The Last Storyteller (47 page)

“Oh, dear God,” I said. “How could I?”

He chuckled. “Did Leonardo make the Mona Lisa’s nose too long? Is that what you’re saying?”

“Yes. Absolutely.”

“I’d have a lot to say about Mrs. Gioconda’s nose. And tonight I went into the first story too fast, not enough preamble. And I flagged badly on the last story.”

“If you say so.”

He bristled a little. “I do say so.”

“Well—do you know why?”

“Yes. I was nervous on the first story, and tired on the last.”

“I can understand ‘tired.’ But ‘nervous’? Surely not.”

“Look at the reality. I’ve been training you for months and months, and now the teacher has to be watched by the student.”

I conceded: “I know what you mean. But I saw no flaws. Anywhere.”

He went to work on the tobacco in the heel of his hand, the pipe stuck in the corner of his mouth.

“We’ll see how you like it when I come to hear you, soon.”

I laughed. “That’s not fair. And if you do, I’ll be tongue-tied.”

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “You won’t. I’ve found my true successor.”

That, children, was almost too much. He knew it, too.

“Damn! I left my lighter in your car.”

I think he did it to release me, so that I could hide my emotion in a few minutes of absence. When I came back with the lighter, he had begun to clear the table.

I said, “No. Not tonight, or this morning, or whatever time it is. You have to sit down. I’m doing this.”

Meeker than I had ever seen him, he headed for his chair. By now the fire had taken heart and flared with beauty—orange and red flames, with flickers of green.

When I came back to the kitchen with everything washed up and tidied away in the scullery, he had recovered his energy.

“We talked,” he said, “before Templederg about a philosophy for you, and perhaps a plan of what you’re going to do now.”

I said, “I’m taking to the road.”

“I know that. How will you handle it?”

“Don’t know yet. I’m still thinking it through.”

“Can I help?” The pipe glowed; the blue-white smoke rose.

I said, “I need to know why I’m doing it.”

He took the pipe from his mouth and looked at me; I didn’t dare break the eye contact.

“We both know why you’re doing it, Ben. Let yourself hear yourself say it. Out loud. Alone, if you prefer. That has always worked for me.”

“How do I do that?”

“Open your mouth and be spontaneous.”

I did as he said, and these words emerged and hung in the air: “I need to change myself. In order to heal myself.”

“Good boy.”

Neither of us spoke for some time. We both looked into the fire, each lost in—perhaps—the same thoughts. John Jacob broke the silence:

“I did something very bad once. Foul. Outright, black evil. Sometime later, I heard from an old, old man the stories that I told last night in Templederg. I followed him, I learned them, and I told them.”

The next day I sat down with him and made my own plans. Thoughts, ideas, proposals, and arrangements flowed from me in a torrent. He approved everything I intended. For a time we were like children, high with glee at the speed and intelligence of our thoughts.

We agreed that the first year or so should continue to be a learning process for me, and then he planned what he called my “release,” the moment when I would go out into the world alone on this brave, venturesome project. After that, on a date to be agreed, he would come and hear me. At my bidding. It would take place sometime after the year ended. In the meantime, we would not see each other.

As we sat back and rested from our great efforts, John Jacob laughed. I looked at him with a quiz in my eyes.

“I’m just wondering,” he said, “whether you’re poacher turned gamekeeper or gamekeeper turned poacher.”

“I’ll give you a John Jacob O’Neill kind of answer,” I said. “Both.”

As to my repertoire, we determined that I would not yet attempt stories in three different houses in one night, not until I had gained a lot of experience—some of it theatrical. “Theatrical”—John Jacob’s idea—meant that I was to book village halls here and there and hope that the people would arrive.

My main thrust, though, would be the reconstruction of a
seanchai
’s life, the only difference being my car (and that didn’t last long). I would tell stories he had taught me, and then move on to material I had collected.

Wasn’t this all quite an undertaking? Indeed. Think, however, of the depth and degree to which it occupied my repeatedly troubled mind.

It also took my mind off my country. And how I needed that. I still wonder that we didn’t fall apart. Ireland grew worse by the day. People emigrated by the thousands, to desperate jobs and worse circumstances in England, to promises of sunshine in the United States, but only if they
had relatives there. Political myopia spread like a rancid fog across the land, as the church interfered more and more in the running of the state.

Ironically, the Border Campaign limped along, with pathetic attacks and sadder deaths. I say “ironically” because a case could be made that the rebels had waged the wrong fight—they should have tried to take over the south. We needed something to shake us out of our torpor. (We did in due course receive the impetus we needed, but not until the early 1960s, and only then when a golden visitor showed us what the power of glamour looked like.)

And so, on a Monday morning, with maps and schedules, I set off on my new road around Ireland, to become a storyteller in the great tradition. Was I nervous? Yes. And frightened. Anxious. Unknowing, and therefore uncertain. Full of doubt. The times had changed—how would I be received?

I made for the coast of Clare, for the small place not far from Doolin where James Clare had been born, within earshot of the Atlantic breakers. It seemed the perfect choice—and it had been my idea. I followed John Jacob’s instructions to the letter: park a mile away; walk to the hamlet as though I had been walking all day; choose the house; knock on the door; and greet the inhabitants as he had taught me.

According to his directive, I had to select a house I didn’t know, one I had never visited. Coward that I was, I yet drove through beforehand, in daylight, looking around for the cleanest, the most well-ordered place. I found a cottage with white walls and a new slate roof. Neat window boxes held geraniums, and in the tiny front garden hydrangea blossoms bobbed their heads like babies.

During the long Atlantic dusk I came back and knocked on the door. A woman answered, in her sixties, perhaps seventy.

“Yes?”

“God save all in this good house.”

“There’s only myself, but thanks anyway,” she said, a spry and cautious woman.

“Do you have room in your mind for a tale of life itself, a tale of wonder, wisdom, and delight?”

She looked me up and down with her pale eyes. “What is it you’re trying to sell?”

I took the question and transformed it: “A story. A long story. Of love found and lost. Of dignity and failure. Of grandeur and defeat.”

She eased, in front of my eyes: so gratifying.

“Come in, so,” she said and stepped aside.

I had chosen well; she kept her home shiny as a new pin, so clean I almost felt afraid to sit down. As I stood in her kitchen, feeling too big for the room, and awkward at being twice her size, she looked up at me and said, “I’ve had a chair here for years big enough for a man to sit in, and not a man has come yet to sit in it, so you might as well be the first.”

She directed me to a great leather armchair.

“Thank you, ma’am.”

“That was my grandfather’s chair. And my father’s. They were big men, like you. My name is Maura O’Grady.”

She generated hospitality by way of the inevitable tea—I refused liquor, another part of my deal with John Jacob. When we had finished with the small talk—she had never heard of James Clare—I told her the story of the great Malachi MacCool and the girl Emer.

Such an attentive audience: still as a stone; pale eyes on mine; not a fidget or a move. I took about two hours, told a shorter version than John Jacob’s, and not at all as accomplished, not by a long chalk. Not yet.

At the end she thanked me.

“I haven’t heard a story like that since I was a child,” she said, in quite a flat way.

This was a woman in whom joy would be difficult to perceive. I wanted her to tell me whether she had been moved, but she said nothing more. Except when I stood at the door and said, “Good night now, and thank you for listening to my story.”

“The girl was right,” she said. “To marry the young fella. Oul’ Malachi didn’t have the guts to fight for her. He should have challenged the young fella to a boxing match or a duel or something. If I had a fella, that’s what I’d want from him.”

I couldn’t resist asking a question, even though it took me out of character: “Did you ever have a man in your life like that?”

She said, with no feeling discernible, “I never had a man in my life at all. I’m an only child, and my mother didn’t like men, so she warned me off them.”

So ended my first story. I made my way to Doolin and stayed in a bed-and-breakfast place. My last thought as I fell asleep?
This is cheating. I should be sleeping in a barn somewhere or the open air
. Soon I would be.

As I made my way through every place on my schedule, I remained steady and calm—for hours at a time. Yet, no day passed without a memory of that house in Cavan and its three dead bodies—which I now chose to see as vile in death. That’s how I processed what I didn’t wish to acknowledge: I demonized. The bodies were to blame for their own foulness, nothing to do with me.

And Venetia? Those were thoughts that I could and did control. How could I do otherwise? She had vanished of, I believed, her own accord. Had made her choice. Rejection. Of me, and all that I stood for, and any relationship that we might have. So—I demonized her, too. Arrested every thought process the moment it began. Didn’t even allow myself to wonder whether she had mourned Jack Stirling. Note, however, that I thought of her as still alive.

For weeks I made my calls, on my schedule that had taken so long to plan. I told the stories John Jacob had told me, and soon I began to tell some of my own. Here, again, I obeyed directives; as soon as I had become accustomed to telling his tales I could include stories I had known from elsewhere, from my own collecting.

Now, at this far distance, it astounds me that I did it. But back then? Not a moment’s faltering did I have, as though I knew I had no choice. And I didn’t—that is, if I’m permitted to use the word “spiritually.” My alternative? If you’d asked me, I’d have said, “Death.”

An interesting cowardice rose to the surface. I kept choosing stories I might never see reflected in life. For example, after six weeks or so, I was almost telling the Malachi MacCool story in my sleep. From this locked pattern I had to break away—and I confess that I was curious to see whether anything I might tell a family had any bearing in real life. Or would prove to have.

This inquiry nagged me, especially as I had been so intrigued and, I believe, influenced by it from John Jacob’s storytelling.

For my “breakout,” I chose a Friday night, and again I set up everything in advance. This time I knew the house, had been there a number of times as a collector, and felt sure of my welcome. Also (and this will tell you how I tried to control things) I had calculated that I might afterward make things happen that would echo the legend I had chosen.

The children of the house had an appetite for narrative (and so, in truth, had their parents). So by way of preamble I merely said that it was a story of the ancient world, and I settled down to it.

Long ago and not too far away, on an island off the coast of Munster, where the sun shone through the leaves on the trees and made colors like stars on the ground, where the birds flew upside down when it rained because that’s the easiest way of all to get a drink of water, where the horses held contests to see which of them could run faster than the wind, there lived a king who believed himself the finest king in the world
.

His royal majesty liked to show what a fine fellow he was. He even insisted that his only child, a son, call him “Your Royal Majesty.” As part of his royalness he held his head as though it sat on a pointed stick, and turned it this way or that only when he felt that he saw something worthy of his royal eyes. And he walked like a stork, tall and slow and stately, as though he had no need to keep up with the pace of the world
.

This was the part of him that most troubled his advisers—the slow, deliberate, lordly pace, the way he looked at the universe down the long slope of his
royal nose. They, being wise men, knew that the planet spins at its own pace and that we had better keep up with that
.

He also had a third and, to some people, even worse characteristic: he spoke in a very slow and orderly way. No hurried words, everything considered—that was how he believed a king should speak
.

So look at him for a moment: holding his head stiff and upright and avoiding any sight of which he might not approve, because he was such a fine fellow. Walking slowly, because he believed that he, being such a great king, did not need to keep pace with the world; rather, he believed that it was the world’s place to keep up with him. And speaking in a measured and slow way, believing that to be the royal manner in which a king should speak
.

There were, however, those who believed that the king behaved like this because he was a sad man. He had no wife anymore; she had disappeared during a lightning storm one night and was never seen again. The king’s son had left, too. He had no wish to succeed to the throne, and he’d gone abroad to become a scientist, interested only in the lives and habits of spiders
.

Sad or not, for years and years and years the king went his royal way, while ivy thickened into bushes on the castle walls, while his dog grew a gray beard and went blind, while his marshes slowly became bogland that his children’s children would dig for peat to put on the fire
.