The Last Storyteller (6 page)

I began to give chase. For what? I have no idea. To take them on? Two against one? And a shotgun? Randall called me.

“Ben, I need you here,” he said. He was trying to stand. I came back and helped him upright. He put his head back. Hands covering his eyes, blood in his white beard, he looked like a smitten Moses. His broken spectacles lay on the ground. I picked up the remains.

“Did the stone hit the actual eye?”

“Christ, dear boy.”

“Can you see?”

“Bastards. If I were a pianist, would they have broken my fingers?”

I took Randall’s arm. “Keep your hands on your eyes. I’ll lead you back to the door.”

Annette danced on hot coals.

“Warm water,” I said. “Not hot. And a towel.”

She rushed; I eased Randall to a chair; he kept his head tilted back.

“I am like Job blinded by the swallow’s dung.”

“That would make me a Job’s comforter,” I said, trying to keep it light.

“My mother was a Job’s comforter,” said Randall. “If I fell and cut my knee she’d say, ‘Oh, poor you, I hope you won’t be damaged for life.’ ”

Annette brought the water and towel.

“Call Jimmy,” I said.

I eased Randall’s hands away from his face. His left eyebrow had a violent bruise glowing through the white hair. Almost as I watched, it spread up his forehead. A minuscule sliver of glass glinted on the pad of flesh under the eyebrow. Above the eyelashes. I eased it away.

“I think your glasses deflected the worst of it,” I said. “Open your right eye first.”

Fear and shock had darkened and widened his pupil. I dipped the towel in the warm water and patted his face.

Randall said, “Thank you, dear boy.”

“Now the second eye,” I said.

Nothing happened. A faint tremor, perhaps of the eyelashes—but he wouldn’t or couldn’t open the lid. From the right eye slid a tear.

“I’m afraid,” he said.

“All right, Randall. Take your time. There’s no hurry. It’s all right.”

I stood there, my hand on his shoulder, waiting as long as it took. On the far wall hung a Randall Duff masterpiece: large, unframed canvas; chalk-gray ground; a great, glistening salmon, its pink as faint as a dream. What dominated the painting? The fish’s eye.

I looked back to Randall. The unhurt eye had fixed on me. He nodded.

“Good,” I said. “Take a deep breath.”

He inhaled like a giant. As though handling a baby, I pressed the towel down on the general area of the closed eye. I held it there, soft as snow, for ten, maybe twenty seconds, maybe hours. When I took it away, he fluttered the eyelash. The eye opened. No shattered lens, no dreaded whiteout, not even redness. Tears, though—a good sign.

“How does it feel?” I asked, and Randall winked the eye.

He sat there for a few minutes more. A tableau began to form. Jimmy Bermingham arrived at last and walked to Randall’s chair. Elma Sloane remained in the doorway, pinched and cold, arms folded tight to her young bosom, like a woman just come in from the harsh world. Annette appeared with a book-sized slab of marble in her hand.

“Dead cold,” she said. “Press it to your forehead. It’ll stop the bruising.”

Elma Sloane said, “That was my uncle threw the stone. Everybody knows about him—he did jail for manslaughter. He killed a fellow with a brick he threw.”

The tableau froze.

On that same afternoon of broken glass, the following incident took place more than a hundred miles to the north. Since two of the perpetrators are still alive, I’ll change the location’s name and call it “Brookbridge.”

In weak sunlight after rain, a twenty-year-old man was repairing his tractor on a roadside. Three other men in a black van drove by. They stopped; they were wearing police uniforms; they marched back to the young farmer. He looked up from his engine, then stood erect; he had a screwdriver in his hand. Without a greeting they grabbed his hair, pushed him back against the tractor, and took the screwdriver. (Years later, one of the trio, having found God, told his conscience-stricken story to a journalist—who refused to testify.)

The first policeman tugged out clumps of the young farmer’s hair and drew blood. The second man reached down, grabbed the young farmer by the crotch, and iron-gripped, then twisted the testicles. Nobody spoke; the young farmer screamed, but he was half a mile from the nearest house, his own home.

They marched him—his name was Joseph McConnell—to the van and threw him in the back, where one sat on his face. The others climbed into the front, and they drove the van in the direction of the Brookbridge police station. On the way, however, Joseph McConnell began to scream as nobody had ever heard a man scream before. They stopped the van, the men in front climbed out, and one opened the rear door.

“What’s after happening?” they asked their comrade. He held up his hands—covered in blood.

“Bastard bit me.”

Not the whole truth, as the volume of blood suggested. The policeman (whom we shall call Sammy) had knelt on Joseph McConnell’s throat and gouged out Joseph McConnell’s left eye with Joseph McConnell’s own screwdriver. Apparently Sammy said with a grin, “Like the stone out of a plum.”

The other two scowled.

“This is a right mess, like,” said their sergeant.

To which the third man said, “I know how to fix it.”

“You’ll never put back an eye.”

The third man shook his head. “Haul him out here.”

They stood Joseph McConnell against a tree, blood a dark torrent on his fresh young face, his eye easing loose. From a few feet away, aiming at his profile, the third man fired a shotgun with heavy-caliber cartridges and blasted away his forehead and upper face.

“Nobody’ll know about the eye now,” said the man with the shotgun.

“Anyway, didn’t he attack Sammy, like?” said the sergeant.

“He did so attack me,” said Sammy. “He bit me, didn’t he?”

They slung the young corpse into the van and drove away, back to Brookbridge.

The local doctor, a Protestant, name of Henderson, a decent man, concerned for all people of all persuasions on his rounds, examined the body that evening. Later, in the safety of his own home, he looked at his
wife and sighed, “How can anybody think that such things don’t have consequences?”

That was in November 1956.

Louise and Ben, I wish I’d told you more about the land in which you were conceived. I know this country as intimately as I know my own body. And, yes, I’ve talked to you about all kinds of interesting places—mine shafts and riverbanks and old abbeys; high villages, remote and forgotten; empty castles where they left the plates on the racks, the books on the shelves.

But I’m talking now about the spirit of the land, and in particular about a dimension of violence that was close to spiritual in its intensity. It took decades to build, and much of it had already lodged deep within me and, I submit, most Irishmen by the time these incidents occurred. The police and the screwdriver; the painter’s eye—they didn’t feel strange or untypical (and there will be more).

You’ll think that I may have made the violence seem too commonplace. Well, it was. When I was on the road I saw it everywhere—ordinary, local, everyday brutality. All over the country. Ask the old-timers, they’ll tell you. Scarcely a day ended without some row, brawl, or riot somewhere. And casual fisticuffs in many a bar and pub.

The week before I met Jimmy Bermingham, I watched a fracas in the little County Carlow town of Tullow, involving forty or fifty people. A farmer accused a tinker of trying to peddle a lame horse at the fair (the tinker limped while walking the dud animal toward the farmer), and everybody piled in. The fighting Irish; that was us.

I know you still struggle with this reality, because you grew up in Florida, where Venetia gave you an Emerald Isle view of Ireland, all castles and cottages and glossy brochures. As you know, I’ve tried to see it through your eyes and explain it to you, but I don’t think I’ve done so particularly well—so let me try again.

The word I reach for is “adolescence.” We were, in the south of Ireland at any rate, a new state. With notable violence we’d broken from England in 1922, and we severed the last ties when we declared our republic in 1948. Then, and on into the 1950s, we still resolved our difficulties as children and adolescents do: by violence. If guns had been freely available, we’d have been killing each other wholesale.

Our political immaturity contributed. We had two major factions who stood poles apart. One side, the republicans, believed that we should never have signed the treaty with England.
Fight on
, they said,
until we get back our last six counties. Become a nation once again
. The other side, traditional conservatives and peacemakers, shook its collective head and said we still needed England.
They’re our allies. Our neighbors. Our chief trading partners. Don’t anger them
.

That polarization trickled down and by the middle of the century was damaging us every day—because with it came poverty. The governing republicans banned exports to England—our biggest customer. Result: no jobs anywhere; we were fighting what our rulers called an “economic war” with vastly richer England. Laughable.

Do you have any idea how poor we were? I remained the only one of my graduating class who hadn’t emigrated to England or the United States. If you stayed behind, you barely ate. We had a national culture of need.

As to the general quality of life, think of the simplicities you children took for granted in Florida. Most rural dwellers in Ireland had neither electricity nor running water, nor did the large villages, nor even some small towns.

Few people drove cars. We rode bicycles. Country buses helped; so did the train service installed by the Victorian English. Even though that was worse than ever. We used to have a joke:
What are the two things you know about the Dublin-to-Cork train? Answer: That it’ll break down on the way to Cork. And that it’ll break down on the way back to Dublin
.

We were a makeshift people. In a makeshift nation. We were a curious hybrid; we came from a glorious ancient past, and yet we looked and acted like a recently discovered tribe, settling our disputes with our fists and eking out, for the most part, an existence with few comforts. No wonder the Catholic Church throve—as do all major religions where affluence has not yet arrived.

Our food, too, reflected our state of undeclared poverty. The national diet continued: centuries of meat and starch, either bread or potatoes, with little variation. Some housewives cooked excellently, but from their mothers’ and grandmothers’ recipes, not from any new, cosmopolitan information.

And this island nation still hadn’t discovered fish—which would have saved its people during the famine of the 1840s. On Fridays, when meat was forbidden by the church, eggs took over. Baking flourished: soda bread, pastry for pies, “shop bread” for sandwiches. Little else. The term “health food” had yet to reach Ireland—or perhaps even to be coined.

In the clothes of the adults you’d have found not a ribbon of chic. A handful of women, from old money, shopped in London. The rapacious
nouveaux riches
, the green greed crowd, hadn’t yet been spawned, and if Dublin stores carried outfits for the wife of the surgeon, the barrister, the company man, they were rarely
haute
and never
couture
. In any case, fine dressing earned disapproval, because display of the body might lead to what the priests called, with a sinister grunt, “other things.”

Those clergy—they had an absolute grip. They took command of the crucial arena between thought and feeling. Controlled both. Thomas Aquinas was the moral gold standard, with brides told, “No sex unless you’re trying to conceive. Otherwise you’re committing sin.” The subtext was “Have as many little Catholics as you can, and to hell with the family economics.” I visited a family once out in Barna, beyond Galway, the Quinlans—twenty-five children in a two-bedroom cottage.

The bishops called it “faith,” but they told us what to believe in: heaven and modesty; the infallibility of the pope; transubstantiation. And of course all non-Catholics went to hell. “The big H,” you’d probably have called it. Yes, that truly was what it was like, a revolution waiting to happen.

The politicians went along with it. They allowed a kind of social power vacuum, which the church filled. And as the church controlled most of the education, so the priests patrolled that fence, too.

Some of the support for them came because people felt they owed the church a debt. After Irish Catholicism was decriminalized, in 1829, the priests seized the moment. They rallied the people. They led the campaign to take back the land. On ramshackle village streets they gave fiery, dog-collared speeches. When they had condemned the English landlords,
the priests then carried the fight to the parliamentarians. And won—and in 1956 the Catholic Church still held that intangible but real power.

Signs, though, had begun to appear, stirrings from the caves of the sages. The poet Yeats, the exile Joyce—even though dead by now, they had been pathfinders; they’d shown an entire people that the world of ideas belonged in the light of the sun and not in the dark of the pews.

To retaliate, the bishops increased the pressure for censorship. The government censor banned Irish novelists as a monthly routine. Newspapers published the lists, and we laughed out loud, because the works of serious writers appeared alongside
Playboy
, or
Madam Lash
, or
Lurid Girls in Wet Rubber: Issue 14
. Yes, we were makeshift all right.

You could see it everywhere. Consider that bunch of us in Randall’s house. He came from the old world of Ireland, and everything in his presence and his possessions and his properties showed it. Fiercely anti-clerical, a committed and militant atheist, he represented the bridge from the ancient, mythological glories of kingship and chieftaincy to a brave new dawn that so many of us hoped might lie ahead.

I had come from the ancient MacCarthys, with my branch a well-to-do farming family that had held on to its land for centuries. That farm was mine anytime I wanted to return to it. My parents still lived and worked there, and they had no great passion for prayer.