The Last Storyteller (21 page)

And if those passions had subsided a little, these two deaths in this new campaign gave a mighty scratch to the surface of that culture.

I saw all that subliminal remembrance played out in Limerick. How many people at Sean South’s funeral? “Thousands,” said the newspaper—and it’s true that I had never seen a larger crowd, except inside a stadium at a sporting event. Here are the notes I made:

Contradictory details emerged of how Feargal O’Hanlon and Sean South had died. That’s always dangerous in Ireland, where suspicion makes its living from embroidery. Some facts went uncontested, which is to say that both sides gave out the same version. Then they diverged.

The Royal Ulster Constabulary spokesman said that both men had been killed at the scene, and their bodies carried by their comrades on a truck to a distant barn. The rest of the rebels had then escaped across the border.

An Irish Republican Army version said that both men had been hit in the first phase of the action. Their comrades carried them to the barn as
a firefight followed all of them. While conducting a rearguard action, the active members hid the injured men until nothing more could be done for them. As the survivors headed out in the dark, said the IRA, the police found the two men and killed them.

Well, Ben and Louise, you know what they say: Truth is the first casualty of war. And I surmise that in your professions you know that more than most. And truth lurched about a bit after that incident. The Irish Republican Publicity Bureau issued a statement saying that “an Irish resistance fighter” had been killed in an attack on the police station and that “later, a second fighter died after being captured by the enemy.” That’s the view that stuck all over the south, and among the north’s Catholics.

The Northern Ireland police put out their version. It was fully reported by all the newspapers. And backed by medical evidence given at the inquests on the two dead men. The police resisted accusations that they had “finished off” the two wounded men in the old byre.

Few believed them—especially as the dreaded name “B Specials” came up. However, from all I have been able to determine, Sean South had indeed died on the truck, and Feargal O’Hanlon had lost too much blood to survive. (I made extensive notes; you can find them in the commission archives.)

The men who got back across the border that night went to the houses of friends. Who took them to Monaghan Hospital. Where they were arrested by the southern police. Who took those needing greater treatment to the Mater Hospital in Dublin. Whence one escaped dressed as a woman.

After the funeral in Limerick, I tried to get back to normal. The crowds dispersed. Somberness remained. Rain still fell. I went to see my “Occasion Merchant”—his name for himself, not mine; that’s what the signboard outside his door called him. He rented and sold goods for every
possibility; I’d met him with somebody who’d hired dentures from him to go on a date.

I liked Mr. MacManus, a big bear of a man, with his heavy breathing, and his own black-and-white teeth like piano keys, and his habit of speaking in paragraphs. He always had news for me of some erratic kind: some unusual emigrant returned from “the New World,” as he persisted in calling the United States; a new cache of bizarre goods he had found; a family row out in the country. To this last sort of account, no matter what the details, he habitually added the same final remark: “And I’d bet there was a bit of incest there, too.”

He didn’t disappoint me; he had just purchased a stock of chamber pots from a hardware store in County Waterford that was closing down.

“Come here till I show you,” he said, heaving himself along the crammed passageways of his storerooms. “You’re the one man now that’d be interested in this. It’d never strike anybody that the humble chamber pot, in its willing existence under the beds of the world, would supply historical commentary or social observation. You’re familiar with it, I know, because you grew up in the countryside with the chamber pot in all its forms, white enamel with a blue rim, or china in decent households, and flowers everywhere, including on the bottom, which always struck me as odd and superfluous, given what has to land on them same flowers. But here’s something you never saw. This hardware merchant supplied Lord Waterford and a great number of other Protestant gentlemen with household goods, and he had one pot left from a stock that was popular with them gentry in the last century. Look at it.”

He pulled the china pot from a long, high drawer. For a handle it had a grotesque human ear. Around the side were pictures of dozens of Irish peasant children, romping and disheveled, and on the base of the interior the portrait of a whiskered man. Above him ran a curved caption: “Daniel O’Connell, the Liberator.” The line below said, in a wide curve, “Do Your Duty.”

Mr. MacManus said, “Isn’t that a treasure? If proof were needed of how they feared O’Connell, there you have it, as round as a hoop. I like to think of the gentry who opposed Mr. O’Connell as being unable to combat him with ingenuity and wit in the departments of debate, rhetoric, and logical assumption, they being reduced to bodily functions of
the basest and most private kind to express their indignation and frustrated sense of contentiousness.”

How does a man with such short breathing run off such long sentences?

The chamber pot helped me. Further validated the link between folklore and history. People knew of O’Connell like they knew of Finn MacCool. Years later, maybe prompted by Mr. MacManus, I researched O’Connell. His body may have expired in 1847, but he never died; heroes don’t. And he had the essential legendary status—of outwitting the British Parliament. And fathering dozens of children. Both sides of the blanket.

I asked John Jacob O’Neill one day if it was valid to count a figure such as O’Connell as myth. His answer clinched it for me:

“Did he earn his legends?”

So the stories of O’Connell will have to wait for another day. If you remind me, children, some night here around my own fireplace I’ll tell them to you. And we’ll be up until dawn.

From Mr. MacManus, I headed out to the Atlantic, to a house just south of Doolin, in Clare, where an old woman told me of her marriage. When young and pretty, and evidently mischievous, she had been wooed by three brothers. Each of their names began with the letter
P
—Peter, Paul, and Patrick.

They didn’t know about the others’ courtship. Hannah never told them. Not only that—Peter and Paul were twins.

“I kept them all dancing on strings,” she said. “Because I found that very enjoyable.”

“You did?” I prodded.

“They each had their different nights of the week. That was the only way I could manage them. Because they all sounded the very same, they all spoke alike, and in the dark of the night I didn’t want to make a mistake when I went out to meet them.”

“What would have happened,” I asked, “if they had switched places one night?”

Hannah laughed as openly as a rogue. “I’d have known from the kissing,” she said.

“The kissing?”

“They were all different. Peter never shaved himself right. Paul was
always trying to get the tongue working. And Patrick would keep his lips pressed on your mouth even if a crowd formed and told him to stop.”

“Which of them did you marry?” I said.

“None of them.” She giggled, eighty and naughty.

“None of them?” I could hear my surprise in my own echo.

“No.” She paused. “What happened was—didn’t they all find out. A jealous girl at the creamery, and I thought she was my friend, she told them. And without any of them telling the other, they all emigrated.”

“Where did they go, Hannah?”

She held up three fingers and took them down one by one.

“Peter went to Canada. Paul went to San Francisco. And Patrick went to Brisbane in Australia.”

“And who did you end up marrying?”

“A nice man. He was an only child, and my grandmother said that a girl should always marry an only child, because they were always looking for love, and if they found it with you, they’d look after you very well.”

“And what happened to Peter, Paul, and Patrick?”

“They came home for my wedding. Would you believe that? They got over all their bitterness, and each of them danced with me, and we laughed and laughed about the three years they courted me. I said, If you added it all up didn’t I give each of them a year of my life. We had a great time.”

Her name was Mrs. Hogan, originally Hannah Prendergast; she’s long dead, but you never saw such a twinkle.

The next tale I gathered that week—I’d been told it was a ghost story. A man in North Clare, on the edges of Galway Bay, had always boasted that he possessed a complete Spanish Armada uniform: “Haven’t I the tunic, the breastplate, the silver helmet, and the long sword?” Nobody believed him, because nobody had seen it. And he, a bachelor and a suspicious man, wouldn’t let anybody into his house.

One winter he’d been saying that he hadn’t been well. Then came a time when nobody had seen him in Ballyvaughan for weeks. They went out to the house, broke down his door, and found him dead—but prepared for death: he’d arrayed himself on his bed in the silver uniform he’d always insisted he owned, all the parts of which had been maintained in museum condition.

My informant said, “He told me one night, with drink on him, that he dreamed of being a Spanish conquistador because his family came from out there on the coast near Black Head, where some of the Armada ships foundered in 1588. The helmet was shining in the dark when we found him, and I knew how he died, and it probably answers a puzzle. He probably caught a chill.”

I asked, “What’s the connection between the uniform, the puzzle, and the chill?”

My narrator answered, “For years local people said they saw a ghost out there, the ghost of a Spanish soldier, walking the cliffs at night, with his helmet gleaming in the moonlight. Now I know who it was; it was our man. I bet he used to put on the uniform and go for a stroll when he thought nobody would see him. That’s how he caught his chill. So ’twas his dream that killed him.”

The following day I went east, inland by many miles. At dusk, I parked my car at a gate. This farm, half a mile from the road, never had an avenue. James used to say that the people who lived there didn’t want anyone to know they were alive.

A shopping bag flapped from the gatepost. I snooped; it contained a note. I took the bag back to the car, where I could read the paper with some light. It was a letter two weeks old from the local health authority: one of the people in the house had contracted polio. “Accordingly,” it said, “these premises must now be considered quarantined.”

I drove into the nearby town. It shall remain nameless; its people
lacked decency in this case. At the grocery, I asked about the farm I’d wanted to visit. As excited as gossips, they told me that yes, it was true, the house had polio. A child might have died; they weren’t sure. Had anybody gone up there? Oh, God, no. Was anything confirmed? Listen, they said, even the police aren’t going in. Nor the doctors themselves.

I said, “But how is the family managing for food?”

Somebody answered, “Aren’t we all asking that question?” And then they looked awkward and began to resume their prior conversations, shutting me out.

I loaded up: bacon, eggs, bread, butter, anything that seemed viable and convenient. If the people inside that house had serious illness, they surely had low morale. When I asked for milk, the owner, who hadn’t spoken a word, said, “They have their own cows; they’ll be milking every day.”

I asked him to tally up my items. Maybe I expected him to say that they were free. Or that he’d give a discount. No such thing. I paid him, and as he gave me back the change, I said, “Maybe some sweets or something? For the children?” When he turned to fetch something, I planted the knife. “Do those people shop here? I mean when things are normal?”

The blow landed. Embarrassment set in. He didn’t meet my eye.

“That’s for the youngsters,” he said, and handed over a solitary chocolate bar.

I took the risk of driving across the fields, a slow, careful journey, avoiding ruts. Gravel around a house is a good watchdog. Curtains twitched; I saw a face caught in the headlights. It disappeared when I climbed out of the car. From directly inside the door a man answered my knock.