He scarcely had enough breath to address the effort of dying. No movement came from him; now and then his throat rasped, or his head lolled into an uncomfortable position and was righted by the nurse. Miss Fay came around to the other side of the bed and laid her hands on top of mine, on top of his.
It seems to be the case that we have no rational thoughts at such moments. I was aware that something fabulously important was happening to me, but I feared too much the selfishness of the thought. And yet, I should have given the idea free rein, because I was losing one of the major components of my life, inside and out. From the moment he heard what had happened to Venetia, and how brutal had seemed the kidnapping, and how savagely our young, innocent lives had been wrecked, James had watched over me. No parent, no teacher, no priest could have been more vigilant.
I’ve known all my life the fabled difficulty of defining the precise, the exact moment of death. How we debated it in religion classes in school! When does the soul leave the body? How long may a soul linger here on earth? By and large, we were taught that the soul continues to dwell in the fading cadaver for up to twenty-four hours. Who determined that span of time has always been a puzzle to me, and it produced enjoyable debate. Now, though, I found myself unable to say the precise moment at which James left us, taking his great, informed soul with him.
Miss Fay, however, knew exactly. She withdrew her hands from mine and cupped James’s face. Then she leaned in and kissed the dry line of his mouth, and pressed her forehead to his.
“Dear man. Dear man.” She said it over and over. “My dear man. My dear, dear man.”
For the next several hours—no, years—Miss Fay and I sat in that room, on side-by-side chairs. We said little; we ate nothing; we drank water. Eventually, Miss Fay remarked that we should get some sleep.
I rose; she reached for my hand.
“Ben, what do we do now? The two of us?”
Frozen to her chair, she removed her spectacles; I had never seen her without them, and the nakedness shocked me. So alone did she travel into her grief that, when she waved me away, I did exactly as she wished and went to what they’d both called “Ben’s room.”
And by the way, it is true that somebody’s death can change your life forever. It was Christmas Day.
43
James Clare is buried on a hillside overlooking the sea at a place named Howth (rhymes with “oath”), north of Dublin. He chose the place himself, Dora Fay told me: “He said, ‘History and mythology meet there.’ ”
The cemetery slants up along the hill, and on a clear day, especially in the diamond brightness of a frosty morning, I can see its whitened stones like a mouthful of small teeth across Dublin Bay from my front door. I’m pleased to be within sight of James’s last resting place.
Thousands of people turned out. Dublin had no traffic problems in those days—not enough cars—but for James’s farewell they bought, they hired, they begged and borrowed. Most came from distant counties, by bus, by train, by car, some on bicycles. Every taxi in the city, it was said, disappeared that day, following the hearse along the road by the sea north of the city.
At the neck of land they call Sutton Cross, the funeral stopped. Everybody climbed out of every conveyance, and for the last few miles we walked behind a lone piper. Hundreds of men took turns carrying the coffin. They made changeovers so smooth that not a pace did we misstep.
When my pall-bearing stint was done, I slowed down to let Miss Fay catch up with me. She was the only female member of the cortege; in Dublin, the women tended not to go to the graveyard, but try telling that to Dora Fay. She wore a deep black veil that fell from her hat.
“If he could only see it,” she said. After a pause she added, “And thank you for not saying something stupid and platitudinous like ‘I’m sure he’s watching.’ ”
The name “Howth” derived from the Scandinavian, from the Viking settlers who lived here in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries, and meant simply a headland or clifflike promontory.
We climbed up the slope, stumbling among bleached headstones. Ahead stood a crippled tree, also white as bones. We stork-stepped over the old mounds until we reached the brown grave where men still dug, their heads level with our feet.
I looked back at the road to Dublin. And nudged Miss Fay. For miles behind us stretched a long line of people, a tapering black snake.
“But they’ll not all get in here,” she fretted, anxious in her courtesy.
“The piper will stay until everybody has visited,” I said. I’d been to funerals like this in the north and west.
“Then so will we,” she said. “I have something to say to you, Ben, and this is the place to say it.”
With my head bowed toward her, I waited. Nobody as yet had come to stand near us.
“James always wanted you to go back to Venetia.”
I said, “I know.”
“She’s in Dublin. I’ve seen the posters.”
“In the Olympia Theatre.”
“Why don’t you go, Ben?”
Never did I encounter a circumstance where it felt possible not to answer Dora Fay. I always spoke candidly to her—partly out of fear of her disapproval, but wholly to honor the deep role she played in my life.
Now I answered, “I’m afraid.”
“Of?” The one-word question—always her best shot.
“I’m not sure.”
“Then look for sureness. Find the true reason.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because you won’t find it. There is no reason. James said you were a natural couple.”
Why now, at such a moment? Why whisper this monumental thought over the deep rectangular hole in the ground that would shortly receive the body of her best beloved, the man of whom she’d once said to me, “I have only one god”?
“But I so wrecked my chances in Florida.”
How that meeting haunted me. And, children, your mother had never looked more wondrous, and I, who had tracked her to Jacksonville, and had stalked her along the wide, wide sands, and watched her swim in the ocean, and then had come face-to-face with her, my heart pounding in my ears, couldn’t stay and listen to what she so frantically wanted me to hear.
“There’s no such thing as a wrecked chance with someone who loves you,” Dora Fay said.
“But I stormed off. Full of my own injury.”
“Yes, and the fact that you know you did—that enables you not to do it again. What did James say to you one night long ago in my kitchen?”
“He said so many things.”
“I mean about fear.”
I remembered and smiled. “When you’re afraid, stand on your tippy toes—in your mind as well as your boots.” She murmured the final sentence with me: “Make yourself taller and the fear will be afraid of you.”
The priest and the acolytes arrived, in their black soutanes and white surplices.
“Oh, and there’s this,” Miss Fay told me. “James said you’d read it well.” She pulled a sheet of paper from her pocket, her pointed nose now wind-tipped to blue. “It was his favorite piece that he’d ever collected.”
The piper ceased. Voices rose and fell in the muttered and stuttered litanies of obsequy. Some of the prayers ran away with the breeze. Dipping a round-knobbed silver pestle into a small silver bucket, the priest scattered holy water on the coffin. Now the loss began to bite.
Miss Fay tightened her hand on my arm. We had one last chanted incantation, one last attempt to persuade “the Almighty to welcome the soul of thy humble servant, James Clare”—who’d been nobody’s servant and never humble. The priest stepped back, Miss Fay nudged me, and I opened my mouth to speak.
To my surprise, my throat and my lips worked. I heard myself say, “James had one famous and favorite piece of folklore that he collected, and I’ll read it now; it’s very short.”
Eyes blue as flowers, eyebrows blue-black and shining bright as the shell of a beetle, teeth as twin rows of pearls in her mout
h, gold abundant hair woven into two tresses, each tress woven into strands, the point of each strand rounded by a little golden ball. Eyes dancing like stars. Each cheek glowing rosy as the berries of the rowan tree, lips gleaming red, each slender arm white as the may blossom, shoulders soft and high and white, wrists tender, polished, and white, nails pink and delicate. Neck arching long as a swan’s and smooth as silk and white as the foam of a wave, thighs smooth and creamy, legs as true as a carpenter’s measure, feet slim and dainty and white. Such was the beauty of the beautiful Princess Etain. And so we celebrate the beauty of the world, and beauty has no time limits.
I finished, and, all around me, people nodded their heads and I could almost hear them say, “Yes, that was James, all right.”
Miss Fay said, “Well done.” She tightened her grip on my arm. “He gave me that after one year together. He said it made him think of me.”
I folded the paper.
Miss Fay murmured, “Keep your eyes closed and your head down. Do you know why?”
“Respect?” I said.
“There’s more to it. At the funeral of a good man, the sky fills with angels. But we don’t look up in case we don’t see them,” said Miss Dora Fay.
44
I escorted Miss Fay to the university hallway at Earlsfort Terrace. Music, stories, more music. Not too much to drink, just enough for hospitality’s sake, because James, for all his conviviality, for all his ability to get the best stories out of people, felt uncomfortable near too much alcohol.
I didn’t enjoy it much. James’s friends hassled me. It didn’t matter that I’d been doing his job—and my own—for the two previous years, since James had been off the road.
“You’ll never be the man James was.”
“You’re not in James’s league.”
“You’re wet behind the ears.”
“James knew the world.”
How James would have fumed. Miss Fay, when by my side, countered them for me. She didn’t catch the worst of them.
I left the hall to take a break. And heard the voice behind me. “Well now, Captain.”
Uninvited.
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m sorry for your trouble,” he said, using the traditional condolence phrase in Ireland.
“How did you know?”
“Heard it on the news,” he said. “He wasn’t that old, was he?”
“I never knew his age,” I heard myself say—and realized for the first time that it was the truth.
“What did he die of?”
Old joke: he died of a Tuesday. “Emphysema. Heart gave out finally. How are you?”
“Have you your notebook with you?”
We found a quiet corner at the end of a long corridor. Jimmy Bermingham was one of the few men I’ve ever known whose eyes actually glinted.
“What am I supposed to be taking down?”
“I’m only doing what you asked me to do, Captain, telling you what I was doing.” And he did:
Do you know the town of Larne? A cold town, up there in East Antrim. Well, a bunch of the boys was caught out there last week. I was with them and we were interrupted in our very first job, which was to give a good hard kick to the British occupation of our country. This wasn’t in the papers at all, so we have censorship now, and you’re going to be the only person who has the full story, Captain.
Soldiers, police, tracker dogs, trucks, jeeps, tanks nearly, the occupying power, as we call them, mustered everything they had to catch us. We got trapped in a cave, a strange kind of a place up near the Giant’s Causeway.
And the dogs outside were going mental, because they got the scent all right, but the soldiers and the cops were too frightened to come into the cave or even to the mouth of the cave. Because they didn’t know how many of us were inside. And they didn’t know how heavily armed we were.
Now, we were over that side of the county because we were aiming to wreck a big consignment of ammunition and guns that the soldiers were to unload from the dock at Larne. That cargo was being brought in from England to strengthen the garrisons all across the north.
If we could only have got down onto the port, our impact would have been mighty. Because there was meant to be very few soldiers there, and we’d plug them and then blow up the whole mixture. But with the explosions the night before, the English brought in hundreds of troops to protect the unloading. The rest of their soldiers went out chasing our boys.
And here we were now, in terrible weather, holed up in a deep hollow in the icy rocks of the northeast. On those same hills, that’s where Saint Patrick served out his slavery. Herding pigs, he was, and he said he nearly froze to death.
We sat in the cave for three days. My legs were shafts of ice. But we were well equipped. I mean we had plenty to eat and water to drink; there was a spring and a pool in the cave near us, and we were armed to the teeth. The soldiers outside kept being relieved in relays, and we were stuck.
On the morning of the fourth day, nobody was making a move either way. It looked as if we might be trapped in there for four more days, and maybe even beyond that. Our commandant said to us, “Lads, we can’t stay here much longer. We don’t know what kind of stuff they might throw in here to gas us out.”
We could tell at nighttime that the soldiers or the police had brought up big, huge lights and were running them off the engines of trucks. Anybody who came to the mouth of the cave would be seen immediately, and we all knew there would be no coming out with our hands up, no surrender—we’d be shot at sight.
Now one of our fellows was from around there in East Antrim, and he said that he’d always heard that these hills were honeycombed with strange caves and potholes. In his opinion, there was probably another way out of the cave, and he asked his commandant if he could go and look for one. He was given permission, and the lad was gone for twelve hours.
When the lad came back, he said that he’d been out in the open air. It was a simple enough route; you just had to be careful in one place with the underground water, but if you followed a stream it would lead you right out. In fact, he said, when they came out on the other side they’d find themselves looking down a hill straight into the yard of the very school he went to as a child.
Slowly and carefully, and it took several hours, the young lad led us out into the open air. We emerged blinking at ten o’clock in the morning. Straight in front of us down the hill was the school with the gate wide open. There were six of us, and we walked into the schoolyard and stole six bicycles.
We rode these bikes a few hundred yards across the open countryside, and then we made arrangements to split up and come back together again on the hill above the town of Larne. Six men on a bunch of bicycles with rifles on their shoulders? We had to hide.
If you’re coming into Larne, you come down a hill, and you see the port down below. Well, we hid in various places along the same roadside, and when it was time to come together again, we followed the road, each one of us whistling or singing the same tune until we all met up. There we were, hidden in trees along by the road, looking down the hill at the port.
And what was happening at the port? Soldiers, hundreds of them, were guarding the dockers, who were unloading crates and huge equipment and machinery off a ship onto a series of trucks. We knew that we’d hit the jackpot.
We waited together—God, it took patience! We figured that the army trucks had to drive past us. This was the biggest road out of Larne. We all took up position, scattered down along the roadside, hidden in the brush, to ambush the trucks when they started coming up the hill.
The commandant dispatched two men to find a farmer’s cart. They found one. The farmer wasn’t there, but his wife was, and she was chatty. She said, sure, they could borrow the old cart, and she told them that she had a son who was a soldier and he was down there loading guns and all kinds of machinery onto the trucks for distribution across the province, and she was expecting him home for his dinner, because they were leaving t
he port at exactly twelve o’clock and he had two days’ leave after his job was done. They thanked her for the cart, she gave them some homemade bread and some milk, and told them hurry up and go before her husband got home and changed his mind.
Our two boys wheeled the cart nearly a mile cross-country, to the place on the side of the road where they were all hiding. Now they had their timing: noon that day. So they ate the bread and drank the milk. And none for us. We reefed them for that later on.
When we saw the convoy of trucks leaving the port way down below, we settled down into our positions, a spread of about a hundred and fifty yards, and all on one side of the road so that we wouldn’t hit each other with our own bullets. As the convoy started to climb the hill, two of the lads pushed the old cart out into the middle of the road, and they guessed right, that the trucks would be the first traffic to come that way. There weren’t that many cars in East Antrim.
The first truck stopped, and we opened fire. We ran down the hill and we fired at every wheel we could see, and we punctured every tire we shot. We hit fifteen trucks altogether, and none of the soldiers got a clear shot at us. Mission accomplished. Gone. It took two weeks before the British army could get over their problems. By that time we were back down across the border.
45
After Jimmy left, Miss Fay and I made the most of the night. We saw all the people she needed to see. Many stiffened toward her. She had, after all, a doubtful status in Catholic Ireland, because she and James had never married, and he’d been staying in her house for thirty years. The least they said about her was “Ah, what could you expect from a Protestant?”
The hypocrites. Many of them, with their pious frowns, had borrowed money from James, and most had never paid him back. I discovered their debts in his effects long after his death.
A decent core, though, all men, acknowledged her as fully as they would any widow. His real friends. And she showed her gratitude. She also introduced all of them to me and made them pledge that if they could ever be of use to me, they would gladly do so. We listened to stories about James. We heard two of the tunes that he had inspired—a reel named “James Clare’s Fancy” and a jig, “James Clare’s Pony,” which is what he called his famous bicycle.