Ireland

by Frank Delaney

  “And today, I shall reveal to you curses under which each of you and each of your children’s children shall labor forever.”

  The Elders muttered. If they could have done so, some would have killed the man then and there. But the Chief Elder, who knew that a man’s own bitterness condemns him, said, “We shall always be blessed with a land full of milk and honey, the riches of the earth.”

  The betrayer countered: “But quarrels over land will set father against son, brother against brother, husband against wife.”

  The crowd began to shift, uncomfortable and confused.

  “Our descendants,” intoned the Chief Elder, “shall be men of strength and wisdom, women of beauty and love.”

  The fat man waited, then cried out, “But we shall abuse and disrespect our children without reason.”

  “Never!” shouted angry people on the slopes.

  By now the Chief Elder wished this to end. He spoke his next blessing: “Though strangers may come among us and attempt to defile us, they shall not prevail.”

  “You shall be conquered again and again,” roared the Silken Elder. “Your seed, breed, and generations shall be made subject to others.”

  The Chief Elder spoke again.

  “Our fighting men will become feared wherever water flows or birds fly.”

  “Your fighting men will destroy the root of thought, the soul of reason.”

  The betrayer’s voice carried much farther than that of the frailer Chief Elder. And he spoke his words much more fiercely. But suddenly, he stumbled. His hands trembled, and his knees shook.

  The Chief Elder spoke again. “Our ancestors shall bless us. They shall visit us here, on this hillside, again and again.”

  The Silken Elder recoiled, stumbled once more. For years he had tried to discover what lay at the core of the Architect’s plan—he had always feared that the Architect would outwit him by forging some new connection to the past and would indeed create, as he had promised, something wonderful. Now the rage he’d contained for fifteen years attacked him. His chest felt on fire—he could scarcely speak, he was so angry.

  “Our ancestors,” he cried, shouting so loudly that no Speaker felt the need to carry his words forward, “will be misrepresented. Men will use the power of the past to give themselves the power of the future!”

  He screamed the final words and drew himself up and back, like a man suffering a mortal blow. Those nearest to him saw that his face grew as pale as the stones from the quarries of Wicklow.

  The Chief Elder knew what was happening. A year ago, the Silken Elder had come to him and said he had been suffering pains in his chest. Cures were offered and taken. Nothing further had been said. Now the Chief Elder smiled benignly at the betrayer.

  “I have a last and most wonderful blessing. In time we shall spread our breed and our blood. To other lands. To other people. Everywhere we go, we shall always be known to come of this land. And we shall be known as people who bring bright light wherever they go.”

  He stepped back. A cheer began—a cheer that would and should have been mighty. But the Silken Elder staggered forward and began to speak. His voice had grown so weak that two of the nearest Speakers ran to his side to hear what he had to say. These were his words.

  “It shall indeed be the case that your children and their children and their children’s children forever will go to other lands and be among other people. But your descendants will leave because this land will drive them out, drive them away. Will not be able to sustain them. Will not be able to give them enough food and drink—”

  He stopped, incapable. His words had been uttered with such passion and feeling that the Speakers who relayed them gave them a respect close to fear. The last voice of the last Speaker, echoing down by the reeds and the rushes, died away. In complete silence every eye watched the torchlit events on the hill.

  The Silken Elder raised himself for one last time to his full height. He had something else to say. While his right hand clutched at his chest, he held out his left hand and used the index finger as a rigid pointing arrow, which traveled round the semicircle of the Elders. He lurched forward, intending to stab his pointing finger into the Architect’s chest. But he made no more than a few steps before he collapsed on his face. His forehead struck the stone step at the entrance to the tomb so loudly that the crack echoed in the dawn.

  Somewhere a night bird called, a warbling, melodic sound.

  Nobody ever knew what killed the Silken Elder—was it the pain in his chest or the cracking of his head on the wide, thick, flat stone? All the watchers saw was a fat man who had been one of their chosen number, now revealed as a traitor, lying dead at their feet in the entrance to the tomb. Blood began to seep from his nose onto the stone. In the silence the Chief Elder gestured the guards to remove the fallen man’s robe and take away the corpse. And in the silence the Chief Elder draped the robe on the shoulders of the Architect.

  A baby cried somewhere. The Architect turned to look at the ridge, and as brightening light seeped upward from the east, he beckoned the Elders into the mouth of the monument. In total darkness they followed him tentatively, heads bent slightly so as not to hit the stones of the roof. Ahead they could see the flickering lamp. When their eyes became accustomed to the gloom, they began to admire the rocks, the structure, the carved symbols.

  They reached the central chamber. The Architect arranged the group in a semicircle behind the polished stone dish. For a moment he held up the small lamp so that the Elders could inspect the chamber. Each felt overcome with wonder at the magnificence, the elaborateness, the enormous magic of it all. When the Architect blew out the light, total darkness fell, black as a mine—and outside the dawn began to spread across a sky as clear as joy.

  Nobody spoke. One or two coughed; the Chief Elder breathed heavily. Someone shifted from one foot to the other. Soon the breathing of the group melded into one rhythm, as though they had all fallen asleep standing up.

  The Architect never took his eyes off the passageway. He waited and waited. Not for a moment did he fear the Elders’ impatience. The earlier events had dismayed them, but what they were about to see would renew them as never before. He stared toward the passageway, and his heart began to sing.

  “Look,” he told the Elders. “Look toward the door!”

  That morning was the winter solstice, the twenty-first day of December. Outside the tomb, the upper rim of the sun’s disc had begun to peep over the top of the ridge. Without mathematical instruments, calibrations, or any of our scientific tools, no compasses, setsquares, sextants, or slide rules, the Architect had calculated that, each December solstice, the people of Newgrange would invite the rising sun to enter the tomb through the little rectangle of the four flat stones above the door. If the sun accepted the invitation—that is, if the clouds permitted—the sun’s ray would travel along the passageway as the sun rose, and when fully risen would come to rest in the stone dish.

  Imagine his judgments: from the stars, from the skies of winter and summer, from the speed of the sun’s rising, taking into account the height of the hillside, the depth of the building, the color and thickness of the stone, the length of the passageway. He had calculated miraculously.

  At the farthest end of the tomb, red-gold colors tinged the edges of the rectangular aperture, making it look like a box full of light. Next, a shaft of sunshine slid through the box and lit the floor, just inside the entrance.

  The Elders watched this glow and became transfixed. Not a word, not a sound, did they make. Outside, the sun had started to climb over the ridge. Inside, the shaft of light, beaming through the narrow little box over the door, began to travel slowly toward them.

  Steadily, with no jumps, no lurches, the light filtered down the passageway. Its golden yellow beam, thick as a man’s arm, flowed slowly, slowly—it was as though the sunlight was honey from a bowl that someone had tipped over and spilled into a long, pleasant stream.

  The Architect could scarcely br
eathe. It had worked! After all, after everything, the rain, the blood, the deaths, the cracked bones, the stone, the fatigue—it had worked! He clasped his hands tight to his chest, a rare display of feeling.

  When the sunbeam reached the edge of the chamber, its yellow-orange light began to glow upward into the gathering, gilding the Elders’ faces. The ray seemed to hesitate for a moment. And then it surged forward until it splashed into the great stone bowl. It began to fill the dish—and it filled it exactly. Not a drop of sunshine slipped over an edge—not here, there, or anywhere. The final resting place of the sun for that brief moment was precisely within the full circumference of the bowl, leaving no area of the bowl’s stone surface dark or cold. It lay there like a golden sphere. Outside, the rising sun had just cleared the ridge.

  “Here in this dish,” pronounced the Architect, “we will warm again the bones of our beloved dead.”

  The Elders, one and all, began to weep. In the fire of the visiting sun their faces shone like the faces of children lit by a golden lamp. And then, as gently and as miraculously as it had come, the sun began to retreat, slipping down the passageway and finally sliding back out through the box of light to warm the rest of the world.

  In Ireland since that morning, on every clear-skied December solstice except for those centuries when grass and foliage overgrew the tomb, that wondrous ray of light has responded to the Architect’s great invitation and entered the building. When it lies in the stone dish, it looks as though the sun, the greatest god of our skies, now rendered mellow and sweet, has come to Earth for a golden moment—by wondrous invitation from the Architect of Newgrange.

  And that’s the end of my story tonight.

  The Storyteller leaned back and surveyed his audience. Had he done well enough? The adults nodded their heads, smiling at each other in the shared experience. And the boy? He hugged himself with delight. No eyes in the room shone brighter; no stage drama or circus tent or cinema epic had matched this thrill.

  “Well, well!” the boy’s father said. “That’s a tale and a half. You’ll stay, I hope? And give us another story tomorrow night?”

  As the room dispersed, the boy remained seated, watching the Storyteller’s every move. This had reached far beyond any expectation or hope; in the color of the tale and the power of its narrator, the boy knew that he had met great, rare magic. And more than that—again and again, the Storyteller’s eyes, dark as a gypsy’s, had looked straight into his.

  He went to bed in something of a trance—and with little chance of sleep. In the darkness he began to wonder if the Storyteller had come specifically for him, to seek him out, to tell him his tale—because it felt as though the Storyteller had addressed the story of Newgrange to him and him alone. Was this what people called “Fate”? What was the other word for it—Destiny? Would he, one day, leave this house and become a storyteller himself, traveling here, traveling there, welcomed in people’s homes up and down the land, telling magnificent tales?

  The year was 1951; the boy was named Ronan O’Mara—and even though he was only nine, he was ripe for change. He lived in a household where a blanket of seeming calm covered emotional tumult. An only child among three adults, he loved his father more dearly than anyone; John O’Mara told his son, “When you were born, you had a round, serious face, with big eyes. Most babies look like boxers—but you looked like a little seal, which is what the name Ronan means.” Ronan felt his father’s warmth every day. Some gesture, some new joke, some touch, some word, bound them deeper. He still rode occasionally on his father’s shoulders; during mealtimes he often ate off his father’s plate. At night, his father’s was the last face he saw and the last voice in his ear. Every morning he heard the same warm words, “Come on, sleepyhead—the sun is up before you.”

  They grew together like dear friends, rather than father and child. A stick to be cut, a toy to be fixed, a wooden sword to be made—with never a curt word the father taught the son every skill a boy needs. He came to know the smell of his father’s jackets, the gristled rub of his father’s beard, the burls of his father’s hands.

  The mother cast a darker shadow; she caused Ronan fright, confusion, and dismay. Where his father always smiled, his mother seemed to frown every time she saw the boy. Alison was twenty-eight when Ronan was born. Her young son was given to understand from an early age that he was her seventh and final and only successful pregnancy; the previous six had miscarried. All his life he never recalled how that information had come to him; from an early age he merely knew that he knew—and that, as a consequence, he must demand little of her.

  But he hoped eternally that she might cherish him more. Indeed, as he grew older he often heard that an only child was a child beloved of its mother. Not, it seemed, in his case, and as a young adult he constantly asked himself: Why? Had she been afraid while carrying him? All those previous stillbirths? Was he imperfect in some way, a disappointment? Had she wanted a girl?

  There had to be something—far from cherishing him, she acted as though she found him irritating. She made him feel superfluous, always getting in the way; he might have been one of ten children, instead of the one and only. Her distant and almost hostile stance baffled all who watched it, and her son most of all.

  Ronan tried everything to please her; nothing worked. By the time he was five years old, he had learned not to bring her flowers from the fields—it embarrassed her. At six he bought her chocolates for her birthday; she said she had “gone off chocolates.” And then came the scarf.

  Red, and knit, it seemed, of gossamer, he had saved enough money from birthdays and visitors to buy it. His father whistled at the price and praised Ronan’s prudence. The woman in the shop joined in the conspiracy and gave a discount.

  “She’ll love this. Red’s grand with your mother’s coloring, the black hair. And this is a one-and-only. Like yourself. A one-and-only. Like all of us, I s’pose, we’re all one-and-only, aren’t we?”

  That night before supper, Ronan handed the package to his mother. She looked at it; he stood by, blinking a little.

  “Open it,” urged John quietly.

  “Now?” she said.

  “It’s for your birthday,” said Ronan.

  “I don’t need anything.”

  She opened the package. Ronan watched, and for a moment, Alison flickered. He knew he had struck gold—and then she recovered herself; “But—I have so many scarves.”

  That was all she said. He never saw the scarf again.

  But sometimes, when Ronan was asleep, she slipped into his room and gazed down at him with a tenderness and a look of longing as deep as the sea, as though some wound in the relationship between woman and boy proved beyond her reach or repair.

  The third adult in his life gave him love more abundant than life. Kate, his mother’s younger sister, lived with the family, and she always smelled of some sweet thing. She hugged and kissed Ronan from infancy as though he were a small bear. He often awoke in her bed, where he had wandered in the night, and the world had no safer haven. As he grew older, she loved him even more demonstratively, and he relished all contact with her; she rewarded his every breath with a response as warm as his mother’s was cold.

  Kate chose his clothes, bathed him, wrapped him against the cold; Kate cured where the wasp stung him, collected jokes to tell him. She also taught him songs; perched high on the piano, he watched for her nod to join in, and she and his father laughed with delight when he hit his cue.

  Nineteen when Ronan was born, Kate had turned twenty-eight a month before the Storyteller arrived. Without her, life in his mother’s orbit would have been immeasurably colder. Kate took charge of his day-to-day worldly education—how to tie his shoe laces, how to use a toothbrush, how to wash his hair, how to count slowly to a hundred, breathing in and out so that he calmed down. And, born lovely, Kate stayed that way all her life.

  Ronan O’Mara’s life thus ricocheted from adult to adult. Consequently, he daydreamed lavishly, making himself t
he center of a world he had himself invented. For many of his free hours, especially when hurting from a clash with his mother, he roamed the countryside; he made the outdoors a second home.

  All the terrain welcomed him. A deep wood rode down the hill almost to the backyard and became a secret universe. It teemed with wildlife; he watched foxes, badgers, rabbits, and birds. And deer; he learned their traces and scouted where they had lain. They left marks where they nibbled the trees, and he followed their trail to pools where they drank.

  Upwind and downwind became his friends. He learned how to gauge the direction of the breeze by wetting his finger and holding it to the sky. When the rustling ground told him the deer were drawing near, he became a Sioux or a Cherokee and flitted from tree to tree. He held himself ready to trap and kill and return in triumph to his village with the buck draped over his shoulders. Or he chose to startle them and watch their high, sable bodies undulate like brown clowns across the rough ground.

  Mostly he identified with them. They also held themselves distant, alert, ready to run at the slightest disturbance and escape along their private trails.

  Ronan’s bedroom faced south, over green countryside stretching to the distant mountains—the same lands through which he had watched the Storyteller come stumbling to the house. A broad and ancient riverbed coiled across the nearest field, and in wintertime Ronan dammed and redirected the nearby stream so that the wide, shallow gully filled with water and attracted marsh birds. When it occasionally froze, it offered a long, safe skating rink. Then, in summer, the riverbed dried up again, and larks nested there. He learned to step carefully so that he never trod on the tiny eggs.

  Nobody else knew or shared this outdoor inner life, because he had no friends whom he trusted enough with such secrets, and he also feared breaking the forest’s spells. Now and then he would form an intense friendship with some boy or girl at school, but it rarely survived their first argument. Typically, Ronan withdrew, fled the school as quickly as the rules allowed, and raced back to his own stamping grounds and his private games.