The Last Storyteller

  33

  My father had a way of scurrying that said, “Embarrassed.” As I climbed out of the car, I saw him do it. In the opposite direction. He crossed the stableyard and went into the house by the scullery door. Not a good sign; he usually hallooed me and came forward, talking already, in full spate, with some story: “Well, do-do-do you know what just happened?” or “Well, we were just-just-just talking about you.”

  Now he ran away from me, and I knew he hoped that I hadn’t seen him. I also knew what would happen next: he and my mother would materialize on the front porch and walk out to my car together. When something difficult had to be said, she rode shotgun for him.

  As she did now—and my heart plummeted. She embraced me—unusual in itself; this was not a demonstrative woman—while he hung back a little and said nothing.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I’d say that ‘wrong’ isn’t the right-right-right word.” He beat her to it. “In fact, ‘right’ may very well be the right-right-right word. Heh-heh.”

  Her face and eyes offered calm. “Come on in, Ben. When did you eat?” But she stopped in the hallway, put her hand on my arm, and said, “We’ve sold up.” He walked on.

  “You what?”

  He turned back. “We-we-we got a great price,” he said.

  “Here?” I asked. “Not Ballycarron?” We had a second farm run by a manager.

  “Both,” she said. “We sold both.”

  They knew that I had no interest in carrying on the farm. The place would have given me too much pain. My memories of Goldenfields remained too imbued with recollections of Venetia, and our meeting in the woods, and my young husbandhood. Yet when they told me, the breath left my body, and tears surprised my eyes.

  My father walked away, embarrassment daubing his face red. Mother stood in front of me, anxious and waiting.

  “He can’t do it anymore, Ben. He’s not up to it.”

  My first words, as I look back, still appall me. “But where will I stay?” I wailed. “Where will I go? I have nowhere else.”

  Unbeknownst to myself, I had defined the word “home.”

  Mother gave me a timeline. I agreed to come back for the auction of the effects and contents. The house still contained many of my childhood treasures. And their new abode had a small guest room. “Anytime, Ben. For as often and as long as you ever need.”

  But that old and sometimes gilded life of mine was over, and I knew it.

  My father never raised the subject with me. I stayed for two nights, the three of us ate our meals together, and the sale details never fell from his lips. I, perhaps sadistically, didn’t mention it either. Or perhaps the weight around my heart felt too heavy.

  I left in the middle of a bright morning, promising to come back in good time for the auction. As Mother walked me to the car, she said in the tone of a confidante, “Do you know that she’s back?”

  “Who told you?”

  “Everybody around here went to see the show. Except your father.” She half-chuckled. I said nothing. We walked on.

  By the car door, Mother took my arm, her typical move with grave issues.

  “Ben, he hits her. That fellow she’s with.”

  I looked at her with eyes of stone.

  “Mother, what are you talking about?”

  “Ally Carroll’s sister has a bed-and-breakfast in Mitchelstown. They stayed there. The police were called. She had a broken rib. He’s a drinker.”

  For the next two hours I paced by the river. A small guest room? No! I’m not seeing the water. I’m not looking for the flights of the birds. The children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the birds I first learned to love here. Now I’ll be a bird, too, a bird of passage. He hits her. He broke her rib. How often do I have to be told? Failed again.

  As depression swept in like a tide of sludge, I took one last look at the house. Seen from the river, the chimneys stand up through the trees. That’s the view I knew best, the view that had given me security and the lessons in how to be free of it, the view that still means the most to me in the world.

  34

  In my earlier days, after such a painful time, and wearing a huge sense of loss, I’d have avoided people; I’d have sought quiet places such as woodlands or mountainsides and wallowed in bleak groves. This form of retreat had a curious side effect, in that I became able to identify the legends I collected with the undulations of the land.

  This time, however, I didn’t seek the quiet places; I resumed work, went straight back into collecting, fulfilling the month of appointments I had made.

  Indeed, that very day, I found a short tale in the next county. It’s a little piece of mythology that supports what I’ve observed about the connection between legend and landscape. Here it is, as I took it down from a retired farmworker in County Kilkenny (not far from Randall’s house).

  Near Mooncoin, where the River Nore has a wide bend, there used to be a thick stand of trees on a height above the water. Long ago, the land was owned by an old Irish family, name of Riordan or O’Riordan. The farm was taken from them by a family of Scottish planters brought in by the English government. Jer Riordan, the oldest son, had to stand there and watch his parents carried out in a cart, the farm they’d worked on all their lives robbed from under them.

  Now Jer Riordan was a quiet fellow, born weak, and not able to fight. So he went up to the man who was taking over the farm, a man by the name of Langden, and says to him, “I’m going to curse your family for five generations until we get our land back. Whenever you see a deer on that hill over there by the trees, a big buck with fine antlers, then you’ll know that a Langden is going to die.”

  The following morning, Mr. Langden got up and went out his front door, and there, across the river, he saw a big stag, with a rack of antlers you could hang vestments on. And then he heard a shout above his head. He looked up and saw his small son waving out the window to him. But the boy leaned too far out and fell down at his father’s feet and broke his little neck and died. That kind of thing happened four more times in a hundred years—and there’s Riordans back on that farm again now.

  35

  As long as I kept moving, I knew I’d begin to feel better. And Jimmy Bermingham wouldn’t find me. Five weeks had gone by since the shooting of Sammy Gilpin—five weeks since I’d shoved Jimmy out of the car in Dundalk, south of the Irish border, the town they’d later call “El Paso.” And then, calmer, resigned, and even making plans in my head, I went to watch the afternoon sunlight dancing through Randall’s long windows.

  It was one of those days when a hush hangs everywhere, heavy as cloth. Nobody to be seen on the property, no workmen in the fields, no housemaid cleaning the brasses on the front door. The lake spread long and lovely, blue satin, to the tall red reeds on the far bank. I parked the car on the terrace.

  Silence everywhere. No answer to the long, echoing clang of the doorbell. I opened the door and, reacting to the house’s stillness, closed it behind me with no noise. No dog barked. No Annette bustled. No voice called.

  I stood for a moment; how wonderful were those limestone flags in their big, regular squares. A great portrait, which I somehow hadn’t taken in previously, hung on the darkest wall: a benign man of considerable age, old enough for his blue eyes to have grown watery; his wooden chair seemed a plain throne. No legend on the frame, just a date: 1786. An ancestor?

  Somewhere, distant and reassuring, a human coughed. Through the farthest doorway in the hall’s corner I followed the sound, walking without weight. I recalled the corridor—to Randall’s studio. Another cough, closer now, led me to the studio door, ajar though less than half open.

  Randall stood at his easel; Elma Sloane sat on the podium, which was as high and wide as a small stage. He had shown me this platform before; he’d had it built for tableaux when experimenting with painting historical pageants from Irish history. Sometimes, poets came and read from there.

  I looked at Elma first—I stared. She sat
upright, completely naked, as free as a child. Her arms rested on the chair’s arms, her feet squarely and wide apart on the floor, her head high but not falsely so. That Randall had posed her so explicitly seemed likely; that she had embraced the pose without question also seemed true—because an animation came off her, a lively sense of involvement, and even joy.

  I craned my head to see his work. He had stretched a large canvas, maybe ten feet by six. Two splattered palettes sat on the worktable next to him, and innumerable knives and brushes, and rags as colorful as a clown. But although he glanced up at his model every few seconds, he wasn’t painting a great nude portrait. On his canvas, as large and silver as the river from which it might have come, gleamed a massive fish.

  For several moments I stood at the door, looking in. It may not say much for my presence that neither Elma nor Randall noticed me. In fact, neither could see the door without a serious turn of the head. Naturally, my eyes kept going to her, and I found myself on edge. Her age never crossed my mind.

  I knocked.

  Randall called out, “Don’t come in!”

  Elma, however, said, “It’s Ben.” I recall listening for some excitement in her voice.

  “Randall, sorry if I’m interrupting.”

  “Dear boy! Come in, come in. Not everybody is an interruption.” He nodded to Elma. She sat back in the chair and didn’t reach for a robe, though she did fold her arms and close her legs.

  “Hiya, Ben, howya doing?” She had a smile as wide and bright as a window.

  “I hope you’ll stay,” said Randall.

  “May I look?” I asked. “Or are you superstitious?”

  “I won’t seat thirteen people at my table,” said Randall. “But you may look.”

  A score of questions raced into my mind. Why is the salmon’s head on the left of the canvas and not the right? Does that suggest, say, that you are left-handed? How does a painter make such a decision? For what reasons? Did you work from colors on an actual fish to capture that iridescent pink that fades down? How did you remember how brilliant a fish’s body can be? Did you have to learn to put a dot of white in the eye to generate light? Or was that something you knew by instinct? The size of the fish in relation to the rectangle of the canvas: what powered that decision?

  Over all these inquiries arched one question: How did you paint a fish lustrous enough to make us gasp, while using as your model the naked body of a lovely girl not yet twenty?

  I bit the bullet and asked. Randall had been standing beside me as I looked at the painting. It still had some way to go. He called to Elma, “Would you, like a good girl, resume the pose?”

  She sat forward again, placed her feet very deliberately on the stage—I saw that he had set down chalk marks—and sat up with her elbows along the arms of the chair, her head once more high.

  Randall said, “Look at her. Consider her as if you were going to paint her portrait.”

  I looked. Beauty, desirability, excitement—I registered all of that, and after a moment felt any embarrassment slip away. She had a summer-colored face, all mallow and light and alabaster. Looking at her would have inspired any kind of portrayal, direct or unconscious.

  36

  Over dinner, Randall asked, “How long is it since you were here, Ben?”

  No trace of bruising remained around the assaulted eye. He looked so like an eagle.

  Elma answered my unasked question: “It’s great, Ben.”

  I loved her natural happiness. Her bad family circumstances hadn’t raped her uncomplicated spirit.

  “Elma, tell Ben the rules we established when we agreed that you’d stay here?”

  “That I’d pose for his pictures.” She grinned at me. “Without any fuss or nonsense about being in the nude, that’s what he said to me. He told me he’d teach me all he knew.”

  “And what else? Ben is to be trusted.”

  “That I’d never tell the outside world what goes on here.”

  I asked Elma, “What have you learned from Randall?”

  She sought his approval; I saw the glance. Is he exercising more control than he seems to be?

  Randall said, “What do you want to know?”

  Clever, putting the onus back on me. I said, “The most interesting thing you’ve learned.”

  “That I’m up in the air,” she said.

  Randall translated: “That she’s capable of anything at which she wants to excel.”

  “And fix it all,” she said. “Always fix it.”

  He translated again: “That there’s no such thing as a problem without a solution.”

  “I’ll contradict that,” I said, and not quite knowing what possessed me, I told my story of the guns.

  When I had finished my account of Maisie and how she had compromised me, and Jimmy Bermingham and the failed assassination, they remained silent. Excitement danced in Elma’s eyes, and she said, “Randall would tell you that you already know what to do.”

  Though I saw him nodding, I shook my head. “I don’t know what to do. What can I do? I’ve already breached the law. Christ, I can go to jail. You’ve seen the newspapers.”

  Bombs had gone off. Men had been arrested.

  Randall shook his head. “No. Let’s think.”

  “That bloody gun. My fingerprints. Is there anything I can do?”

  He said. “Dive back into the problem.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Ramp it up.”

  “Aren’t things bad enough?” I said.

  “That woman got your fingerprints on the gun so that she could threaten you with the police.”

  “Right.”

  “So—pull her teeth. Go to the police. Neutralize her. Shoot her fox.”

  “But won’t she and her gang—won’t they come after me?”

  “How will they know?”

  “Randall, they don’t need to. If they’re raided, they’ll say it was me. And the gun will be there. With my damned fingerprints.”

  “Make a deal. Be a double agent. I’ll make the introductions for you.”

  “This is unreal.”

  “Life is unreal, Ben. Especially in Ireland. Now I have a question for you.” I watched him like a dog about to be kicked. “The newspaper cutting. Last time you were here.”

  “Yes.”

  Randall said, “Have you done anything about it?”

  I didn’t want him raising this topic, and I shook my head.

  “You should,” said Randall. “There was a goodness in her. It shone from the stage—and remember, I never saw her in anything but a rickety old village hall. But she could be acting from the back of a truck and you’d see it.”

  “Did she die?” said Elma.

  “For a long time I thought she did,” I said.

  37

  The next day, I said to Elma, “Come with me.”

  She didn’t resist.

  It was an enormous morning, of sun, wind, and heavy clouds.

  “Can you guess where we’re going?” I asked her.

  She said, “He’s still in the hospital.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Things cycle by us out here,” she said.

  As we parked the car, I remarked to her, “This is a great chance for you.” Her eyebrow asked the question. She wore a black knit top with three buttons falling like teardrops from the neck. “A chance to be kind,” I said. “A chance to make someone feel special.”

  She took a deep breath, preparing for an effort. We walked quietly along the hospital ward; he sat alone between two empty beds; she hesitated.

  I whispered, “It’s all right. I’ll move us out after a few minutes.”

  Like some great, scrawny, mythical creature, he turned his head. His eyes lit up our path to his bedside.

  “I knew it,” he said, struggling to sit higher. “I knew it, look out at the sky.”

  By now the sun had gone high, and the clouds were racing past it like children past a teacher.

  “Howya
, Dan?” said Elma. She leaned in; I saw her fists tighten; she kissed him—on the forehead, on the cheek, and on the lips. Light and fast those kisses fell, and she stepped back to join me.

  “Good girl!” I whispered.

  She sat on the edge of the bed.

  “Sit here beside me and let me look at you,” he said.

  Twenty years began to fall away from this man’s face; a moment ago it had sagged like an old tent.

  “Dan, you’re still in here.”

  “Well, Elma, I had the damn ol’ heart attack,” he said, “and they’re lettin’ me home soon. Did you come all the way to see me?”

  “I did, Dan, I did; a stray calf is what I am. Don’t tell my father.” She reached out and took his hand. “Look at you,” she said, and she spoke like a bossy woman. “Why aren’t you at home?”

  He loved it. “Will you come with me?”

  “Dan, I’d have to hoist different sails. I have a job now, a good job, working under a shiny kind of a man.”

  “What’s England like?” he asked.

  “Up the middle and down the sides,” she said. “Level enough. I’m living in a very nice place.”

  And he said, “I didn’t know they had any nice places in England.”

  “Ah, Dan, ’tis a long time since the English were here.”

  “Stand up for me till I see you,” he said.

  She rose. “Do you like my clothes?” she asked, and did a slow twirl.

  “Ah, you’re the loveliest girl. I’d fight them all over again for you.”

  I intervened. “They told us not to tire you out.”

  He said, “And tell me again—did you come from England specially to see me?”

  “I didn’t come to see nobody else,” she said. “I’m going straight back.” She took his hand and kissed it. “You’re to look after yourself, d’you hear me?” She held the hand as though it felt important to her. “How will you be any good to anyone if the devil takes your pay? You’re serious for us.”