Ireland

by Frank Delaney

  “Let someone else do that. Inside the box, the only thing in it, you’ll find the last piece of the document I wrote for you.”

  “The chronicle?”

  “Read it. It’s not very long.”

  Kate arrived early next morning and helped to prepare the old man for his public. He allowed himself to feel excited and had kept abreast of every invitation and every acceptance.

  “This is like giving me back the best parts of my life,” he said. “I don’t deserve this—but it’ll be lovely to see them all.”

  Ronan had previously explained his chore to Kate. He then left the two of them, having worked out detailed timetables of everyone’s arrival at the theater. Following the Storyteller’s directions, he drove to the riverbank; no swans appeared, but he found the essential tree and shivered as he dug up the box wrapped in sacking—it felt to him like exhuming a body.

  Prizing open the rusted lid required a screwdriver from the car and finally a stone to hammer in the sides. In an old oilcloth, like a tobacco pouch, he found the small stash of blue pages; the title page read, “A Storyteller’s Chronicle—Final Installment.”

  Ronan sat in the car and read.

  OF LOVE AND TRUTH

  FOR MANY YEARS I HAVE HAD TWO POWERFUL loves in my life; I have had them for as long as I have been able to think clearly about my feelings; I have carried them in my heart, and they have defined my existence. When they were joined by a third love, my life felt completed, a circle closed. My feelings for these three—I shall call them “entities”—have been my salvation, although it has taken me until now to understand that fact. This realization broke upon me gradually; I had no epiphany, no blinding light, no voice booming down from on high. Slowly I began to grasp what they have meant to me.

  The first love is my country. I describe it to myself as like one of those wells I know, out in the land somewhere, miles from anywhere, on a mountainside, or beneath ferns in an old forest. There it will sit, alone and untroubled, secluded and quiet, yielding pure and cool water that has risen to the surface from deep in the earth.

  I have a number of such wells in mind. In county Longford, not far from the town of Granard, a spring bubbles in some rough ground a few yards from the roadside. Climb the old wire fence where it ties into a tree, walk in a north-westerly direction, and look out for some unexpected ferns and water fronds; the big green blades will catch your eye. The water in that spring, which bubbles up by some stones, has as lovely a taste as water may ever have.

  Just off the road between Cashel and Tipperary, beyond the hamlet of Thomastown, you will find, along a broad avenue going north, a deep well, lined with stone, a dark and excellent spring that once serviced the great local houses.

  And, out in the plowed fields of Kildare, near the town of Newbridge, there is a well so hidden in an old grove that I may be the last person alive who knows of its existence.

  My love of country feels like those wells; I go to it for refreshment. The springs may rest in brackish land, but their waters rise up from a source deep as the soul, and to drink it is private and renewing.

  And love of country must remain a private matter. In Ireland, to love your country requires a political statement, which I refrain from uttering. Worse than that, it is a political statement measured only by the hostility expressed against England. As I believe that no love can have enmity as a component; therefore I say nothing, and I continue to love my country more than I have words to tell. Besides, to express such powerful emotion in public smacks of vulgarity.

  That is partly the reason that, in my stories, I never directly mention my love of country. The other reason is—my eyes will fill with tears. But when I come out on the road of a morning, when I have had a night’s sleep and perhaps a breakfast, and the sun lights a hill in the distance, a hill I know I shall walk across an hour or two thence, and it is green and silken to my eye, and the clouds have begun their slow, fat rolling journey across the sky, no land in the world can inspire such love in a common man.

  Or when I sit by the weir on a river and watch small birds fly, busy, busy, in and out of the hawthorn bushes, or a peaceful man in the distance flicking a line onto the water, or touch a horse’s velvet muzzle over a fence in county Limerick—then I know that I love this land down to its limestone bones.

  My second love had flesh and blood. Her name was Sylvia; I miss her still, as I have missed her every day of my life, and I vowed when I began to keep this ramshackle record of my existence that I would conclude by honoring her and her memory and her descendants. Sylvia was my only true love. I met her in a house in county Monaghan that first year I took to the road. Other than a wild woman in Rome one night, she was the only girl with whom I lay. It happened like this. We stayed, my old storytelling mentor and I, in Sylvia’s family home, telling stories for four days. She sat facing me each night in the kitchen, and I began to dream of her. When the time came for us to leave and take to the roads again, I found I could not go. Back I went and found her, and we sat on the hillside. She enchanted me, and she said I enthralled her. We wrapped our arms around each other, and no other world existed. I lingered in the neighborhood for weeks, seeing her every day.

  Inevitably it transpired that Sylvia had conceived a child. When her body could not be masked anymore, our world caved in. Priests were called; I was whipped and kicked by her family and told what shame I had brought to a lovely girl—and banished from her sight forever.

  It is probably impossible to imagine today how much shame a pregnancy outside wedlock could bring down on a girl and her family. Sylvia’s distress, and the fact that I had caused it, broke off a part of my heart; that she and I had to part, and would never live our lives with and for each other, destroyed part of my soul.

  The church, the priests, forced the pace. They made her marry the well-to-do local man whom her parents had always wanted to bring into the family. And the world was told to assume that he was the father of her child. He was a man called O’Mara, and the boy Sylvia bore under his name was my son—my son, John; I believe she named him after me, even though John was also her own father’s name. Later, she had a son by this Mr. O’Mara, whom she named Tobias.

  I managed through the years to keep track of my son. Sylvia’s closest friends helped secretly; they told me where John went to school, what happened to him next, and so on. Year by year I kept in touch with his life—and one day, not long after he married, I visited him and his new wife, down in the south.

  My son John knew about me and received me with a kindness that made me proud of him. His wife, however, feared the disreputableness of her husband’s bastardy, and I was never truly welcome in that house. Were we ever to meet in public, she told me, I would not be acknowledged.

  My life changed again when my third love came to earth—when my grandson was born. I learned that a child of my son had come into the world, healthy and strong. He was an infant when I first saw him—a snatched glimpse in his father’s arms on the streets of the nearby town.

  Thereafter, I found ways of learning his progress, largely through Sylvia’s other son, Toby, who was always kind to me. As the boy grew, I was able to keep a kind of watchful eye over him, and from time to time I was even able to observe him at play in the woods among the badgers and the deer. But I knew that were I to try and make him truly part of my life, he might suffer from my past, and so I have had to be content with a few days spent in his company as a little boy and a few hours after the funeral of his father, my dear son.

  And through Toby too I was able to return Sylvia’s ring to our son’s finger; Toby gave it to me when his mother died, and in his kindness he never felt overlooked when, years later, I asked him to put it on his half-brother’s hand.

  This, then, has been my life’s secret—a hidden and surely unpopular love of country; an unrequited passion for the only woman I ever loved; and a son and grandson observed from a distance. And to think that my loss of family came from love.

  It proba
bly could not happen now; Ireland is more elastic, and these matters do not weigh so gravely. Back then, in 1912, it amounted to a black disgrace; there was no shame like shame, especially if it involved a former aspirant priest such as I was.

  If I have a dream left, it is that my “family” (I feel only a hesitant right to call them so) will one day understand that for this love and this disgrace I committed myself to a life on the road and to teaching the history of my country by means largely of my imagination—facts alone have always been too painful for me. There were times when I knew this was an extreme decision—but all in all I have gained inner riches beyond measure. I hope I have brought light into people’s lives; to love of woman I have added love of country and, now, love of a generation that will carry my blood—and my name, which is the same as my grandson’s.

  I, the writer of this entire account, am the young Ronan O’Mara; I am the one who has been telling you this story, which began in 1951 when my grandfather came across the fields to our house.

  Now I know why my father had always told me about the old storytellers and that I should look out for one; what was it he said? “I wouldn’t be surprised if one of them came here one day.” The picture he painted was, of course, that of his own father; I remember the words so well: “He’ll probably be tall and old, with boots and a hat, and he’ll enchant us all.” And again, on the night we first saw television, he pressed me further: “This is my advice. Go look for him.”

  For the rest of my life I shall remember that time, that April day when I learned the Storyteller’s identity; the texture of the weather, sunshine trying to break through; how the wind-screen of the car misted up as I sat inside reading; the kind air when I got out again to lean on the car and weep; the farmyard geese tugging at the grasses of the field where I dug up the box.

  And I remember every moment of the drive to Cork—how everything fell into place, above all my “mother’s” rejection of the Storyteller. Alison, to whom appearances and moral respectability had such critical importance, evidently feared that her husband’s illegitimacy might become public. Then, had I found the old man in my travels and brought him back into the family, as I would surely have done, she might have threatened my inheritance; was that why he had so clearly wished to evade my company—to keep me safe? He certainly altered when I told him my father’s will had been discharged.

  But—did Alison not know that in all secretive communities, such as the Irish countryside, there is no such thing as a secret, except to the people who live it? Suddenly I recalled how the people after the funeral looked at me when the Storyteller told of Hugh O’Neill in that cottage; did they all know he was my grandfather, did everyone always know? I have no doubt that they did, as they most certainly knew of my parentage.

  As for Sylvia: now I understood too why the details of my father’s mother had been so vague. Toby was the only member of his family that I knew—Toby was all I would ever have been allowed to know. Now his role was clarified too; that’s how I was able to receive a letter from my grandfather at the bank; he had obviously kept in touch with my grandfather, fed him news of Dad—and of me. By the time I drove by the ribbon of the river Lee into Cork city, my questions had begun to evaporate like mist in sudden sunlight.

  Fifteen minutes before curtain time I slipped in at the stage door. In the wings Kate stood beside my grandfather, who sat on a stool and looked away when I approached; Kate stepped aside from us.

  “Did you find it?” he said.

  “I did.”

  He lifted a cautioning finger. “Say nothing to me now, not now.” His eyes looked desperate, and I felt indescribable, almost panic-stricken sorrow for him—all those years; all that displacement; his and my father’s loss of each other; the loneliness implicit at the thought that I would have dearly loved to have lived my life never more than five feet away from him.

  I said, “Please. I’m trying to cope with shock.”

  With worry his ears seemed to draw back like a frightened dog.

  “One question,” I said.

  He nodded.

  “If you already knew that Alison was so hostile—why did you come to our house that evening in nineteen-fifty-one?”

  He had a habit of gnawing his lower teeth on his upper lip. Now he did it—but he had such bravery; he never took his eyes off mine.

  “Because,” he said, “I couldn’t bear it any longer. I contacted your father, and I told him I’d die if I didn’t meet you.”

  A stagehand strolled forward, in shirtsleeves; “Any time you like, sir, we’re all ready for you.”

  I was by now thoroughly flummoxed. For something to say, I asked Kate, “Should someone introduce him?”

  She calmed my fretting; “It’s an invited audience—they all know him or know of him. And they’re not expecting to see anyone else.”

  And now I certainly would not have been capable of any coherent few words.

  My grandfather rose to his feet, took off his hat, and put it on again. Kate fixed his lapels, brushed him down a little, tweaked his waistcoat, and, not a little quavery, he strolled onstage and in the center sat on the simple kitchen chair he had requested.

  The curtains rolled back, and the applause built up and up, almost into a roar. As Kate and I watched, the quavers in his hands vanished; like an old stage trouper, he sat there calmly and went through all the familiar motions.

  “I’ll be with you in a minute,” he said to the audience, fixing the hat, the pipe, the opening out of the coat, the settling back in the chair, the surveying. Finally he cleared his throat.

  I’M TO TALK TO YOU, THIS ANNIVERSARY YEAR, about the insurrection of nineteen-sixteen. The Irish Rebellion, the Easter Rising, the Poets’ Rebellion—people have given it many names. Let me be clear immediately as to how I think of it: it was the final movement that gained the Irish people back most of their country from the English. On a personal level, it made me look at people and their capacity for bravery in a way I have never since forgotten to do.

  Often I make up the stories I tell, especially if they refer to times before history was written down. If I’m within the bounds of history, I invent little, only what I need for color and atmosphere—but otherwise I follow the historical facts largely as I was taught them. Which doesn’t mean they’re always right, and which doesn’t mean I always tell them as they were meant to be told.

  Tonight, I’m certainly going to tell you a story, but ’tis a story with a difference because, unlike virtually every other tale I tell—in this case, I was there. And yet I know that although I was there, and I saw people who were real, they have since become somewhat imagined—because I now view them through my memory. That’s something every human being does—but storytellers live by it.

  The building that housed the Easter Rising was the General Post Office in Dublin, and it must be the largest building ever constructed in the world, to judge from the number of people who claim to have been in it on that famous Easter Monday, the twenty-fourth of April, nineteen-sixteen; I was twenty-seven and a half years old when I entered its carved portals.

  Let me begin by describing the morning, the way the world felt. It was mild; the weather was what we’d call “soft”; people were still in an airy mood after Easter Sunday.

  I had been in a good billet outside Dublin in the village of Chapelizod on the river Liffey. After five hospitable nights, I found myself on the Monday morning walking in the tranquillity of Phoenix Park. More than a few carriages clopped by on their way through the park, heading off to be in plenty of time for the first race at Fairyhouse, which as you know is about twenty miles outside Dublin. Some of the carriages were lovely, elegant broughams and painted sidecars, and I stood to watch them drive by, with the spokes of their wheels flashing. The ladies in them wore bonnets and looked grand.

  For myself, I resisted anything that looked like an omnibus or a tram, and soon I reached Kingsbridge. I kept on walking east toward the sun, following the river along the quays towa
rd the center of the city. Tongues of bright water gurgled from pipes pouring into the river Liffey; now and then someone went past me on a bicycle, whistling; a man on a horse and cart delivered milk to a high doorway behind which everybody was asleep; you could tell from the blindness of the windows.

  The odd thing was—and I can capture this feeling now—something in my heart had begun to stir. I didn’t know what it was; I could call it excitement, but it was more than that. Was it elation, a sense of triumph, or something dark? Yes and no to all of those things; it was a strange feeling; it hurt me, worried me, and made me happy at the same time. I might have been as near to tears as to laughing.

  At the next bridge I stopped to admire the view; the sky was clear, except for a lovely wisp of cloud like the tail of a white mare. In my reverie, I thought I heard something very definite approaching, something considerable, but I could see nothing. Remember, banks, shops, and offices were to stay closed that day, a public holiday. A woman walked by; she looked thoughtful; she was wearing black, and she was probably going to half-past-eleven mass somewhere in a church along the quays.

  The kind morning air seemed to grow clearer. Then I heard it again—from behind me, steady and in a rhythm. I still couldn’t see anything, and the noise puzzled me. I walked to the far side of the bridge, and round a corner they came; I shall never forget it.

  A troop of armed men marched along that quayside toward me, about eighty of them, a people’s army, you’d call them, mostly in civilian clothes. “Country boys,” I thought immediately; they had complexions ruddy from fields, not pale from offices; they lacked the general smoothness to which a city rubs its dwellers. A few, not more than nine or ten of them, wore a green uniform with a slouch hat—that is to say, a hat with one side of the brim standing up at right angles.

  Who were these men, these boys? I think of them now as Irish tribesmen, with names such as Dolan, MacEnroe, Cusack, Egan, O’Donnell, Keogh, Brady, Daly, Lahiffe, Curran, MacMahon, O’Loughlin—any and all of the names in Ireland’s long genealogy, names from before the time of Saint Patrick, names you have all known and heard, the music of our daily lives.