Ireland

  After they had rested, Brendan heard a voice shouting what he hoped was a greeting. He looked up and saw a band of men coming toward them. Fine-looking men, tall and handsome, they had painted their bodies and wore great headdresses of feathers. Their leader raised his hand in the air and with the palm held outward and flat said to Brendan, “How.”

  Brendan knew this was some kind of greeting; because he could see that the flat palm meant the man didn’t conceal a weapon. He bowed to the man and offered him a drink of Irish whiskey from the leather flask that they carried on the boat. The gentleman took it and loved it. Brendan taught the man how to pronounce its name—“ish-keh.” In gratitude, the man, with a wide sweep of his hand, indicated the country behind him, as though suggesting that Brendan was welcome to visit—or indeed own—any part of it.

  But Brendan, with the gracious air that caused people to love him, declined. He had accomplished his mission, and if this was the Promised Land, then God had kept his word, because it looked wonderful. There might not have been any gilded towers inland or tall fountains of water or circling flocks of multicolored birds—but the earth was obviously fruitful, and the inhabitants obviously welcoming.

  After a few days, Brendan decided to return to Ireland and his monastery in Kerry. So he and his monks loaded the boat with provisions and accepted the gifts of precious stones given them by the man with the feathers, who then plucked from his headdress the most brilliant feather, taken from the wing of a great eagle, and handed it to Brendan, his special gift. Brendan promised to send many more countrymen from Ireland to this Promised Land. He kept his promise many million times over.

  Brendan the Navigator sailed home, where all the people of Kerry turned out on the shore to greet him. And that’s the story of how Saint Brendan discovered America. As for Hy-Brasil and Atlantis, who needed to find them when he had seen such wonders? And anyway—aren’t they all one and the same place?

  Heavier rain swept in. Another tale had ended. The carters shuffled their reins and chatted to themselves in that same shared delight that the Storyteller had generated up and down the country for so many years. Ronan slid down from the wall. Red Indians! Sea creatures! The Storyteller had aimed this one last story more at him than anyone else.

  During the telling, Miss Burke had arrived. She neither scolded nor objected. In shelter near the gate pillar, she folded her arms and listened. At the end, the Storyteller looked at her apprehensively and held out a hand for her to shake. She took it.

  “I’m to blame,” he said. “Blame me.”

  “No blame,” she said, a thin woman with wire-rimmed spectacles and tense curly hair close to her head. “Only a brute or a fool would interrupt a story.”

  Ronan said, “Where are you going, sir?”

  “I’m going where I always go. On the road.”

  “Sir, where’ll you be tonight? My father’ll drive me to meet you.” He twisted his fingers round and round.

  “Listen,” said the Storyteller, bending toward Ronan. “I’m a hard man to find. Here.”

  He took Ronan’s hand and spoke so that no one else could hear.

  “You’re an important boy. That’s what you are. And you’ll grow to be an important man.”

  The Storyteller straightened up, then stepped fast away from the group and never looked back.

  Ronan said, “Listen! Sir! Wait!” He started to follow—then held back. “Oh, God!”

  The tall dark figure headed east, walking so fast and smooth that he seemed like a man on wheels. Behind him on the little hedge-lined road, everyone stood watching the lone walker.

  Dan Collins broke the silence; “Hop up, Captain.”

  Deirdre Mullen helped Ronan onto the cart. He looked back—but all he saw behind him was the lumbering file of horses and carts. Rain veiled the distance.

  After school Ronan set about his mother.

  “Did you send him away? You did, you did!”

  “Behave, please.”

  “He was the best thing ever happened. And you’re not going to stop him telling us stories. And I’m going to find him.”

  His disturbance became worse than anything Alison had seen in him. She hauled him screaming to his room, locked the door. He lay facedown and churned the bed in a weeping, raging hurricane.

  John O’Mara came home and heard Alison’s complaint.

  “Appalling. If it had been a mere tantrum—I was almost afraid of him.”

  “Well, you know why—”

  “Are you saying we should condone it? Really, John!”

  “Look, Allie—I also wanted him to stay. Not just for Ronan’s sake—”

  “I don’t want to talk about it, I don’t want to know about it.”

  John went upstairs, unlocked Ronan’s door. For a moment he worried whether he should call a doctor; Ronan lay in a heaving wheeze, still in hysterics. After several minutes of soothing talk, water helped, taken in sips with John holding the glass for him. But the anguish broke out again, and John listened to his son’s gasping-for-breath tirade, saying nothing, nodding his head, holding Ronan’s hand, stroking the boy’s hair.

  Again Ronan lay down, this time less angry but still weeping in a helpless way. John asked him questions, invited recollections, tried to talk him out of it.

  “That picture of the Devil at Cashel. His mouth full of rock, Patrick on his heels. I thought of it all day.”

  No response, no let-up.

  “In all the stories, what was the thing you liked most?”

  The weeping continued, a sound of genuine loss.

  “C’mon, champion. It’ll be all right.”

  Kate arrived. She lifted Ronan’s upper body from the bed and held him tight. Not quite crooning, she nonetheless made soothing sounds and rocked him in her arms, looking over his blond head at John’s concern.

  It took an hour and more; eventually Ronan began to tell them, as best he could, the story of Brendan the Navigator’s great voyage; from time to time the echo of a sob tripped his breath. Kate brought food; all three had supper in Ronan’s room; he did not go downstairs again that night. Neither did Kate.

  She said, “He’ll be back one day.”

  John waited to comment until Ronan was ready to sleep and said, “Try and turn bad into good.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Find him. Learn more about him. Become his friend.”

  Later that night, Alison lay in John’s arms and wept at her own actions.

  “Why can’t I stop myself? Why?”

  He said, “Shhhh. Let it pass.”

  “Kate’s right. I can be such a bitch. I don’t mean to be.” The tears poured down.

  “Shhhhhhh. Easy, easy.” John stroked and stroked her hair—and the matter ended there.

  Ronan never mentioned the Storyteller again in Alison’s presence. But, long accustomed to an inner world, he now created his greatest secret yet. As methodically as geometry, as driven as an underground movement, he began a plan to find the Storyteller and make the man part of his life. From that moment, even though he was only nine years old, he built a core system known to many men—three lives, public, private, and secret. In Ronan’s case they comprised school and the neighborhood; home and its curious ramifications; and, deep inside him, his secret quest for the man in the long black coat.

  He began by contacting every person who had heard the Storyteller in the O’Mara house. What with children and carters, neighbors and wives, women who had helped prepare food and drink, this amounted to over a hundred people.

  Schoolmates gave him the first guidance, that is to say, the first measure of difficulty. Ronan altered his behavior to get what he wanted; he stopped quarreling and developed a facile, pleasant manner.

  “Did you ever hear where he went?” he said to Deirdre Mullen.

  “My father thought he wasn’t going far.”

  “How far?”

  “Maybe ten miles. Maybe twenty.”

  “Where would ten miles tak
e him?”

  Deirdre said, “Which direction?”

  This flummoxed Ronan, made him think again. He had assumed the man would follow the road to a logical place—a town or a village.

  Deirdre’s friend cut in. “My brother said he heard the man got a lift to Dublin.”

  “That far?”

  Deirdre said, “Ronan—he could be anywhere.”

  After that arresting thought, Ronan decided to establish patterns: whether the man came to the same houses year in, year out; whether the Storyteller had previously been in Ronan’s neighborhood; whether anyone had met him anywhere. One or two neighbors thought they had seen him in the past, but couldn’t be sure.

  He made all his inquiries sound casual, and in due course, he met every adult who had been to the storytelling sessions. Some lived nearby, and he could easily ask innocent questions. He got a bicycle for his tenth birthday, and on this he traveled the countryside.

  People responded generously. They liked discussing the stories, told Ronan what they remembered, rehashed them as they did great sporting events.

  “That woman, arriving at the palace in the moonlight, what was her name?”

  “Ah, but what about that shaft of light? We should all see that.”

  “The devil’s tail—the heat off it.”

  On and on it went, lively and vigorous memory, pleased reminiscence with people happy to be reminded.

  Two years Ronan spent, of weekends, vacations, and long summer evenings, two years of pondering, looking at maps, measuring distances—and sometimes fighting off anxiety; could the old man still be healthy? But not one answer took him any closer—no address, no connection, no trace. By then, however, he knew so many lanes, fields, and hidden avenues, and these too became the secret places of his mind. He also traveled inwardly; over and over again he revisited the four tales he had heard from the Storyteller, and he felt that he knew them by heart; Newgrange, Ulster, Patrick, and Brendan.

  So far as he could tell, nobody had yet sensed his search. He grew daily closer to his father and Kate; if they guessed at his great enterprise, they never pried. At the same time, to protect it—and himself—he drew further and further from Alison. He learned not to inflame her with a tantrum nor touch any of her numerous flashpoints.

  Indeed he ensured his distance from her in an ironic fashion—by doing something he knew she dearly wanted. He enlisted as an altar boy, in crimson soutane and white surplice. On Sunday mornings he lit candles, answered the Latin prayers of the mass, brought forward the altar wine. Alison’s pleasure at his newfound “piety” doused some of her ire at him; his careful distancing did the rest. Ronan gained doubly—by her approval and by a new visibility in the parish; if anyone heard anything about the Storyteller, they knew where to find Ronan.

  About six months into his search, Ronan developed a parallel, separate passion. He became imbued—and soon obsessed—with his country’s past. His private games changed. No longer Hawkeye, he became a warrior, a champion. He borrowed entirely different books from the library; no more Jack London or Zane Grey—now he took out Celtic myths, old sagas, accessible history books, and collections of folk tales. Following his father’s mail-order gene, he spent his pocket money on secondhand books from catalogs: Annals of the Fair Isle, Ulster’s Champions, Ancient Irish Warriors. He traced Celtic scrolls in special notebooks.

  Night after night he followed a driven course; homework, supper, and then a long, glorious delve into the past. He taught himself every legend of the long-ago. Ancient family names and their meanings; places of magical fame; the birthplaces of heroes—they went into another notebook. He learned the weapons that Champions bore, the curses witches cast, the evils of shape-shifting goddesses—such as the Morrigan, harbinger of war who sometimes appeared as a bird and sometimes a bride. Great duels, fights to the death between famous warriors, love affairs, elopements, intrigues—he escaped into a past that not only satisfied his huge thirst for story but affirmed him in the deepest way.

  “This is what I come from,” he said to himself—a short step from, “This is what I am.”

  His passion for the past brought him nothing but advantage. Such reading had a scholarly appearance, and it also kept him in touch with his search as he traversed the same ground—and more crucially, breathed the same atmosphere—that he had heard from the Storyteller’s lips. He read Saint Patrick’s Confessio; he found Brendan’s Navigatio. In effect he became the complete bookworm, content to live in his room.

  He paid no price. The social life of his peers had never been important to him; he had never mixed much, and now he never missed it; his inner force drove him like powerful twin engines. Best of all, he was left alone to pursue it. The adults in his life approved his studiousness; they endorsed it, even indulged it. His head deep in piles of books, lit by a single candle, he frequently had to be reminded of bedtime by Kate or John.

  On the broad surface of the world, Ronan’s life seemed little different from the norm. Primary school ended when he was eleven, after which he went to a higher school in the town where his father worked. On most mornings Ronan cycled the five miles, his imagination calling giants down from the hills or seeing fields as battlegrounds. During bad weather he traveled in the car with his father and, later in the day, did his homework in a corner of the law office. The staff made a fuss of him, especially the unmarried ladies.

  Every Thursday, he had lunch with his creature-of-habit father, either in the office or at McGuane’s Hotel. Sometimes acquaintances joined them. If the opportunity arose, Ronan asked whether they had ever encountered a traveling storyteller. The question usually triggered a discussion, but in all of his inquiries he learned nothing of the man in the long black coat. Nobody knew his name, whence he came, or where he went.

  He might have vanished completely. The police had no trace of the Storyteller nor knew how to track him; they defined such a person as “of no fixed abode.” No other house in the parish had ever accommodated him, not before, not after, his time at the O’Maras’. No farmer or carter or truck driver had been known to give the man a helping hand on his journey. None of the doctors—in the town or in the country parish—had ever treated him. Nor had anyone reported food missing or traces of a stranger sleeping in their barn, as sometimes happened with tramps or men caught on a journey with insufficient money.

  At last, in December 1954, three years after the visit, Ronan asked his father to help. Not caring to divulge the passion of his hidden search, he broached the subject elliptically.

  “Mr. Cronin was teaching us the history of Newgrange today.”

  “Oh?”

  “He was wondering when educational tours might start.”

  His father put down the newspaper and began to gaze through the window.

  “Wasn’t the Storyteller remarkable?”

  “Better than the pictures,” said Ronan.

  “Better than the cinema, yes.”

  Nothing else was said for a moment as father and son reflected.

  “He looked so ill,” said Ronan. “D’you remember? When he came here first?”

  “Ye-es,” said his father.

  “I wonder if he’s still alive? I mean—we could go and see him, couldn’t we? If he was in a hospital?”

  John flinched. “D’you know ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’? Kate was playing it on the piano last night. D’you know why that carol’s interesting?”

  Ronan looked at his father: Why this swerve, this blunt change of topic? He waited.

  John said, “If you add up all the gifts, they come to three hundred and sixty-four, one for every day of the year except Christmas.”

  Yes: a definite change of subject. Ronan opened his mouth to make the challenge—but he recognized the finality with which his father returned to the newspaper.

  Three weeks later, though, Ronan heard once more the voice for which he so longed and ached.

  Traveling storytellers prospered best in undeveloped times. They triump
hed before print, before mass communications. In Ireland they had occupied a special niche—storytellers in a land of stories. Here too, however, time eventually defeated them, with books, then newspapers. The hammer blow, though, came from their own idiom, words spoken by the fireside: in the late 1920s Ireland acquired radio.

  John O’Mara bought a set when he and Alison married. It sat on a table in the parlor, covered with a brocade cloth like a household god. John alone knew the controls—the volume, the tuning, the exotic, mysterious wavelengths: Hilversum, Berlin, Kobenhavn, Bergen. On the shelf beneath the set, the great batteries sat in a stout box and lasted many months, because the family used the radio so rarely. They listened to a daily news bulletin and—for Alison—an occasional papal broadcast from Rome.

  On New Year’s Eve, 1954, the O’Maras visited friends. Ronan, as usual, declined.

  From the hallway John, departing, said, “This might be a good night on the wireless.”

  For the first time he showed Ronan the controls.

  “Don’t move the dial. It’s always on Athlone.”

  The moment they all drove away, Ronan turned on the radio, and the god’s green light glowed like an eye.

  Half listening, Ronan sat rereading The Ancient Irish Warrior. He had long tried to run through a wood without rustling a leaf or treading on a twig, jump a bar set at the height of his own head, pluck a thorn from his foot while running at top speed; all the old warrior trials from the tale of Newgrange had cropped up repeatedly in his reading. The radio droned a distant mixture of speech in Irish and English, punctuated by dance music.

  Suddenly, Ronan heard the words “oral tradition” and a word that sounded like “shana-quee,” which he recognized as seanchai, the Irish term for storyteller. Heart racing, he rushed to the set—God! Is it?! Yes! It is!

  “No, I’ve never separated history from myth,” said the great voice. “I don’t think you can in Ireland.”