The Last Storyteller

  “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.

  22

  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.”

  And still he screamed; we could hear him as we walked out.

  More shaken than we wished to admit, we got into the car and leaned back. Jimmy lit a cigarette.

  When he’d smoked the last drag he said, “D’you want a drink?”

  I shook my head. “You go. I’ll pick you up in a while.”

  “I’ll be at Mick Davern’s,” he said.

  My car had a clock, a rare accessory. “It’s nine in the morning, Jimmy. They won’t be open.”

  “They know me.” I drove him over to Mick’s. Outside the pub, his coat tattered, he then said, “Come in with me, Ben. Big work needs big drink.”

  “Jimmy, I have to see a man about a dog.” That was our national euphemism for private matters.

  When they let him in, I drove away—to the hospital, back to the dry-witted nun.

  “I forgot to ask, Sister. Yesterday the ambulance brought in an old gentleman. He might have had a heart attack.”

  “He’s here, but he’s a bit vacant,” she said. “We’ll hold on to him a while yet.”

  In country towns, we hadn’t much by way of hospitals in those days. We could barely afford hygiene. And if we had any, it wasn’t exactly stainless steel. Yet the sensitivity to illness and disease could not have been higher, because for many years the country had lived under the tyranny of tuberculosis. Thousands died, in ghastly sanatoria, to which people went as to the gallows. That deadly little cough, almost a politeness. That dabbing of the handkerchief to the mouth, almost demure. Those flecks of blood, almost a death sentence.

  Let me say now, though, and it isn’t relevant but I’ll tell you anyway: we beat it. We trounced TB. Cleared it from the land. I tell you only because it shows that we could always do the right thing when we wished.

  23

  Imagine the kind of hospital you’ve seen in old war films: white-painted iron beds against beige walls; sheets crisp and white, but fraying; wooden floors waxed an inch high. Get that antiseptic smell in your nostrils anywhere ever after, and you’re back among those wards. Where now I walked, unsure of myself. Again.

  I saw him before he saw me. He sat propped up in bed, halfway down the shabby ward. How ancient he looked. Inert and lost, he stared ahead into some unknown land, his face as wrinkled as old stones, his gaping mouth a small cave.

  At my mild cough he looked up, seemed to recognize me, and his face began to open. The striped hospital nightshirt barely framed his gaunt shoulders; his neck sagged, a blue-veined craw. Straightaway he drew me into his story.

  “Is my girl with you, did you bring her?”

  How much older than Cleopatra was Antony? Arthur than Guinevere? Here was their descendant, who saw no impediment in the age difference between a man and his love object. He felt all the ardor of a young buck, all the pain of a teenage Romeo.

  I paused, trying to think fast. Why am I here? What have I come for? My heart hurts for him. He’s prepared to lose any dignity he has. And has already surrendered so much. There must be some good that I can do. But what is it?

  “Is she out in the car, is she? Is she coming in to see me?” He rasped his words, his eagerness overcoming his weakness.

  “How are you feeling? My name is Ben MacCarthy, by the way.”

  He didn’t care if I’d been christened Moby Dick.

  “Is she with you?”

  “I have a message from her.”

  “It’s bad news, so,” he said.

  I sa
id, “No—”

  “If it was good news, she’d be here.”

  “She’s gone over to England. Just for a while.”

  “Ah,” he said. “She has an aunt over there.”

  “When she comes back, I’ll bring her to see you.”

  Malachi strode the land, burgeoning in his spirit, a gentleman respected and admired.

  “I’m aware,” he said, with some effort, “that I’m seen by some people as doing damage. But I can offer her a very good life.”

  He built a great house, and he modeled it on the mansions you see in the morning when you look up at the cities and towns in the clouds above your head.

  “But I might as well tell the whole truth. I’m not in my seventies; I’m in my eighties.” He closed his eyes. “Her father’s aware of this.”

  A different nun came by. “All right there, Mr. Barry? And is this your son?”

  I smiled, we shook our heads, and as she walked on a bell rang in my head, and I said, “Mr. Barry? Are you the same Dan Barry—?”

  And Mal had his own talents as a warrior.… Bravery became his signature, fearlessness his stamp, and valor his seal, and he grew famous throughout the land.

  I stood and shook his hand. “I’m delighted to meet you.”

  “Will she write to me, do you think?”

  For seven long years Malachi MacCool waged the fight for his green fields …

  “I read the book of your fighting days.”

  “So did a lot of people,” he said.

  His mythic dimension grew in my mind. A generation earlier, this aged lover had been a famed and fierce guerrilla, known as far as China for his firefights in the Irish fields.

  His slingshot became an object of muttering and fear among the bad and the mad.

  Mr. Barry began to weep a little. There was no sound, just a trickle of tears down from each eye. I didn’t know what to do.

  “Listen,” I said, about to tell him that I’d visit again. He held up a hand and stopped me.

  “The thing about the one true person in your life, the thing is this,” he said. “Nothing is important except the trueness. It could be the other way round. She could be eighty-five and me twenty. Doesn’t matter a straw. The one true person is the only person who fits exactly into the shape of what’s inside you. And that’s her for me. I mean, if you put a bullet into a gun, doesn’t it have to fit the gun in order to fire it?”

  With this he stopped. And so did the world.

  I stared at him, and my mind’s eyes began to swim. Alarm surged in me. Uh-oh. I know this feeling. Christ! Twice in one morning. Red rage. Triggered now with no chance of escape.

  24

  With my slow emotional metabolism, the flood builds and then the dam bursts. At such moments a chair becomes a straitjacket, a room a prison. When that mood took me—and it always had to do with Venetia—I became unreliable. Unsteady. I had to act, but then I did things I shouldn’t have done. Mostly self-damaging. Now, and I knew it, I was about to return to that bad pathway.

  I could feel myself wishing to close my eyes and shake my head. If I did, it would be a slow shake, from side to side. That has always been the first symptom of serious disturbance. At any moment, awful fears would rise in me, black and red and twisting.

  Stop! Stop everything! Halt every thought! Too late.

  Old feelings, long locked away, began to break out. I could physically feel—I could see—the beginnings of a tornado inside me. On and on it came, ripping the roof off my composure. Debris flew into the inner air. The walls of denial that I had built for twenty-four years burst open. They’d done so only once or twice before, and they’d caused havoc.

  In essence, there was a part of me over which, for many years, I had little or no control. I’m not proud of it. Truth, or at least truth I hated to face, triggered it. This old man—he was telling me my own story, telling me how I, too, had known such an exact fit and had lost it. If my rage at that fact of my life turned inward on me, I would not be able to keep myself safe.

  Sad and defeated, Mr. Barry said no more. His hands, translucent and calm, rested on the white sheet.

  “Listen here—” He opened his eyes and looked at me. “If a man ever feels like this in his life,” he said, “it’ll always be in him. No matter what he does or no matter what happens to it.”

  When I heard that remark—what chance had I left?

  My beloved Louise, my beloved Ben, here’s something else I haven’t told you. I’ve never revealed my decision to kill the man your mother married. Brace yourselves. I’m about to describe the first steps I took to humiliate, and then slaughter, him whom you called “Dad,” who raised you, out there along the long, empty, Atlantic beaches of Florida, where I once followed your mother down the path of the sun.

  “I met someone who wanted to look after me,” she said that morning. “His name is Jack Stirling.” And she told me about you, both of you, for the first time. “There were—are—twins.”

  I said to her, “Didn’t we joke about that possibility?”

  “Do you want to know their names?” And she told me: Louise and Ben. My mother’s name and mine.

  I hated that Jack Stirling raised you. You were my children. Not his. I still hate it. Perhaps not “hate”—perhaps bitter regret. But those two feelings are close to each other.

  I knew what he looked like, had already seen him—I’d waited outside your house in Jacksonville that morning and watched him go in. Couldn’t bear the sight of him, that thin black line of mustache, that oily skin. He looked like some minor functionary, a deliveryman, a salesman for a low-rent outfit. Not good enough for your mother. Or my children.

  25

  On fire, blinking my eyes in confusion, I said goodbye.

  “I’ll be back to visit you soon.”

  “Don’t come if you can’t bring her with you,” Mr. Barry said.

  As soon as I quit the hospital, he left my mind. Greater forces moved in. My confused brain ran film of a sniper, a bullet, a gun, drawing a bead, with the music of death on the soundtrack.

  In the old days, when the insides of my lips turned dry, that meant sadistic violence, vile and worthless. I had long banished it, and for a moment I had composure enough to track its pathway: from Randall’s sarcasm about my avoidance, through his urging that I find Venetia, and on to the kicking of mad Jody Sloane.

  Mr. Barry had capped it. He’d shown me my own truth, and my own failure to regain it. “Trueness.” What else is there?

  Randall had said Templemore—a long narrow town, easy to survey. Easy, too, to figure where the show would play every night; and easy to confirm from the posters.

  Theatrical companies liked Ireland: good audiences, and not much by way of rival entertainment. Most towns had one or two bed-and-breakfast landladies who would take traveling entertainers. Not everyone did, because some troupes flitted by moonlight and never paid the bill.

  The women who took the risk liked the shows and the performers. Often they had a little theater in their own heads—like Lily Egan in Templemore. I had known her for years: tall, rouged, and whispering, a ship in full sail when out in the street.

  Sometimes I stayed at her place—Morning Glory: Select Bed & Breakfast—for the fun rather than the food; she had the best gossip in the county. She’d also hinted that she’d been a high-kicking chorus girl in London. That fact reached me late one night on half a bottle of Madeira.

  “And you needn’t ask me,” she whispered, rolling those big velvet eyes, “if I had to take off my clothes. Because I won’t tell you.” At which she hoisted her bosom again.

  I drove into Templemore that morning in a blaze of desperate confusion. Lily Egan greeted me with caution.

  “Yes, they’re staying here.”

  “When did they arrive?”

  “Are you here to make trouble, Mr. MacCarthy?”

  “What makes you say that, Miss Egan?”

  “Well, everybody knows who she is.”

&nb
sp; “How is she?”

  Lily Egan didn’t invite me in at first. She looked up and down the street, in case anyone could hear.

  “That isn’t a happy lady.” She saw—she must have seen—the anguish cross my face. “But are you going to make her any happier, I ask myself.”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “They’re not in, anyway.”

  “I can wait.”

  She pursed those fat crimson lips.

  “On the grounds that a few hours won’t make a difference?” When I began to speak she stopped me and said, “Don’t you remember telling me the whole story one night?”

  I didn’t. But it was likely.

  I said, “I miss her.”

  “The children are lovely,” said Lily Egan. “They’re like children you’d write away for. Great natural teeth,” she added, tapping her own tall dentures. She narrowed her velvet eyes and measured me. “Yes, you are here to make trouble, aren’t you?” She had a witch’s chin. “Mr. MacCarthy, don’t. Not in front of the children.”

  Some air left me. “May I come in for a moment?”

  She opened the door, and I walked past her and leaned against a wall in the hallway.

  “They went out very early,” she said. “They’re climbing the Devil’s Bit Mountain; the children were intrigued by it.”

  “What’s he like?” I said, meaning—as I now know—Would he be easy to kill?

  Lily Egan looked me up and down as though about to make a purchase. “Well, he’s not you.”

  And then I again asked the panicky question: “How is she?” The marks in my palms from my fingernails lasted two days.

  “She’s silent,” said Lily Egan. “She hasn’t said a word since she got here.” Then she looked away.

  “You’re hiding something.”

  “This is none of my business,” she said.

  “But it is mine.” I caught her hands. “What are you hiding?”

  Lily Egan had always liked me. I knew that, and my touch to her hands succeeded.