Three Wishes for Jamie

by Charles O'Neal

  “Queen Maeve upon hearing this boast of the king, her husband, laughed a queen-lady-like laugh that shook the heavy timbers of her fortress in the West, and rattled the shields hung upon the great walls there. With queenly modesty she disputed the words of her king-husband, pointing out that so great was her dowry in gold and silver brought from Tara that the wheels of the chariots bearing the treasure sank to their hubs in solid stone, so heavy was the burden of their riches; and her droves of cattle, horses, and sheep threw up new mountain ranges with their trampling hoofs, so multitudinous and violent was their passing.

  “Thus one argument led to another, until to settle the mild dispute, king-husband and queen-wife ordered servants to fetch and assemble all their possessions, that they might be weighed and counted to determine which and whose outranked the other’s. Not one fishhook, feather, or jeweled comb was to be overlooked.

  “Now when all this had been done as ordered, Queen Maeve found that the king was owner of one black bull more than she. In all else their possessions were identical. ‘How irritating,’ said she, and over her queenly beauty a shadow fell, as when some deep cloud obscures the sun, casting shade and somber gloom across the surface of the land.

  “To the north and eastward where the great Connor—he had been Maeve’s first husband—was king in Ulster, there was a famous dun bull, known throughout the length and breadth of Ireland. Straight at once Queen Maeve dispatched emissaries to the owner of the dun bull, asking the loan of the creature, and promising rewards and favors both rich and personal.

  “‘Sure now ’twill be my deepest pleasure to gratify the queen,’ said the owner of the dun bull like the gentleman he was. As one of Ulster’s warrior chiefs, he received the queen’s messengers with honor, filling them with food and drink and kind words. But while the emissaries were drinking and feasting they fell to quarreling. Said one, it were well their host had agreed to lend the dun bull, else would the great queen have been constrained to take it by force of arms.

  “Sure now,” Tavish commented philosophically, “this began the brannigan. When the Ulster chieftain heard of the drunken boast, he not only withdrew the loan of the dun bull, but told the queen of the west that she was lucky to get her messengers back with their skins. Och, but the queen was furious. East and west and north and south she sent, rallying the warrior chieftains of the land beneath her banner. Assembled, the heroes covered the plains outside Maeve’s fortress as Manannan mac Lir’s horses covered the sea with their foamy manes. Fierce and war-proud were these mighty champions; and none fiercer, none more proud, none fairer of face and form, than Ferdiad, son of Daman, son of Dare.”

  Tavish paused, as if lowering the curtain on the prologue of the mighty drama he was relating. The cooking fires had sunk to a soft glow of coals. From the ring of darkness edging the camp came the thin medley of small night sounds; the comforting little noises that underscored the deeper silences. Fireflies spotted the lower night with yellow, temporary stars that glowed silently for an instant, then vanished to flash their mellow radiance deeper in the shadows of the towering pines.

  Step by step he led his listeners through the ancient tale—from humor to heroism and then to final heartbreak. Like an ancient tapestry maker, he drew the threads of drama in and out, until a vivid portrait of the times stood rich and true. He told how the wily Maeve launched one of Ireland’s most famous and bloody wars. Then he described the magnificence of Connor’s court and its hero.

  “Strange and beautiful was the young champion, Cuchulainn. Seven toes to each foot, he had, and on either hand as many fingers. His eyes were bright with seven pupils apiece, and each one glittered with seven gemlike sparkles. On each cheek he had four moles—a blue, a crimson, a green, and a yellow one. From the top of his head, between one ear and the other, grew fifty tresses, long and yellow as the wax of bees, or like a brooch of white gold when it glittered in the afternoon sun. Of all the champions of Ulster, he alone was prepared to meet the onrush of Queen Maeve’s men of Connacht. The others were taken with a sudden affliction, a strange weakness of the stones, which impaired their manliness. But that is another story.”

  Again Tavish paused and again his audience waited. Then in rich and measured tones, he related the last act of the drama: How Queen Maeve, through wine and lures and blandishments, had won from Ferdiad, Cuchulainn’s friend and foster brother, a promise to meet the Ulsterman in mortal combat. There was the glint of tears in the eyes of his listeners, as the Speaker described how the two friends met and exchanged challenges with heavy hearts. He told of how they battled for three days, resting at night and returning to the fray in the mornings, until the water was driven from the ford of the river in which they fought, and the Bocanachs and Bananachs and wild people of the glens screamed from the rims of their shields and from the hilts of their swords and from the hafts of their spears; and of how, at the end of the third day, Cuchulainn struck the blow that slew his friend and foster brother.

  “‘That is enough now, indeed,’ said Ferdiad. ‘I fall of that. Now, indeed, may I say that I am sickly after thee, and not by thy hand should I have fallen.’

  “Cuchulainn ran toward him and clasped his two arms about him, and lifted him and his armor and his clothes across the ford northward, in order that the slain should be by the ford on the north and not by the west, with the men of Erin.

  “He laid Ferdiad down there, and a trance and faintness fell upon him, from which he would not rouse. ’Good, O Cuchulainn,’ said his charioteer, ’rise up now for the men of Erin are coming upon us, and it is not single combat they will give thee since Ferdiad, son of Daman, son of Dare, has fallen by thee.’

  “‘Friend,’ Cuchulainn replied, ’what availeth me to rise after him that has fallen by me is dead?’

  “He wept, and there were those who said the tears were pure heart’s blood. And that was the battle of the ford, between Ferdiad and Cuchulainn, friends and foster brothers, in the great Cattle Raid of the Cooley, two thousand years ago, which is but a day and a night in God’s own time.”

  Tavish’s voice was low and edged with emotion when he finished. The sadness was without relation to time or space, but universal. It had touched both speaker and listeners. Tears glistened in the eyes of the women as they turned silently toward their tents. The children, sensing a depth of feeling they could not understand, clung silently to their mothers.

  The group of men dissolved with no exchange of words. The spell that had held them transported was too fine to be broken suddenly. Owen Roe Tavish had warmed into life a tragedy dead two thousand years, and for a little while, on the stage created by his words, men had loved, suffered, and died. The Hero’s Light that shone from the foreheads of the ancient great had penetrated the dark in between, and its magic glow had fallen upon the listeners. Each went his own thoughtful, pensive way, possessor of some rich fragment of his jeweled and heroic past, to store the wonder of it in some inner temple sacred to himself alone.

  PART THREE

  A child to come with the springtime; it will have luck.…

  XVII

  During the summer months the caravans of the Travelers expanded northward, threading their way into remote rural communities with odd, provocative names familiar only to politicians and post office maps. Paprika, Doodlebug, Polkadot were as well known to them as Athens and Augusta. As nearly as possible their arrival was timed to coincide with the marketing of local crops, so farm wives would have money to spend on handmade lace and linoleum; or farmers ready to exchange old mules for new. When money was short, the Travelers took in exchange hams, bacon, eggs, butter, home-canned vegetables and fruit; or grain and fodder for the stock.

  Older women from the caravans scouted the countryside near the camps, driving patiently from farmhouse to farmhouse, displaying their wares with cool, contained dignity. Meanwhile they kept a sharp lookout for animals in the barnyards, reporting back to their menfolk of mules and horses that might be likely prospects for purchase or
trade.

  In the spring of 1898, when the April rituals were over, Jamie persuaded Shiel Harrigan’s caravan to delay their departure from Atlanta.

  “There’s been a great booming in the market for mules and horses,” he argued. “We should be camped close to an auction center, not moving about.”

  The older men listened and yielded somewhat resentfully. Since Jamie had been with the group, his influence had mounted steadily, especially with the younger men. They studied his methods and marveled at the swift ease with which he converted horseflesh into cash. As time passed, they tended to accept his leadership over that of Shiel Harrigan and the older horse traders.

  One morning Jamie drove his new team of matched sorrel geldings into the camp just before the midday meal. Beside him in the buggy was a stranger.

  “Meet Oran Talbot,” he said to the men, introducing Talbot about. “He used to be a barber—now he’s buying mules for the government.”

  Talbot was a lean, sly man, with pale, foxy eyes that were never still. He laughed easily and too often. “Yep … I been a barber fer ten years; but where can a man git on two-bit haircuts and fifteen-cent shaves! Now I’m a mule buyer fer Uncle Sam. I don’t know the south end of a northbound mule from the other, but I’m a mule buyer. Says so in my contract!” He laughed and slapped his lean thigh.

  “Just why does the government want to buy mules?” Shiel Harrigan asked.

  Talbot looked at the circle of faces around him craftily. “You mean you ain’t heard about Spain and the war?”

  “We’re on the move so much there be little time to read the newspapers,” Jamie explained.

  “That so?” Talbot said, weighing the information. “Well … seems there’s a little shooting war on with Spain … in a place called Cuba. Government needs mules and horses in a hurry … to haul guns and wagons.…”

  “That’s why the prices have been jumping higher and higher,” said Shiel Harrigan, and the other horse traders nodded in agreement.

  “They’ll be jumping higher still, according to Mister Talbot, here,” said Jamie.

  “They’ll go over the moon,” said Talbot, “dependin’ on how long the war lasts … which brings me to you fellers. I been told you can stuff a dead mule’s skin with sawdust and pass it off as the first-class offspring of a Spanish jack!”

  “Just what did you have in mind?” Shiel Harrigan inquired.

  “’Tis this,” Jamie cut in. “Mister Talbot, here, has a cousin in Atlanta who is a livestock broker. He is buying up all the culls and rejected stock at the auctions; animals the buyers have turned down. He’d like to turn those animals over to us for feeding and sweetening. When they’re ready, we offer them again … to Oran Talbot, here, who buys them for the government.”

  “Sounds profitable,” was Shiel Harrigan’s comment, “but is it honest?”

  “Honest?” exclaimed Talbot. “Why, it’s more’n honest! It’s patriotic! There’ll be money hanging on trees fer all of us.”

  Harrigan and the older men protested that to enter into a deal with Talbot would require their leaving the road. “We have regular customers … people we do business with year after year. Are we to give them up for this—‘get rich quick’ scheme?” they argued.

  But the younger men under the leadership of Jamie were eager for the plan. The lure of quick and easy money beckoned them like green and distant pastures. Shiel Harrigan’s caravan split on the issue. There was no bitterness or recrimination. The Donners, the Devlins, and the Hennesseys struck their tents and moved on.

  “It’s not that we’re against the money,” Tade Hennessey told Jamie as they were leaving, “it’s that we’d be lost without movement. Our people have had it in their blood for two thousand years. Maybe the young ones will change … but I hope not. When a man has more than he can put wheels under, ’tis too much for the good of his own soul, I’m thinking.”

  Shiel Harrigan stayed with Jamie’s group. He did not approve of the plan, but Maeve was his nearest of kin and he could not bring himself to part with her. By common consent the new group’s leadership passed to Jamie, and Shiel Harrigan’s wise counsel was seldom heard in meetings, and then only when he was pressed for it by the others.

  Occasionally he spoke of his fears to Maeve. “’Tis not only this sudden hunger for riches,” he said, “but the methods he is using will destroy the reputation for fair dealing we have been building these past fifty years.”

  The developments of the past months had disturbed Maeve, too, but she defended her husband. “The making of money is like a new game to Jamie,” she protested, hopefully. “By and by he’ll have had enough of it.”

  “The making of money is like the taste for drink,” her father warned. “The more you have the more you want. You’re a sensible girl, Maeve. Call halt to him before it is too late. For years we’ve had the freedom of the road. No one asked where we’d been or where we were going. But there’ll be an end to that freedom if the outsiders turn against us.”

  “Why should they?” Maeve asked, troubled.

  “Take my word for it, they will if we draw down too much attention on ourselves. Already they’re talking about Jamie in Atlanta. There was even a piece about him in one of the newspapers—calling him the ‘Mule Millionaire.’”

  “I’ll do what I can,” Maeve promised, “but with Jamie, when the sun is shining, there’s little to gain in talking of showers to come.”

  She spoke to Jamie that night when they were alone, broaching the subject of returning to the road. “We’ve been here almost a year. Don’t you miss the rolling wheels and the wonder of what’s ahead over the next hill?” she pleaded.

  Jamie scoffed good-naturedly. “Sure the round dollars we’re piling up will roll better than any wagon wheels made … and a lot more comfortably.”

  “But why?” Maeve persisted. “And who are we filling the banks with money for?”

  The question was no sooner out than she wished she hadn’t asked it. One subject she and Jamie had come to avoid by unspoken, mutual consent was the mention of children. In their nearly four years of married life, Maeve had come to know and understand her husband’s every mood. She could read the thoughts in his eyes long before the words found expression on his lips.

  For a fleeting instant Jamie’s guard was down. He gazed at Maeve with such an expression of baffled misery that she felt her heart contract as if caught in the grasp of a giant fist. I’ve hurt him, she thought. He’s never given up hoping for the child we never had. I’ve failed him in the chiefest way a woman can fail her husband.…”

  “Sure now and there’s always need for money,” Jamie stammered. “We send it home in every letter … and they be always crying for more. Kate now has two mouths to feed besides her own and Waddie O’Dowd’s.…”

  He halted and his jaw knotted as it always did when he was trapped by a lack of logic. Maeve wanted to let the matter drop, but Jamie was disturbed and sought to hide his frustration behind the mask of anger.

  “You’ve small liking for anything I do these days,” he complained, edging his words with bitterness, “and sure ’tis for you I be doing it all!”

  “Is it?” Maeve said. She tried to keep the acid from her voice, but her words had a way of finding the chinks in Jamie’s armor of self-satisfaction.

  “Aye—it is that,” he declared stubbornly, and began to point out all the new furnishings and luxuries that had been added to the tent. “Is there anything else you want? Anything your heart desires? If there be, sure you’ve but to name it and I’ll get it for you.”

  Maeve could feel the quarrel gathering about them as electricity collects in a mounting storm, but she felt helpless to check it. “I’ve more than enough of everything,” she said placatingly.

  Jamie pounced upon her choice of words. “More than enough, is it?” he protested angrily. “And what kind of answer is that? How can a body have more than enough and yet still be wanting something else?”

  “What I’m as
king for isn’t anything your money can buy,” Maeve flashed at him, her anger rising, too. “Of course there’s more money in the camp than ever before—but is there more happiness? Is there even as much? Where are the songs and the laughter we used to know on the road? You came with your Oran Talbot and your promises of bulging pockets and tents full of money, and you take from us a way of life we’d been leading for two thousand years! And what do you give us in return? Money! Too much of it! A golden mountain, with our people snarling and snapping like hyenas around the foot of it. Is that something to be proud of? I was more impressed with the boy I fell in love with—who had only the clothes on his back, but could put his ear to the ground and hear the grass growing, and who listened to the music rising from the fairy mounds. I’m not at all impressed with King Jamie, the ‘Mule Millionaire.’”

  The violence of her outburst left Maeve spent and a little sick. With trembling hands she began to undress. Jamie was hurt and angry, but a little frightened, too.

  “Sure this tent will never be lacking a mule whip,” he grumbled, “for ’tis yourself that has a tongue can snap the ears off any lead team. And there be no point in mentioning Oran Talbot. Sure I’m through with him, and have been for weeks.”

  He put out the light and undressed in the dark, muttering the while. It was the first of a series of short, sharp quarrels that raised and fed a barrier of glacial ice which threatened to spread and envelop Maeve and Jamie’s entire marriage.

  In the weeks that followed, Maeve sensed the ever-increasing chill that was nipping like deadly, destructive frost at her and Jamie’s happiness. But she felt powerless to check it. Upon her heart she bore a feeling of deep guilt. It was her childlessness that had laid the foundation for this wall abuilding between herself and her husband. Each passing day—each flurry of cutting words—added fresh bricks and mortar to its insurmountability.