“Gude evening, sir,” she said in cultured tones, at the same time appraising Jamie with sharp, shrewd eyes in the same manner he would examine a horse. Satisfied, her air of false elegance dropped from her as if by default.
“Stranger in town?” she asked in a husky, good-natured voice.
“Yes … er no,” Jamie said, flustered. “I’ve been in Atlanta before.”
Madame Blanche gave a vulgar chortle and jogged him with a fat elbow. “I’ll bet you have, big boy. Do you wanta drink first, or d’you wanta go straight upstairs?”
Jamie muttered that he’d prefer a drink. The thought of “going upstairs,” with all that it implied, left his flesh clammy.
“Sure,” said Blanche, flashing her gold-and-white smile. “I’ll send one of the girls to drink with you.”
She sailed from the room, wafting an aura of perfume in Jamie’s direction that made his eyes water; the heavy folds of her red silk gown creaking and rustling like a schooner straining under full sail.
“Bernice,” Jamie heard her call up the stairs, “gentleman in the parlor.”
Glumly he wished he were somewhere else. The stubborn bravado that had brought him to Madame Blanche’s, after a round of drinking places, was gone. He was hung over emotionally as well as physically. I should have gone back to camp with Tavish; given the Sherwood bairn my chestnut colt for a birthday present; and then let Tom Sherwood break my jaw in return for the beating I gave him, he ruminated.
A tall, slight girl, with fair hair and a pale sort of undernourished prettiness about her, came into the room. “Hello,” she said in a flat, southern voice, “I’m Bernice. Blanche said you wanted a drink.”
Jamie nodded uneasily. The colored maid arrived almost on Bernice’s heels, bearing a tray crowded with bottles and glasses. She set up a temporary bar on a small side table, then stood waiting.
“Y’gotta give the girl something,” Bernice told him. Jamie fished in his pocket and handed the maid a dollar. He had no way of knowing if it was too much or too little. The girl took it and whisked away.
“How y’want your drink?” Bernice asked, acting as bartender.
Jamie shrugged distastefully. “Straight whiskey,” he said.
Bernice handed him a small bar glass filled to the brim. He downed it with a grimace. She brought her glass untouched and sat beside him on the red plush sofa. “You a farmer?” she asked disinterestedly.
Jamie shook his head.
“I didn’t think you talked like a farmer.” She took a small sip of her drink.
“I buy and sell horses … mules,” Jamie said.
Bernice looked at him, her pale eyes brightening. “You do? I was raised on a farm. We had an old mule … name was Luke. He just died a few weeks back.”
Jamie was grateful for any sort of common ground. “Sure now I wish I’d seen your mule. Maybe I could have saved him.”
“Think so?” the girl said dreamily. “I dunno … he was pretty old.”
“I’ve got the way of a way with animals,” Jamie assured her. “At home it was said I could take a horse cut in two and sew the pieces together, leaving the animal good as new, except for a slight stitching around the middle.”
Bernice laughed. “Aw, you’re spoofing me.”
“As sure as there’s truth in this world. Do I look like a man who would tell a lie like that?”
“It’d take more than stitching together to save Old Luke,” the girl said. “He was worked to death. Just like my ma’s being worked to death. Just like I’d a-been worked to death if I’d stayed there an’ let him.”
“Him? Is it your father you’re speaking of?” Jamie asked, shocked and curious.
Bernice turned her pale eyes on him. “I like the way you talk. Kinda crazy. Are you a foreigner?”
“An Irishman is never a foreigner,” Jamie told her. “He’s at home anywhere … like a tinker’s dog.”
“Of course I’m talkin’ about my pa,” Bernice said, reverting to the original subject with disconcerting abruptness. “He used to drag me away from the mirror by my hair to chop cotton in the field. You think it’s a sin for a girl to wanta look pretty?”
Jamie said that it wasn’t, thinking of his sister, Kate, with her plain, good face and her toil-roughened hands.
Bernice swallowed her drink and her voice took on a bitter edge. “He used to be drunk, too; sometimes for days. Then he’d wallop us kids for makin’ a sound. Got so we had to tiptoe round the house like mice. I won’t never forget the look on ma’s face when he was beatin’ one of us and she was begging him to stop.”
Jamie focused his eyes on the drop of amber fluid at the bottom of his glass. He was growing drowsy. Bernice droned on, reconstructing ugly fragments in the mirror of her early life.
“You know what? I’m glad I run away. I’m glad I’m a dollah fluzey. I’d rather be that than …” She paused while her mind fumbled for a comparison. “Anyway, I’m gonna make enough money to take my ma and the kids away from him.”
Madame Blanche rustled in, her eyebrows arched like sickles. “Well, well; haven’t you and big boy gone upstairs yet?” she asked Bernice.
“We been talkin’ over old times,” Bernice said shortly. She stood up, and Jamie also.
“Would you believe it,” Jamie exclaimed in fake shocked tones, “I know her father.”
The two women regarded him in dumfounded silence, and in the brief hiatus he marched to the door. “Sure it took the eyes right out of my head to find you here, Bernice, but your secret is safe with me.” With a flourish, he drew his last twenty-dollar bill from his pocket, crossed back and pressed the money into the girl’s limp hand.
“I knew her when the rose and the lily were fighting one another in her cheek,” he said to Blanche sadly. “Finding her here has been one of the bruising moments of my life. Good-by, Bernice. God go between you and harm in all the empty places you must walk.” He was out the door and down the block before either of the women found their tongues.
“You never told me you had a young man before you came here,” Blanche said, hurt, “and such a good-looker, too.”
The first merriment in years crept into Bernice’s eyes and face, and lifted the corners of her mouth. “A girl’s gotta have some secrets,” she said, and laughed.
Blanche heard her laughing all the way up the stairs. “Well it sure beats me,” she muttered to herself, puzzled. “Handsome fella like that … he finds her, just like in a storybook; then away he goes again … and her laughin’. I don’t rightly get it.”
The spirit of the jest shortened Jamie’s long walk to the camp. He hopped along the dark and empty road like a boy, occasionally laughing aloud at the memory of Madame Blanche and the perplexed look on her rouged face. “Oh, the poor pity of a woman. Another minute of my taletelling, and the tears would have been washing down the faces of the two of them.”
Dawn was tracing the even line of hills to the eastward with a rosy crayon when he heard the sharp, rhythmic clop-clop of a horse trotting behind him. Jamie stepped to the side of the road and waited, hoping for a ride. In the graying half-light he saw a shiny, well-kept buggy, with a woman driving a familiar-looking horse. The horse was Big Red. The woman driving him was Maeve.
“Whoa,” Jamie called as the vehicle came abreast. At the sound of the familiar voice, Big Red pulled up short and whinnied. “Madame,” Jamie saluted his wife, “would you offer a poor, footworn traveler a bit of a lift in your fine new carriage, and accept his blessing in return?”
“I might,” Maeve said unsmilingly. “Where has the poor, footworn traveler been?”
“To the Well at the End of the World, where I had a drink of the Water of Youth,” Jamie said grandly, climbing into the buggy. “Sure this is the day of my luck: A ride in a fine, new carriage in the morning twilight along a road as red as a fairy path, and with a strange and beautiful princess.”
Maeve leaned close to him and sniffed suspiciously at his clothes. “I feel the smell of
a melodious, lying Irishman,” she said coldly. “What have you been doing?”
“Now where did you pick up a fine expression like that?” Jamie asked, “melodious, lying Irishman.”
“From Tavish, when he was telling stories to the children. But let’s not change the subject,” Maeve continued. “What have you been doing?”
“Slaying dragons, and that I’ll make oath on.”
“Male or female?” Maeve demanded.
“Female … but now how would you be knowing that?”
“By the smell of your clothes,” Maeve said grimly. “There’s dragon blood on them.”
She whipped up Big Red and there was no more joking. Jamie sensed that he was in trouble and kept mouse quiet. When they arrived at the silent, sleeping camp, Maeve went directly to their tent, leaving Jamie to unhitch the horse. When he had finished and stepped inside the tent, he almost tripped over a washtub full of water.
“Now what might that be for?” he demanded.
“That, Mister Dragon Killer, is for you to wash off a certain smell before you sleep in this tent,” Maeve snapped. “Hurry up … off with those clothes. Into the fire they go.”
“’Tis my best suit,” Jamie wailed.
“Nothing less than fire will take out that stench,” Maeve retorted. “Hurry up … give them me.”
Reluctantly Jamie stripped to his underwear. “That, too,” Maeve insisted firmly.
“No,” Jamie cried. “Where’s your modesty, woman? Were I laid out stiff and cold at my own wake, and they came to take my underwear, sure I’d raise myself up in protest.”
“All right … you’ve protested; now take it off.” While Jamie moaned his objections, Maeve pealed the long union suit from him. “Now … into the tub.”
“Ouch … it’s cold, it is,” Jamie complained, testing the water with his foot.
“Yes it’s cold and it’s not from the Well at the End of the World, but it will wash the stench of fluzeys from you.” As Maeve talked her anger mounted, as much at herself as at her husband.
“Do you know how I happened along the road? Looking for you I’d been … all night, in Atlanta,” she flailed at him, “expecting to find you sprawled in some gutter.”
“Now that’s a fine thing to say to your own sweet husband,” Jamie protested.
“Well I’d rather have found you in a nice, clean gutter than where you were … doing what you were doing.” Maeve’s anger trembled on the verge of tears.
Jamie was conscience stricken. “Maeve, darling, hear me now …” he started to climb out of the tub but Maeve pushed him back.
“Don’t you get out until every inch of you has been scrubbed raw,” she ordered.
“I won’t … I won’t,” Jamie assured her, “but please hear me out.”
“I’ll never listen to you again. I sat for hours at the police station, telling them you were sure to be fighting and would be brought in. I thought you would need me. When you fought Travis Bunn, I promised to always be there … to hold your head in my lap; to bind your hurts. Now you’ve made me ashamed. I hate myself for worrying about you.” Maeve suddenly felt very tired. She went to the other side of the tent, undressed quickly and climbed into bed.
Quietly Jamie stepped from the tub and dried himself. He was aware now of how deeply he had hurt his wife. After blowing out the lamp, he crept silently between the covers and stretched himself at the farthest edge of the bed, while Maeve lay at the opposite, abject and miserable.
The gray of morning had invaded the tent, touching familiar objects with light and recognition. Outside, the chorus of birds chirped, whirred, and trilled. “Maeve,” Jamie said softly after what seemed like a long time, “give me leave to speak—to tell you what truly happened?”
From her side of the bed, Maeve gave no sign she heard. “You’ve every right to be angry,” Jamie continued. “I did go to one of those places. But nothing happened … I take oath upon that. Stand me over the Stone of Truth upon which St. Patrick knelt to pray and on which no man can utter a lie, and you’ll get the same answer. I wanted to hurt someone—anyone; but mostly myself. Now I know it was the love of my heart I was wounding.” He paused again but there was still no indication Maeve heard or was listening.
“You’re there … beside me … within reach of my hand, and yet so far from me, were I the man with the third foot who had but to touch it to the ground and seven miles passed as one step, still I could not cross to you.”
From Maeve’s small, shadowy figure came a strangled sound. “Please don’t,” Jamie whispered, “please don’t cry.”
“I’m not crying … I’m laughing,” Maeve said, her voice choking. She turned to Jamie and took him in her arms. “Och, what a child I have married. Jamie, my love, when will you learn to think first and act afterward?”
She was laughing and crying as Jamie smothered her lips with kisses. “My heart’s darling,” he said, “my treasure. I thought you had gone away, leaving the inside of me sacked and ruined; burned out like a captured castle of the olden time.”
About them the camp stirred and buzzed with life, but Maeve and Jamie who had been lost and apart for a time, slept soundly, locked in each other’s arms.
XVI
The quarrel between Jamie and Big Tom had thrown a chill upon the camp. Me-Dennis O’Ryan and his clan were embittered and threatened to take their numerous members away and form a group of their own.
“Your Jamie has outgrown his boots. He’s too much of a muchness,” Me-Dennis told Maeve, when she sought to smooth the matter out. “Laying into Big Tom for small reason, and him with the drink taken.”
Me-Dennis was speaking for Big Tom, who was not yet in a condition to talk for himself, with his scalp laid open by its contact with the sharp edge of the shackle. However, the gift of the chestnut colt soothed the leader of the O’Ryan clan somewhat, and he hurried off to examine the animal, muttering but mollified.
Maeve diplomatically kept Jamie out of sight until the matter was settled. When she brought the word that Me-Dennis was ready to forgive and forget, Jamie bussed her joyfully.
“’Tis proof of what I already knew—I have a wife who can walk in a river without wetting her shoes. What about that great lump of a fellow, Tom? Will he kiss and make up?”
“When the sense returns to his head that you knocked out of it, he will,” Maeve said, adding slyly, “but I’d speak a little admiration of Doreen’s baby if I were you. There’s an old saying: If you want a man’s friendship, praise his child or his horse.”
“I’ll do it now … and to his face,” declared Jamie, and departed to make amends with Big Tom.
By evening more Travelers’ caravans had rolled into the camp in the pines and pitched their spacious green tents. Instead of music and dancing that night, Owen Roe Tavish was called upon for a story. “A story it shall be, then,” he said, “and Heaven to everyone who shall remember this.”
The men broke off their conversations, packed tight their pipes, and shuffled closer, eager and attentive. Mothers quieted their children and grouped with the women in a body to listen. There was no intermingling of sexes. Men and boys, married or not, sat or stood together, while the women and children stayed apart.
Tavish was a self-trained, self-taught bard, but with a power to put his own skin on the tales he told. As a master storyteller, he warmed and breathed new life into the ancient sagas of heroism and heartbreak, which had passed from mouth to ear for untold generations.
In the time he had been with Shiel Harrigan’s group, the old man had won a warm and respected place. For the grown people he had become the shanachie, or historian and storyteller. With the children, he had taken Aunt Bid’s place, teaching them the legends and charms, the hundreds of small prayers and blessings that wrapped their daily lives in a mist of piety.
With the older men, he labored to bring their thick, strong fingers under control, so they might sign their names to deeds of sale, and not be shamed by making a clumsy cro
ss at the bottom of a document.
“There’s only one cross you should know about,” he would scold them, “and that’s the Cross of the Mountain, not one you scratch on a piece of paper.”
Deliberately this night he chose the epic story of Ferdiad and Cuchulainn, the friends and foster brothers, who had battled each other to the death in the great Cattle Raid of of the Cooley, some two thousand years before. The formal telling of a story was a thing of magic to these semi-illiterate wanderers. Their literature had been lost in the loot and pillage of their country; its language shriveled by neglect and persecution from a rich and expressive seven or eight thousand words to a paltry seven or eight hundred. There remained for them only the spoken word, and Tavish was a master of that.
“It has been said,” he began in a voice so soft his listeners had to strain to catch his words, “that a thousand years is as but a single day in God’s time, and a single day as a thousand years. A small while since, then, by God’s reckoning, there lived in the west of Ireland, a great and proud queen named Maeve, daughter of the High King of Tara. Such was the force of her beauty, ’twas also said, that men would close one eye when looking at her, as if peering at the sun, so bright-shining was her loveliness. Some historians make claim that this was how the ‘wink’ was invented.…” Tavish paused for the light laugh that swept his listeners like a sigh of eagerness.
“Sure I don’t hold with that interpretation,” he continued. “If the ‘wink’ needed inventing, then Maeve would have invented it herself. One day in the coolish part of the evening, she and her husband, a loud but lesser man than herself, were engaged in light pillow-talk. It was the custom in those uncivilized days among the melodious, lying Irish, to boast a little. So said the king: ‘Sure now ’tis plain my cows and kine, my pigs and swine, my horses, sheep, cups of gold and plate, my chariots, shields, spears, javelins, jewels, rich-dyed feathers and furs, gold and silver, outnumber and outweigh the likes of yours, dear wife.’
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