The Last Storyteller (10 page)

“How do we know he’s any good?” she said. She had iron-gray hair in a straggly bun and a university voice.

“If Jimmy says he’s the goods, he’s the goods,” said Bob, who seemed to want little more in life than a new drinking companion. Maisie needed more; she thirsted for anarchy.

I asked, “Could you please pull back your gun?”

“Just reminding you,” she said. Eyes like bugs, black in a white face, and she kept sawing her upper lip with her lower teeth.

“Tell him, Maisie,” said Jimmy Bermingham. “Tell him about the B Specials.”

“B Specials”—the Northern Ireland police reserve. They harassed and killed Catholics along the border. So we were told. For sport, we were told.

“A repressive power is always expressed through those whom it most wants you to trust,” she said.

I looked puzzled at this proclamation.

“What are police for?” she ranted. “To protect the people and their property, right? To let the world go about its business safely, right? They’re the officials we’re most invited to trust, right?”

Bob, helpful and drinking, agreed: “That’s the general picture, Maisie.”

“So when they, in the course of their duty, are encouraged to destroy that trust—well, then you know what kind of regime you have.”

Bob took another swig. “That’s it. That’s the picture.”

I made the mistake of saying, “But it’s in the north—it has nothing to do with us.”

She hissed like an angry goose. “Where were you born? Is all of your native island not your concern?” Turning to Jimmy, she asked, “Where did you pick him up?”

Jimmy said, “He’s actually okay, Maisie. And he knows the country like the back of his hand.”

“How?” She festered with suspicion.

“I work for the Folklore Commission,” I said.

This restrained her, and she laughed.

“Well, I bloody hope you brought your notebook.”

That was the moment at which I should have risen from my chair and left that house. But I didn’t, and it’s in the not doing as well as the doing that we undo our lives.

“Are you sure he’s one of us?” asked Maisie.

I said, “No, I’m not. Not at all.”

Maisie, striding like a hiker, exited the room. She returned within minutes and walked straight over to me. In her hands she held an old-fashioned rifle, its heavy stock gleaming with wood polish, a Lee-Enfield.

“Here’s your choice,” she told me. “This?” She put the muzzle to my right temple. “Or this?” She thrust the gun at me so hard that I had no choice but to take it from her. “Which is it?”

Guns discommode me. Their facility alarms me. Point and kill. Ruin someone’s life. Remove at a finger pull deeply loved people, as important in their spheres as the sun in the sky. The very weight of a gun disturbs me—an insolent object, insisting on its own importance.

Maisie walked away from me, clapping her hands.

“You’re in now,” she said.

I looked around, cleared a space on the kitchen table, and laid the rifle down as gently as a glass.

“Not me,” I said. But I didn’t storm and rant and rave as I should have done.

“Your fingerprints are on that gun,” she said, looking out the window. “I won’t be wiping them off.”

From my pocket I took a handkerchief and began with foolish movements to wipe the gleaming wooden stock. She strode over and pushed me away.

“Listen to me.” She was at that moment every spitting female revolutionary the world has ever seen. “The border is a few miles away. And we lost one of our best men yesterday. They gouged out his eyes. In the back of their van. We know the bastard who did it. A B Special called Sammy Gilpin.” (Not his real name.) “That’s what’s going on here.”

And I? The implications couldn’t have been clearer or more dismaying: damned if I do and damned if I don’t.

When
in extremis
, talk or stay silent. Shrewdness is knowing when to do which. I didn’t know, so I turned my back on that gun, and on the three people in that house, and I walked out.

At the car, I halted and looked back. Nobody followed me. I opened the door, sat, closed the door. When I went to start the engine—no key. Jimmy Bermingham had taken it. I sat back, afraid once more.

These people had made their calculations. What could I do? Go to the police and tell what I knew? That I’d seen caches of guns in private houses? And that one of them had my fingerprints on it? Maisie and friends need only say, “He asked to join up.”

And even if the police did believe my story, how long would I, an informer, a squealer, live? At my waist, on my hipbones, and slipping down from under my arms, I felt the feary coldness of sweat.

Not knowing where I was made it worse. Driving in, I’d been so intent on finding the place that I hadn’t looked around. This area felt new to me. I got out of the car and went for a walk, and now that I could see the location, a sense of wonder eased my mood. Maisie’s cottage, surrounded by trees and shrubs, had been the steward’s house or the gate lodge of a great manor. I followed a high stone wall to a pair of huge,
rusty gates leaning off their hinges. Lions, their proud heads wigged green with moss, squatted on the pillars.

The manor had long fallen. In the distance, piles of cut stone marked its collapse. To my left, the old garden opened up. How bizarre.

Twin trees marked where a wide door had stood. Beyond them, tall evergreen cones marched for hundreds of yards. From the feet of these trees radiated gravel pathways, like rays of gray light. I followed one; they stretched off into smaller enclaves, with smaller evergreens. Here and there, among these cones, deep circles had been cut into the ground—ornamental flower beds, perhaps. From God’s view it must have looked like a formal geometric drawing with circles and their tangents.

At the end of the garden I climbed two steep flights of grassy stone steps to a high terrace, and from there I looked down. The ornamental circles seemed like the pockmarks on the moon. Dusk had begun to fall. Shadows were sneaking into the greenery. Some of the evergreen cones began to hide themselves.

Behind me I felt something, a presence, not ghostly but defined. I turned to look. A deer stood five feet away, unafraid. No flinching; it didn’t even turn its head, not even when I walked toward it—because it was made of stone. Another illusion in my unreal life.

Back at the car, Jimmy waited, his elbows leaning on the roof, his face a white place in the closing darkness.

“Will we go, Captain?” he said. His tone sought to appease me.

“Where’s the key of the car?”

“Sorry, Ben.” He climbed in and, when I followed, handed me the key.

“You planned all this, didn’t you?” I said. “You set me up.” Moments later, I had this thought:
Why didn’t I try to stop him from getting into the car?

“I did,” he said. “I did it deliberately.”

“Why me?”

“You’ll be invaluable to the cause.”

“And I could go to jail for life. Or even be hanged,” I said.

“That’ll never happen, Ben.”

“You don’t know that.”

“In every revolutionary movement, there’s a man who survives everything because of his own stature, because of the kind of man he is. You’re that kind of man, Ben.”

“There isn’t a movement!” I yelled.

“There is now,” he said. “You saw it back there.”

I shouted, “That madwoman, that manipulative bitch—that’s no revolution!”

“Why wouldn’t it be?” asked Jimmy Bermingham. In those days I could rarely distinguish calm from cold.

“Why me?”

“Who else collects our traditions? Who else understands our depth as a people?”

“What clowns you are. Clowns.” By now I was steaming.

The facts are these. Relics of the guerrilla squads who had fought in the War of Independence from, effectively, the 1916 rebellion to the treaty of 1921, and then against their sons and brothers and comrades in the civil war for two years, had continued to rage against the Irish border. Many of them, articulate, capable, and educated, felt horribly denied. In due course, they spawned new blood. Time, they said, to start again. Strike at the hated partition and the forces who patrol it. Get back our six counties—only the full thirty-two counties can restore the ancient nation.

They had money, they had guns, they had volunteers. Maisie, for all her mad wildness, had been a professor of political science. They’d removed her for her views; she’d retreated, then disappeared—to this remote place near enough to the border to kick-start attacks. Nothing or nobody could have been farther from any choice of mine—for anything.

Jimmy Bermingham spoke directions and I drove: east and north. No light anywhere, not a house, not a candle. When we’d reached civilization by way of a straggling village with a lamp on a lone pole, Jimmy said, “We have to make a little bit of a detour, Ben.”

“No detours. We’re going to Dublin, I’m dropping you off in the middle of the city, and then I’m going down home to see my parents.”

“Yeh, sure, Ben, after a detour.”

Something in his voice snagged me on a spike of worry. I looked across. He had put his hand inside his ragged coat.

“What are you doing?”

“We have a little errand to run, Ben.”

“No, we haven’t.”

He said, “Ben, we’re heading for a place you might be familiar with. Glenboy. D’you know it?”

He pulled out a handgun and laid it on his lap. Catching my breath, I detoured.

It’s difficult to call Glenboy a “place”—but it existed, north of Killarga, a nowhere cluster of houses at the edge of high scree. A retired schoolmaster who lived on Saddle Hill had interesting legends here about ladies with long hair who rose from the nearby waters of Lough Melvin and Lough Allen. On my last visit, the snow had come in, and I couldn’t get out of his house for two days; since he had talked nonstop, he’d nearly crazed me.

“What’s in Glenboy?”

“There’s a man I have to see, Captain.”

“Don’t call me that. Does he know you’re coming?”

The anger of the morning hadn’t yet dissipated. But it hadn’t remained at a high enough level for me to fight back. I caved again.

Jimmy Bermingham said, “He’ll know I’m there. Leave it at that.”

I can’t write down what I said to him—it’s too obscene. And using profanity enrages me further.

He countered, “Think of it as your job, Ben. Write us up.”

“Jesus Christ,” I said. “There’s a place in hell for your kind.”

Jimmy Bermingham flinched and caressed the ugly gun on his lap. We reached a main road, and I headed north. I should have headed south, found the police in Dromahair or Drumshanbo, but I didn’t. Wrong choice.

Clutching at straws and telling nobody, I decided to take Jimmy Bermingham at his word and keep a record. Here was my first idea:
I know this is crazy and lethal, but treating it as history might one day somewhat justify my stupidity in not running from them
. Next thought:
Am I going to dignify this scruffy insurgence by keeping a record?
And here is the actual extract from my first attempt; you’ll see why I didn’t file it for decades.

Verbatim account of James J. Bermingham (Jimmy) of his first involvement in the Border campaign of the IRA, December 12, 1956. Note: The IRA actions continued to February 26, 1962
.

We left Kildysart when darkness fell
. [This is J.B. speaking.]
I felt proud and important—the designated assassin. Like one of Michael Collins’s men in the old days
. [The War of Independence was run by the famous hero Michael Collins, later assassinated by his old comrades in the civil war of 1922–23.]
We knew about this B Special, Gilpin, we knew where he lived. Sammy Gilpin was his name. Maisie said as I was going out, “Two shots. Legs first, to immobilize him, then the head shot.” And she said, “Good luck. For God and for Ireland.”

The Webley was inside my coat; she was firing .455 slugs. We got her from a girl who smuggled it out of a British army barracks in Germany. Friends everywhere. You need that in a guerrilla war. Collins could have stayed in any farmhouse or cottage in Ireland and been safe. Maisie couldn’t talk about Collins and not break into tears
.

Did I think about what it would be like to kill somebody? No. No point. And no worries on that score. The cause orders everything. The cause is my master. Get them off our island. Stop them persecuting native Irish people. Maisie says that the problem south of the border is that the people have gotten fat and soft, and as long as they’re comfortable they don’t care about anyone else
.

Once we hit Belturbet I knew this was it. In deep. I’d been to a lot of the briefings, and I knew there was a big operation starting up that night. The boys were going after a transmitter in Derry. A courthouse somewhere else. And a radar station over on the Antrim coast
.

The gun was warm from my handling it. I didn’t load it yet. And I had to be ready to throw it out the window if we saw a roadblock up ahead. We weren’t going to cross the border by an approved road, and there was a police barracks in Lisnaskea
.

Maisie told us how to find the unapproved roads and we hit one or two that were blocked by barrels full of cement so we had to turn back, we couldn’t get across the Border that way. In the end our driver
[that was me, Ben MacCarthy: I took my own name out of this report]
got us over by going through the forest above Lisnaskea. When we came down onto the level road you could see in the light of the headlamps the water glinting on each side. A land of lakes
.

I’d memorized the details Maisie gave me. Anyway we had a map and a torch. The driver swung into a wood, and we followed a small road along by a stream. This would lead us close to the bigger road that the B Special boyo would take from the pub to his mother’s house. He went that way every night. Our small road was parallel to his, with the stream between us. None of us knew was how wide was the stream
.

They told us that he came home about half past ten. We sat there in that car. I loaded in the slugs and turned on the safety catch. Nothing went along his road nor ours. A dead-quiet night. Black as a cat in a coal hole. We knew that Maguiresbridge was over to our right. The Gilpin house was off to our left. We couldn’t see either
.