost in the mornings bit my hands and my ears. The rain in the day stung my face and my neck. I built a hay shed in County Monaghan, I repaired a mowing machine in Kildare, I herded sheep on the coldest headland in County Mayo, and I’ll never do that again.

  But I know how to do it, and I know how to get a horse to calm down when she’s foaling, and a sheep to go easy when she’s lambing. And I can teach a child to milk a cow, to squeeze and pull at the same time and never too hard because the cows don’t like it.

  What a time it was, wonderful in many ways and lonesome in most. It also contained atonement—for the sins I had committed, of blackmail, harassment, and that time I ran away from Mother, and the brawl with my father. And losing my wife and child.

  I should have atoned. After all, I had cause. And so I atoned. On every freezing hill, in every damp bed above a barn, under the voice of every abusing farmer, lashed by the tongue of every harsh farm wife—I atoned. In the process I tried and tried to grant James Clare the favor he asked, to keep my promise. It did not go well.

  And then one day, when it finally got too lonesome and I was very, very tired, and I had taken myself down as low as I needed, where I touched the base of my grief, I went home to my parents.

  Perhaps you’ve been thinking me callous—that I haven’t mentioned them, or talked about seeing them. I often wrote to them; I wrote to them when I was at Miss Fay’s, explaining that I wasn’t feeling well. Miss Fay had also written to Mother, of whom, as I’ve said, she was particularly fond. My parents knew what had happened; my father read the newspapers; he put two and two together.

  If anything, they’d grown closer. He deferred to her more, Mother touched him oftener. No outward appearance could have given the slightest hint of the drama that had gone on here previously, the Catastrophe. The farm throve and Billy Moloney had grown larger.

  When I walked in, he was working in the yard.

  “Hah! The big flockin’ man himself! How’re they hangin’, Big Ben?”—a good job Mother didn’t overhear that little squib.

  Had it happened, had it all really happened? It had. That first night at dinner—Mother insisted on the dining room—they spoke of it.

  “It was all a deep plan, wasn’t it?” and “Such an old crook.” It was from my parents I learned that Professor Fay had taken a job at a college in Scotland.

  “I hope never to meet him,” I said.

  They marveled at my appearance—windblown, sunburnt, and much, much older-looking than when they had seen me last. As Mother said, “You actually have lines on your face.”

  “Without you,” said my father, “we probably wouldn’t be alive today. We’d have died.”

  I said, “It was my job. And I w
ouldn’t have known that but for Mother.”

  In different ways, and at separate times, each asked me, “How are you, Ben? Are you all right?”—meaning, We know what happened and how on earth are you managing?

  My father said, “Jesus God, she was wonderful, wasn’t she? And her mother. And that bloody old crook is still alive.”

  “Where is he?”

  He laughed. “Would-would-would you believe it? He bought land a few miles from here. Paid for it this time. You should go to see him. Rattle him up a bit.”

  “What’s Sarah really like?” I asked him. “Is she as bad as her father?”

  “In-in-in his thrall,” said my father. “Did I ever tell you I saw her once, long before you were born? She was with John M. Synge. They were walking in Dublin. He’d have made some play out of all this, wouldn’t he?”

  And Mother and I—at another moment we sat on the window seat, looking out on the huge beech. Never had I seen the branches so naked, so gaunt; at the last moment of autumn, the gales had come in and done their annual work of stripping the leaves and sending them down to fertilize the earth. I made some remark about the tree’s fingers, and its very bareness, and its age.

  Mother, not looking at me, said, “The things you know, Ben, don’t you? And you knew them so young.”

  James’s story began to echo. There was a man one time and he knew many things. He knew how to grow beautiful ears of wheat and when to take the new potatoes out of the ground.

  I tried to kill the echo; it persisted.

  He knew when a horse was ready to be taught how to jump a ditch, and he knew when to bring his dairy cows in for the winter. He knew how to take care of his family, for he had a wife …

  Excusing myself, I rose and walked away. I was that man. Or, I could have been. Had I still a wife.