The Last Storyteller

  Mother made it clear: “No deals; everything goes under the hammer.” The “Three Wise Men,” as they called themselves, relaxed and sang for their breakfast. They vied with great tales: eccentric owners, dream finds—including, they said, a Vermeer in a County Wicklow cottage and a Stradivarius cello in Belfast.

  66

  Just before nine o’clock, the auctioneers arrived. An hour later, scores of people surged through the opened gate.

  “Gawk-gawk-gawkers,” declared my father, “burn-burn-burning with curiosity to see what we have.” He appointed himself patrolman for the day. “They-they-they’d take the milk out of your tea and come back for the sugar,” he said. And he said it often.

  My spirits must have been improving. I must have been getting stronger. Maybe my adventures in the Shannon flood strengthened me. Why do I say this? Because without angst or mood, I emptied my own bedroom bare. Down to the boards. Even unhooked the curtains. So that no feet could trample through, I then locked the door, hid the key, and stuck up a notice: “This room is empty and is closed off to protect it.” Did that mean my old room or my own soul?

  We had a day of amazement. So much went for six, ten, or fourteen times above appraisal or expectation. Everybody was bidding. As the crowds grew, it got ridiculous—heated escalations for a wallplate, a pitcher, a watering can.

  Mother, nervous and astonished, presided over the day. She walked here, halted there, greeted old friends, recalled past acquaintances, bent to small children like a queen at an orphanage. Which is how she used to inspect her flowers in the garden. The distress I feared never surfaced. Rather, she kept an eye on my father, as though he might be the one who combusted.

  Harry, though, held himself together. I watched him, too, and when, late in the afternoon, he wandered off in the direction of the kitchen garden, I followed him at a distance.

  I’d been a child spy; I still knew all the places to hide. Where ivy congealed on the walls, some bricks had long broken loose. Through these I could peer into the garden and not be seen. My father went down the seed beds, looking at earth in which he would never again dig.

  I gave him several minutes. The wooden garden door had a noisy hinge. He waved and beckoned. His face seemed both strained and flushed.

  “Do you think-think-think the new crowd will till it as well as we did, Ben?” he said.

  “Are they gardeners?” I hadn’t met them—a family from Carlow, with a horde of children.

  “They’ll be able to teach the little ones how to grow radishes,” he said. “Do you re-re-remember?”

  I smiled. “And lettuce. And onions.”

  “And-and-and you even managed to grow carrots,” he said.

  We paused. “Do you see that spot over there?” I pointed. “That’s where you knocked down Mr. Kane.”

  “God above! How do you know that?”

  I said, “I was hiding up there, behind those black-currant bushes.”

  “What? Why?”

  I said, “I was afraid you’d get hurt, and I wanted to be ready to run for help—I was too small to attack him.”

  He laughed. “I-I-I got him a good one, didn’t I?”

  We walked on. Saying nothing. Multiple feelings never to be spoken.

  The lower gate led to the meadow adjoining Mr. Treacy’s field.

  “Will-will-will you be all right, Ben?”

  “I’ll be all right.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Are-are-are you—I mean, will things change for you?”

  “Dad, things are always changing.”

  He knew what I meant. I knew what he meant. And there we left it.

  67

  Back at the auction, Goldenfields was closing down in front of my eyes. People I had never seen before bustled away hugging intimacies from my life. The large copper pan—how often had I stirred plum jam or apple jelly? Two men carried the mangle. I’d built my childish biceps turning that handle to squeeze the water from the towels, with our housekeeper Large Lily telling me, “That’ll put hairs on your chest.”

  Her husband, Billy Moloney, who ran our farmyard, and who couldn’t speak without profanity, came over to where I was standing. I would report to Mother later what he said, and I would make sure to use the euphemism we had long, long ago agreed on.

  “The whole thing’s flocked, Ben. And I’m flocked with it. Nothin’ll ever be as flockin’ good again.”

  Even though she laughed and laughed—how it touched her.

  That night they drove away, Harry MacCarthy and his wife, Louise; they drove all of eight miles to Goold’s Cross, but it might have been to Moscow or Atlanta or Cádiz.

  And I? I stayed in a bed-and-breakfast place in Mitchelstown, the first place I’d ever stayed away from home, where I’d lodged when I went looking to bring my father home the day after he ran away with Venetia.

  68

  Broken ribs, broken ankle, fractured skull, severe lung infection—did he look shaken? But he still had the seducer’s grin.

  “They’re saying to me here, Captain, How did you survive at all? And I says to them, Ah, I have good friends, I have a guardian angel.” He looked at me with his usual cheek. “And I’ve learned how to answer to ‘Liam.’ ”

  “I bet that confused you for a while.”

  “It wasn’t till someone called me ‘Mr. MacCarthy’ that I figured it out.”

  “I said you were my cousin. Our car went into the river.”

  “Actually, Ben, it was the river went into our car.”

  “You’re in good form—‘Liam,’ ” I said.

  “The fellow in the next bed keeps telling me jokes all day.”

  “You like jokes.”

  “I do, Ben. But his jokes are very bad.”

  “What does a bad joke sound like?”

  “No. I’m not telling you. It’d make me worse.”

  “So—tell me a good joke.” I sat down, put the bunch of grapes I’d brought on his nightstand.

  He reflected for a moment, a lock of his black hair making a fat comma on his forehead.

  “Okay. I have one. There’s an old farmer. He’s out in his field looking at his cattle, he’s smoking his pipe leaning on a gate, and he hears a little voice saying, ‘Help me. Sir! Please help me.’ “I laughed; Jimmy mimicking a small voice was, in itself, sidesplitting. “The farmer looks everywhere and finally, as the voice keeps calling, he looks down and he sees this frog on a clump of grass near his feet. And sure enough, ’tis the frog that’s talking.

  “So he bends down and he picks it up and the frog says, ‘Sir! Kiss me and you’ll discover wonders. I’m actually a beautiful young girl who was trapped in a spell by my cruel and jealous stepmother. In true life I am tall and slender and eternally loyal, and if you kiss me and restore me to human form I will be your loyal and loving and very beautiful companion for life.’

  “So the farmer takes the pipe out his mouth and says, ‘Would you mind repeating all that?’ And the frog says, ‘One kiss. That’s all it’ll take, and I’ll be your adoring love, always young, to take care of you forever.’

  “The farmer says, ‘One kiss?’ The frog says, ‘One kiss,’ its little eyes bulging, its little green chest heaving. And the farmer says, ‘And that’s all?’ And the frog says, ‘That’s all.’ So the farmer thinks for a minute and then says, ‘D’you know what? At this age of my life I’d rather have a talking frog.’ And he puts the frog in his pocket and goes on smoking his pipe.”

  A nurse came by and said, “Shush!” When I’d stopped laughing, I had an idea.

  “What are you going to do when you get out of here—‘Liam’?”

  He said, “I was hoping you’d drive me to Marian’s. But maybe I can stay with you?”

  I said, “My parents have just sold up. I’m homeless.”

  We sat quietly for a while.

  “Thanks for the grapes,” he said. “I knew you’d come in.”

  “Any other visito
rs?”

  “No. I’m sure everybody thinks I got swept away. Which I nearly did.”

  “You nearly did.”

  “Any idea what happened to the others?”

  “I wasn’t exactly looking out for them,” I said.

  “Why did you look after me?” Jimmy asked. “Especially after we all threatened you?”

  I shrugged. “That’s a stupid question.”

  “Well, thanks anyway.”

  “Now,” I said, “you have to make your life a good one.”

  “Listen to Bishop Ben.”

  In acting mode, I pretended to start, as though with a sudden thought. “I have an idea. Randall is very fond of you. And nobody will know you’re there. If you go to Marian’s, you’ll be in Dublin. All those cops.”

  I swear that I actually saw his mind working, click-click-click!, like the tumblers on a safe being burgled, a lock being picked.

  He said again, “Thanks for the grapes.” Jimmy repeated himself when he was thinking. I didn’t draw attention to it. “Will you drive me there? When they let me out?”

  I nodded and said, “I have a question.”

  He looked at me. “I think I know what it is.”

  “What is it?”

  “No, Ben, you have to ask it.”

  I took a deep breath. “That day, the day of the flood. Would they have killed me?”

  He looked away. “No, Ben. They wouldn’t.” But I sensed that he hadn’t finished. And he hadn’t. He said, slow as a funeral, “They wouldn’t have killed you—I would.”

  I said nothing. What was there to say?

  69

  Did John Jacob O’Neill understand that he’d told me two tales and each had foreshadowed events of which I had later heard? A few moments after I arrived, he decided to bake.

  He cleared a quarter of the long table, rapped it with his knuckles, declared it “the Territory,” and laughed. “Now the Right Order.” He assembled his ingredients, one above the other: flour, baking soda, sour milk in a blue-and-white pitcher, eggs, salt, and sugar. “The Weaponry,” he said, and another laugh: sieve, wooden spoon, an old-fashioned scale, a knife, and a large yellow bowl. He fetched an apron, long, wide, and blue, and tied it at his waist in front with the awkward commitment of a little boy tying a shoelace. Into the apron’s cord he stuck a clean dishcloth. “Let Life Commence,” he said and smiled at me.

  Before he began to mix he paused and, with fingers touching each item, checked to see that he had everything: the eggs, the flour, the baking soda, the salt cellar, the little sugar bowl (“A Souvenir of Galway”), the sour milk, on which curds floated like tiny blue-white ice floes. Satisfied, he weighed the flour, tipped it into the bowl, and shook the bowl, from side to side. Then he sifted, letting it flow like powdered fog through his fingers. The afternoon light through the window turned the flour to magic dust; he might have been caressing a beloved woman’s long hair.

  He made a well in the flour, a deep socket, and lowered in some of the sour milk. Then he cracked the three eggs and dropped them into the milk in the well, and began to mix with the wooden spoon. It looked like a tiny canoe paddle in his large, boyish hands.

  Is this why he has no age spots, no liver marks? Because he bakes? And has his hands stuck in ingredients all the time? Children, do you know how unusual it was in those days to find a countryman in Ireland who cooked and baked?

  Only when he had the process under way did he speak again.

  “I hear James’s funeral was a grand business.”

  “So you didn’t get there yourself?”

  “No. I had a Japanese visitor, and he’s afraid of crowds and doesn’t speak English.”

  “Most of the government turned out.”

  “Was that such a good thing?” said John Jacob O’Neill, and laughed. He concentrated again.

  “Now,” he said, “why did you ask me such a question?”

  I told him my second experience: first, Ballyneety, followed by the raid on the British convoy at Larne. He went on mixing. I sat, expecting a pronouncement. None came.

  When he had mixed and melded and molded, he had created a loose egg of dough. With both hands he raised it from the large yellow bowl and rested it like a patient on a patch of flour that he had sprinkled on the table. There he shaped the dough into a pale flying saucer.

  He went to the fireplace and brought to the table a large black pot with three short legs and a long iron handle.

  “Did you ever see one of these, Ben?”

  I said, “Is it a bastible oven?”

  “The very thing.” He lowered the dough cake into the pot, which he then took to the fire. A hook swung from an arm that looked like a little black crane. He suspended the pot from the hook, and satisfied himself that the pot hung at the most suitable height. From beneath the burning logs he then plucked, with a long pair of tongs, several glowing embers, which he distributed all over the lid of the pot. He would do that many times, as they burned out.

  “It’s not true,” he said eventually, “that a watched pot never boils. It certainly bakes.” And then he told me a new story, quite short, about a haunting, but of a kind I had never heard before.

  70

  I was in Macao. Have you ever been to China, Ben? Macao is a tough old town. It gets all the flotsam and jetsam, all the dross of the South China Sea, and therefore it’s a great place for sailors and their stories and people who get lost. There’s a quarter of a million people packed tight into that old town. It’s a place of shadows and knives and people who weep.

  My story is about a woman who called me from a doorway as I walked by. The time was two o’clock in the afternoon. I was wearing a white suit and a Panama hat.

  She said to me, “Come here, stranger, come over here.”

  I walked to her door, and she said, “Come in, stranger, come in here.” In I went, and she said, “Sit down, stranger, sit down here.” And I sat down.

  “Did you see a man up there on the street,” she said, “a sad man, with a long mustache drooping down?”

  I had seen such a man, so I said, yes, I saw him, and yes, he did indeed look sad.

  “That man,” she said, “is haunted by a ghost. A ghost that comes to him every night.”

  She said to me, “Move closer. Not everybody’s ears are pure enough to receive what I’m about to tell you.”

  Truth be known, my own ears struggled a little. Her dialect lacked the music that had helped me learn the easier ways of Mandarin, and a few more of the Chinese languages. There are three hundred of them, but don’t we all have to smile and frown, language or no language?

  So I moved closer, because she also directed me; she had fingers of ivory, long and tapering, and her fingernails curved a little in their length, and she had rubbed a kind of rosewood paint on them, so that they seemed like little flowers on long stems.

  As I looked at her, I began to perceive that whatever her age—and it’s difficult to tell with some Chinese people; she could have been sixty or ninety—she had retained a remarkable beauty. Imagine a small face, of a kind you might see painted on a jar from a faraway dynasty, or on a doll for an emperor’s daughter.

  In truth, she might have been Japanese, though when I later asked her if that was possible, she gave me an answer as blunt as it was brief, I can tell you. And she wore her hair in a great, thick cascade around her head and neck, to her cheeks on both sides.

  I complimented her on her beauty, and she looked at me as though I suffered from fits of idiocy. As calm as candlelight she pursued her theme, and told me the story of the haunting. I believe I have remembered it much as she told me, although you, Ben, must, of course, suffer my translation. I’ll speak now as she spoke. Am I going too fast for your notes?

  I shook my head; I wanted to say that the translation didn’t matter, since I spoke none of the three hundred languages of China and thought that the word “mandarin” signified either a dignitary or an orange—but I would have cut out my tongue rather
than interrupt him.

  Here she is speaking: We have had pirates for centuries in the South China Sea. Macao being a port, they come ashore here when the fruits of the shipping fail, as they do from time to time. One year, when all the big vessels and the rich cargo freighters were keeping away from the South China Sea, a pirate named Wong Kiu came ashore [I asked him to spell it]. Wong Kiu had so much power and seemed so frightening that not even the dogs would bark at him.

  From his ship, he swaggered along the quays as you’d expect a pirate to swagger, with his drooping mustache and a black bandanna around his head, his knife in his belt. Behind him walked his pirate crew, the cutthroats everybody imagines pirates to be. They commandeered provisions here, liquor there, tobacco and cigarettes somewhere else, grabbed girls and kissed them, and when they had supervised the carrying of all their contraband goods back to their ship, Wong Kiu decided to give his men a drink.

  Down on the port there was an old tavern whose name when translated from the Chinese means “Time to Rest from the Sea,” and they made for this place. Now, the tavern was closed for business that day because the owner was giving his daughter her wedding party. Wong Kiu and his pirates knocked on the door and were waved away, like everybody else who tried to get in. The pirates, though, unlike everybody else, kicked down the door.

  A hundred and one people, the luckiest number, were attending the wedding, and most of them knew who Wong Kiu was: the most feared buccaneer on the sea, whose ships came like arrows out of Bias Bay. The owner, a decent man, and prudent, explained that it was his daughter’s wedding, but that the pirates were welcome to stay and have a drink. Instead, Wong Kiu saw, over the owner’s shoulder, the bride. She had flowers in her hair and looked as pretty as the summer.

  Wong Kiu walked over to the girl, took her by the wrist, and dragged her from the wedding. His pirate gang followed. Not one man, not a single one, of all the men there that day attempted to stop him, not even the bridegroom, a big, hefty fellow. He just stood there, weeping.