The Last Storyteller (16 page)

“How did you know?”

“Heard it on the news,” he said. “He wasn’t that old, was he?”

“I never knew his age,” I heard myself say—and realized for the first time that it was the truth.

“What did he die of?”

Old joke: he died of a Tuesday. “Emphysema. Heart gave out finally. How are you?”

“Have you your notebook with you?”

We found a quiet corner at the end of a long corridor. Jimmy Bermingham was one of the few men I’ve ever known whose eyes actually glinted.

“What am I supposed to be taking down?”

“I’m only doing what you asked me to do, Captain, telling you what I was doing.” And he did:

Do you know the town of Larne? A cold town, up there in East Antrim. Well, a bunch of the boys was caught out there last week. I was with them and we were interrupted in our very first job, which was to give a good hard kick to the British occupation of our country. This wasn’t in the papers at all, so we have censorship now, and you’re going to be the only person who has the full story, Captain
.

Soldiers, police, tracker dogs, trucks, jeeps, tanks nearly, the occupying power, as we call them, mustered everything they had to catch us. We got trapped in a cave, a strange kind of a place up near the Giant’s Causeway
.

And the dogs outside were going mental, because they got the scent all right, but the soldiers and the cops were too frightened to come into the cave or even to the mouth of the cave. Because they didn’t know how many of us were inside. And they didn’t know how heavily armed we were
.

Now, we were over that side of the county because we were aiming to wreck a big consignment of ammunition and guns that the soldiers were to unload from the dock at Larne. That cargo was being brought in from England to strengthen the garrisons all across the north
.

If we could only have got down onto the port, our impact would have been mighty. Because there was meant to be very few soldiers there, and we’d plug them and then blow up the whole mixture. But with the explosions the
night before, the English brought in hundreds of troops to protect the unloading. The rest of their soldiers went out chasing our boys
.

And here we were now, in terrible weather, holed up in a deep hollow in the icy rocks of the northeast. On those same hills, that’s where Saint Patrick served out his slavery. Herding pigs, he was, and he said he nearly froze to death
.

We sat in the cave for three days. My legs were shafts of ice. But we were well equipped. I mean we had plenty to eat and water to drink; there was a spring and a pool in the cave near us, and we were armed to the teeth. The soldiers outside kept being relieved in relays, and we were stuck
.

On the morning of the fourth day, nobody was making a move either way. It looked as if we might be trapped in there for four more days, and maybe even beyond that. Our commandant said to us, “Lads, we can’t stay here much longer. We don’t know what kind of stuff they might throw in here to gas us out.”

We could tell at nighttime that the soldiers or the police had brought up big, huge lights and were running them off the engines of trucks. Anybody who came to the mouth of the cave would be seen immediately, and we all knew there would be no coming out with our hands up, no surrender—we’d be shot at sight
.

Now one of our fellows was from around there in East Antrim, and he said that he’d always heard that these hills were honeycombed with strange caves and potholes. In his opinion, there was probably another way out of the cave, and he asked his commandant if he could go and look for one. He was given permission, and the lad was gone for twelve hours
.

When the lad came back, he said that he’d been out in the open air. It was a simple enough route; you just had to be careful in one place with the underground water, but if you followed a stream it would lead you right out. In fact, he said, when they came out on the other side they’d find themselves looking down a hill straight into the yard of the very school he went to as a child
.

Slowly and carefully, and it took several hours, the young lad led us out into the open air. We emerged blinking at ten o’clock in the morning. Straight in front of us down the hill was the school with the gate wide open. There were six of us, and we walked into the schoolyard and stole six bicycles
.

We rode these bikes a few hundred yards across the open countryside, and then we made arrangements to split up and come back together again on the
hill above the town of Larne. Six men on a bunch of bicycles with rifles on their shoulders? We had to hide
.

If you’re coming into Larne, you come down a hill, and you see the port down below. Well, we hid in various places along the same roadside, and when it was time to come together again, we followed the road, each one of us whistling or singing the same tune until we all met up. There we were, hidden in trees along by the road, looking down the hill at the port
.

And what was happening at the port? Soldiers, hundreds of them, were guarding the dockers, who were unloading crates and huge equipment and machinery off a ship onto a series of trucks. We knew that we’d hit the jackpot
.

We waited together—God, it took patience! We figured that the army trucks had to drive past us. This was the biggest road out of Larne. We all took up position, scattered down along the roadside, hidden in the brush, to ambush the trucks when they started coming up the hill
.

The commandant dispatched two men to find a farmer’s cart. They found one. The farmer wasn’t there, but his wife was, and she was chatty. She said, sure, they could borrow the old cart, and she told them that she had a son who was a soldier and he was down there loading guns and all kinds of machinery onto the trucks for distribution across the province, and she was expecting him home for his dinner, because they were leaving the port at exactly twelve o’clock and he had two days’ leave after his job was done. They thanked her for the cart, she gave them some homemade bread and some milk, and told them hurry up and go before her husband got home and changed his mind
.

Our two boys wheeled the cart nearly a mile cross-country, to the place on the side of the road where they were all hiding. Now they had their timing: noon that day. So they ate the bread and drank the milk. And none for us. We reefed them for that later on
.

When we saw the convoy of trucks leaving the port way down below, we settled down into our positions, a spread of about a hundred and fifty yards, and all on one side of the road so that we wouldn’t hit each other with our own bullets. As the convoy started to climb the hill, two of the lads pushed the old cart out into the middle of the road, and they guessed right, that the trucks would be the first traffic to come that way. There weren’t that many cars in East Antrim
.

The first truck stopped, and we opened fire. We ran down the hill and we
fired at every wheel we could see, and we punctured every tire we shot. We hit fifteen trucks altogether, and none of the soldiers got a clear shot at us. Mission accomplished. Gone. It took two weeks before the British army could get over their problems. By that time we were back down across the border
.

After Jimmy left, Miss Fay and I made the most of the night. We saw all the people she needed to see. Many stiffened toward her. She had, after all, a doubtful status in Catholic Ireland, because she and James had never married, and he’d been staying in her house for thirty years. The least they said about her was “Ah, what could you expect from a Protestant?”

The hypocrites. Many of them, with their pious frowns, had borrowed money from James, and most had never paid him back. I discovered their debts in his effects long after his death.

A decent core, though, all men, acknowledged her as fully as they would any widow. His real friends. And she showed her gratitude. She also introduced all of them to me and made them pledge that if they could ever be of use to me, they would gladly do so. We listened to stories about James. We heard two of the tunes that he had inspired—a reel named “James Clare’s Fancy” and a jig, “James Clare’s Pony,” which is what he called his famous bicycle.

When the last guests had gone, we went home to her kitchen table, a place where lives—mostly mine—were saved.

“What will you do now?”

“I will build a garden,” she said. “Here. At the back of the house. There’s plenty of room. And everything I put in that garden will have to do with James. And with you.”

When you have nothing to say, say nothing.

“And you, Ben? Well, I know what you will do.”

She could always surprise me.

“You do?”

“You will pursue Venetia. Bring her here to me, so that I can tell her about you.”

I said, “I don’t know. I’m not sure.”

“You should,” she said. “It’s what life wants you to do. My garden—I will begin it soon. We will both be gardening at the same time. In a manner of speaking.”

How old was Miss Fay? I think in her seventies, but passing for sixty; and when she eventually died I found three birth certificates, all showing different ages.

After dinner, she led me into the drawing room. She had set up the long dining table to its full, extended length. White sheets concealed piles of objects. She loaded a Chopin nocturne onto her gramophone. No. 19. Peaceful as deep snow. She laid a finger on her lips. As the first breaths of the E Minor moved across the room, she beckoned. Together we lifted and folded the white sheets.

In sectors along the table, she had laid out James’s possessions. First, his shirts, all white, all collarless; the starched collars lay folded beside them. Next to them, laid to their full length, lay James’s one dozen black ties.

She pointed. Across the room, on a coat stand from the hall, hung his four black suits. Draped across an armchair lay his famous long black coat, empty now, and hollow with missing him.

Next to the shirts sat his tobacco pipes, and his two pouches, one in soft black leather, one in brown. All the accoutrements lay there, too: his cigarette lighters, the pipe-cleaning tools, a little brass tamp he had like a tiny barbell.

James used this to punctuate his stories as he told them; just at the moment of greatest suspense he would finger the barbell, turn it over in his fingers like a magician doing a coin trick, and pause in his telling as he tamped down the tobacco. Sometimes he made it worse; he allowed the pipe to go out, and then, with short, grunting pauses in his tale, he’d relight it and tamp down the tobacco. Maddening, but I now recognized where he had learned it.

From looking at the pipes and the tobacco equipment I understood that two versions of James had been on this earth: the James who traveled
the roads and the James who had maintained an identical life in this house for much of his adult life. And he’d kept this side of him a secret from most people.

We moved along the table to a series of boxes—ebony, sandalwood, mahogany, some with inlay, all about the size of an average book. Miss Fay opened each box like an Egyptologist and displayed the contents: pens and nibs, some as old-fashioned as quills, some fountain pens with shiny black or marbled barrels and gold bands, more than one of which bore the initials J.A.C. I hadn’t even known of a middle initial. “Abraham,” she told me; even at christening his life had been unusual.

I stroked the boxes; I handled the pens; I fingered the gold bands with the initials. Beside me, Miss Fay leaned across the table and pulled the boxes toward us. With a sweep of the hand, but not a word from her lips, she gave me the boxes; I have them still; you have seen them, children, and handled them. I cherish them; in fact, as you know, I mention them specifically in my Will.

By now I understood that I was being led through James’s life, and being asked without words what possessions of his I would like to have. James’s books had long been merged with Miss Fay’s, and in time, when she left the planet, all of those came to me. They are full of annotations, those books, some in James’s handwriting, some in Miss Fay’s. Often I come across a notation from one or the other of them, and for that moment they’re standing beside me again.

The next group made me smile. James had a passion for small, useful tools—screwdrivers, pocketknives, bottle openers, and, as he used to say, “things for taking stones out of horses’ hooves.” Some had metal handles and casings, some bone, some mother-of-pearl, and when Miss Fay saw my smile she swept them, too, toward me.

Now we came to an attaché case, again with the initials J.A.C. About the size of a deep modern briefcase, it had a new leather smell, and the central brass catch also looked undisturbed—no scratches, no wear and tear. This case had scarcely been out-of-doors.

Miss Fay clicked open the brass lock and then pushed the attaché case to me. I took hold of it, felt its significant weight. She made an “open it” gesture. When I eased back the lid, I saw a card lying on a green felt cloth: James’s handwriting: “For Ben: a legacy of sorts.”

Beneath the green cloth lay packet after packet of banknotes, each
denomination a hundred pounds, each packet containing a hundred bills—ten thousand per packet, and the case contained twenty packets.

I recoiled. Too much, too much—both the size of the gift and the intent behind it. I already knew, though, that I had no way of refusing it; and Miss Fay—as she had often made clear—had deep financial security (all of which she bequeathed to me).

Later that night she would tell me that James had had a “saving demon” in him, and every Monday he’d put aside what he had not spent of his previous week’s allotted budget. When it reached a hundred pounds, he went to a bank and translated the smaller bills into a one-hundred-pound note. From time to time he took the older notes to the bank and refreshed them with new issues.

My arithmetic raced. How could he have saved that much money? Not on government pay. The full story didn’t come from Miss Fay. In the following months and years, out in the country, I learned that James had been a card player—who always won. Miss Fay never told me that. Nor did she confirm it when I found out. It was probably the only time I ever saw her defensive.