The Last Storyteller

  In the morning, Miss Fay had returned to work. The housekeeper, May, made my breakfast. Little Boy might not necessarily be following me. He’d have been watching the theater because he expected that I might have gone there. Simple as that.

  Into my thoughts broke May, polishing my boots and making nonstop commentary.

  “Your feet must be only like an elephant,” she said. “You should be paying rent, boots the size of them. If you ever need to walk on the water, you’ve a right pair of canoes here; they’ll think you’re Jesus all over again, and all you’ll need is a couple of loaves of bread, and was it five fishes he had? You’ll be able to feed the city on that, although nobody in Dublin likes fish. How many holes for your bootlaces, is it ten on each side? You must have rheumatism from bending down to tie them. Isn’t it a good job you went to school and learned the black knot, or you’d be walking around, your laces flapping, and they wrapping theirselves around the ankles of passing strangers and tripping them up, and you’d be getting sued for malicious injury and broken bones.”

  James used to call them “May’s monologues,” and we had debated whether we should be noting them down as genuine vernacular.

  I sat on after breakfast, planning my next weeks. The Folklore Commission had some cures they wanted me to collect. I wanted to interview a woman near Galway who had been wooed by three brothers. The ghost of a Spanish sailor had been appearing in North Clare. There was a healing stone somewhere in the same area.

  By noon I had rearranged all my schedules. I repacked my bags and my car. Several weeks on the road faced me—such a delight, and I would end with John Jacob O’Neill. Perhaps we might reconstruct a week, or at least a few days, of his past life on the road.

  But the newspaper arrived, with a headline shouting, “THREE MEN KILLED IN BORDER ATTACK.” In an instant, not quite knowing why, I altered my plans.

  55

  The director of the Folklore Commission knew how much I liked the road. I think he liked me, too; he had paid me some compliments. My report “Matchmaking in Rural Ireland” had gone down well, which had helped his annual budget deal with the government. And I was James’s protégé.

  After the necessary conversation—the funeral, the obituaries, James’s history in the field—the director sat back and listened. He had boot-brush eyebrows and smoked a pipe big as a toilet, incongruous for a man so small. Without filling in too many details—such as the presence in my life of Little Boy—I outlined the idea that had sent me hot-footed to him. He listened—that was his greatest asset; he made one feel well regarded. And then he summarized:

  “I agree with you that what’s happening has an element of interest for us. But it’s awkward. I think you should take your planned trip now. But if you bumped into one of the two funerals—I see from the newspapers that they’re being held tomorrow—that’d be fine. We might not need these records to appear for years. In fact, we won’t ask for any reports from you on this topic. Don’t break the law. I can’t give you any official papers—by which I mean I can’t give you a letter saying, ‘Ben MacCarthy is covering this campaign of violence along the border on behalf of the Irish Folklore Commission,’ can I?” He smiled at his own irony.

  He counted on his fingers. “Read every newspaper report. Make your own assessments as to what you can and cannot research. Note down what’s safe to observe. Be more discreet than you ever imagined possible. And keep us out of it.”

  As I left, I asked him, “What would James say?”

  He laughed. “James could be a bit nefarious himself when he wanted to be.”

  And so I changed course. I went back to Miss Fay’s with as many different newspapers as I could find. All day long I read. Measuring what was happening. Trying to see where I could work. I told myself, If you can prove that your interests are objective, you’ll keep yourself from harm. And now I had something powerful that I needed: the moral backing of my own job.

  I’ll summarize it for you. “Three Men Killed in Border Attack” rescued me. I saw a way out. Make official a record of this new political violence. Somebody should do it. Excellent alibi; I felt that I had hit something of a jackpot.

  First, it kept me safe. From all sides. To the police I had an official role, like a journalist, and to the activists I was recording their effort. Second, I placed a prime value on the idea of “records”: notated observations of the life of my country as seen from the fireside, from the kitchen chair. That’s where you discerned the shape of a nation, the history and the dreams. Now I had made it the instrument of my safety. Or so I hoped.

  56

  The three deaths took place on the night of New Year’s Day 1957. One man was a police officer, and two came from the south, both of them Irish republican activists carrying guns. A raid on a police barracks in County Fermanagh collapsed. Doorstep bombs didn’t explode. Police opened unexpected fire and hampered the attackers’ escape.

  The two IRA men became heroes and martyrs. In front of its own eyes, the country’s emotions changed. This had happened before. When the rebellion of Easter 1916 broke out, the public jeered the insurgents and threw cabbages at their marching columns in Dublin. But some weeks later, when fifteen of the leaders were summarily executed, opinion swung one hundred and eighty degrees, and thus did the Easter Rising become Ireland’s most iconic moment of history.

  One headline said, “TWO DEAD RAIDERS IDENTIFIED,” and reported them as “Feargal O’Hanlon of Park St., Monaghan, and Sean South, Henry St., Limerick. Yesterday their bodies lay in the Royal Ulster Constabulary barracks in Enniskillen.”

  On the next page, the fashion reporters of the wire services listed “eight of the world’s best-dressed women according to the New York Dress Institute. Heading the poll was Mrs. William Paley; the Duchess of Windsor second, Princess Grace of Monaco, third.” Also-rans included Marlene Dietrich and Audrey Hepburn.

  Such was the life of the moment.

  The newspapers were forecasting huge attendances at the funerals of O’Hanlon, aged twenty, from Ballybay, County Monaghan, and South, aged twenty-eight, from Garryowen, in Limerick.

  And then I tightened my focus to a paragraph lower down. What?!

  Alongside a speech condemning the IRA action by the Irish premier, Mr. Costello, ran a report stating that “several men, believed to have been involved in the raid, had been treated for injuries in the Mater Hospital, Dublin. One of them had discharged himself, although rumors that he had disguised himself as a woman in order to leave the hospital could not be confirmed. The police continued to question the others.”

  Of course it’s Jimmy. Must be! Who else would do it? I can see Jimmy in a skirt; he certainly has the figure for it. Won’t Randall chuckle? And don’t I need to record this?

  57

  Here, from 7 January 1957, is one newspaper report:

  FUNERAL OF LIMERICK MAN KILLED IN RAID

  The funeral of Sean South (28) … took place in Mount St. Lawrence Cemetery, Limerick, after a Solemn Requiem Mass in St. Michael’s Church.

  The celebrant of the Mass was Rev. P. Lyons, C.C.; Rev. T. Lyons, C.C., was deacon, and Rev. P. O’Donnell, C.C., subdeacon. [Note: “C.C.” indicated “curate,” the lowest level of ordained priest; did nobody of seniority in the church wish to be associated with the event?]

  Thousands of people lined the footpath as the funeral procession, led by the Cork Volunteer Pipe Band, moved through the streets. The tricolor-draped coffin was carried from the church to the house by young men wearing black berets and black armlets with tricolor ribbons. Other young men formed a guard of honor flanking the hearse, which was followed by groups of people from Dublin, Galway, Mayo, Roscommon, Clare, Kerry, Cork, Limerick, Tipperary, and other counties. Tricolors, some with black drapes, hung from the windows of a number of business premises.

  My instincts felt right. Something was again happening down among the people: note the “business premises” draped with black. Maisie had said it. It wasn’t over. For many people, e
specially in the southern counties, the War of Independence had never ended.

  Their long memories still held fast to the dispossessions and humiliations of occupation, the loss of land, the servile roles. They, too, were the people who had believed in rejecting a border; they, more than most, had said, “Fight on.”

  And if those passions had subsided a little, these two deaths in this new campaign gave a mighty scratch to the surface of that culture.

  I saw all that subliminal remembrance played out in Limerick. How many people at Sean South’s funeral? “Thousands,” said the newspaper—and it’s true that I had never seen a larger crowd, except inside a stadium at a sporting event. Here are the notes I made:

  First the cortege: These are the men whom I meet in their own homes. But their faces have a somber darkness here, and they frown. They range across all ages, grandfathers and grandsons, the storytellers I meet, and their families of listeners. Many have formed up into loose honor guards, attempting marching formations. Nobody looks wealthy. All seem committed, though, and they share an intensity of purpose. I see no grief on their faces, nothing personal; I see a kind of pride, an air of being where they feel they should be, solidarity.

  In the crowds along the streets I perceive less of that. Curiosity dominates, and I see a smattering of sentimentality, women blowing noses and wiping away tears, and a respect shown by the bowing of heads as the cortege passes. Most impressive of all is the silence. I can hear the footsteps of the marchers, the swish of the hearse’s tires. Even when the cortege had long passed I could hear the barked orders of the commands—in Irish—far ahead.

  From the beginning of the procession, the people waiting in the streets swung in behind the marchers; only a few people didn’t follow. By the time the hearse reached the cemetery, the wide streets had filled. Two funerals in a week with thousands following the coffin: are we once more the Land of the Glorious Dead?

  Unlike James Clare’s funeral, they didn’t wait for everybody to get to the graveyard. Half a mile from the gates I heard the three volleys of shots, then the trumpets and drums playing “Last Post” and “Reveille.”

  By the time I got there, the oration had long ended. Some newspapers, mostly local, reported the speaker’s words: “He died for my freedom; for my sake, for your sake, for the sake of the generations that are to come. Let his life and death be a lesson and a guide to us all, as his deeds and the honor he earned were a cause of joy and pride. His sacrifice on the altar of freedom encourages us.”

  58

  Contradictory details emerged of how Feargal O’Hanlon and Sean South had died. That’s always dangerous in Ireland, where suspicion makes its living from embroidery. Some facts went uncontested, which is to say that both sides gave out the same version. Then they diverged.

  The Royal Ulster Constabulary spokesman said that both men had been killed at the scene, and their bodies carried by their comrades on a truck to a distant barn. The rest of the rebels had then escaped across the border.

  An Irish Republican Army version said that both men had been hit in the first phase of the action. Their comrades carried them to the barn as a firefight followed all of them. While conducting a rearguard action, the active members hid the injured men until nothing more could be done for them. As the survivors headed out in the dark, said the IRA, the police found the two men and killed them.

  Well, Ben and Louise, you know what they say: Truth is the first casualty of war. And I surmise that in your professions you know that more than most. And truth lurched about a bit after that incident. The Irish Republican Publicity Bureau issued a statement saying that “an Irish resistance fighter” had been killed in an attack on the police station and that “later, a second fighter died after being captured by the enemy.” That’s the view that stuck all over the south, and among the north’s Catholics.

  The Northern Ireland police put out their version. It was fully reported by all the newspapers. And backed by medical evidence given at the inquests on the two dead men. The police resisted accusations that they had “finished off” the two wounded men in the old byre.

  Few believed them—especially as the dreaded name “B Specials” came up. However, from all I have been able to determine, Sean South had indeed died on the truck, and Feargal O’Hanlon had lost too much blood to survive. (I made extensive notes; you can find them in the commission archives.)

  The men who got back across the border that night went to the houses of friends. Who took them to Monaghan Hospital. Where they were arrested by the southern police. Who took those needing greater treatment to the Mater Hospital in Dublin. Whence one escaped dressed as a woman.

  59

  After the funeral in Limerick, I tried to get back to normal. The crowds dispersed. Somberness remained. Rain still fell. I went to see my “Occasion Merchant”—his name for himself, not mine; that’s what the signboard outside his door called him. He rented and sold goods for every possibility; I’d met him with somebody who’d hired dentures from him to go on a date.

  I liked Mr. MacManus, a big bear of a man, with his heavy breathing, and his own black-and-white teeth like piano keys, and his habit of speaking in paragraphs. He always had news for me of some erratic kind: some unusual emigrant returned from “the New World,” as he persisted in calling the United States; a new cache of bizarre goods he had found; a family row out in the country. To this last sort of account, no matter what the details, he habitually added the same final remark: “And I’d bet there was a bit of incest there, too.”

  He didn’t disappoint me; he had just purchased a stock of chamber pots from a hardware store in County Waterford that was closing down.

  “Come here till I show you,” he said, heaving himself along the crammed passageways of his storerooms. “You’re the one man now that’d be interested in this. It’d never strike anybody that the humble chamber pot, in its willing existence under the beds of the world, would supply historical commentary or social observation. You’re familiar with it, I know, because you grew up in the countryside with the chamber pot in all its forms, white enamel with a blue rim, or china in decent households, and flowers everywhere, including on the bottom, which always struck me as odd and superfluous, given what has to land on them same flowers. But here’s something you never saw. This hardware merchant supplied Lord Waterford and a great number of other Protestant gentlemen with household goods, and he had one pot left from a stock that was popular with them gentry in the last century. Look at it.”

  He pulled the china pot from a long, high drawer. For a handle it had a grotesque human ear. Around the side were pictures of dozens of Irish peasant children, romping and disheveled, and on the base of the interior the portrait of a whiskered man. Above him ran a curved caption: “Daniel O’Connell, the Liberator.” The line below said, in a wide curve, “Do Your Duty.”

  Mr. MacManus said, “Isn’t that a treasure? If proof were needed of how they feared O’Connell, there you have it, as round as a hoop. I like to think of the gentry who opposed Mr. O’Connell as being unable to combat him with ingenuity and wit in the departments of debate, rhetoric, and logical assumption, they being reduced to bodily functions of the basest and most private kind to express their indignation and frustrated sense of contentiousness.”

  How does a man with such short breathing run off such long sentences?

  The chamber pot helped me. Further validated the link between folklore and history. People knew of O’Connell like they knew of Finn MacCool. Years later, maybe prompted by Mr. MacManus, I researched O’Connell. His body may have expired in 1847, but he never died; heroes don’t. And he had the essential legendary status—of outwitting the British Parliament. And fathering dozens of children. Both sides of the blanket.

  I asked John Jacob O’Neill one day if it was valid to count a figure such as O’Connell as myth. His answer clinched it for me:

  “Did he earn his legends?”

  So the stories of O’Connell will have to wait for
another day. If you remind me, children, some night here around my own fireplace I’ll tell them to you. And we’ll be up until dawn.

  From Mr. MacManus, I headed out to the Atlantic, to a house just south of Doolin, in Clare, where an old woman told me of her marriage. When young and pretty, and evidently mischievous, she had been wooed by three brothers. Each of their names began with the letter P—Peter, Paul, and Patrick.

  They didn’t know about the others’ courtship. Hannah never told them. Not only that—Peter and Paul were twins.

  “I kept them all dancing on strings,” she said. “Because I found that very enjoyable.”

  “You did?” I prodded.

  “They each had their different nights of the week. That was the only way I could manage them. Because they all sounded the very same, they all spoke alike, and in the dark of the night I didn’t want to make a mistake when I went out to meet them.”

  “What would have happened,” I asked, “if they had switched places one night?”

  Hannah laughed as openly as a rogue. “I’d have known from the kissing,” she said.

  “The kissing?”

  “They were all different. Peter never shaved himself right. Paul was always trying to get the tongue working. And Patrick would keep his lips pressed on your mouth even if a crowd formed and told him to stop.”

  “Which of them did you marry?” I said.

  “None of them.” She giggled, eighty and naughty.

  “None of them?” I could hear my surprise in my own echo.

  “No.” She paused. “What happened was—didn’t they all find out. A jealous girl at the creamery, and I thought she was my friend, she told them. And without any of them telling the other, they all emigrated.”

  “Where did they go, Hannah?”

  She held up three fingers and took them down one by one.