It took centuries more for the family to build stone walls, but the triangle was passed down the generations. When the time came to embed it in the wall of their castle, the famous Cormac decided that he’d trace the stone’s origins, and when he searched for the witch, he was told that she came from Tara, the province of the High King of Ireland, and that the slab was originally part of the Stone of Destiny that sat on Tara’s hill.
This stone formed a crucial part of prehistoric Ireland’s governance, because it identified impostors and pretenders. Every would-be king had to sit on the Stone of Destiny. If he was a fraud, a silence would fall; but when a rightful heir to a throne sat on it, the stone shrieked like a wild thing with joy at the new monarch.
One day, when the true High King was found, a bolt of lightning accompanied the shriek; it broke off a corner of the stone, and that was the triangle given to the MacCarthys by the witch. All this, you understand, is also true.
As to the origin of the word blarney, taken to mean lies and shameless flattery, that came from Queen Elizabeth I of England. (Her sobriquet the “virgin” queen might itself belong in the realms of blarney, by all accounts.) She’d ordered her envoy—who was also her lover—to acquire the loyalty and the lands of the MacCarthys. Every time the good ambassador tried to negotiate with the MacCarthys, they flattered him with a banquet in his honor, where they sang his praises and talked him out of his plan. To explain himself, his reports to the queen were long and wordy, and she said, referring to the MacCarthys, “This is all Blarney”—which in a sense it was.
End of Digression; now back to my own story, which, as it developed, had more than its share of blarney—the flattery that kills.
Looking back, I now think that I grew up with the country. First, the rowdy infancy—we’d had a revolution in 1916, and a two-year guerrilla war that began in 1919. Then the age of reason, with agreements and treaties. Next, the first noisy childhood of the new state—and we certainly knew all about that. Then, the adolescent fights with parents and siblings—the Civil War.
When it ended, there was a sort of settling-down into a system, a maturing. In politics, as in life, those who want to be successful see the writing on the wall and, unless they want to be permanently unemployed and powerless, they get themselves organized.
Where democracy is an option, that pattern is familiar all over the world. Ireland still provides a tidy case history, because we modeled that pattern more or less exactly. Having at first thrown into turmoil the post-treaty debates about how we should govern ourselves, Mr. de Valera’s republicans strengthened and rallied voters behind them.
All through the 1920s, noisy and aggressive, they began to give the governing party of Mr. Cosgrave a run for its money—Dev even had fringe elements still threatening armed struggle. The government countered, shouting the word “sedition,” wondering aloud about an armed coup, striking fear. Mr. de Valera grew stronger and stronger in parliamentary and local polling, and in late 1931, he seemed at his strongest. And here was I, also fledgling, trying to grow up very fast, too fast. That, you understand, is hindsight again.
Now, given that interest in politics, you can imagine, can’t you, how excited I was to meet an actual parliamentary candidate? At that first meeting in the cottage, no alarm bells rang—or at least I was deliberately deaf to them, and a little overwhelmed by King Kelly. Therefore, despite how uneasy I was about the rental transaction—I thought he’d bullied Mother—I couldn’t wait to get to the cottage next day.
At ten o’clock in the morning, I set off. By then, as had become my habit when at home, I had checked Mother’s general condition, found out what was happening everywhere on the farm, eaten breakfast, read the paper, and done some more thinking about the “situation.”
I had plenty to think about: The Kelly women, they’ve left some kind of mark on me. I’ve never met their like—they’re mysterious. And I knew that they were exotic—I gathered from her photographs that Sarah had sparkled in the brilliance of New York, and I guessed that she and Venetia had outclassed the new style of Dublin. Can you imagine how they looked in the small towns of Munster, where fleas still hopped, where milk went sour when the sun came out?
My father, though, he doesn’t look happy; that was my next thought. Is he unhappy because he hasn’t got his familiar things around him? Or is he unhappy because he’s trying to put on a kind of new personality? He looked cold in his bones, and I don’t think he’s enjoying his food. I didn’t sense much nourishment in his life. Those clothes, they didn’t look right on him—or is that because I’ve never seen them before?
And that affable certainty that was his hallmark—that was gone. He seemed more hesitant, not exactly timorous, but he had less assurance about him, and he conducted himself, his hands, his face, his general expression and demeanor, as though struck by a kind of permanent half-shyness. That smile—it had an embarrassed tinge to it.
My thoughts kept switching between him and the two women: Which of them had captivated him? A blind man could have figured that they were mother and daughter—the same walk, the carriage of the head, the neck. But whereas I’d been entertained, so to speak, by Sarah, and she’d engaged in conversation with me very fully and generously, I had no clue as to Venetia’s personality.
As I finished breakfast and prepared to walk down to the cottage, I thought again of the face behind the scarf. And I stepped back like a man scalded. Of course! Of course! It all hangs together!
How is it that a fraction often tells the whole story? Synecdoche—the part represents the whole. How is it that a sliver of light illuminates a whole room? From no more than the glimpse of the person behind the scarf, I somehow knew that she with her eyes glowing at me, and her mother with the soft touch and deep welcome—they were King Kelly’s blood.
Would this man, therefore, if indeed he were connected to the people with whom my father had run away—would he be any good in getting my father to come home to us?
The innocence that I had then. Oh, the innocence.
Those weren’t just trees in our woods, they were friends of mine. I loved our woodland, and I knew all the residents—they stood there, one-legged, cold in the winter, anxious in the damp and mists. In the coming summer I’d see them relaxed and so pleased with themselves in their new leaves. How often I visited them, just rambling, placing a hand on a trunk here, swinging from a branch there. I often helped them by clearing away their old bark and fallen debris, but I never ripped off a branch until I knew it to be truly dead. If I saw fungus I made sure to scrape it away—nasty stuff, and damaging, full of disease. (I met the human version that very morning.) If you’d dropped me blindfolded into that wood I could tell you where I’d landed, and I’d make my way simply by caressing tree after tree. We didn’t have woodpeckers, and I’d have hated it if we had—those beaks piercing the sweet bark.
The sun had emerged, that primrose sun we get along the river in winter, mild as a lamp shining in daylight. I came out of the trees and, despite the wet grasses, ignored the path and went straight across the fields to approach the cottage from the rear.
It had a small fence all around the front, enclosing a little garden, where Mother grew zinnias. There was a lilac tree to one side, large enough to give Miss Fay shade when she read out-of-doors in the summer. The rear of the cottage was reached abruptly—no fence, just the grass of the field running straight up to the wall and the back door, which was usually closed in winter but opened in the summer to let a breeze blow straight through the house.
As I skirted the corner I glanced in through the living-room window—and stopped. King Kelly was standing in the middle of the floor holding a gun. Next to him, with another rifle, stood a stranger, a man whose kind I’d never seen—stocky, very swarthy, hair gleaming black. I walked on past the window, pretending not to have seen, halted, didn’t know what to do, half-turned back, stopped.
A gun? Well, maybe the man—and Mr. Kelly—had come here for the shooting, for the
abundant pheasants.
When I knocked on the closed door, I heard some quick shuffling from within. I waited, then knocked again. King Kelly opened the door and greeted me like a gale—he greeted bigger than anybody I’ve ever known.
“Come in! The very man I want to see! I was just sitting here thinking about you and our little appointment. Come in!”
He led the way into the empty living room; the gentleman with the oily black hair had disappeared.
“Sit down, sit down! Are you Benedict or Benjamin?”
“Benedict, sir.”
“Of course you are. The most distinguished name in the church. Did you know that Saint Benedict founded the most arduous order of monks ever seen? Oh, yes. I have great devotion to him myself. One of my favorite books is the account Saint Patrick wrote of Saint Benedict’s life. Oh, yes, I’ve even been to Rome to visit Saint Benedict’s first monastery; they’ve his body preserved there. God, he was a hard man, he was as hard as Hell’s doorstep. He used to flog his monks to within an inch of their lives—did you know that? And then pray with them, for he was a very devout man. That’s a great name you have, Benedict, a great name. And he was a wonderful athlete; by all accounts, he could run like the wind.”
Every word of this was a lie. One of my teachers was a devout man called Willie Dalton. “He prays like a flockin’ engine,” Billy Moloney said, because he used to approach the altar on Sundays and say, “Jesus, Willie is here.” My father observed, “And there was probably a voice from Heaven saying, ‘Jesus, I hope not.’”
Mr. Dalton often narrated to us the lives of the saints for whom we were named. Saint Benedict was one of his favorites. And I had visited with my parents the Benedictine Abbey of Glenstal in County Limerick, where we were given a tour by the abbot, who was the son of Mother’s cousin.
(The genealogical term for such a relative is “a first cousin once removed.” Every time the abbot’s name was mentioned, my father said, “A first-first-first cousin once removed is very difficult to replace.” Again, one of his oldest and most threadbare jokes.)
Therefore I knew that the order of Benedict—actually, there isn’t an “order;” there’s a Benedictine Rule—wasn’t in the same league as, say, the hair-shirted and silent Trappists; that Saint Patrick didn’t write the life of Benedict because Saint Patrick was dead long years before Benedict was born—it was Pope Gregory who wrote it; that Benedict was a quiet and thoughtful man who never raised a hand to anybody; that his first monastery (as such) wasn’t in Rome but farther south in Monte Cassino; and that his body wasn’t preserved.
From an early age I knew the name of every saint whose body was preserved anywhere in the world, and I knew the state of preservation, whether bones, leathery skin, or parchment. Call it a morbid interest if you like, but there it is.
And I’d never heard a word about Benedict being an athlete.
Knowing that I had just listened to a pack of lies from an adult, I sat down as bidden. King Kelly sat directly opposite me. From his pocket he took a cigar bigger than a rocket to the moon, and offered it to me. I didn’t know what to do, so I said, “I don’t smoke, thank you, sir.”
With silver cutters and elaborate match work, and more ceremony than you’d see from a priest saying Mass, he fiddled the cigar into life, blew a bonfire-size plume of smoke to the ceiling, bent forward, and looked straight into my eyes.
“Would you be prepared, Ben, to become a leader of men?”
I said, “I don’t know, sir.” And I added, “I’m very busy just at the moment.”
“If you want something done,” he said, “ask a busy man. This is a serious question.”
“I suppose, sir,” I said, “I’d have to know a little bit more before I could answer such a question honestly.”
“Hah!” He slapped his thigh hard. “There’s the word I was hoping for. ‘Honestly.’ Where would I be lucky enough to find a young man today who has that word in his vocabulary? ‘Honestly.’ Hah!”
James Clare told me something interesting one day; he said, “Whenever you hear somebody saying, ‘To be perfectly honest with you’—you can be sure they’re lying.” I wish I’d known it then, it would have helped me with this man facing me, a man who applauded needlessly my casual use of the word “honestly,” a man who looked like a huge toad with black hair in his ears.
Next, King Kelly said, “Ben, would you be prepared to die for your country?” He said it with the gravity of ages; he might have been reading the words from a stone tablet. “Ben, there are serious times coming. Serious times. A group of us, all like-minded men—we’re looking to be ahead of these times. And we’re looking for a young leader—a handsome, striking young man. He’ll be our standard-bearer.”
When I’m in difficulty I want to close my eyes. In fact, I feel them closing and it takes an extraordinary effort to keep them open. It began to happen at that moment—and what kept them open was a different physical reaction, the response I now know as fear.
The insides of my bones, where the marrow is, grew cold. My thighs chilled; so did my forearms under my sleeves; so did my neck. I ran my tongue against the back of my upper teeth; I felt my toes clench.
King Kelly reached forward and put a hand on my knee. My father had told me long ago, “There’s no-no-no need for any man anywhere to put his hand on your knee or connected regions, and if some fellow does, you should politely leave the room and say you have to see a man about a horse.” (This was much in keeping with my father’s style. When I asked him where babies came from, he told me this and only this: “It depends on the weather and the condition of the roads.”)
I sat back a little, not able to move my knee on account of the tightness with which it was now gripped. Apart from the prizefight in the garden, I had no experience of physical violence; school had been peaceful; my size had helped.
Keeping his hand on my knee, King Kelly said, “I won’t sing, but I’ll recite to you the words of a famous song about an ancestor of mine.” He arranged his face into what I assumed he considered a look of nobility, and said, “Tell me, who is that giant with gold curling hair, he who rides at the head of our band? Seven feet is his height with some inches to spare, and he looks like a king in command.”
Naturally I recognized it, as everybody in Ireland would have done: “Kelly of Killane,” a famous ballad about one of the Wexford leaders in the 1798 rebellion.
“Ben, listen to me. John Kelly of Killane was my great-grandfather.”
This too, I reckoned, must be a lie; John Kelly was executed before he was twenty and, as every schoolboy knew, the yeomen soldiers of England used his head as a football in the streets of Wexford.
King Kelly squeezed my knee harder, and released me.
“The world, Ben,” he said, “is often a dark place, and into that darkness we have to bring light. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And it’s given, Ben, to only a few to be the bearers of that light. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“A true leader has to be a big man. Big. Strong. Kind. Moral. A man of decency.” King Kelly pushed back his chair, stood up, and began to pace the floor. “Like you, Ben. You’re a big, strong, kind young man. You’ll make a great leader. Like my great-grandfather, John Kelly of Killane.”
I rose from my chair and said, “Sir, I only came down to tell you that I couldn’t stay long.”
He looked at me with an eye so calculating and dangerous that I felt the first reaches of a vomiting impulse.
“Come over here to me,” he said, standing in the middle of the room, his chest puffed out like a vile monarch’s, his pale eyes glittering like a seagull’s.
I didn’t go over to him; I made a little feeble wave, said, “Good-bye, sir,” got to the door and out into the air, and didn’t calm down until I reached my lovely, familiar wood and was able to hug my friends the trees.
Within an hour I went back on the road. My quest to bring my father
home suddenly felt even more urgent.
Once again, I had no plan. My general feeling was that I should head to Charleville. Assuming that he’d still be there, what could I say to him, what would we talk about? Suppose I didn’t talk to him about the “situation”? Suppose we talked only about politics?
Back at the house, Mother had asked nothing about my visit to King Kelly. Anyway I had made up my mind to lie, say he wanted to know about milk and eggs and such things—and I wasn’t going to say a word about my belief that he had a connection to the traveling show. How I loathed deceiving her!
In Charleville, I saw my father on the street. The sight arrested me—not because he was doing anything wrong or awkward, but because he was sitting on a bench reading the newspaper, and he looked as though he might have been doing this all his life—gone out in the morning, bought the paper, and read it on this same bench.
In those days people still came out of their houses to look at a motorcar. A small crowd had gathered by the time I’d parked. Over his pages my father looked at me and the car and the half-dozen people and didn’t move, and I knew that he wouldn’t. I sensed that he wasn’t necessarily waiting for me to go sit beside him.
When all the questions had been answered, and the people and the children had dispersed, I walked to where he sat.
“Were they looking for the handlebars?” he said.
I laughed; this was a spark of him as he used to be.
“How are you?” I said to him.
“D’you know,” he said, “that you can make your teeth three shades whiter in three days?” He showed me an advertisement for a toothpaste called Kolynos. “I suppose that’d be a shade a day.”
“Where’s the show tonight?” I said.
He said, “Here’s good news,” and read an advertisement. “‘Switzers’ millinery buyer has returned and a lovely selection of new spring hats is now ready in their millinery department, including a large variety of sports and afternoon models, some of which are quite inexpensive.’”
Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show: A Novel of Ireland Page 17
