Ireland

  Although the rain cleared, he continued to hold up the umbrella. From somewhere deep in the countryside a green van came toward the bridge of Slane; Ronan flattened himself against the parapet—no time to get out of the way. The van stopped beside him, and the driver looked out.

  “Well, you’re not local for a start.”

  “How d’you know that?”

  “There’s no one round here’d carry an umbrella when there’s no rain.”

  He made Ronan smile, a return of courage, and he asked, “Where would I find a man called Joe Cooney?”

  “You wouldn’t. Not today anyway—he’s gone off for a long drive.”

  “Is he with an elderly gentleman?”

  “He is so.”

  So that was the Storyteller; now Ronan knew certainly that the opportunity had passed; no choice now but to regroup.

  “You from Dublin?”

  “At the moment I am.”

  “And that’s where I’m goin’ myself—hop in if you want to; if you don’t, stay where yew are.”

  Ronan climbed into the van, whose inner door handle had been replaced with string.

  “Pull it hard, or the door’ll fall off and you’ll be out on the road.”

  The entire vehicle shuddered with the force of the slam. Ronan started as something wet touched his ear. He turned to see a greyhound, who had a pleading look.

  “That’s Morning Star of Slane,” said the driver. “We all calls her Judy, and she’s running tonight if you want to make money.”

  Ronan patted Morning Star of Slane’s head. The dog licked him again.

  “There’s only one thing wrong with Judy, she’s very reticient.” Ronan knew he meant “reticent” but didn’t say so. “Just as you think she’s goin’ to say somethin’, she says nuthin’.”

  Ronan nodded, not sure whether it was polite or impolite to laugh.

  “Oh, hey, here,” said the driver. “I’m Archie, by the way, Archie Halpin, my father’s Archie too. You must be a student, are you?”

  The same short, glottal curl—“ahhrr yew”—another new accent to Ronan’s ear, a world away from the urban Dublin of last night’s girls.

  “History.”

  “Well, you come to the right place for that, we’ve plenty of it round here, you can’t go out the door but history’s hittin’ you in the face. I got a fair wedge of it last night in Joe’s house. How d’you know Joe?”

  Ronan remarked that, in fact, he didn’t know Joe.

  “You don’t? Jizz sure the dogs of the road know Joe. Well, I went over to Joe’s last night, and who was there only a big, oul’ fella with a hat on him like a dead doctor’s and he telling stories like you never heard coming outta anyone. A man with no name to him, he said.”

  Ronan leaped in. “That’s the man I’m looking for.”

  “Right enough, he said he was goin’ off to meet someone up at the Boyne Water at twelve o’clock—Joe was goin’ to drive him there—and if the fella wasn’t there they were going to go off somewhere. But boys-oh-boys can’t he tell stories. And a long coat on him like he was gettin’ ready to wear it into the coffin.”

  “Into the coffin?”

  “He had a wheeze goin’ like a hearse horse, so he had.”

  “And he never said where he was going next?”

  “No, I’d say ’twas a case he didn’t know where he was goin’—for he told us he stayed a different place nearly every night. Do you know him itself?”

  “Sort of.”

  Archie Halpin chattered all the way; Ronan, lost and feeling loss, scarcely heard the benign words; Morning Star of Slane, also known as Judy, licked Ronan’s hand, and Ronan’s low mood continued to descend. In eighteen hours he had had a tantrum that might have killed an older man, drunk unprecedented amounts of liquor, kissed a girl on the mouth for the first time ever, got no sleep, no food, felt the sharp blows of a fist on his head, and endured long, long walks in the cold rain. At the same time he nursed sufficient grievance to avoid a return to Kate, a bitter choice into which he felt forced.

  Ronan had played no sports at school; Alison had decreed him too fragile for the physical risk. Therefore he had limited capacity to endure effort or privation. He began to do what all survivors must—he narrowed his thoughts to essentials, namely food and rest.

  Suddenly, some miles north of Dublin’s outskirts, he asked Archie Halpin to drop him on the roadside. He had to recover himself, and he believed that, exhausted though he was, he would retrieve some sense of himself by walking. Morning Star of Slane had one more lick, Archie bade him cheerful luck, and Ronan walked again. But after a mile the walking became trudging, and he stopped, giving in to the fact that he could not go on; he was, ultimately, too defeated.

  He reached the outskirts of a village and looked ahead at its deadness. Across the road a clock winked in an electrical shop—it told him the time but not the place.

  But last week’s sign in the window advertised a pre-Christmas bazaar in a nearby school. He found the school and an unlocked window. Inside, he also found an office with a couch and an electric heater; from another office he fetched a second heater and turned them both on. He had a haven of sorts; the schools had closed for Christmas until several days into January.

  The sun woke him, and the wall clock said noon; he had slept twelve hours. Every part of him ached; the hunger made him dizzy. He lay without moving, grappling with his disturbing state. Slowly, slowly, he drew his body together. The instinct to weep attacked again, and he fought it off. Still bleary with sleep and aches, he searched his pockets and reminded himself that he carried not one single possession, and the weeping threatened to attack once more.

  Ronan began a systematic search of the school. He had slept, he discovered, in the teachers’ room, now cozily warm. The corridors felt icy, but no door had been locked. He found the door marked “Principal” and in the large desk, after some searching, came across the box marked “Petty Cash.” Not much, it yet guaranteed that he would eat. He checked the school diary—reopening in six days.

  For the first time in his life he had by now strung together hours of existence that he alone defined, he alone controlled. The feeling of freedom surprised him and then almost exhilarated him. He made the teachers’ room ever cozier, took some blankets from a closet, bought biscuits, chocolate, and lemonade in the village shop. Fortune was helping; no house looked into the school grounds, so his comings and goings remained undetected, and the teachers’ room could not be seen from the road. Nor, more luck, did he show any public marks from his affray; his clothes hid the bruises on his thighs, hip, ribs, and arms; he had a sore but unmarked head and face and a raw seam of damaged pride.

  In his first thirty-six hours at the school, Ronan ran through every emotion. Then, sleeping and waking, sleeping and waking, he grew refreshed and determined. By Tuesday afternoon he knew exactly what he wanted to do and how he would do it. That night, he telephoned his uncle, Toby, in Oxford.

  “How much do you need, Ronan?”

  “It has to be a lot.”

  “How much is a lot?”

  “Enough to keep me for a while?”

  “How long d’you think a while will be?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know.” Ronan felt the waves of distress coming in. “I mean—I need food and stuff.”

  “Will we start with, say, a thousand?” Toby’s voice grew jaunty.

  “As much as that? I hadn’t sort of thought…”

  “D’you know that you’re going to be rich?”

  “How d’you mean?”

  “Your father made a lot of money. And when you’re twenty-one, you’ll be the richest young man in Ireland, I’d say. There’ll be girls perched on your gate. And on the mantelpiece, if you let them into the house. And then you’ll never get rid of them.”

  “Yeah. Well.” Ronan neither knew nor cared what to say. But he somehow felt the comforting hand of his father at his back.

  Toby said, “You’re not in
trouble, Ronan, are you?”

  “No—but I don’t want anyone to know I phoned you.”

  “What about Kate? And your mother?”

  “I don’t want to talk to anyone.”

  Two days later, the money arrived at the local bank that Ronan had designated. He drew it in cash; Toby and he had agreed passwords because Ronan had no other identification. As signed for the money, the cashier reached into his drawer and handed Ronan a blue envelope; “This came for you too. A man handed it in.”

  Ronan did not even ask for a description of the man. He already knew from the handwriting, from the mere existence of the envelope. (And he also grasped that only Toby knew he would visit that bank.)

  WHERE MY SOUL TRAVELS

  THE PRINCIPAL ADVANTAGE IN THE HARD and uncertain life of a Storyteller is the freedom of his soul. It is a freedom expressed in travel—I need not plan where I shall be, I have no need to know where I may next go. However, over the years certain principles have developed and I can look back and see two patterns in the way I have journeyed.

  Mostly I go to the places where I might find—or have found—stories. I revisit them over and over, and sometimes the first story that I found in such a place changes in my mind so much that I have a new version. Or it simply returns to me ever more vividly, in which case a second story may arrive. Battlefields draw me back, and places where kings ruled and saints preached. I like to visit the houses—or the remains of houses—where great men lived or stayed on visits or the abbeys where the monks made their beautiful works, those sweet cloistered limestone ruins in the middle of the fields or often on the banks of rivers.

  In short, I seem to bend myself in the direction of places where history gleams brightest. And fruitfully so; we would give our birthright, would we not, to tread in the steps of our future? But we never shall—and I would argue that the past may prove equally exciting when you step into it, a land full of battles, intrigues, heroes, and magic.

  It can also be sad, full of the mournful echoing past. One year in Mayo, deep in the west, I spent a day and more moving from foundation to foundation in the long grass. I knew I was tracing the outlines of an old village that had disappeared under the tide of poverty or misrule in the abuse of Irish land. As happened more fiercely in Scotland, landlords in Ireland evicted people because sheep yielded greater profit than tenants. Thus, few things have hurt my heart so much as the outlines of those and other abandoned houses, which, one day, must have been built in such hope and gaiety.

  When I climbed the next great height, I saw the western ocean that those uprooted people had to cross in order to make a new life. Some took the rooftrees of their houses with them on the boat and set down again in the earth of Nova Scotia or Canada or Delaware or whatever newfound land they embraced.

  In my second pattern of travel, I go to safe and decent houses, places where I have told my stories so well that they have appreciated me and kept me fed and warm. A fireside where the householders and their neighbors look at me with round eyes and cheeks rosy from the fire compels me back there—the actor needs his audience. To such homes I return again and again. If busy and capable men and women live there, so much the better; I find something reassuring about the company of people who accomplish good tasks in their daily lives—aimlessness distresses me.

  Other than those two guiding principles, I have favorite places for specific times of the year. In the dead of winter I love to see the small birds scurry and then skate accidentally on the ice of a lake. When the new year’s evenings stretch—not much, just a little—hope gathers in the lengthening sky. Sharp air dives into the lungs, and we get what old people call “pet days,” when the sun unseasonably shines as warm as early summer.

  One such January morning, in county Armagh, near the site of the Yellow Ford, I strode across a small stream by a hilly grove and saw two deer ahead of me. Perhaps I was downwind, or the light dazzled them—the sun in the north of Ireland does hang lower in the sky on winter days. In any case, they never saw me; they stood nuzzling each other like young lovers, which, I suppose, is what they were. I could smell the ferns and the heather—it had lately rained—but I most remember the delicacy of their hooves as each raised a foot and pawed the ground a little. So reluctant did I become to disturb their privacy that I hunkered down slowly and watched them until one mooched off into the trees, and the other followed a little haughtily.

  Some farmers, especially in western counties whose shores are washed by the warm Gulf Stream, let their cattle out early after the winter. I love to watch such a herd, steam rising from their brown backs as they graze a hillside, and I know then that I am not far from a decent meal; people with fat cattle keep a good table.

  The coming of spring always refreshes me. Clouds scud across the sky, and the twilight is the gentlest of all the seasons. In my earlier years I sometimes helped the farmers with their work, and one year I footed turf in a bog near Athlone, the very center of the country, a place to which I enjoy returning.

  The young people have never heard the expression “to foot turf,” and I am sad at that. We used an implement called a slane or shlaan, a spade with another blade at right angles to the main one. To “foot” turf, we stepped on that implement, drove it into the peat of a bog and dug out a long rectangular block—a “sod” of turf—that is, peat, which is black with wisps of white, like an old woman’s hair. I find comfort in the fact that peat is congealed root and vegetable matter. To think that it lies buried there for thousands of years, and then, when we dry it out, gives us a lovely, hot fire with blue smoke and exciting images in the flames—surely those are the pictures of the past.

  When the days strengthen, I usually make my way to the banks of a certain river in the south, where it meets its own little tributary. There, in the ground near the tree at the fork of the two rivers, I have a “safe.” This is a tin box that contains some of my possessions, and I have many such boxes buried across the countryside. How I am to gather them all up before I die, I cannot say, and if I don’t collect them, some farmers of the future shall find interesting surprises on the tips of their plowshares.

  This particular place has a pair of swans, and I sit and watch them foraging in the rushes. Swans mate for life. In the farm overlooking the river bend lives a woman who tells me that she dreams very bright dreams every night of her life. After her husband died, she sat with me on the log we use for a bench, watching the rivers meet. She told me she dreamed of his death a week before he died.

  “Do you dream of him now?”

  “I dream of milk.”

  “That’s to be expected on a farm.”

  “I dream of drinking milk, and I dream of spilling milk.”

  “Then,” I said to her, “you are dreaming of mixed fortunes, because to dream of drinking milk foretells success, and to dream of spilling it foretells misfortune.”

  She took off her shoes. “My husband said he married me because he thought my feet beautiful. Did you ever hear of such a thing?”

  I said to her, “I have heard of a man who married a girl because he heard her laugh beneath his window. And I have heard of a man who married a girl because she could dance a jig on a dinner plate and not break the plate, and she was not a small girl. I know a man in county Monaghan who married a girl because she could not pronounce the letter ‘r,’ and he found that charming.”

  “Things are strange,” said the woman with the lovely feet. “The strangest of all would be if my husband came back to me. But he was thirty years older.”

  Every year I go back there and smoke a pipe, sitting at the angle of the rivers. Sometimes I meet her, and she gives me a mug of fresh milk; other years they tell me she doesn’t want to meet anybody. Then I dig up my box at night, add to its contents or take some money out, tip my hat respectfully in the direction of her fine house, and move on.

  I also like to be in the lakes, the bowl at the center of Ireland. Their names make music to me—Derravaragh, Gowna, Owel, sweet names f
or watered hollows full of reeds and the cries of birds. I have known afternoons where the silence over Westmeath had a stillness I have never found elsewhere. To lie on a grassy slope, to look down and see the lake waters reflecting a clear sky and not hear a sound other than the sudden crawk! of a bird—why would I exchange such a life for anything else?

  The waters of the lakes feel icy, and one of them has a clear bed—like Lake Inchiquin in Clare, where the limestone floor reflects a brightness up to the surface and the lake has a clarity like an intelligent mind. These, I think, are the last of the ice pools—and I believe the ice still owns them; I cannot explain their cold in any other way. In the year in which I was forty and in which I therefore set myself a number of physical challenges—walking speeds, etc.—I attempted to stay half an hour in the waters of Lough Gowna. Ten minutes finished me—it was a bright, scorching day, yet the lake water found the marrow of my bones and invaded. On the bank I shivered for an hour.

  Until a few years ago, I welcomed August more than any month in the calendar, especially those last ten days when the gold is seeping into everywhere and the high temperature of the day lingers. Heat becomes vital in your life if you have no sure bed for the night, and thus August brings some guarantees of warmth. Where it delighted me most, though, it no longer can—I have no suppleness now, and August has lost its greatest charm for me, the hard work of harvest; it is a young man’s month, and now I watch them, as muscular as I once was.

  This I regret, because I used to help in the many harvests. Come August, the farmers wanted all the hay in and all the corn standing in sheaves across the fields. Those golden days brought me an inner peace and happiness that I draw on now like a bank account. We worked hard, and I am old enough to have seen the manual harvesting replaced by machinery. No doubt the mechanization has proved a great saving and efficiency, but the old methods, with us since God was a small boy, brought more people to the event.