The Last Storyteller
The Last Storyteller is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2012 by Frank Delaney, L.L.C.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House,
an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered
trademarks of Random House, Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Delaney, Frank
The last storyteller: a novel / Frank Delaney.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-679-64422-4
1. Ireland—Fiction. 2. Ireland—Politics and
government—1922–1949—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6054.E396L37 2012 823’.914—dc23 2011037154
www.atrandom.com
Title-page illustration: iStockphoto
Jacket design: Olga Grlic
Jacket illustration: Robert G. Steele
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Author’s Note
Part One - The Living Legend
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Part Two - Gentleman Jack and His Friend
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Part Three - A Kind of Salvation
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Part Four - The Pursuit of the Past
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 100
Part Five - A Carelessness with Death
Chapter 101
Chapter 102
Chapter 103
Chapter 104
Chapter 105
Chapter 106
Chapter 107
Chapter 108
Chapter 109
Chapter 110
Chapter 111
Chapter 112
Chapter 113
Chapter 114
Chapter 115
Chapter 116
Chapter 117
Chapter 118
Part Six - The Passing of the Torch
Chapter 119
Chapter 120
Chapter 121
Chapter 122
Chapter 123
Chapter 124
Chapter 125
Chapter 126
Chapter 127
Chapter 128
Chapter 129
Chapter 130
Chapter 131
Chapter 132
Chapter 133
Chapter 134
Part Seven - The Last Storyteller
Chapter 135
Chapter 136
Chapter 137
Chapter 138
Chapter 139
Chapter 140
Chapter 141
Chapter 142
Chapter 143
Chapter 144
Chapter 145
Chapter 146
Chapter 147
Part Eight - Epilogue
Chapter 148
Chapter 149
Chapter 150
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
Author’s Note
The classical mythologies had conspicuous purpose—to teach us how to live. Not only that, it was to their design that we built the drama that entertains us on film, on the page, on the stage. Action, betrayal, murder, romance, politics—the gods had it all. Every archetypal figure known to us—for good or bad—had a legendary beginning: the sage, the hero, the villain, the virgin. Every plot that stirs our blood, whatever its technological sophistication or contemporary reference, can first be found in the antics of Zeus and all who sprang from his forehead (or elsewhere), or the deities of China, India, Indonesia, Peru, Scandinavia—gods put their feet everywhere. Every fictional ingredient that we relish today was first savored at the feet of those mythic figures—heroism and cowardice, deed and retribution, revenge, obsession, passion, unrequited love, gain, loss, remorse, grief, redemption. Mythology was a bible ever before there was a Bible.
The Irish own an especially rich seam of mythic literature. If its themes consist in common humanity, it has a personality like no other. Warriors, naturally, play leading roles, as do impressive women, jilted lovers and wise men. Beautiful apparel features, and exquisite jewelry, and gorgeous horses, and food, and bards, and evil magicians—but to find where Irish legends differ from other mythologies, look for ambiguity, and a capacity to feel conflicting passions with equal force.
And the Irish keep regenerating their mythology. In the middle of the twentieth century, as though to keep the warrior forces of their legends rolling onward, revolution broke out again, twenty years after most of the island believed that ancient matters with England had been somewhat resolved. The Partition, if not a wholly satisfactory result to many, had at least proved workable. Some gods, it seems, thought otherwise. And when matters turned bloody, the Irish saw, once again, the greatest and subtlest of all mythology’s ingredients—irony.
PART ONE
The Living Legend
1
He comes back to my mind when I smell wood smoke. We had a clear and crisp October that year, and a simple white plume of smoke rose through the trees from his fairy-tale chimney. The long, quiet lane ended at his gate. My nose wrinkled as I climbed out of the car. Applewood? Not sweet enough. Beech? Possibly, from the old mansion demesne across the road. Could it be elm? Twenty years later it would be, as the elms died everywhere.
A white fence protected his small yard and its long rectangles of grass. He had a yellow garden bench and rosebushes, pruned to austerity. Around the side of the house I counted one, two, three fruit trees. If, on a calendar, a tourist brochure, or a postcard, you saw such a scene, with the golden roof of thatched and smocked straw, a pleased smile would cross your mind.
Not a sound to be heard, not a dog nor a bird. My breathing went short and shallow, and I swallowed, trying to manage my anticipation. Somebody had polished the door knocker so brilliantly that my fingers smudged the gleaming brass.
They said that he was eighty. Maybe he was, but when he opened the door our eyes came exactly level, and I was six feet three and a half inches. He shook hands as though closing a deal, and I was so thrilled to meet him at long last that my mouth turned dry as paper.
“Do you know anything about houses like this?” he asked as he led me into the wide old kitchen.
I knew everything about the house, I knew everything about him—but I wanted to hear it in his words, his voice.
“It feels nicely old,” I ventured.
He laughed. “Hah! ‘Nicely old’—I’ll borrow that.” Then, with some care, he turned to survey me, inclined his head a little, and smiled at me as though I were his beloved son. “I’m very pleased to meet you at last.”
I said, “I’m more than pleased to meet you, sir.”
He waved a hand, taking in the wide fireplace, the rafters, the room.
“This was what they called a ‘strong farmer’s’ house. Now with ‘all the modern conveniences,’ as they say. I suppose you know what a strong farmer was?”
“Wasn’t it somebody who supported his family from what he produced on his farm?”
“The very man,” he said.
He showed me the walls—two feet thick: “They keep in the heat for the winter, and they keep out the heat of the summer—those boys knew how to build. And look, I can put wide things on the windowsills.” He lifted a great bowl of jade, glinting with dragons. “Feel the weight of that. I carried it all the way back from Ceylon in 1936.”
Looking up, he stretched an arm and patted a beam.
“Did you know that people used to hide weapons in their thatch?” He had a habit of nodding when he made a statement, as though agreeing with himself.
Such endearing pride: he drew my attention to everything—the floor of huge flagstones, shaped by a local stonemason; the handmade chairs from a neighboring carpenter, who had also built the long table dominating the middle of the room. He rubbed it with his hand. “In the original they’d have used a timber called white deal. I had to settle for pine.”
“When did you buy the place?” I asked.
“Twenty-eight years, two months, and four days ago. When I finally came in off the road.” He surveyed the walls. “There was only the shell here, it was burned out by the redcoats in 1848—there was that bit of a rebellion that year, and evictions everywhere. When I bought it you could still see the black streaks at the top of the walls where they’d burned out the straw on the roof.”
He gave me the tour—but let me cut this short and give you the essential fact. This man, regarded (and jealously guarded) by the Folklore Commission as the most powerful remaining storyteller in the country, and possibly in the world, had restored fully an old farmhouse of considerable proportions. The conservationists, while allowing for the modern plumbing and electricity, had applauded him. “An elegant and authentic reconstruction,” they’d said, “solid, proud, and wholeheartedly traditional.” And that’s what I mean by “the essential fact”: the house was the man, and the man was the house.
He stood with his back to the fire. “So I’m to be yours now, am I?” he said. “How’s James doing?”
“I believe he’s holding on.”
Mixed feelings were always going to leak into this visit. For years, my superior, my mentor, otherwise so good to me, had kept this man for himself, and I had not been allowed to visit him, write to him, have anything to do with him. But now my mentor had bequeathed him to me because he himself, the inimitable James Clare, lay silent and still in Dublin, his lungs closing down day by day to emphysema. That morning I had made a note in my journal: I think that James will die soon.
“He won’t hold on long,” said Mr. O’Neill—full name, John Jacob Farrell O’Neill. “What color do you think Death’s face will be when it comes for James?”
“Gray,” I said, without thinking, “It’ll be gray.” I knew that color. From the war.
“That’s what I think, too.” He nodded, and turned his head around to look into the fire. When he turned back he said, “Then you’ll be ready.”
My mind asked, Ready for what?
Even though I didn’t speak the question, he answered it.
“Ready for everything.”
He couldn’t have known what “everything” would come to mean—or could he?
2
I wasn’t ready for anything—and in particular, not for the events of the next day, when I halted for a pub sandwich in the little town of Urlingford.
It was the siesta time, and raining. Nothing should have been happening, and nothing was. Using no energy, I eavesdropped on the silence around me, punctuated by snatches of idle conversation.
“They say she will.” This came out of the blue from an old coot at the bar, his nose hooked as Punch’s.
“I bet she won’t,” said his drinking companion.
“She told Midge Corcoran,” said the barman, “that all he wants to do is look at her.”
“God, then he’s paying dear for that,” said Punch, whose pal had wide-open nostrils like little gun barrels.
The pal said, “There’s fifty-two years between them.”
To which Ted, the fat and fatuous barman, said, “One for every week of the year.”
I knew these people well—not as individuals, but as a culture. Filthy old cords, worse boots, scant hygiene, no (you can bet on it) underwear. Every day of the week I saw men like them. Sitting at some bar everywhere, gossiping like knitters, stitching and bitching. Doing no work because there was no work, rarely a job that one could call a decent hire. Just sitting there talking. Talking, talking, talking. Or being silent. Silent in the hatred of their lives was what I’d always figured, until I realized that their emotions stood at zero. Their needles flickered only for sport or gossip.
In their faces I could see the blue veins of perdition, lines on a map of the country. That’s why I listened but kept my distance: I didn’t want to be infected with their ruin or catch their low-rent banality. Shallow as a saucer, they had no value to me in terms of what I collected.
Yet they caused some affect. For no reason that I could identify, I felt my chest tighten, and I heard the question in my mind: What’s making you anxious?
Ted the barman had a smarm to him, aiming to please everyone. In the past, before I’d mellowed down, I’d have needled him, picked a fight. The frosted glass panel beside me hadn’t been cleaned in a generation.
Most Irish pubs had a snug, a little room shuttered from the world, open only to the barman, where, typically, ladies were supposed to do their drinking because it was too indelicate for them to be seen in the public bar. Thus, I often found the snug a useful place to sit and listen.
My anxiety climbed. I fought a pricking of my thumbs and turned my ears inward. A frigid Saturday in late 1956, in my struggling, depressed native land.
Silence fell. We had a cough or two, a clink from a glass, a match being struck to light a cigarette. The rain no longer lashed the wi
ndow. Weak sunlight spread a mild and yellow fire on the roofs of the houses across the street. With a clang of a latch rudely lifted, the pub’s front door burst open. Jimmy Bermingham flew in, landed, and came straight toward me. Thus began the most dreadful part of my life.
3
Once upon a time, and it was a long time ago, when boys were boys, and girls were girls, and bears combed the fur on their coats, and the soldiers of the north carried spears of ice, and giant frogs who spoke in rhymes ruled our hemisphere, there lived a man who had a love as noble as the mountains, and as deep as the deep blue sea.
The story John Jacob Farrell O’Neill told me on that night of my first heady visit to him took so long that we didn’t part until three o’clock in the morning. With the comfort of the chair by the fireplace, and the logs he kept heaping on the broad orange flames, I felt so safe.
“What’s that you’re burning?” I asked.
“Believe it or not,” he said, “cherry. For the aroma. I had an old cherry tree out the back—I tried for years to save it, but it wanted to go. And do you know what? When they took it to the sawmill they found a musket ball in the heart of the wood.”
From the mantelpiece he took down a small white dish, in which, like a little iron eye, rested the old musket ball. We marveled together.
He cooked for me. From a pot hanging over the fire he produced an excellent meal of lamb stew, with onions and carrots and potatoes. He moved around his large kitchen with the agility of a girl. The silver watch chain on his vest caught the light from the fire.
His various tics interested me. I’ve mentioned the nodding, though he didn’t nod after everything he said, and soon it calmed down—perhaps it was a shyness response. Now and then he fiddled with his breast-pocket handkerchief, rebunching it. When listening to me (not that I spoke much), he pursed his lips into a small bow.
I looked at him, thinking, but not saying, I wonder if he has always cooked, if he never married? And he said, “I’ve always cooked. You can’t have a wife if you spend your life on the road—’twould be unfair to a woman. So I never married.”
Here’s a note I made that night: Such a practiced voice, educated by the universe, every word clear and warm. But—he’s an uncanny man. Don’t yet know how or why.
James Clare had said to me: It all comes together in this fellow. He’s the culmination.
This is what James meant: in his years and mine, traveling as collectors for the Irish Folklore Commission, James and I had heard all kinds of things: herbal cures, rambling ballads, family curses, jigs and reels played on fiddles and pipes, nonsense verse, riddles and recitations—and, above all, stories. Call them legends, call them fragments of mythology, call them, simply, “lore”; they had become my staple diet.