Ireland

  “Ma’am, I never meant—”

  “I don’t care what you meant.”

  “Easy,” said John O’Mara, blinking hard. “Alison, c’mon now, easy.”

  “John!” She rapped the table hard, and he fell quiet.

  “Ma’am, I never meant to do anything but tell a story—I never meant any harm.”

  “I’m not interested in your excuses,” said Alison, her face closed in a rictus of anger. “This is a respectable house.”

  She brought down a cold silence as she scrutinized the tall old man, head to toe. Ronan chewed his hand—the Storyteller had begun to cry. Tears filled the dark eyes, and slow fat drops rolled down the weathered cheeks. Ronan could hear his own mind whimpering for the man, and he wished desperately to hug him. Kate turned away. Alison rode on through the disorder she had triggered.

  “Today is Sunday. You weren’t at mass.”

  “Ma’am, I’ve been walking for weeks—”

  “Don’t interrupt me! Even you must observe the Sabbath day. So, tonight,” she said, “you’ll tell a story about Saint Patrick.”

  “But I was going to tell a different—I mean, ma’am, stories are my trade.” The Storyteller began to sweep at his tears with his big frayed cuff.

  “Take it or leave it,” Alison said.

  John came forward and took the man by the arm.

  “C’mon. Go for a walk. I’ll come over to see you later. It’ll be all right.”

  “I never meant to jar anyone,” said the Storyteller, his great voice cracking. “Never. No. Not a bit.” Then he turned and looked John in the eye from a pace away. “You know—you tell her—go on, tell her—tell her I’m all right.”

  John stopped him with haste—“C’mon, c’mon. Let things settle”—and steered him away.

  The two men left the house. Ronan sat down hard on the wooden bench, bewildered, no breath in his throat. Kate looked at Alison.

  “You can be some bitch!” said Kate. “You and your bloody nonsense. Jesus!”

  She saw Ronan’s breathing change, and his chest begin to heave; she went over, sat beside him, and took his hand.

  “Now—count. To a hundred. One. Two. Slowly. Three.”

  Alison stormed upstairs and slammed the bedroom door.

  When John returned, Ronan broke off counting at eighty-five.

  “Dad, why didn’t you stop her? Dad?!”

  John said, “It’ll be all right. It will.” He soothed Ronan’s hair. “We’ll have another story tonight. He’ll be here.”

  He picked up the Sunday newspapers and began to read.

  Ronan whispered to Kate, “Why didn’t Dad stop her? He’s the only one can stop her. Why didn’t he do it? He said nothing.”

  “Shhhhhhhhh,” Kate said and stroked his hair over and over: “Shhhhhhhhh.”

  When they were courting, John O’Mara received this letter from the girl with whom he had fallen in love.

  I want you to know everything about me, so we had better start with my name. “Alison” comes from “Alice,” which descends from “Adelaide,” and it means “noble” and “kind.” As for “MacCarthy,” it means “the loving one,” and some say it is connected to the Roman name “Caractacus” and the Welsh name “Caradoc.” Our fortunes ebbed and flowed down the centuries, but we retained Kilcarthy House, and I think that makes me an Irish aristocrat. You know how the English upper classes call themselves “bluebloods”—meaning that there’s no black or dark breeding, i.e., no slaves among them, because their veins glow blue? Well, I reckon that I’m a “greenblood.” What are you?!

  The year was 1934, and she was twenty. Her education had been far more privileged than almost anyone’s in Ireland at that time. Her boarding school in Dublin, nicknamed “the Little Sisters of the Rich,” also had an English convent. There she spent two years, of which six months were taken in Montreux. By the age of seventeen Alison MacCarthy spoke Swiss French, when many of her Irish neighbors had barely stayed in school long enough to read and write. Then she went to the Sorbonne.

  If you studied art in the Paris of the 1930s, you were presumed by many to have tasted nectar. Alison remained demure, an observer of the demimonde, never a participant. But the sights that she saw loosened her stays, and John O’Mara did the rest; from the moment she met him, she would have given anything he asked of her. Two years her senior, emotionally twenty years older, he reminded her of her own father, whom, in her puberty, she had lost to a hunting accident.

  Jacob MacCarthy had local fame as a fearless rider. The first in the county to make his horse clear wire fences, he came down one day jumping onto a road. He made it home, lamenting that his horse had to be put down. But the doctor had himself been damaged—a piece of grit sliced into his scalp. The infection killed him in ten shivering days, baffled that he could not heal himself.

  On the night he died, twelve-year-old Alison never went to bed; she walked a hundred circuits of the house and gardens. At dawn, she took her father’s leather-bound notebook from his desk, and wherever she traveled for the rest of her life, the notebook went with her. Already a “difficult” child, now she became unmanageable—she ate no food, went missing for days at a time, stayed silent. The mother, also inclined to be catatonic, sent the girl to boarding school, whence eventually, via Paris, she fell into John O’Mara’s arms at a party one Easter in Dublin.

  With him, she loosened, eased, laughed. From the night they met, they kissed like libertines. He wanted her, and she wanted him, and that desire gingered every day of their lives. The relationship’s deeper power, though, came from his care of her emotions.

  When pressured, when lonely, when oppressed more than usual, Alison headed for the gates of silence. Early in the relationship, John instinctively sensed these moods and trained himself to wait for her. If one of their dates proved silent, with Alison’s mouth pleated in gloom, he canceled their plans, took her to bed—profoundly against the conventional mores—and held her.

  It always worked, and in time they survived all their jolts, such as a pregnancy three months after they met. They coped with this by agreeing to wed, and when she miscarried, they married anyway. By then Alison had decided: John O’Mara or no other.

  He felt ideal to her; he even looked a little like her father: same dislike of confrontation; same refusal to flap in a crisis; same size, over six feet; similar large ears and large hands. Same touch of the debonair, too; John, though never pretending to be anything other than a country town lawyer, groomed himself like a dandy—perfect tweeds and varsity tie with white collars on striped shirts. For days in court he wore dark three-piece suits with foaming white handkerchiefs.

  And he was and remained his wife’s only lover; smart, resourceful, amusing—and strong as a horse in the hips.

  As Ronan grew up, he too thrilled to his father’s style. So ardently did John O’Mara fight for his clients that nobody bore him grudges, not even in the lawsuits he lost. He liked saying that only one client had ever failed to speak to him again—a man who was being sued for Breach of Promise. John advised him that he would certainly lose his case, and when the man felt coerced into wedding the woman he had tried to jilt, he blamed John. The story made great telling.

  “I knew he was a problem the minute he came to the door,” John would say. “He didn’t knock—he kicked.”

  When he came in, he refused to sit down and grabbed John’s hands.

  “I’m possessed by the devil,” he said.

  “Then it’s an exorcist you need.”

  “No, this is her”—and he showed John an advertisement for a local hairdressing salon where the “devil” worked.

  “And did you ask her to marry you?”

  “I did—but I didn’t mean to.”

  John wheezed when he laughed—and Alison could never hear enough of that wheeze.

  Other than that one “failure,” everybody loved John O’Mara. His clients weighed him down with gifts—geese, turkeys, chickens, hams, bottles of drink.
Some of the parcels arrived anonymously—salmon stolen from a licensed river, pheasants shot on a preserved estate, a hunk of venison, the fur still attached. Always wrapped in newspaper inside thick brown paper and usually leaking by the time they were delivered, John always knew who had sent them.

  Whatever cards John was dealt, he played easily. An outstanding sprinter, he should have represented Ireland at the 1932 Olympics. But he got peritonitis that January, and once he met Alison, he never returned to training. He concentrated instead on building a career in law, and when his hair turned prematurely white, he called it a gift; “I’ll win all my cases now—I look venerable.”

  John inherited his uncle’s practice, in a small town near the new border with the North of Ireland. Alison never felt comfortable there, so he sold out and came down south to her territory. Within a year the MacCarthy relatives had sent him more business than he could handle; he bought an excellent old house, and car number 500 in the country.

  Their lives became, to his mind, splendid. His journey to the office took twenty minutes along beautiful roads across a ridge; morning and evening the sun blessed the valley. On Saturdays he finished work around noon and met Alison for lunch in the town’s one hotel or took food into the office. Always they drank wine, and always they jumped into bed when they came home. He made her laugh—and laugh—and laugh.

  For pastime John gathered local history and sent it to the Folklore Commission in Dublin. In many a dark farmhouse or cottage kitchen, Ronan sat eating currant bread hot from the oven with melting butter as his father collected a family’s long-held cures or transcribed old people’s accounts of their parents in the Great Famine of 1846 or gathered ancient, homespun prayers.

  A shrewd hobby, the folklore; recording people’s histories brought John O’Mara new business. When someone had finished talking about the past, he’d ask, “What about the future?”

  To the inevitable blank look, he said, “I mean, you should make a will.”

  Alison never went on those folklore trips. She knew she was much less popular than her husband, she knew that she rode on his coattails. Afflicted with her mother’s haughty touch, she was only welcome in the houses they visited because of their affection for John.

  But, obsessively private, she never gave them a chance to accept her on other terms. They knew nothing of the playful, cuddling Alison that only John saw, who hugged him each night in bed and held on and on and on; or the thoughtful Alison who sent anonymous gifts of food to a grieving neighbor; or the conscientious Alison who cared so tenderly for a manipulative and ungrateful mother, even overcoming her own tense fastidiousness to perform appallingly intimate nursing.

  The rural Irish always liked to go out on Sunday nights; consequently the Storyteller’s next audience grew by thirty people. Most had to stand, leaning against the walls. Ronan retained his prime seat on the fireside bench.

  John O’Mara had laid in cases of liquor. Early in the afternoon, Josie Hogan and Aunt Kate and Mrs. Dowling and Mrs. Condon and Mrs. Ryan toiled at sandwiches and baking. Alison eventually joined them.

  At seven o’clock the house began to fill. Everyone helped to hand around food and drink. By a quarter to eight Alison had seated herself directly across from the Storyteller’s chair. He had not appeared for his evening meal, and sandwiches had been sent; Ronan offered to bring them over, and was denied by his mother, who had insisted that Ronan remain within her sight all day.

  Eight o’clock saw the large room packed. Children squatted on the stairs, and men sat on the floor. Five minutes went by, then five minutes more.

  At a quarter past the hour, John O’Mara walked out of the house and closed the door behind him. Ronan looked anxiously at Kate while Alison chatted with those near her. At half past eight John came back and stood still. The room grew quiet; for a moment Ronan feared the old man had fled—until he saw his father smile.

  With what seemed like pride John said, “Here he is.”

  He stepped into the kitchen and beckoned. The Storyteller stooped a little as he entered the doorway, and doffed his hat briefly to all.

  In that reticent society nobody applauded. But the buzz of interest and the murmured words of welcome would elsewhere have translated into a standing ovation.

  “Oh, now, isn’t he tall?”

  “God bless him, hasn’t he the look of a traveled man?”

  “How are you, sir, ’tis very nice to meet you.”

  “The whole place is talking about you.”

  People moved aside to let him reach his chair. Women reached out and shook his hand. Kate stepped forward with a glass of whiskey for him and a warm pat on the arm. A man from down the valley offered him a fill of tobacco.

  Then the Storyteller saw Alison, her arms folded, all pearls and formality; he faltered at her show of power and focused on wresting his pipe from his pocket. Next, though, he saw Ronan, and this seemed to give him courage; he raised his hat courteously to Alison.

  Yet when he sat down in front of her, his hands trembled and the whiskey quavered in his glass. He tried to clear his throat, but it became a coughing fit. People chatted among themselves again until he had recovered enough to speak.

  His pipe, his main prop, eased his way. He fiddled with it, filled it, and prepared to light it.

  “Tonight being Sunday night,” he said, slow in his speech and his pipe filling, “and the seventh day being the day on which God rested, and the Sabbath day, which we are obliged to keep holy, I’m going to tell you another story about the formation of Ireland. Is there anyone here who’s been with me since the first night?”

  Among many, Ronan’s hand shot up.

  “Well, you’ll know by now that the stories I’ve been telling can be used to trace broadly the history of Ireland and the Irish people and the way our ancestors lived. Tonight’s story is part of all that—but there’s one mighty difference. And it’s this.”

  As he warmed, he calmed. He settled himself more firmly in his chair, but never seemed as though he would have the courage to look Alison in the eye.

  “From tonight onward, we’re in real history. D’you understand what that means? I’ll tell you. Every word out of my mouth so far in this decent house has described a time when no history was written down. Tonight, though, we enter the realms of record. I knew a man once, he was a town clerk up the country somewhere, and he was very fond of ‘the realms of record’—that is to say, he preferred facts to anything else. Whatever facts are. And that’s an argument for another night.”

  The match flared, and he puffed until smoke billowed.

  “So tonight I’m going to tell you about the patron saint of Ireland—Saint Patrick, Saint Paddy, Saint Pat. Now you all know certain things about Saint Patrick. He wasn’t yet a saint, of course, at the time I’m talking about. So we’ll refer to him simply as ‘Patrick,’ and this is about the way he walked among us. I’m going to tell you how he converted the country from paganism. And then I’ll tell you how he banished snakes and drove the devil out of Ireland.”

  IF YOU LOOK AT THE MAP OF SCOTLAND, YOU’LL find a town on the west coast called Ballantrae; it’s just across from the northeast of Ireland. One morning, in the year four hundred and three, a little flotilla of Irish boats sailed into Ballantrae and moored there. The men who disembarked were big and wild-looking. They had long hair piled on top of their heads or braided like ladies or free like the mane of a horse. And they were armed to the teeth with swords made of iron.

  Near the town of Ballantrae stood a Roman house owned by a wealthy man called Colpornius, who was the son of a man called Potitus. I tell you this to emphasize the fact that even though they lived in Scotland, they were Romans, because at that time Britain was part of the Roman Empire.

  The Romans never came to Ireland. They say that eighty years after the birth of Christ, a Roman general called Agricola stood on the shores of Scotland, looked over at the distant headlands of Ireland, and boasted that he could take us with one legion. Obser
ve, however, that he never tried, and so Ireland was the only country in the west of Europe that never became a Roman dominion.

  That’s not to say the Romans were unknown in Ireland.

  Many an Irish raider or trader brought back from Roman Britain a lovely goblet for himself or a brooch for his wife, and some say that Roman boats occasionally came up the rivers as far inland as sixty or seventy miles.

  Now: this man Colpornius in Ballantrae had a son called Patricius, not an uncommon name among the Romans in Britain in those days. It means “noble” or “of the ruling classes”—the Romans gave their children Latin names that had a practical meaning. If a Roman seventh child happened to be a son, he was most likely called Septimus, which means “seventh,” or the third child, Tertius, the fifth child, Quintus, and so on. Sometimes they still do it; I lived in Italy for a while, and I had a friend who called his oldest son Massimo, meaning “Maximus—the greatest.”

  Anyway: Patricius was sixteen years old when the raiders in the boats arrived. These fellows were looking for anything of value that they could rob—including human beings that they could turn into slaves. Slaves were free labor and could be sold on the open market.

  When they reached the gates of the villa, the men split up into two groups. The first gang attacked the house and terrified everyone inside. Weapons, wine bottles, jewels—anything they wanted, they took. The other group went to the gardens, where they might find slaves working. And there sat Patricius—we’ll call him Patrick from now on—he was reading a book in the sunshine. They grabbed this big, strong lad and ran him back to the shore at the point of a sword. He was pitched into the bottom of a boat with several other captives and taken back to county Antrim.

  Patrick became a swineherd, on the side of that bleak mountain called Slieve Mish or Slemish. For the first few weeks he lived in a frightened daze, not quite able to understand what had happened to him. He had no warm clothes, they gave him no good food—often he envied the pigs what they ate. The other slaves were pitched into a rough and bewildered life too, except that Patrick got one of the tougher jobs because he looked robust.