Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show (40 page)

The feeling of responsibility also enabled me to cope with not watching the show. When she emerged later I would be able to swing into action and begin my intended project of taking care of her. We had already established that I would take her back to the house in Charleville, and that from now on I would spend every night in the same bed with her.

I know it seems fanciful to look back after all these years and insist that those were my feelings—that driven sense of responsibility. But I assure you—I’ve given it intensive and extensive thought, and that is truly what I believe I was feeling at that time.

And as I stood there, a figure walked toward me, the maker perhaps of that responsibility gene—my father. Not saying a word at first, he patted me on the shoulder and leaned against the wall right beside me.

We stood there for long minutes, smiling and chuckling at our separate—but I’m sure not very dissimilar—thoughts, as we heard the laughter and applause coming from inside the hall.

During a lull he said to me, without turning his head, “I-I-I often do this. I often wait here so that I have the pleasure of looking forward to seeing her.”

I had been thinking the same.

The likely problem facing me hadn’t yet surfaced. I was so lost in my new, white-hot, tumbling emotions that I never focused on any difficulty for long. Nor did I when he made that remark—“the pleasure of looking forward to seeing her.” Nor did I say to him, as I was supposed to, “When are you coming home?” or “Please come home.” I said nothing, not a word.

He said it again, in different words. “It’s such a joy to be with her when the night ends; she’s always so tired and I can look after her.”

And I wasn’t even jolted by this. Nor did I give any thought to the next moves of the night, which were now approaching, because we could hear Blarney’s voice from inside, and we could hear the laughter, and Blarney was always top of the bill—meaning the evening would end within half an hour or so.

I stood there with my father in what I now see was a most unreal situation. He closed his eyes, a smile on his face, and settled back to enjoy the laughter.

“Oh, by the way,” he said suddenly. “Could you come over with the car tomorrow? I want to go to a funeral.”

“What time?”

“Your uncle Denny is dead. In Kilmallock.” In an instant I saw him again:
the man under the lamplight, the affable host, the much beloved, walking weakly home
.

Loud applause, loud and louder—the show was over. My father pulled his shoulders off the wall and bounded away like a colt. Now the reality rode in. I stood there, not knowing what to do, and fending off the idea of what might happen next. Instinct is the oxygen of love. I remained where I stood.

The crowd departed in the usual glee, laughing and reminding one another of the evening’s highlights. I moved a few yards around to the front of the hall, to stand in the light coming from the open doors. As I did so, I saw Venetia jump from the stage and run down the shabby hall between the chairs. At the door she grabbed my hand and led me away, running from the place. I had parked the car out of sight, to keep the curious from pawing it; we left town within minutes.

“He’s staying with the company,” she said.

I looked at her; she had fixed this.
Should I ask how?
I didn’t.

Sometime before dawn we fell asleep. Our last remarks to each other had to do with how much better could this get, with how much older than eighteen I seemed to be, and with the future. The future—ah, yes, the future; it and its possibilities became the subject of challenge while we were still asleep.

I
heard the knock. Then I heard the door open. I’m a light sleeper. Somebody looked in and I saw a disappearing arm, a woman’s. Venetia woke too, took no action, and went back to sleep. I lay there, wide awake, and now the implications sailed in like menacing ships. I didn’t own a watch in those days and always guessed the time by the light of day—not more than eight o’clock. Once again the noises floated up of a small town waking—a door slam, the clang of some utensil somewhere, a cyclist whistling, the clop of a horse’s slow hooves: sleepy sounds, but important in their assuring-ness. Typically they’d have lifted me into the morning; I had no intention of leaving that bed, not that day, if I could help it.

Venetia slept for another hour, and I lay there, shifting between the delight of recent memory, anticipation of the imminent, and fear engendered by the implications.

We didn’t rise until late. She sent me downstairs first, and the darkness of the day under heavy overcast, gave us night at noon. Ravenous, I went straight to the kitchen, Mrs. Haas’s exclusive domain; I had never seen anybody else in there. She’d heard me coming and stood in front of the black stove with its driving flames seen through the grid. As I walked
in she clasped her hands in front of her like somebody receiving an award.

“Oh,” she said, and said it again. “This is so good, so good.”

I mustn’t have been quite sure of what she meant, because she crossed the floor and stood close to me.

“She is a lovely young voman and I am pleased, pleased. This is the right way, not the other way, the other way was bad and wrong, this is good. Oh, yes, and I am going now to make you such food.”

Mrs. Haas, when she first met me, told Venetia that the fates had intervened and that the “right man” had arrived. Apparently, those two spent most of their lives discussing the possibility of a loving life partner for Venetia. When my father showed up Mrs. Haas had wondered at first if this was indeed the direction that the world had chosen—but then decided that my father had been only the pathfinder, which is where Venetia got that idea.

She turned and marched back to the stove, beside which she had arranged all her pans and ingredients, and once again I heard her noises, this time a small song, almost beneath her breath. As she began to cook she looked at me again and winked, then went on arranging pans on the stove. I stood and watched—and she turned, looked gravely at me, and said, “Run away. The two of you. I don’t know how you vill do it. But run away.”

Mrs. Haas stood over me as I ate the bacon, the eggs, the potato cakes—the mound of food. Now and then she muttered, “Strength, strength.”

I felt some undercurrent; I couldn’t say what it was. If I’d known enough, I’d have said I was being oversensitive, that all my senses were now heightened and everything magnified. If I could sum up what I felt—Mrs. Haas was showing an unseemly sense of triumph, and I knew not why.

When I finished the first batch of food, she strode across, took my plate, went to the stove, renewed my plate, and came back. I didn’t protest. As I began to thank her, she looked away at something else, and began to step backward; her face had turned white as a gravestone.

I looked where she stared. Three people, one behind the other, blocked the wide doorway of the kitchen. Nearest me stood the man with the black hair oil, from the cottage, from the secret blue-shirted
drilling. He was holding a rifle with a shining wooden butt and he had pointed the gray-blue barrel straight at me. Behind him stood King Kelly. And behind him, holding her face in her hands as though expecting something awful to happen, stood Sarah, Venetia’s mother.

Everybody froze. The tableau stayed rigid for maybe ten long seconds. I felt some food coming back up my throat into my mouth, a sign of intense fear. My stillness—which came from fright, nothing else—may have persuaded them that they were dealing with somebody of a cooler and braver temperament. King Kelly spoke.

“Go closer,” he directed the gunman.

“No,” said Mrs. Haas, who began to scream.

You have never heard a scream like Mrs. Haas’s. She opened her mouth just as the gunman put the muzzle as close to my left eye as he could without actually impaling me on the gun.

The muzzle touched my eyeball—I swear that when I blinked, my eyelashes brushed the metal. Mrs. Haas’s scream rose higher and higher. I had the thought:
Has she trained as a singer?
She didn’t take a breath, and if you can imagine something between the howl of an aged wolf and the dragging of metal along a road, you’ll get close.

The scream distracted everybody standing in the doorway, and then I heard the footsteps on the stairs. The gunman’s finger tightened on the trigger. I saw it and felt it, and the gun moved a fraction, touching my eye again—I pulled back my head and the muzzle followed me. The scream continued—it rose like a shriek in a nightmare of terrifying fogs and shapeless beasts.

Somebody said, “Stop, stop.” Sarah’s calm voice, it transpired—and then Venetia’s, asking, “What is it?”

She told me afterward that she’d heard her grandfather’s voice, then heard Mrs. Haas screaming, and thought me dead. As Venetia reached the bottom step of the staircase, Sarah moved to block her. But Venetia knew that her grandfather could be there—as she later said—“for no good reason.”

By now the noise had grown huge, because a loud argument broke out between Sarah and Venetia. Sarah wanted to keep Venetia out of the kitchen, and Venetia had guessed that something wrong had come my way. And the man with the gun moved the black hole of the muzzle to my left temple, and King Kelly told me, “Stand up, boy.”

When you look back on extreme circumstances in which you may ever have found yourself, try to remember what you did with your body. It’s illuminating and very instructive. That day, I stayed very still. The time was by now close to one o’clock in the afternoon and I held myself like a creature in a web. In fact, I rose to a half-crouch before I stood to my full height.

Did I do this because I knew that the man with the gun was very much shorter than me, and that he might have to make a sudden—and therefore perhaps dangerous—movement to compensate? Who can say? I can’t; but nothing would surprise me.

Now freeze this tableau for a moment: Stop all the movement. We have Mrs. Haas with her mouth open wide, and I can tell you that her teeth were pointed like a saw all the way around, the Sierra Haas. I’m standing nine tenths upright like a tall lobster, my hands on the edge of the table. The man with the dense dark hair, so oiled that I can see a yellow tidemark on his forehead, is holding a gun to his shoulder and sighting along the barrel as though he were lining up a target, which in fact he was.

I see King Kelly: Again a contemptible brown suit, and a check waistcoat, and the nest of hair in his nose and ears—his mouth is open too, in mid-bark of an order. Behind him I see the back of Sarah’s head turned to her daughter—Sarah is wearing some peach-colored garment that falls in large soft rolls around her neck.

And there is Venetia, suspended in mid-struggle to get into the kitchen; her hair is wet; she has a towel over her shoulder, she is now wearing the long white nightdress that she wore briefly last night.

Action again—Venetia breaks through and the noise of her movement alerts the very jumpy man with the gun.

Whatever you’ve read, whatever you’ve seen in films, nothing is ever what you expect when you’re faced with something like this. The hero is not free at a swift leap, nor is the villain vanquished. Nobody overpowers anybody else. That is how tragedy is born—expecting heroism where none is possible.

Somehow I knew all this, and yet I was driven by my sense of responsibility, by my private, intimate connection, to protect this woman. So, I was the one who moved.

Mrs. Haas is still screaming the longest screams that I or anybody else have ever heard—I bet she auditioned for
Lucia di Lammermoor
. The man with the gun jerks up the muzzle ever so slightly—a tiny movement with the menace of a shark.

King Kelly says, “Make him march. Never to come back.”

Sarah is saying, “Venetia!”—who is saying, “Let me in.”

And I? I say nothing. Instead I step back from the gun. One step—the muzzle is now a foot away. A second step—another foot. The third step takes me a yard away, and I can see the puzzlement in the man’s eyes, dark eyes, dark as a Latin.
Is he Irish? He could be from Galway, a descendant of the Spanish Armada
.

One more step takes me much farther away in the sense that I have now stepped around the corner of the table—and my plate of lovely food lies there beneath my eye. If this is to be mended it’s not going to be by anything I say. Another irrelevant question rolls loosely about my reeling brain.
Is there a past tense of “mended”? Could it be “ment”?

I step farther and farther back, and now the man with the gun adjusts his aim—we’re still talking about a distance of less than ten feet, about the maximum distance for accuracy in an old and beautiful gun such as this one was.

It ended. Venetia came through, and at the sound of her voice the gunman, on a tap on the shoulder from King Kelly, lowered the gun.

“I’m trying,” King Kelly said, jovial as a clown, “to turn this young man”—he pointed to me—“into a soldier who’ll fight for his country.”

Now, of course, I sagged. Would they have killed me? I don’t doubt it—given what I now know. They certainly meant to frighten me and ideally to run me out of town; King Kelly’s time in the American West had shown him things.