Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show: A Novel of Ireland

by Frank Delaney

The upshot? I was sent out next day with new marching orders: Stay near him. Follow wherever he goes. And don’t come home without him.

  I’ll never forget that first period of pursuit, that awful rough, damp time of February days, bad food and worse beds, cold journeys, hours of waiting outside decrepit halls and shabby pubs. Worst of all was the nonstop sense of pain and failure. I’d have given anything to be somebody else—or at least to be somewhere else. How could I succeed? You see, I still lived according to a boy’s fast, racing imagination, an adolescent’s need to be in the other world, the existence that has nothing to do yet with Life or Reality. I still hoped that I’d one day learn to fly, and swoop down on our yard, back from some foreign place where great birds as black as malice sat on stones high above the sandy desert. I still hoped that I’d one day go to some warrior school and learn swordcraft, and then stride through my own country, dealing out justice and avenging wrongs.

  On good days, I sometimes consider that horrid task the greatest compliment I’ve ever been paid. Mother kept on saying that she knew I was up to it, and I can see now that, even at the age of eighteen, I knew things. Epic things. Mysterious things. I don’t know how I came to know and understand them—all that solitude as a boy, I suppose.

  Was that how I came to grasp while still a schoolboy that my own country was in an epic moment? It had all the trappings, plus something that all epics need—a mysterious giant. He was the tallest man in politics, an epic figure if ever there were one, the difficult, opinion-splitting Eamon de Valera. Bear with me while I give you his background; you’re about to see him up close.

  God, monster, or both, Eamon de Valera dominated the country. He’d raised his image with care—the scholar-warrior, the soldier-intellectual.

  Control is the essence of power. De Valera measured every step he took, pondered every word he spoke. He allowed a brief pause before he answered a question. He had a frown as deep as the silence of Buddha. He stood head and shoulders above most people; it was said that his closest allies were chosen from men no more than five feet ten inches tall, so that his six feet and several inches could seem further heightened.

  They were the men who also nurtured his mythology. They called him “Dev,” but never to his face: They addressed him as “Chief” even before he won office. They said he understood the theory of relativity. They whispered that he had, in his soldier days, a beautiful and rich mistress from the upper reaches of his enemies, the English aristocracy.

  An entire mythology surrounded his birth. I’ve heard many versions, and depending on who told me the story, they ranged from immaculate conception to the whore with the heart of gold.

  One man swore to me, “Dev is the child of a Protestant mathematics genius from New England and a wild, beautiful dancer from Mexico.” Another man in the group said, “No, no—he was born in a Florida cathouse.”

  Here’s the version that my father told me.

  Edward—originally George—de Valera was the child of a girl from Bruree, a wooded part of County Limerick. Catherine or Kate Coll went into the service of an Episcopalian or Anglican clergyman down in the southwest of Ireland, and fell pregnant to the son of the house. To evade scandal the clergyman and his wife paid Kate’s passage to New York.

  Onboard ship, as her condition became more and more noticeable, the captain told her that without a named father for her child she wouldn’t get into the United States.

  He, as ship captains are empowered to do, entered her into a marriage of convenience. On deck on a sunny morning, a day out from the Hudson, Kate Coll married a Spanish gentleman by name of Juan Vivión de Valeros. He’s recorded in the birth details an “artist;” some people insist that he was a sailor on the crew of the ship.

  The child was born in New York some weeks later, registered on 10 November 1882 at a foundling home in midtown Manhattan. Senõr de Valeros is said to have died. The mother, who was to remarry a gentleman named Wheelwright, had no place in her new life for her barely legitimate son. She sent him back to County Limerick to be raised by her relatives.

  That’s the story as I’ve pieced it together, and some of it at least must be true, because it’s a fact of history that in 1916 Mr. de Valera had been able to prove to the British military authorities that he was American-born, and that’s why he wasn’t executed with the other rebel leaders.

  When the 1921 treaty was signed, Mr. de Valera used his fierce opposition to it as his power base. But half the country’s population blamed him for the civil war that broke out.

  His standing took another hammering when his former rebel ally and now chief rival, Michael Collins, the new nation’s army chief, and the country’s unequivocally beloved hero, died in an ambush. Dev’s enemies said that if he didn’t pull the trigger himself, he knew it was going to be pulled, and he could have stopped it. He could have issued an order to his men decreeing the absolute exemption of Collins from all and any assassination threats.

  My father, a fair-minded man in his conscious thoughts, worshipped Collins—yet he voted for Dev. He said that the Civil War and the death of Collins left Dev no place to go except deeper into a stance for the unity of Ireland. If Dev diluted his position, then the voices asking why Collins had needed to die would have forced Dev out of politics completely.

  As it was, Dev’s republican, united-Ireland stance cost him four elections and threatened to keep him out of power for all time. He, however, drove on, drawing huge crowds every time he made a speech. Soon, as he built his legend, the rural Irish people saw him as almost a mystic, as a leader whom they would follow over a cliff.

  Year by year, that power built up, and it cut both ways. Those who loved him would die for him—and many did. Those who hated him wanted to kill “the Long Fellow,” as they called him. In fact, were Dev to look like winning this election, said the rumors, the sitting government would stage an armed coup to keep him from getting power.

  And thus I, while searching for my father, came to observe a living myth at first hand, and in time drew him into my life.

  Never have I seen rain come down so vertically. It leaked into the car as I drove; when I halted under a tree, the wind blew the branches so hard that the rain tipped down on the roof in slews and slobs. I thought about turning back—until I imagined Mother’s face when I arrived home alone.

  The show was advertised to appear in Kilmallock that night. Blarney’s candidacy had by now made all the newspaper headlines—IT’S ALL BLARNEY ANYWAY and HOW APPROPRIATE and ANOTHER DUMMY IN THE RACE. A big crowd would surely turn up—but there was an even greater attraction. The town was about to see a larger audience than any hall in the county could hold, thousands of people. Driving rain wasn’t going to stop them.

  By the time I reached the outskirts of Kilmallock, the windshield had misted over on the inside; rain washed diagonally across the glass outside. I could scarcely see, nor could I peer out of the side window and look ahead. My speed came down to about five miles an hour; a donkey could have passed me.

  I asked a man sheltering in a doorway where the traveling show was to be.

  He said, “’twon’t be ’til very late—the Long Fella is giving a speech here.”

  “In the town?” I’d been so preoccupied I hadn’t noticed.

  “I hope he gets pneumonia.”

  I said, “Well, we have the weather for it,” and drove on.

  The Chief was known to let nothing stop him. Were the weather to turn biblical, the rally would still go ahead—his crowds were already on the march. By arriving so early I secured a place front and center. My eyes would be level with the speakers’ feet. Above me, I’d get the closest view of their faces. Looking behind me, I’d be able to see the entourage approach.

  Also, in this position I’d be able to turn to see the heckling when it started—if it started. Mr. de Valera represented the biggest prize among all the election hecklers, but his henchmen had a robust attitude toward interruptions.

  The crowd thickened early
and soon began to press around me. My raincoat and sou’wester hat proved equal to the weather and I stayed dry as flour. Judging from the pressing forward, the crowd was going to get even bigger than expected. I held firm, my hands against the backs of the barricade. A man behind me said, “Pity you’re not a girl I’m that close to you.”

  Within minutes I saw a familiar face—my uncle Denny, married to my father’s sister. We often visited their house; my father and my aunt had a close and friendly relationship, and my father dearly liked his brother-in-law. That night I knew I mustn’t meet him; Mother had warned me to avoid all contact with everybody we knew: “Don’t talk to anybody until your father comes home again.”

  Which meant I had to slink around the countryside like a spy. But from the depths of the crowd and muffled in my raingear, I could look at my uncle without him seeing me—and I didn’t like what I saw.

  This decent, happy man had changed for the worse. Always round and jolly, he now sagged, gray in the face and with a lonely air. His coat hung from his shoulders like an empty sail, and he stared ahead, unseeing and alone. That told me how ill he was, this famously gregarious host, who kept a most genial public house at the far end of the street.

  I looked away and looked back again, to confirm my first impression. The second look gave me a worse result, and I wondered if my father had seen him lately. This could help me; this could draw my father back into the fold.

  But I didn’t have time to dwell on it. A moment later I felt a sudden surge of pressure at my back as newcomers piled forward. A chatter sprinkled though the crowd, a buzz of fever.

  “He’s here,” said voices around me, rising in excitement. “He’s here.”

  I heard pipe music and I turned around.

  In the distance of the dark night, down the hill of Sarsfield Street, which had been kept empty, a wide and long rectangle of lights moved forward at a steady pace. These were lines of men holding up pitchforks, on which sat flaming bricks of gasoline-soaked peat. I counted ten men across and twenty deep. Under the poor street lighting, they marched in slow step, a triumphal and stately advance guard. Their flames soared and flickered up into the night, lighting their faces, and those faces were as rustic as the burning peat, and as fierce as the fire they carried.

  Many yards behind them, in a wide open space all to himself, stepped a piper, with a set of bagpipes as big as a sheep. He played one of those Irish tunes that are called a “march,” but they’re a slow march, and they stir the blood with their deliberate power.

  Behind the piper marched twelve more torchbearers, six on either side of a great white horse. On the horse rode a tall man wrapped in a massive black cloak. Dev had arrived, the Chief, the leader of the “Soldiers of the Legion of the Rearguard,” as the republicans now called themselves, the Warriors of Destiny. This was politics as theater—and how we loved it.

  The site of the speech had also been chosen for dramatic reasons—the medieval stone arch at the foot of the hill. Under its ancient curve sat a truck whose wooden flatbed had been set with chairs. The torchbearers arrived at the arch and formed two columns of honor guard; within moments the campaign team arrived. Six men ascended the platform by a short wooden ladder, and stood, three by three, to face the crowd.

  And then came the seventh man, the One. Sedate and competent, he slid from his horse and walked a slow pace forward. The round spectacles on a beaked nose glinted in the light. With a steady climb he ascended to the truck flatbed and stepped forward for the crowd to see him. Had I been standing farther back I’d have seen how he’d arranged for the arch to frame him. The crowd began to applaud—and then to cheer, and to cheer, and to cheer. Eamon de Valera bowed with a swirl of his wide black cloak, looked behind him to find his chair, and sat down.

  The early speakers had little to say: land sales, dairy prices, and a hot national potato—wage increases for the police. Their warm-up act didn’t last long, and then the Chief stood up.

  He pushed back the hood of his cloak and stood bare-headed, so far forward from under the arch’s edge that the rain poured down his long face. He would be fifty the coming October, and he looked older than the mountains. The great black cloak stayed wrapped around him; the glass circles of his spectacles shone. His head turned like a lighthouse, for five, ten, fifteen seconds, scanning the crowd, giving them his beam. Then he threw open the cloak, held out his long white hands, and pronounced, “My beloved people.”

  Everything about him—the torchbearers, the white horse (or was it winged Pegasus?), the black cloak, the defiance of the elements: mythic. Even as I watched, he seemed to grow taller.

  And the voice completed the fabled presence—a wide, rich accent, with a growl when needed, and above all a clarity. Though he seemed never to enunciate, you could hear every word he spoke. He’d been a teacher, I knew; and his experience of a classroom’s authority had translated itself upward to the political stage. This man stood there as if rooted—unassailable and fierce. As Large Lily would have said, “He was like something you’d write away for.”

  The content of de Valera’s speech took second place to its form; the meaning of his words mattered less than the impression. At first he didn’t seem a spectacular orator—little fire, less brimstone; but as his speech continued I began to feel hypnotized.

  Remember—I wasn’t there to fall under anybody’s spell. Yet I found myself unable to stay outside this experience, to watch as a mere observer. Whether I liked it or not, I was being drawn into the mood of the night.

  Epic? Yes—without question, especially to somebody like me, who even at that age was drawn to the legendary and the fabled. Here, though, wasn’t I watching that most dangerous of things—a myth being deliberately built? Of course I was! Politics has always reached for whatever it can to secure the hearts and minds of the voters—promises, theatrics, blandishments, snake oil.

  It’s to my credit and discredit that I went along with it—and perhaps as a boy of eighteen I should have done. I felt the crowd’s excitement. I looked up at this man and was awe-stricken. I saw the weather of Ireland on him, the rain falling on his head and flowing down his face, and I felt that he was part of those elements, that he was in some way from the gods.

  That’s what he wanted me to feel, I know. And yes, he did grow taller as his speech went on, but it was a rising to the occasion that lifted him higher. And the cadences of his voice grew warmer, but it was the warmth of fire. And he became more reassuring, but it was the reassurance of a man who felt that he was about to be confirmed as the most powerful figure in the land.

  “Since we got our freedom,” he intoned, “the freedom we struggled for, the freedom we roamed the mountains and hills fighting for, the freedom we spilled our blood for. Since we got that freedom, we have been seeing the beginnings of a new slavery. Taxation. The government has paid its members and its friends handsomely. Taxation. Out of our money. Taxation. They drive big cars. Taxation. They live in fine houses. Taxation. What has happened to freedom? Taxation. What have they done to man’s most precious possession, the gift of liberty? Taxation.”

  Not once did he wipe the rain from his face. Not once did he flinch as a fresh February squall swept over him. Not once did he falter, hesitate, stumble, or halt.

  And I doubt that any of his three thousand listeners flinched either—I certainly never wiped my face. I stood directly beneath him and next day I had a crick in my neck, because I’d never once ceased to look up at him. If that’s not a mesmeric effect, what is?

  The words he spoke told us nothing new. We were a proud nation, with an ancient history; we had the resources and the international friendships to go it alone; we deserved our total independence, but we wouldn’t have that independence until all the vestiges of a foreign power had been expelled from our rich and storied island.

  He’d said it all before; he’d say it all again; this was a man who rode to power on the white horse of his own vision. And made us see that white horse too, and wish we o
wned it.

  Mr. de Valera didn’t stay for the adulation; he’d have been there all night. He turned away, descended, didn’t look right or left, didn’t shake hands—and vanished into the dark of Sarsfield Street. I saw the hawk face in profile one last time and it wasn’t made of flesh, it was carved from stone.

  Somebody near me asked, “How long was the speech?”

  A few voices answered, “Just over the hour.”

  In the rain, on a cold evening, this man as aloof as a hermit had made us forget for sixty minutes where we were, and made us think only of where we might go. Under his leadership—and he said so—we could go anywhere, be anything, be free.

  The crowd began to thin out, and I looked across to see my uncle Denny. He didn’t move when the others did; he stood there, silent, head bowed, rain dripping from his hat. His hand rested on a lamppost—I soon realized that he needed its support. He looked dreadfully ill, and it wasn’t just the peculiar light from the lamp above his head. I waited until he began to walk, and then I followed him to make sure that he reached his home or someplace that looked safe.

  He could have taken a number of shortcuts, but he stayed on the same long, climbing street. I saw him clearly all the way, ten yards ahead. He walked very slowly. Many people hurried past him; nobody stopped him to greet, to talk. They say that when a man knows he’s going to die, he’ll let nobody recognize him.

  With me now twenty yards or so behind, my uncle reached his house, climbed the steps, and paused. He was so weak, trembling and shaking his head. At last he opened the door to his house and went in, slow as a funeral. I never saw him again.

  “My beloved people,” began another political speech that night, “I love you because you’re going to vote for me. Since we got our freedom, the freedom we hid under the beds for, the freedom we ran away for, the freedom we spilled other people’s blood for—since we got that freedom, we’re slaves. But I want you to be my slaves. I want you to stop paying your taxes to the government and pay them to me. I want a big car out of your money. I want to buy myself a fine house out of your money. That’s what your money can do for me. That’s why I want you to vote for me—I want you to elect me as the best man to take your money. I’ll buy a bigger car than anyone. I’ll buy a better house than anyone.”