And at the same time, heading across over here east of us, you’d have seen the fat king’s army, a great column of soldiers and horses and donkeys and mules, dragging wagons of food and ammunition and explosives, and big, shiny, heavy field guns that’d knock down the golden walls of heaven itself.
Again I found myself torn: listen or hope to take an accurate note? The weather lost its meaning for John Jacob—by which I mean a typhoon could have struck and he’d have kept going.
Did I imagine it or did he seem to rise higher on the ground, proud as the little hill of Ballyneety itself? I’m certain to this day that a person passing by, down on the main road, might have looked up at us and thought that a statue had been erected on this historic site, or at the very least that a great actor had come here to perform.
I ceased to exist in my body, because as he rose to the high and wild climax of his story, my spirit ascended with him.
Now you’re asking yourself, “How in the name of God could a force of five hundred horse soldiers go through the countryside and not get seen?” Well, they did get noticed. Protestants in Killaloe saw them and reported them, but the word didn’t get to King Billy until the Sunday, and he sent out a sizable military party to find these wild riders, but he didn’t find them. In any case, he was too late.
By then Sarsfield and his men were up there on those wooded hills. Look! You can see the same trees or their grandchildren, and hidden there beneath the branches, the leaves making dapples on their faces, Sarsfield and his riders could watch the siege train off in the distance, dust rising from it. Miles long it was, a hundred and fifty wagons, and they saw the head of the snake get to the village of Cullen, while the tail of the serpent was still back in the village of Monard.
The siege train camped that night here at Ballyneety. In the lee of this big rock they lit a great campfire. Those old stones over there—they’re the remains of a ruined castle the men could shelter in. And they had only a dozen miles to go the next day to join King Billy’s main army.
When the soldiers of the king put the horses grazing, they posted a few indolent sentries, they ate their supper, and they settled down for the night. Not for an atom of time did they suspect that five hundred tough Irishmen on horses were about to breathe down their necks—well, they say a good soldier never looks behind. Their sentries, most of them, fell asleep.
The ball hops to the winning team, and that afternoon Sarsfield got a great bounce. One of Galloping Hogan’s men had a horse that threw a shoe, and the man had no choice but to get off and walk. He wasn’t, of course, wearing a military uniform—why would he? He was a rapparee. So he could walk his horse along the road and nobody would suspect that he was part of a big raiding party.
He saw a woman ahead of him, and being a man who liked the ladies, he got into a chat with her. Dimpling her cheeks, she told him that she was the wife of one of King Billy’s soldiers, and that she was going to see her husband in the camp at Ballyneety that night.
He said to her, “But will they let you in?” and she said, “I have the password.” And he said to her, “What’s the password?” and she said to him, “I’m not supposed to tell you.” But he gave her the glad eye, and maybe a bit of a squeeze, and she told him. And d’you know what the password was? The password was the name “Sarsfield.”
Galloping Hogan, Patrick Sarsfield, and the five hundred men formed up a few fields away from the siege train. They could see the glow of the campfire, they could almost hear the chomping of the horses grazing, they could smell the food. Slowly they rode up to the nearest sentry.
“Halt!” says this fella. “Who goes there—friend or foe?”
“Friend,” says Sarsfield, cool as cress.
“Give the word, friend,” says the sentry, meaning the password.
“Sarsfield is the word,” says Sarsfield, “and Sarsfield is the man.” Leaning down, he bisected the sentry with a mighty slash from his sword, and he and Hogan and their fiery hundreds rode into the camp.
Sarsfield’s men rounded up the siege train horses, which were all saddled and bridled and armed, and prepared to rustle them home. They terrified the siege train soldiers into gathering all the cannons, the guns, and the gunpowder. When Sarsfield saw what he had captured, he danced on his saddle: a dozen pieces of large artillery, wagon after wagon of gunpowder, shot, and cannonballs—and matches to light them all.
Galloping Hogan ordered one of the gunners to demonstrate how best to explode everything. The gunner stuck the muzzles of half a dozen field guns into the ground, like geese in a field with their beaks in the clay, then stuffed the guns with gunpowder. They piled everything else on and around the field guns.
With the blade of Sarsfield’s sword at his neck, the gunner ran a fat trail of gunpowder, thick as the spoor of a giant snail, along the ground to a safe distance. Sarsfield’s men took all the horses from the siege train and all the mules, and they rode them away, far out of reach of King Billy’s soldiers, because no decent Irishman would ever want to harm a horse.
Sarsfield turned to Galloping Hogan and said, “Mr. Hogan, to you falls the honor of lighting this fuse.”
Hogan put a match to the trail of gunpowder, and they rode out of the camp like the wind and let the flame eat the fuse.
The explosion woke people out of their sleep for miles and miles around. They heard it in Tipperary, twenty miles away, where it broke windows. They heard it in Clare, thirty miles away, where it cracked a chimney. They heard it in Kilkenny, forty miles away, where it roused the birds from their nests. And they heard it in the city of Limerick, where they danced in the streets: Sarsfield was indeed the man. King Billy knew that the game was up, and it wasn’t long until he finished the siege and went away home.
I tell you this, the most famous story in Ireland, just to prove to you that we have to be careful when we use the word “mythology”—because it might also be history. And what’s the most important thing about history? The most important thing is: history is what’s happening to us all the time, and it happens again and again. To each and every one of us.
41
All they’d said about John Jacob O’Neill had come true. All the times and all the days on the road, and all the legends had, for me, come down to this man.
Although he told me a news story from three hundred years ago, a story known in every Irish schoolroom—he yet told it as the bards had done in the courtyards of the kings. As the storytellers did under the banyan trees of Asia. As the weatherbeaten travelers with their brown, creased faces still do in the high villages of Peru.
We sat in the car. He looked exhausted. How much heart did it cost him to build that stage on which figures laughed, and rode horses, and tempted Providence? How much emotional energy did he commit to laying the trail of gunpowder, “thick as the spoor of a giant snail,” across the grass and out of the camp, ending in a small pile to which that wild man, Galloping Hogan, then applied the flame from a tinderbox?
And where did he learn that he must show us the life behind and beyond the story? How the riders looked to a wife whose farm they rode past; how they lolled with their horses under the trees on Keeper Hill; how the brave sentry at the Williamite camp stepped forward with his challenge and then looked up aghast at Sarsfield’s descending sword as it flashed in the light from the campfire.
My hand ached as I closed my notebook.
I asked, “You’re tired now, Mr. O’Neill?”
“Not much of a story if I wasn’t,” he said.
I was about to ask, “Is there any correlation between the story and the tiredness after the telling?” when he said, “Big story—weary storyteller.”
There it is again. He truly is uncanny. Is he reading my thoughts? Remember when he said, “I’ve always cooked … I never married?” Should I be nervous of this? Or is it benign? Think nothing of it, said my mind’s sanest voice. Perfectly logical. Shared thoughts at shared moments. Would he—would this gift of his—be of use to me? Help me to s
ort out my life?
I shifted my feet, to check my stability.
“The next time you’re here,” he said, anticipating me again, “I want to talk to you about yourself.”
I said, “You’re the interesting one.”
He said, “Go and see James.”
42
Within days of the Sarsfield elation a new tide swept in, a sad, slow wave. When it swept back out to sea it took with it the dear person who for twenty-five years had been my safest, sanest reference point.
I wish you’d known the peerless James Clare. He met your mother—just once—and found her enchanting. I know that he would have loved you, too. Louise, he’d have held on to your handshake, looked all over your face, smiled at that head of frizzy red hair, and said, “Well, your father’s apple didn’t fall far from his orchard.” And to you, Ben, he’d have said, “You have your mother’s soft eyes—are they gray or are they blue?”
Nine o’clock at night: I parked on the street near Miss Fay’s, because two cars sat in the small forecourt. Visitors? The front door stood ajar. Inside, every light blazed as though in a stadium. This is odd. She’s a demon with light switches. Although I had my own key to Miss Fay’s house, I always rang the bell during social hours. No answer.
In that house you can see from the hallway into all the rooms on the ground floor. Nobody anywhere. I called out a quiet “Miss Fay?”
Her head appeared around a door at the top of the stairs. Then she stepped into view, a tall and exotic bird more than ever before. She had dressed as for a gala dinner. A huge butterfly brooch sparkled on a light purple silk dress that hung royally on her bony, coat-hanger shoulders. She blinked through her great spectacles, and clasped her hands together.
At the top of the stairs, she held her arms out. I took both her hands and said, “Well, well—look at you. Lovely!”
She whispered, “James is dying. I’m wearing my best finery to see him off,” and she began to cry, a phenomenon that I had never seen.
We looked into each other’s eyes with that slow desperation of a complete and awful truth. The skin on my face began to tighten.
“Is he very bad?”
“He took a coughing fit at the weekend,” she said, and patted her angular rib cage.
“Internal damage?”
“If he had the lung power, he’d survive.”
“Is he lucid?”
She said, “I was about to try and find you.” Her typical stoicism finally collapsed. She cried harder and her tears stained dark the light purple of her dress at the neck.
“May I see him?”
“D’you want to know my dilemma?” said Miss Fay. “My dilemma is—when he sees you, he’ll feel it’s all right to go.” She won back some control. “But that’s my selfishness.”
These days, if I’m asked, I describe James Clare as a national monument. He certainly looked like one, with his long black coat, and his shiny boots—all of which I have myself emulated. And the bicycle—let us not forget the bicycle; was ever a bicycle so polished and gleaming? And did ever a briefcase seem so tidy, so beautifully kept, so magisterially important, as James’s old black leather Gladstone bag?
To this day he remains the standard for folklore collecting. In his lifetime the Scandinavians honored him with medals and awards, as did Scotland. And Australia—how he regretted that he didn’t have the strength to make that journey; he so wanted to meet “the dream people.” Now I wanted to talk to him about John Jacob O’Neill.
And I wanted once again the wisdom of the real James, the man who saved my life, and to inhale the gigantic kindness he ever showed to me. James has been dead now for more than forty years, and I am unable to think of him without tears in my eyes. Among the many lessons he taught me, one remains the most important, the lesson he himself fetched from the life he perceived. Here’s how he spoke it to me:
“Ben, every legend and all mythologies exist to teach us how to run our days. In kind fashion. A loving way. But there’s no story, no matter how ancient, as important as one’s own. So if we’re to live good lives, we have to tell ourselves our own story. In a good way. A way that’s decent to ourselves.”
Whatever softness of nature you may perceive in me, I might not have developed any such quality without James. He was ever the figure in my mind, sitting in a chair across a room or standing in the distance, under a tree, of whom I would ask a crucial question.
“James, how can I give up drinking?”
“James, what should I do about Venetia?”
“James, should I interfere in the lives of my parents?”
And James, the real James in his black suit and white shirt, or the imagined James under the tree, would always come back with an answer that seemed to work.
I said to him one day, “James, are you aware that when I take your advice it always seems to work?”
“Ben, I don’t give anybody advice. All I do is release the good thinking that’s already inside of you. You’re the one who acts on your own advice, and I have the pleasure of helping you reach those thoughts about yourself. So it’s not me helping you—it’s you helping you.”
“But, James, how come it always works? Always?”
“Run a little test for me, Ben.” He loved little tests. “Try to observe decisions that are taken out of kindness. Then try to observe decisions that are taken with a little negative kick to them. It is my profound belief”—he had a lot of profound beliefs—“that in the former you will find success, though perhaps not immediately. And in the latter you may find short-term success. But in the former, we make everybody feel good. In the latter, we make enmity. And as we all know, there’s nothing eats up your energy as much as hostility. Do you know how acid is made? The manufacturers distill resentment.”
And so we would talk, every time we met. Mostly, in recent years, we met in Miss Fay’s kitchen, with her slinging in toothy observations from across the floor by the stove.
That night I would go to bed, regretting once again that James had retired, and that the Irish countryside no longer got the visitations of his great wisdom, from which so many people—they told me themselves—had benefited so much and so often.
Now I pushed the door of the bedroom with care and in silence. The doctor, blond as a young Viking, sat on the edge of the bed; the nurse, firm and starched, prowled.
James had been raised on the pillows, and even from the doorway I could hear that rasp that I so hated from his battered chest. His eyes were closed and his hands were joined, as if he were already making the undertaker’s job less difficult.
Miss Fay whispered to the doctor, “He’s here. Is James awake?”
The nurse looked at me, then reached in and stroked James’s hands.
“Your son is here,” she said. “What’s his name, James?”
James, scarcely able to breathe, said, “His name is Ben.”
The nurse and the doctor both beckoned to me at the same time, and I walked around the nurse, reached in, and laid my hands on James’s folded hands.
“What are you doing?” I said. “I come all the way up from Limerick to see you, and this is what I find.”
“I’ve decided to travel on, Ben,” said James, and he opened his eyes.
“Not your best decision, James.”
“What are you complaining about? I waited for you. How’s the road?”
I said, “Up and down.”
He tried to laugh; that was our old joke.
“Wouldn’t we have the finest job if it wasn’t for the hills,” James used to say. “And the hills would be fine if it wasn’t for the hollows.”
The effort to laugh nailed him. He laid his head to one side and stopped. But his fingers tightened on mine, and I knew that I would be there, in that position, for several more minutes. So did Miss Fay, and she brought a chair from the far side of the room. I sat down and James said no more. Ever again.
The skin on his face had become rice paper. Thin lines I had never seen
before ran down his cheekbones, small, ice-blue veins. His hair, dense as scrub, stood up, as uncombed as ever. Against the pallor of the skin, the insides of his nostrils seemed almost to glow red. And I saw, not for the first time, his deerlike eyelashes.
It’s fair to say that I had long envisaged a scene such as this: James at last beaten back by the poor respiration he’d had since infancy; and we know nowadays that his sixty cigarettes a day didn’t help.
I had long planned all kinds of words for this occasion.
“James, tell me what I should be collecting.”
“James, are there great untold stories in the countryside that I should now be looking for?”
“James, tell me how to run the rest of my life without you.”
Within those imagined sentences lurked slices of our history together. James was the one who had sent me on the road, who had first directed me into a world where people had strange and interesting chores, habits handed down through generations of their families, family cures efficacious for all kinds of ailments. James was the one who from time to time told me a great legend or a major slice of mythology that he had uncovered in some corner of some parish in some remote county somewhere in Ireland. Notably, he usually revealed it to me after he himself had collected it; however kind, James did not allow sentimentality to interfere with his competitiveness.
As for running the rest of my life without him, if I’d stopped to think about it I wouldn’t have been able to do it. Knowing James was like walking down a staircase; hesitate—that is to say, imagine what life would be like without him—and you fall.
Time stood still in that room. Forgive the cliché, but that seems to me a truth that has stayed with me ever since. Four people, two of whom he loved and who loved him, Miss Fay and I, and two who were clearly impressed by him, the nurse and the doctor, stayed with James Clare until he quit the planet. We should all go like that.