Ireland

by Frank Delaney

  Of course, I didn’t see them that day, and I certainly didn’t see them at that moment. All of that came to me later, when I contemplated him as his fame grew. That morning, there were three things that went on between us; first of all, he clarified what he meant when he addressed me; secondly, he gave me a short lecture; and finally, I’m afraid, I played a little trick on him. This is how our meeting went.

  “When I said, ‘Don’t do it’—the ‘it’ I don’t want you to do is go to war.”

  I said, “Sir, I’m not going to any war.”

  By the way, I knew who he was; and, if I hadn’t, the ring he was wearing would have told me—a great, bright scarab on his finger. A woman in Portumna said to me that she had seen the same ring on Yeats, and that it was the only piece of jewelry she had ever coveted—you hear strange things when you travel the roads.

  I also knew that his mother’s family, the Pollexfens, came from Sligo, that he spent a lot of time over there, and that his family solicitors had their office in the town, with a most suitable name perhaps for a firm of lawyers, “Argue and Phibbs.” They’re still there, so far as I know.

  “I’m glad to hear you’re not going to war,” he said. “Man shouldn’t make war, it opposes the natural spirit, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”

  Now, I like it when people talk like that; I believe the world of the spirit is in general greatly neglected and not at all served by the practice of faith as we know it, because religion isn’t individual enough. So I said to him, “I’d love to hear a little more of what you mean.”

  “War,” he said, “goes in the direction opposite to that in which man naturally wants to aim. Man wants peace and ease, so that he can work out the mysteries of life, but war introduces such chaos and actual physical pain that man can’t think. And that, of course, is what politicians want—they want us not to think.”

  “So—how would you counter it?” I said.

  “If we can only look away from this world,” said Mr. Yeats, “we’d find such wonders elsewhere that we’d never want to fight.”

  “What kind of wonders do you have in mind?”

  He said to me, “Turn around, young man, and look at that mountain over there. D’you know what it’s called?”

  I said, “Ben Bulben,” a fact that everyone knows because the mountain isn’t shaped like any other mountain in Ireland—it’s high and flat, a genuine plateau.

  Mr. Yeats said to me, “Screw up your eyes hard and tell me—can you see up there, halfway up the side of Ben Bulben, any traces of a door?”

  I narrowed my eyes and peered hard—it was a bright sunny day—and I said, “Yes, I believe I can.”

  “Now,” said he, “look over there.” We turned in the opposite direction. “What’s that mountain called?”

  “I believe it’s Knocknarea.”

  “It is,” he said. “And d’you see that pile of stones on top of it?”

  “I do.”

  “That’s the grave of Maeve, the Queen of the Fairies. Now, at midnight every midsummer, that door on Ben Bulben opens, and out across the sky, on little fairy horses, ride the hosts of the air. Out and out they ride, high across the sky in a great wide loop, until they land at that cairn of stones on Knocknarea. They pay homage at Queen Maeve’s grave, they hold a full wake with music and dancing, and then, just before dawn breaks, they ride back and return to the world they were given long ago—all of Ireland beneath the earth.”

  Now: I had known this story for some years; the old storyteller from whom I learned my trade often told it when he was in Sligo or south Donegal, because it connected with the people who lived in sight of these two mountains. To my great sadness, though, I have never met anyone who actually saw the hosts of the air on their midnight ride. But now I had met a man who believed it happened every year.

  I said to him, “Do you derive comfort from the fact that such a thing takes place?”

  “Oh, I do,” he said. “And more than comfort. I feel it places me squarely within the fellowship of the world.”

  That was a mysterious saying, and I asked him to explain it a little.

  Mr. Yeats said to me, “You know about leprechauns, I suppose.”

  “Oh-ho,” I said. “I know a great deal about leprechauns.”

  “Well,” said he, “if ever there was a definition of the fellowship of the world, then the leprechaun embodies it,” and he launched himself into a little lecture on the subject.

  “We may think the leprechaun exists solely for the entertainment of visitors to our shores—but not at all. He’s not unique to Ireland. Every society in the world has a little green man somewhere in its soul, who usually appears under the influence of too much alcohol. It even happens in Mexico, I’m told. And in Africa and Hawaii and Lithuania. He first appeared in Irish lore around the year sixteen hundred, and there are two explanations I give for his name. This is the first explanation: to those who have seen him in Ireland, he has always appeared as a little shoemaker—maybe they were walking home from a good, lubricated evening, and the roads were wet, and they had leaky boots. Anyway, there he sat, and this is the point—he was always working on just one shoe at a time. Now—the Irish-language word for ‘half’ is leas or leath, pronounced ‘la.’ And another word for shoe is brogue. So, as he was working on half a pair of shoes at a time, he was a ‘la-brog-awn.’ That awn suffix means ‘little,’ but it also got tagged on for the sake of making a word sound musical.

  “And here’s the second explanation: the word leprechaun came from lucorpawn—lu meaning ‘little’ and corp being a body—and again you have the awn diminutive suffix. Time expanded the feelings and imagination of those who saw the leprechaun, and all factors conspired to resolve in the image of a little man with a green hat and a face like a potato, hammering on a pair of boots.”

  I said to Mr. Yeats, “That’s most interesting.”

  He agreed with me. “What’s more,” he said, “I intend to give a paper on the subject to a gathering of important doctors in Switzerland early next year. I hope this war doesn’t prevent me from traveling.”

  He was very serious about all this—and that was when I decided I’d play a little trick on him.

  “Did you ever see a leprechaun?” I asked him—and this is where my little trick came into it.

  “No,” said he. “Did you?”

  “Only last night,” I said. “Only last night.”

  Well! He nearly fell off the gate.

  “You did? Where?”

  “Up the road a bit,” said I. “Just inside the avenue at Lissadell.”

  His face lit up. “I know Lissadell; I have the honor to be called a friend of the Gore-Booth family. Tell me more.”

  “I was walking past the gate,” I said. “It was just gathering dusk, and I heard this little voice singing. Very melodious, very true, every note like a small bell. It was a merry little song, without words, keeping time to something tapping. So I strolled over—in fact, I went on tippy-toes—”

  “Very wise,” said Mr. Yeats.

  “—and I looked in through the gate. Now you know there are lovely shrubs lining the drive of Lissadell, and in there, under an arbutus tree, sitting cross-legged on a large stone, was the neatest little man you ever saw. He was about two feet high, and he was repairing a shoe. The shoe had a silver buckle on it, and I realized it must have been his own shoe—because he was only wearing one shoe, and that had a silver buckle. And there he sat, tapping and making lovely mouth music.”

  Mr. Yeats’s eyes were now as round as twin moons in the sky. “You see! Half a pair of shoes! What did you do?”

  “I had a good look at him, I took in everything—the ginger hair sprouting out from under the hat, the green jacket and darker green pants, the big nose and the dancing silver hammer, the hands twinkling at his work, the skin weathered by all those rainbows. I have to say he was no film star, no oil painting.”

  “Did he see you?”

  “Oh, sure he di
d. He looked up at me and winked, a big broad wink—with his right eye. I raised my hat and said to him, ‘Good evening, sir, God bless the work.’”

  “Oh, no! You didn’t!” said Mr. Yeats. “Oh, no!”

  “Did I do wrong?”

  “Ohhhh! You must never mention God to them, that’s a rival power, a different system altogether.”

  I allowed myself to have light dawn on my face.

  “Ach, that explains everything,” I said.

  “What happened? What happened?”

  “Well,” I said, “as I was replacing the hat on my head, I passed it briefly before my face, blocking my line of vision for an instant. In that second—he was gone. By the time I had the hat back on my head, he had disappeared.”

  Mr. Yeats sagged back, very disappointed.

  “And left no trace?”

  “No trace.”

  He sat back on the rail of the gate, and he looked into the distance and thought very deeply.

  “Would you mind,” said he at last, “if I went looking for the same leprechaun?”

  “Of course I wouldn’t,” said I. “Leprechauns belong to us all. Why would I mind?”

  “Ah,” he said. “You must be a true gentleman—you understand that we must all share in each other’s visions if the world is to become civilized.”

  He climbed down off the gate and shook my hand with both of his big hands. That was the way William Butler Yeats and I parted company, expressing all the good wishes gentlemen like to convey to each other.

  I have it on good authority that the great poet, William Butler Yeats, was seen that same evening, and many evenings thereafter, hovering on tiptoe just inside the gates of Lissadell. Local people thought he was summoning up courage to ask either of the Gore-Booth girls to walk out with him because, as he wrote later, one of them was beautiful, and one moved like a gazelle. But I know different—I know what he was looking for.

  Nurses and orderlies came flooding in, and the Storyteller drew his tale to a close.

  “I hope you’ve been paying attention, because tomorrow I’ll be asking questions.”

  The elderly audience laughed. As they dispersed, the Storyteller sat without moving, watching them until the last one had left the room.

  Deirdre watched Ronan closely, then whispered, “He came in here three years ago; they sent him up from Cork. They have no records for him, and he wouldn’t give them a name. Isn’t he the same man? He asked me to try and find you.”

  “Does he have a name?”

  “He never told us. We call him Pat, but we do that with all people who can’t remember their names.”

  The Storyteller heard the whispering and half turned his head—but not so fully that he could see who stood behind him.

  He said, “Is that who I think it is?”

  Ronan stepped round, into the man’s eye line.

  “How are you, sir?”

  Deirdre withdrew, leaving the old man and his young pursuer alone in the wide, bright room. Ronan sat and scrutinized the face. All those lines—and now so pale; the eyes seemed sunken in the head, the whole presence so lacking in vigor. Both hands lay resting on his knees—the long bony hands, surprisingly smooth, with trimmed and clean fingernails.

  Ronan, with no cogent thought in his head, reached out, and gently took one hand in a handshake. The Storyteller blinked, blinked again, then shook his head; he looked around the empty room and back at Ronan; he looked at Ronan’s hand holding his own hand.

  “I told you I’d send for you,” he said.

  Within two weeks Ronan had finalized arrangements. He brought the Storyteller into his house and gave the Storyteller his own bed. But once he had moved in, the old man’s health sagged alarmingly; he developed infection after infection—sinus, bronchial, ear. The doctor said it seemed as if, having fought off everything during his years on the road, and held himself together in front of others at the old people’s home, he now felt it was safe to succumb. Day by day the Storyteller fell into deeper and longer sleeps.

  He refused to go to hospital, and Ronan approved of the decision. Deirdre Mullen said she would be glad of the extra money to nurse him; she knew others who would join a roster of care. Until the Storyteller recovered fully, and began to sit up, then walk, then go outside, Ronan felt he could ask none of the questions he had planned.

  But the old man’s mood sank in parallel with his physical decline, and he spoke less and less. He shied away from contact; intimate conversation seemed to faze him. Many times Ronan asked him his name and received no answer; to any other queries he answered at best perfunctorily.

  Kate came to see him, and the Storyteller, though he seemed to recall her easily, scarcely spoke to her. She visited again and again, and always reported that he seemed close to catatonic, or afraid of something. (Alison put in no appearance, and when Ronan told her of his new house guest, she merely said, not unkindly, “Well, that will please you.”)

  The doctor began to take a keener interest. More progressive than the typical medical man of 1966, he opined that the old man needed some psychological help or perhaps had something locked in him that was hindering his recovery. Ronan resolved to conquer the baffling melancholy, and he knew of only one thing that might do it—get the Storyteller back into his most familiar mode, get him to perform again.

  In early February 1966, by the fire on yet another generally silent evening, Ronan said to the Storyteller, “Pat—how much do you know about the Easter Rising?”

  The old man looked at him. “I was there.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I was in the General Post Office in Dublin on Easter Monday and Tuesday.”

  “Would you tell it to some people?”

  A shake of the head. “I’m done with telling stories.” And down once more came the silence.

  “I think it would cheer you up.”

  The Storyteller shook his head.

  “All right,” said Ronan. “There’s something I have to tell you. The year my father died, in nineteen-sixty, even though I was broken-hearted, I gave up my life, and for six months and more I followed you all over Ireland, trying to find you and, when I failed, trying to be like you. I don’t quite know why I did it. The letters you wrote to me—and I know they came from you—I read them very closely, and I felt as I was being driven by you for, I don’t know—some mysterious reason. In the end I gave up and went back to my studies. When I reached the age of twenty-one, my father’s will gave me all this comfort that I hope I can now share with you.”

  For the remainder of the evening he told the Storyteller of his travels through the counties, of the people he had met and the stories he, Ronan, had heard and told. “Pat” listened, growing more and more moved. At the end he said, almost in a whisper, “And you say you came into your inheritance?”

  “Every penny.”

  The Storyteller thought for a moment. “And you say you went on all that traveling to try and find me?”

  “Every step.”

  “I don’t think I can refuse you one last story.”

  Ronan said, “Suppose we call it—one more story?”

  The old man smiled, thin and lost. “I remember—Saint Brendan, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But I have two favors to ask. The first is—if I’m to speak like that, can it be somewhere bigger than a kitchen? I easily get feelings of being crowded these days, being unaccustomed to indoors, I suppose.”

  “Fine,” said Ronan. “We’ll do it in a hall or a theater, so that the people aren’t sitting too close to you. And the second favor?”

  “I’ll tell you nearer the day.”

  In Ireland in 1966, the country celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising, the final rebellion that led to the War of Independence, that led to the Anglo-Irish treaty, that led to the two states of Ireland—the twenty-six counties of the republican south, and the six counties of Northern Ireland, governed by Br
itain. Ronan wrote to everyone who had ever been part of his Storyteller search and invited them to a special evening in the main lecture theater of University College, Cork. He also wrote to another host of names that the Storyteller gave him; houses he had stayed in, people who had sustained him, old friends.

  So many replied and with such enthusiasm that they had to move the event to a public theater in the city with a capacity of six hundred seats, each one of which they filled.

  Ronan took all necessary measurements, and in the shops of Cork bought the Storyteller his old “wardrobe”—the long black overcoat, jacket, waistcoat and stovepipe trousers, excellent boots. And a new homburg hat.

  The old man smiled. “I’ve only one criticism—they’re not shabby enough.” He seemed more animated, readier to recover; he began to sleep better, and the doctor reported improvements.

  On the night before the event, the old man said to Ronan, “You and I have much to talk about.”

  “I have a hundred questions.”

  The Storyteller said, “And I have a thousand. And—” He hesitated. “D’you remember I said I have a second favor?”

  “Yes?”

  “You wouldn’t be surprised to hear—from your knowledge of me—that I have a box buried in the ground. As you yourself had.”

  “That was one of my main questions: How did you know about mine? You left one of your chronicles in it for me.”

  “I used to see you as a small boy—I was often in those woods near your house.”

  Ronan felt surprised not to find the information sinister.

  “My own box isn’t too far from here, and tomorrow I want you to get it.”

  “But I have to take you to the theater in Cork.”