Ireland

by Frank Delaney

  Dr. Kelly said, “I’ve changed the liquid intake. Just a little. The nurse’ll tell you. And we’ll be in again at midnight.”

  John ate no more food, and he gossiped not a word. It only took two days, and all three saw him die.

  First he said to Ronan, “There’s no one like you. Not for me, anyway.”

  Next time he woke, he said to Kate, “That red’s lovely on you.”

  He said his last words to Alison—“The television will be great company in the evenings.”

  Then he slept; the head back on the pillow; a rumble from the stomach; a small drool that Alison wiped away. One hour later he woke briefly, startled and unseeing—the hands flinched, and he died.

  As Kate said afterward, “He all but waved good-bye.”

  Outside, a sudden shower of rain, heavy as blood, flogged down on the roof.

  Ronan could touch no one. He held his hands out from his body as though frozen, then put them behind his back like a soldier at a lying-in-state and bowed his head. Once or twice he swayed from side to side; in grief, no two people behave the same.

  They brought John home—to the house he had restored and loved. Her mind clear as a spring, Alison ran the wake. Teams of neighbors helped; linen draped the table; every fireplace blazed; food and drink piled up.

  Kate said, “Expect five hundred people.”

  Alison allowed for twice that—and got it right. As the undertakers arranged the room, she called Ronan aside.

  “Come here to me.”

  In the past, he had dreaded the phrase; this time it carried different freight.

  “Now, listen. You’re eighteen years old. Men not much older have led regiments, and men your age have won Olympic medals. This is your father’s funeral, and I want you to comport yourself with dignity and calm. You do not allow yourself to break down, not even when the coffin is lowered. Keep your tears to yourself. Shed them when everyone’s gone. You’re the host of your father’s funeral.”

  Ronan looked at her and saw again the steel on which he had been so often pierced. He said nothing.

  “Agreed?” she said.

  Still not a word.

  “Agreed, Ronan? What your father would want?”

  Ronan agreed.

  They came from everywhere—silent, awkward, rich, rough; men from the town; widows with hats; strange people from the hills. Two couples came a hundred miles, one timid man from his sickbed. All stood in the hallway and praised.

  “He saved our farm from the bank.”

  “That man won my injury claim.”

  “No one else would have taken the case.”

  All said, “Sorry for your trouble.”

  The legend came back to life; John had steered them through a will to protect their children; John had straightened out a boundary that had caused strife; John wrote down the stories of their lives.

  Women in black, with pleasant faces and heavy bodies, said to Alison, “Ohhhh, wasn’t he so handsome then, I remember when he came here first, we were all jealous he was married, and he always dressed so well, I used to annoy my husband comparing him.”

  For hour after hour the house refilled. More than once Ronan saw people from the Storyteller’s nights. Two old foes shook hands over the open coffin, looked down, and said, “He’d like us for that.” Odd people, with squints or lip defects or massive birthmarks or crippling diffidence, came forward and shook Ronan’s hand; they said, “The apple never fell far from that tree,” and, “If you’re half the man your father was, you’ll be twice the man of any of us,” and, “What a fatherly son you are.” When Kate explained that it referred to the resemblance, Ronan found it easier to look at his dead father’s—now younger—face.

  A woman whom nobody knew and no one would ever see again slid in, laid a bunch of green holly with red berries on the catafalque, and vanished. Mrs. Dr. Kelly arrived and hugged Alison without a word. Policemen shook hands, still in uniform; aged and wrinkled twin sisters wept in tune.

  And at last Toby came and all but collapsed in grief. John’s younger brother, he lived in Oxford; they corresponded rarely, visited less. Toby took off a thin gold ring and hooked it to a finger of John’s left hand.

  Four judges arrived, somber by practice, conscious of their status. They spoke only to Alison, Ronan, and Kate. When they left, the wake took courage. A man in a cap sang a song like a dirge. His brother came forward to speak ringing praise.

  “Who was he? He wasn’t even from here—he was a stranger from up in the north, where they have people we don’t understand. But he came down here and made us his own. And what was he? As decent a man as ever pulled on a shoe. He let me go two years without paying him, and he never sent me a bill. I’d meet him in town, and I’d say, ‘John, I owe you money,’ and he’d say to me, ‘Patsy, you’ll know when you can pay me.’ There’s not many’ll do that.” When the eulogist finished, he doffed his cap to the coffin. The woman by his side sang a slow Irish song, “Kilcash,” which spoke of a great house dying and the end of times that they loved.

  When she finished, a fiddler began to rosin his bow, and someone unwrapped an accordion. Their first tunes came slow and sad, stately laments with mellow grace notes, and then, as drink followed drink, the music quickened. A banjo player joined in, and a man played castanets with two spoons. Finally a piper arrived; he squeezed the doleful woolen bag under his arm, and the session matured—horn-pipes, jigs and reels. It went on for two hours and more; on the stroke of midnight it ended, when the other musicians held up their hands for the piper to play a slow march, “The Death of the High King.”

  At Ronan’s elbow a tiny woman with a red nose said, on her sixth sherry, “If your father ever comes back to earth, I’ll want a son like you off him.”

  The funeral of John O’Mara closed the town until midafternoon. From the church to the graveyard stretches a mile. All windows closed their blinds in respect. Every life along that route had been touched by the man and his work. The deeds he stamped, the contracts he drafted, the sales he closed, the letters he wrote, the lore he heard—his presence had pervaded their lives, and their memories spoke the word “good.”

  He had also spiced their world—and he did so now once more. Behind the chromed black hearse walked the gossip of his life—his son, his wife, and her sister. Alison wore a black coat, loose as a cape, her two rows of pearls and a pearl hatpin in her black cloche. Kate, hatless and brave, wore a fitted black coat over a fitted black dress and the brightest red lipstick. Underneath, she wore the most expensive and beautiful white underwear she owned. Both women wore stockings black and sheer; they had been prepared for weeks.

  Ronan wore his father’s darkest suit.

  Everyone who watched knew the truth of their lives; the sisters never made such a thought conscious—or disallowed it. John, however, astride everyone’s secrets, had always faced the fact; he knew better than most the things that people know but don’t say. And so the funeral continued, a slow, steady pace behind a slow, steady hearse on a bright December afternoon.

  Men counted the crowds and told their wives that night, “Five thousand. It took an hour,” they said, “to pass the corpse’s office.”

  Black crepe ribbon framed the shingle’s polished brass: “John O’Mara, Commissioner for Oaths.”

  At the graveside, people jostled for space. Politicians rushed to be seen; women’s heels sank; the priest and the undertaker pushed through the parting crowd. On the hillock by the grave, Ronan stood rigid, hands behind his back; Kate linked his arm; Toby stood on the other side of Alison. Everybody waited, breathing on the air; the tail of the crowd was long.

  That grave was dry as a bone; the shovels had sliced it neat, a deep, rectangular slot. Ronan almost looked in but chose to gaze at the sky. The coffin rested on wooden spars over the mouth of the pit, with canvas straps looped beneath. When the priest intoned the prayers, not a sound could be held. And no bird sang.

  The holy water splashed. “In nomine Patris.”
And the priest kept time with the splashes. “Et Filii.” Which fell on the shiny wood. “Et Spiritui Sancti.” He wore a white baggy cassock, and round his neck a purple stole that matched small veins in his cheeks. “Dearly beloved brethren. We’ll observe a minute’s silence now. To release the soul of our friend, John. May he rise to his just reward with God.”

  Ronan swung between two feelings—a curious sense of enjoyment and the driving pain of dismay; his body felt tight as a drum, and his eyes were sore with restraint. He joined with the crowd in a murmured giant “Amen.”

  Five gravediggers, faces weathered as bark, hustled forward in trained respect. Four took each end of the two canvas straps and hauled. As the coffin rose, the fifth man took away the spars, and the coffin went lumbering down, played out on the canvas loops. Kate, beside Ronan, gasped, and Alison seized her arm. Nobody moved; nobody left the place. The men replaced the spars and drew green canvas over the cut. And the priest drew away from the scene; John O’Mara was in the ground.

  The crowd took its time; condolers came forward afresh. Alison, Toby, Ronan, and Kate shook hands in perfect calm. Then Ronan saw Alison start. The old cold humor crossed her face, and her lips narrowed to a thin line. What had she seen? Ronan surveyed the crowd, seeking the source of her wrath. He looked at her again; she had definitely taken an angry turn, though only her family would know. His eyes swung right and left; he saw no hostile face—and then he followed her line of sight.

  High on the hill, at the top of that cemetery, stood two cypress trees. Someone had planted them thinking a graveyard should have such presence, but the prevailing wind from the west had reduced them over the years, and they lacked enough branches for grace.

  Between the lonely trees stood the man Ronan dreamed of. The same long coat, the same immortal bearing—tall, powerful, and gaunt; it could have been a ghost, but it wasn’t, and Ronan would have known him anywhere in the world.

  He turned to Kate, “Jesus God!”

  “What?”

  “He’s here, Kate!”

  “Who?”

  Ronan stepped past the grave to get through the swirling crowd. Alison grasped his arm to hold him back; he shrugged her off. But it took too long; the crowd still milled; folk tried to shake his hand; the graves gave no easy path. By the time he got clear and ran up the hill, the Storyteller had gone from the trees.

  Ronan stood there, looking across the fields. On that hard, cold morning, visibility from the cemetery wall stretched for miles; he could see Grantstown Castle, he could hear the Dublin train’s whistle, he watched distant flights of birds flicker across the empty sky—but he saw no long-striding man in an ancient homburg hat.

  In that part of the country, farmers can afford labor; they keep their farms neat; hedges are low and trimmed. No hedgerow could have obscured a walking traveler, unless he sat down to hide. No, he had gone; inside minutes the Storyteller had vanished.

  It seemed that everyone had come back to the house for lunch. Kate put Ronan “on parade”; he welcomed people, poured drinks, greeted distant kin. Thus he kept his grief at bay—and his chagrin at the Storyteller’s flight.

  Toby openly grieved. He wept in bursts, laughing too loudly, drinking compulsively, eating mammoth plates of food. Kate detailed Ronan to steer him to a quiet room.

  “My God, how juvenile.” Toby wiped a crumb from his mustache. “I’m drinking too fast. It’s a sad day when a man has to learn decorum from his nephew. But I suppose it’s a sad day anyhow, wouldn’t you say?”

  He wore a silver watch chain on his waistcoat, and at forty hadn’t the age to carry it off.

  “Were you there, Ronan? At the, ah’m, you know—the end? When he went? He went well, didn’t he? John’d die well, he’d make a point of it.” More tears.

  Toby had perfect fingernails, which he scanned often.

  “The thing I remember about your father—he always had money, even when we were boys, I used to call him ‘the mystery man’ because he always had cash, some people are like that. And I hear you’re all rich now, everyone’s talking about it, and for once it won’t be a case of ‘Where there’s a will there’s a lawsuit,’ will it?”

  “I don’t know,” said Ronan, truthfully.

  “Buckets of it,” said Toby. “Money to burn.”

  Someone knocked on the door. A man with wire nests of nose hair said, “You must be Ronan?”

  “I am.”

  “You’re wanted.”

  He led the way through the back door, down the long garden path, to the lane and a parked car. Ronan stopped him.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Just down the road.”

  “I can’t go.”

  “You have to come.”

  “How long’ll this take?”

  “I’d say an hour.”

  “For what? I can’t stay away.”

  The nose hair man said, “You’ll be glad.”

  “No—come on. I have to know.”

  The man said, “I’d say, you’ll be very glad.” He looked excited and opened the passenger door. Ronan climbed in, as did the man, and they drove away.

  “How far?”

  “You’ll see in a minute.”

  Not more than two miles away they stopped, at the cottage of a stonemason beside the river bridge.

  “They’re waiting for you in there,” said the man with the nose hair. “I’ll go back to your house and tell them you’ll be away for a bit.”

  Ten or twelve cars stood nearby, unusual for such a modest house. A woman opened the door before Ronan knocked; with no hallway he walked directly into the packed kitchen. People turned to look at him; all had been at the graveyard; this seemed like the funeral’s overflow. They shook his hand, sorry for his trouble—and they handed him deeper into the room.

  His eyes got used to the dimness; something momentous was here. Two men stepped aside, and behind them, in a small space by the fireside, sat the Storyteller. Pipe in one hand, whiskey glass in the other, he looked at Ronan as no man ever had—tense and welcoming, a fearful yet delighted look.

  Ronan clenched both hands and felt his mouth go dry. Every eye watched, every voice stopped. The Storyteller put his glass on the floor, stood up, and held out his hand. Ronan reached for the handshake—the same texture as nine years ago.

  “People say you’ve been looking for me.”

  “I have,” said Ronan, short of words. “How are you?”

  “I guessed you’d grow this tall.”

  “The last time was in the rain,” said Ronan.

  “Brendan the Navigator. Broaden your horizons,” said the Storyteller. “I’m pleased you remember.”

  The man of the house came forward and took Ronan’s shoulders from behind; gently he steered him to a stool a few feet from the Storyteller’s face. “He’s just started.”

  Ronan tried to feel calm but reeled at the force of life. One beloved man buried, another reappeared—this was a day of fate. How to be quiet, yet exult? He settled himself by inspecting the old man.

  Had he changed? Undoubtedly—older and frail now; the decade had been harsh to him. His eyes had the red of longstanding rheum, and his glance seemed less in control; the canvas of the face was stretched tighter. The voice, though, had grown more resonant, as though someone had added a bass bell to a deep chime. Ronan blinked his feasting eyes—and then sat back to listen.

  BY OUR STANDARDS TODAY, WE’D THINK HUGH O’Neill a marvelous man—so what must they have thought of him in fifteen-ninety? To some of his people he was like a god. He was their leader, their chieftain, their governor, their guardian; he was a family man, a great soldier, a forward thinker. That last bit is the most important, because it made him immortal to us. His title was the second earl of Tyrone—I prefer the name history has given him, the Last Chieftain; it’s a sad name, but it has the right depth.

  At the time he became “The O’Neill,” as he was called, and therefore the most important man in the northern half of Irela
nd, the whole country was in a bad way. Hugh had done a lot of fighting inside his own family to get to the top—because he saw that if he didn’t become chieftain, the O’Neill clan would lose everything to the English. Or indeed to his marauding Irish neighbors, of which there were plenty. Who needs enemies, he probably said to himself, when you have friends like mine? Once he got the power, though, the neighbors left him alone.

  So he consolidated himself in his own territories, and he set out to rebel against the queen. A daring thing to do; as an Irish earl he was supposed to swear allegiance to Elizabeth or to whosoever sat on the English throne. But no, he didn’t want to do that—he took the opposite course. He planned and he organized and he marched against the English, and—the most important thing he did—he gave us a military style.

  I think of him often; he’s one of the men I’d most like to meet. There are mornings on the roads of county Tyrone when I say to myself, “He rode past here on his big gray horse,” or “He stopped on this hill to admire the view down the valley.” A bearded man, as so many were four centuries ago; and a spirited man, fond of a good time; a thoughtful man and a man of deeds. And a man with twists to his life; he was known to have an eye for the ladies, and that put ink in the milk.

  He’d been raised inside the Pale, where he’d a lot of contact with English families. And he’d even adopted some English ideas. In fact you could say he copied the king, because Hugh also divorced his wife—fine if you’re Henry the Eighth, but a very spicy thing for anyone else to do in fifteen-seventy-four. The lady he then married, wife number two, died in fifteen-ninety-one, and the bold Hugh, at the age of forty-one, decided to elope with the daughter of Sir Henry Bagenal.

  Bagenal was an English gentleman, and he didn’t want his daughter marrying some wild Irish go-the-road with a reputation for unruliness, earl or no earl. He refused to give the girl, who was called Mabel, any dowry so long as she was involved with that Beelzebub, O’Neill.