Three Wishes for Jamie

by Charles O'Neal

  “It could or it couldn’t,” said the Speaker. “I haven’t seen Power in over forty years. He came to America when he was eighteen.”

  “Would you say he was a thin man, taller than most and balder than many, wearing thick glasses?”

  “That I wouldn’t … because I don’t know,” Tavish replied, peevishly. “He probably has changed some in all those years.”

  “That wouldn’t be the O’Malley I’m thinking of anyway,” Me-Dennis admitted. “The one I know is short and wide, with hair thick or a beaver’s, only gray, and eyebrows that stand out to here.”

  To quiet the conversation Tavish agreed that this undoubtedly was the right O’Malley.

  “He has a shop on West Peachtree Street,” said Me-Dennis, and for the remainder of the trip brooded in silence.

  Tavish left the garrulous trader examining and faulting horses as if he intended buying the animals instead of renting them. Rush, the livery stable proprietor, directed him toward West Peachtree Street, and after a brief walk he came to his cousin’s stonecutting establishment.

  The shop was in the lower half of a ramshackle, two-story house, badly in need of paint. It sat some distance from the street and the yard was crowded with granite slabs and objects of the stonecutter’s art. There was no proper fence, but two tall shafts of gray granite upheld a third slab of pink, forming a stern but celestial arch for an entrance, though no entrance was required. Chiseled perpendicularly upon the upright shafts was the name: O’MALLEY, while POWER was graved horizontally across the top.

  The porch, like the yard, was littered with stone angels of all sizes and descriptions: cherubim and seraphim. Tavish made his way into the house through the open front doorway. The interior was dim and quiet as a cathedral, and charged with the pungent smell of rock dust. Almost obscured in a far corner was a high, old-style, slanting bookkeeper’s desk. Perched behind it on a tall stool was a gnomelike little man absorbed in reading a letter. Had it not been that his lips were moving as they audibly spelled out the words, Tavish would have mistaken him for another piece of statuary. His short, crisp hair was so matted and whitened with stone dust that it appeared carved.

  “Speak up or go away,” the little man said in a voice as abrasive as the dust on the floor.

  “Is it you now, Power O’Malley, my cousin that left Ireland forty years ago a little green-coated boy, and set out on the rocky roads of the world to push his fortune?” Tavish said, unconsciously keeping his voice low as if he were whispering in a graveyard or a church. “’Tis I, your darling relation, Owen Roe Tavish, that you haven’t laid eyes on these many years.”

  Power O’Malley blinked at Tavish but gave no other evidence of interest or surprise. “What took you so long, Cousin?” he said finally with disconcerting mildness.

  His lack of surprise left Tavish taken aback. “Sure ’twas the roughness of the crossing,” he hastened to explain. “The worst in the history of steam navigation. One minute the ocean was spitting at us, whiter than white, and the next minute hissing away, greener than green. Sure with our ups and downs we traveled enough to circumnavigate the globe.”

  “Did you now?” said Power, chuckling to himself as if he relished some small private joke. “I’m just after reading this letter from our cousin, Meg O’Leary, in Donegal. She’s written a whole page about you and another cousin, Jamie … what’s-his-name.…”

  “McRuin … he’s with me here.…”

  Tavish’s mouth was open, ready to explain that Jamie was stopping temporarily with the horse traders and would be along later, when Power O’Malley interrupted crossly: “I see him … I see him; and a fine looking lad he is, too. Good day to you, lad. Sure you must be weary after your long trip. Sit yourself on a slab. I’ll read you both what Cousin Meg writes about your glorious funeral.”

  The old stonecutter was affably addressing the dust-laden air beside Tavish, and the Speaker felt the hair at the base of his neck rise. At the same moment he experienced a sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach.

  “Cousin Power,” he said gently, “Jamie I left behind with the Irish Travelers. He’s not with me just now.”

  Power O’Malley seemed not to have heard. He was busy scanning Meg’s letter, which was many pages in length.

  “Travelers?” he said. “Fine people. Do a lot of work for them. Respectful of their dead, they are. Ah, here’s the first page.”

  Without further ado he began reading snatches of the letter aloud in a fast mumble.

  Your welcome letter received and me and your Uncle Esme thank you for the money you sent. We had masses said for your father and mother, God rest their souls … your cousin by marriage, Tade MacFigg, was hung in Belfast last week for killing a policeman. May God rest his soul—and may God’s curse be on Prinny Butt, the informer, and may she burn in Hell, God forgive me.… We had a grand time at Pat Cullinan’s wake … he was eighty! Some young roughs shouted at him last week,—Give us the wake, Pat Cullinan’—and he obliged. Brigid O’Flaherty, that you once went to school with, has married again … an Englishman—and at her age! She’ll have no luck.…

  “Ah, here it is,” said the stonecutter, shaking a rumpled page at Tavish.

  Bless your heart, I almost forgot to tell you about your distant cousins, Owen Roe Tavish, him that was the matchmaker, and young Jamie McRuin. Both drowned, they were, in the gap of Dunriggan, and their bodies never recovered. The double wake was the talk of the countryside and went on for three days while they searched for the bodies. What a lively time! Some dirty, thieving upstart stole the priest’s offering from off the coffins, but old Shanahan, him that was the tinker, replaced the missing money, believing, ’tis said by them that know, one of his own sons took it. Sure no one knew his sons better than Shanahan himself, and if he suspected them, then there’s no one in the county to gainsay him. Things have turned out well, all in all. Dennis McRuin married the Shanahan girl, keeping the fortune in the family. His sister, Kate, was married to Waddie O’Dowd and now Old Dan is snugly kept, with plenty of tobacco for his pipe and a warm fire to toast his shins.… May God take care of you and keep you from sudden death.… P.S. Keep sending the money.… Your loving cousin …

  Meg

  Power raised his eyes from the letter and surveyed Tavish through the shaggy brows veiling his bright little eyes. “Think of that, Cousin Tavish, a three-day wake. Sure now that’s something to warm the souls of drownded men.”

  The suspicion that had been growing within Owen Roe Tavish was now an awesome certainty. Power O’Malley believed him to be a ghost. The old stonecutter had lived so long among the symbols of the grave that he could no longer discern between the quick and the dead.

  “Hear me now, Power O’Malley,” Tavish said sternly, though his voice shook slightly: “I’m no more of a ghost than you are. Jamie McRuin dragged me from Dunriggan Gap and ’twas us snatched the money from off our own coffins to buy passage to America. We’re here, man, flesh and blood. Feel my hand.…”

  Power smiled patiently. “’Tis but the reaction to the reaction of being kilt, Cousin Tavish. Them that dies by drowning finds it hardest to believe at first. You’ll get used to it. Hardly a day goes by but what a ghost or two drops in. Only last week Cyprian O’Leary, him that was kicked to death by a horse, was here to see me. He didn’t believe he was dead either. And him with a hole in his head from the horse’s hoof I could put my fist in.”

  A young man wearing a black arm band, and accompanied by two older women also in mourning, came to the door of the shop. “Don’t go way, Tavish,” Power said, going to meet them. “When I’m done here we’ll pick out a nice stone for you.”

  “Sure wild horses couldn’t drag me away until I’ve got it through your doddering head that I’m live as you are … liver,” Tavish shouted after him.

  He stuck by his determination until he overheard Power O’Malley explaining to the customers that the man inside was really the ghost of a drowned cousin who had crossed the wild At
lantic just to visit him. This was too much for Owen Roe Tavish. He swept past the startled women and the staring young man, smothering a Puckish impulse to give out a wild banshee wail.

  “Sure that would send Power’s customers shopping for a tombstone somewhere in the next county,” he told himself grimly.

  “Are you off so soon, Cousin?” Power queried solicitously. “Say a word to the blessed Brigid for me.”

  Tavish was still a small boy at heart. Before a towering stone angel with wings outspread, he paused dramatically and faced the women and men. Spreading his arms wide as if about to take flight, he said solemnly: “Beir bog ar an saoghal agus beirfhidh an saoghal bog ort.”

  One of the women seemed on the verge of fainting. When she opened her eyes Tavish had vanished. Power O’Malley, pleased with the excitement, translated Tavish’s words from the Gaelic.

  “Twas an old Irish proverb that says ‘if you bear easy on life, sure then life will bear easy on you.’ Just think of it,” he added happily, “they’re speaking Irish in Heaven.”

  VIII

  Tavish rode back to the horse traders’ camp with Me-Dennis. The livery stable proprietor with his five strapping sons followed in the cavalcade of surreys. They brought saddle horses on which to ride back into town. It was a pleasant trip for everyone except Owen Roe Tavish. A bright half-moon tipped the tree-edges with spring silver and the air was filled with the thudding of hoofs, the smell of hay and horses’ sweat and leather. The steel rims of the carriage wheels sang a thin, sweet obbligato as they sliced through the carpet of red dust on the road. But Tavish found small pleasure in the sights or sounds. He was depressed and homesick for familiar things. The steady drone of Me-Dennis’ voice, reciting how he had bested Rush on the rental of the surreys, flowed over him unheeded.

  “Why so silent, man? Have you lost your spark?” Me-Dennis demanded.

  “That I have. I’m a ghost on two continents,” replied Tavish sadly.

  The cryptic answer silenced Me-Dennis, who was fond of worrying with words as dogs worried with bones. The glow of fires shone through the trees as they neared the camp in the pine grove, and the rollicking music of Irish dances was borne to them on the warm night air.

  “Sounds like the Travelers are all come in,” Me-Dennis cried. He whipped up the horse, anxious to end the trip and take part in the festivities. Beside him, Tavish pondered his and Jamie’s doubtful future when they were set adrift by the migratory horse traders.

  Two more musicians had joined with Dan Devlin and the old fiddler. The orchestra perched in a wagon bed to play “The Siege of Ennis” and “The Walls of Limerick,” and others, while the dancers stepped, clapped, and swung in rhythm. Some of the men passed a jug among themselves but there was no rowdiness. Occasionally some oldster, fired by the liquor and the music, would hop into the arena and attempt to match his steps against the flying feet of the younger people.

  Tavish found Jamie among the inner circle of watchers, his eyes following Maeve’s every movement in the line of dancers. “You’re wearing the Day of Judgment in your face. Do you be wanting everyone in the camp to know your feelings?” the old man queried crossly.

  Jamie shrugged without removing his eyes from the girl and her partner. “They know them now, except the black one there, dancing with Maeve.” He nodded toward Travis Bunn in the square of dancers.

  “And how long do you think the secret will be kept from him, with you glowering up and down the length and breadth of the man, as if measuring him for a beating. And if that’s what’s in your mind—forget it. We’ll not repay courtesy with rioting.”

  Tavish’s warning was not without reason. Travis Bunn had already become conscious of Jamie’s steady stare.

  “Who’s the one that’s trying to stare me out of the county?” he asked Aunt Bid, between dances.

  “A spalpeen with a heart as cold as charity and a tongue like a rasp. Picked up along the road out of the goodness of our souls, he was … him and the old one,” she added, jerking her head in Tavish’s direction.

  Shiel Harrigan had little more to say about Jamie than had Aunt Bid. “He’s a green lad from the old country who rode with us for a few days. He’ll be going his own way tomorrow or the day after.”

  Bunn would have accepted these dismissals of Jamie’s rudeness, but Maeve’s evasiveness and the covert whispering of the women made him suspicious. The hopeless love of the stranger from Ireland for Shiel Harrigan’s daughter was now common knowledge in the camp. Mothers ringed about the dancers kept one eye on their offspring and with the other watched the mounting tension between Bunn and Jamie.

  Maeve, too, sensed the impending clash. She tried to draw Bunn away from the dancers. “I’m tired. Let’s walk along the road a little way,” she said.

  Ordinarily he would have leapt at the chance to be alone with the girl he loved, but now Bunn suspected something was behind her request.

  “Maybe it’s dancing with me that has wearied you,” he said sourly. “Another partner you might find less tiresome.”

  “The music and the dancing and the noise has tired me,” Maeve replied coolly. “The music and the dancing and the noise would be the same no matter who was my partner.”

  She would have quit the reel but Bunn held her. “What’s this coldness that’s come over you, Maeve Harrigan? I have no liking for it in the girl I’m going to marry.”

  Maeve pushed his hands from her and walked away. Bunn stood while the dancers whirled about him and the wrath inside him mounted until it throbbed at his temples. Then he turned and pushed his way to where Jamie stood.

  “Did no one teach you at home ’tis not polite to stare?” he said, with deliberate sarcasm.

  Jamie smiled an aggravating smile, as if he were receiving a bit of pleasant news. “Sure now you’re that nimble on your spags I couldn’t keep my eyes off you, Mister Bunn. Did you have your lessons from a mountain goat? Or is it that you’re part pooka, with hind legs like a rabbit?”

  Bunn’s mouth tightened and he crouched as if to spring. “I thought as much. ’Tis you that’s set Maeve against me. Walk with me to the timber, for I’m of a mind to teach you a lesson.”

  Jamie’s eyes were hard as crystal but his lips continued to smile. “If you’re as lively with your fists as you are with your tongue, Mister Bunn, sure then you could outbox the wind.”

  “Do you come, or do I put your head on the other side of your face here and now?” Bunn’s cup of rage was running over but Jamie’s voice stayed soft and his lips continued to smile.

  “I’ll not go with you out of kindness, Mister Bunn,” he said. “It’s in my heart to kill you, but you’re hers, and because of that I won’t lay a finger on you.”

  Bunn swung at Jamie’s taunting face before the words were fully out. His fist caught the Irish boy a glancing blow on the nose and cheek, staggering him. “Put up your hands,” he snarled, circling catlike around Jamie.

  A trickle of crimson crept along Jamie’s upper lip from one nostril. He faced Bunn still smiling. Deliberately he slid his hands into his trouser’s pockets. “Though his fists are weak, sure he slays armies with his tongue. ’Tis not in your power to hurt me, Travis Bunn,” he jeered softly.

  The dancers had lost interest in the dancing with the first blow, and the music collapsed immediately. By common instinct a ring formed solidly about the two men. Tavish, who was deep in conversation with Tade Hennessy and Me-Dennis, heard the crack of Bunn’s fist and turned in time to see Jamie recovering his balance, the blood oozing from his nose.

  The horse traders were bound together by blood ties and ties of self-interest, like a family. There could be quarrels and even blows among them, but against any and all outsiders they presented an unbroken front. The faces tightly ringed about Bunn and Jamie expressed only grim impartiality or open hostility toward the stranger. They watched without show of sympathy as Bunn struck again and again. Jamie made no move to defend himself, only weaving and pulling with the blows to
avoid their full force.

  “Jamie, for the love of Heaven, lad, defend yourself,” Tavish shouted.

  “What … from the pillows that this bowsie calls his fists?” Jamie retorted through bloody lips.

  He was bleeding profusely now from mouth and nose, and purple splotches marked his white skin. Bunn had lost all control. With fists flailing he crowded in for the kill. Through battered lips, Jamie continued to whip the other man’s nerves until they were raw.

  “What a wonder of a man the girl must think you, Travis Bunn,” he taunted, “seeing you waving your fists and beating at the wind.”

  “Sure if it’s smashing you want, you’ll get it,” Bunn snarled. He feinted and caught Jamie solidly on the jaw—a blow that would have dropped a young bull.

  Jamie saw the lacy tops of the trees shimmering in the moonlight. A sigh that could have come from the crowd, but probably came from the wind in the branches, hummed in his ears. His head thumped against the ground and he lay still while galaxies of stars exploded inside his skull.

  “I must get up,” he drove himself. “Half a beating won’t do. Bunn must hammer at me ’til he himself is sick of the sight.”

  He staggered to his feet, hands still in pockets. “Sure you’ve got the ground on your side now,” he rasped. “It’s thumping me from one side while you’re blasting at me from the other.”

  Bunn was sick of the slaughter but he had to go on. He had to stop that mocking, taunting, bloody mouth. From a corner of his eye he saw Maeve. She was standing back from the crowd, on a small rise of earth. Her face shone deathly pale in the light from the ring of fires. Her eyes were wide and staring, but she followed every motion of the two men. Tavish went from man to man, pleading with them to stop the one-sided struggle. They shook their heads. A fight was finished only when one of the participants could no longer rise, or was unable to continue and said so.

  “But it’s murder,” Tavish pleaded. “The boy won’t defend himself.”

  The men shrugged. That was Jamie’s problem. Some of them turned away, sickened. The women had long since withdrawn, drawing the children as far from the unequal battle as possible. Finally Jamie went down and could not rise again. Tavish knelt beside him, almost in tears.